The Problem With American Women: The Commodification of Sexuality in American Culture
Of course I realize that this title was going to attract your attention.
But if you’re expecting a misogynistic rant about my failures to attract American women for sex, love and money while listing an arbitrary itinerary of American female failings (heads not flat enough on top to rest a beer on; always changing their minds from what I want to what THEY want; too busy working, taking care of children, cleaning the house, running errands and cooking to dress up in lingerie and give me a poll dance [double entendre intended]), then you will be sadly disappointed.
What James Thurber endearingly referred to the war between the sexes is a significantly different battlefield than in his age of single income affluence when women couldn’t own property without the consent of their husband or father or older brother.
Economically, socially, politically, psychologically and most importantly, sexually
My age grants me the memory of what there was before what there is now.
My adolescence coincided with the 70s, the decade in which the formant of social and technological changes of the 50s and 60s came to fruition into permanence in the 70s.
Readily available contraception, nascent computational technologies and the emancipation of the African American all spread ripples that were waves of change, like an asteroid had struck and plunged into the center of the collective, American cultural pool. African Americans and their other than colored allies, strode the lunch counters,school buses and schools that had been violently forbidden them.
The British adoption of the African American sound and its subsequent export back to America via the Beatles, the Stones and other blues based white boy bands infiltarted the American psyche.
Elvis Presley no longer played n*g**r music that stirred the white youth into sexual frenzy, but now was seen as performing classic Americana, to the extent that Richard Nixon invited him to the Whitehouse and made Elvis a federal cop.
Through the 70s I saw women becoming bus drivers, cops, doctors, lawyers, business women. I saw black faces on my colored TV. And the emancipation kept rippling. Homosexuality became Gay.
Mexicans became strikers, fighting for a decent wage.
Asians became Kung Fu fighters, although their star had to be David Carradine not Bruce Lee. Movies became the subversion of the times. Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Woody Allen, et al chronicled the narrative of change and their audiences applauded in self-recognition.
But in many ways the change in over half the human population (51%) was most significant of all. As women regained their economic power through wider employment and enterprise opportunity coupled with their control over their reproductive rights, the right not to get pregnant from having sex, our society as a whole began to shift it’s world view.
The feminine became mainstream. Women were taken more and more seriously by men, not just as objects of desire and potential child bearing mates, but as agents of agency and volition all their own.
The masculine was being checked.
This however was no bed of emancipation roses.
With women gaining more social power, many men felt that the power of their patriarchy was under threat. Many men embraced the reality of neater, gentler, more considerate and nurturing values infecting the mainstream of alpha male dominance. But many more did not. As women gained prominence as agents of their own agency, many men began to begrudge the loss of their sex toys.
If women were less and less beholden to men for their economic and social status, then why should they continue sleeping with them or bearing their children?
So with the positive social changes came the desire to maintain control over what was being lost. What was being lost was the masculine dominance and control over the feminine. In response, men began to alienate themselves from the very people that they loved and wanted to be close to. The perceived loss of power trumped (pun intended), the loss of intimacy.
This was manifested by the explosion of the porn industry in the mid to late 1970s.
If women no longer submitted their sexuality, their reproductive volitions to men, then men needed to extract what it was that they thought they desired in women: their image, their sexuality, their allure.
Americans are the most effective industrializers of human commodities since Nazi Germany created their factories of death.
Capitalism has always been about two things: the assignation of value to market demand and second, the exploitation of labour for the sake of “surplus value” i.e. money, Capital.
Capitalism means money, the value of which supersedes all other human values as the ultimate measure of humanity.
.
In true American Consumer Capitalist fashion, America created the porn industry on an industrial scale, hiring women in the thousands to perform to male ideals, to submit to masculine desires.
Men, having lost the intimacy of their gender dynamic could now afford to “buy” the fulfillment of their assumed entitlement, their deserved desires. Even before the internet, (which ultimately bankrupted the porn industry by making imagery, the sound and motion of performative sex free), porn pervaded every corner of male culture.
If you are a woman or don’t know this already, you need to understand that every man you have every met or will meet, including your partner, your father, your uncle and your sons have masturbated to pornography until climax.
This is a fact, not merely my opinion.
There are no men who don’t use porn as a tool of literal self relief.
The problem of course congeals because porn is not sex; or rather it is feigned sex, performative sex. The actors who are hired to expose themselves, to engage in the myriad of soft to hard core scenarios that are delivered as commodities, don’t necessarily enjoy what they are doing. They’re doing it for the money, not the pleasure.
Of course, as in any acting, some performers are more fully immersed in their roles than others but the fact remains that without money, there would be no porn.
Pornography is the ultimate commodification of human beings.
I write this not as a Puritan (who have their own sexual problems). I write this as a partaker (seldom and less and less), but nonetheless a user of pornography.
I have watched pornography with women who claim, at least to me, that they enjoy it. But mainly they say that they enjoy my enjoyment of it. The more turned on I am the more turned on she is: and that’s the crux of the dilema.
Pornography is NOT sexuality, it’s not sex; it’s fake sex.
When fake sex begins to replace real sex we begin to lose our discernment of humanity on an emotional, visceral level.
There is no way I can make love, have sex with a woman without completely surrendering to my empathy for who she is as a human being. I want to use her for my own gratification, yes; but I equally want her to use me for her gratification. I desire her to desire me. The more she desires me,, the more desire I feel for her.
In pornography, fake sex, all the desire is one way.
There’s the object, commodified, paid for and thus acquired and then there’s the recipient of the product’s desire, who has paid for its delivery.
There’s no collaboration, there’s no carnal dialogue, no exchange and no empathy.
There’s no sex, really.
It’s Important at this Juncture to Address the Metaphysics of Sex and Sexuality.
The sexual act, when engaged in, is one of the most powerful psychological/emotional and physical behaviors that human being experience. Speaking phenomenologically, as a participant (rather than an observer), the human body undergoes dramatic physiological and chemical variance when sexually aroused and when engaging (again, NOT observing; ENGAGING) in sex. 
Biochemically, the body’s hormones trigger a radical change to the body chemistry and psychological experience and behavior of the participants. When we are aroused it feels as if another force is acting through us. We lose our inhibitions and surrender to our senses. We are consumed by our desires for another’s body.
