CoL XIV : Two Part Collage

In the throes of finals assessment, I tend to break it off about 9pm to read for fun. You know, give my head some good, well revised prose before sleep. Last night, this collage happened.

From the July 2006 Harper's article on Wally World by Barry C. Lynn:

The difference between a system dominated by firms built to produce and a system dominated by firms built to exercise monopsony by power over producers is extreme. The producers that dominated the American economy for more of the twentieth century were geared to build more and to introduce new, to protect their capital investments against overly predatory investors, to raise price faster then cost, to show some degree of loyalty to workers and outside suppliers and communities. Wal-Mart and growing number of today's dominant firms, by contrast, are programmed to cut cost faster than price, to slow the introduction of new technologies and techniques, to dictate downward the wages and profits of the millions of people and smaller firms who make and grow what they sell, to break down entire lines of production in the name of efficiency. The effects of this change are clear: We see them in the collapsing profit margins of the firms caught in Wal-Mart's system. We see them inthe faxt that of Wal-Mart's top ten suppliers in 1994, four have sought bankruptcy protection. (36)

The history Lynn provides for arrival at this point is extremely well researched and patiently laid out. No shocker that the deregulation mania of the Regan era led the ground for this sitch. Go read it.

And then, because I was getting my Kali up and wanted to get my Shakti up intead, I read some Kerouac from The Book of Sketches, written between 1951 and 1957. Randomly I opened to this: (Jack, for give my not retaining your line breaks. What's in this passage is an essay with line breaks, but the HTML for that is PIA, man, so forgive):

CONSUMER CREDIT & the new E. A. Mattison Budget Finance Plan Inc. is just a loan to someone to finance, manufacture, distribute & sell a product, such as home freezers -- But this is going in debt in order to pay it off with savings. You borrow money, buy or invest, & and then save to pay off your debt: leaves U.S. with record savings & record debts at the same time. Consumer credit is one arm of machine reaching out to help other, but under conditions of debt.

In other words, Debt (Neal's big hassle) is the form, financially, The Machine creates to enslave the individual to It -- for instance, Sinatra owes taxes, back taxes, & is "forbidden" to go to Europe, also Dick Haymes --The collusion of Debt, the "Tax" & "Insurance" are tying people closer

& closer to the great Wheel Rack -- Don't accept "Loan" or "Arm" of Machine -- it is deceptive enslavement -- simple souls mis-trust offers of loan for no idle reason --

The traffic problem is merely that cares (ok, that was "cars" but i like my typo) by the millions enslave us to new city systems requiring hours of driving to & from needs, on "congested" arteries, naturally -- where once you'd-a walked -- These are all conditions pointing to the imminent cancerous death of America, the Final Cog in the Western Civ. Maching -- the supreme end result of early Gothic Phallic forms is the skyscraper & the oil drill & powered compressor & pistons of great engines -- the Machine copulates, men aren't allowed to anymore --

The flesh gets numb, but the soul doesn't. (214-16)

What's it mean these bits of the world soul fell to me last night? Gramsci and Marcuse were as right as I thought they were. Lynn, Gramsci, Marcuse, (relax, I'm down with Marxism as a mode of analysis, but I'm not confusing analysis for solution) and Kerouac love the human soul and body far more than the civil and economic systems we have put in place to support them, but have wound up supporting with our souls and bodies instead, and it's time, now, kiddos, to re-engage with consciously shaping the world we live in, and to shape it to the well-being of life, because Mammon and Moloch got each other's backs just fine.

One conversation I had with Robert Trammell two years ago was about my astonishment at how little Beat poets work changed over the course of their lives. I felt, for all my deep love of them, that they had somehow arrested in a way that I don't see in some other generations of poets. Robert said something like, "Well, it's not like the deep layers of the history changed in all that time." And, hmmm. They haven't, not all that much. At the root, the base, Those Gothic Phallic shapes and their implications, the effects of the Eisenhower era, of the military-industrial complex, of the &c. of it all have not changed, except to become accentuated. The culture has switched out is accessories, the shoes and the hair cuts and the handbags and the ties and the widths of lapels, but not the bones (to whiplash metaphors there), not the cogs that make Mammon and Moloch so very fat and happy.

CoL's Renaissance 2.0 has to be about insistently moving to systems that serve people, and not having people serve systems. New Operating System. New Standard Operating Procedure. Hell-thoughts are bugs -- like the notion that CO2 is life, like the notion that women cannot be reliable moral agents, like the notion that diagramming sentences does nothing to teach the youngins how to think/write/create clearly -- and we must write them out of the code. In the Ethical World that thinkers like Irigaray and hooks and Wilber and hosts upon hosts of angelic others have and are thinking into being, ethics would have teeth. Ethics only have teeth when people insist on them. So, insist, crank it up, kiddos, get magical and serious and blissed out and real.