it's the economy, stupid

On my short drive home from campus today (I almost never drive, but it was raining and I'm exhausted), I heard a report on American Public Radio's show Marketplace about saving money and bartering will slow economic recovery because, as it was explained, if you have your friend cut your hair instead of going to a salon, and if you cook dinner for your friend in exchange, instead of your friend going out to a restaurant, you reduce economic activity, because you reduce the demand for goods and services.

Wrongo! Bartering is economic activity! The Missourian they discussed on the program had a demand for a service, and produced a good in exchange. In fact, I had a friend cut my hair in exchange for a dinner once in graduate school, and we constantly bartered to one another our goods and services - growing food, brewing beer, moving, pet care, child care, even construction, plumbing, electrical work, mechanics. None of us had any cash, because we were impoverished grad students. We had no lack of demand for goods and services, and we engaged in a great deal of economic, productive activity to meet our own and one another's needs. I spent several summers during grad school "unemployed," but without collecting unemployment or welfare. I didn't try to set a dollar value on the amount of my productivity and how much I "earned" in that way, but I do know I rarely needed to buy vegetables, for instance.

What they mean to say, properly put, is that the more we produce for ourselves rather than consume from another source, and the more we exchange with one another rather than purchase, the less monetary activity there is. Money is not equal to economy.

Amazing how easily these ideological words and ideas about economy are rolled out in our culture, and how easily we forget, or neglect that the basis for economy is production and exchange, not just money or share prices.

just noticing

Since some time during the final phases of the Clinton administration, news media are less and less presenting unemployment and jobless statistics and federal budget data. During the Clinton administration, this may have been because of the economic good times: unemployment across the US was something under 4% for a while there (though, of course, in the San Joaquin valley it was still close to 10%), and the federal budget was in surplus.

But now, those data would seem to be important again as evidence for claims about the health or illness of the economy and the federal coffers. No? But what's the current jobless rate in the US? And how high is the budget deficit now?

I don't watch TV news, for a variety of reasons, so I don't have a complete picture of mainstream news media these days. I do, however, read newspapers (online, that is), and listen to NPR with some frequency. So on balance, I believe this is an accurate observation.

fcc changes rules on media ownership, again

A corporation can now own a newspaper and TV station in the same media market, thanks to a change in FCC ownership regulations. Democrats did a fair job of staging opposition and outrage, but really, it's a token gesture by both the Dems and the FCC. The real regulatory changes came in the 80s, when, under the guidance of such luminaries as Mark Fowler (who called TV "a toaster with pictures"), the FCC opened media ownership across markets and eliminated the requirement that broadcast media provide public affairs information on a regular basis. Corporate media are, at this stage, fundamentally incapable of legitimate news reporting of anything beyond fires and sports scores - and I'm not really willing to stand behind that.

The Democrats' outrage was focused on the alleged clandestine nature of the Commission's vote on the regulation. Whether or not the vote happened late at night, the fact is that the proposed regulation has been floating around for around 6 months.

Republican Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate described the process as "transparent and thorough." She said the changes proposed are narrow, and hinted she was in favor of a greater liberalization of the media ownership rules.

Debbie Tate is right!

But you can still do rotten things transparently. It's ironic as hell: media have, per the FCC, no responsibility to the public whatsoever. The transparency of any FCC regulation shift depends, in our society, on its being made public through the media the FCC increasingly avoid regulating.

Eh. That's why we only watch ice hockey, the occasional flick, and Comedy Central.

harry potter spoiler alert! harry potter spoiler alert!

The buzz about the next and allegedly last Harry Potter book is reaching a pitch that is usually reserved for Second Comings, but I'll leave that unexplored for the moment in order to announce this startling bit of news:

I die in the new Harry Potter book!

I know! I know! This was as shocking to me as it no doubt is to you! But according to reputable sources online, including iamdeadnowpleasestopspammingme.com and the Great International Chinese Communist Harry Potter Conspiracy (dot com), that miserable bitch J. K. Rowling kills me the heck off in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Well, first of all, BITCH!

Secondly, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, because (1) my death contributes nothing whatsoever to the plot; (2) I'm such a minor character that no one has ever heard of me, let alone become attached emotionally; (3) not only did my character not become more friendly with Hermione, but in fact couldn't even get friendlier with Hagrid, before this ignominious demise; (4) she didn't even have the decency to have Voldemort or Snape, or even a prominent Death Eater off me, but I had to die by misfired wand; and (5) I'm not getting paid for this!

