Spreading the Wealth

Today's headline on The New Republic homepage:

"Socialism" is the topic du jour of the presidential campaign, thanks to some dude from Ohio now famous as "Joe the Plumber."  Plumber Joe confronted Senator Obama during a campaign stop last week and asked him why he wanted to raise taxes.  Obama patiently explained that small business owners making more than $250,000 would see a tax increase from 36 to 39 percent (the same rate as under Bill Clinton), and that they would actually get a tax credit for employee health care coverage.  

Hardly a huge step in the direction of a Scandinavian nanny state.  And if you go back and watch the original exchange between Obama and Joe, the word "socialism" doesn't even come up.  Plumber Joe didn't mention the "S" word until he got interviewed by Neil Cavuto on Fox.  And then old' Tippecanoe and Tyler--oops, I mean John McCain and Sarah Palin--took up the same theme and started accusing Obama of socialism this and socialism that.

Almost exactly eight years ago, I, like Joe the Plumber, was enjoying my fifteen minutes because of socialism in the public conversation.  My short-lived "fame" was confined to the Atlanta metro area.  My given appellations included "Young Davey" or "This kid from Parkview High School, David Smith."  The latter was included in a short list of "People who are causing the downfall of this country," along with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Ralph Nader.  Not bad for an 18-year-old just voting in his first election.

It all began with a letter I wrote to the Gwinnett Daily Post, which was published under the headline, "Is Nader a Socialist?"  I wrote:

"Various conservatives such as Neal Boortz have recently attacked Ralph Nader, branding him a 'socialist' and accusing him of being the latest incarnation of Russian communism in America.

These attacks are unfair for two reasons.  First, the use of the term 'socialist' is unfair because it plays on long-standing myths and fears held by many Americans and perpetuated by the media.  Socialism is not totalitarianism.  It is a system in which the basic productive means of society [...] are held by the government and thus kept from corporate abuse.  Socialism would incorporate all of the sacred freedoms we hold as Americans into this system.

Second, Ralph Nader is not a socialist.  He simply seeks to correct the abuses of corporate power in America."

Neal Boortz is a talk radio personality, basically Atlanta's hometown answer to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.  My letter was penned in response to some tirade of his I happened to hear one October day leading up to the Bush-Gore contest of 2000.  Obviously, I had cast my lot with a certain third party candidate that year.  (Yes, I am sorry.)

The result of this letter was a good thirty minutes of talk radio vitriol directed at Yours Truly.  Boortz actually called my high school that morning to see if I would agree to talk to him on the air.  But the school officials wouldn't allow me to leave class for this.

After I listened to the replay of the Boortz radio program that evening, I kind of lost my nerve. I was young. All across the Atlanta airwaves, a bunch of screaming adults were blaming me for the putrefaction of American democracy. A certain amount of giddy pride went with that, of course, but I also felt fairly intimidated and started flirting with libertarianism once I got to college. 

Then, the past eight years happened. Looking back now on that letter, on my nascent grasping towards some political self-expression, all I can see is just how right I had it then.  Clearly, I had a ways to go as a writer.  But though the expression was imperfect, the basic point remains true: that "socialism" is a word American politicians toss off whenever they want to scare Americans away from progressive reforms.  Fulfilling the American Dream and evenly distributing wealth in a socialist manner are not mutually exclusive.  

I now live in a country where the finance minister is a politician from the Socialist Left Party. Nearly a quarter of my income goes for tax, on top of a 25% sales tax.  And you know what?  I'm fine with that.  The reason people here give up so much of their money in taxes is not because the government forces them to, it's because they've chosen to do so and they're fine with that. "Spreading the wealth" is something people do when they want to achieve greater goods than can be achieved under each-man-for-himself.

What a difference eight years makes.  Colin Powell is endorsing Obama.  I've already mailed my absentee ballot for the so-called "socialist."  And something tells me that this time, I won't be sorry.

For my Athens, Georgia readers

Yesterday I saw a fellow at the University of Bergen library wearing a Blue Sky t-shirt. He said he got it from his sister who goes (went?) to UGA.

In other news, R.E.M. is coming to Bergen in September. I never saw them in Athens but now I can see them here.

