The Parasitic Meme

A wistful song entitled “I.G.Y”,[1] by singer-songwriter Donald Fagen got a lot of airplay on radio stations in my area in the mid 1980’s. The song’s title is an abbreviation for “International Geophysical Year,” a span of 17 months in 1957 and 1958 when scientists and their institutions collaborated across national boundaries, based on earlier “International Polar Years,” efforts to collaborate internationally on scientific research at the Earth’s poles. Using a pop music verse-chorus form and the tonal rules of jazz music adapted to it, “I.G.Y.” depicts the optimism of scientists during the late 1950s. Much of the lyric of the song centers around an enumeration of modern infrastructure projects, leisure opportunities, and consumer products, such as fast trains to Europe, spandex, and satellite casinos in space, all things which were either available or considered to be shortly available to “artists everywhere.” In its description of that near future, the song’s chorus sings with that optimism: “What a beautiful world this will be! / What a glorious time to be free!” And in doing so, successfully captured the imagination and appeal of American consumer culture near the end of the postwar period after World War II. Fagen might just as well have been writing about the 1920s as the 1950s; similar trends were active during both postwar periods, which, when seen in broad strokes, resembled each other more than the surface differences commonly drawn between the two eras.

It is fair to call either time an age of affluence. Very large companies keen to grow internationally exploited a postwar climate where the United States was really the only Great Power or Superpower with any significant economic might. Americans eager to be free of the rationing and other depravations of a total national war war footing desired a return to “normalcy,” as Warren Harding put it during his 1920 candidacy: a time when they could work for themselves and their own prosperity after having secured for their country a measure of safety from imperialism or fascism. Domestically, they elected Harding, and in the 50’s they “liked Ike”, and worked in those large companies applied their ingenuity and energy to consumer products, and in both time periods the economy experienced a sharp postwar money shock before recovering for a period of sustained growth.

The leaders of those companies worked with government to grow their businesses worldwide, at times wielding the military power of the United States to open or maintain trade routes. In the first postwar period the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the occupations of Caribbean and Philippine islands, the Panama Canal, and parts of Mexico, all served to clear the way for American-branded trade. Most of those areas remained under American hegemony during the second postwar period, either through direct occupation, as in Guam or Puerto Rico, or through basing agreements which persisted after Philippine and Cuban independence, and in places like occupied Germany or South Korea. And after World War II, the United States led the United Nations in “peacekeeping” policy, reified a stance of “containment” toward Soviet expansion, and helped rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan, as it did with commercial and investment banking arrangements in the 1920’s to help Europe pay war reparations and recover from the first World War. Among other effects, this in turn opened markets for American companies and directly or indirectly created millions of jobs for its people. At their height, both postwar cultures looked forward, through commerce, for the “streamlined world” from Fagen’s song, with “perfect weather” in which the people would be “eternally free, yes, and eternally young.”

But Fagen started by singing, “Standing tough under stars and stripes,” an attitude any Cold Warrior would instantly recognize. The idea of uniting under the American flag is not unique to any particular decade of American history, but during the two postwar periods, it took a form that receives almost nothing but hindsight criticism, if it’s examined at all. While lacking a real wartime enemy, some politicians felt to invent or exaggerate real threats into unreal panics. The 1920s had A. Mitchell Palmer, the 50s had Senator Joseph McCarthy. Both regarded Socialism and Communism as imminent threats to American culture. Each overstated his case: Palmer’s Red Scare “predicted that on May Day 1920 an unnamed radical conspiracy would attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government,” (700) a warning that turned out to be meritless. McCarthy’s Great Fear swept up Hollywood and other media producers grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He claimed to know the names of “57… card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.” (817) As with Palmer, McCarthy escalated his accusations until he overreached, when he disingenuously accused the Army of disloyalty on a television broadcast of his hearings.

That Americans in peacetime would direct suspicion at Socialist and Communist ideas after wartime is not surprising. Communist ideas may have originally come from German philosophers like Marx and Engels, but the people bringing them to American shores were immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe for whom socialist ideas had the greatest appeal, in part because they had become an underclass in American cities rivaled in size only by the almost permanently segregated African American minority. “Senator William Bruce of Maryland branded them ‘indigestible lumps’ in the ‘national stomach,’ implying that they might never be absorbed into the dominant culture.” (718) These groups tended to organize into labor unions which utilized socialist ideas within their organizations, and called for the kinds of social reform which they hoped could set them on equal footing with established, more privileged Whites in the nation. These were people whose experience was a little outside the depiction in “I.G.Y.,” but as they repudiated Communism, their place in America became more assured.

