“Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist who is one of the leading students of global income distribution, writes in his latest book, “The Haves and the Have-Nots,” that it is far easier to secure funding for research about poverty than about income inequality. The reason for that is “rather simple even if often wisely ignored,” Milanovic says. “Inequality studies are not particularly appreciated by the rich.” Indeed, Milanovic says he was “once told by the head of a prestigious think tank in Washington, D.C., that the institution’s board was very unlikely to fund any work that had income or wealth inequality in its title. Yes, they would finance anything to do with poverty alleviation, but inequality was an altogether different matter. Why? Because ‘my’ concern with the poverty of some people actually projects me in a very nice, warm glow: I am ready to use my money to help them… But inequality is different. Every mention of it raises in fact the issue of the appropriateness or legitimacy of my income.””

I guess that since the media is the message, and the media requires financing, then if you can’t say it, it doesn’t exist. Pretty neat, huh? But do you want to say it?

            The winter of 2010-11 was continuously long, cold, and snow covered. Near the end, the feeder was raided at night by marauding raccoons, eventually being totally destroyed. No biggy, I’ll replace it with a new one next year.

            Winter was reluctant to arrive in Ohio at the end of 2011. My normal procrastination ceased with the year’s ending and my purchasing a new feeder to perch on the pole along with new bags of birdseed. Wow. I was impressed by the molded plastic design, same durable material as commercial trash cans. Raccoons will find this one to be a challenge. Made in the US of A, good, double bonus. Initially I liked it though it barely fit on the pole, the filler opening was smaller than the old one (rough on cold windy days) and it had this funny tub/recessed wall design where the seed slowly and evenly trickled out well underneath the retaining structure. The bottoms of the tub were slotted to release water, but practice showed it to freeze up into a congealed mass of seed after a rain/freeze cycle. It is a high maintenance feeder, with only a small window to show when it is low on supply. The increasing cold and some sporadic snows finally persuaded the birds to forego their natural reticence of new structures. The new economy finds them with nowhere to perch. They now literally stand in the troughs of seed like goats on a hay bale placed in their bin. Seed doesn’t get scattered to the humble ground scavengers. The feeder is very miserly in its dispensation of choice morsels. The jays, flickers and cardinals really have to work hard at getting the slow release sustenance; nothing leftover for the chipping sparrows to scratch for. No free lunch here. High energy chickadees, titmice and nuthatches remain undaunted by this efficient, exacting and meticulous dispensary. It goes without saying that there has been a marked decrease of not only the number of birds able to access this island of winter nutrition, but also the joy I get at witnessing their number and diversity. I am concerned about those not seen. Much to my chagrin I discovered that I missed the old, sloppy, inefficient, and delightfully generous feeder of years past. I have replaced it with an austere, conservative machine!

            Contained within the word “agriculture” is the word “culture”. The first definition given within Webster’s College Dictionary of the latter term is “artistic and intellectual pursuits and products”. What could farming have to do with that?

            Farmers today are doing quite well. The value of agricultural land and what it produces are very high and increasing. The markets claim one set of reasons for that (global demand), technology accounts for another (genetically modified cultivars and methodology) and the smaller percentage of people engaged in the practice may account for still another reason. A recent local news item concerned a township trustee suspected of a conflict of interest in terms of his civic responsibilities. Coming from a multi generational family farm background, his credentials for public service appeared impeccable. Now it is revealed that he individually farms over 2,000 acres and was steering development away from land he leases. “Intellectual pursuits and products” become apparent when considering traditional farming methods of retaining some of the harvest to be reused as seed in the following year’s planting. Do that today and you might find yourself sued for patent infringement on intellectual property. GM planting and methodology assume agreement with the terms of use which essentially retain ownership of how the product is used thereby eliminating the ability to reuse the end result for further production. Luke Skywalker might feel right at home with the “double loop”. Overheard on a morning radio ag talk show, it was mentioned casually as a contemporary matter of fact, much as a cell phone or hybrid automobile. Within that touted efficiency, the agricultural product is marketed as a resource for an energy manufacturing facility (such as biodiesel or ethanol). The residue (waste) from that production is then “recycled” back as animal feed. The residue (waste) from the livestock operation is then used to produce methane, another source of energy. The discussion on supplying the cash crop of energy failed to mention that the livestock are ultimately kept for human consumption (a traditional given). The emphasis of “intellectual pursuits and products” has shifted from supplying food for the table to satisfying the globe’s insatiable appetite for energy, and carbon based energy at that. This has various repercussions other than just, ultimately, global warming. One news item recently indicated that the GM phenomenon of huge per acre yields (allowing for the use of what the land yields as a resource for energy production) has been put into jeopardy by the very mechanism which originally stimulated its patented invention. Under the terms of use agreement, the agri business is to reserve 20% of its corn planting to a non GM cultivar, thereby providing “islands” of refuge for the destructive rootworms found in the soil in order that the 80% GM strain will maintain its rootworm resistance viability. Given the incredibly high yields per acre possible with GM products, and the high price for those products, many are choosing not to forgo that extra 20% earning potential. Studies in the Midwest indicate that this results in the evolution of a rootworm that is impervious to the systemic insecticidal features of GM corn. The entire house of cards is threatened to come down by the greed of a handful who want, or need to have that additional 20% immediately. We’ve seen this movie before. It is not a healthy outlook when agriculture stops being “farming” (with all its unpredictability), and decides to be like manufacturing or mining (with its singular and complete focus on end product and efficiency).