We become more in and connected to the moment of our gratification.
We become simultaneously emotionally charged and emotionally vulnerable. When we are with someone we trust, someone we have affection for, our emotions are hightened and stimulated into a state of adoration.
It is no coincidence that we culturally refer (across all cultures, by the way), to the sexual act as ‘Making Love’. Because it is precisely Love that we are experiencing during this hightened state of transcendental arousal.
Moreover, our senses become dilated, our focus dissipates into a primarily sensory experience. Our sense of time alters, even space appears to contract to the realm within reach of our senses.
As we reach orgasm we lose our normal sense of self and can experience the melding of one into two and then into one. Most of all, we experience pleasure and ultimately ecstasy.
On an experiential level, good sex is psychedelic, reminding the body and mind of our natural lack of separation from the place and time we are in and who we are with. The spiritual value of good sex is better explored by the Hindus and the concepts of Tantric sex which really amounts to treating sex as a meditative activity, an active Yoga of mind, Spirit and mind. 
Good sex is curative.
It relieves us of our daily suffering we have grown numb to. It relieves anxiety and fear, it grounds us in our own bodies and minds. But most of all, it connects us to another (or others) through a transcendence of our senses into a higher state of awareness.
Sex is the LSD anyone can take any time and still go to work the next day (or same afternoon).
Sex is so good for us, for everyone that of course, like LSD they had to make it illegal!
Or if not strictly illegal, controlled by the church, by the state and by the inhibitions of guilt and shame that were taught to us. Taught? Brainwashed, more exactly!
All of us have been abused into associating sex with shame.
Because nature wants us to fuck, urgently, imperatively; and nature must by every and any means, be controlled.
Good Sex is the key to the survival of our species. The primeval drive to procreate is so powerful that it even supersedes the mind’s normal self awareness of causality and consequence. We don’t give a fuck, we just want to fuck and that is where the social context steps in.
Such a strong, spiritual nay metaphysical, force that affects every aspect of the human’s being really can’t be controlled. One’s sex drive can be regulated, restrained even, but ultimately the force prevails or the subject becomes ill.
Sexuality has always threatened organized society precisely because everyone knows it can’t really be controlled.
The Bonono chimpanzees of Africa, our closest biological relatives on the planet spend most of their day fucking, when they’re not eating. Bononos fuck everyone, males fuck males, females fucks females, fathers fuck their daughter, sons fuck their mothers. A tribe of Bononos are a virtual ongoing orgy. Even when they’re not fucking, Bononos will engage is mass masturbation behavior especially when feeling anxious or fearful of predators.
This is what nature provides and what nature wants.
Now humans, on the other hand, have developed complex social labyrinths determining status and pedigree based mainly on language and power.
So the less Bonono and more human people became, the greater the need to control sexual behavior. Taboos evolved. Some pragmatic, such as the incest taboo; but others less so, like the pervading Victorian era myth that good women didn’t want to have sex.
With the advent of the so-called Sexual Revolution facilitated by the mass availability of the pill, as well as the misunderstanding of the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s study of the sexual habits of Polynesian people, sex once again began to assume its default position within human behavior. So ofcourse, the powers-that-be needed to exercise firmer control over what cannot ultimately be controlled.
The tragedy of the Human Comedy is that we always try to control what cannot be and should not be controlled.
Capitalism in its neurotic quest to commodify everything, conquered sex by commodifying it. By deconstructing the blessed act into it’s sensory components that could be sold piecemeal. Like a corporate takeover that strip mines a successful company for its assets. American Capitalism pornographies sexuality, made it an observer’s obsession rather than a participants spiritual celebration.
By disarming the subjective participant into an observer, our modern society is able to regulate our sexuality, determin fresh taboos and grant licence to what was previously prohibited as long as it can be sold for profit.
Thus homosexuality was allowed to be Gay.
Because Capitalism is an international conspiracy to dehumanize our species, the commodification of our sexuality is not contrained to American shores. It’s just much worse and more intense here.
American women especially, have been subjected to the most abusive dimension of this dehumanization. I speak from the personal experience of having lived in half a dozen mainly European cultures, having married an English woman and courted many a non American woman. (Well not MANY, but enough to draw an accurate comparison).
The American woman, having more recently reached a level of economic, ediucative and social emancipation (but still not paid the same amount for the same job as her male counterpart), determined to seize the reins of her own sexuality. And compared to the early 20th century, have seemingly succeeded in doing so.
Reproductive rights and women’s sexual health are currently political issues for the presidential election.
The great Sigmund Freud made his reputation and foundation of Psychoanalysis based on treating bourgeois (upper middle class) women for the affliction of “Hysteria”.
Hysteria was a common diagnosis in the early part of the 20th century and medical doctors all through Europe received the wives of welathy industrialists to cure them of this mass affliction. Brutal practices such as ECT and even lobotomies were applied to “cure” these poor, afflicted women.
The symptoms of Hysteria were depression, listlessness and non submissive behaviors. If a woman argued, then she might be suffering from Hysteria and rushed to an institution to be cured.
But one of the foremost symptoms of Hysteria as reported by the husbands of these unfortunate women of the time was seeking sexual attentions from their partners.
Yes!
Wanting to have sex with her husband, to surrender to that primal state of natural human being, was considered at one time a sure tell sign of hysteria and thus remedied by electric shock, ice water plunges and even lobotomy!
As I write this I shudder at the mere thought of the extremes of human cruelty and callous indifference.
Fortunately, Freud’s approach was to actually listen to his women patients and when he wasn’t prescribing them cocaine, he wrote down their words, their confessions into his famous case histories that eventually were the foundation of his “talking cure” and theories of child sexuality.
His daughter Anna Freud furthered her father’s paradigm-shifting approach and founded the field of Child Psychology, studying and reporting the effects of sexuality on our natures and happiness as adult individuals.
Freud famously posed the question “What do women want?” and ultimately through years of interviews and research, answered his own question.
What we all want, Good Sex!
So what’s the problem with American women?
