First, a moment of disclosure: My media diet as of late has been akin to devouring an entire American-size pack of past-their-expiration-date chocolate-chip cookies in a single sitting, being as it is, comprised of MPR and assorted up-to and out-of date books on globalization. Sadly, my retrospective memories of last week, which by all accounts was brimming with activity (only consider such barely-remembered events as the trip to the Art Institute to examine a collection of Flemish Medeival tryptichs with anomolously similar embrodiered backgrounds and whose painting frames (at least according to a preeminent German forensic art historiologist) were all mysteriously cut from the same grove of Polish maple trees sometime between the year 1492 and 1500) -- sadly, my truly lucid memories of this week are limited to a scant pairing. The first is the moment where I used my limited French vocabulary to explain to a visiting mustachioed cardiologist from Burgundy all about why exactly the American political system lacks basic democratic representation, the exigencies, ins, and outs of the electoral college and the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all, now-hopelessly-gerrymandered representative districts. I guess French has more nuanced ways of

Intellectual typography

expressing these hopelessly-hyphenated concepts, because, along with all the nodding and percieved interest, actual trans-Atlantic communication seemed to have taken place.

Later, my ambassador moment reminded me of a book currently sitting atop my toilet tank through which I've been paging for some time: Acts of Resistance, by French sociologist and so-called public intellectual Pierre Bordieu. It's a collection of motivational speeches delivered by Mr. Bordieu at various points during the past decade of tumult and unrest in continental Europe. Bordieu is a kind of French Chomsky, though his speeches, supposedly for the proletariat, have a high degree of so-called intellectualism. For example "Against the Destruction of Civilization," a 1995 rallying cry to striking Trade Unionists, exorts, "the only effective way of fighting against national and international technocracy is by confronting it on its own preferred terrains, in particular that of economics, and putting forward, in place of the abstract and limited knowledge which it regards as enough, a knowledge more respectful of human beings and of the realities which confront them."

Intellectual content aside, this kind of argument, i.e. that the (international) Left has to break apart the ill-matched marriage

A radically different approach

between the increasingly insecure middle classes and the business-at-all-costs community, is exactly the kind of opinion espoused in another European primer from which I've been unable to tear myself away: British economist and so-called public intellectual John Gray's 1998 work, False Dawn. While it might at first seem that a pre-9/11 book about globalization, this one, with in its predictions of nationalism and the express-elevator ascendance of the Chinese economy, is remarkably hindsight-friendly. Although his writing style is all over the map, riddled with seeming flippant profundities, any of which could launch a protracted debate, his main points seem to be that the lassiez-faire free market, that theoretical level playing field in defense of which NYT columist Thomas Friedman is currently criss-crossing the country like a good Mormon proselyte, is profoundly un-democratic and socially destabilizing. He explains how the post-industrial ungrounding of labor is one of the main social forces undermining the strength of family structure and community, and he uses some rather convincing statistics about labor mobility in various

Moderate paragon

developed societies to back it up, along with statistics about incarceration, violent crime, and health insurance, social safety nets, and other innumberable gripes.

More on Friedman: I heard him on the radio this week. He's travelling the country on behalf of his new book, The World is Flat, and if you haven't read it, check out this thermonuclear review by someone named Matt Taibbi, courtesy of The New York Press. It includes this sentence: "If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country."

The collected economic reimaginings of the European Union only make me wonder all the more about the fallen-dollar future of the our fine country, and the FUBAR-i-fication currently underway in DC. (Witness the latest incarnation, the Senate filibuster debate, which is to my mind garnering an incredible amount of albiet-fascile activist mobilization for what amounts to a technical change in some subsection of Senate rules.) Before the election, most every Democratic strategist was talking about how we need to reconnect voters with their

Demagoguery!

pocketbook, and remind them who, exactly, if anyone, is fighting for their economic independence. I personally went door-to-door reminding people in a completely non-partisan way about the parallels between the American economy and a West Virginia VFW Bingo Hall. At the time, it seemed every liberal writer was talking about the economy, stupid, and, with the now-re-elected POTUS on the record expalaining crime by saying things like, "Just because you're . . . [picture Bush searching for the right word] . . . not rich . . . [he found the word!, or words!] . . . doesn't mean you're willing to kill," it sure seemed like a change had been ordered and America was just sitting patiently in the window booth waiting for the food to cook. Instead, read this recent POTUS exchange, ripped lately from a Molly Ivin's column:

Dialogue between President Bush and a citizen during a February meeting in Nebraska, where Bush was trying to sell his scheme to privatize Social Security:

Woman: "That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute."

Betraying the common touch

Bush: "You work three jobs?"

Woman: "Three jobs, yes."

Bush: "Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)"

Yes, things went badly, and those unfortunate Democratic party strategists have changed their tune, rhetorically speaking, to focus on rhetoric itself. The second, and only other of last week's extant memories is hearing Howard Dean on the radio talking to the ALCU about how to talk to the "American public." I have to admit that from the very first, I've always been impressed with Dr. Dean of Vermont, finding him both intelligent and down-to-earth-seeming. (ed -- Is there a word for this? "forthright?") And he was again, sitting in his new Chair of the DNC, and explaining to the civil rights defending crowd how, for many people, what's important isn't their own "economic interest," but the perceived convictions of the candidate. And, unlike many of the oft-critized columnns asserting the rise of "values" voting, Dean explained that these decisions aren't made with the sorts of lithmus test of the sort prescribed by hard-right Christianity, but instead with a sort-of graduated point system. It was good stuff, and well said, but I wonder if Dean is really putting the nail on his head, so to speak. Aren't many voters voting Republican because they think that's in their best interest, in a sense, that somehow the

Pulitzer prize!

free-market-driven policies are indeed the correct prescription for economic growth? Don't people sort-of, kind-of buy the whole trickle-down theory? Aren't many Bush voters people who think they're out to right the economic injustices of the downward-wage-spiraling past few decades?

So, anyway, says Thomas Frank, who (along with his evil twin, David Brooks) is not only what passes for a public intellectual in the U.S. these days, but includes a whole chapter on anti-intellectualism in his quite well-written What's the Matter With Kansas, now out in paperback with a new afterword. I heard this guy on the radio last fall, when the shit was hitting the fan, and he's a genuine firebrand. In fact, I daresay he and Dean tag-teamed together could take a pair of Bob Jones' finest in a firebrand-off. No joke: Frank's is the best book I've read since I polished off my Rick Moody short story collection.

Post-script: There has been, of late, an ceaseless stream of examples illustrating the harm caused by the unfettered market on the lower- and middle-classes, ranging from the systematic discrimination outlined in Liza Featherstone's book on Wal-Mart's treatment of women, to tiny Minnesotan suburb Lake Elmo's fight against the moneyed real estate developers that seem to control so much of suburban local politics, to such historical as the Irish potato famine. I was glancing through this month's public intellectual monthly bible, Harper's Monthly, the bible of non-literary-pretention NY intellecutalism, and there's a delightfully brief article tracing the links between economics and Evangelicalism as far back as mid-18th century. It includes this:

Roughly a million people died; another million emigrated. The population ofIreland dropped by nearly one quarter in the space of a decade. It remains one of the most striking illustrations of the incapacity of markets to run themselves. When fovernment corn supplements stopped, and food prices rose, private charities and workhouses were overwhelmed, and families starved by the sides of the roads.