Chart of the Day: Only the Rich Get Richer

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And it’s only gotten worse, thanks to — you guessed it — the unrelenting trend of tax cuts for the richest of the rich:

The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

New data show that the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest parts of the population in 2007 was the highest it’s been in 80 years, while the share of income going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level ever.

The CBPP report attributes the widening of this gap partly to Bush Administration tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy. Of the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts taxpayers received through 2008, high-income households received by far the largest — not only in amount but also as a percentage of income — which shifted the concentration of after-tax income toward the top of the spectrum. (From The Huffington Post)

Now that’s redistribution of wealth!  As Nouriel Roubini has noted, “We have invented socialism for the rich.”

The Canadian trend in income disparity is virtually identical.

In related news, 1 in 7 wealthy homeowners are in default or seriously behind in payments for at least one of their mortgages, which is by far the highest of any cohort: they’re simply walking away from what they consider to be a bad investment.  So much for the vicious right-wing meme that the financial crisis was caused by poor (i.e. non-white) people taking out mortgages on homes they ought never to have had.

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Frye in “The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris”:

We said that culture seems to develop spatially in the opposite direction from political and economic movements.  The latter centralize and the former decentralize.  (CW 17, 321)

So few words, so much truth.  Our culture is remarkable for its lively decentralization (whose proliferating hybridization of course drives retrograde conservatives nuts — a very good sign that it’s the right way to go), while at the same time we see the unmistakable emergence of “plutonomy”: the economic and political domination of society by the few.  As an old boss of mine liked to intone: “This has gotta cease.”

Alice Munro

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Alice interviewed at the Vancouver International Authors’ Festival in October 2009 on the occasion of the publication of her latest collection of stories, Too Much Happiness.

Today is Alice Munro‘s 79th birthday.

Frye in “Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784-1984”:

….[T]he [Bildungsroman] theme seems to have an unusual intensity for Ontario writers: the best and most skillful of them, including Robertson Davies and Alice Munro, continue to employ a great deal of what is essentially the Stephen Leacock Mariposa theme, however different in tone.  Most such books take us from the first to the second birth of the central character.  Childhood and adolescence are passed in a small town or village, then a final initiation, often a sexual one, marks the entry into a more complex social contract.  (CW 12, 621)

In any case, as we saw, prose in Ontario began with the documentary realism of journals and memoirs, and when fiction developed, that was the tradition it recaptured.  Documents, when not government reports, tend to have short units, and the fact may account for the curious ascendancy in Canadian fiction of the novel which consists of sequence of interrelated short stories.  This form is the favorite of Alice Munro, and reaches a dazzling technical virtuosity in Lives of Girls and Women.  (ibid., 624)

In “‘Condominium Mentality’ in CanLit,” an interview with the University of Toronto Bulletin, February 1990:

O’Brien: Which Canadian writers are you most enthusiastic about?

Frye: The obvious people: Peggy Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Timothy Findlay, Mordecai Richler, . . . especially Alice Munro, who seems to be a twentieth-century Jane Austen.  (CW 24, 1037)

Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999) in the New Yorker here.

TGIF: Three by Andy Kaufman

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Mighty Mouse

Andy Kaufman died of cancer 26 years ago at the tragically young age of 35.  These performances are more than 30 years old but they still retain their liberating strangeness: mime-singing the refrain from a Mighty Mouse record, reading The Great Gatsby to an audience that doesn’t want to be read The Great Gatsby, and conducting a variety show in a sort of Mediterranean/Aegean gibberish, and then leading his audience through a sing-along in the same language.

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“Act Against Slavery”

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Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe of Upper Canada, anti-slavery advocate

On this date in 1793, the Act Against Slavery was passed in Upper Canada (present day Ontario), also prohibiting the importation of slaves into Lower Canada (present day Quebec).  This was a full fourteen years before the British Empire outlawed the slave trade, forty years before it outlawed slavery altogether, and sixty-nine years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Quote of the Day: “The US no longer has an adversarial press”

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Four minutes and eighteen seconds of nonsensical vocables from Sarah Palin.  On her relevant experience in foreign affairs: “Our next door neighbors are foreign countries are in the state I’m executive of [sic] . . .  Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of America.  Where do they go?”

“[W]e have to realize that the US no longer has a truly adversarial press. It has a commercial press that is entirely driven by fear of losing readers and/or viewers. Remember that the MSM allowed Palin – then a total unknown – to go an entire campaign without an open press conference. She knows they’re patsies. She’s much less afraid of them than they are of her. And rightly so.”  Andrew Sullivan

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Frye in “The Renaissance of Books” (1973) comparing the commercial interests of the “free” press with the dictatorial control of Orwell’s telescreen in 1984:

In the democracies, of course, radio and television reflect the economic anxieties of selling and making profits through consumer goods rather than the political anxieties of censorship and thought control, but the cultural consequences have many parallels.  Newspapers also become one-way streets in proportion to their preoccupation with headlines and deadlines: however, the competition of television is now forcing them to becomes something more like journals of opinion.  (CW 11, 154)

Roger Ailes, president of Fox News in January: “I’m not in politics.  I’m in ratings.  We’re winning.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Shelley

On this date Percy Bysshe Shelley died (1792-1822).

