I was listening to public radio
this morning. A quartet
by Jennifer Higdon.
I was cooking in the kitchen,
where I also have a small radio
and when the title was announced,
I thought he said
"An exaltation of Marx"
(actually, it was "Larks").
"Hey, that's pretty cool,"
I thought. I was just thinking
about how today's right-wing
"business class" -
the Neo-cons, the war imperialists,
the monopoly-finance capitalists
were all brainwashed
by basic Marxist doctrine.
How many generations of
stupid academics
have been injected
with this stuff,
passing it on to their
backward students,
while their bad-boy clubs
seduced them into
criminal celebrations
of wealth and power.
Isn't this the essence of our
"higher education?"
Capitalists are bad,
the business cycle is inevitable -
the rich get richer
while the poor get
progressively starved,
or as Marx said, "immiserated."
I must admit, I had
great teachers who explained
all this stuff to me.
American Marxists
weren't really Marxists.
Marx was a philosopher,
not a politician,
or tenured professor
at an Ivy League school.
Denny Davis,
my World History teacher,
from St. Olaf's,
later to be the father
of US Figure Skating Champion,
Scott Davis.
(Just last year, I learned
that Scott was the product
of an illicit student-teacher
relationship. Funny no one
ever mentioned that
at an appropriate time!)
Denny was also
the Offensive Coordinator
for the CMR Rustlers football team
the most successful in the state
in those years.
An amazing exercise
in suspending punishment
for the best and brightest.
But Denny paid a price,
becoming cynical and
devoid of hope.
That's where I first learned about
Marx and Machiavelli.
It's all about status,
not truth.
Power, not ethics
or righteousness.
Not even benevolence,
or a desire to serve humanity.
These Marxists were Hegelians -
it's all about patterns and process.
The Phenomenology of the Market,
one might say.
Isn't that a different department?
We don't do that
in Business Schools or
"Agricultural Economics".
I remember a couple
of lone environmental economists
in my last year at UCLA - by then,
a Philosophy grad-school drop-out
(this was 1970), just beginning
to smoke pot and dance
with Mescalito (although I'd
wanted to since age 15, when
I'd read about it in Playboy).
It hardly seems conceivable, now,
in that crowded, chaotic place
called Los Angeles.
It seemed more like
Victoria de los Angeles
than the Lakers, Kareem,
or the Johnny Carson show.
Yes, this was where the movies
were made, and since I watched movies
(but not TV - not since Leave it to Beaver,
anyway), I knew LA.
It was cool.
Even the Watts Riots didn't bother me,
although it freaked out my mother
and other former Midwest, Chicago
white people - even the "liberals."
Kareem was in my class.
They only lost one game
while I was there - to Houston.
I never attended one, either.
And I attributed that loss
to HASP, the Houston
Automatic Spooling Program
used in our mainframe computer-
the IBM 360-75,
which later went to Santa Barbara,
after being replaced
by the NASA-standard
360-91 at UCLA.
I actually watched
the first moon landing
from the computer-room at UCLA.
It almost seemed staged,
that's for sure.
It was like celebrating
a naval victory
from a sister-ship, far away.
I did that. I must have died,
and went to heaven,
to sing among the angels.
And I didn't even believe
in God,
although I was forced to make
some adjustments in that,
after studying Medieval Philosophy.
I was told Prof Moody was famous,
and this was his final year and class.
One of my preppy friends
wrote a Latin farewell
appropriate for such occasions.
You can imagine my sense
of deep inferiority
coming from rural Montana,
with hardly a cultural experience
or connection to my name.
The one trump card I held,
I never used.
That was being Jean Arthur's
cousin,
and actually having met her,
and hung out with her
(at about age 10).
But I never understood
it's significance. You couldn't simply
check out an old movie
and watch it.
It was Taboo.
I don't think I mentioned it
to anyone, although a few
already knew,
it seems in retrospect.
Nor was I a displaced Rebel
VP of the Confederacy
(Jean Arthur, Selznick's mistress
tried out for the Scarlett O'Hara
role. She was then pushing 40.)
Somehow, all that information
was kept secret. Yes, a Stephens
was the first head of UC
Southern Branch, the original UCLA.
Yes, this was Southern California.
Surely I fit in somewhere.
And so I did.
Alonzo Church,
of Church's Theorem fame.
He was there, at UCLA,
in the Philosophy Dept.
as well as Mathematics.