They have been co-opted into the business of sex to the extent that they have begun to commodify their own sexuality and sell it to men. Not as prostitutes, although there are plenty of both male and female versions of this. No, they have begun to deconstruct their own sexualities as components to be observed, not loved, not actually fucked, but seen to be sexual..
They have harnessed the sexualities of alienated lonely, pathetic men into a market force that they can supply. Only Fans is just the latest example of this. American women have countered the tyranny of the patriarchal gaze by consciously manipulating it for their material gain. Emancipation has become self-slavery.
Sex is now a power struggle as to who dominates who, commercially, transactionally.
Instead of connectivity, of intimacy and shared sensualities, sex for the American woman has become transactional. ‘What do I get out of it?’, is as strong a calling as nature’s pull. Stronger in the form of manifesting neurotic behaviors such as manipulation, salesmanship, intentional confusion and chaotic communications.
Since sex is now a transaction, the only question becomes who gains the most?. Pleasure and fulfillment are secondary considerations. Intimacy, even Love, a fairy tale you grow out of to join the “real world”
Surely this is true of European women as well, I hear someone saying.
Yes, but not so much so in my experience.
English, French, Italian and Spanish women are no more promiscous than their American counterparts. However, in general European women know what they want, know who they want and don’t want it from and are much more comfortable in their sexuality as well as expressing it than American women are.
American women seem at times to be almost afraid of their own sexuality, afraid of losing control, of surrendering to lust. This is by no means healthy!
Whereas Europeans just don’t make that big a deal out of it. They enjoy sex because they know it’s good for them and if it doesn’t work out, c’est la vie; there’s always other experiences with better partners down the line.
In Europe sex is treated more like a fine meal.
Necessary for healthy living and worthy of enjoyment. Bad sex, like a bad meal is to be avoided and hopefully not repeated. But you don’t know until you try it, right? Just taste a little, you might like it.
Good sex, like a good meal is literally a divine experience, a jubilant celebration of the senses (btw, anything accompanied by the right wine is a ticket to paradise).
I have enjoyed meals in Paris bistros, Greek tavernas, Italian Tratorias thate can only be described in transcendetnal terms.
Likewise I have loved, made love to, had love with women of Europe that will adhere to my memory like a childhood. Respectful, tender loving moments that will never escape me.
Unfortunately, outside of the adolescent fumblings of highschool and early college, I have yet to experience the same level of encounter here in my native land. I attribute my failure to connect as an aspect of Capitalist culture. I cannot bridge the transactional nature of American sexuality; to me it all seems like a verision of pornography or even prostitution to me; an impression which has been reinforced most recently when a woman friend of mine suggested I hire a professional sex worker to share intimacy with.
I was genuinely shocked as if it had been a male friend, I could have understood his clumsy solution. This friend knew me and yet her choice of assistance was to suggest I buy the services of a sex. I am MUCH TOO CHEAP, to ever consider this as a practical option. Besides why wouldn’t the woman PAY ME, for my « services »?
My friend was a well intended American woman, a peer who seriously suggested that my path to sexual fulfillment could be purchased and transacted rather than pursued or danced for.
I can only conclude that the sexuality of the American woman has been seriously compromised by a cultural and societal appartus constructed by men but now reinforced by women. This apparatus generates sexual neurosis and ultimately dehumanizes and devalues the most powerful and wonderful experience people can give each other.
So What’s Your Solution, Sherlock?
Well, not cocaine.
Far be it for me to prescribe remedies for societal ills; even my arrogance has limits!
I would fall back on conversation. People need to start talking about sex a lot more, especially to the people we want to have sex with.
A lot more.
The social rituals are still too complex. When I first met my future wife, we had sex the same night we met because we were both attracted to each other and trusted each other enough to act on our desires. My beautiful daughter Olivia is a product of unbridled, unihibited sexuality as she was and continues to be the best thing in my life.
Men, being stupider than women, need to be less coy and less aggressive at the same time. We need to learn to ask for what we want without acting like petulant children when refused. We need to cultivate a taste for the sensual, not just the sex; everything surrounding and leading up to and following the act, not just the act itself. We need to learn how to be better lovers, not technically but emotionally.
Remember you men reading these words, the number one cause of female mortality in the US, more than disease, more than accidents is men. So just keep in mind that women have just cause to be wary of us.
And women: you lovely, lovely, horrific creatures must learn how to celebrate your sexuality, not as a tit for tat transaction, but as something for yourself. Something you enjoy in itself for it’s own sake, not for status and/or material gain. Women must learn to be joyful participants, equal partners in the sensual dance of lust and desire.
Learn how to clearly signal what you want from a man. Remember, men are stupider than you are, so make sure your signals are clear and obvious. SPELL IT OUT that you want to fuck when you want to. Protect yourself, of course, but when you trust a man and trust your own desires, surrender to the power of your libido.
You have nothing to lose but your inhibition and your neurosis.
Learn how to fuck with gusto, with tenderness, with celebration. Embrace the moment you can step out of your daily concerns and like wild Bonono chipanzees be animals for a night (or a day, or an afternoon or the entire weekend).
Celebrate the Body Electric!
And have no expectations. Sex happens in the moment not in the anxiety of the future nor the nostalgia of the past. Keep your emotional baggage to the size where it can fit comfortably in the overhead locker of you flight. Then buckle up and fly baby, fly!
I guarantee that you will be happier, healthier and free from the constraints and manipulations of commodification. You will become your better self by embracing what is most precious about being human.
Have a divine meal of an other, feast on the sensuous pleasures you can unfurl from within your own sacred being and discover within an other.
Don’t feel guilt or shame or poker-player gaming, feel joy, scream out loud, laugh, cry and be free.
For what it’s worth that’s my advice.
I leave you not with my words but that of Patti Smith’s:
“Love is an Angel Disguised as Lust”
thanks for reading and have A Great Flying Fuck!
Running Away With Bob Dylan
When I was 15, I ran away from home.
Actually, I hitchhiked away from home.
I told my mother that I was going camping with my friend Barry Alphonso and got him to vouch for the lie. My mother dropped me off in Pacific Beach near the on ramp for highway 5 and not too removed from where I find myself dwelling now.
Barry met me on the turnpike and gave me a golf club. I think he thought it was for protection and I thought it was to help me walk, as my backpack was loaded with too many clothes.