In short, they integrated themselves. The unions were in the way of the ambitions of corporate oligarchs unwilling to submit quietly to a labor union’s demands, who in both eras chose instead to try and obviate them. Collective bargaining, especially if it meant dealing with the ascendency of Socialists, Communists, or agitators for greater racial equality, went against the sense of the populace and restrained what the CIO, IWW, or AFL could claim. And in a way, the need for labor unions abated somewhat during both periods, as the country drew back from wartime employment levels and rising prosperity permitted companies the resources they needed to negotiate with individuals in good faith, implementing what has come to be known as “welfare capitalism.” Neither era saw the elimination of labor unions whose ranks and influence swelled in wartime, but the promises of pensions and healthcare for vital employees often kept unions from getting a foothold in a company in the first place. Instead, where unions survived, companies negotiated accords which balanced their interests, a tension that still exists today where labor or trade unions exist.

The cases Palmer and McCarthy had made against Communist radicalism were not entirely without merit in either time period. Although their approaches to fighting it poisoned their efforts and eventually turned the tide of public opinion against total support for all they did, each postwar era still contained nativist cultural elements more modern Americans are apparently proud to reject, at least insofar as such impulses today have been redirected to groupings of political party membership, national origin, or level of education, instead of race. In the 1920’s the Ku Klux Klan, known then and now for its white supremacist stances, resurged in popularity and operated in the open, capturing state and local governments around the country, and in conspiracy also combined to suppress Black activism through raw, violent intimidation, in the North as well as the South. In the 1950s, segregated racism, especially for African Americans, imposed a superficially genteel kind of oppression which denied Blacks any opportunities to lay hold on very much of the new prosperity at all, disingenuously claiming segregated equality without actual equality.

In the South, these minority groups suffered oppression under Jim Crow laws and the remnants of prewar Klan activity, including secretive lynchings. In places where they migrated in the North and West, they were denied entrance into circles of prosperity by real estate covenants attached to the sale of homes in the new suburbs, and in the 1920s, by Klan threats. No non-Whites could live in any Levittown. People like Malcolm X or Rosa Parks, whose families suffered oppression throughout both postwar periods and the times of turmoil after and between them, could never have had a wistful reaction to the lyrics of “I.G.Y.” Instead their activism was focused on a “beautiful world” of social and economic parity or equity, not perfection through consumer products and leisure, and throughout both eras the tides of nativism and willful ignorance of the disparity combined to keep them down. A full national conversation about race relations would not come until the 1960s. Malcolm X decried this condition, and Parks permitted her own persecution on a bus in order to start that conversation.

“I.G.Y.” omits from its lines those depravations. In his album liner for “The Nightfly”, where “I.G.Y.” is the first track, Fagen wrote, “The songs on this album represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build.” Such a young man would have had a life like like that of my own parents from Salt Lake City or southern Idaho, where no minorities were in their neighborhoods at all. Even as late as 1981, when rumors flew around my Vancouver, Washington suburban neighborhood that a “colored teacher” had been hired by the school, I and my sixth grade friends wondered to each other why and whether that had any significance, even though it had never happened there before then.

That 1981 date itself is telling: Fagen recorded the song that year, during what is known now as the second-worst economic drawback since the Great Depression, a sharp contraction caused by very high interest rates. By that time the country had changed, singing of a near-future time when “fellows with compassion and vision” would program the perfect future drips with irony and not a little bit of nostalgia for what might have been, had Americans noticed: All ages of affluence in America have ended. “I.G.Y.,” lives on today as enjoyable and perfectly recorded studio pop music, but is also useful as a way to showcase the things Americans always see and, by omission, miss, when times are very good.
Notes

[1] I.G.Y — by Donald Fagen
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from new york to paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be a.o.k.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from new york to paris
(more leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Works Cited

Page numbers inserted refer to Henretta, James A., David Brody, and Lynn Dumeinil, America’s History, Volume Two: Since 1865. Sixth Edition, Boston, New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2008.

“I.G.Y. Lyrics – Steely Dan.” Lyrics, Song Lyrics – LyricsFreak.com. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/steely+dan/igy_20469426.html (accessed October 7, 2012).

