#shally manne

[musicollage]

Tom Waits – Small Change. 1976 : Asylum.

[ support the artist ★ buy me a coffee ]

[collapsedsquid]

Once citizenship was equated with human dignity, its extension to all classes, professions, both sexes, all races, creeds, and locations was only a matter of time. Universal franchise, the national service, and state education for all had to follow. Moreover, once all human beings were supposed to be able to accede to the high rank of a citizen, national solidarity within the newly egalitarian political community demanded the relief of the estate of Man, a dignified material existence for all, and the eradication of the remnants of personal servitude. The state, putatively representing everybody, was prevailed upon to grant not only a modicum of wealth for most people, but also a minimum of leisure, once the exclusive temporal fief of gentlemen only, in order to enable us all to play and enjoy the benefits of culture.

For the liberal, social-democratic, and other assorted progressive heirs of the Enlightenment, then, progress meant universal citizenship—that is, a virtual equality of political condition, a virtually equal say for all in the common affairs of any given community—together with a social condition and a model of rationality that could make it possible. For some, socialism seemed to be the straightforward continuation and enlargement of the Enlightenment project; for some, like Karl Marx, the completion of the project required a revolution (doing away with the appropriation of surplus value and an end to the social division of labor). But for all of them it appeared fairly obvious that the merger of the human and the political condition was, simply, moral necessity.2

The savage nineteenth-century condemnations of bourgeois society—the common basis, for a time, of the culturally avant-garde and politically radical—stemmed from the conviction that the process, as it was, was fraudulent, and that individual liberty was not all it was cracked up to be, but not from the view, represented only by a few solitary figures, that the endeavor was worthless. It was not only Nietzsche and Dostoevsky who feared that increasing equality might transform everybody above and under the middle classes into bourgeois philistines. Progressive revolutionaries, too, wanted a New Man and a New Woman, bereft of the inner demons of repression and domination: a civic community that was at the same time the human community needed a new morality grounded in respect for the hitherto excluded.

This adventure ended in the debacle of 1914. Fascism offered the most determined response to the collapse of the Enlightenment, especially of democratic socialism and progressive social reform. Fascism, on the whole, was not conservative, even if it was counter-revolutionary: it did not re-establish hereditary aristocracy or the monarchy, despite some romantic-reactionary verbiage. But it was able to undo the key regulative (or liminal) notion of modern society, that of universal citizenship. By then, governments were thought to represent and protect everybody. National or state borders defined the difference between friend and foe; foreigners could be foes, fellow citizens could not. Pace Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist of fascism and the political theologian of the Third Reich, the sovereign could not simply decide by fiat who would be friend and who would be foe. But Schmitt was right on one fundamental point: the idea of universal citizenship contains an inherent contradiction in that the dominant institution of modern society, the nation-state, is both a universalistic and a parochial (since territorial) institution. Liberal nationalism, unlike ethnicism and fascism, is limited—if you wish, tempered—universalism. Fascism put an end to this shilly-shallying: the sovereign was judge of who does and does not belong to the civic community, and citizenship became a function of his (or its) trenchant decree.

[...]

The perilous differentiation between citizen and non-citizen is not, of course, a fascist invention. As Michael Mann points out in a pathbreaking study3, the classical expression "we the People" did not include black slaves and "red Indians" (Native Americans), and the ethnic, regional, class, and denominational definitions of "the people" have led to genocide both "out there" (in settler colonies) and within nation states (see the Armenian massacre perpetrated by modernizing Turkish nationalists) under democratic, semi-democratic, or authoritarian (but not "totalitarian") governments. If sovereignty is vested in the people, the territorial or demographic definition of what and who the people are becomes decisive. Moreover, the withdrawal of legitimacy from state socialist (communist) and revolutionary nationalist ("Third World") regimes with their mock-Enlightenment definitions of nationhood left only racial, ethnic, and confessional (or denominational) bases for a legitimate claim or title for "state-formation" (as in Yugoslavia, Czecho-Slovakia, the ex-Soviet Union, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Sudan, etc.)

Everywhere, then, from Lithuania to California, immigrant and even autochthonous minorities have become the enemy and are expected to put up with the diminution and suspension of their civic and human rights. The propensity of the European Union to weaken the nation-state and strengthen regionalism (which, by extension, might prop up the power of the center at Brussels and Strasbourg) manages to ethnicize rivalry and territorial inequality (see Northern vs. Southern Italy, Catalonia vs. Andalusia, English South East vs. Scotland, Fleming vs. Walloon Belgium, Brittany vs. Normandy). Class conflict, too, is being ethnicized and racialized, between the established and secure working class and lower middle class of the metropolis and the new immigrant of the periphery, also construed as a problem of security and crime.4 Hungarian and Serbian ethnicists pretend that the nation is wherever persons of Hungarian or Serbian origin happen to live, regardless of their citizenship, with the corollary that citizens of their nation-state who are ethnically, racially, denominationally, or culturally "alien" do not really belong to the nation.