            Other farm related news out stated that last year saw an increase of first time farmers; mostly young people wanting to supply the veggies, etc. that the farmers’ market, healthy eating craze has created. Good news indeed as small scale farming doesn’t require the enormous capital/cash flow that agri business demands, is very compatible with current high tech media marketing, and allows for part time off farm income opportunities. One becomes apprehensive of the sustainability of such practices when one considers that family farms became agri businesses primarily for the benefit of the family. Come again, you say? Folks that farm also want their kids to have a better life and, like all parents, will do whatever in their means to help their children thrive. They want their kids to go to college, as well as have their own homes, etc. Such aspirations can be met by farming 2,000 acres, etc. But will the small scale, start up “family” farmers working to meet the demand of organic restaurants and pricey farm markets forego such desire? The day to day budget may be balanced with maybe some left over for health care and the homestead serving as a retirement investment, but will the children’s future be neglected? Is it that easy (or obvious) to slip the bondage of progressive modernity with all its genetic engineering and convoluted loops of economy?

            Martin Luther King is no longer present to give voice to what has none. As he said “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

            Politics as usual. In this day and age of super pacs and lobbies (having the full constitutional rights of any individual citizen), trackers are equal opportunity muck rakers (or rather muck providers). They supply the data necessary for all those ads created in such bad taste. The amended US constitution guarantees the right to publish those ads. What’s questionable about that? No news there. Paparazzi have been sticking cameras in celebrities’ faces for as long as there has been dirt to be dug. Where’s the slant on the aesthetics of visual culture after the end of art?

            Speculate for an instant. Let your imagination roam. Just say that somehow something like this found itself before the US Supreme Court. Clear enough that one can pretty much disseminate just about anything, short of what could be deemed libelous or seditious. But this wasn’t a matter of publishing or distributing. The tracker was utilizing his hand held communication device to produce something, eventually to be reproduced. Consummate contortionist skills would still leave the strict constitutionalists looking like pretzels. Reproductive technologies during the time of the Constitution’s signing were all about printed (and disseminated) text and imagery. Producing the image was much as producing the word. Both originated from the pen of an author. Anecdotal accounts about the life drawing studio art pedagogy of Ingres had it that his students were required to study the live figure model on one floor, then had to go up to the studio on the next floor to draw what they had seen. In short, no recording devices were extensively employed at the time of our nation’s founders. The legalities of all this may be considered obtuse by legal scholars. But for students of visual culture, it is fascinating to grasp the distinction between the reliance on hand and memory with regard the art (and culture) of 200 years ago and the present emphasis on the utilization of reproductive technologies without any reliance on memory, let alone dexterity.  The intricacies (and distinctions in definition) of such cultural designations as space, person, or boundary become readily apparent without ever having to enter into any theoretical discourse.

            There was a recent art opening of very current work by a local artist. Without being overtly formatted as such, the work chronicled, “journaled” (ours is the culture of predication) the symbiotic creativity of the parent-child relationship, the Pop Culture bedrock of family. Be it baby Louie, Lourdes, or Chaz, that relationship is totally comprehendible within the public imaginary, almost iconic by definition (mother and child). It is currently red hot and circulation is practically guaranteed. You can stake your career on it. And the artist did.