“The Nightfly.” The Nightfly. http://aln2.albumlinernotes.com/The_Nightfly.html (accessed October 7, 2012).

Today it’s raining on and off, and it’s about 50 degrees. It’s my birthday. On my birthday I go for a drive. I strike out on my own for awhile just to have a quiet time to think. Last year I took a circuit around the county and saw some countryside. My region boasts verdant, green, gorgeous countryside.

This year I saw something different. On a busy street corner near the freeway entrance next to a gas station I saw a woman, clearly seven months pregnant, holding a sign. It read “Please help me. Seven Months Pregnant,” asking for money “to sleep indoors tonight.” I rolled down the window and emptied the car’s change box into her hand. It had about $1.75 in quarters in it. She thanked me and the green light forced me to go on.

Now, I’m politically engaged. Those who know me best know that I’m fond of pointing out the ironies of the American market economy. I will gladly tell you about how you’re being fleeced by a phone or cable company, and how little power you have to negotiate prices with them. I can explain the dynamics of education politics to you. Why you should care about whether there are charter schools and where the tax money is going.

But I’m the crazy uncle. The one whose opinions don’t jibe with the rest of the family. It’s an appalling insult to be patted on the head repeatedly by family who don’t think I can see clearly, but whatever, y’know? I’m used to that, and I love those people. I’m required to take it, and in the name of family peace and harmony, my tongue has molar indentations a quarter inch deep. If I speak instead of mutilating myself, I have been ordered to stop speaking. This year that dynamic has extended beyond the immediate family, as I’ve watched fellow Mormons around me accuse the sitting President and all his cohort of everything from misguided policy positions to outright infanticide. In such a climate it is difficult not to speak.

But driving through my hometown, you can find a pregnant woman standing in 50 degree rain begging on the street for two hours’ wages. Well, two hours for me. Maybe ten for her, if anyone would hire her, which nobody has and probably nobody will.

And I’m sick of it; the problem with political discourse isn’t the positions the politicians hold. It’s that there is no discourse. Many of us watched and enjoyed a political debate between Romney and Obama, where they mostly bit at each others’ ankles. Later, Jon Stewart got some funny jokes out of it and there was a lot of arguing on the Internet about whether the moderator was fair. I found myself locked out of a debate about charter schools, with my words removed and the whole Facebook conversation re-contextualized into something that made the proponents of the issue seem fair-minded and victorious. I have spent the last few days in shock about that bit of Orwellian campaigning. I’d never been blocked on Facebook before.

But today, for my birthday, I got to see a pregnant woman begging for spare change in the rain.

Nobody stands in 50 degree rain begging for money, if there are any other options left. As I pulled away from that street corner and compared the size of my problems with the size of the country’s problems. They now stood in contrast to a young woman reduced to begging for change and as I drove away my heart broke. In two weeks, the election will be over. Maybe there will be a fight somewhere about votes and recounts. Someone will accuse a county or two of fixing the election. A few weeks later there will be an inauguration and the most likely result will be that 51 legislatures will remain steadfastly deadlocked, with no changes in policies. We’ll tip over the “fiscal cliff” and my taxes will go up a little bit. I probably won’t even notice it except as a more slowly decreasing credit card balance.

In two weeks that woman will likely still be homeless and most definitely still pregnant. By inauguration day a baby will be born to a homeless woman. This is happening down the road from where I live. I pulled onto the freeway and thought about all of that. I crossed a bridge made possible by Glenn Jackson, arguably the most fiscally responsible Transportation Secretary the State of Oregon has ever had. He’s dead and gone now and his replacements have not filled his shoes. Neither Romney nor Obama approach him for character. I thought about that, too. I thought of being slighted by an initiative campaign and feeling like the outsider at family gatherings.

And none of it mattered any more. None of it means a thing, unless young pregnant women can sleep in a warm place at night. I went back to the gas station and saw that there was a man standing with her. I filled my tank and thought about it. I walked a little closer to the sign to read it. It named the amount of money they wanted. And then walked up to the man holding it and asked, “That sign is true?”

“Yes,” he said. His face was ravaged. Her teeth looked like that of a recovering meth addict. At their feet was a cat carrier in a plastic shopping bag and another sign. There was nothing in the carrier.

“And this is the amount you need?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

I walked away, pulled some money I’ll never miss from an ATM, returned and pressed it into the woman’s hands. “Please, go get warm.”

I walked off before she could count it and heard him call, “God bless you!” as they packed up the sign.

“You too!” I called back. But I thought, “Why should He?” as we parted ways.

I’m fascinated by the ways that many organizations use the compartmentalization of job duties for employees to enforce various policies or avoid problems with negative circumstances or consequences.

For example, if you buy a car from a dealership, the salesperson has no real authority over the price, the manager does, but he or she doesn’t actually close the deal when you agree to buy a car. Upsells like extra warranties and taxes are handled by the financing department, and getting a final price that doesn’t creep up requires significant vigilance and other kinds of care. It’s a hassle. It’s meant to be a hassle, designed to maximize how much money a buyer leaves behind. Not illegal, not even really evil, just a hassle.

Another example: The law permits a consumer to “freeze” his credit file with the three credit reporting bureaus for about $30, and to unfreeze them with a “PIN” code for another $15 or so. It’s a relatively good idea to freeze one’s account if there are no plans to use credit. It was imposed on the bureaus largely because of new difficulties with identity theft and fraud.

However, none of the entities you commonly encounter, such as insurance companies or cell phone contract salespeople, all the way to mortgage brokers, are equipped to deal with the PIN code you can hand them. It’s a case where the law was passed but the people resistant to it simply inconvenience their own customers by helplessly confessing that their computers can’t handle it and the customer has no choice but to completely reset his credit file to a state where any entity with a couple of bucks can buy his file. My father ran into that upon his return from the Philippines; State Farm wouldn’t even offer an insurance quote to him without an unfrozen credit file with all three bureaus.

It’s a hassle. It’s meant to be a hassle, designed to frustrate you so that you won’t actually ever freeze your credit file. Who cares what the law is?

So, that’s the context. Now here’s the pièce de résistance for the day.

My alternate cell phone rang (a number we’re no longer using which costs more to deactivate than to maintain and pay for because of the phone contract [hassle; meant to be]). It was a robo-survey, the kind we’ve been getting lately, and it had a couple of innocuous questions about national politics.

But this one was a little different. The recording said to me, “Take the 30 second survey and we will give you a free cruise to the Bahamas.”

Okay… I took the survey, and, curious, pressed “1″ to be transferred to the agent who would give me the “free cruise to the Bahamas.”

Miles Gilbert picked up and regaled me with stories of the excellence of the good ship “Bahama Celebration” and the fun I’d have on my free cruise, before he asked me for $118 in “port fees”. The regular cost of the 2-day cruise? Glad you asked: $118. (Of course it’s a minor scam if not an outright fraud; the upsells at the ports must be remarkable. If you get a cruise at all without losing your credit rating to someone like Miles.)

He did not give the name of his firm. From the background noise I suppose it was one of any number of high pressure telemarketers, akin to the call-in mailings I used to get in college offering me free stuff, but only if I paid a deposit.

I replied by pointing out that the number they’d called is on the Federal do-not-call list, and that I thought his firm was in violation of FCC rules with respect to the list and telemarketing law.

His demeanor became harsh and he lectured me on how guilty I was because I pressed “1″ instead of “2″ to decline the deal. I asked, three times, for my number to be removed from the list. He refused, claiming he didn’t have the number, his “partner firm”, “EFA Research Group” at “www.politicalopinionsofamerica.org” had the number, and I’d have to take it up with them. I asked a third time, and he became very strident, repeating his accusation that it was my own fault I got the pitch, and if I didn’t want it I should have not pressed “1″ to be transferred.

I hung up.

The domain registration for politicalopinionsofamerica.org is hidden from view by domainsbyproxy.com. I can’t tell who they are. The pages themselves are filled with badly spelled boilerplate (“POA prides itself on conducting fair on in unbias surveys.”) and links to the Gallup website.

I had thought that registering for the do-not-call list was supposed to scrub one’s number from telemarketing efforts. By perverting the purpose of a political survey, they’re getting around the do-not-call law. Getting off the lists? Go to the relatively undocumented website and, key in your number.

Why, that would verify that someone has a valid number, and that someone at that number verifiably will take a political survey, and press a button to receive a promotional offer. Take it off one list, sure, but sell it on others for another revenue stream.

Is any of that illegal? Maybe, probably not. But it’s a hassle, isn’t it? And, it’s meant to be.

Caveat Emptor, my friends.

I hadn’t intended to make any kind of commentary about the September 11, 2001 attacks. I hadn’t planned to explicitly remember or commemorate 9/11 in any way. I don’t doubt my fellow citizens’ need to do so, or the proper level of news coverage and analysis that journalists are doing this week. All those people are like me and not like me in different ways, and I recognize the need for that.