Jernmannen

I saw the movie Iron Man yesterday. It's not often I get to see movies in Norway (100 kroner a ticket and all) but I like to, especially in order to gauge the reaction of Norwegians to particularly American jokes or references.

For instance, in Iron Man, the hero Tony Stark takes certain initiatives that cause his corporation's stock to drop precipitously. Jim Cramer, of MSNBC's Mad Money, has a cameo and goes berserk, taking a baseball bat to a coffee mug and having sound-effect-bombs drop on Stark's company.

The reaction of the Norwegian audience seemed to be universal bafflement.

Sometimes the subtitles can be a source of amusement as well. I remember in The Simpsons Movie, Ned Flanders' "Hidely-ho, neighborino!" was rendered "Heisann sveisann!" which is a greeting of similarly irritating cheeriness in Norwegian.

The translations of titles can range from somewhat appropriate to hilariously awful. The title of the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm is given as Ingen grunn for begeistring, roughly, "No Reason to Get Excited." Not bad. But then there's the Norwegian title for The Shining, which is Ondskapens hotell, "The Hotel of Evil." As for Deliverance, that's Picnic med døden, or "Picnic with Death."

They should have just left those last two alone. It seems to me Norwegians usually refer to them by their original titles anyway.

The colorful language of a Tarantino film is another thing altogether. I saw Deathproof at the cinema in Oslo last summer, as for some reason the two films of Grindhouse were given two separate releases everywhere but in the US. Inevitably in a Tarantino flick, one character is going to say, "What's up, nigga!" Which--if I recall correctly--was rendered, "Hvordan har du det?" That's the everyday, polite expression for "How is it going?" or "How are you doing?"

On the other hand are Scandinavian films that I watch as an American. Last week I watched a Swedish movie called Tillsammans ("Together") with a couple of my flatmates. It's a pretty simple comedy about a group of socialist hippies living under one roof in the 70's. Kind of like That 70's Show, only with more radical politics, and nudity.

I remarked to my friends that one can be said to have mastered a language when one can understand jokes in that language. But the word I used for "jokes" was wrong and they had to correct me.

Later I looked up what I actually said, and it was that one really understands a language when one can understand trash or cheating in that language.

On [insert broad, spacey topic]

When I was in Russia, Katya's father told me about the distribution of banned books in the Soviet Union, like The Gulag Archipelago and 1984. Professional typists would transcribe four or five typed copies of whole books, which were then read and passed around an informal, untraceable, nationwide network of readers.

The authorities strictly controlled access to typewriters and kept sample typed pages from each in case a match was needed.

* * *

My next article for Contrary will be a retrospective piece about Frank Conroy's Stop-Time. I'm currently going through my worn copy of the book, making careful underlines and notes in the back pages, as I always do in preparation for a review.

This is an old copy of the book. It's a Penguin pocket paperback with a faded orange spine, printed in 1983, the year after I was born. The book has taken the following route over the course of its lifespan:

1. Untold unknown places prior to 2006. No markings of ownership or location exist prior to 2006. There is, however, a somewhat cryptic, half-torn away label pasted on the back cover, obscuring the book's description:

2 continuous-tone prints of front cover only.
Color-correct if necessary--type
[label torn, missing text] must read.
[text redacted by Sharpie] %
BLACK & WHITE

It seems to indicate that this was a sample copy for proofing and correction by the printer. But I'm not sure.
2. December 2006: I buy the book at Jackson Street Books in Athens, Georgia for 60% of the cover price ($4.95).
3. I take it back with me to the University of Chicago and read it over the course of Winter Quarter.
4. I take it to my parent's home in Lawrenceville, Georgia, where it sits on a bookshelf until
5. February 2008, when it travels with me to Russia. On the Moscow metro, I idly thumb through its pages, with a vague thought that I'd like to study it and master Conroy's memoir technique.
6. After two weeks in Russia it comes with me to Bergen, Norway.

Future Locations:
6. After I've written the review, I plan to give the book away. The recipient is a secret.
7. This person will receive the book on the condition that they pass it along to someone else.
8. Etc, etc.

Obama spoke Norwegian

From Bergens Tidende, 7 April 2008:

"North Dakota is one of the largest Norwegian bastions in the US. A few Norwegian expressions have survived the generations, and have almost become a part of the dialect.