But now I think it was a flagstaff; a fasces of power to herald my embarking on adventure. I had $20 in my pocket, a rolled up sleeping bag an overloaded backpack and a fasces of a golf club.
I said goodbye to Barry and stuck out my thumb on the turnpike and thrust it into the wind.
I had no idea where I was going, I just wanted to go.
As far from navel gazing San Diego as I could.
My father had moved out of our recently bought house a couple of weeks previous to my embarkment. My mother and he had been fighting for years but recently the arguments had got louder while my sister and I cowered in our shared bedroom, confused and bewildered by our world falling apart.
And then my dad moved out and took an apartment.
My parents played that typical futile, delusional adult trick of hiding it from the children.
My sister and I knew better, our world was ending.
At 15, I was beginning to listen to music that wasn’t classical or show tunes. I started with Simon and Garfunkel, The Sounds of Silence, then Bridge Over Troubled Waters. And then Bob Dylan who changed my world. Highway 61 Revisted left an indelible mark on me. From the Triumph Bonneville that he strides on the cover (my first ever motorcycle), to the road trip I was now setting off on at 15. Dylan had a terrible voice like mine but it didn’t stop him from singing, sneering and spinning imagery that lifted me far above suburbia with it’s over watered golf courses,
apartheid gardners and stupid, stupid sports teams.
Bob Dylan wrote the truth and then recited it while he strummed an acoustic and then electric guitar. His gravel encrusted voice shaped mine. Dylan taught me not to trust authority, that the police were not my friend, that the government was corrupted by its own power, that the world was a mystical carnival of sighs and how to make love to a woman on a roof top at night under a canopy of stars and dreams.
I had no idea where on earth I was going but damn if I wasn’t taking Dylan with me, in my head, in my heart and on the soul of my shoes.
I had a vague idea of San Francisco where my parents had once driven us, my sister and I to. I had loved it. To me, San Francisco was the Emerald City and San Diego was a dust bitten Kansas.
It took me at least a dozen rides and several days to get up to the Bay Area. I passed the time on the side of highway 101 singing songs of the road. The Boxer, Homeward Bound, Mr. Jones, She Belongs to Me and of course the incomparable Like a Rolling Stone. No walkman, no headphones, no wireless stream; just the sound of my lungs flying with the wind.
In Bakersfield, I hopped a train car that was luckily heading to Oakland for the last leg of my pilgrimage. I had slept under bridges, in open fields on cowboy ranches, city shelters and Christian refugees on the way and the train car gave me a respite from seeking shelter.
When I crawled out of the train car, blinking and squinting at the orange sunlight in the Oakland trainyard, I smelled the dawn, it smelt like freedom.
I panhandled enough change to get to Berkeley and spent the night sleeping in People’s Park. The protests, the revolution, the 60’s were well over but there were still vestiges of change in the air, of lingering desires for another way of living than endless repeating episodes of Leave it to Beaver.
My brother was actually enrolled at UC Berkeley when I passed through but it didn’t even occur to me to contact him. He was a half brother from my father’s first wife who had died in a lunatic asylum. My mother had raised my brother until he eventually went to college. Then I was born and we’ve never got along since.
I was on Telegraph Avenue asking for spare change.
A man in a suit handed me a five dollar bill and I was set.
Enough to get to San Francisco, the City of Love, where I would find the Wizard and ask him for a new heart, a new brain, new courage and the way back home. All in one.
The Bart let me out downtown and I hiked up Pike street to get to Haight Ashbury where the revolution was still happening.
Of course it wasn’t.
There will still free concerts in Golden Gate Park and the smell of burning marijuana was woven into the morning fog like a blanket.
The hippies with their brightly coloured scarves and tie dye rags made the streets undulate with color.
I walked up the Haight until I got to the point of this story:
A window above the steps to a walk down basement proclaimed:
THE HAIGHT ASHBURY SWITCHBOARD
I walked down the steps, turned the knob on the door and entered a hallway lined with benches. The benches were packed with travellers, backpacks in freon of them. Men, women, boys and girls, some my age and some younger all waiting to be registered. Once our names were on the list, local residents would stop by and the girl at the desk would shout out something like, ‘4 places in a shared room, a couch, a back garden, floorspace for 2, a couch, 2 for a bunk bed’. and other variations of the same.
This was the Haight Ashbury Switchboard where people who needed a place to stay came to put their name on a list and people who had room in their houses and apartments would show up to give somebody a place to stay.
This is how the Hippies and the Revolution solved the homeless problem. People who needed hospice went to a place where other people came to give hospice.
For no money!
There were also other resources like free food kitchens, drug and suicide counselling, access to libraries but always, 
always a place to sleep safe at night. I spent 2 weeks in San Francisco cared for by strangers, by people of open hearts and minds who had enough to spare a wayward 15 year old runaway, running away from his collapsing word.
That’s how you solve homelessness:
YOU FUCKING GIVE PEOPLE HOMES!
Or at the very least a temporary safe place to crash that’s not on the streets, until they figure out where they’re going.
When people are lost, you give them directions. You help them find their way.
That’s what decent people do.
Nothing has both shocked and struck me dumb since my return from Europe to my native Calfornia than the treatment, nay, mistreatment of the homeless.
This state is the richest state in the richest nation on this earth. California ranks like the 5th or 6th richest economy on the planet. It rivals the wealth of whole nations. And yet, and yet the selfish, self obsessed, glutenous PIGS that reside in this state can’t be bothered to offer the most meagre of resources to alleviate the suffering of others.
People treat the homeless like scum here and it’s the most disgusting socially acceptable attitude I have ever encountered.
Voltaire said that you can judge a society based on how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable. His words not mine, but his judgement is mine and I condemn the lifestyle, the privilege, the hypocricy, the victim-blaming that fuels this Consumer Capitalist nightmare that is California.
It’s not rocket science or brain surgery.
When people don’t have houses, you house them so that they don’t languish on the streets. Sure, you get something from them for the privilege, but you don’t ignore them, you don’t spit on the homeless for not having what you have, however you happen to get what you have that they don’t.
If someone is lost, you give them directions.
If someone is hungry you feed them.
If someone is homeless you give them a home.
