Joseph Stiglitz explains how “conservative” policy has manacled “the invisible hand”
Thanks in large part to the anarchists who call themselves the Republican party, the world is being plunged into what seems destined to be a second and precipitously deep recessionary dip.
While this is not exactly news, it is a fact worth recalling that these “free-market” “conservatives” know nothing about Adam Smith, the God of capitalism whose name they take in vain.
Meanwhile, the know-nothing parade continues to add more floats. Texas governor, Rick Perry, who can be reliably identified as stupider than George Bush, seems set to run for president. The Republicans are incapable of putting together a full slate of candidates that doesn’t include an alarming number of cranks and nitwits. In fact, those quaint terms do not fully characterize the pathology represented here. The field now includes or has included or is expected to include the following: Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum, and, of course, Teabagger-in-Chief Sarah Palin.
These are the faces of the most dangerous political organization in the world. Behind the scenes, it is even scarier.
Marshall McLuhan and Norman Miller go head-to-head in a 1968 debate on CBC television
I have finally put together a compilation of Frye references to Marshall McLuhan across twenty-three volumes of the Collected Works — almost 20,000 words worth. This was a very illuminating experience. Once I have proof-read the collection, I will post it. I will also put together a post providing an overview, which will be the basis of a much longer paper that I hope will be one of my contributions to the Frye centenary next year.
So, once again, here are a couple of quotes to prepare the palette: Frye’s first reference to McLuhan in his 1949 diary, and his last more than forty years later in an interview conducted in November 1990, two months before his death.
From the 1949 diary:
Norma Arnett came up to me last night & wanted to know why a poem she (and I remember to some extent) thought was good had not been considered even for honourable mention in the Varsity contest. . . I said the judge was just plain wrong (I think it was McLuhan, so it’s a reasonable enough assumption). (CW 8, 94)
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From “Cultural Identity in Canada” (27 November 1990: interview with Carl Mollins):
Mollins: I suppose McLuhan has certainly acknowledged his debt to Innis and to you, I think?
Frye: Well to Innis, not to me [laughing]. I suspect a great deal of that—I think that’s something to give the critics to play with. Innis was a man who worked like a vacuum cleaner, picking up books everywhere, and he saw something very distinctive in McLuhan, and so he asked McLuhan for autographs, and they did exchange some correspondence. There was a bit of mixture there. I think McLuhan was just a coming person and, with no special reputation at that time, was very flattered by this (as he should have been), and the result was that you get a rather Innis-McLuhan link. But I don’t really see a great deal of influence from Innis on McLuhan.
Mollins: There is something in each of you—the use of the aphorism, the cryptic utterance which compels a reader to dwell upon a sentence.
Frye: It is true that both McLuhan and I are rather discontinuous, mosaic writers of very different kinds. It’s less true of Innis, although actually that book that Christian got out, The Idea File of Innis, does indicate that he thought aphoristically. That’s certainly true of me. I keep notebooks and write aphoristically, and ninety-five per cent of the work I do is putting them out on a line, and then you have a continuous rhythm. (CW 24, 1094-5)
Yes, the title is a play on Marshall McLuhan’s notion of a “cool medium.” Medium Cool is a souvenir of McLuhan’s association with the radical mood of the 1960s, depicted here by events surrounding the riots at the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago. The movie was controversial when it was released in 1969 — it received an X rating, which, according to the lore, was not for violence or sex, but for political content. People loved and hated it, sometimes simultaneously. An excerpt from Vincent Canby’s New York Times review:
The shock of “Medium Cool” comes not from the fiction, but from the facts provided Wexler by Mayor Daley, the Illinois National Guard and the Chicago police. In his use of these events and others, however, Wexler does seem to be somewhat presumptuous, attempting to surpass the devastating live show that television—Marshall McLuhan’s “cool medium” — presented as the Chicago riots actually were taking place.
Above is Marshall McLuhan interviewed by the CBC about the “global village” during the super-heated phase of his celebrity.
