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“The moral failings of advanced liberal societies, not least this one, tend to be slow-motion sins. We don’t stone the adulterer or hang the sodomite or massacre the restive inner-city residents. We allow the atmosphere to be filled with greenhouse gases; we allow the hypertrophic growth of inequality; we let the prison population grow to the size of a megalopolis. And the key is that there’s no particular moment when they happened, no single event to expose and decry. “

(Via The Daily Beast)

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“The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.”

(Via Feministing)

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If you guessed picturesque violence as a means of psychological liberation you are technically correct. But I have in mind something even more fundamental. Strip away the circumstantial differences and The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, and Weeds are all about the acquisition of capital, territorial expansion, the liquidation of assets and enemies.

Americans love this story. It’s a kind of bootstrap fairytale that exalts the glories of the free market for those willing to unyoke ambition from conscience. We know, in our brains, that Tony Soprano is a gluttonous thug. But in our rancid capitalist hearts we root for him anyway.

At least I do.

***

I’ve been thinking about all this because last week Americans got a rare peek at how the One Percent actually rolls in this country. All it took was the disclosure of a single annual tax return by Republican frontrunner and part-time humanoid Mitt Romney.

Mitt released his return under duress, having concluded (rightly) that not releasing it would only prolong the media narrative. He did so on the same day as the President’s State of the Union Address, and the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations, which wasn’t quite enough to bury the matter.

The short version: Mitt paid $3 million in taxes on the $21.7 million he received in 2010, for an effective rate of 13.9 percent. The former governor, whose grasp of his own finances is charmingly fuzzy, originally told reporters that he paid “about 15 percent” in taxes, which translates as another $240,000. (A quarter of a million dollars is known, in Mittville, as “a rounding error.”)

Of course, the big revelation for those of us not intimate with affluence was that Mitt’s millions are what economists call – with no apparent sense of irony – “unearned income.” Mitt doesn’t work for his money. His money works for him. Had his $21.7 million been earned, it would have been taxed (theoretically) at the top rate of 35 percent. That’s $3.6 million more in taxes.

Those politicians who decry unemployment benefits as a dangerous inducement for people not to work would do well to ponder this scenario.

***

There were lots of other fascinating tidbits from Mitt’s disclosure, including the fact he had a Swiss bank account, and dough socked away in several countries considered tax havens, from the Cayman Islands to Ireland. But the most striking thing on display was the essential nature of extreme wealth.

Your average American still conceives of wealth along the Soprano model. Tony, he sees an opportunity, bribes the necessary officials, bumps off the necessary rivals, and collects the booty. We like to think this way because it means that with sufficient industry, imagination, and risk, we too might become Tony. Or at least Paulie Walnuts.

But the vast majority of wealth in this country is passive in nature, occasionally amassed but far more often inherited. Rich people make money not by doing things but by owning things. They own stock and collect dividends. They own bonds and earn interest. They position themselves in such a way that money has to flow through them to get to somewhere. (This is called leverage.) Or they play one force against another, such as hiring a Chinese worker to perform labors formerly undertaken by an American, then selling the resulting product for the same price and pocketing the difference. (This is called arbitrage.)

Mitt’s labors at Bain Capital consisted, almost exclusively, of leverage and arbitrage. He bought companies, often with borrowed money, improved their financial health—or at least the appearance thereof—then sold them at a profit. Sometimes, the companies failed and people lost their jobs. Bain executives awarded themselves special dividends anyway. It was a very Soprano way of doing business.

Mitt’s current income, by contrast, derives from his manipulation of our financial and tax regulations.

That’s what the public is finally figuring out. Or, anyway, what it has an opportunity to figure out. Really rich people don’t work harder than the rest of us. They don’t sit around dreaming up new ways to create jobs, or rejuvenate the economy. They hire lobbyists to craft legislation, and asset managers who can navigate the ensuing maze of loopholes.

To offer but one example: back when Mitt actually was a working stiff, he availed himself of the so-called “carried interest” loophole. This allowed him to be paid a deferred salary from Bain in the form of capital gains. And thus to have the untold millions he earned was taxed at 15 percent rather than 35 percent.

Nobody knows how much money this allowed him to avoid paying in taxes, and we are not likely to find out, because citizen Mitt Romney really wants to be President. I am going to estimate a gazillion dollars. Give or take a quarter a mil.

***

In the boom years following World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower enforced a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent. The idea was to force the super rich not to sit on their dough but to reinvest it by opening factories and hiring workers.

If you take a quick look at this chart, you will see that I am not actually making this up. You will also notice that in 1982, when Ronald Reagan took office, he and his loyal Congress lowered the top tax rate from 70 percent down into the 30s, where it has remained ever since. The result has been a steady upward surge of wealth. Everyone else has seen wages stagnate and benefits plummet. Also: massive federal and state deficits.

I realize I’ve gone somewhat wonky here. But the point is simple: the most crucial issue of the 2012 campaign already has emerged. Will voters—offered an object lesson in extreme wealth—finally revolt against the glittering mythos that protects our gilded class?

***

Mitt’s job, in the days ahead, will be to convince us that he’s Tony Soprano – the private sector Godfather who can make us all rich, rather than Willard Romney the amazingly life-like tax cheat. He will rely both on his personal fortune, and the lucre pouring in from those who stand to benefit from his policies. He’ll at least flirt with choosing as his running mate New Jersey governor and Tony Soprano body double Chris Christie.

But his greatest ally, I’m afraid, will be our own capacity for self-delusion. After all, Americans can be counted upon to ignore the most obvious signifiers of our own predicament.

The truth is, we can’t become Tony Soprano because we don’t belong to the mafia and because we lack his gift for psychopathic greed. But we can still vote for him.

***

I realize I should conclude by quoting from Mitt’s most recent gospel of prosperity, in which he said unto CNN, the morning after claiming the Florida primary, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

But that feels like dirty pool.

Instead, let me offer a more intimate and revealing statement, which also recently emerged from his mouthhole:

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

Let’s do this thing, Paulie.

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Wherever he went, the man of God carried his shotgun…

Christopher Goffard’s You Will See Fire is a tense and harrowing look at the life and mysterious death – of a brave, at times, recklessly so – American priest living and working in Kenya. It’s also one of the finest non-fiction books set in Africa in recent years.

In direct, matter-of-fact prose, Goffard builds a vivid picture of a complicated man who dared challenge the vast corruption and violence that characterized the 24 year kleptocractic rule of Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya’s now ex-tyrant.

The country with its fierce light and impenetrable dark, its jumbo maize rows and seasons of starvation, was immense, large enough to contain his clashing selves: the priest and the paratrooper, the healer and the hunter, the collar and the gun, the man of obedience who chafed at authority.

Among many other courageous moves, Father Kaiser helped bring public attention to the fact that one of Moi’s top cronies, a man who may thought might even succeed him, was likely guilty of routinely raping school girls.

When Kaiser’s body was found by the side of the road, a bullet in the back of his head, most Kenyans assumed, with good reason, that the priest was murdered. Then the American FBI entered the picture with a suicide theory.

Ultimately, whether murder or suicide, the book is less a who-done-it than an honest, searing, and necessary look at an individual who – truly – spoke truth to power.

Christopher Goffard writes for the Los Angeles Times. He’s also the author of a novel, Snitch Jacket. This interview was conducted over numerous emails.