It’s a right, not a privilege.
Just like living, loving, working and dying.
What We Learned From the Nazis:
Deconstructing Identity and the Death of Empathy
After recently being turned away from a doctor’s appointment by a receptionist/assistant for being 30 seconds late over the 15 minute cut off period, it occurred to me that the postmodern era is a very different social time frame than any other human period.
I had taken a long laborious journey to get to an appointment with a doctor so that I could deal with a personal health issue. I was feeling better already as a took the elevator up the lofty tower as I was dealing with my problem the best way I could: by seeking the advice and consultation of an expert who knew ore than me.
The Hippocratic oath is a mantra of comfort and compassion. I’ve always trusted doctors and nurses because they’ve chosen to study the human body and learn how to heal it. But my surrender to the support of experts was et and thwarted by a stronger human force: That of bureaucracy
Bureaucracy is “a system of administration that is characterized by a “hierarchy of authority, specialization of functions, and adherence to fixed rules.”
The word bureaucracy comes from the old French word bureau, which means “writing desk”, and the Latin word -cracy, which means “power”. Literally, the power of the desk or rather the power of those who sit at desks.
Here are some other persistent characteristics of bureaucracy:
- Complex systems:
Bureaucracies are complex organizations with multilayered systems and processes. most, if not all of which are kept hidden from the outsider or those who are subject to the powers of the bureaucracy - Division of labor:
Each employee in a bureaucracy has a specialized skill set and responsibilities.That is referred to as their job; as in “I’m just doing my job” - Red tape:
Bureaucracies can be characterized by officialism, red tape, and proliferation. - Slow decision-making:
Bureaucracies are often described as having procedures that slow down decision-making. Because the longer it takes, the more likely the subject will give up. Bureaucracy wins!
oBureaucracies can be found in many different types of organizations, including: Government agencies, Corporations, Societies, Nonprofit organizations, and Clubs.
Bureaucracy nos pervades every aspect of human reality from work place to school place to banks to courts to stores and of course to doctor’s office
So what am I complaining about?
Complex concentrations of people require complex systems to manage the needs of those people. Surely the efficient management of people and resources is fundamental to the benefit of everyone. And why are you using the hyperbolic term ‘Nazi’ all the time? Nazis aren’t responsible for everything!
Oh, Yes they are.
The downside of bureaucracy is that although it is intended to create efficiencies it can only do so by repressing indeed quashing the subjective experience of the individual One cannot effectively coordinate thousands or millions of people if you treat them all as individuals. Instead bureaucracy use categorize people create artificial groupings based on status and position within the bureaucratic process. This ultimately enforces an abstraction an alienation fro the individual. y doctor’s receptionist was not concerned with e as an individual with a subjective experience but as a unit that had surpassed the rule of the “cut off” period by 30 seconds
I was no longer a patient seeking treatment. I was a unit within her process who had transgressed a regulation, a rule she was obligated to adhere to as part of “her job”. It wasn’t her fault she was preventing me from seeing my doctor, she was just “following orders”
(See where the ‘Nazi” part is working itself in?)
For the receptionist to have granted e 1 30 second reprieve to have ade an exception to the rule she would have had to see e as an individual having a subjective experience. She would have had to have empathy with my situation and valued my subjective experience as an individual ABOVE the demands of the bureaucracy that paid her wages.
She would have literally had to put on my shoes and you just can’t do that with hundreds, thousands or millions of people. No one can. So for a bureaucrat to do their job effectively they have to create a wall of alienation between themselves as human beings and the human beings they are processing
They must think numbers, units, quotas, targets, time frames, cut off periods, in order to do their job efficiently and to the satisfaction of her employer. Otherwise the employer will fire here (yet another statistic) and employ someone who can dehumanize others ore efficiently
Ok so we already know all this. What’s “Nazis” got to do with it? Nazis were over 60 years ago how could they teach us anything worth learning?
Within the context of a post industrial society, they taught us everything!
The Nazis were originally a fringe political party that spouted a mixture of pseudo socialist slogans with standardized uniforms and sparse rallies that was aimed at appealing to the impoverished working class who were suffering under the ass intense inflation in Germany at the time. This was largely due to the exorbitant war reparations Germany was forced to pay the allies as a punitive vengeance for losing WWI. Of course the German military government didn’t
pay the reparations the German people did. To the point of mass unemployment and near starvation.
the political environment was intense with gangs of Colunista fascists and anarchists openly fighting on the streets. It was into this environment a WWI lieutenant joined the Nazi Party and forever changed the face of not just Germany and Europe but the entire world. Hitler was ambitious and used any eans to accumulate and Anita in power first by infiltrating the already established Nazi Party and eliminating the old guard and then successfully catapulting this previously fringe party onto the forefront of political and military power
This is much better accounted for in other places
But my point is about what was exceptional not so much of the Nazis but of their style of governance that pervades our daily lives to this day
In the great American philosopher Hannah Arendt was covering the infamous Nurebourg trials of the defeated Nazi authorities, on behalf of the New Yorker magazine. She attended the trial of Adolph Eichmann a Nazi bureaucrat in person.
Eichmann Had been in charge of the the transport of Jews Colunista and homosexuals on trains to the infamous concentration camps. Eichmann‘s self defence was historically significant as is the Cruze of the argument I am presenting in this essay.
Eichmann Basically argued that he had no culpability in the extermination of illions of Jews (and others) because he didn’t know what happened at the end of the train rides. All he was responsible and accountable for was the rounding up and transport of Jews he had nothing to do with their extermination. He only fulfilled one function within a vast complex bureaucracy of death and therefore could not be held accountable for the actual deaths
He was only following orders
It this defence that ultimately failed that inspired Arendt to coin the term “the banality of evil” and her essay by that same title is well worth the read in understanding the role bureaucracy continues to play in the dehumanization and deconstruction of individuals
In general the true horror of the Nazi holocaust was not that they murded millions and millions of of people believe it or not. It was the systemized manner in which this genocide was coined with the full cooperation of the German people any of whom weren’t particularly anti septic. Germans Poles Albanians French all colluded in this ass genocide. Normal people like you and me willfully complied with the ass extermination of their fellow human beings
How an this be?