Below is one of Frye’s numerous assessments of McLuhan’s concept from Notebook 11f (1969-70):
The “flow of information,” which is mostly disinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths. Take another McLuhan phrase, “global village”–one early satellite broadcast was called the “town meeting of the world.” The myth behind this phrase assumes that every technological development creates a new anxiety & understanding–that a village is a community of friends. But, of course, a village may be a community of cliques & feuds & backbiting & gossip of a ferocity far worse than any metropolis, like those hideous little towns at the divisional points of railways, where the conductor’s wife couldn’t compromise her dignity by speaking to the brakeman’s wife. So when communicators, with a schoolteacher’s bright & glassy smile, say: now we’re going to be able to create a dialogue with Paraguay & Tanzania, & won’t that be nice? the reaction is, very often: we don’t want all those people in our living room: we want to get together with the people who speak our language & share our beliefs & prejudices, including, if we’re lucky, a minority that we can have fun of kicking around. Separatism, except when it is a genuine effort to escape from tyranny, is in most respects a mean, squalid & neurotic philosophy, but it is the strongest force yet thrown up by the age of total communication. (CW 13, 97)
The Frye on McLuhan compilation is almost done. I’m off for a few days and will complete it while I’m away. Until then, below is a sample. (I’ve also put together Frye/McLuhan-related posts for Friday and Saturday.)
From “Literary and Mechanical Models” (1989):
Apart from the analogies of ballad and folklore scholarship, I was also influenced by the twentieth-century fluidity of media, in which a story might begin as a magazine serial, then become a book, and then a film. I remember the shock of picking up a copy of [Dostoevsky’s] The Brothers Karamozov and seeing it described as “the book of the film,” but I also realized that certain verbal cores, of the kind I usually call archetypes, were constants throughout the metamorphoses. The variety of media, in fact, was what made the conventions and genres I was interested in stand out in such bold relief.
It was this that made it impossible for me to go along with McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” axiom, despite my general sympathy for what McLuhan was trying to do. McLuhan’s formula was essentially in application of the Aristotelian form-content unity. He says, for example, that the form of one medium is the content of a later medium. I could see the identity of form and content: the content of a picture, for example, is the form of that picture, as long as we are talking about it as a picture and not as a representation of something else. But the McLuhan aphorism also implied an identity of form and medium, and that I cannot buy. A medium is precisely that, a vehicle or means of transmission, and what is transmitted are the real forms. The form of a Mozart quartet is not affected by whether it is heard in a concert hall or over the radio or read in a score, though there would be psychological variants in reacting to it, of the kind that McLuhan made so much of. The real forms are not media but verbal or pictorial structural units that have been there since the Stone Age. (CW 18, 455-6)
Frye in an interview conducted on 13 October 1976. Four years later we had Ronald Reagan and the thirty-years-and-counting nightmare of crony capitalism. Things apparently had to get much worse. However, we can hope that the expectation Frye articulates here will prove correct in the long run. The symptomology he lays out very accurately describes the general collapse of democratic values, political discourse, and economic opportunity since the scorched-earth administration of George W. Bush:
In this North American complex that we’re in there’s a crisis of confidence perhaps in our own liberal and democratic values, and I think that that’s partly a political and economic thing. It’s almost a repetition of what happened after 1929 when I was a freshman here. There was a great wave of buoyant confidence which was really infantile, based entirely on credit. Then there was a great stock market crash. Then there was a tremendous reassessment of the values of capitalism and out of that emerged the Roosevelt period. I think that something like that is happening now. We’re going through a crisis of confidence not so much in capitalism as in democracy. (CW 24, 322-3)
Andrew Sullivan takes a much more sanguine view of the debt ceiling settlement, seeing it as a game changer in which Obama has the longterm advantage.
Maybe. But the human cost has been and will continue to be immense. It never had to be. Meanwhile, the incidence of political thuggery on the right has barreled headlong into uncharted territory.
So the debt deal has finally been reached. As expected, the agreement arrives in a form that right-thinking people everywhere can feel terrible about with great confidence.
The general consensus is that for the second time in three years, a gang of financial terrorists has successfully extorted the congress and the White House, threatening to blow up the planet if they didn’t get what they wanted.
Back in 2008, the congress and George Bush rewarded Hank Paulson and Wall Street for pulling the Cleavon-Little-“the-next-man-makes-a-move-the-n—er-gets-it” routine by tossing trillions of bailout dollars at the same people who had wrecked the economy.
Now, Barack Obama has surrendered control of the budget to the Tea Party, whose operatives in congress used the same suicide-bomber tactic, threatening a catastrophic default unless the Democrats committed to a regime of steep spending cuts without any tax increases on the wealthy.
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The Democrats aren’t failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there’s political hay to be made moving to the right. They’re doing it because they do not represent any actual voters. I know I’ve said this before, but they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television.
For evidence, all you have to do is look at this latest fiasco.
The Republicans in this debt debate fought like wolves or alley thugs, biting and scratching and using blades and rocks and shards of glass and every weapon they could reach.
The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn’t fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time — as fixed fights go, you don’t see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did — but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive.