Occupy Middle America-How and Why?

An average middle-class individual may be conflicted in these days of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, by feelings of deep sympathy for the perceptions of a nation gone haywire and in need of remediation, and the externally-imposed, time-consuming requirements of meeting one’s financial and personal obligations. One understands very well the answer to the question Why should one occupy something, as a personal statement of patriotic concern and dismay at the way things have become. Answering the question: How can one make a personal contribution to the movement without jeopardizing everything one has worked to build, is a serious challenge. Each of us must answer it for ourselves, and do so within the bounds of what we are prepared to risk, for risk is certainly involved, if the needed changes are ever to come about. Anyone who insists on avoiding sacrifice is probably not in tune with the prevailing harmony, and will need some convincing. I feel, respectfully, that I must try to convince them.

If disinterested polls or instinct are to be trusted, and I believe they are, there are a lot more supporters of than will ever be found in the streets at any given moment. None of us who support this extraordinary movement are directly afflicted with all of the ills that the movement purports to remedy, but the indirect effects are universal. It is about the quality of life as we know it. It’s a loaded phrase, “quality of life”. Most of those, this blogger included, who have spent an entire lifetime as a citizen of Middle America, may think of it as meaning having things we want, to the limit of our buying power. More buying power equals better quality of life.

Much as we intuit that life requires more than purchased goods for its quality, the other elements can be elusive, and at the mercy of forces we may think are not susceptible to comprehension or remedy. We may ask ourselves, as we sit surrounded by our stuff (in those brief moments left to us by our hectic schedule and breakneck pace it dictates) Is this all there is? I propose that our quality of life would improve by a power of ten, if we could agree, as a free people, to define it in terms other than our ability to consume.

Our habit (in all senses of the term) of consumption is produced by the economic philosophy that every transaction must provide an increment of material increase to the initiator, i.e. the seller. It’s called “making a profit”. For those who pursue it to the exclusion of most other interests, it is the chief article of faith, and living any other way is unimaginable. “I love doing it, so it must be good!” It is an approach to “quality of life” that has held sway in human affairs for a long time. The impulse became so strong in ancient times, as populations grew and the empires that accompanied the growth of civilization expanded, that money had to be invented to facilitate the smooth exchange of items of both necessity and luxury. And (face it) gaining a margin of profit from an exchange is a lot more satisfying than losing one’s ass (or dog or wife).

For the overwhelming majority of us, every “necessary” product we use is delivered to us at the end of a trail of profit. It accrues in increment steps along the product’s way to us, from the producer, harvester, storer, mover, sorter, broker, banker, wholesaler, retailer. This is the modern “marketplace”, and many of us, most of us, take for granted that there is no other and conceivably better way for necessaries to reach us. We should keep one thing uppermost in our minds as we work out such notions, however. It is that our need is not the most significant determinant in the equation of “supply and demand”, the watchword of the modern marketplace. The (today) almost sacred drive for ever-increasing profits, is the determining element of greatest significance.

Profit margins are flexible and depend on variable criteria that have nothing to do with an individual’s or a family’s needs. We can sell that stack of plywood today and make 20% on what we paid, or we can wait for desperate hurricane evacuees to triple our investment. So we ask ourselves, Is there no other way to live, whereby the element of profit can be minimized at the same time as improving the quality of life. The ready answer is, emphatically, Yes!, if we are prepared to A) re-define our sense of quality to exclude the drive to own “stuff” far beyond any rational need for the stuff we own, and B) evaluate more highly the social and personal elements of quality that are unrelated to consumption. In simpler terms, stop buying things for people we love as a substitute for spending time exchanging real, affectionate values, i.e. sharing time and space.

Stop buying things you don’t need and won’t want if you wait long enough for sound of a braying TV pitch-model to die away. Sell off, or better yet, donate to charity, anything unused for a year or longer. Re-use as much as possible. Stop growing lawns and build your soil with available organic material to the point where any seed you push into it will be the source of delicious food in 2-3 months with a minimum of care. Watch less sport on TV and play more sport at the local park. Trade with neighbors and others the things that you can. Car-pool or bicycle whenever you can. Get healthy by eliminating fast food, snack food, high-calorie/low nutrition foods, and walk the dog (more like him walking you, for the first 75 pounds of weight loss.

Watch TV less and read more, especially history and science. Build your opinions of fact; don’t simply parrot the ideas of others because it’s easier to memorize a catchy phrase than it is to learn about issues. Teach children by example; attraction is always more convincing and long-lasting than promotion. Respect those who provide public services through agencies of government, if you expect services like fire, safety, transportation and communication to be there for you when you need it. Don’t let employers forget that, without you, their employee, they have no business, and when that employer responds with better pay and conditions, spare no effort in helping them reap the deserved rewards. Don’t settle for jobs that exploit citizens, or ruin natural places, or leave a mess behind for others to clean up, or violate the right of the public to know their goods and services are as advertised, and give fair value. The list goes on, but each person must extend it to suit their own notion of life’s quality that doesn’t rest on spending and consumption. Godspeed.

Korea in Knots: Palace Goods at Gyeongbokkung

Embroidered silk string pouch w/5-color tassels, by Choi Ji-Young

An appealing feature of monarchy is its habit of engendering creativity and manual skill in the community of artisans that feed its appetite for the trappings of wealth and power by the possession of which it can be identified. Who but a monarch has both the means and commanding position to bring into being such extraordinary new examples of manual virtuosity as a Faberge egg, or ormolu clocks and light fixtures.

Royal retainers and staff assembled in the palace courtyard, in painting details that include items that appear further down in this post.