How can normal people be trained to behave like monsters?
Because ofthe systematic dehumanization of the individual and the deliberate killing of the capacity for empathy. The Nazi war and death industries were just that: the first post industrial genocide. No individual would have to bear the burden of accountability everyone was just part of a process just doing their job
By alienating the murderers from from their own empathy from their own ability to relate to the subjective experience of another human being it became easier. If these aren’t people but numbers quotas targets tie frames then what happens to the actual individuals is of no consequence the bureaucracy must be sustained I must keep my job, my rank, my position in the process at all costs
The Nazi genocide was a genius of post industrial organization a monument to bureaucratic efficiency. Down to the organizing and stacking of concentration viti’s personal effects into carefully organized piles of spectacles shoes hats teeth and the like. No human tribe or grouping had every orchestrated such an indifferent efficiency before in the history of the human race
And this was indeed the turning point of the 20th century and nothing has ever been the same again. Today each os us is subject to a similar dehumanization Our subjective experiences our actual lives have no value within a bureaucratic organization. We are our numbers, our passwords, our qualifications, our credentials not how we think feel of experience the world.
We are no more than our data.
And our value in how we are processed by faster and ore efficient bureaucratic machines.
The Science fiction nightmare of a future human world ruled by robots and machines isn’t tomorrow it’s today; only we weren’t taken over by machines we have surrendered without firing a shot
My answer to this present day dystopian nightmare?
Don’t stop fighting!
Rage Against the Machine!
Don’t put up with being treated as less than human!
Call the bureaucrats out. Try to convert the ones that you can; they’re still human after all. State you case. Share your subjective experience. Appeal to the remaining vestiges of empathy and common humanity that you can find.
Be kind, be caring, talk to people like people even when they respond like robots.
Don’t give up the fight and we may be able to save the world fro the Nazis after all!
Your subjective, individual comments are welcome below fellow human!
I AM THE ALIEN
In Opposing Immigration:
You’re asking a lot of different questions and operating off of some poor information. Let me rather than argue with you, try to create a little context for the general issue of immigration.
Firstly, you know from studying US history that unlike any other country in the world, the US is purely an immigrant nation. No one but the original indigenous people who crossed the Baring Strait some 20,000 years ago is anything but an immigrant to this country.
We are all the same in that respect.
Secondly, this country was built by immigrants. Its wealth was generated by wave after wave of immigration from all over the world. The Irish, fleeing the potato famine (and the English), the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian Jews fleeing the pogroms, first the Czar’s then Stalin’s, the Italians fleeing poverty, the Vietnamese fleeing the collapse of the South, Koreans, Chinese….etc. etc.
Everyone who has ever come here has come here to escape somewhere else.
Do you get that? That’s our shared history.
Now more recently we have Central American, Venezuelan, Haitian, Ukrainian an even a fresh wave of Chinese migrants and refugees also escaping their circumstances to survive.
I hate this stupid jingoistic myth that because “we’re the greatest country on earth” that refugees choose to come here like we would choose a vacation destination.
It’s not just a myth, it’s a dangerous xenophobic lie. Just like you and me, the vast majority of people on this planet would rather live where their parents grew up. Where they grew up with the language and the culture. Migrating half way across the world or even a thousand miles to a strange and foreign land where you are received with suspicion and derision is not an easy thing to do.
So why do they come here?
Why did our familial predecessors come here?
Because more often than not, they had no other choice than to survive.
Yes, this is a generous nation, the wealthiest nation on the planet. We can afford our generosity. But it’s not selfless. Americans know that our lifeblood is dependent on the steady influx of immigrants. It has from at least the 1860’s.
Look up the facts and statistics: immigrants generate wealth. They take the jobs no one else will do. They congregate in communities and care for and build those communities.
Where do you think Little Italy comes from, or Old Town, or China Town or Japan Town (in LA and SF) or the Polish neighborhoods of Chicago, the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan (where you can still get Kosher pickles out of a street barrel)?
These neighborhood weren’t engineered by Disney or Lucas Films.
They were built by immigrants attracting extended families and more immigrants to safe neighborhoods, small businesses and jobs. There would be no Broadway or Hollywood in not for the Jewish rag merchants of turn of the century NYC who invested in Jewish Theaters, that became Vaudeville, that became Musicals on Broadway, that became silent films. Then hopped to West Coast to build cheap studios in an undeveloped part of LA?
But enough history, look at the present. Federal crime statistics confirm that immigrants commit fewer crimes that US citizens, are more likely to pay their fair share of taxes than citizens and improve the safety and prosperity of the cheap rent neighborhoods they congregate in.
All this Bullshit about emptying prisons, rapists, drug traffickers and child traffickers is just that: BULLSHIT. Contrived by Donald Trump and his band of MAGA-Morons to instill paranoia, division and xenophobia for the sole purpose of gaining political power.
It worked for Hitler, for Mussolini, Stalin and it has worked short term for Trump. Get everyone to blame the immigrants for their domestic problems.
“They’re taking our jobs”! Clogging our schools, ruining our hospitals and polluting our neighborhoods with their funny foreign food smells, accents and UN American dress sense.
Don’t get sucked into the xenophobia; you’re being manipulated for a specific outcome: To increase the power of a dwindling elite who arrogantly claim righteous dominance just because their grandparents arrived here a hundred years ago instead of last month.
Again, the lifeblood of America IS immigration.
From a global perspective, people have always migrated when food got short, they felt threatened by violence or just to explore a further horizon.
It’s in our genetic nature to migrate.
It’s how we’ve survived.
Otherwise, we’d all still be dodging lions on the southern African plains.
Nation states have always imposed changing borders to regulate the flow of people moving around and to assure that such people could be relied on to pay the state for the privilege of residing there.
National borders are imposed and maintained by violence, usually after armed conflict with a rival nation state. Take the US southern border which dates back to the end of The Mexican American War in the 1860s. Do you realize where the border was before then? Since the 17th century, some 4-500 hundred years! Before then the border was the Mississippi River. The US to the east and first Spain then Mexico to the west. There were also vast swathes of tribal territories that were defined by people not fences. For over 400 years.