***

The Rumpus: What drew you to Father John Kaiser’s story? How did you first come upon it?

Father John Kaiser in the 1960's, during his first years in Kenya.

Christopher Goffard: I saw a squib buried in the newspaper in August 2007, three sentences long, 61 words. The headline was “Priest’s Death Ruled Homicide,” and it gave the barest outlines of the John Kaiser case. I’d never heard his name before. The story mentioned that the FBI had earlier concluded that he’d shot himself, which immediately aroused my interest, because Roman Catholic priests are not supposed to commit suicide, on penalty of eternal punishment – suicide isn’t just a sin but THE sin – and I got curious about what might have led investigators to this conclusion and how politics might have shaded it. Then I became fascinated with Kaiser, this former paratrooper who carried his shotgun across the savanna and waded rivers to get to sick calls, and the great paradoxes of his personality.

Rumpus: One of the many things I appreciated about this book is that the narrative has a real insider’s knowledge of Kenya without feeling the need to go out of its way to establish the writer’s African credentials. What made you decide to keep yourself out of it?

Goffard: Well, I’ve made my living as a journalist for major daily newspapers, where you’re trained to subordinate your personality as much as possible in service of the story. In a narrative of this length your fingerprints will be all over it anyway, in tone, in word choice, in sentence structure, in subject matter. I think there’s always a sense of insecurity when you’re writing about a place not your own, an anxiety about getting it right – or there ought to be – so people understandably feel the need to trot out their bona fides. But in this case throwing in the authorial “I” would have been a pointless distraction. My obsessions animate the book, but it’s not about me.

Rumpus: You never knew Father John Kaiser personally, but you capture the complexity of his character the page. What kind of man of man was he? What sort of priest?

Goffard: When I went to Lolgorien, the little village where he lived in his final years, people spoke of him with great love. He lived on nothing and neglected his diet and his health, sometimes to the extreme, but would trek miles through the bush to administer the sacraments or to give game meat to people who were starving. He was always hauling people to the doctor, though he hated being a patient himself. With other priests, he was argumentative, stubborn in a way they found exasperating – especially on the issue of justice – and I think some of them dreaded his company. One diplomat told me Kaiser “blew hot and cold” — he’d be warm and friendly one day, brusque or confrontational the next.

Rumpus: Why was Kaiser such a thorn in the side of the Kenyan authorities throughout his many years in Kenya?

Goffard: For most of his time there, he was kind of below the radar. For decades he didn’t go public with the horrors he’d witnessed, though he castigated himself later for this. He tried to work within the system, tried to send his pleas up through the church hierarchy, and his bishop didn’t want to hear that Moi’s government was culpable for the carnage and corruption. When he finally spoke out, he became very dangerous. He’d been gathering evidence methodically for years, he was articulate, and – this made him really unusual – he couldn’t be scared off.

Rumpus: What drove Kaiser to take such personal risk?

Goffard: He had a strong sense of justice, and he took seriously the ethos of radical love and empathy. I remember Christopher Hitchens saying that decency precedes faith, not the other way around. But in Kaiser’s case, it’s just impossible to make sense of the really heroic efforts he undertook if you divorce them from his religious views. Of course, it’s complicated: Some priests who knew him suggested he took these risks because he had a death wish, or a longing for martyrdom.

Rumpus: Before his death, you write that the US Embassy considered Kaiser “an eccentric”. Was he? How was he different than other foreign priests in Kenya? Other Americans In Kenya?

Goffard: He flouted the social proprieties. He lived out on the savanna for years and ate whatever he shot. He wore the same dusty clothes day after day, crumpled them up in a corner, then uncrumpled them and wore them some more. He was more hands-on than a lot of foreign missionaries. He was always building things, always immersed in the villagers’ lives. He’d sleep in a Masai hut if he was out late. He considered himself African.

Rumpus: Although maybe not a dictator with a household name, longtime Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi, is up there with some of the most corrupt and ruthless African leaders, men like Mugabe and Mobutu. And yet it seems this American priest got under his skin. Why?

Goffard: Moi relied heavily on Western money – Western tourism dollars, American military aid – and this required him to maintain at least the flimsy semblance of participatory democracy and free speech and the rule of law. So there was a lot of grotesque play-acting under Moi. There were elections and newspapers and courts, but they were often Potemkin facades. Moi launched a public tribunal supposedly meant to uncover the truth about the ethnic clashes, but – farcically – it was forbidden to mention him as a culprit. Most people were afraid to say what they knew anyway. There were lines they knew not to cross. So here comes this obstreperous American priest who refuses to play along, who is well-known to the embassy of the superpower that Moi relies on, who can’t be intimidated and can’t be made to vanish without an ensuing stink. And he names Moi and his ministers.

Rumpus: The US and Kenya have close ties, stemming back many years, a relationship made even closer by the cooperation of the two countries during the investigation of the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. How did Kaiser’s death complicate this relationship?

Goffard: The U.S. ambassador, Johnnie Carson, worried it would hurt relations if it emerged that someone in the Kenyan government had a role in Kaiser’s death. Carson brought in the FBI to obviate any suggestion of a cover-up. I don’t think he was successful. The FBI’s conclusion of suicide left U.S.-Kenyan relations in fine shape.

Rumpus: You are pretty fair to the FBI agents who conducted the investigation – much more fair, for instance, than the Kenyan Magistrate who conducted her own investigation later. And yet you also point out the serious flaws and the fact that the involvement of the Kenyan police may have compromised them from the beginning. In your view, did the FBI act in good faith in concluding in their final report that Kaiser had killed himself?

Goffard: The Kenyan magistrate seemed personally offended that the agents didn’t show up in her courtroom to defend their report. I don’t think she got an explanation for this, and she seemed to assume the worst – that they had something to hide. Now, the FBI can be very frustrating to deal with. It’s a tight-lipped institution, and a lot of stuff is classified, and if you want an answer to a question there are layers and layers of people to go through. I spent months –  it’s kind of a blur now, but I remember it being a maddeningly long time — trying to get someone at the FBI to talk to me about the case. I was going through official channels and getting no response. At that point some people would angrily conclude, “They’re obviously hiding something.” But finally through other channels I got one of the agents who’d worked on the case, and he apologized for the delay and told me, “Look, bureaucracy is our middle name.” Two of the key agents, Graney and Corbett, ultimately gave me hours of their time, answering questions in great detail. My final impression was they had done what they could within the very sharp limits they faced. I mean, they were dependant on Moi’s good will even to stay in the country. Let’s say, as a hypothetical, that someone high in the Kenyan government had murdered Kaiser. Was the FBI really ever in a position to find this out?

Rumpus: John Kaiser’s story and the story of Charles Mbuthi Gathenji, a lawyer who took the lead on investigating this case, collide in a way that I found so compelling. And in many ways the book is as much about Gathenji as it is about Kaiser. Both are men with complex characters. You are also a novelist…I’m wondering about how you went about constructing these guys on the page. What was different about recreating Kaiser as opposed to Gathenji?

