April 2008

I’ve been remiss in not posting anything about the results of the Italian election – the result of a number of deadlines crashing in on me at once. But in lieu of proper analysis, it’s worth noting that the biggest winner in the elections – the _Lega Nord_ – is one of the most genuinely revolting political parties in the Western world. The picture below (nicked from “Foreign Policy’s Passport blog”:http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8692) gives some idea of what their winning electoral strategy involved.

According to _Passport_, it appears that Lega leading light Roberto Calderoli is likely to become deputy Prime Minister. Regular CT readers may “recall”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/18/follies-berlesque/ his resignation from a previous government after wearing a t-shirt with one of the Danish anti-Muslim cartoons; he has distinguished himself in the meantime with his dismissal of the French football team as “negroes, communists and Muslims” after Italy beat them in the infamous Zidane-headbutt game and by threatening to have a pig ‘defile’ a site in Bologna where a mosque was to be built. US readers who aren’t familiar with European politics should try to imagine a political party with a program co-written by Mark Steyn, David Duke and Tom Tancredo, and they’ll be at least half-way there.

Gareth Wilson brings something up in comments to this post. What do the parents among you say when your children ask you if your family is rich? I say, yes, we’re rich. Living in Asia as we do, our family has lots of chances to see really poor people in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. We see these people because we’re going on family vacations to stay in villas in Bali. There doesn’t seem to be much to say about that except, being rich sure is great, eh? I tend to say, well, that doesn’t mean we can buy just anything we want, and we’ll often see other people we know having great things we can’t afford, but on the whole, we’re rich. This is ideally meant to inspire charitable thoughts rather than mercenary self-satisfaction. Am I going to deprive my children of their God-given American right to insist they are middle-class? And when is Richie Rich Euros going to come out and serve as the grave monument for the mighty US dollar?

This is by way of announcing that “Eric Rauchway”:http://history.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Rauchway_Eric will be guest-blogging with us for a week. Eric’s been blogging up a storm together with Ari Kelman at “The Edge of the American West”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/ for a few months; a combination of history, contemporary politics, cutting edge Sesame Street commentary and literary stuff. Sort of like us in other words. We’re very happy he’ll be guesting for a while.

This NYT article, The Decline of the $20 Wage”, on the vanishing blue-collar worker with a middle-class income is both depressing and…confusing. Adjusting the numbers for inflation is at least alluded to initially:

Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still have them? Once upon a time, a large number earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don’t.

However, from this point on the article seems to talk about wages which were $20-an-hour or above in the past–even as far back as the 70s–and are now less than $20 in nominal terms.

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction….

Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class….

Since [the 1970s] the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.

The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

The shrinkage is sometimes quite open. The Big Three automakers are currently buying out more than 25,000 employees who earn above $20 an hour, replacing many with new hires tied to a “second tier” wage scale that never quite reaches $20. A similar buyout last year removed 80,000 auto workers. Many were not replaced, but many were, with the new hires paid today at the non-middle-class scale, and with fewer benefits.

Surely $20 an hour in the 70s would be $60 or so an hour now, adjusted for inflation? It makes a big difference to this article and the author has totally failed to explain the issue. ‘Fewer people of this class make even 1/3 as much per hour as they did 30 years ago’ is a very different message from ‘fewer people of this class make this inflation-adjusted wage.’ It seems clear the article implies the former but muddies the waters with the nominal wage, ironically further masking the dramatic decline of the blue-collar middle class.

Anyone reading blogs over the last few years know how obsessive the wingnut element can get over faked, altered and “faked” photographs. Sometimes there’s a case to answer; sometimes there’s a picture that contradicts their narrative and they’re shrilly convinced that “it isn’t trooo!” We saw instances of both in the recent Lebanon war. Now the great-granddaddy of such controversies “looks set for reinvestigation”:http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Robert_Capa_photo_investigators_defend_war_picture_news_252312.html : did Robert Capa stage his most famous picture, the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War? The International Center of Photography in New York has acquired a suitcase discovered in Mexico last year containing Capa negatives abandoned when he fled from Paris in 1939.

Via “Dan Nexon”:http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2008/04/charles-tilly-wins-albert-o-hirschman.html, Charles Tilly “has won”:http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/recipients.php the SSRC’s 2008 Albert O. Hirschman prize. I’ve blogged occasionally before about his wonderful little essay _Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime_; now I find that it’s finally available on the WWW in a “decent scan”:http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/51028?mode=full&submit_simple=Show+full+item+record (as a working paper, but I think it is pretty well identical to the final version apart from page numbers etc). It’s a piece I can’t recommend highly enough – short, brutal and brilliant (and quite accessible to curious non-academics, I would think).

Also of interest from the SSRC is this “roundtable”:http://www.ssrc.org/raceinamerica/ on MLK, Obama and William Kristol.

Together with various other media types and bloggers, I’ve signed a “letter of protest”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080505/open_letter at the way in which ABC conducted the debate on Wednesday night. Text is below.

We the undersigned deplore the conduct of ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson at the Democratic Presidential debate on April 16. The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world. This is not the first Democratic or Republican presidential debate to emphasize gotcha questions over real discussion. However, it is, so far, the worst.
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Following up my last rhythm-related YouTube post: who would win in a fight between Mighty Mr. Titan and Orgesticulanismus? (both via Cartoon Brew, at one time or another.)

If you are into that whole MST3K thing, the whole Cartoon Dump is worth your horrified gaze. (Titan is merely episode one.) Here [Big World of Little Adam] and here [Captain Fathom] and here [Spunky and Tadpole] and here [Bucky and Pepito] and here [Adventures of Sir Gee Whiz on the Far Side of the Moon]. I have to admit that, before seeing that last one, I had no idea Gee Whiz was an Irish name, nor that Irish accents came from the moon.

As a bonus I’ll throw in Buster Keaton in a 1964 Ford van ad.

The big increase in food prices over the last six months or so raises lots of issues, of which I’ll try to cover a few.
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So I’m about 50 minutes into the ABC Pennsylvania debate, and it’s like its being run by some crazed syndicate of Newsmax, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh – stupid talking point question after stupid talking point question, and so far not even a hint of interest in e.g. actual policy debates . All I need is for the moderators to ask _either_ the ‘So, Barack Hussein Osama, do you want to tell the American people about what you REALLY learned in the madrassa,’ or ‘Hillary Clinton, many Americans are concerned that you are secretly a lesbian? What do you have to say to them?’ question and I score the full house. I mean, what the fuck?

I just spent an hour trying to make my way through the Popage – I had forgotten that the papal procession would be wending its way along Pennsylvania Avenue, which inconveniently cuts between my Metro station and my office. Eventually, the Pope made his way through, waving at the cheering crowds on both sides of the street, but even afterwards the street was closed (for some unexplained reason which I suspect had more to do with DC police overtime than security needs, they aren’t letting people cross the street again for another couple of hours).

It was an interesting contrast with the last time that I had seen a Pope in person – when John Paul II came to visit Ireland in 1979, I, along with a very significant chunk of the rest of the population, went to see him. This was probably the high-water mark of the Catholic Church’s influence in Ireland – the 1980s saw a series of largely successful defensive actions against encroaching secularism, while the 1990s saw a series of unsuccessful ones against teh gay (finally legalized in 1993), the introduction of condoms (which had previously been available only by prescription in order to try to limit their use to married couples), divorce, and the right to travel to obtain an abortion.

In particular, I was struck by the similarities between the 1979 Popemobile and the 2008 version – either the engineers haven’t much imagination, or there isn’t all that much you can do to improve the basic design (although I don’t remember the original having bulletproof glass). Nor was the 1979 experience complicated by evangelical Christians with bullhorns vigorously denouncing ‘false religion’ and telling the cheering nuns and folks in Pope Benedict t-shirts that they were all going to go to hell unless they were born again in Christ. Finally, I was intrigued by this sign (apologies for blurriness of photo; the camera on my phone is garbage), which seemed to me to have dark undertones that were presumably not intended by the person who was waving it about.

Who would win in a fight between the Rhythm Bug and the Rhythm Thief? (By the by, I think the Swingology Prof. of Katnip Kollege could go toe to toe with Roosevelt Franklin any day.)

This being a blog with global reach, you never know whether what you take to be exotic isn’t mundane in the region where your snarky fellow-blogger or commenter lives or comes from. So, with that caveat, I report that I had “squirrel cocotte” for my dinner last night, with, appropriately enough, hazelnuts. Now I’ve ticked it off the list of stuff I’ve eaten, I probably won’t choose it again from a menu, but nor would I turn it down if offered by a friend. Dark, intense, a bit like venison, with hints of chocolate (since you ask).

I know that last week was children’s television week at CT, but I thought I’d just note that the Richard Greene version of The Adventures of Robin Hood is finally out on DVD in the US (it’s been available for years in the UK, and a few episodes have been available on region 1 in dollar stores for a while, but not the whole first series), and is almost free at amazon. This was Lew Grade’s first real foray into making ambitious television, and was written, in large part, by blacklisted and self-exiled Hollywood writers (I met Norma Barzman several times when I lived in LA; I was somewhat in awe of her and am only glad that I didn’t know then that she wrote for Robin Hood, or I would have been an embarrassing wreck. Like most Europeans of my generation I’m intensely grateful to the blacklisters for sending all those talented and decent people to start up TV for us). Watching it today, it holds up amazingly well — the film quality is excellent, the scripts are wry and well-plotted, and the acting is excellent (for a kid’s show) with major future stars turning up in nearly every episode. It compares very favourably with Disney’s Davy Crockett, which I also watched with my girls. Robin is a socialist, of course (very much in the Bows Against the Barons mould) and never commits violence in excess of what is needed, whereas Davy Crockett is full of morally dubious bloodbaths, and scripted….lightly. Highly Recommended — whether you have kids or not, frankly.