The native language of the western US is Spanish, it’s been spoken and continues to be spoken by the majority of our inhabitants. You can’t build a border that contains culture. Language, culture and indeed humanity itself always overwhelms and supersedes walls and borders. Remember the Berlin Wall? Sees like an archaic artifact of a distant history by now
Of all nationalities, Mexican nationals are still the biggest immigrant group that crosses the 140 year old southern border. However; their ancestors lived across the border and regularly crossed the new border for years prior to the US even existing. Additionally most Mexicans are mixed blood with tribal peoples who were here in this land long before white European brought their horses, guns and fence wire to this territory.
Do you see the bigger picture?
Mexican immigration is actually going down because of improvements in the Mexican economy and the crack down on the cartels.
However impoverished families are still fleeing crime violence in Central America and coming to our border because they have no choice but to survive.
Currently. Joe Biden has imposed a 2,500 person a day cap on border crossings regardless the reason. That was largely in response to Donald Trump torpedoing the bi partisan immigration reform bill tat would have add 1,600 ICE personnel and sped up immigrant processing to a matter of weeks rather than a year.
Trump needed the border to continue being a problem that the right could promote purely to make Biden look bad.
Lastly, we need to distinguish between immigrants, both documented and undocumented and refugees.
There is no such thing as an “illegal” human being.
That a deliberately dehumanizing term to generate the sense of otherness and threat supposedly posed by foreigners you haven’t even met.
The correct descriptive term, as used by ICE and all immigration authorities is ‘’undocumented visitor’ or alien.
A documented alien may be on their way to citizenship. When my grandfather first came to this country escaping the Cossacks and the pogroms, he jumped ship at Hudson Bay, swam to the New Jersey shore and got work in the shipyards building boats for WWI.
He had no documents or papers and he didn’t speak a word of English. But like ALL immigrants then and now, he was willing to work to earn his living. Eventually he learned English, got his work papers and eventual citizenship, then went back to Poland/Russia married my grandmother and brought her, her family and his family out of Russia, across Europe, to the UK In Liverpool they boarded a ship for New York’s Ellis Island. Many of my grandfather’s family did not have papers either and spent more thana week being processed on Ellis Island. Some want to Canada without papers and settled there.
So not all aliens have documents, Not all aliens are legally here on paper but that does not make them less than human, does it?
What difference does it are these precious pieces of paper?
How does it make me more human, less alien to be carrying a stamped passport than not? Have we really got to the sad point where we’ve allowed government documentation to determine the degree of our humanity our worth?
”Ve must see your papers!” He said in a cartoon Nazi’s voice
”Vif-out papers you are worth nothing!”
At the end of WWII, the League of Nations established the Refugee Council later to became and still is, the UN Refugee Council. It was established to avoid the anything approaching the Jewish Diaspora to ever happen again. Nearly as any Jews fleeing Europe on refugee ships drowned at sea as perished int he concentrations camps. The British navy even deliberately capsized such desperate boats to prevent Jews from entering Palestine. Yet another triumph of borders over people
The UN Refugee Council is comprised of delegates from every UN member, but most importantly every nation in the UN contributes to the International Refugee Fund. This money is allocated by the council to every nation who accepts asylum seekers seeking refugee in their nation state.
THE US TAX PAYER DOES NOT PAY TO HOUSE OR FEED OR SCHOOL ASYLUM SEEKERS
The UN does. Everyone contributes equally as allocated by the number of refugees each nation agrees to admit. Who admits the highest number of refugees per capita?
Iran. Followed by Lebanon and then Ireland.
The US is about number 7. The admission of asylum seekers and refugees is by international treaty as detailed in the Geneva Conventions. Look it up
As a signatory to that treaty and member of the UN Refugee Council we are obligated by law to permit ANYONE seeking political asylum to be admitted into or nation.
That is THE LAW.
It can take up to a year to process an asylum application and during that time, the costs and expenses of their hospice including health care translation services legal representation are all covered by the UN in the form of yearly reimbursements. That said, some 80% of all asylum applications are rejected and the applicant is returned to their country of origin.
That’s over 900,000 “border crossers” who have been returned to their native country to date this year.
This doesn’t get publicized, the number isn’t subtracted from the numbers crossing the border and the right wing xenophobic don’t want you to know anything about this
Are their “illegal border crossers” intent on malfeasance, breaking every law they can, murdering, raping, dealing drugs.
OF COURSE there are but not to the extent touted by right wing racists and a whole lot fewer compared to the percentage of rapists, murderers and drug dealers amongst the documented GENERAL US POPULATION.
Don’t fall for the BULLSHIT and the hatred.
An anecdote is not a trend or the rule.
Look at the facts, look at history and ask yourself deep down:
What does it really mean to call myself an American?
Who am I and how did I get here?
I am the Alien Igor Goldkind.
igorgoldkind
Dropping Out to Drop In
A Facebook Dialogue with Rebecca Behar
My art is also poetry and short “fiction”. And I am head on confronting this very issue every day of my working life. I turned my back on academia where you can get paid to regurgitate curriculum while you do your real work.
Why?
Because ultimately academia is a crutch that consumes your mind and soul after a while if you’re trying to be an artist. I call academia the artist’s meth. It feels great while you’re smoking it; status, paycheck, the admiration of the young….but ultimately your artist’s teeth fall out, you get uglier from compromise, and the admiration of youth makes you psychotic when you start actually believing it.
So I decided 6 years ago to starve to death.
No, let me tell you the truth.
I determined that the undervaluing of poetry by the mainstream (commercial) was a social malaise, a symptom of a wider social problem compounded by the monetization of popular culture.
I looked at who was actually reading and writing poetry first by hitting the poetry readings circuit. There I found the old clutching at reminiscences and the young clutching at life and strait jackets.
The number of young people 16-26 earnestly writing and writing confessional poetry struck me. Especially young women. They were confessing their angst and being young, about being raped, about being molested, about living in a world weighed down by the gravity of the male gaze. There were also cocky young men, rapping and slamming their hearts away.
So I started writing for them.
The same age group that suffers from historic levels of suicide, anxiety and depression, gave me fodder for my writing.