Even the wealthiest merchant or landlord would prefer to give up his prize artifact to the crown, than for word to get about that his possessions were superior in beauty and value to those of the king or empress on whose favor his special trading privileges and social position might depend. The rules of that game are not “trickle-down”, but trickle-up.

There are worse places for keeping such treasures, too, than the heavily fortified and guarded palace compounds where frolic the pampered and demanding royal scions and their offspring. The steady flow of top-quality goods and services to and from royal purveyance has an attractive influence on all who would pursue such enhancements of their art and craft as can only be accomplished by including in the process the tools and materials and processes of utmost quality, precision and conceptual advancement.

Temporary exhibitions are mounted in this room.

The ends of monarchy, historically, are neither placid nor pretty, and if the royal artifacts their flowering has produced survive that always-volatile process, they do so in the hands of those who know great pains must be taken to conceal them, as they are part of revolutionary plunder. They may gradually reappear as years pass, to be marveled at in museums, or as part of the private collections of the descendents of those whose fortunes were inherited from contemporaries of deposed royals, who were beholden to them for the permissions and investments that were first causes of amassed wealth.

Royal palanquin

A scale model of the royal palanquin, replete with knotcraft tassels and other ornamentation.

It is to these museum artifacts and the graphic representations of pieces like them, that any modern artisan must turn if they are of a mind to reproduce them at the same level of quality, and with the same skill of craftsmanship found in the originals. Today, the repositories of such artifacts can be found everywhere there was once a thriving monarchy, along with communities of modern artists and masters of craft whose creative mission it is to attempt their replication.

Detail of silk surrounding the top of the enclosure

Corner detail of palanquin

They are not motivated to the same hopeful degree of potential material gain as the original class of workers, but are moved instead by the sheer satisfaction that only comes with the knowledge that you have accomplished, and in some instances surpassed the level of skill mastery required in the production of the priceless originals that clutter the more fortunate museums. They can become very good at what they do; their work is neither priceless, nor in demand sufficient to qualify as a livelihood. They are artists, and that they take great pride in creating these works, shows plainly in the finish.

Tassel detail shows knotted webbing enclosing a gilt ball, about the size of a standard glass marble

Knotted mesh surrounds and encloses gilt sqare.

These were some of the thoughts chasing through my consciousness on a recent Sunday as I strolled through subterranean rooms within the grounds of Gyeongbokkung, the primary residence of the last kings and rulers of Korea, in downtown Seoul. Before they succumbed, at last, to a combination of historical forces: great power aggression, recent Japanese military success, home-grown intrigue and factiousness, treachery and the lack of sufficient strength to resist, the so-called “Hermit Kingdom” displayed in full the qualities both formidable and whimsical that make of monarchies one of the most interesting political establishments yet invented by a humanity in search of humane governance.

Crown detail of a 3-pendant assembly

Detail of knots atop a 3-tassel pendant

A royal procession as painted

The Korean monarchy ended forever in 1910, when the peninsula was formally “annexed” to a Japan still basking in the warm glow of its recent military defeat of Russia and no other country willing, or with the ability, to stop them. The Americans would say to Japan, in essence, “We won’t interfere with you in Korea, if you ignore our move into The Philippines, and so it was done. Never again would occur such scenes as this partial portrayal in an old painting.

Each pennant marks status and function of those assembled under it

I have found many things to like about Korea and her people in over two decades of residence. One of my favorites is that they have never invaded another country. True, they have thrown in with the US a couple of times on ill-advised military adventures abroad, but they soon pulled back, having properly observed the form, if not the letter, of alliance, and debt assumed by “liberation” at the end of WWII.

Brocade pennant. Others are silk, each with a characteristic color, shape and meaning.

Some standards appear mystical to the uninitiated.

A powerful, magical protector.

The Phoenix is a prominent mythical power being.

Name the monster.

On my first visit to a Korean museum, almost a quarter-century ago in N. Jeolla Province, I was struck by what seemed then to be a rather ostentatious array of ornamental tassels, and so-called “maedup” pendants. I may have thought this display too expansive in relation to the totality of the royal ornamentation set. What’s so special about tassels and pendants, anyway? It’s taken me two decades to learn to appreciate the knots. For that, I must thank the artisan, Ms. Choi Ji Young, and her family, for bringing it to our attention and inviting us to join their family outing in its enjoyment.

Ms Ji-Young Choi, with her niece.

On my first visit to a Korean museum, almost a quarter-century ago in N. Jeolla Province, I was struck by what seemed then to be a rather ostentatious array of ornamental tassels, and so-called “maedup” pendants. I may have thought this display too expansive in relation to the totality of the royal ornamentation set. What’s so special about tassels and pendants, anyway? It’s taken me two decades to learn to appreciate the knots. For that, I must thank the artisan, Ms. Choi Ji Young, and her family, for bringing it to our attention and inviting us to join their family’s tour of it.

It was our second visit to an exhibition of Ms Choi’s work. It’s included in the group exhibition of the national society of which she is a member. I have emphasized her work in this post for two simple reasons: I’m grateful to her and her family; the craftsmanship of the work is superb. I show it here in a mix with authentic palace goods, as displayed in rooms adjacent. I’ve included other recent works by member artisans,  original works inspired by the study of records from various periods of royal history.

Just a guess, but i'll say carved from wood and hollowed for variable tones depending on where struck.

No royal panoply would be complete without musical heraldry, and the Korean palace percussion instruments are unique and fanciful to see. I found myself longing to give audience to their use by masters of the form.

I think I could play this one, but I wouldn't want to make a mistake.

Palace chimes, tuned by varying thickness of the metal, probably bronze.

A closer look.

A rack of cymbals

A tin horn

A conch bugle

As fanciful a suspended gong as I'm likely to see anywhere

A pair of pipe flutes

A large bell, the top roughly eye-level to the standing striker

Tuned chimes, same shape as the large, solitary gong

Corner view, with decorative pheasant tail-plume pendant

A closer look

The royal water clock; a marvel of engineering and craftsmanship

I found many more, and more satisfying, things to like in the glass cases and exhibition halls of the Palace Museum. They, and the group of people (and their families) devoted to their study and reproduction of pieces contained in them, moved me to new heights of appreciation, and exhausted my store of energy for their photographing. It’s time to wrap up this museum visit. How do I know? I consulted the Palace water clock.

Stop a Head when Flashing

[note] I wrote this for a publisher who wanted something about the people, days and events in it. After he accepted it, I checked it with Charlie and he objected to what, in his memory (admittedly somewhat more acute than mine, for reasons that will become apparent). I pulled it, so you’re reading it fresh. Rather than change it, I’ll just call it a work of pure fiction, and add Charlie’s objections in the home stretch. Let the reader make of it whatever he or she likes.

Charles Potts and I met in Pocatello not long before he left for Mexico, so I didn’t get to know him well until he showed up months later in Seattle. Charlie and LSD came on me at about the same time. Acid was stronger, but had nowhere near Charlie’s legs. He was staying with a friend in Olympia, intent on starting a poetry magazine in Seattle. I had quit my job at Boeing the day after dropping my first acid. I had a room in Abie Label’s “artist’s colony” on the eleventh floor of the Frye Hotel at 2nd and Yesler.(It wasn’t all altruism-the elevator went only to 10. The rooms on 11 were just over 6 ft high on one side, sloping up to about 7 and a half on the other to allow for drainage from the roof.)

I had been reading publications like Screw and Fuck, a lot of Ed Sanders’ and Tuli Kupferberg’s stuff, and other arcana of hipness at Jean Andre’s Id Bookstore on 1st Avenue at Yesler, kitty corner Pioneer Square. Sitting around the Id a lot, one lighthearted day (if that’s the right body part), I wrote a send-up of Poe, encountering his eponymous Raven on acid.

Everybody I read it to thought it was cool, naturally, so I was having my 15 minutes when Charlie came back from Mexico with poetry, or more accurately producing a poetry mag on his mind. He didn’t have a name for it yet, and in my new-found acid consciousness, I reached down into memories of my boyhood and found “Litmus”, with its cool dual entendre of the little strips of paper chemists use to test solutions for acidity, and the alliteral allusion to literature. This account is disputed by the estimable, and otherwise absolutely dependable Larry Kent,  also present and the time, and making the same claim for himself. Maybe we had become the same person in that moment. The difference was that I knew exactly what the idea had sprung from.

My father had given me a chemistry set for Christmas back when you could still get one with everything needed to make black powder. His demonstration of the use of litmus paper was magical, indelible in my memory. I’m not sure Charles is ready even now to acknowledge that I named Litmus. I let him down in the stretch, leading up to the appearance of #1, by failing to get the big old multilith printing machine into orbit, that I had acquired in hopes of ensuring book quality printing work.  I was also smoking a lot of weed by, and during, the time he was laboring herculanimously to get #1 out, and off, and on multiple fronts. He took a job at a motorcycle tire dealer to save enough to move to Seattle from Olympia, where he had, in a very short time, become a popular reader in the [name?] coffeehouse.

I’d had friction with some of the artists at the Frye by then. Their underwear bunched up at my plan to move a noisy printing machine into their Zen sanctuary, as it might disrupt the flow of lissome art groupies fluttering in and out of their ersatz ashram. With no appetite for another war, ‘Nam nowhere near over yet, I bailed from there.

Charles and I took an apartment together for a couple months in Belltown, on 2nd Avenue. We found it tastelessly ironic that our new pad was directly above the navy recruiter’s office. That any of our crowd had to pass the “Go Navy” sign to reach our door, tickled us nonetheless. It was there where I took the photo of Edward Smith in the same bathtub where Charlie has written elsewhere that he had found his roommate breaking up a “key”, and it was also there where I shot the picture of Charlie uprooting the Space Needle, both hands under the cap as if it were a great metallic fungus.

Edward Smith was one of several persons that Charlie and I met in the poetry workshops we led together for the Magic Mountain’s Miriam Rader and her Free University of Seattle project, who would become influential in our lives. I was a farce as far as being a poetry teacher goes. I was a humorist abusing the privilege by pretending to write poetry. While the occasional jokes might amuse, they didn’t make for good poetry. A redeeming fact, perhaps, was that I recognized this before anyone else, with the outcome being that I dumped the A B Dick lemon on a guy eager to strike a blow against the man in the form of a magazine for transvestites, and I bailed.

This left Charlie holding the growing poetry bag-Litmus, poetry class, and all, but with with a pair of good hands. I moved into the back room at Jack Cabe’s Zig Zag Gallery in the Pike Place Market, where I would still be in a position to help Charlie host the “Theodore Roethke Gladness Wake” (he still has the flyers!) About that event I can say that on that evening, Charlie, Edward and another former Pocatellan, Clair Oursler, showed me how exciting a live poetry reading could be; it really had to be if it was to do more than merely derive from others’ earlier work, however magnificent.

Of course I did my Poe turn, which was already tasting stale in my mouth. Edward read his feminist call to arms, “Rise up my cunted ones”; Charlie read “I dream of Oaxaca” (which I had been the first person to hear, earlier, when he finished writing it in Belltown), and Clair, astonishingly enough, read the product liner notes from a package of VA douche powder, by the light of an electric lint remover. Whatever one thinks of Roethke, his name lost some of its luster that night, or if not, at least the 30-odd poets and hipsters who attended the readings left less inclined, probably, to use reverential tones when dropping the name.

Another poet who read was David Hiatt. Because I didn’t know him well, I lost complete memory of him and his reading until recently, although I was always aware that there was a hot poetry connection between him and Charles Potts. I recently got a Facebook friend request from David, and in a subsequent exchange of messages he debunked my presumption of propinquity between him and the too-soon-gone poet, Ben Hiatt, he reminded me that I had given him a small amount of “walking around money” at that reading. Maybe Facebook is as close as we have yet come to the global electronic village promised us all those decades ago by Marshall McLuhan and Tim Leary.

My Poe takedown appeared in Litmus #1, which also used my B/W photo of a spider on a chrysanthemum on the cover. From then on, as a result of having met David Horton, already a master photographer espoused to another of the dozen or so brilliant attendees of the poetry class, he became my mentor in a visual art form for which I thought I had more aptitude than for writing poetry. Prose was always more “my thing”, and we all know its not the same.

I was probably a little jealous of the bond I watched grow so quickly between Charles and Edward; they are, or were, now Ed is deceased, both eminently loveable men. The final cooling stroke in the relationship between Charles and I was delivered in the person of Janice P, a lively Nordic blonde, with  a large Alsatian, and  also in the poetry class. We thought of her as our groupie, as she had put a lip-lock on Charlie before you could say “fellatio trumps cunnilingus”. In the end, she threw us both over for a guy who “could beat her at tennis,” but I chalked it up to a rough first acid trip. Twenty years later, either one of us would have accepted the tennis challenge, switching gender roles for the Bobby Riggs-Billy Jean King Classic match-up result, but I didn’t come here to take up sports writing.

For awhile, as time was reckoned in the Summer of Love, it was fair to say she was Charlie’s girl. One day she came around the gallery looking for Charlie, so she said, and I don’t claim otherwise. Charlie wasn’t there, nor was he usually, for if not at his job, he would be very busy working to get Litmus out. Before anyone but the rare clearheaded person realized what was happening, Janice and I were putting the wood away on the gallery floor while the Alsatian licked his balls in the corner.

I felt a little self-conscious about it afterward, all our fashionable pretensions about the correctness of free love notwithstanding. I didn’t think Charlie was too pleased about it either when I told him later, but the damage was done. A few months, a thousand poetry publishing headaches, and a few issues of Litmus later, and Charlie was off to meet his alter ego, Laffing Water in Berkeley (cf. Vol II, Valga Krusa, Green Panda, 2007, Cleveland).

It’s been said that if you remember the 60’s, you weren’t there, and there may be truth in it. I sent the above text to Charles, expecting his memory to be as good or better than mine. Our versions don’t match, but I have neither an argument against his, nor an inclination to vary mine, since I remember it. Even so, I concede to Charles’ account of his motivations, intentions and actions. His mind wasn’t nearly as addled with weed, wine and psychecelics as mine, then or ever. His account of the time follows:

“Per the biography, my memory is substantially different from yours. I did not return from Mexico or move to Seattle obsessed with publishing a poetry magazine. When we re-met in Seattle, you and David Wagner and others whose names escape me were planning an anti-war anti-establishment magazine that was to be called Shrapnel. For which Wagner had made a proto typical cover misspelling the word as Scrapnel I believe.

What I offered in those late days of August was to procure some poetry for this magazine as I had left Pocatello feeling slightly guilty that I had let Bob Serpa talk me out of including Dawn, Clair, and Mary Heckler in an anthology Serpa and I published called Do You Want to Be in Our Zoo Too? which contained the works of Serpa, CP, Zig, and Geoffrey Dunbar.

I had read Ford Madox Ford’s It Was the Nightingale which was a nightmare about publishing The Transatlantic Review and I had determined never to be the editor or publisher of a magazine.
As time went along, and the name of the projected magazine changed to Litmus, it became apparent that you and Wagner weren’t going to be able to produce. I was perfectly willing to let down my friends, Oursler, Dawn, and Mary Heckler one more time and let the project languish. It was only after the 3rd meeting of “Poetry—Language—Now” at the free university when Ed Smith read “The Queen of the Blue Fox” and we had a poem that had to be published, did I become obsessive about getting the first and second issues out, and subsequently took over the publishing in order to finish it.
Those are the most substantive objections to the portrayal of me in those days. Per the Theodore Roethke Gladness Wakes, the first one was you me and Clair. Ed Smith read at the 2nd one along with Paul Malanga and Bobby Byrd. [Charles Potts, personal email, 11 March 2009]

Sequelae: I sought Charlie out in Berkeley alongside a “buying trip” I had undertaken, as necessitated by seekers from Seattle in those early days of designer chemistry. I arrived at the airport early in the morning, bought a newspaper and took the bus into Berkeley. The headlines blared the the cops raiding Black Panther headquarters in Berkeley, killing two men, including Bobby Seale, and arresting Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton. It was not unexpected push-back by the police, and was viewed on the streets as the cops getting even for the Panthers well-established habit of “patrolling the pigs”, or cruising the streets of Oakland and Berkeley with serious firepower protruding from every window. It was a policy ostensibly designed to awaken all to a perceived need to protect local citizens from being harassed by police for walking while black.

Reaching Charlie’s room, I woke him up to read him this news, as he had as yet no inkling of it. It was a delicious moment for me, that rare one when any of his friends learned a salient fact before Charlie, always so diligent in his pursuit, and rarely forgetting anything. I imagine it enabled me to somewhat refuel Charles’ esteem of me as a reliable participant in our scene. I have been lucky in that way.

If you have read this far with any interest (and how could you not?)  and yet are unfamiliar with Valga Krusa (in 2 vols: The Yellow Christ, and Laffing Water, which details the hair-raising and heart-rending experiences of Charlie in Berkely, culminating in his descent into psychiatric hell, and subsequent (and quite brilliant) recovery, the book is available by contacting this space.