Barack Obama took the consequences of this when he visited the state Saturday. He had just received a gift, a hockey puck, and let the Norwegian words fall:

'Uff da,' said Obama.

What did he really mean?
The expression has taken on another meaning among Norwegian-Americans than it has in Norway. The TV network NBC translates it as "Oh my!"

Here is one Norwegian dictionary's definition of "Uff" (from ordnett.no):

uff interj. (used to express discomfort, dissatisfaction, frustration etc.) Uff! It's so cold / Uff, that's too bad / Uff, how you talk nonsense / Uff, oh me!

We don't believe Obama meant to express dissatisfaction with the gift, which he received from the University of North Dakota hockey team.

Won the state
Obama, who looks likely to become the Democrats' presidential candidate, was in the state to gather votes for the election in the fall. He won the nominating contest in North Dakota at the beginning of February, with 61 percent of the vote.

North Dakota is one of the least populated areas in the US, with 640,000 residents. The population is dominated by the decendants of Scandinavian and German immigrants."
Translated by David S.

By the way, the editorial board of Bergens Tidende chose to endorse Hillary. Uff da.

Couple of things I've been reading

1. For the past year or so I've been quite enamored of the German techno group, Kraftwerk. They're not quite outside of the mainstream, I suppose, but a lot of people think of them as sort of a novelty, kitsch act from the same 80's dustbin that contains Devo and Revenge of the Nerds. On the surface, Kraftwerk's main themes are nerdy, boyish subjects like robots, space labs, and pocket calculators.

However, I think there is a fairly significant philosophical component to their music that not many people have taken seriously. See, for instance, the minimal lyrics of "Die Mensch Maschine:"

Die Mensch Maschine
Halb Wesen und halb Ding
(The man-machine
Half being/essence and half thing)

These words, Wesen and Ding, are rather loaded terms in the German philosophical lexicon. What looked like a gimmicky obsession with humanoid robots turns out to be a metaphor for the creative act: the union of the human being or essence with the raw materials of art. Viewed in this way, Kraftwerk's use of synthesizers and electric drum-pads begins to look like a lot more than just technical savvy; it might even be profound.

I hoped there'd be some elaboration of these ideas in Wolfgang Flür's tell-all autobiography, I Was a Robot. Flür was the drummer from 1973 to the mid-80's, the period in which Kraftwerk achieved their widest recognition and released their best-known albums.

Unfortunately, Flür's book is a rather superficial account. He is content to say that Kraftwerk was more "philosophical" than other groups, and to leave it at that. He fills more pages with tiresome descriptions of the cities Kraftwerk toured--the book begins to feel like a travelogue in some places--along with the surprisingly large number of Kraftwerk groupies. The way Flür tells it, the four robotic gentlemen from Düsseldorf were lusted after in quantities rivaled perhaps only by Zeppelin.

Flür's inability to speak to the deeper ideas of Kraftwerk can be explained partly by the fact that Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider are often tipped as the main creative forces, with Flür and Karl Bartos at the periphery (like Ringos to the others' Lennon and McCartney, we might say). When Flür discusses the idea of machines and mechanical art, he does so only by way of discussing the absence of warmth and friendship among his fellow band members. Hence, the title of the book alludes both to the lyric We are the robots in "Die Roboter" and to Flür's treatment at the hands of Hütter and Schneider, like a cog in a machine.

All valid feelings, no doubt, but not much is gained by reducing Kraftwerk's overarching themes to the legal and personal battles among its members. In the end, the book becomes just another who-cares story of a band that split up amidst petty rivalries--again, kind of like the Beatles. Maybe someday they'll reconcile and produce the long-awaited Kraftwerk Anthology. I guess we'll just have to wait until that day comes...or not.

2. On quite a different note than Kraftwerk, my other major interest as of late has been Walt Whitman. Actually, I haven't been reading so much as listening to Whitman on an series of podcasts by the oaken-voiced Alan Davis Drake (website). Drake is an excellent reader of Whitman, full of verve and energy; and I can listen to his podcasts over and over, just as much as a track by Kraftwerk or anyone else.