I wrote and read to them in public and my piece Suicide Note gained an audience of lonely girls who would approach me after my reading to highlight how that poem in particular struck them as they didn’t realize that other people felt as they did.
I also began carrying copies of my modestly selling my author copy books with me everywhere I went, signing and selling copies by hand at readings. But also if I met someone new in a cafe or party and the conversation got to the “and what do you do”? part, I’d answer, “let me show you” and pull out a copy of my latest.
“I’m a poet, would you like to hear a poem?”
IOW, regardless of the market, I decided to take my professional seriously and not try and disguise the thrust of what I do. I always have enough author copies of my books within reach so that when someone asks where they can buy one of my books, I list the usual Amazon, Barnes&Nobel, bookshops local to me and then I add “or you can buy a copy from me and I’ll sign it for you”.
At this point, I am ahead of the market because I have numerous direct contacts with my buyers. I talk to them. I find out who they are and why they read and what they need from an author.
Laborious, yes. Low yielding revenue, yes. Time consuming, yes. But I would match my market research on my audience against any data crunching publisher, any day of the week.
I am determined to make poetry pay.
Not a lot, but enough to make a bare boned living at.
I stopped buying things.
I stopped trying to be middle class.
I live in a meager apartment.
I collect food stamps and any other government assistance I can talk my way into and I have absolutely no shame. The government is paying me to be a poet, a writer and an educator.
That’s my government subsidized job, in the long standing, centuries old tradition of the patronized arts.
There is never any shame in survival.
How many fast food jobs did Socrates work? Or Ovid or Homer. Did Dante pack groceries at Trader Joe’s in one of his circles of hell?
I teach independent poetry workshops at libraries for non mandatory donations. I lecture on poetry. I do readings and signings. I collaborate with a music producer in Stockholm, Frederic Iriarte who records my readings to mix with his music and publishes them on line as albums for download streaming. Do they make any money? No. Barely enough to justify the effort.
But I am getting paid to write and read poetry, just not very well.
I love my work and the place it puts me mentally and spiritually to labor through, more than the comforts of middle class continuous consumption I have had to leave behind.
I am totally dedicated to improving upon and perfecting my work for the sake of an unseen audience. For the sake of readers I haven’t even met yet.
I am not unemployed, although I collect unemployment.
I write and teach poetry and writing.
That’s my job.
Here I am: http//igorgoldkind.com
Don’t get me wrong, it’s much harder to be an artist than a businessman. But over 6 years, I have built an audience. I have 5,000 FB followers, nearly a thousand subscribers on other media, including my blog.
I now run into people both on and off line who knows someone who bought one of my books. I also get anonymous phone death threats, obscene emails and am persona non grata among my local amateur poetry community.
But these are small prices to pay for being to hold up my head and answer “Poet” when someone asks me what I do for a living.
I like to add “But I’m only in it for the money”.
Rebecca Behar:
“Igor Goldkind You are just describing the life of dropouts who succeeded, why not – my best friend was like this, but she went to Italia. Depends on the place. Also in some countries you cannot do anything directly with a bookshop or a library – the distribution is perfectly controled, no freelance accepted.
But it does not matter, I belong to this underground and we did wonders, and now slam and spoken word are still great. So I agree that it is very difficult to kill poetry – like weed. But just compare with Victor Hugo – not only his poetry paid for a big house in Guernessey, but for his expensive way of life. And anyway he believed that he was a kind of prophet. But there is something else which is what ppl can accept and understand, called “reception” in general. I think that a real poet provocative and misunderstood by definition.
About an audience and ppl reacting, this became quite easy with internet, but again all these video kids are relying on marketing. My concern is that written, hermetic, creative poetry is obviously confidential. PS – I just visited an exhibition on surrealism, this is exactly what is missing : a big bang, a scandal, a movement breaking all this business & technology boredom. I think that it is happening in Iran, with the movement “women, life, freedom”.”
Rebecca Behar, look at the life and lifestyle of Stephan Mallarme, at a time in Paris where Poets were rock stars. He didn’t compromise his art for the sake of his acquired wealth and fame. The Roll of the Dice, his last work was perhaps his greatest masterpiece inspiring CharlesOlsen and the Black Mountain Poets, as well as my first book, Is She Available?
Rimbaud was a great poet too, but died poor in Africa. And Charles Baudelaire lived off of his mother’s money his entire life. This didn’t qualify his genius nor the fact that he gave world our Edgar Allen Poe; who without Baudelaire’s promotion would have been buried in obscurity.
The general point being is that financial reward and market value has very little to do with art and nothing to do with talent.
It’s funny that you would refer to my naked confessional as “Dropping Out”. I worked decades at corporates, in publishing in academia as a professor at the University of Liverpool. I always earned good money for marketing and publishing other people’s work. (Ever heard of the “Graphic Novel”? I coined the term in the mid 1980s and made publishers billions!)
And earned steady income teaching students how to be artists.
But I never had the balls to walk the line myself and it does take balls (or the equivalent female genitalia). And I was never completely happy with my life, having had wanted to write for a living since I was a child.
Now some 45 years later, I get to do this.
And I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Because now regardless of my food stamps, I know that every working hour I live is dedicated to my authentic being, to the truth of my experience.
(I also live 4 blocks from the beach and go there a lot to swim and stare at the horizon).
So no, I haven’t dropped out; I was a drop out, I’ve dropped in.
I’ve dropped out of the ‘real world’ of stable salary, constant consumption, obeying the dictates of fools and being happy chattel for human crushing machine Ginsberg named the demon Mollock, in Howl.
And I’ve dropped into the actual world, behind the real world, where poetry and art connect me intimately with 10,000 years of my compatriots from all over the world.
I’ve dropped into the world where me and Rumi can share a bottle of wine while watching the sunset.
You can call me a drop out if you want; but in my experience, I had to drop out to drop in.
I would like your permission to republish this dialogue on my blog. Igorgoldkind.com
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September 23, 2024 | Categories: Americana, beat, books, comments about poetry, death, Depression, Existentialism, Faith, graphic novels, Igor Goldkind, literature, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, mental health, Mindfulness, new poetry, poetry, Poetry Therapy, San Diego, Self-Therapy, spoken word, story-telling, Suicide, Therapy, Zen | Leave a comment