But Russell Fox’s comments on the event at its 10th anniversary got me thoughtful (thanks for that, Russell!) and in the mood to jot some things down.

At the time, it seemed to me that we would end up going to war. We did; it followed from simple logic that enough Americans would want revenge and all of us would want prevention. I remember the online discussions I participated in. Some were angry enough to call for bin Laden’s entire culture to be destroyed in nuclear fire.

I remember thinking that, once the smoke cleared and the count was taken, 3000 out of three hundred million was not a large number. I thought at the time that that many people died each day in the U.S. without anyone taking notice or moving to prevent their loss with armies or billions of dollars. I thought all those things.

Today I checked the numbers again, and I’m wrong. It was, in fact, a big deal. 3000 dead in a morning is two orders of magnitude larger than the number of American traffic deaths in a day. It’s half that of an average day of deaths by any cause in my country. It should have caused the mourning it did.

At the time, it seemed to me that we ought to mourn the fact of that certain and future war making and regret the deaths of all the people our soldiers were preparing to kill, even if we were now required to concede its necessity. The only reasons to go to any war, I thought, would have been to get them to leave us alone.

We went beyond that when we went nation-building. I wanted us all to mourn those dead, too, as victims of 9/11. The tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqis lost as collateral damage when the U.S. didn’t (couldn’t?) secure the peace there after toppling Saddam. So many others whose minds and bodies drowned in all that rage.

But we didn’t. Far too many of us watched war-making the way we’d watch a football game, cheering our own side and hoping (perhaps praying?) that our enemies would die horribly.

I kept thinking about the Christian edict: Love your enemies; do good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you. Doubtless the al Qaeda operatives involved, from Mohammed Atta to Osama bin Laden, did both those things.

It was a dissonant mentation: How do you love an enemy whose hatred for you is idealistic and complete? That the only choice he permits is that in which you will instantly die? How do you love him, if his intent is surprise, with the fact that he gives no time to decide? If his picture of you is so false, so self-serving, so perfectly evil, that there is nothing you can do to change it?

The thing I wanted out of my leaders was to appear on the world stage to do nothing. No flashy invasions, no public recrimination. Heightened security at airports and a marvelous public relations campaign teaching us all how to spot monsters like that, and where to report what we saw.

I wanted them to answer malice with military silence, and in that silence, to do the quiet, difficult, thankless police and diplomatic work that would get them to relax their own fieldcraft a bit and start being sloppy. And then, quietly, simply, take them out and throw the news of it out with Friday afternoon White House press announcements. Any more than that, I thought at the time, gave them too much credit.

Instead, we got two flashy wars; not every American wants what I want. But, we also got the hard police work and the results of determination against an enemy. Osama bin Laden is dead today. Our enemies are routed and though still organized, they’re back to the scale of car bomb surprises, plans which they haven’t been able to complete on our soil since then.

God willing, they won’t ever succeed again.

On September 11, 2002, in a personal bid to overcome the terror in my own heart about airplanes, I took a flying lesson in a Piper Cub. I carried an American flag in the Cub to commemorate the day. The flag sits on a shelf in my office now. I would go on to earn a full private pilot certificate a few months later. Planes don’t scare me any longer. The flag is on my shelf in my office. The terror is gone.

And tomorrow, on September 11, 2011, on the 10th anniversary but certainly not for it, I will board a Boeing 737 from Portland, OR to Anaheim, CA, for a work-related trip. When making the flights I gave no thought to the date.

That alone is commemoration. That means to me that we Americans won. We’re more vigilant today, but business is possible as usual.

And when the replacement tower is complete and there’s a restaurant at the top, I will go to New York City and sit down there to make a final contribution and remembrance: I will pay a New Yorker for waiting table, a service freely offered and gratefully received, in trade currency we both honor, in the most banal and unnoticeable way possible, having used commercial airplanes to get there and back in simple and thoughtless obviation of terrorist enmity.

A view up the hill from Itingen, Basel-Land

I write this from a hotel room in Basel which we can’t actually afford and would never have chosen were it not for the efforts and invitations of a Swiss couple who couldn’t offer us their extra room for a two-night stay in Basel, after all. But one of them works for Swiss Airlines and got us the good rate, as an apology for their circumstance.

Read the rest of this entry »