Goffard: Kaiser had been dead seven years before I’d even heard of him, but he wrote letters prolifically, which provided a strong sense of his personality and of the texture of his life. Gathenji’s alive, and I could ask him anything I wanted, and I spent hours interviewing him in Kenya (and in California, once, when he came here). It’s structured as a novel, in the sense that I cover a great sweep of Kenyan history through the subjective prisms of the people who lived it, which I think is more palatable to readers than chapter after chapter of potted history. It’s kind of a converging-track narrative in the fashion of In Cold Blood, shuttling between these two characters who you know are going to meet at some point, and I tried to create the intimacy of a novel, putting you inside people’s heads. Of course, every sentence has to be defensible factually, which is why there are 40 pages of footnotes – a lot of the faith readers used to extend to journalists has shriveled and so you work harder to show your math.

Rumpus: The book is also very much about the way certain individuals challenge institutional power, Kaiser did it his way, Gathenji, his way. In some ways for me, Gathenji is even more brave because, in some respects at least, Kasier was protected as a white American. Could you discuss what motivated Gathenji to take the risks he does?

Goffard: When Gathenji was 20, his father was murdered – dragged from his home and beaten and slashed by fellow Kikuyus for refusing the swear an oath of tribal loyalty. Gathenji believed elements of then-President Jomo Kenyatta’s regime were involved, and that his dad’s fellow churchmen had sold him out. So he developed an abiding distrust of institutional power, governmental and ecclesiastical, and he saw the law, despite all the ways it might be corrupted, as a counterbalancing force – maybe the only avenue available in Kenya at the time. Kaiser’s own distrust of institutions was profound; he was always clashing with his own church.

Rumpus: Can you talk about Gathenji – and others like him – in the context of the future of Kenya?

Goffard: It’s a different country than it was under Moi. Gathenji’s position is that for all Kenya’s current troubles, there’s much greater room for debate and dissent. Part of what Gathenji represents in the book is the honorable practice of law, the law as a weapon against dictatorship, even in a country where the courts were as gutted and compromised as they were under Moi. Repairing their credibility is crucial in preventing further catastrophes – I’m thinking of the bloody vigilantism attending the last election – and I hope people like Gathenji will play a role in the process.

Rumpus: Of the books you site in the Selected Reading section, among them is Ngugi’s glorious, often hilarious, and often too true novel – Wizard of the Crow. How did this book influence your own story of Kenya?

Daniel Arap Moi

Goffard: So much of Moi’s reign teetered on the absurd and Kafkaesque. He once dispatched his agents across the countryside to arrest the fictional hero of Ngugi wa Thiong’o's novel Matigari. And Ngugi himself says, “The world of a dictator has an element of pure fantasy. He will kill, jail, and drive hundreds into exile and imagine that he is actually loved for it.” And this insight animates his masterpiece, Wizard of the Crow, which features a demented megalomaniac for a dictator and blends reality and fantasy constantly. Though it’s not about Moi per se it provides a much clearer window into his soul than, say, his official biography would, and the atmosphere it conjures seems much truer to daily life in such a world than the Kenyan newspapers would give you. It’s one of the great dictatorship novels, and as you say, extremely funny. (Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, which explores the stupidity of power, is the other funny dictatorship novel that comes to mind.) Kaiser’s death, and the investigations surrounding it, had a through-the-looking-glass quality: leads were blind alleys, witnesses vanished, the most basic facts were slippery. And you can’t appreciate how hard it was for the FBI or anyone else to make sense of the case unless you have a sense of this fog-and-shifting-sand landscape.

Rumpus: I asked a Kenyan friend today what he thought of the case. He knew immediately what I was talking about, and said that the bullet was fired from a range inconsistent with suicide. He said most Kenyans think Kaiser was murdered. Has that been your experience, that most Kenyans think this?

Goffard: Yes. In fact, I’m trying to think of any Kenyan I’ve met who buys into the suicide theory, and it’s tough. The murder scenario fits much more neatly with their experience of the Moi years, with the climate of dread and late-night disappearances and staged accidents they remember. But I don’t think most have read the report by Vincent DiMaio, the gunshot expert – he literally wrote the book on gunshot wounds – who said the shot that killed Kaiser was consistent with suicide, that the barrel could have been angled against his head but left no burns because it was a long shotgun barrel.

Rumpus: My thought is that you seem, at times, to lean toward the suicide theory without embracing it, given all the very good reasons any number of people had for killing him. What’s your take? Forgive my asking.

Goffard: One of my favorite books is The Executioner’s Song, where Mailer manages to inhabit all these different characters and perspectives, and I tried to do something like that here. I tried to present the most forceful possible case, consistent with the evidence, for each of the different views, and to suggest where these views come from – how they seem to be experience-dependant. Most people who read the book conclude that I’m advancing the argument it was murder, though, so your remark is interesting.

Rumpus: For you, what was the importance of John Kaiser’s life?

Goffard: Wangari Maathai, the Green Belt founder who won the Nobel Peace Prize, put it succinctly: Kaiser was “the people’s voice in an era when ordinary people did not have a voice.” After his death, he became a strong symbol for the pro-democracy movement. He was a reminder that even in a police state, some people cannot be cowed. Along with a lot of other brave people, he helped nudge Kenya out of the endless Moi epoch.

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The movie is a cult classic and has spawned sequels as well as inspired later films, such as The Ring (and its Japanese original) in which the same sort of thing occurs except this time (perhaps more germane to the topic of pornography) from a VHS tape.

The obscenity trial of Michael Peacock arose from such fears of the supernatural power of the image and word, and even though he was found not guilty and we are told these laws will perhaps undergo a radical reevaluation, the fear will stay with us.

 ***

Peacock, a sex worker, was arrested in 2009 by an undercover policeman from the UK’s Human Exploitation and Organised Crime Command for selling sexually explicit DVDs that featured fisting, piss-play, and BDSM. He was charged under the Obscene Publications Act. Though the acts on the DVD were not illegal, selling depictions of them was.

The obscenity laws hinge on something less defined, even, than pornography: “moral corruption/depravity”. A legal definition is, “to deprave means to make morally bad, to debase or to corrupt morally. To corrupt means to render morally unsound or rotten, to destroy the moral purity or chastity, to pervert or ruin a good quality; to debase; to defile it.” Of course, it doesn’t matter much what the state’s definition is – they will choose what depraves and corrupts.

The counter to this, often raised by intellectuals and cultural heroes concerned with sexuality, is that sexual morality and ethics are about consent. This is true, and well-said. But this is not, as often thought, a point overlooked by obscenity laws. Indeed, it is a truth all-but conceded by them. The substance of these laws is that when we watch certain sexual acts, we give up our consent. The distribution of and ultimately the encounter with these images corrupts us without us having much say.

Like the kids in the woods, by the time the tape is playing, it’s already too late.

During a sexual act, consent should generally be easy to establish (of course there are exceptions and victims of these exceptions) – it is an inner feeling of “go ahead” or “stop” expressed outwardly to our partner(s). This go-and-stop is ongoing throughout the act, though it can become increasingly more difficult to flesh out consent after initial consent is given.

An image, however, is one-sided. It can only assume you’ve said yes to its effects.

When we encounter an image, we are thought to be saying, “go ahead” to the image. To decide to watch or to see at all implies consent. But is it so simple? What if the recording contains something we do not take seriously, but has serious effects? What if it unleashes something we’re not ready for?

While some commentators have pondered the newness of these questions in an internet age, the magical quality of the danger in The Evil Dead and The Ring show us that these are not new questions at all, but ancient ones.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Michael Peacock’s innocence, but it will be an incomplete victory if we merely applaud and do not go on to ask these questions:

How do the image, the word, the symbol truly affect us?

***

Another recent item of porn – and law – related news: The Los Angeles City Council recently voted that porn performers must wear condoms. This law vote was ushered through under auspices of performer safety. But of course, a cultural element echoes through the decision: Should bareback porn exist?

Gay men, whether porn-performer, producer, or consumer have been arguing this at great length for a long time. Some demand it be legally abolished: It is said to promote and inspire sexual behaviors that could lead to illness.  Others revel in it: It is a demonstration of sexual freedom, and it shows that condom-less sex is not dead or wrong. Because pornography is often one of the first affirming depictions of homosexuality a gay man will see, its power to influence is understood. In fact a gay porn performer can even become a sort of cultural icon for his work displaying a sex-positive attitude.

Another example: do constantly sexualized depictions of women (or men, for that matter) in advertising affect how women feel about their bodies and their behaviors? Many liberals would be fine with pornography, but less willing to give advertisement – conceived of as being wed to corporate power – a pass. Progressives with media literacy campaigns are often the most vocal about their concerns about “objectification.”

I know firsthand that body image and presentation of the body are wed to corporate interest. Though most porn studios and producers have proved compassionate and kind, one studio owner once assured me that I needed to lose weight if I wanted to continue working, and another gently asked me to do steroids. They had perceptions of what the public wants to see, and pressured me into conforming to that image.

Of course “perfect” bodies – cut abs, huge muscles – are almost an artifact in porn. Wedged between average-bodied men of 1970s and early 1980s porn, and today’s slew of wildly popular amateur pornography and XTube, the chiseled man’s popularity may turn out to be a 1990s blip. But the idea and effects of image still drove the porn producers to push me to unhealthy acts to meet their imagined standard.

In a strange imaginary loop, these two porn producers were creating the images that they thought the public wanted, which reinforced their idea of the sort of porn they should make. Whether they were right or wrong, I struggled with both insistences, and eventually decided to ignore them. But it sure didn’t feel good. And it’s not difficult for me to see how the viewer could feel the same if he or she begins to compare himself to the models – in porn or in advertising.

 ***

Since on the one hand, we say no, media cannot affect us, and on the other, we fear its affects we turn to the experts:

A popular approach to answering how the image affects us has been through scientific experimentation and social science surveys; and science is our most occult of philosophies, filled with symbols, images, and tools. But there, we have mostly failed. Not because we haven’t gathered evidence, but because all the evidence seems to clash. How can there be so many books on sex and violence that reach different conclusions?

In the meantime, a demand is made: Take sides.

Will watching fisting make someone want to try fisting? Yes or no. Do you believe that bareback sex in porn makes the viewer want to have condom-less sex? Yes or no. Will watching horror movies make you more prone to violent acts? Yes or no. Do fantasy portrayals of incest in pornography glorify abuse?  What about portrayals of rape?  What about gay or lesbian sex?  What about general corruption and depravity – can watching a sexual or violent act make you a worse person?

The questions gather and back us into a corner, so it is easy to see why such a callous and ridiculous statement as Andrea Dworkin’s, that, “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too,” becomes appealing: It’s not an answer, it’s an escape.

***

Just give up one or the other – your values or your sexuality.

Yes or no, please.

But most importantly, answer quickly, there are monsters at the door.

***

Permitting one form of the image on principle or cultural critique alone, but not permitting it in another form proves very difficult, and all arguments seem to undo themselves.

For example, one might object to comparisons of pornography and sexualized images of women in advertising because porn is consumed privately and advertising (sometimes) isn’t. But the logical consequence could easily – and often has easily – become: we cannot have women depicted sexually in public. To keep the argument logically consistent: in porn, we consent and so it’s okay, in advertisement, we don’t consent, so it’s not. That means banning advertisement with questionable content, back to women showing their ankles off in ads, and wearing full-length dresses otherwise.

More evidence for how problematic this is: Would you object, as many did, to gay cruising site Manhunt.com’s billboard campaign prominently displaying two men about to kiss (and surely, one thing leads to another) to anyone on the street? Yes or no.

What if they were kissing and you had your kids with you?

Since you’re reading this essay, I suspect your answer would be no, but you can see how the question weaves into others, and evades easy answers.

What if they were fucking?

Whether it’s behind closed doors or freely displayed must shrink in importance in our conversation next to the question, “How does the image affect us?” But to answer, we need to do more than respond with feelings and thoughts.

The menace of the image and its affects leads some to talk supernaturally about images, as if stating their names is evidence enough for their power. Because the depiction of the act is what has initially repulsed the critic, one only needs to state what the act is to argue. This is why arguments against pornography are often simply descriptions of the act. “He had a bullwhip up his rectum!” anti-Maplethorpe censors cried. Or, in Chris Hedges’s essay (in an otherwise thoughtful book – Empire of Illusion -from an otherwise thoughtful man, in which he desperately clings to Dworkin’s escapist quote), “The Illusion of Love”, he falls under the (sexual?) trance of naming what he sees and believing this naming presents some sort of  self-evident truth:  “…oral sex, vaginal sex, double penetration, and double anal.” He quotes a performer who says during a shoot, “Shove it up my fucking ass…: and “Fuck, motherfucker…” and “Fucking love it…” No explanations required for Hedges, who is always more rigorous than this.

The supernatural: To say its name is to evoke it.

 ***

Of course, no name, word, image, has the same effect on everyone. And each image changes meanings in context. A doctor sees (and even enters) naked bodies all the time, but this is not considered sexual. Yet I’ve played a doctor in a porn, having sex with my “patient” – and this, of course, was meant to elicit arousal. Furthermore, some patients may be aroused by their doctors, and vice versa, or else why would the fantasy be portrayed in pornography at all?

***

All of this is another way of saying that – even in the light of Peacock’s innocence – the State and its supporters still consider us their children. Why else would they present us with monsters? How else could an entire law hinge on something as clumsy, as childlike as “to make morally bad”?

We’re expected, not just through obscenity laws, but by so many governmental and corporate actions, to share morality. And this morality will be decided by a group of our leaders. This, in spite of the fact that we all agree they are no longer our leaders, now that confidence in government has waned.

They and their processes are, we all know, corrupted and depraved.

Their argument goes that individual morality is impossible. Better to come up with it under a system and a structure, otherwise there would be too many individuals striving for too many different goals, and all those would clash. Especially when it comes to culture, individual morality would collapse all order. We’d have burning buildings, raped women, busted out shop windows. The environment, the whole world would turn against us. The demons would be unleashed.

But if we trained ourselves to be unafraid of individualized morality, we could see easily that everything they’ve told us to be afraid of is already here, and that they are the product of collective morality. Destruction, famines, sexual fear. And of course, war is collective morality’s greatest expression.

 ***

“Sexual morality is about consent.” What “consent” really needs to indicate here is context. Contexts arise from a strata of culture, nature, race, class, but most importantly from the individual. Our duty is to be unafraid of bearing the responsibility of the image, especially the sexual one. We continue to be the children of the State so long as we do not (or are not allowed to) develop – and it’s important to note here that culturally as well as biologically, sexual development is a dividing line between being a child and being an adult.