His office was near the computer center
where I worked, so I knew who he was.
It would be nearly 40 years later
that I learned that A H Stephens
had been befriended by a math prof
with the same name, in Georgia -
when? The 1820's, or thereabouts.
That was the school at Athens,
that became The University of Georgia,
and a classmate, LeConte,
would be the father
of a famous UC Berkeley Chancellor.
Meanwhile, the frat-boy future
MBA's of America, the CEO's,
the politicians,
the "social networkers"
droned on or dropped out.
The successful ones
were also engineers or
computer nerds - a species
just being born,
with me attending
(at the UCLA and Santa Barbara
computer centers, birthplace
of the DARPA science network),
laboring for 2 1/2 years
in ecstatic obscurity.
Operations, you understand.
Not the systems programmers,
who even then seemed
barely human.
And there were drugs.
Every kind, of highest quality.
Psycho-cybernetics.
Ceremonial chemistry.
Call it what you will.
We didn't think of ourselves
as criminals,
for having "broken the law."
We were creating law,
not breaking it.
Natural law. People's law.
Cosmic law. Spiritual law.
All without a single judge
or lawyer. We, the Jury.
The Educated and Enlightened.
We thought of ourselves
as scientists, explorers,
the Galileo's of this
unfolding Cosmos.
All the fundamental issues
were on the table.
Nothing
need be left unsaid,
and yet everything was.
I was not the person
people thought I was -
some Caligula, some war-lord
reincarnated from the Viking Age.
By that time, family networks
were shredded
beyond recognition.
Nothing fit together
in my mind.
The women, of course,
had different perceptions
and ambitions. I tried to stay
clear of them, but of course
they wanted to control me,
and claim a share
of whatever booty
I accumulated,
if not be rid of me
completely.
I never really knew
what I wanted to do, except
I was always told I'd get the ranch,
and be the 4th generation
on that homestead.
I gave it a shot,
and missed, apparently.
Should I have killed myself?
I came close
a couple of times, anyway.
The Buffalo spirits
always with me.
A real Commons
of the Mind.
I just couldn't
seem to get it together.
Everyone was playing
a different game.
A stranger
in a strange land, indeed
but that was something I knew
how to do.
I remember saying,
"After moving to Southern California
to go to UCLA."
(and that, in large part,
in imitation of Nathaniel Branden)
"it took me two years to adjust to it.
Then, everything was fine."
"But when I returned to Montana,
I simply couldn't cope with it.
Nothing seemed right.
Everyone was playing games
which somehow, I was a part of,
but never understood.
And that is still true, today."
I knew my relatives
must hate me, or be jealous
of my greater "privileges".
The Ugly Duckling
might be the right metaphor.
So as not to disappoint them
I went to jail
and otherwise became
an outcast.
Human nature, I suppose.
Why some men become gay,
or else brutal and tyrannical.
Boys cannot hit girls.
All we can do
is stay clear of them.
So, thank you Marx
and your daughter, Ayn Rand.
My sister was named Eleanor -
we thought, after Eleanor Roosevelt.
And we didn't like Roosevelt.
Both, perhaps, were named after
Eleanor Marx, who did kill herself
in despair at all the evil in the world.
- Paul Stephens (revised 1-14-14)
+++++++++++++
I've written several essays on "The Tragedy of Economics" and other basically "economics denial" subjects. Here's an excellent one from the current press:
The corruption of the economics profession
by Dean Baker @DeanBaker13
Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author, most recently, of The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.
December 30, 2013
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/economics-sciencecorruption.html
The public needs expert guidance on economic issues, but moneyed interests have gotten in the way
It is remarkable that the public has been convinced that the earth revolves around the sun. This is remarkable because we can all look up in the sky and see the sun revolving around the earth.
Most of us are willing to believe the direct opposite of what we can see with our own eyes because we accept the analysis of the solar system developed by astronomers through many centuries of careful observation. The overwhelming majority of people will never go through the measurements and reproduce the calculations. Rather, our belief that the earth revolves around the sun depends on our confidence in the competence and integrity of astronomers. If they all tell us that the earth in fact orbits the sun, we are prepared to accept this view.
Unfortunately the economics profession cannot claim to have a similar stature. This is both good and bad. It is good because it doesn’t deserve that stature. Economists too often work as hired guns for those with money and power. It is bad because the public needs expertise in economics, just as it needs expertise in medicine and other areas.
Theories for sale.....
