Megan McArdle Gets Piggish

Yesterday’s BBC World Service radio broadcast included a segment about the Cramer/Stewart exchange as perceived by Megan McArdle, commentator for The Atlantic.  During the segment, McArdle declared Cramer and CNBC innocent of even something as simple as violating the advice of P.G. Wodehouse: “It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

McArdle told the World (Service) to pin its blame buttons on the overalls of ordinary people, not on the designer lapels of the suits of anyone working at mortgage companies, advertising agencies, investment banks (McArdle used to work at one), the credit companies.  And no one should be looking suspiciously at McArdle and others who work at the magazines, newspapers, and media conglomerates who were the hand puppets for the ventriloquists on Wall Street, Fleet Street, and Easy Street.  McArdle says: “I think the biggest part of the blame does have to go, not to people like Jim Cramer, but to the vast swamp of ordinary Americans who thought that they had found a way to get something for free.”  Rather than to declare McArdle incompetent as an etiologist — after all, she is someone who defines herself through upscale coffee –, we might benefit from attending to the evolutionary picture she offers, a picture that starts off in the “swamp of ordinary people” and progresses to Cramer and Stewart, whom she, by the end of her cameo on the BBC World Service, compares to a pig and a pig wrestler.  This seems to be an evolutionary picture McArdle endorses, if we are to trust her comments at the end of her BBC cameo.  From the swamp, I can see that she could make as good a pig as those she described on the BBC.

Flickr Creative Commons photograph

Traditionally, pigs have been associated with the rich, those not in the swamp. Pigs do not want to be like ordinary people in the McArdle-O’Rourke hypothesis.  According to an O’Rourke article from 1997, pigs have at least two main fears, one of which is becoming like everyone else, one of us ordinary people, and the other of being eaten, a version of phagophobia (pronounce it without a long vowel in the first syllable, and enjoy the added meaning).  O’Rourke displays his worship of capitalism and of the rich in his article, while also foregrounding the fear the pigs have of those who support heinous, un-American notions like equality (note that McArdle did not include herself in her judgment about the “vast swamp of ordinary Americans”):

Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heroes. They don’t usually mean to be but that’s their moral problem, not ours. Most of the world now admits that free enterprise works. Economic liberty makes people rich. But in our residual collectivism and our infatuation with equality we keep trying to get rid of rich people.

There’s a joke President Reagan told about the way collectivist politicians treat rich people: A traveling salesman stays overnight with a farm family. When the family gathers to eat there’s a pig seated at the table. And the pig has three medals hanging around his neck and a peg leg. The salesman says, “Um, I see you have a pig having dinner with you.”

“Yes,” says the farmer. “That’s because he’s a very special pig. You see those medals around his neck? Well, the first medal is from when our youngest son fell in the pond, and he was drowning, and that pig swam out and saved his life. The second medal, that’s from when the barn caught fire and our little daughter was trapped in there and the pig ran inside, carried her out and saved her life. And the third medal, that’s from when our oldest boy was cornered in the stock yard by a mean bull, and that pig ran under the fence and bit the bull on the tail and saved the boy’s life.”

“Yes,” says the salesman, “I can see why you let that pig sit right at the table and have dinner with you. And I can see why you awarded him the medals. But how did he get the peg leg?”

“Well,” says, the farmer, “a pig like that–you don’t eat him all at once.”

CNBC – No Business Like Show Business

The great Italiam theorist Antonio Gramsci did not have television available when he made the following comments in 1916 about newspapers, but his advice to people about newspapers works equally well for television:

Above all, the worker must resolutely reject any solidarity with a bourgeois newspaper. And he must always, always, always remember that the bourgeois newspaper (whatever its hue) is an instrument of struggle motivated by ideas and interests that are contrary to his. Everything that is published is influenced by one idea: that of serving the dominant class.

Over at Smashing Telly, the reaction over a recent episode of “The Daily Show” complements Gramsci’s points above:

US network and cable news are an embarrassment, a children’s view of the world based upon geographical and historical ignorance delivered by people who look like Long Island realtors and whose opinions should be deemed equally suspect.

Who Was Better than Nostradamus and Jack Van Impe at Predicting Economic Collapse?

The answer to the question could include several names, but I choose one for purposes of this post: Fredric Jameson.  A decade before the current global financial fiasco, Jameson published an essay called “Culture and Finance Capital” in Critical Inquiry, a journal that had far more clout in 1997 than it does now.  Here are some salient passages to give the flavor of Jameson’s piece:

How can you have profit without production in the first place? Where does all this extreme speculation come from?

The guiding thread of all contemporary politics seems much easier to grasp, namely, that the rich want their taxes lowered.

After the disappearance (or brutal downsizing) of heavy industry, the only thing that seemed to keep it [the U.S. economy] going (besides the two prodigious American industries of food and entertainment) was the stock market.  How was this possible, and where did the money keep coming from?

Then there is the grimmer conjecture, in which the capital of an entire center or region abandons production altogether in order to seek maximization in nonproductive spaces, which as we have seen are those of speculation, the money market, and finance capital in general.

Reading the full article without noticing the date on it would leave many readers in an odd chronological space. For another twist on time, Jameson provides an excellent explanation of capitalism’s capacity, through its cultural products, to compress time, to open up new spaces of commercialization via a minimalist aesthetic.  He mentions that film trailers are, in many instances, “all you need.”  The longer narratives of the films themselves that are previewed end up serving a different purpose.  A current development that would bolster Jameson’s reading of temporal condensation is Twitter, a microtrend that causes affluent intellectuals and technophiles to accept a bounded form of communication that insists on offering up its readers only fragments. It is an analysis of the fragment that occupies the last section of Jameson’s essay.

Some of the defenders and disciples of Twitter have pointed interestingly to Twitter’s role in the recent attacks on Mumbai and in the crash of the U.S. Airways jet into the Hudson River, as if Twitter is the medium of choice for disaster, a strange and disturbing selling point for a so-called social service, but perhaps one appropriate for the times.

Migrant worker's family - Nipomo, California (1936)

Jameson’s 1997 essay concludes by informing the reader that we are being steered “unwittingly towards a crash.” The crash has come, and Wall Street is twittering.  The Wall Street Journal probably now regrets that in its endorsement of Twitter (in October 2008) as a business tool it used a real estate agent as an example.

Twitter can be useful for keeping up with friends, but businesses are also finding ways to employ it. Daniel Rothamel, a real-estate agent from Palmyra, Va., follows feeds from more than 1,000 people, including neighbors and fellow real-estate professionals. The 27-year-old searches the site for people who indicate that they are seeking real-estate help in his area.

We trust that Mr. Rothamel now provides foreclosure help with his feeds.

Lilliputians of Higher Education Invent Microlectures

1900, The U.S. Printing Co., Russell-Morgan Print, Cincinnati & New York-No. 4370

Worried about overworking yourself as an academic?  Are you an administrator trying to come up with the next flavor of the month for distance education?  We can all move to microlectures, as described in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Apparently, one of this state’s flagship schools has no problems accepting transfer credits from a school in New Mexico that has developed microlectures.  The Dean at the school in New Mexico noticed, as some Deans tend to do as masters of tautology, that microlectures are short.  “It’s like snapshots of learning.”  If we adopt this model, classes could be 5-10 minutes long, demonstrating efficiencies that ought to cause the politicians seeking budgetary constrictions on higher education to lick this flavor. (For more on politicians, see paragraph six of one of Charlie Brooker’s columns.)  Microlectures could be especially impressive in a History Department, where, say, a professor could provide two or three microlectures to cover the rise and fall of Rome. It would be like snapshots of history.