How Could Someone Get So Low In A Building So Damn Tall
How long until there's nothing left at all?
Here is another plug to subscribe if you like what you’ve been reading in this newsletter, awkardly placed right at the top because I don’t know how else to work it in.
On Monday morning, while getting some blood drawn, I had the most intense vasovagal syncope of my life. That’s the fancy name for the phenomenon where seeing or losing even a tiny bit of blood from certain areas of your body makes your BP plummet, causing you to pass out with dramatic flair. It’s nothing new for me (not to brag), but Monday’s was rough—according to the nurse, she thought I was having a seizure, as I somehow managed to fling myself out of the bed and onto the floor, banging my shins on the frame for good measure.
She explained (once I had chewed some ice chips and gotten the needle safely into the other elbow) that it’s likely a leftover primitive response in the brain; the preceding trauma and blood loss makes it think it’s being attacked by a predator or something and sends the whole body into “playing possum” mode. I gotta tell you I think that’s a shitty strategy and if it had been an apex predator in the room with me instead of Mary the nurse I wouldn’t have woken up at all.
Why can’t it make you play possum like this instead?
Speaking of shitty strategies, how about baseball, huh? I don’t think the MLB will shut down even if it means not letting the Miami Marlins play at all, but man, it’s hard to see a way they actually get through even a 55-game season at this point.
It is somewhat humbling to watch America bumble through one more element of the COVID recovery process that the rest of the world has largely figured out how to do correctly, which is to say that oh my god it is so fucking stupid watching the MLB and NBA try to hold their seasons right now. The NBA “bubble” is about as leaky a ship as anyone could have predicted and the MLB isn’t even bothering with such measures. (Canada even had to kick out the Toronto Blue Jays, who will play their home games in Buffalo for the foreseeable future. And you thought calling baseball’s championship the World Series was an egregious exaggeration before.)
As a result of things like this there are probably fewer and fewer American exceptionalists out there with each passing day, but that kind of indoctrination is hard to fully shake even for the most hardened critics of this pyramid scheme disguised as a country. Here, Jacob Bacharach cuts to one of the core myths propping this whole thing up:
It is true that, as measured by GDP, or by the size of the credit and equity markets, or even just by the gaudy presence of our Googles, Amazons and Apples, the United States is the greatest machine for the production of money in the modern history of the world.
But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely meaningless aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business pages call “economics.” The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished. Ask anyone who’s compared the nine-plus-hour train ride from Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to Bordeaux, an equidistant journey, or who’s watched the orderly, accurate exit polls from a German election and compared them with the fizzling, overheating voting machines in Florida.
I don’t want to speak for the dead but I don’t think Karl Marx would have any quibble with those paragraphs. He has previously posited roughly the same thing about what the capitalist system is actually good for.
The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm.
With all of this bleak reality lined up before you, you’d be forgiven for wanting to tune out and escape for a bit. Why not do that with some music? As I mentioned a few weeks ago I’m hooked on Billy Strings’ music right now. “Watch It Fall” in particular is a good tune.
Well it's not so easy now
Though it never was back then
We still can't seem to work this out
But you can still pretend
And these tattered walls and burning bridges
Quickly start to fall
How long until there's nothing left at all?Well the old men said the great Big Apple’s rotten to the core
With Wall Street skimming from the till
While no one minds the store
And how could someone get so low
In a building so damn tall?
How long until there's nothing left at all?
Ah. Nevertheless.
As always, I think the only way out of any of this is through collective action, particularly in the workplace. Something that has heartened me lately is the bevy of actions and events being planned by Demand Safe Schools, a DSA-led group fighting for safe conditions for teachers, students, and school employees. A lot of my writing tends to focus on teachers and not industrial sectors because that’s what I am and that’s what I know, but I think the lessons here are more broadly applicable as well—something that I certainly don’t have to tell union workers in other industries anyway.
That’s it for this week. This newsletter is free and will remain so forever, but if you want to support the work at all, buying a copy of my Pacific Crest Trail book is the best way to do that (along with sharing these posts when you like them).
Take care of yourselves.
-Chuck