            This week found me reading something I would never have stalked at my favorite book supplier, the library. It was a gifted book, a rather long one (comparable to War and Peace by the looks of it). “The New York Times bestseller COLLAPSE: how societies choose to fail or succeed JARED DIAMOND author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel With A New Afterword” floats in a cloudy sky over a Mayan ruin landscape on the book’s cover- all in black, white, and tones of grey with a few spare horizontal lines of orange. How much of that IS the book cover by design and how much is marketing is totally academic (it is all one and the same, including the academic!). I haven’t completed the book. But this is not about the book. The author includes his anecdotal and personal experience as part of his professional expertise. Sounds only natural for a naturalist who studies nature to rely on his observation. Nothing exceptional about that, is there? But when one starts to do the math, a different image emerges; one of exception that accounts for the book’s cover. Jared Diamond is no Upton Sinclair. It “appears” that the two have a certain affinity. Both seem to be stating that something is rotten in Denmark. Like current news media, Diamond tries to present “both sides”. This is no simple matter he has researched and writes of. His research has taken him all over the globe, as well as to his second home in Montana which is the subject of the first chapter. Folks there have issues (problems) of historic precedence as well as contemporary urgency. Things are unpleasant. According to Jared the citizens of Montana could choose to address these issues through the passage of laws and vigilant enforcement. Diamond himself lives and works in, and is a citizen of Los Angeles, not Montana. Returning to the math, almost a half century has found him at his profession of research, teaching and writing, with accolades aplenty. His second residence in the Bitterroot Valley was the result of an initial professional invitation on the part of a foundation to spend time there. To put it in distinguishing language, how many students lives has he touched? How many have followed in his footsteps to become research and teaching professionals? Now multiply this by how many have done likewise, within the same or affiliated professions without having encountered him. Add to this the professionals who stake their careers on their expertise with regard cats or “family”, and the ranks swell incredibly; a very large contingency of people, “business person[s] without a business” (Our Literal Speed, unless you consider branding a business), who can afford a second home in a desirable location, yet not predicate themselves as part of the problem (or the solution). The tone of Jared Diamond’s discourse does not implicate him as part of the problem or the solution. After all, researching, analyzing, and disclosure of research analysis IS his profession. Laws and their enforcement are what other people, residents (the people he has studied), do to address these matters. His research and writing requires distancing and detachment to maintain professional standards and credibility. And there’s the rub. To paraphrase Eldridge Cleaver, within a democracy there are no spectators.

            Judging a book by its cover, I sense that the primary difference between Sinclair and Diamond is that Diamond’s work is produced and consumed as part of a society of spectacle. It has vast appeal (and is marketed) to intelligent, knowledgeable professionals (like himself) who will “Tsk Tsk” while engaging in quality entertainment worthy of their education and station. Where Sinclair utilized the text to activate change, Diamond simply wants to do his job, report on his correlations, sell books, and retire to his home in Montana.

            Zmijewski is on to something when he urges that “professional” artists implement their professional abilities, utilize their art expertise for social change (Applied Social Arts). Yes, there is the risk of shame, of historically falling on one’s face because of the decision to get involved with a specific social action. But this ostensibly “required” deference and detachment, primarily on the basis of what is expedient for one’s career and profession, reinforces and contributes to the status quo. Clinging to an assumption that being “about” something sets one apart from being the actual something does not contribute to the solution of the problem that “something” may actually be.

            A punch line that arises in many angst permeated liberal discussions is that “the revolution took place, and we lost”. The joke relies on the lead up conversation advocating for some kind of radical social enterprise. To a limited extent, the “failed” upheavals in Europe and North America of the 1960’s lend credence to this form of gallows humor. Though lacking the enormous historic detachment (necessary for analysis) of events from over a century ago, most agree that something took place in the 60’s, that what occurred failed, that what didn’t occur was relegated to utopian aspirations, and that the outcome of failure led to what it is we have today. One could liken the resolution of that upheaval of a half century ago to the Father Knows Best TV sitcom of roughly that same time period. The upheaval was around how society “ought” to be structured. In the end, something in charge of society (father), as opposed to society itself (the family), determined what became priority and policy. The revolution took place and we lost. The outcome was of an accelerated social inequity, in earnings and worth as well as opportunity, resulting in the contemporary situation that Dowd connects with Dickens’ life and writing.