So Michael Peacock’s innocence is not merely a legal triumph, but an invitation to a shift in thinking. The responsibility of sex, pornography, and more broadly, the image is more and more becoming ours. Now is the time to investigate what that means or we’ll still be stuck in the old narrative, and we must be willing to do this as individuals. We must even go so far as to say that it is our right to decide whether we want to be corrupted or depraved.

Pornography, the image, and art in general is not fantasy, nor is it real. It is something beyond both. It has fantasy effects and real effects and everyone will encounter them differently.

We cannot understand if it affects us without understanding how and why – and that is a long and sometimes frightening trip that only freedom can afford. If we leave any aspect of it to the State, we only have the two choices presented in The Evil Dead: Throw it all into the fire or die.

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Bella Santorum is the eighth child (one prior child died when just two hours old) of presidential candidate and Internet punch line Rick Santorum and his wife Karen Garver Santorum. Rick Santorum, though charming and Midwestern on the campaign trail, though given to a humbling fashion tendency—the sweater vest—that has gotten most men a beat down in the middle school years, is among the more doctrinaire and dangerous politicians of the moment, right up there with Sam Brownback or Jon Kyl or Mitch McConnell. He never met a social issue that didn’t require from him a knee-jerk one liner that would turn heads with its oversimplification and vacuity. He never met an earmark he wouldn’t try to bring home to Pittsburgh. Though he is not as preening and narcissistic as Newt Gingrich, he is just as willing to say anything. And Karen Garver Santorum once wrote a book on children’s manners, called Everyday Graces. Before that, though, before marrying Rick, the guy whose last name also refers to a frothy mixture of lube and fecal material etc., she was living out of wedlock with an obstetrician who provided abortions. I’m betting that in those days she was a different Karen.

I find hypocrisy and mendacity among politicians somehow reassuring. It goes to show that anyone can be bought, and that in politics the price for which people can be bought is usually rather low. These things make the grim politics of the present less surprising.

However, when I think about how much contempt I have for Rick Santorum and how sure I am that somewhere in him lurks an anally-compulsive disco boy—why all the comments about how horrible it would be if people were allowed to do anything— I then start thinking about Bella. Bella is three years old and was born with Trisomy 18, which is a genetic condition not unlike Down Syndrome, but with more serious health complications. The list of potentially lethal effects of Trisomy 18, in fact, is rather terrifying. Half of children born with Trisomy 18 die upon birth, and 90% die within the first year. Santorum himself has indicated that while he was campaigning in Iowa at the end of 2011, Bella was having a lot of trouble breathing and had to be sent home to Virginia to be cared for by a nurse.

Now: when Bella was in utero Santorum and his wife presumably were able to have an amniotic fluid test to determine that Bella had a genetic abnormality, which Bella was more likely to have, because of Karen Santorum’s age at the time of the pregnancy, and they were able to decide to carry Bella to term because that is consistent with Santorum’s positions on abortion. More power to them. When my daughter was in utero, my wife and I decided not to get the amniotic fluid test because of the risk of miscarriage for “geriatric” moms, and because we agreed we would be content to have a child with Down’s Syndrome (Trisomy 21), if it came to that, which it did not. I commend the Santorums for carrying Bella to term and for caring for her now that she is here. Some people are not physically like the majority of us, and yet we can still love them deeply.

This is the sort of thing that bears repeating. Even when you are Pro Choice in all cases.

Still, Just as I found Sarah Palin’s use of Trig on the campaign trail in 2008 slightly sinister, so have I found Bella’s appearances in Iowa sinister, and I’m glad she is back in Virginia where her breathing problems can be monitored carefully. But as a parent myself I am afraid I am also thinking about how keen is the absence of a child especially during a professional year as demanding as what Santorum is going through now, assuming Santorum is capable of human emotions. Yes, he has six other children, one of whom, an older daughter, acts as a spokesman for her dad. This daughter recently indicated that the family carries around lapel buttons depicting Bella, so that she is uppermost in their thoughts no matter where they are. Publicity stunt? Or grief manifested?

And what does Bella think about exactly? And how often is she affixed to the breathing apparatus? Does she think about the discomfort of the mask? Does she miss her parents? Are there certain repetitive images, screensavers, let’s say, that are capable of keeping her mesmerized for hours? Will there ever be an age when Bella Santorum can understand party politics? Will she respond to love? Will she, like a friend of mine who has Trisomy 21, love Elvis? And when they say that those kids who survive a childhood with Trisomy 18 will “live into adulthood,” what does that mean? Will she live out a complete term? Or will she devastate her parents and her siblings down the road? Does she realize that there is something about her that is unlike other children? What will the Santorums do with her if her dad wins the nomination? (Unlikely, I know.) Does Bella feel the pressures of the campaign? Does she care what her dad does? Will she welcome him home when he loses? How did she feel in that one impressive publicity photo she did with her dad, where he seems to have John Boehner’s tan on? Was that love enough for her? And is she named after Queen Isabella? Or Isabella Adjani? Wouldn’t we all love Bella? If Bella were sitting in our lap?

Easy to loath Santorum. Easy to love that Internet buffoon that Dan Savage has made of him. But what about Bella? Have you thought about Bella?

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Let me start by saying that I think there’s really no legitimate argument that downloading content protected by copyright isn’t theft. The fact that Yglesias is twisting himself into knots in order to argue that if you look at downloading in one specific way it might not quite be theft is evidence of that. If you’re having to construct special circumstances and questionable analogies in order to make a case, your case is on pretty shaky footing.

But here’s what Crain is missing. The question over whether or not it’s stealing is irrelevant at this point. There’s no social stigma attached to being a downloader the way there is to, say, shoplifting, and I suspect that most people who are generally opposed to downloading (who don’t have a financial stake either way) don’t think of downloaders as morally repugnant people. Part of that comes from the fact that there’s still a relatively small number of people who are downloading (compared to the general internet populace), and part stems from the general public’s lack of understanding about what’s going on or how.

I think, though, that the bigger reason why there’s no social stigma attached to downloading is because, on some level, most people break laws when we find them inconvenient and when we don’t see harm in doing so. Drivers exceed the speed limit all the time–some do it recklessly, but others do it moderately. I’ve been known to go 75 in a 70 under the notion that a state trooper isn’t likely to pull me over when there are people going 80 or faster. I rationalize it by saying to myself that the damage I’m doing is minimal at worst. There’s no question I’m breaking the law, and if a trooper gives me a ticket, then I can’t really complain about it (though I no doubt will).

This is how the casual downloader sees what they’re doing–they’re doing 75 in a 70. They’re getting a movie once in a while, or a TV show that’s not available on their cable package, or an album from their youth. They don’t see themselves as doing serious damage to the economics of intellectual property. And on an individual level, they’re right. There are people who are the downloading equivalent of the drunk driver going 130 in an M-1 Tank through a school zone (I have no idea if that’s possible, but the image is vivid, right?). They hog tons of bandwidth and make money off the pirated content itself or off advertising ways to get to the pirated content.

We can take this analogy a little further. The person who gets a ticket for driving 5 miles per hour over the limit probably has reason to feel like the punishment is harsh. Not only is there the issue of the cost of the ticket, but there’s the chance that one’s insurance rates will go up, and one’s time will be spent dealing with the aggravation of a ticket. The ticket for the person going 5 mph over the limit hurts more than the one for going 20 mph because the fine feels disproportionate to the offense.

