WTF Bailout

The only meaningful thing to come from Lehman. from Esaraph's flickr

This whole economic crisis is causing me a lot of unexpected stress. Very unexpected. I suspect it’s because the affair is playing out in this wildly abstract language: ‘credit lines’ ‘bank failure’ ‘debt swaps’ etc. – the only thing concrete about it is everyone’s seething hatred of George W. Bush’s lame-duck guts. Seriously: when was the last time someone talked about paychecks? Or houses? Or jobs (for jobs’ sake, not this ‘health of the economy’ indicator bullshit)? Compare New Deal propaganda that focused on job creation and common labor with the blather streaming from the government now about credit lines and what not – they talk about similar things but in wildly different languages.  Despite the total abstraction of it all, I keep hearing very shrill, disturbing things, and it may be producing neurosis.

A great deal of ink and worry has been created about something that seems to be totally invisible. That invisibility is reinforced by a ‘bailout’ plan that only solidifies the fundamental lack of democracy at the core of our economic system – the ‘unilateral power’ claimed by Henry Paulson to carry out decisions on buying back bad debt echoes the power wielded by the capitalist elite to control people’s lives via the management of debt, employment and production.

Furthermore, I’m disturbed by the Congress’ inability to do ANYTHING whatsoever, even when the bills put before them provide massive benefits to their friends and benefactors.  Therefore I have no faith in the ability of Congress to pass a bill that would in fact benefit folks losing their homes or seeing the value of their paychecks shrink.

I’m still struggling to find a good way to express my hatred of the Bush Bailout and simultaneously express my disgust for the Democrats that went along with it, and the Republicans that didn’t because it just wasn’t evil enough.  It’s just a giant clusterfuck of sinister, self interested corrupt assholes.  The only thing that seems to make sense is how much I hate George Bush for developing into such a ineffective, disheartened President.  We really need a fucking leader of some kind, and he just offers polices that are simultaneously totally worthless and terrifying.

Mostly I’m angry.  I want more rage inserted in this discussion.  A tiny cabal of filthy rich men in suits living at the tip of a phallic island in the Northeast corner of the US have managed to nearly upend the entire way of life for hundreds of millions of people, and that’s fucked up.

Pinocchio!

Coming soon to a town near you!

Hello! Been involving myself with some creative character assassination re: that dottering old man that you sometimes see on your television, John McCain! Wednesday was the first action of the campaign, (soon dwarfed by John McCain’s decision to bail on the debate), but we’ve been making headway with the newsmedia, local activists and the mythical ‘blogosphere’

Much like the Take Back NYU! adventure, this campaign is a PR sandbox for my wandering attentions. I’ve learned a few things since signing on:

- Condense condense condense – left-types get caught up too easily in writing out litanies of crimes or deceptions, which usually take too long to read and very rarely make an effective point (in terms of salience). Try to focus that energy into an image, slogan or idea. The Pinocchio nose only works in certain cases – McCain at one point tried to run a campaign on “honor,” and he has his face on the TV a lot, so the iconic image of the Pinocchio nose works particularly well.

- Entertain as well as act -  a point belabored elsewhere on this blog, but reinforced in the course of organizing – people react much better to the idea of public confrontation with a presidential candidate if they think it will be fun.

- The floating signifier – people respond to the surface of things.  This campaign intentionally tries to avoid dealing in depth.  Instead of trying to parse out truth from falsehood, we’re aiming for the image able to circulate independent of the exact ‘facts’ behind it.  That’s why the image of McCain with the Pinocchio nose was needed to anchor the campaign before we went public.

- Keep up with the news cycle, even when its hard – this was a campaign that developed lightning fast, riding the wave of a news cycle that was focused on McCain’s lies and deceptions in ads and elsewhere.  Arguably, the media backlash to the McCain negative press drove back down his numbers following the Palin/Convention bump.

Overriding question: What is the new ‘voice’ of the left, why are we so Ironic all the time?

12 Ways to Become a Better Writer

List compiled for a class – most of this is advice I don’t follow, but I found the process of putting thoughts down immensely helpful in getting me back on track to writing more (and perhaps better). I encourage you to make a list like this one.

Thoughts assembled out of some personal experience, advice from people I trust, hearsay, and good books I’ve read.

1. Read a lot – People have been writing for a long time, and chances are that you aren’t the first person to think about what you want to write about.  Reading other authors sharpens your perspective on subjects you want to write about, but also keeps your writing fresh – hopefully by reading others, you keep tabs on overused clichés and overlaps in content or form.