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Literature doesn’t argue.  That’s the principle of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry — that literature doesn’t argue.  As Yeats says, “You can refute Hegel but not the Song of Sixpence.”  The whole argumentative side is something that critics, without examining the matter, think must be true of criticism but not of literature.  But to me criticism is really the expression of the awareness of language.  And what I try to do in my writing is express awareness of language, particularly of literary language and what it’s trying to do.  (CW 24, 953-4)

Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry” here.

Quote of the Day

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Rick Barber’s congressional campaign ad, “Gather Your Armies,” which is to say, “Calling All Crazies”

“I would not have thought in a million years that this kind of thinking would be inside the conservative mainstream. If it is not, it is time for rational conservatives to speak up.” — Ruth Marcus of the heavily right-leaning Washington Post in “Unhinged on the Right,” her latest account of the ongoing insanity of the teabagger movement and its branded and Palin-anointed candidates, such as Rick Barber

Official Languages Act

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On this date in 1969 the Official Languages Act gave French equal status to English in the federal government.

Frye on the influence of French Canadian culture on English Canadian culture:

I believe that the French Canadians discovered their own identity first.  The French Canadian intellectuals and writers, including Quebecers, understood, almost from the beginning, what their function and role should be.  They should be the defenders and the heralds of a language and a culture in a continual state of siege; it is precisely this which allowed them to define, with maximum clarity, their own identity.  English Canadian writers, when they in turn discovered their identity in the 1960s, did it, as it were, by rebound, as a reaction to the problems posed by the French Canadians. (CW 24, 45)

Quote of the Day

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Socialism

Brink Lindsey reviews the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur C. Brooks’s new book with a title too long and too silly to reproduce here.  In the paragraph below, Lindsey takes exception to Brooks’s notion of “American exceptionalism” being defined by “free markets,” as compared to the social democratic example of Europe, and, presumably, the outright communism we have here in Canada:

Plenty of European countries have markets about as free as those in the land of the free. Look at the ratings provided by the annual Economic Freedom of the World report, co-published by the Cato Institute. On four broad categories of economic freedom — legal structure and security of property rights; access to sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation — the United States was slightly “freer” than Sweden, the United Kingdom, Austria, Finland, and Switzerland. Meanwhile, Ireland, the Netherlands and, by a wide margin, Denmark were found to have freer markets. Note that the two highest scorers have two of the biggest welfare states in the world — which just goes to show that blurring issues of regulation and redistribution, as Brooks tries to do, leads to intellectual confusion.

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Here’s Frye in one of the late notebooks:

At present we have capitalist and socialist societies, but the old notion of socialism as the fulfilment of capitalism, so sacrosanct in my youth, I don’t believe in now.  I think that socialism as it got established was only the antithesis of capitalism, and the fulfilment is ahead of us.  The core of the fulfilment is what we call democracy, which I see, at least at present, as a tension between politico-economic and cultural rhythms.  (CW 6, 553)

Endtimes

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M.C. Karl Rove “rapping” in 2007

I’ve known about this video since it emerged from the 2007 White House Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner.  But I never had the stomach to watch it.

However, David Browich’s review of Rove’s “memoir,” Courage and Consequence: My Life Yadda Yadda Yadda in the New York Review of Books, seems to signal that the time has come.  The full Rasputinian horror of the period needs to be witnessed and its implications contemplated.  For example, is that the coddled and perpetually-grinning-dipstick David Gregory of NBC News also performing as part of (vomiting  in my mouth a little) Karl Rove’s “posse”?  Maybe we all should just start referring to the inside-the-beltway press corps and the demagogues enabled by them as Romanovs:  Karl Romanov, Cokie Romanov, George F. Romanov, Glenn Romanov, Rush Romanov, Sean Romanov, Candy Romanov, Wolf Romanov, Bill O’Romanov, and so on.  It certainly befits the historical cycle they’re currently riding into the ground with their incomes, investments and retirement savings intact.  They’re done.  They’re of no use except to make a bad situation even worse in a more obviously diminishing  return.

Frye in “The View From Here”:

The intellectual seems to be aware only of the higher level of culture, just as the demagogue is aware only of the lower one.  Real political guidance, of course, is constantly aware of both.  (Writings on Education, 562)