Author Archives: Larry Franz

Housekeeping

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If it weren’t 11 degrees outside (-12 C), this post might be called “Spring Cleaning”. But “Housekeeping” is probably better.

As we all know, comments on Internet sites are a touchy subject. Sometimes, it’s hard to read them without feeling dirty afterward (and not “dirty” in a good way).

This blog doesn’t attract a lot of comments (or readers, for that matter), but according to WordPress’s statistics, my 259 posts have received 161 comments (probably half of which were my responses). Most of them have been fine, but a few have been obnoxious. I’ve had a few repetitious exchanges in which no communication occurred. I’ve also been called a “racist”, “ridiculous” and “juvenile” and told to fuck myself (which wasn’t offered as helpful advice).

WordPress offers several ways to deal with comments. I could ban them completely, for example, or only allow them on certain posts. Freedom of speech and the exchange of ideas generally being a good thing, however, I’ve decided to continue allowing comments on all posts, but severely edit those that are especially rude or silly. So a 500-word comment that I find especially objectionable might show up as “What you said …” or “You’re really …” or “How about … ” or “Why don’t … ” and be followed by “The comment above was too rude or obnoxious to print in full.” The ellipsis can be our friend.

On a somewhat related note, I’ve removed three posts regarding my recent experience with jury duty: “On Not Being a Juror”, “On Whether I Am a Judgmental Racist” and “Maybe the Defendant’s Lawyer Should Have Kept Me on the Jury”.

For some reason, these three posts continue to draw attention. Maybe they’re being passed around by students at prestigious law schools. Or maybe they appeal to a bunch of white supremacists in Idaho. The only comment they’ve received wasn’t complimentary, as you can tell from one of the titles. But since they express a few opinions of mine that some people consider right-wingish, I’ve decided to remove them from public view. I’d rather not feed the prejudices of real right-wingers, at the risk of leaving brilliant law students uninformed.

Friedrich Nietzsche on Doing It Again

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Friedrich Nietzsche had a recurring thought about recurrence.

In one of his early works, he imagines people being asked “whether they would wish to live through the past ten or twenty years once more”.

In a later work, he appears to raise the stakes:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine”.

Assuming the demon and I didn’t get hung up on questions like “Who are you anyway?” and “Are you sure about that?”, I’d want some clarification. (I can’t imagine gnashing my teeth, since I don’t know what that is.)

Tell me, demon. Would I know that I was living my life again? There wouldn’t seem to be much point in doing it again from scratch.

The demon would probably have a ready answer: if you knew you were living it again, it wouldn’t be the same as living it the first time. You’d have more knowledge the second (or third, or fourth) time around, and presumably be in a position to make different choices.

Right, the Debbie Anderson thing again.

But if I didn’t know anything more this time or remember how things turned out before, what difference would it make? Even if things turned out differently, I wouldn’t know they were turning out differently. I’d simply be living my life as if it were the first time. In fact, for all I know, I’m living my life right now for the umpteenth time, even though it sure feels like the very first (and only) time.

The demon might be nonplussed at this point. Hey, he might say, I never thought of it that way. If you remember you’re doing it again, you’re not really doing it again. But if you don’t know you’re doing it again, you might as well be doing it for the first time. Oh well, I guess it was a stupid question to begin with.

Nietzsche clearly didn’t think it was a stupid question. He thought that a superior person would willingly live the very same life over and over again. To do so would be the highest affirmation. Life is tragic and full of pain, but the best among us will embrace it anyway.

He’s probably right about that, even though the idea of “eternal recurrence” is a dead end.

What some of us really want, of course, is to go back and do things differently. If I could only go back to that one moment ten years ago, or forty years ago, I’d do it better this time.

Since we’re merely human, fantasizing about the past is much easier than getting the future right.

The Everly Brothers – “Oh, So Many Years”

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The Everly Brothers’ first album, released in 1958, featured songs like “Bye Bye Love”,  “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Rip It Up”. Later that year, they released their second album: Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. It was a surprising choice as a follow-up, since it included no rock and roll at all. 

Don Everly, 76, released a statement tonight: “I loved my brother very much. I always thought I’d be the one to go first.”

“Oh, So Many Years” was originally recorded by the Bailes Brothers in the 1940s. The Everly Brothers sang it like nobody else on Songs Our Daddy Taught Us:

It’s the Austerity and Lack of Trust

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The chart below shows government spending after our last four recessions (that’s total federal, state and local spending, corrected for inflation, with the numbers at the bottom representing yearly quarters after the recessions).

After three recessions, government spending went up. After the most recent recession, it’s gone down:

blog_austerity_state_local_federal_spending_0

It makes sense for families to cut spending if they run into economic difficulty, but it makes no sense for the government to do the same. In situations like we’re in now, the government has to counteract the natural tendency of families and businesses to cut back when economic times are hard. Common sense and economic theory tell us the government should spend more after a recession in order to help the economy recover, even if that means increasing government debt until things get better. Yet we’ve been following the opposite policy the past few years. The result has been a relatively weak recovery that has left too many Americans unemployed and underemployed.

Why have we acted so stupidly? The obvious answer is that there were Republicans in the White House after those earlier recessions. Now there’s a Democrat. That’s why Republicans in Congress supported government spending after the earlier recessions, but have vigorously opposed it this time. (After all, Republicans love certain kinds of government spending, despite what they claim.) Hypocrisy, foolishness, the desire to recapture the White House, combined with the failure of Democrats to make the case for more stimulus. It’s all those things and more. 

The chart is from “How Austerity Wrecked the American Economy” at Mother Jones. The author updates the story here.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman sees a connection between the declining acceptance of evolution among Republicans and their rejection of stimulus spending: in order to be a good Republican these days, you have to deny climate change, evolution and modern economics.

Another economist who has repeatedly pointed out the stupidity of what we’ve been doing is Joseph Stiglitz. In a New York Times article called “In No One We Trust”, he explains how we’re losing trust in each other and our institutions as inequality increases. The article is especially interesting when he shows how a lack of trust and an excess of bad behavior got us into the economic mess we’re still trying to get out of:

Trust is becoming yet another casualty of our country’s staggering inequality: As the gap between Americans widens, the bonds that hold society together weaken. So, too, as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding….

The banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.

Which Side Are You On?

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Journalist Edward McClelland lays it on the line at Salon in “The ‘Middle Class’ Myth: Here’s Why Wages Are Really So Low Today”.

Some key points:

In the relatively recent past, an “unskilled” worker straight out of high school could get a union job and earn enough to buy a car and rent an apartment.

Workers aren’t simply paid according to their skills. They’re paid based on how much they can get from their employers.

The anti-union movement’s biggest victory hasn’t been the elimination of existing union jobs. It’s been preventing the unionization of other jobs.

Companies claim that low-paid jobs were never meant to support a family or lead to a career, but that’s simply a way to justify paying low wages. And they can do that because they don’t have to deal with unions.

Today’s workers have to stop thinking of themselves as middle-class, just because they don’t work in a factory or they went to college: “Unless you own the business, you’re working class”.

“The smartest people I ever met were guys who ran cranes in the mill…They were smart enough, at least, to get their fair share of the company’s profits.”

It’s an excellent article and not very long. 

While we’re on the subject, Pete Seeger sings “Which Side Are You On?”, written in 1931 by Florence Reece, the wife of a union organizer, during Kentucky’s Harlan County War.

PS – Wikipedia says Florence Reece took the melody from a Baptist hymn. Pete Seeger was only 12 in 1931.