President Carter goes to Pyongyang

Former US President Jimmy Carter and a working party of other elder world leaders travel to Pyongyang, N. Korea this week, bearing humanitarian offerings and looking for rapprochement on questions of inter-Korean relations and the inexorable expansion of that belligerent nation’s uni-purpose drive to arm itself with a range of nuclear weapons. We should all wish them luck, but what they need more is money.

The funds are not likely to be forthcoming from a world close to the brink in so many nations, of economic collapse, if we can believe an army of non-official or unaffiliated economists, and we like can. What N. Korea (and the rest of the world) needs is a rational development plan that enables the small country to thread a path through the tall timbers surrounding her on all sides. I have suggestions, already made at least once, that I want to trot out again, just in case there might be one reader out there with access to any the “Elders” on this imminent visit to the northern cousins (I live in Seoul), who might find them amusing, if not useful.

Suggest to Kim Jong-il and Baby Kim that they make it the national cause celebre to seek the status of most bicycle-friendly nation on earth. Others have a head start, so it’s a high bar to set, but that’s a good thing. It’s good because it will take many years of full-on development to bring N. Korea to the level of economic health of its neighbors, of which the far eastern provinces of Russia may be closest. This plan also renders undesirable a focus on the personal automobile as the leader of national economic salvation, the course taken by South Korea toward its “miracle on the Han”.

Automobiles aren’t going away soon, though, even S. Korea would benefit greatly in quality of life if a few million of them would, and that is the key to the next suggestion. North Korea should build two secure expressway corridors for motor traffic connecting S. Korea, Russia and China. Secure, because that’s what they seem to be obsessed with, namely preventing too much open contact between the free world outside, and their imprisoned and dark-closeted citizenry.

Finally, Development of a bridge or tunnel, a la the European “Chunnel” for rail and/or motor traffic between Japan and S. Korea would benefit the entire East Asian economic sphere, with North Korea at dead center. The sooner this inevitable project gets into the planning phase, the sooner is it likely to be completed. It won’t ever be any less costly to undertake than it is today.

These are not modest suggestions, because the magnitude of need (and the consequences of continuing to take small steps forward and back) demand no less. They offered in all sincerity, in the spirit of seeking a peaceful and prosperous future. It is an opportunity that, to be realized, will require the boldest and confident leaders of good will. It is possible for Baby Kim to become “Elder Kim” himself, one day, but it won’t happen if the best he’s got is lobbing artillery rounds at defenseless offshore (S. Korean) islands, or launching sneak submarine attacks against non-threatening military units. That’s the path to title of “Elder Lunatic Kim”

So, Be bold, Mr. President, and succeed at what all others have failed, otherwise we’ll have to add a verse to an old Yankee Doodle favorite:

Jimmy Carter went to Pyongyang riding Rocinante
Found the promise in his plan well-meant but still baloney.

Dogpatch Spy Provocateur: An American Original

There are so many holes in this story, it’s hard to know where to push in the probes. It began, the public part, with an incident Jan. 27, in Lahore, as reported in the New York Times.  An American driver stopped at an intersection, suspected two men on a scooter of being armed, and firing “through his windshield” with a Glock 9mm, killed both. He then emerged from his vehicle to photograph the corpses with his digital camera. Soon afterward, he was arrested by Pakistani police. A search and preliminary interrogation turned up a lot of suspicious gear and eyebrow raising documentation, setting in motion a chain of shadowy exchanges between US and Pakistani officials, and the New York Times.

Meet Raymond Davis, identified as the American at the center of this brewing storm in relations between the two countries, and a figure so enigmatic at this point that one is hard-pressed to think of his equal in international spy fiction. An International (Express) Tribune story has identified him as either a CIA spook, or a US State Department adjunct working out of Lahore, Pakistan. He certainly looks like the sort we became so uncomfortably familiar with in the bad old days before  Blackwater, forced by a growing number of incidents eerily similar in type to the present one, rose Phoenix-like from its own ashes, reincarnated as Xe (pronounced “Kaiser Seozay”).

What is wrong with this picture?

David Lindorf, writing on the growing debacle in Truthout,makes it very clear that, although the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post were all slow to seize on this story, perhaps due to pressure from the Obama administration, the story is so far out ahead of the traditional news outlets that, whatever damage it has the potential to do US-Pakistani relations is unlikely to be mitigated anytime before a lot more damage-causing information, and possibly disinformation, has been revealed.

Raymond Davis seems a most unlikely choice to be out in front of the kind of covert shenanigans he is being accused of perpetrating in behalf of whoever his shadowy masters are. At first glance, he seems utterly lacking in either the formal education or cross-cultural sophistication, to pull off anything nearly so tricky. And that is precisely why the story, focusing as it does on dueling spy agencies carrying out leftover missions from the W Bush era, seems so abjectly plausible. Stay tuned. This story is going to get a lot uglier before it goes away.

The Best of the Billionaires

Since I put the idea out there for them to embrace with the alacrity and verve we find so appealing in them, America’s billionaires have been slow to recognize the real opportunity my plan represents. This is hard to explain. After all, who’s better known for seizing an opportunity to become even more financially rotund than the commercial behemoths produced by the US system of trickle down, Hoover up freemarket capitalism.

The plan in a nutshell, you may remember, is a unique combination of reality TV and game show, with an American Idol twist. It starts with a move every billionaire can get behind, and divides up the planet between a number of the most competitive billionaires (weaklings under $2bn net worth need not apply.) Each billionaire is allowed to compete with up to one billion of his or her own money, and whatever profits are gained from their enterprise in the competition are theirs to keep, after all expenses have been settled.