The same goes for occasional downloaders who get tagged by content companies. Lawsuits with six-figure demands for downloading movies feel overly harsh, both to the people being sued and to bystanders (especially when the proof being offered is questionable much of the time). It feels like users are being targeted more than the providers are.

There’s one last reason why this whole question is irrelevant though, and it’s linked to technology. Even before the current versions of SOPA and PIPA were shelved, hackers were posting workarounds so that downloaders could get to the content they want. The pirates have always stayed ahead of legislation and enforcement, and there’s no reason to suspect this will change in the future. Not even if governments are willing to break the internet in an attempt to try.

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Back when my mother and I lived in Westwood, in apartment #4 in a quadplex, we had roommates. A Caribbean film student who argued with her boyfriend too loudly, and a gay couple: one tall redhead named David and his boyfriend, a brunette with a Tom Selleck moustache (also named David). The mustachioed David argued with my mom too much, and our refrigerator was just a bunch of M’s and D’s on everything. So then we lived by ourselves but then we were robbed a lot. By a lot I mean we were robbed four times. One of the times we were home and a guy came in our room with a dull knife poised in the air like he was going to stab us. Instinctually my mom screamed, “Ted!” and at the sound of a man’s name he dropped his knife and ran out. The burglar didn’t even think about taking our jars. They were the first things I checked for. I had seventy-six cents in mine.

Later, we were able to get the fuck out of there, and we didn’t have to worry about the robberies and the burglars, and we packed our two little ceramic cookie jars that sat on the mantle. Mine was a small jar with a cork stopper that read ‘Porsche Savings Account.’ Hers was painted pink and had the words ‘Boob Job’ on it.

We moved in with my mom’s boyfriend. He had a really Irish last name, like Murphy or O’Neill. He was obsessed with everything Japanese. He wanted us to speak Japanese. He wanted me to eat Japanese. He wanted me to write Japanese. He had a two bedroom apartment and a roommate and a big black piano. I slept in his closet. I pushed his shoes aside and put blankets in the middle and made a fort. Sometimes I lined it with my toys.

That feels like a long time ago. Even though my mom is holding on to those days with tight knuckles turned white. Even though her long pointed witchy nails won’t let go. It was so long ago I block it out on most days.

***

Before foster care there was a night we were raped. My mom in a small twin bed perched beside me. Me alone in a bathroom. Maybe this is why a whirlwind hit our house when I entered my teen years. Before the teen years we were always poor.

***

On the day that I was moved out of that apartment, I didn’t know it was going to be the last time I would see the neighboring Mexicans in the building. I was packed like a runaway with just a week’s worth of clothing in my backpack. There was a little puffy drooling baby girl in the window below us. She had dark brown hair and big pearl boba eyes and I flicked her off because I was trying to teach her how to do that when no one was looking.

***

I was born nice as hell. I was born so damn sweet. I could never get mad. I could never get in trouble. Good good good. I curtsied. I studied hard. I said my prayers. I finished my food. If I went to your mom’s house I’d make her love me. I was born with an invisible locket around my neck. Only half of a heart. The right half. The half that said, “BE.” Everyone else had the “MINE.”

***

Then in foster care I got pissed. I was pissed because there were so many small sticky faces. So many kids that I met that had photos of their mothers tucked in their socks. Or they put them in a drawer somewhere between their shirts. Or they ran away almost every week with the picture next to their chests. They ran away to see their mom that they loved so much who worked so hard but they couldn’t stay together because their mom was a prostitute, or their mom was on drugs, or their mom worked in the morning and in the night so their mom worked all the time and they never saw them, or their mom was on welfare and they had too many other siblings. I saw so many kids who wanted more than anything to be with their mom that loved them a lot but their mom was poor so they were taken away. Then they lived in a place like the place that I lived on Venice Boardwalk where we couldn’t go anywhere and there were lots of rules on how to talk and how to act and what to clean and who not to fuck and it was all a lot to make me mad.

***

I was pissed. I was virile. I was a clot of gamey teenager. I wanted to fight and draw and write and make messes and I was hoping maybe that I could go into an alley and get raped and then murdered and then maybe someone would rape my bones. That was the good type of mood I was in when I first picked up a copy of Leontiev’s Political Economy. And then suddenly I was critical and I started to get a little strategic and maybe even tactical at times. But then there were these people that welcomed me into this big house that used to be the Ukranian Cultural Center. It was a big wooden house in West Adams with large banisters and upstairs there was a bookstore. The woman that worked there was an old Bolshevik named Esther who was at least seventy years old. She joked about going outside and feeling a breeze and when she looked down she realized she’d forgotten her pants. If we ever had a rally and someone was gonna get arrested she raised her hand up high, because really who would want to arrest her? And we had meetings in that big old house and we plotted how we were gonna find a solution and my heart was on fire and I took all that gamey anger and pushed toward plotting for a revolution.

***

I used to “teach” at a juvenile detention center and came to find very quickly that in order to learn a child needs four things 1) safety, 2) shelter, 3) food, 4) love. Don’t we want all children to have that?

I needed it, but I had absolutely no clue. I was fifteen years old. It was my first family placement. Instantly I had a family. A mom, a dad, three brothers, one sister, a dog, a cat. The house was in Cheviot Hills. My basketball team ran past the house during practice. When it was hot we’d swoop through the door and all jump in the pool. My room was in the back-end of the house. It had a waterbed and its own bathroom and windows that cranked out to the pool.

I was on an outing with my birth mother. She got to see me once a week. She always liked to push for more. We were at a teahouse. Time was beginning to drag. It was getting toward the end of our allotted visiting time. I needed to ask for what I wanted. That’s the moment I realized I might be poor for the rest of my life.

***

As a child I was certain I was going to make something of myself. There was the whole bit with the grapes and practicing to be a neurosurgeon. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time alone trying to find a way to make my mom and me rich. I wanted to save lots of lives so I thought maybe I could be a neurosurgeon. I heard they were the best-paid ones. I heard it was like taking off the skin of a grape in one piece without injuring the meat of the grape and then sewing it back together. I sat many hours with a big pile of grapes. One by one unpeeling them. If I made a mistake I put one down and started over again. I eventually gave up. Mark, my mom’s boyfriend, taught me how to smoke cigarettes. I did that instead. Marlboro Reds.

There was the Porsche savings account with two dollars and some change in it. I just never doubted I was gonna be rich. I mean I was already taller than all the women in my family. How much harder would it be to be richer? So it was a shock to be sitting in a teahouse at fifteen years old and to ask my mom for money for Spring Break, a weekend in Mexico, and for her to hand me twenty bucks.

I’ll tell you what I did. I handed it back. I had to hand it back and tell her never mind. Because it was too much to explain that when I said I needed money for a weekend away I meant more like two hundred bucks not twenty. It was too hard to explain that things cost things these days. I took one glance at my plans to be just like my friends. With a family, and a pool, and a dog, and a cat, and to get to go away for Spring Break. I looked at that idea and let it go. I wasn’t like anyone…unless that person was poor.