            Presently there is social upheaval recurring almost globally, with slow but continuous frequency. We do not have the luxury of chronological distance to assist us in grasping its significance or character. In an essay entitled What To Do With Pictures (October 138) David Joselit likens formatting to the art medium of today. Unlike the material mediums of previous art (paint, metal, paper, etc.), formatting permits digital operations in terms of actions and activity through the use of data. Underlying this insight is the consideration that the art of the last 50 years has shifted and become entwined with the market political economy of today. With the end of art, the “romantic” notion of ideas and utopias has been eschewed for the “realism” of economics. Folks created art for the Medici’s, the burghers of Antwerp, and the European bourgeoisie because ultimately it paid the bills (and sent the kids to college), not because it created new forms of knowledge (which version one subscribes to becomes a matter of formatting the data!). According to Joselit, omnipresent is current art’s involvement with market culture. One would look in vain today for writers or artists whose works reflect the “spirit of the age” (in the manner of the 19^th century), in contradistinction to the driving force of the age. But then again, maybe that very collaboration is indicative of the spirit of current social upheaval. Analogous to the grammar of nouns and verbs, the art before the end of art was more concerned with nouns, the subjective elements. The art after the end of art is more concerned with the verbs, the action words that predicate a service economy. Perhaps the upheavals of today are about the disappearance of the subject, the emphasis on the predicate, the ultimate mobility and fluidity of labor totally and solely determined by market force. Symptomatic of this is the increasing pressure to always be connected via an individual mobile communication device, so that anywhere, at any time, the bearer is prepared to accommodate any needed change in activity or action required by the market (always available to be accessed or appropriated). A perfunctory review of some of the issues precipitating upheaval- job security, health care, housing as a “home”, reassurance of retirement consideration, the uncertainty of the everyday ecological environment, etc.- reveals the centrality of “security”. For the limited 1% determining priority and policy, security against terrorism and financial chaos supersedes the “security” issues of the 99%.

While on the subject of the GOP candidates, those with any previous reading of Palestinians about Palestinians realize how offensively derogatory Newt Gingrich’s description of Palestinians as an “invented people” is. I guess for Newt, Native Americans are an “invented people”. Post colonialism finds many “invented people” now governing themselves after being invented by their colonizers. Even non-colonized parts of the world like the Czech and Slovak republics resist being termed “invented”. I guess Newt will side with the Chinese government; that the Tibetans are an “invented people”.  In terms of globalism, what Mr. Gingrich says is analogous to what many said about Afro-Americans in the 1950’s (and they also made various historic claims to substantiate those views).

This year found the passing of Steve Jobs. This past week found news of Apple opening a super store in NYC. Couple that with Bill Gates’ association with nuclear power plant construction and Microsoft’s co founder Paul Allen’s venture into space, and one begins to sense the waning of the hyper celebrity of technology. Could it possibly be that innovation ownership no longer produces the phenomenal return on investment that it once did?

Oh yes, I was thinking of an author, someone who wrote a half century ago regarding colonialism. I remembered what he wrote about, his description of colonialism from the colonist’s standpoint. It had to do with Algeria under the French; the memory of descriptions of how the colonizer, by definition, is in all intent and action focused on deriving the greatest wealth from the colonized without necessarily consuming the colonized in total. The colonizer always must remember to allocate some residual vestige of wealth for the colonized to maintain the semblance of existence and autonomy in order to simultaneously facilitate the colonial process (much as one remembers to feed the horse that enables transit); all for the one, with only the least bit of the one for the all. So the colonizer recognizes the need for hospitals, institutions of learning, orphanages and charitable institutions to be maintained. The colonized are given the autonomy and authority amongst themselves to maintain and manage these from the residual resources allowed them for their everyday continuance (though the colonizers always retain the memory of all the wealth that has passed through their fingers and emphasize that it is their wealth that makes these charities possible).  I remembered the years this covered and the writer having been a doctor or psychiatrist, but I couldn’t remember the author’s name, only vague vocalizations of phonetic association.

I forgot to mention that all this was precipitated by recent criticism of Occupy, that it is misdirected and ineffective. That it would be better positioned to utilize its energy in actually doing “good” through some social or charitable work, like a walk for diabetes, or canned food drive, or maybe some colored ribbons of support. That these activities better reflect solving problems than the occupation of critical expression through performance; something more in line with Newt Gingrich’s “Take a shower and get a job”, maybe at Walmarts, thereby enabling that company to continue to be the number one business donor in America. All this created memories of Empire. I had forgotten that I actually owned a copy (instead of using the library’s as I am want). Certainly Hardt and Negri would have remembered to reference this 20^th century African writer. My phonetic pronunciations proved pertinent. There it was in the index.

The titles of his work had escaped my memory but having the name allowed me to search the online interlibrary resources.  My memory of Franz Fanon’s work was of his writings being readily available, with little interest except for the marginal few. Now I noticed that a number of the volumes were listed as missing or checked out.  Truly “the most varied things may happen”.