economic anxiety

After two years, we are finally discussing the Wall as a religious sculpture. 

Though some continue to claim it's a real wall, these gestures are like burlesque moves at a drag show.

The Wall is, has always been, a monument. 

So why does an obviously symbolic wall mean so much to so many people? 

Wholesome.

From the moment we're born, literally severed from our mother's flesh, we are constantly feeling the edges of where we end and the world begins.

As adolescents, we push against our parents to define ourselves. As adults, we pull others close – those who we say "complete us". 

The reality is that where we end, and where the world begins, is not a line but a knot of connections, like the expansive roots of a hundred year-old tree. 

What is inside of us vs. what is outside of us; what is self vs. and what is other.



In reality, these distinctions are impossible to draw. 

Much of our body is inside out. Our skin is, in fact, our largest organ. There are organisms constantly passing through us and biomes in our guts. More than half your body is not human. 

Who or what you are today, literally, is not who you were yesterday and it's not who you will be tomorrow.* 

Luckily, society gives us a sense of self that is stable and, usually, affirmative. Until it doesn't.

Until society erases our name, and calls us by one that reduces us to what it wants. 

When the "I" is threatened, we may cling to whatever presents itself as solid, unchanging. The Rock of Ages. The Arc of the Moral Universe. A loving God. 

To believe is to endure, to believe is to hold fast.

A wall as a religious sculpture makes a powerful promise: believe in me and we will separate the inside from the outside.



Worship me and you will remain whole. Sacrifice for me and your intengrity will be restored.  

Is it any surprise that hundreds of thousands are willing to pay for the Wall out of pocket? 

Such totems are a protection against contagion. A backstop against change. †

Are they suckers? They're certainly not alone.

"whole" foods

The leisure class are just as instrumental to our economy. As in, an instrument of. 

Like the working poor, the working rich must play their role in a production that yields only capital, often at the expense of community.

If you are what you can buy, then what are you but an insatiable need?

How do you plug a hole in the center of your self that no amount of money can fill?
 

"Only pure substances will enter my and/or my child's body" is the "Walls work" for people who have access to the most expensive information in the world, but still need a belief system to makes sense of their inexplicable emptiness. 


Purity is a powerful myth. It can be used to animate the machinery of racism ("pure" blood) but it can also drive rituals of consumption and sacrifice (pure goods). 

What makes purity so seductive is that it instantiates a mythical Eden, a time and place wherein everything was in balance; be it with nature or with machines or with "the others".

​Organic. 

Ancient grains 👈🏼. 

Everything in its right place. Borders.

Authentic.

On the last day of the year, I was looking for parsley in Highland Park, to make rabo encendido or oxtail stew.

I'd read online that this poor person's soup (the tail!) has now become popular with the leisure class (cf. bone soup) and their demand has driven up prices. I'd better make it soon before I can't, or so went my self-serving logic.

Highland Park, as you may know, is itself a poor person's neighborhood where demand from the leisure class has driven up prices‡ such that the previous community is being displaced.  Creative destruction in action.

Within a few minutes, I criss-crossed a holy intersection of potent spells: Kinship, Kinfolk, Cookbook, Civil.§

I didn't find any parsley (amaranth, anyone?), but I picked up this bag of Coava coffee.


Inside the bag was a color trading card of the Central American farmer who grew the beans I was to consume. 

What all of these brands have in common is that they promise to be authentic. (Not so the new Framebroiler, down the block, which promises only to be cheap, convenient and consistent.)

Much like the Wall, they offer to transport the consumer to a better time and place. Authentic and real.

These businesses promise to make you whole. To enrich your spirit. (We should pause on that.)

That these are often luxury products only adds to their spiritual value. Their high prices feed the hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel; that if you amass a sufficient fortune, you can escape to a world that is still in harmony.

Like the Wall, they are a religious response to the same economic anxiety.

At best, they offer a salve for the symptoms. At worst, they spread and deepen the anxiety.

Ultimately, they fail to cure what ails us because they are religious answer to a political problem.

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's – like a 70% marginal tax. 

In America, rich and thus powerful elites have used their influence to actively disinform and disenfranchise voters. They have installed polluters to protect the environment and con men to regulate the markets. They've stacked the courts with loyal sophists. 

These are people who believe in nothing at all, and now is their time. Again.

That's why I sympathize with the people who contributed to the Wall, evil as it is. Just as I sympathize with the people who would pay $500 for an axe sold by a graphic designer. We are all groping for the real.


The ground underneath us all is being liquified, into capital.

We survive insofar as we can maximize returns to shareholders.

The fear of being erased; the fear of being displaced; the fear of losing control (autonomy, sovereignty) to unseen powers; the fear of being contaminated: these are all logical and necessary reactions to a political reality in which the wolves are guarding the henhouse.

The wealthy have recaptured the state, but unlike previous gilded ages, the institutions that once provided people with a sense of self – our clans, our confessions – are less persuasive.

In their place will come new organizations – or renewed versions of the old. I'm certain of it. 

Because we'll need more than religious sculptures to withstand the floods, and the rains, and the fires. To say nothing of the tens of millions, who will be displaced by the consequences of today's orgy of greed. 

I don't have a line to those who believe in the Wall. But as someone who has squandered a small fortune in art, I'd like to make a pitch to those who would buy a $635 knife.

I agree that it feels good to have and to hold something simple and pure, authentic and real.
 
My suggestion is that those $635 would cut much deeper, and cleaner, in the hands of Elizabeth Warren and/or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

Postscript

I found the parsley, and much more, at Food 4 Less. As of October 2017, their parent company Kroger entered into a three year contract with UFCW.

Footnotes

More people should know the history of this Wall, which is now being cited by actual beauracrats as a real and serious thing when it was always mythical. (Alchemy at work!)

Joshua Green: "the idea for the wall was devised by frustrated Trump aides, primarily Sam Nunberg, annoyed that their candidate wouldn’t stay focused on the issue of immigration:
 

* Even the atom betrays us: "One of the mysteries of science is how something as apparently solid and straightforward as your body can be made of strangely behaving quantum particles such as atoms and their constituents…  What's more, as quantum particles, electrons exist as a collection of probabilities rather than at specific locations, so a better picture is to show the electrons as a set of fuzzy shells around the nucleus." 

See also: Your Body Acquires Trillions of New Mutations Every Day

† Racism has provided many Americans a similar salve for their psychic wounds. "I might be poor and thus powerless, but at least I'm not a ------."  The belief that women are worth less than men still provides some such relief. But as good people chip away at racism and misogeny, those who would use bigotry as armor are once again exposed to the machinery that daily grinds them into inputs and outputs. They'll try to hide behind the Wall.

‡ I don't blame hipsters for displacing first- and second-generation immigrant families. I welcome all "foreigners". Instead, I blame the real estate sector for having successsfully captured the state. As I've written here before, housing should not be an investment vehicle. But the resulting, unfolding tragedy has a silver lining. The phrase "income inequality" is so technical and opaque it makes eyes gloss over. Here's a better phrase: "I was priced out of my home." Priced out. of a home. How is that possible in a civilized society?

§ Some of you already know my stories about "Civil", and this letter is my longest yet, so I'll just summarize my affair with this Latino-owned business thusly: to call yourself civil, meaning "pertaining to public life, relating to the civic order, befitting a citizen" is to raise the bar really fucking high. Spoiler: too high. "Creative Class" would have been a better name, all around. But the convention has always been to hijack a term of community – e.g., kinship, kinfolk, fidelity, prudential – for private use.


If you've read this far, my God, thank you! Here's a small reward from a masterwork:

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."