***

I remember the first time I became politically active as a time of too much and too little. Our parents were useless at their jobs; aging out because of computers and ideas weren’t enough anymore. There was no working your way up to the top. It was all schools and classes and there was this thing called NAFTA and people were getting everything made for cheaper somewhere else. Somewhere far away.

***

Because of all this want, we sometimes are afraid we feel too much. Some of us try to go numb; we turn on the television and zone out on political debates, or reality people showing their other selves—their nasty bad acting selves—or read news about serial killers or car bombers or we drink too much or eat too much or run too much. We make our lives numb so we can take care of ourselves and be separate from a collective anguish of powerlessness.

But in that last hour we are into feeling. We are into intimacy. My beloved says the single most poignant thing I have ever heard. She says, “I love to go to bed and I love to wake up.”

This is so true. I can’t say how true it is. It’s that first bright moment of feeling everything and completely being relieved of these feelings with either the everythingness of awakeness or the nothingness of sleep.

***

Strangely, it was for dreams like these—the simplest dreams of rest, of feeling, of safety—that I first began to look at taxes. Taxes are the tool that makes these dreams of ours possible. Shelter for everyone, food for everyone, taxes ensure public safety. And what about love? Love is given and received. Love is not a solitary act. Love requires people to commune with one another.

My previous associations with taxes were shame and guilt and trickery. Then I looked at my history with money and public funding in general. Some people have argued that we are a nation of self-interested people. People who only care about themselves. Their own well-being.

I disagree. I think we are better than that but have been assaulted by the overwhelming personification of Greed. In all the books we read, in all the films we watch, all the stuff in the news and social media, those who possess greed have the characteristic affect of the slow scrape of a Brillo pad against my heart. The most ferocious. The taking of things that do not belong (sex, money, power, children). The taking of too much is greed personified.

It’s our first lesson in pain.

***

One of my friends tells a story of being in daycare. All the kids had to learn how to take turns. They lined up to each take their turn on playing in a tire swing. Eager to make new friends she offered up her turn to another girl. The girl took it. My friend was denied hers because she gave it away. She remembers praying afterward, asking god why it hurts so bad to be nice?

Greed is taking all the turns and not sharing any. Greed is having all the money and not paying taxes to help deliver a safe system for abused and abandoned children in foster care. Or greed is having all the money and refusing to pay taxes that results in the separation of families who have plenty of love but no resources to stay together. Greed is what keeps Los Angeles (at 94,000 homeless people) the homeless capitol of the nation despite its residents that belong to the top 1% income bracket.

Greed lies to people, fueling their fears that if oil companies like Chevron or Shell were charged an oil severance tax they would charge us more at the pump.

Greed is what convinces people that if you charge more taxes big corporations would leave your state.

Here’s a secret that the Haves are keeping from us: Taxes are revolutionary. Taxes are a medium to distribute wealth in a capitalist society. Today, I’m happy to be accountable in this way. Accountable to my community. I love my community. I want my community to thrive.

Unlike Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO and Chairman of the board of General Electric. Immelt’s company was deemed the sixth largest firm in the U.S. in 2011 and the 14^th most profitable. In fact the company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion and yet they paid nothing in taxes. In fact they claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

I think Jeffrey Immelt knows how revolutionary taxes can be. In fact, GE claims their extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and “innovative accounting.” I’ll say it’s innovative, especially with former treasury official John Samuels leading their tax department.

Perhaps with all this extra money in pocket Mr. Immelt can now carry the nurturing title of Job Creator. Because I like that: job creator. I like the nice round sweet sound of that. I mean, in 2010 his salary was $21,428,765.00. He should be able to pay a lot of people. But the reality is the average salary at GE in 2010 was $33,840.00. That means he made 633 times the median workers pay.

I don’t want to get bogged down here with numbers. It’s just that it’s the first time in our living memories that this type of disparity between frontline workers and CEOs has occurred. The first time that there are more public sector union workers than private sector union workers. In fact, it’s been noted that the $45,000 median income for males today is the same as it was 30 years earlier in inflation-adjusted terms.

Robert Reich (2010, author of Aftershock) speaks directly to this issue:

“If the gains in productivity in the U.S. economy had been shared equitably over the past 30 years, the typical worker would be more than 60 percent better off than he or she was in 2007.”

When I pay my taxes I am telling my community I value you. What about hard work paying off? It’s true. I think we should be rewarded for hard work. I know that I would not have gotten where I am today were it not for my hard work. But even that is not a solitary effort. I was able to get where I am today because of the people who were here before me. I’m not just talking about the vast civil rights movement, or the woman’s suffragist movement, I’m talking about the guy who works for Caltrans who helped me get to and from school and thousands of job interviews. I’m talking about the teachers, Ms. Smith who was my High School English teacher and saw something in me. Ms. Marshall, the round sweet journalism instructor who as a licensed reporter did her job and got me into foster care, which was a long, achy road, but one that perhaps has saved my life. The nurses who tended to me when I was exposed to tuberculosis as a young child. The military that helped so many members of my family escape poverty and discover a nation they believed in so much they’d risk they’re lives for it. The firefighters who do the unthinkable, who run into burning buildings for perfect strangers. Firefighters who often had to come out to emergency cold weather shelters, where I worked, in the middle of the night to tend to a homeless person who was scared they were losing their mind. Sometimes all they needed was some attention. I’ll never forget one Christmas working in the shelter. A firefighter bent down in front of a homeless woman smiling placing a band-aid on her unwounded flesh just to give her a secret joy. Today the average pay of one S&P 500 index CEO could pay the salary of 252 firefighters.

If we are saying I value you when we pay our taxes, what is a corporation saying when they don’t pay taxes? Are they saying the opposite? Are they saying they don’t care about whether or not other people have healthcare? I think it’s not too much to ask for people to have healthcare.

***

People often ask me what it was like to be in foster care. I can only tell you what my experience was like. For the most part I had a very lucky experience. I ingratiated myself to all of my friend’s parents so eventually when the time came they fostered me. I didn’t enter foster care until I was around fifteen years old. My largest struggle was with my education.

I grew up really valuing education. It was the only way out. The only way I could make something of myself. I applied myself thoroughly. When I was six my mother got accepted and began school at UCLA and I would sit in the library and wait for her to be let out of classes. I scoured the catalogues of books. Books books books.

When I was in junior high I was in a program for disadvantaged youth. Kids who were poor. It allowed us to take college courses while in junior high and high school so we could get ahead, remain interested, save money. I was also in a gifted magnet, which means I got pulled out of class in elementary school to have my IQ tested. I looked at sequences and puzzles and tried to configure them. I remember peering over the desk at the guy administering the test.

“So how’d I do?”

He looked alarmed. I guess it was a secret I was being monitored.

“Excuse me?”

“On my time? How’d I do on my time?”

He was trying to discreetly time me. The stopwatch under the desk. He laughed.

“You’re doing fantastic.” He said. Then later I was put in a smaller class with dorks so I guess I did well. Gifted and talented they said.