The growing de-politicization of the concept of a nation (the shift to a cultural definition) leads to the acceptance of discrimination as "natural." This is the discourse the right intones quite openly in the parliaments and street rallies in eastern and Central Europe, in Asia, and, increasingly, in "the West." It cannot be denied that attacks against egalitarian welfare systems and affirmative action techniques everywhere have a dark racial undertone, accompanied by racist police brutality and vigilantism in many places. The link, once regarded as necessary and logical, between citizenship, equality, and territory may disappear in what the theorist of the Third Way, the formerly Marxissant sociologist Anthony Giddens, calls a society of responsible risk-takers.

[...]

Citizenship in a functional nation-state is the one safe meal ticket in the contemporary world. But such citizenship is now a privilege of the very few. The Enlightenment assimilation of citizenship to the necessary and "natural" political condition of all human beings has been reversed. Citizenship was once upon a time a privilege within nations. It is now a privilege to most persons in some nations. Citizenship is today the very exceptional privilege of the inhabitants of flourishing capitalist nation-states, while the majority of the world’s population cannot even begin to aspire to the civic condition, and has also lost the relative security of pre-state (tribe, kinship) protection.

The scission of citizenship and sub-political humanity is now complete, the work of Enlightenment irretrievably lost. Post-fascism does not need to put non-citizens into freight trains to take them into death; instead, it need only prevent the new non-citizens from boarding any trains that might take them into the happy world of overflowing rubbish bins that could feed them. Post-fascist movements everywhere, but especially in Europe, are anti-immigration movements, grounded in the "homogeneous" world-view of productive usefulness. They are not simply protecting racial and class privileges within the nation-state (although they are doing that, too) but protecting universal citizenship within the rich nation-state against the virtual-universal citizenship of all human beings, regardless of geography, language, race, denomination, and habits. The current notion of "human rights" might defend people from the lawlessness of tyrants, but it is no defense against the lawlessness of no rule.

Believe I posted this before but it’s interesting enough to post again

[sensitivefern]

Day after day, Boswell treads water. His flurries of zeal at court come to little... Boswell is mostly in Edinburgh, and I, rather lost in the petty social swirl there, found no character as continuously engaging as the hero’s big toe, with its ingrown toenail; this pathetic digit, already familiar to readers of the Continental journals, makes its reappearance on April 24, 1779 (‘My sore foot was troublesome’), and inflames and remisses, is maltreated and suffered and dreamed about (‘I dreamt that I saw the cause of my toe being so painful’), and at last, to our great relief, before dinner on January 27, 1780, is decisively cut into by the shilly-shallying surgeon (‘I felt myself resolved to bear the pain, so he cut a good deal of the nail of my great toe out of the flesh. The operation hurt me much. But as soon as it was over I perceived that I was much relieved for I felt only the pain of a green wound instead of the pain of my toe irritated by the nail in it’), and henceforth slowly heals, to fade finally from notice on the 6th of May... Like doctor and patient, reader and writer grope together through a puzzling mass of symptoms and uncathartic crisis that unfold with a maddening organic slowness toward the ambiguous optimum of further survival.

[John Updike]

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The state closest to the Beni was based around Lake Titicaca, the 120-mile-long alpine lake that crosses the Peru-Bolivia border. Most of this region has an altitude of twelve thousand feet or more. Summers are short; winters are correspondingly long. This ‘bleak, frigid land’, wrote... Victor von-Hagen, ‘seemingly was the last place from which one might expect a culture to develop’. But in fact the lake is comparatively warm, and so the land surrounding it is less beaten by frost than the surrounding highlands. Taking advantage of the better climate, the village of Tiwanaku... began after about 800 B.C. to drain the wetlands around the rivers that flowed into the lake from the south...

[1491]

===

T’ville, from Aug. 6, 1966. The house looks better with new screens in the windows, the roof and the back bedroom painted. [...] It was the day of the fireman’s fair and parade. Both Mary’s girls were in the parade, which went by just after we had finished dinner. Susan was playing the clarinet... The whole thing was touching and cheering. Each town had sent its delegation, and they competed with one another in music, display, drum-majorette stick-twirling and other tricks. In one, there was a girl who did flips; in another, the girl would suddenly sink to the ground, then quickly start up again.

[Edmund Wilson]

===

No eaves; so that very quickly one of the hallmarks of compound work, never referred to in the manifestos, became the permanently streaked and stained white or beige stucco exterior wall.

Then there was the principle of ‘expressed structure’. The bourgeoisie had always been great ones for false fronts (it hardly needed saying), thick walls of masonry and other grand materials, overlaid with every manner of quoin and groin and pediment and lintel and rock-faced arch, cozy anthropomorphic elements such as entablatures and capitals, pilasters and columns, plinths and rusticated bases, to create the impression of head, midsection, and foot, and every manner of grandiose and pointless gesture – spires, Spanish tile roofs, bays, corbels – to create a dishonest picture of what went on inside, architecturally and socially. All this had to go.

[From Bauhaus to Our House]

===

That one Holstein cow should produce 50,000 pounds of milk in a year may appear to be marvelous... But what if her productivity is dependent upon the consumption of a huge amount of grain (about a bushel a day), and therefore upon the availability of cheap petroleum? What if she is too valuable (and too delicate) to be allowed outdoors in the rain? What if the proliferation of her kind will again drastically reduce the number of dairy farms and farmers? Or, to use a more obvious example, can we afford a bushel of grain at a cost of five to twenty bushels of topsoil lost to erosion?