Listening to poems over and over helps one to commit lines to memory, where they take on a new significance as an organic part of one's life. Hence, Drake's podcasts have allowed me to appreciate Whitman in a way I never did before. Back in high school, I learned about Whitman as the important innovator of free verse, but other than that, I couldn't discern what the big deal was. Whitman seemed to represent little else than a faintly pleasant Don't-worry-be-happy-ism.

I'm not sure I can describe what the poems mean to me now. Anything one could possibly say about Whitman runs the risk of becoming beside the point, even at the very moment one says it. He writes, for instance, To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so. And furthermore:

Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the meaning of all poems.

[...] You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

These are rather bold promises coming from a writer: that by reading him we can free ourselves from being chained to the visions of other writers--including that of Whitman himself. And therein we see why there was not much that my high school teacher could demonstrate about Whitman, other than his championing of a new poetic form, which is to say, his historical relationship to other poets. The value of Whitman's poems cannot be indicated through someone else; they have to be arrived at on one's own, or else not at all.

Final word (hopefully) on Eat, Pray, Love

Some months ago I wrote a a review of a book entitled Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. At the time, I had no idea that this book was becoming something of a literary sensation. I happened upon it at Hyde Park Borders in Chicago when I was absorbing as many examples of travel nonfiction as I could for my MA thesis. I saw the words "depression" and "divorce" on the back of the book and supposed it would be profound.

I didn't actually get around to reading it until I had left Chicago for Oslo. That was when Jeff, my MA adviser and editor of Contrary, contacted me to see if I would write a review for him. Eat, Pray, Love was the only newish book I had on me, so that was it.

As much as I ended up hating Eat, Pray, Love, I seem to have an obsession with it. The reading of it taught me, in a negative way, some lessons I could bring to my own nonfiction writing. (My entry for 31 January is a long and somewhat scholastic explication of those lessons.) I guess I don't want to be the sort of memoirist who writes that sort of fluffy nonsense, and I keep returning and returning to the book to make sure I don't make Gilbert's mistakes.

The obsession has stems also in part from the book's ubiquity as a literary blockbuster. What other books out there can claim to have inspired an adulatory blog? Here you can find pictures of Gilbert's Brazilian lover and Richard from Texas, who (lest we forget) called her "Groceries" and ended up on Oprah to remind us of all these gory details. Here you can also buy Eat, Pray, Love t-shirts. Now you can announce to all who would know, "I ♥ Richard from Texas."

Slate recently put out an hour-long podcast about the book, a roundtable discussion between three of its book critics. The one male critic hated it; the two women liked it. One of the women speculated that it was impossible for a man to appreciate the book. (The aforementioned blog, incidentally, does not sell the t-shirts in men's sizes.) Me, I'm not going to pretend that we occupy some Platonic, sexless space as readers. Still, I'm reasonably certain that my dislike of Eat, Pray, Love stems less from gender bias and more with the slipshod way in which Gilbert practices creative nonfiction. She can have her journey across Italy and Indonesia and Ireland and Israel and whatever other countries begin with the magical letter "I." I don't care; whatever she does, my only plea is that she not subject us to a stupid book about it.

I read a book called Fat Girl by the late Judith Moore, which to me exemplifies a good approach to creative nonfiction. I'll quote some lines from the preface and let the strengths of Moore's writing speak for themselves:

I am fat. I am not so fat that I can't fasten the seat belt on the plane. But, fat I am. I wanted to write about what it was and is like for me, being fat.
This will not be a book about how I had an eating disorder and how I conquered this disorder through therapies or group process or antidepressants or religion or twelve-step programs or a personal trainer or white-knuckling it or the love of a good man (or woman). This will be the last time in this book you will see the words "eating disorder."
(...)
I will not write here about fat people I have known and I will not interview fat people. All I will do here is tell my story. I will not supply windbag notions about what is wrong with me. You will figure that out. I will tell you only what I know about myself, which is not all that much.
(...)
Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses. I won't. I will not endear myself. I won't put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The older I get the less pleasant I am.
I mistrust real-life stories that conclude on a triumphant note. Rockettes will not arrive on the final page and kick up their heels and show petticoats. This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy.

In conclusion, I wish someone would take Moore's book and smack Elizabeth Gilbert over the head with it.