Every day brings new ideas and insights to the scheme, and today’s come from the sale of the Shine Group, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, to the mogul himself, price tag: $672 million. The old fellow wants the company, we are told, because of all the great things it’s goint to add to the content-creation arm of his behemoth media empire. He may envision improvements to his FOX Broadcasting unit, where the need for help with quality content is sorely needed, if we can’t believe what we’re hearing and seeing there, and it seems we can’t. Good luck with that.

So here it is, Ms Murdoch, here is the gem that will help ensure that the new Shine on the Murdoch fortunes is real, and not just a reflection of the stage lights on Dad’s ego. Pick up the option on this program and produce an instant hit. I say start with the 50 states and give one each to a billionaire with no current financial holdings in that state. Charge them with building a team of idea people, researchers, managers and engineers, and public relations and marketing people who are presently unemployed in that state. Start by landing one or more of the many unemployed human resources professionals wandering around looking dazed and confused and go from there.

All they have to do to get started is to verify that they have placed $US one billion in escrow for the project, and the game is on. Round up the local media teams to keep an eye (and a camera) on their their every move, as they begin to shape a new industry for the state, or to improve its existing resources to a level of fiscal productiveness. Make sure they all get exactly the same breaks, in terms of obeying the local laws. Air weekly or even daily reports on the action, answering questions on the minds of local viewers: Who’re the players? What’s the action?; How much is being spent, and on what?

Empanel a group of experts to evaluate the moguls’ projects in terms of whose ideas are generating the most good for the most citizens of each’s respective state. Finally, set up a method, a la American Idol, where the citizens can make their own opinions count, in terms of how they are receiving that which is being put in place for them. Use an algorithm combining the findings of the panel with the votes of the public to allot a number of points per week to each player. The billionaire with the most points for the week is the “Best Billionaire”.

I’m looking your way, Ms Murdoch, for the same reason I first offered the idea to Donald Trump. I figured he’d jump at the chance to do it, and earned a well-deserved Nobel, thus putting him a giant step closer to the US Presidency that he feels so uniquely qualified for. He’s ignoring me, possibly because it’s easier to just keep building projects that shave money off those of his own class. Who can say?

I reckon that, if you know anything at all, Ms Murdoch, you must know media. I think you will see the merits in this plan, if your imagination is as good as we imagine. This project has the potential to produce more media revenue in the first year alone, than Diddums is forking over for your Shine Group. Here’s your chance to build another one, even bigger and better, and in less time, without even breaking a sweat. Call it Spit Shine. Call it whatever you want, once it’s yours. Call me.

Jack Large

Seoul

The World I Want to See

After posting yesterday’s, it occurred to me that, because the phrase, American Mogul, is a fairly common one, it has likely been used in one context or another by someone. If so, I owed it to that person and myself to find out. I did what anyone does, nowadays, and googled it. Sure enough, there he was, Russell Simmons, an entertainment world figure and a successful entrepreneur himself, if still a toenail short of the billionaire cut. If he remains healthy and energetic, and continues to do everything right, he’ll make it. It’s still America, after all.

Reading about Mr. Simmons, I began to develop a wary admiration of him and his pursuits. He had some help along the way from family, like so many successful people have, but he surely deserves the “self-made” distinction that Forbes applies to billionaires (and less) that the magazine considers more worthy of our approbation. I realized that, while making money had been a relatively central factor in Mr. Simmons’ motivational complex, I was hard-pressed to think of anyone for whom that isn’t necessarily the case. All it takes, in fact, is a trip to the supermarket to put the point into perspective.

I cannot comment about the reality show of which he was the central character, for I’ve only just learned of its existence and have more pressing lacunae on my to-Google list. Apparently it didn’t have the leg for the long run. Others will know; I don’t. It was apparently interesting enough to be signed up for more than a single season, so one wonders what essential ingredient it exhausted first. I had to think about the point for a spell.

As I thought (an activity I do more vigorously before lunch than after) I slipped into a kind of afternoon reverie. I remembered a project I had worked on years earlier in Idaho, taking photographs for a project run by a long-defunct magazine called Idaho Heritage. I spent a day or two, (depending on Day One weather) wandering about taking snapshots, and only occasionally intruding into the daily activities of the residents, to get their ideas about what might be the interesting subjects of my work.

The communities and their citizens were charming, villages, really, each was unique. I’ll bring some of the photos here, soon as it occurs to me where they are archived, for they coincide in years with the advent of the personal computer. I mention these places; there were twelve of them, for one reason. Each of the towns was healthy, but not noticeably growing, and each showed signs of a struggle to remain not just economically viable, but stable enough to remain more than a mere ghost town, of which there are more in Idaho than one might guess.

It occurred to me to wonder what might happen if a single affluent individual decided that one of these towns would be, in a wired world such as ours, a reasonable place to take up residence for all or part of a year? What if, having determined to do so with a budget of a million dollars to make the move, using locally available products and services and tradespeople as possible, they spent 90% of their budget there?

In fact, there is nothing speculative about this scenario, and in Bellevue, Idaho (one of the 12 Idaho Heritage towns) something very similar has happened nearby already, and repeatedly. The next town north of it is Hailey, after which comes Ketchum. All three are part of the Sun Valley, Big Wood River area of central Idaho, which has become the site of serial homes of some of the most recognized names in the country. The easiest way for a longterm resident of the area to become a millionaire is to sell the building lot their pioneer family home still occupies.

