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04 Feb 17:47

Like Your Hair’s On Fire

by James Howard Kunstler

     The past two months I’ve taken in all but the final few episodes of Breaking Bad, America’s loathe letter to itself. What a metaphor for a nation’s transition from an ethos of earnest effort to a mood of criminal buffoonery. For you who haven’t tuned in to this cultural artifact, Breaking Bad is a cable TV series about a bland high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who, facing an expensive battle with lung cancer, decides to get into the lucrative business of cooking methamphetamine, the most atrocious recreational drug there is. The series follows his misadventures in the trade.

     The really remarkable thing about the series is that the most interesting theme in the long-running story remains completely undeveloped — at least so far to within a few installments of the end. That is, Walter’s existential predicament as a hostage to America’s medical racketeering matrix. For many families like Walter White’s, a cancer diagnosis is tantamount to a parallel judgment of financial ruin.

      Like everybody else in America these days, poor Walter just submits to his fleecing. In fact, the blandest moments in the long-running melodrama are the scenes when Walter forks over his massive payments to a grandmotherly-type lady at the hospital billing desk. She’s as sweet as pie, though she also seems rather sweetly surprised that he is actually able to pay his bill. He pays for his treatments, of course, with the income derived from his meth cooking venture. His doctors are portrayed as demigods. There is zero discussion by them of A) the cost of his cancer treatments, and B) the legitimacy of the costs. That’s not their department. He just has to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

            Which he does, simply by discarding his persona as an earnest schoolteacher and entering the ranks of illicit drugdom. Of course, the series is mostly concerned with the twists, turns, and torments of that transition, and the metaphors in that are also rich as to what America has lately become. For instance, Walter’s success as a criminal stems from his technological skills. He is the meth cooker supremo because his formula is the best, his lab practices are the most exacting, his standards are the highest! Walter White is the Steve Jobs of meth. He puts out the best product and won’t settle for less than perfection.

     This jibes nicely with America’s current mood of techno-rhapsodic psychosis, in particular our tendency to ignore all the diminishing returns and blowback from our techno-grandiose endeavors — which range from the magic of shale-oil fracking to the romance of “green” skyscrapers, to high-frequency front-running in the stock markets, to the recruitment of every teenager in America into an obsessive-compulsive cell-phone culture. It’s all good. Walter White’s “ace-in-the-hole” is his science training.

     Another winning metaphor is the supernatural amount of cash-money on display in almost every episode once Walter gets rolling in the meth trade, duffle-bags full of exquisite, freshly packed-and-stacked banknotes, so much that tossing a quarter-million here, a quarter million there loses its meaning. The stuff is tossed around like junk mail. This is not inadvertent, of course. It depicts nicely the disintegration of America’s value system: money is everything and nothing. Walter quickly joins the “one percent” earnings-wise. It hardly makes him a better person. His money-making operations are as disgusting as the “innovation” of new swindles among the Too-Big-To-Jail bankers. By mid-way through the series, Walter even has enough petty cash on hand to pay for his brother-in-law’s hospital and rehab bills, after the BOL is shot up by Mexican drug gangsters. The fantastic cost of all that is also ignored.

     An additional metaphor is found in Walter’s “employer,” the super-polite neatnik Gustavo Fring, who rules the Albuquerque-based drug empire via a false-front fast-food chain of chicken eateries. Fring is the fantasy of every businessman’s ideal self-image: meticulous, careful, fair,  — until Walter White’s buffoonery shoves him over the edge and Gus, too, breaks bad, so to speak, in his own fussy way. And business itself is depicted as the highest-and-best expression of human culture, just as it has been since the reign of Ronald Reagan.

     Finally, there is the matter of what the fruits of Walter White’s techno-savy work does to the “consumer” public who buy his product. It turns them into zombies. It’s also almost too obvious to state that the popularity of zombies in American culture has exactly paralleled the financialization of the American economy. That half the action of Breaking Bad takes place in and around automobiles — in the parking-lot wasteland of Albuquerque — is just the cherry on the metaphorical cake. This is who we are.

New Features this week at kunstler.com: 
Jim’s Garden Report, 2013
Jim’s New Paintings, 2011-2013

Published as an E-book for the first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author

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Bargain Price $3.99

Amazon Kindle  …or …  Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo

31 Dec 04:30

Tweet Of The Day

by Andrew Sullivan

.@BA_Influencers Can we cut out the middleman and you guys just take a big, wet shit right on my soul? Might save time.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) December 27, 2013

He continues here.

31 Dec 03:52

High-Speed Rail Network Passes 12,000km Mark

by Samuel Wade

The opening of the Shenzhen-Xiamen and several other high-speed rail lines on Saturday brought the total length of China’s high-speed network to over 12,000 kilometers, less than seven years after it opened. The rail network as a whole now covers over 100,000 kilometers. From Xinhua:

The 513 km line extends east to Shanghai and westward to Guangzhou, significant business hubs.

It is the last link in the chain between the most dynamic cities and manufacturing centers in east and south China, with a population over 700 million, and almost as large as Europe.

[…] Other new high-speed rail lines which began services on Saturday include one in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, starting point of the ancient Silk Road, and another in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the bridgehead of China-ASEAN cooperation.

[…] The first Chinese “Harmony” high-speed train pulled out of the station in April 2007. Six years and five months later, the world’s second largest economy has built the world’s biggest high-speed rail network. It was a short time and full of ups and downs. [Source]

See more on the new Shenzhen-Xiamen line from He Huifeng at South China Morning Post.

