craziness

Just another name for nothing left to lose.

I saw this article a couple of days ago, about the millions of people living on nothing but food stamps. Nothing. but. food stamps. No other cash income.

And in the middle of the article, the reporter finds a Republican to denounce the situation, but (of course) he says this:

“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.

They literally say that about everything. But... tax cuts would help people with no other cash income. What... eventually? How about groceries this week?

A Lethal Combination

"Medical ventriliquism" indeed. The onset of a condition associated with loss of sexual interest, among other things; a new generation of people allergic to their own mortality; and a pharmaceutical industry that works nights and weekends devising new ways to separate you from your money.

Along the way, television commercials positioned hormone drugs as treatments for more than hot flashes and night sweats — just two of the better-known symptoms of menopause, which is technically defined as commencing one year after a woman’s last menstrual cycle.

One commercial about estrogen loss by the drug maker Wyeth featured a character named Dr. Heartman in a white coat discussing research into connections between menopause and heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and blindness.

...

The suits also assert, based on recently unsealed court documents, that Wyeth oversold the benefits of menopausal hormones and failed to properly warn of the risks.

When I started this last month, I thought it might be somewhat difficult - meaning it would test my own ability to exploit the subject consistently and over time... exactly the very reasons to pursue it. But it's turning out that you don't even have to scroll down the page of the most-read news site - one that treats its readers in a generally childish fashion - to find glaring examples of gross obscenity. Which is itself...

damn.

Masterpiece

Of finance, or art... or whatever it was.

In a gear-changing sign that the art market is shaking off the recession, Sotheby's auctioned off $134.4 million worth of post-war and contemporary art earlier tonight at its Manhattan salesroom, including a smoky sheet of dollar bills by Andy Warhol that sold for $43.7 million. The sale total surpassed the auction house's own goal of $67.9 million to $97.7 million - and outperformed its $125 million sale of contemporary art last November.

After a year of cautious bidding, the mood in the salesroom Wednesday night grew increasingly upbeat, with fashion designer Valentino Garavani and jeweler Laurence Graff among the winning bidders. The night unquestionably belonged to Warhol. The Pop artist is a household name, but his early 1960s silkscreens rarely surface at auction. That's why at least five bidders, including dealer Jose Mugrabi, chased after the artist's "200 One Dollar Bills," a seminal 1962 piece that Sotheby's last sold more than two decades ago for $300,000. A telephone bidder got it tonight for $43.7 million - over three times its $12 million high estimate - or $218,812.50 for each silkscreened dollar bill in the painting

.

Just stop and start anywhere.

McFate

It can be difficult, or at least problematic, to characterize obscenity in this day and time; we're so jaded, careless and personally over-exposed in ways that even the most extroverted would have found obscene just decades earlier that it can be difficult to establish benchmarks in any way other than arbitrarily.

So we might harken back to other eras for contrast. Now, often we do this to verify and showcase the fruits of our own openness, to show how prudish our forebears were in service to illuminating our own sense of civilization - unmindful of the connections we re-establish to our present and prudish pageantry.

Nonetheless, the shocking travesties of the past do carry a certain quaintness in our minds when harvested this much later, set in a frames of 1s and 0s and ogled, as it were. They comfort us, in a way, and reassure with objective relief about how things have changed for the better. And have they.

Take, for instance, Nabokov's Lolita. Dealing as it does with one of three taboos of mid-century book publishing, the then-unknown Nabokov, in order to safeguard his tenured status at Cornell, tried to publish the book anonymously. After being rejected by Simon & Schuster, Viking, New Directions and many others because of its pornographic content, Lolita was finally published under his own name in 1955 by Olympia Press in Paris.

The initial run of 5,000 sold out and brought him recognition in Europe. Heated debates by critics in England - both on the book and about the relative safety of young girls - captured the interest of U.S. publishers, leading to the first American edition by Putnam and Sons in 1958. With the repetitive use of words like obscene, incest, scandal and pornography in subsequent book reviews, Lolita's commercial success was assured, and further, a lesson had been learned. But what lesson? One, obviously, that societal mores can be overwhelmed by financial performance. It is silly to even ask whether the successful book, rather than the supposedly pornographic manuscript, has more value.

If a societal taboo can be overwhelmed by financial success, when it is not one but the other which has by far the more deleterious implication, can we determine which is which? The question is, which is more obscene - a cunning literary treatment of an adult man's fascination with a pre-pubescent girl, or abandoning a supposedly absolute moral line because it is a proven money-maker?

Now don't you feel better?

Shocking

It's shocking, the extent to which anyone finds any of this interesting. But still, to keep working, to remain still for long enough to follow a few thoughts and then find the words to describe them and maybe the music to make them sing. That could be good enough. Shocking, even, in this day in time. But should that be considered obscene?

In fact, by the most casual definition, mere attention greatly fails to register. We expect it to be paid somehow, as though it was the last and ultimate currency and even though we've no plans to exploit it for anything other than itself - not exactly much of a trade. What we could 'get' in exchange for a real shock - discomfort, momentary awkwardness, shaking ground - the things that move needles, we relegate to levels of unimportance and lack of impress in order not concern ourselves with problematic thoughts and actions. If the implications of a thing are no great matter, the thing itself is less of a bother - and we move on to identify other more consensus-oriented offenses everyone can agree on. That, for lack of a better word, unite us. So instead of being divided over matters of conscience, we unite for the sake comity. What's obscene, again?

The sensibility to be crossed is the prejudice to be excavated, lifted out the ground and set right, if not upright, in standing and safe for mixed company. We mire in the dirt and soil with soul in peril - would that it be saved or at least spared the indignity of its own depraved nature. Would that the useless Gommorahs find purpose in staining the very ground on which they are situated, harken back to a time when reproach was in supply and offense, a tactical ground to be sieged and thoroughly pilfered in good time. Was there more or less shock in supply? Is it a quantity that ebbs and flows? How do we recognize gross offenses in a randomized outcome culture based on 1s and 0s?

But the pilfered imagination grows defenseless in all this scrawl - and seeks for old ground to claim as new: bad words, uncovered genetalia, blasphemia - benign outlets for canned offense are at the ready, as is the missionary to zeal to prosecute and subdue it.

All the while, rage evolves, too.

So which of these is obscene?