Well!

Well!

Well, I suppose, Mizz Rowling, if that is your real name, you'll be hearing from my attorneys! (That's "solicitors" in your weirdo language, you miserable media whore!)

Wow, am I cheesed off about this. Plus I'm dead, so there's a limited amount I can do about it.

received: a letter, and numerous papers

I got a letter from my friend Bob the other day. Bob gave up on blogs a little while ago, and I'll be removing the link to his in a moment. He doesn't want to spend time that way, because, in his view, it's not a very rewarding way to communicate. He wrote me a letter instead.

We've written a lot of letters to one another. For a while, I was a quite avid letter writer, sending missives out to him, to Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer, to my high school friend Anne, to my friend Nancy. I generally typed them on my old manual machines, for a long time on an early 60s Hermes 2000, pages and pages of stuff about my life as a grad student, but mainly trying to capture a mood and lived experience.

Compared to email, a letter is a very different thing, especially written out longhand in fountain pen (as Bob's was, in virtually the same nearly illegible hadnwriting he's had since we were kids). It's tangible. It has a feint smell to it. The very good paper it's written on has a definite feel, with an affective dimension. I'm writing him back, in my nearly illegible handwriting.

Partly this is contextual: Bob has been my friend for more than 30 years. We grew up together in Ohio, and when I moved away at 13, writing letters was the way to communicate. Regrettably, perhaps, I don't have any of those any more. A flood in Pittsburgh lost me several boxes of my writing, including about 1000 poems, a couple plays, a dozen or more journals, and almost all my letters. I stopped saving correspondence, and finally have become so much more comfortable with electronic versions of things that I don't particularly like printing out any of my own papers any more.

For one reason or another, for many people, email doesn't have the same feel to it. The medium, or the genre, or the format, or the phenomenon, feels quasi-personal, somewhat institutional. Everything in email looks like a memo.

Bobo and I turned that into a source of amusement, by way of using the memo format inappropriately. You wouldn't write email within an institutional context beginning with something like "Dear Unmitigated Bastard." At least, you wouldn't if you're a fan of employment. In any case, this carried forward a tradition of ironic mutual abuse that began in college and continued through grad school correspondence (and beyond).

I'm a fan of all of it. Each medium has its best uses, I suppose, and each medium has its own way of habituating language and expression. It's a great source of fun to be able to pick them up in turns, to undergo the different ways media shape language and thought, affect, address, tone, all of it.

I'm gonna keep blogging, too, I figure, though as blog this has little "bloggy" about it, and I definitely regard it as a publicly kept journal more than anything else.

As such, let me make one final personal note on the day, most of which I've spent grading final papers. That note is:
WAAAAAAAAH!

Why oh why oh why does grading hurt? I mean, these aren't terrible papers. There've only been a couple duds, which is a very low duddism rate. They've been fine, some even quite good, and a couple wonderful ones. Still, ow.

getting my Schutz together

It's February, which means it's the season for writing a paper for the Society for Phenomenology and Media, something I've done each of the last 9 years. I am the only person to have attended every conference of the group, which I call SPaM.

This year I'm writing about Alfred Schutz's essay "The Well-Informed Citizen," which my honors Human Interests and the Power of Information class is reading. Not usually one to engage in critique (as a result of his commitment to a descriptive phenomenological method), Schutz concludes the essay by saying there is a problem posed by public opinion, especially when it guides political decisions in democratic societies. It's not that original a problem to pose (Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922, though he had a very different attitude toward it), but Schutz's call for the well-informed citizen to "prevail" over public opinion is a peculiar way of dealing with it, especially since Schutz doesn't tell us what that would mean. It's practically tossed off at the end of the essay, and it's not obvious how the essay as a whole helps illuminate the problem, or even how the problem is motivated by the essay or vice-versa.

I've spent a ton of time on this essay over the years, but for some reason this year it seems as if I have been able to get deeper into it. That has its good points and its bad points. I'm finding it very difficult to keep my paper within narrow enough parameters. It wants to creep all over the place. So I'm thinking my presentation this coming Thursday will be a little odd. We'll see. Perhaps I'll be able to get some of the other stuff out of my system in class on Monday, so the focus on public opinion can come back.