2. Know your favorite authors and why they’re your favorite authors – I suspect that if you write, you’ve taken inspiration from some source that inspired you to write.  Go back to those writers and think about what spurred on your passion.  Keep track of why you like them – not just as stylistic source material, but to understand what makes readers want to keep reading.

3. Take notes – both on the books you see and the people you see.  Memory is in short supply, and the act of writing something down allows you to build on a passing thought by putting a bead on it and giving it extended thought.  This provides fodder for content and constructive reflection on ideas that strike you but may need substance to become viable foundations for larger pieces.

4. Outline obsessively – There should be no rush to finish off an article, and I think the final drafting stage should be the shortest step of what you do. Much of the final product should come cut and pasted from outlines and documents where the bulk of your thinking occurred.

5. Think about media – this means understanding the audience’s experience of reading in the format you select to write in.  Reading on the printed page directs thought in different ways than reading on the internet; your work should embody conventions that best suit the medium you – and the reader – have selected.

6. Don’t be afraid to change tack mid-work – your original inspiration isn’t a sacred calling that you must follow to the ends of thought.  If an opportunity presents itself to write a compelling piece on a subject you never intended to, it may be because your first idea wasn’t the real story, and you should shift gears.

7. Don’t look for bad guys and good guys – simple narratives are boring and clichéd caricature turns readers off.  In my experience, unambiguous good and evil almost never exists, and hammering human existence into simple narratives means your story will probably fail, in a myriad of ways.

8. Write every day, or as often as possible – keep the wheels greased linguistically.  You have to practice constructing ideas to find your best work and best ideas.  Treat daily writing as a process of sifting out the good ideas from the bad, and a sandbox for new techniques.  These shouldn’t be published necessarily, but having folks read daily writing might be helpful.

9. Don’t just be a writer – have a passion that allows you to put fervor and purpose in your writing.  I try to take the “80% of life is showing up” maxim to heart, in the sense that you only get an ear in on 20% of the interesting bits of life by spending all your time thinking about/through writing.  I’m an activist, and connections generated through my activist work has generated a huge number of valuable leads, numbers, and story lines that can distinguish a good article from a great one.

10. Take note of the environments where you work best, and create those environments – this is a point about work environments.  Think about pieces you were happiest with, and then think through the environments that let you produce your best work.  Seek out environments like those to write in the future.  I personally know I work best in semi-public, quiet spaces like libraries or study rooms, with people around but research resources at hand.

11. Never hold your best stuff. (Stolen from Clay Felker) If you have a scoop, a story, or a good idea, run with it.  Holding off working on or publishing a good story helps no one, least of all yourself.

12. Treat writing as something more (and less) than a calling. Understand and feed your passion, but know there is a utilitarian angle to what you’re doing.  Your passion and inspiration only take you so far – you must take into account the needs of your readers, and the needs of an industry that surrounds writing and publishing.  Understand the ends-means function of writing from the get go, and you’ll be more successful from the outset and  get over the feeling of soul-burnout in the long run.

I’m a Demographic!

Yesterday while sitting in Washington Square Park, I watched two boxy mini-cars trundle their way to NYU’s Library and park innocently out front. Plastered with the logos of the Pentax a camera company, the drivers lifted up their side panels revealing their cargo of gleaming lenses, dials and switches. Their smiling countenance backed by the multimillion dollar might of their slick corporate sponsors, they worked the crowd, putting hands to cameras and money out of pockets.

Next to them stood the Subway Sandwich One Dollar Off coupon man, perhaps the most consistent figure of my education at NYU. The first day I went to class, he was there; in the biting cold of winter, he was there; when the spring returned the next year, he was there. The Subway down the street buys his persistent call with no doubt meager wages: “Dollaroff, Dollaroff, Sabway dollaroff…”

Two weeks before the Pentax folks was the pomp and circumstance of NYU’s Welcome Week, inducting new students into the NYU community. Of course, this introduction wouldn’t be complete without spending, and NYU stepped in with chartered ’shopping busses’ to ferry students to their Ikea, Target or mall of their choice.

Since then, the streets of NYU’s campus have been filled with hawkers, advertisers and marketing of all kinds. As students become increasingly unreachable by traditional means of television and radio advertising, companies wanting to exploit the time and money of students are forced to take to the streets and directly confront them face to face. And with the price of college going up and federal support going down, schools will gladly oblige companies looking to access a university’s 4-years captive audience – for a small fee here and there.

Looking around, you’ll see the struggle for eyeballs and student dollars spreading on college campuses. Food service contracts increasingly go to national chains (NYU has New York City’s only Chik-Fil-A, and the Kimmel Center for University Life now features a Yolato), buildings get named like sports stadiums (the University of Georgia literally had a Coca-Cola building), and public space becomes cluttered with underpaid sales workers touting special deals for college students if you act now.

The paradigm for any marketing campaign to college students is Facebook. Social networking sites embody the sycophantic relationship of marketers to students – young people voluntarily provide personal information in the course of trying to fit in and meet other people like them; Facebook takes that fairly humane desire and sells it to people with little to no interest in that person’s wellbeing. Connections made for dating or demonstrating become fodder to targeted advertising efforts of face-less corporations. The same goes for advertising on and around college campuses: the student’s desire to learn and live becomes the motor for marketing pushes that cheaply imitate the creative qualities of life that students produce.

And that’s the upshot: the ad campaigns that cover our campuses try to turn the creative energy of student life into a commodity.  Turning our lives into sites for potential transactions cheapens them in ways that escape exact description.  The quality of our lives falls when advertising puts our desires under an assault of images and concocted fears, backed by the daily blackmail of capitalism.

Where this blog is going.

The start of school swamped me for a few days, and I’m putting in a lot of thought to where this semester is going for me intellectually and politically.  I’m currently enrolled in too many classes, and having difficulty finding direction to make a decision about what I want to do with my time.  I hope to make this blog a part of my life for the next few months, but these things are rarely totally up to me.  I want to take on a variety of projects, beginning with the re-establishment of NYU inc., reviving the languishing Malcolm X Prison Debates, and beginning the seed for a writers/intern union in New York – all this on top of Take Back NYU!, the internship, and class.

Hopefully there will be more to say here in the next few days.  I have a lot on my mind.

Radical Jujutsu and Obama

Apologies dear blog.  A hectic time.

First – please please know and read Twin Cities Indymedia during the RNC.  The police response to protests has been violent, overbrearing, and cruel, and you should know as much as possible about the state of civil protest and policing in America.

Today was the first day of school for 2008-9.  Take Back NYU! had a press conference and delivered demands to the NYU administration.  Much fanfare, read about it in your tomorrow’s paper.

Some thoughts on my mind, regarding the eleclection.  While it increasingly looks like John McCain will self destruct of his own accord, something should still be said about this Obama fellow, and his rhetoric – specifically, regarding the radical reaction to Obama and the whole ‘hope’ thing.

First of all, I think that Obama has tapped into the feeling of total disempowerment that people feel regarding national politics.  Seriously: it doesn’t matter how much you hate the war, how many Democrats get into congress, it just feels like everything keeps going downhill.  Obama recognized this and drew on that discontentment to fuel what at least looks like an outsider campaign as a renewal of the American promise.

He’s running as a radical, Jefferson style politician, renewing the tree of liberty and whatnot; focusing on the little person.  He’s co-opting a lot of radical/classic far-left rhetoric, most prominently the “Yes we can” refrain lifted from Caesar Chavez – a particularly sinister device considering his connections to the Chicago School of Economics.

The radical response to Obama seems tepid.  The bulk of what I hear seems to be a very negative response, mainly pointing out that Obama doesn’t represent ‘real change’, and that by golly, folks better be ready to be disappointed.

Look, Obama didn’t become the candidate of change by just saying so.  He also didn’t get it by being real about change either.  He orchestrated a careful symbolic coup that involved his role as a black man on a national political stage, trying to ‘renew the American promise’ (a phrase he used more in teh Convention speech than the ‘change’ line).

The point is this: standing aside and snipping at ‘real change’ won’t get anywhere.  Barack Obama is selling Jeffersonian iPods, and just saying ‘no’ won’t cut it.  He is successfully pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a mainstream American- that’s an opportunity, not something to be casually condemned.  The most successful redeployments of Obama’s rhetoric will be done by folks of color, probably casually lifting snippets of rhetoric without making the connection explicit – trying to make the comparison outright would appear self-promoting, something that Obama carefully avoids, instead embracing a vague ‘community over individual’ aesthetic (there’s a reason he recalls being a community organizer so much).

This is a moment for Jujutsu, not for stodgy naysaying.