Though the high-speed network’s image suffered a heavy blow from the 2011 Wenzhou disaster, The New York Times’ Keith Bradsher wrote in September that it has since “without a doubt, transformed China, often in unexpected ways.” Nevertheless, Global Times’ Shan Renping—believed to be a pen name for editor-in-chief Hu Xijin—complained that the new lines’ opening had been overshadowed by negativity:

Public opinion in China is dominated by cynics and talkers, rather than pragmatic doers. If you follow debate on the Internet every day, you might believe China is filled with beaten petitioners, blackmailed “good Samaritans,” corrupt officials, and silly professors. News like the opening of five new rail lines within a single day are drowned in debate over all kinds of social controversies.

[…] The Internet greatly satisfies the public’s desire for negative and bizarre information. This explains why news portals are reluctant to highlight things like the new rail lines. But whenever an accident takes place on the railway, it will instantly make headlines online and stir up a carnival of criticism. This is the true ecology of Chinese public opinion at the moment. We have no choice but to get used to it. [Source]

Also at Global Times, Zhao Qian reported mixed assessments of the high-speed lines’ profitability:

“The Xiamen-Shenzhen high-speed rail line will likely suffer an annual loss of 2 billion yuan based on the newly announced ticket prices,” the source was quoted by 21st Century Business Herald newspaper as saying.

The total income for the Xiamen-Shenzhen railway line is predicted to be only around 600 million yuan in the first year during its initial operation period, which is still not enough for the railway corporation to pay back the banking loan interest, according to the source.

[…] “Making profits on the high-speed railway is just a matter of time,” Wang Mengshu, deputy chief engineer of the China Railway Tunnel Group, told the Global Times Wednesday.

[…] But Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, had a different view, saying that it is “almost impossible for the high-speed railway lines to reverse their situation of suffering losses due to huge costs, especially in China’s central and western regions, where the passenger flow is very small.”

“Finally, gaining fiscal support from the central government will be the only way for the railway corporation to repay their debts,” Zhao told the Global Times. [Source]

Meanwhile, work on a Beijing-Shenyang line is expected to start by mid year, Xinhua reports:

The 709-km railway will cut travel time between the two cities in half to 2.5 hours, said Tian Limin, a senior manager of the railway project at a conference organized by the Liaoning provincial government on Monday.

The railway is expected to be completed within 5 years with a total investment of 124.5 billion yuan ($20.4 billion). It is designed with a speed of 350 km per hour, said Tian. [Source]


© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: debt, high-speed rail, pearl river delta, railways, Shenzhen, xiamen
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06 Aug 10:42

An Ode To English Majors

by Andrew Sullivan

Mark Edmundson pens one:

Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. “Life piled on life / Were all too little,” says Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and he is right. Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once?

The English major lives many times through the astounding transportive magic of words and the welcoming power of his receptive imagination. The economics major? In all probability he lives but once. If the English major has enough energy and openness of heart, he lives not once but hundreds of times. Not all books are worth being reincarnated into, to be sure—but those that are win Keats’s sweet phrase: “a joy forever.” …

What [the English major] feels about language most of the time is wonder and gratitude. For language is a stupendous gift. It’s been bequeathed to us by all of the foregoing generations. It is the creation of great souls like Shakespeare and Chaucer to be sure. But language is also the creation of salesmen and jive talkers, quacks and mountebanks, hookers and heroic warriors. We spend our lives, knowingly or not, trying to say something impeccably. We long to put the best words in the best order. (That, Coleridge said, is all that poetry really comes down to.) And when we do, we are on the lip of adding something to the language. We’ve perhaps made a contribution, however small, to what the critic R.P. Blackmur called the stock of available reality. And when we do, we’ve lived for a moment with the immortals.


07 Jul 22:00

The Higher Meaning Of Higher Education

by Andrew Sullivan
Clay Burell

Must. Read. Humanities _is_ religion. Without the dogma.

After reading the recently released report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences about the sorry state of the humanities in higher education, Paula Marantz Cohen sighs:

[T]he commission’s report, with the somewhat arch title, The Heart of the Matter, is itself indicative of the problem. It is not badly written—its grammar and syntax are dutifully correct, and in places it tries to be eloquent. But it was written by a committee. It turns the ineffable into a clear-cut “knowledge base” (a horrid phrase). Consider the goals listed in the report’s introduction: “1) to educate Americans in the knowledge, skills, and understanding they will need to thrive in a twenty-first-century democracy; 2) to foster a society that is innovative, competitive, and strong; and 3) to equip the nation for leadership in an interconnected world. These goals cannot be achieved by science alone.”

You may already be drowsing and can probably foresee the padding and platitudes to come—the stating of principles and ideas obvious to any person with common sense.

Peter Laarman likewise finds the report’s emphasis on the practical dismaying, quipping, “God help us if we think the only way to save humanities education is to corrupt it utterly by stressing the cash value—or the national security value—of brushing up our Shakespeare.” Instead, he finds the humanities’ true value to elude such calculations, and connects their study to religion:

The report fails to say anything of significance about the inexpressible joy that a traditional liberal education can ignite, the sense of belonging to the worldwide communion of persons living and dead who can/could think and ponder, the wonderment of consciousness that poets and sages of all epochs have celebrated. The report dwells instead, in a very American way, on the practical applications of a thorough grounding in the humanities and/or the social sciences.

Religion has a stake in this discussion. Religion is about the higher consciousness, after all. Second-century theological heavyweight St. Irenaeus is at least alleged to have said that God’s glory is the fully alive human being (there is a dispute about the translation). Rudimentary human consciousness makes us aware of our finitude; more advanced consciousness, usually the outcome of higher learning, makes the idea of that finitude bearable, even sublime.