The point of today’s maundering entry is that it doesn’t take a big investment in a small community, its residents and their businesses, to set in motion a chain reaction of progressive optimism and hope for the future that makes of such places some of the best places to live in the country. There are a large number of civic projects just waiting on a little bit of liquidity for launch. The knock-on effects of employing a dozen of the most capable local workers, normally resigned to the “rocking chair” of off-season unemployment checks is well known. People with an opportunity to repair, expand, upgrade, begin or complete long-idle projects in their surroundings are people with renewed optimism. Without optimism, life is merely being. The missing ingredient that brings the transformation from being to becoming is disposable capital, and that only comes from the exchange of goods and services, unless you are a Wall Street Banker or a big corporation. But that’s another blog post.

American Mogul

Fifty US billionaires, no, multi-billionaires, launched into one of the 50 American states each, matched by random selection, and each with a simple mission: compete with the others to earn the most points and profits by investing a billion dollars in the people and communities most in need of support there, while the public watches on TV and votes weekly for the winners in a smorgasbord of categories.

It will be a great American experiment in custom-crafted experimental capitalism. It will foster innovation, improvement, preservation, conservation, development and wise governance. A project with the potential to prove true the popular mythology and historical claim to an American exceptionalism, setting an example the entire world can admire and emulate. Once successful, it would herald and usher in a new, humanistic era of enlightened enterprise for the sake of the long-term survival of humankind.

How will it possibly be made to work? Here are some suggestions. From the pool of eligible billionaires, those with a net worth of two or more billions, select 50 names by a public drawing. Approval need not be sought from the participants, because nobody is trying to force them to do anything. The idea is to give them an opportunity to demonstrate and teach the skills that got them where they are today, and to earn more millions as they go about the hard work of becoming genuine American heroes of capitalism.

Winners in the drawing may opt out by vacating their win in any of several ways. They can sell out to another eligible competitor. If they can’t sell, they can give it away. If there is not an American billionaire with the courage and imagination and energy to compete, a foreign player may join the game, once approved by a council selected for the purpose of settling such matters.

Once the roster of contestants is set, things can be expected to move forward with determined speed. Each player must place one billion dollars in escrow, earmarked to retire all costs and expenses of the players’ chosen projects. This would include human resources, research and development, rentals and equipment, insurance, licenses and fees, and additional overhead.

Who runs the game? Our economic lives are shaped by the activities of three institutional types: government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and private enterprises. Each state of the US would form a local council to monitor and facilitate as needed the efforts of their allotted mogul. State council performance would be guided by a grand national council made up of non-participant entrepreneurs, government officials, NGO representatives and a few ordinary citizens drawn from a pool of applicants. Membership in the council should rotate and shift, to minimize the possibility of defeating internal dynamics in the programs set up.

How long will this go on? A person with a billion dollars of working capital should be able to get a lot of balls rolling quickly, which is not to say there is any particular reason to set up projects to be open for business within a matter of weeks or even months. Success in the competition depends at least as much on the mogul’s ability to amass points as to pile up profits in the early going. Careful planning, staffing, research and groundwork-laying will be the key to success in the first year of the project. By the end of that time, the players, and the watching world, should have a fair idea of what to expect as each state(s) project(s) go forward. The first year will be a time of learning and listening and teaching for the moguls. They’ll be meeting people, making friends, interviewing prospective hirees, brainstorming and getting a solid idea of the resources and talents most likely to combine in point-scoring projects with a future.

How are points awarded? The philosophy that has produced the basic design of this project assigns greater importance to people and communities, than to properties and private ownership. The point system reflects that basic fact. Therefore, projects collect more points going forward that display obvious qualities of innovation, problem solving, enhancing public education,  improving governance  (cutting costs and/or increasing revenues), make use of environment-friendly technologies, make infrastructure improvements, provide stay-at-home manufacturing jobs, enhance eco-diversity, foster youth/elderly/ infirm-oriented programs, bring reduced energy usage, promote the arts in public, enhance public safety without encroaching on citizens’ constitutional rights and freedoms, conservation-oriented, healthy lifestyle promoting,small and medium-sized business support, customer-owned financial services niche agricultural, manufacturing, marketing, and alternative sustainable lifestyle, et.al.

Fewer points are awarded  for approaches that smack strongly of old ways that have been discredited in all but their profit-producing dimensions: high value-added retail, costly advertising and marketing components, sports and entertainment, celebrity exploitation, extractive industries such as mining, logging, factory fishing, whaling, or Big Corporate anything that operates in ways known to be polluting, destructive or sending the profits out of the neighborhoods and communities that produce them.  In short, old ways garner fewer points than new ways.

So the first steps are to ascertain who the players are to be, based on the escrow deposits. As soon as those deposits are made, an administrative fee  of one million dollars will be collected by the administrative entity. The game concept is considered the property of that entity, and all proceeds from the sales of media rights, after costs are retired, will be remunerated to moguls as a gesture of good faith and appreciation for playing.

Finally, it is to be expected that the contest will evolve, as the people engaged in it become familiar with all its elements, opportunities and challenges. The funds in escrow remain the property of the moguls, with the understanding that penalties may be taken for failure to participate vigorously and sincerely. The competition should be considered fully matured after five years time, when the escrow funds will be released, and everyone who participates will have established whatever role and position the future may hold for them. In that five years time, everyone should hope that a new public spirit of civic interdependence will have grown out of it, with a better-educated and less ideology driven public its proud guardians.

The reality TV show I’d like to see

The United States, according to Forbes Magazine has a minimum of 400 billionaires. Almost half that number are worth $2 billion or more, give or take. When you’re standing on the mountain, its hard to know the size of it.

Donald Trump, at $2.6 bn, has his eye on the top of the pile always, and not just the money pile. He wants to be president. Fair enough. We’re taught from a very young age that, in America, we can be president if we want it badly enough, and if we work harder to get there than the runners-up do .