[Wendell Berry]

===

Unlike Benjamin Rush, whose medical theories and practices have been relegated to the slops of American history, Nathaniel Hawthorne has remained one of the canonical elect, a certified literary genius... But Hawthorne was hardly isolated from the great currents of nineteenth-century American gastrosophy. His sister-in-law, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann (Mrs. Horace Mann), wrote one of the most representative books of Hawthorne’s time, Christianity in the Kitchen. [...] One of Hawthorne’s short stories from 1846 carries the epigastric title: ‘Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent’. The story’s protagonist, Roderick Elliston, is a ‘lean man, of unwholesome look’, his complexion ‘a greenish tinge over its sickly white’. As it turns out, Elliston’s problem is more than your garden-variety dyspepsia. He is the ‘man with a snake in his bosom’. And thus Elliston’s convulsive alimentary refrain: ‘It gnaws me! It gnaws me!’

[A Short History of the American Stomach]

===

SKUNK: Many investigators have made detailed food studies of skunks and have shown that their principal food is insects and most of the insects taken are injurious to plant life. When fruits are ripe and plentiful, they constitute an important part of skunk diet. Most of these are gathered from the surface of the ground, so represent waste as far as man is concerned. Mice constitute another important food item and their destruction is favorable to man. An occasionally bird is taken and not infrequently they were previously injured or already dead when taken by the skunk. Under these circumstances, this too is a service to man.

Skunks deserve much credit for digging out the June bug or May bettle in both the larval and adult stages.

===

spiny restharrow | Ononis spinosa Mediterranean region, extending out Turkestan way... the root is used medicinally – its constituents include ‘glycosidic iso-flavonoids and their aglycones formononetin and onogenin, the triterpene α-onocerin, the little known ononid’... ‘Along with parsley root, licorice rhizomes and juniper berries it is an important component of diuretic herbal tea mixtures’... in the wild it is found on dry banks, forest edges, rough grasslands principally on limestone soils... is prickly... Leguminosae...

===

Liatris L. spicata ‘pioneers plant succession in strip-mined spoils and in old fields’... chief pollinators are bumble bees and bee flies; the glorious flower moth (Schinia gloriosa) feeds upon it as a well camouflaged caterpillar... ants and lady bugs... sheep find numerous species tasty; deer, the opposite... voles are said to collect the corms, storing them in their pantries...

[The Book of Field and Roadside]

===

❚David Frum Retweeted Sky News Australia BREAKING Sky News sources say Donald Trump was 'yelling' during his phone conversation with PM Turnbull and hung up after 25 minutes

Shy Shelter Dog FLIPS OUT After Realizing He's Been Adopted

The Trump Era Is Al Franken’s Time to Shine The Minnesota senator has emerged from the shadows to make life hell for Republicans.

Donald Trump Grabs National Prayer Breakfast By The Pussy This dumb ritual happens every year, called the National Prayer Breakfast. It’s a bipartisan shindig, where politicians on both sides of the aisle, of all faiths, can come together and agree to spend the morning praying to Jesus. It’s super evangelical, run by a creepy cult of right-wing dominionist Christians called The Family. So obviously our secular government should embrace it as a tradition, right? ANYWAY. Donald Trump got to go to his first National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning, and instead of doing like a common Obama, making nice speeches about faith and family, while the wingnuts in attendance rock back and forth and pray for the unborned babies, Trump urged everybody to pray REALLY HARD... for Arnold Schwarzenegger to get better ratings on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” because that’s what these folks really care about.

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE MOTHERFUCKERS

Doctor, writer, and all-round polymath Thomas Browne (1605-1682) is now better known for his literary work but in his own time was legendary as the greatest – and first – scientific populariser of his day. Browne’s best-selling Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Common Errors, debunked myths in botany, geology, geography, anatomy, and zoology, as well as history and scripture. Going through seven editions during his lifetime and translated into several European languages, it made him the first public “expert” and a pioneer of popular science. Common Errors is a landmark work of myth-busting. In it Browne tackles important questions such as: do elephants have knees? Why do we say “bless you” when we sneeze? Is the earth a magnetic body? Did Jesus have long hair? Who would win in a fight, a toad or a spider? [...] One of Browne’s most prolonged experiments involved the ostrich, acquired by his son Edward. A flock arrived in London in the early 1660s, brought by the Moroccan ambassador as a gift for the king, and immediately caused a splash – exotic animals were rare in England at the time. Edward managed to get hold of one and kept it in his stables. A frenzy of letters between father and son followed, discussing its eating and sleeping habits, the shape of its feet, and the noises it made (“a strange odde noyse … especially in the morning and perhaps when hungry”). This experiment in collaborative zoo-keeping came to an abrupt end when the ostrich died in its sleep one night, as Browne had predicted, being unused to the cold of a London January. It was immediately dissected. Browne was nothing if not thorough.