The Donald has once again inflated the trial balloon, and once again generated as much ridicule as support for the notion, partly because he claims the right no to decide until after the current season of his hit reality show, The Apprentice, has been put to bed.

I have given the matter a lot of thought (strangely enough) and I have divined a path, a Yellow Brick Road, if you will, that ends with Mr. Trump elected POTUS. It is not only plausible, but if he can just go out and pull it off with the same deftness he demonstrates in getting the members of his class to spend on other Trump enterprises, I will vote for Donald Trump myself.

The reader who doesn’t know me will be muttering “Here’s another fool with a disposable vote!”, and that’s fair enough, at least in part. I am a kind of American socialist; our votes are, thus far, the very definition of disposable in our country. Yet, that here is a socialist acknowledging even the possibility of voting for a man whose life e, should give any politically literate person a double-take. So here it is; it needs a name and yours may be better than mine. I call it American Mogul. I am not shy in my triteness.

Four hundred billionaires, if parity was possible, would mean eight per state. Only half of them have enough money to play in this contest, cutting the total number of billionaires eligible for it to four. Eligibility rests on one qualification. Each would-be mogul must be willing to place, at the outset, one billion dollars in escrow if they mean to play. The eligibility pool will contain but 50 contestants, or one per US state. An entry fee of one million dollars will be collected from the escrow funds.

To become the American Mogul, contestants will be judged by a method combining the small administrative skills of an expert panel, a la The Apprentice, and American Idol, with the local perceptions in the state theater of performance, by a panel composed of judges from the ranks of government, education, business and the public-at-large, and finally, by the tally of phone-in votes for candidates as regarded by the national citizenry.

A lottery would pair each mogul with a state. Ground rules requiring each to reveal the extent of their current business activity in the state allotted to them, so that the likelihood is minimized of their approach doing no more good than merely adding substance to an already substantial holding there.

The action required of each mogul, is to devise and implement an investment plan, to be completed within a set period of, say, 4-5 years, that can be shown to produce the greatest amount of financial, social and tax benefit to his/her allotted state, and as the demonstrated result of the mogul’s plan.

The economic spin-offs from media presentation, employment opportunities, bandwagon-jumping investor mogul wanna-bes should be significant and fun to watch. Close scrutiny to guard agains cronyism, corruption, insider trading, sweetheart deals, offshore accounts, and outsourcing of key elements should be recognized as real risks, and rules put in place to minimize and penalize their occurrence.

The perception of most people is that most moguls got their money the old-fashioned way: they inherited it. Furthermore, it is generally perceived that, without teams of lawyers, accountants and managers, most moguls would end their lives with less than they started with.

Here is a chance for them to put us all in our places. Donald Trump can lead the orchestra, and if he does so, successfully, he would deserve the Nobel Peace Price, the one that would make believers of us all, and put him in the White House.

So come on, Mr Trump!  Stand and deliver, you other billionaires! Show us what you’re made of. Prove to us, all and sundry, that Laissez Faire capitalism, even the taxed and regulated kind, is the way to the Promised Land. Or don’t, and continue to confirm our worst suspicions.

Boycott Fortune 500

A boycott is a form of consumer activism involving the act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country as an expression of protest, usually for political reasons. -Wikipedia

Today I have launched in Facebook my campaign to trigger a nationwide boycott of Fortune 500 company products and services to last until all have agreed to absolute transparency of their operations where the national (and global) public health and welfare are at issue. It is intended that an army of determined, aggressive researchers adn field representatives of the boycott action spread out into the communities most at risk, essentially every middle class neighborhood in the United States, to educate and inform the citizens on the goals and philosophies that propel the action.

The erosion of social and economic security that plagues our country is unprecedented, and the eventual worst-case scenario, if it goes unchecked, is the complete collapse of our way of life. If it happens, and the citizenry have not risen to take action ahead of the collapse, when a clear course of action has been proposed that promises both near- and long-term positive results, then the citizens must accept responsibility along with those they prefer to condemn.

Americans must take back into their own hands the reins of control over their economic well-being and livelihood. This means making radical changes, based on humane and sensible actions, in the entire fabric of our economic lives. We must conserve more, consume less, make do with less, share more, socialize more, read and discuss more, make better use of human and material resources in our neighborhoods, create better living, playing, studying and working environments for our young people without boring them to distraction, and we must stop thinking of American as an exception, invulnerable to every normal destructive force of man and nature.

It is time to stop causing so many problems to be part of, and to start offering and being part of the solutions. It starts with altering our patterns of consumption of the most basic goods and services. By sharing costs of such necessities as energy, transportation, child care, health and medical needs, food, clothing and shelter, enormous savings are within our reach. By forcing big companies to stop counting on consumers to be no better nor more intelligent than milch cows and egg-laying chickens and wool-producing sheep, in our consumption of the fat and sugar laden food products, foreign sweatshop-produced garments, and gas-guzzling, pollutant-belching personal conveyances, we can regain control of these critical dimensions of our lives.

I intend to dwell on this topic at length, and I hope in doing so, to attract a range of commentary, pro and con, that will propel the movement forward and serve as a key element of its success as a movement, but more importantly lead to a process of steadily evolving remedies and beneficial changes that only hard-bitten ideologues might condemn out-of-hand.

Some may wonder from whence comes the impetus behind this move. Credit the writing of David Halberstam, a man whose journalism I always admired while he lived. The library of a private school where I sub recently discarded a copy of Halberstam’s The Powers that be, chronicling the 20th Century lives of Luce, Chandler, Paley and Graham families, and the rise of the media empires they led. Even though I was present and mostly paying attention during the last 50 years of the period, I am startled to learn how much I missed, everyone missed, about them, that makes sense of a lot of facts previously disconnected in my understanding.