Then at fifteen there was foster care. I had to live in a temporary shelter while my foster parents were getting licensed, finger printed, house inspected, all of that. During the orientation I was informed that I probably should not go to school. It would be too difficult to get to and from. They weren’t allowed to give us any money for transportation. There were also rules to abide by in the house. Rules like lights out at eight. They said I could stay in the house and take classes on-site. On-site was a fancy way to say Special Ed. The kids there were perfectly nice but stuffed with Lithium, drooling, overweight, with slow, dragging movements. They were At-Risk or some people referred to them as Throw-Away. I was determined to stay on at school. I only ate half my dinners so I could bring the other half to school for lunch. I made friends with a girl who lived in the neighborhood so we could car pool. My roommate at the time, a pregnant teen, slept with one thumb in her mouth and the tops of her feet rubbing up against each other, while I sat with a flashlight in my mouth pointed at a book under a sheet. Reading, reading, reading.

At this point that I got the distinct feeling that it was unfair. Things were unequal. At the end of the year, my classmates and I all got the same piece of paper when we walked across the stage. But the journey there was not equal.

The differences didn’t end there, they just began. I went back into a group home after being fostered by my friend’s family. Cloaked in rejection and abandonment. I had no clue it was temporary. I thought that house and that family and that life was forever. I remember being in my first group home for all girls and having to go to the doctor. They took me to their physician. There in the gynecologist’s office, my legs in stirrups, open like a book, he asked questions, “So why are you in the group home?”

“Uh, because I had to leave where I was staying.”

“Why?”

“The family I was with were getting divorced.”

“Oh, I see. This might pinch a bit take a breath in.”

“—–.”

“Exhale. Have you ever been raped?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you need to douche.”

I guess open like a book is not a good analogy. I was open like a group home. Open like a toilet seat. Open like a trash can. Opened, closed, opened, closed. I had no way to be anymore. And yet I applied to the same jobs as everyone else and put together the same kind of resume as every one else and when I went forward and went on a job interview I tried to look as well kept as everyone else.

I even went to a nice Blue Ribbon school when I was in high school. I graduated from a school in a nice town that’s five miles long and has a Main Street with shops and lots of fraternization and drinking going on. The people who live there own horses and play golf. One of those places.

Something else was happening when I was seventeen. I was going to get emancipated. I had enough with all this temporary foster care open trash can business. I was ready to be my own guardian. So I put together a binder with all my certificates and accomplishments. Photos of me looking like a good girl in Ann Taylor outfits, flowy and silky and non-threatening. I showed these photos to my attorney and a judge and they emancipated me. Which really meant that I got no more financial support from the government and when I was looking at colleges and tracing college applications with my fingertips, places like Sarah Lawrence and Reed College, I suddenly started to wonder how I would pay for this. So I asked my social worker and she said that it was time I went on General Relief.

I didn’t think she heard me correctly. I asked her how I would pay for college and she said again that I could go and apply for General Relief. What you do to get General Relief is you go and stand in a line all day with other people who are hot and tired and poor and sad and hungry.  All of us in the line felt like we moved past this like there was a more dignifying way to spend our time.

Then you fill out some paperwork and if you’re lucky they sign you up and you get two hundred dollars a week. Which was fifty cents less than what I got paid when I worked at Winchell’s Donuts in high school, where the manager smoked in my face and hit on me all the time and I got a gun pulled on me for donuts one time and we couldn’t close because I had to work off the loss that was made with that dozen donuts and closing was simply out of the question. So instead I worked graveyards with a shaky hand any time a batch of teenagers walked by, which was pretty much always.

***

I don’t think readjusting taxes is going to make it all better. I don’t think that if we take another look at this thing suddenly all of the same opportunities are going to pop up for everyone but I think that it’s important to point out that it will make things more even. Corporate tax dodgers are as much job creators as kids in foster care are throwaway.

I’m not an economist. I don’t have to be to see that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt received $313,219.00 in total compensation last year—which was at least nine times the median workers’ pay. Google also employed a tax evasion strategy by housing their licensing and patents outside the US, so they got to enjoy a 10.8 billion dollar profit in 2010.

In 1980, CEO pay equaled only 42 times the average blue-collar worker’s pay. By 2010, CEO pay had grown to 343 times a worker’s median pay. This is the widest gap in the world.

***

Wider than the Philippines. My people live their lives tending to things. And if you told them the city was cruel with budget cuts they would scoff at you and your American budget cuts. They lived half their lives in city dumps. Here the trash bins behind restaurants are caged and locked to keep homeless out. “Why do they lock it up?” they ask.

“So the homeless don’t eat the trash.”

“Oh.”

But it still makes no sense. Is food-trash only for throwing away? My people drink coffee for dinner. Kills the appetite. Little empty bellies always round.

So that’s why I felt my heart pound the first time I saw someone stand at a podium, fist in air, microphone against mouth chanting “Si Se Puede! Si Se Puede! Si Se Puede!” And then there were claps that were slow to start with spaces in between like the clap that a kid makes when he’s teasing another kid. The clap of humiliation but it gained speed faster faster faster until the whole crowd was lifted up by this clap and my heart was catching up with the clap. I felt it clanging against my chest. I felt my nipples hard against my shirt. I felt my hands tight. I wasn’t a person; I was part of this big giant super fast heartbeat. And everything in the vehicle formerly known as my body screamed “SIGN ME UP! SIGN ME UP MOTHERFUCKERS!” And so it began.

***

Some people think electoral politics are for jerks and pussies. I’m sure my younger angry teenage self thought that. Today I know different. Like taxes, they’re a tool. What I’m trying to say is that this is 2012, an electoral year. Let’s all, the At-Risk, the Throwaways, let’s be the secret weapon. They don’t think we’re gonna do anything but camp out. Let’s pursue economic justice. Let’s dare be united and deliberate about it.

***

At night sometimes when I’m reading a book I feel that same loud hummm in my bones. The hum of my heart and mind being on fire. Sometimes it happens when I’m writing or occasionally even if I cook something. It always starts in my head these things. I’ll close my eyes and write a story or draw a picture or imagine a meal and then when the image in my mind matches the world around me my hairs stand on end and I can even still have my eyes shut when I am doing one of these various things and I will just know know, know I am getting it right. That’s how I feel when I vote. Like finally after all of it, all the standing in hungry lines, and marching on asphalt in dark negative degree mornings, all of the gripping of signs, all of the anguish of loving a mother and being terrified of a mother and leaving a mother, has led me to this one place; this one slip of paper. I take the paper and the tiny pencil, that looks like no big deal but is the biggest deal, and I think about all the mega-important times in my life that are marked with dinky little pencils and I put my mark on the paper and plop it in the box and think of it as the box of wishes and prayers for babies to have 1) safety, 2) shelter, 3) food, 4) love.

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His influence throughout the internet is undeniable. In 1991, he famously created the line, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people” as well as influential concepts like the “anxious interval” and “cute formalism.” Momus has also blogged for places like The New York Times and Wired.

He is currently living in Osaka, Japan and is set to go on tour in Europe starting February 2012.

This interviewer’s favorite blog entries written by Momus, which she believes would serve as an interesting glimpse into Momus’s thought include:

Momus’s entries on Tavi, Tao Lin, Fumiko Imano, “Raunch Feminism”, “Growing old in, and with, Japan”, Orientalism, Kate Moss in blackface, and (of one among many) on design.

***

The Rumpus: Some of your fellow fans I have talked to have said that you are guided mostly by your aesthetic sense. Do you agree? I remember that we once talked briefly about the dangers of being led by your aesthetic sense. What do you feel about that? I feel like you aesthetically/emotionally/intuitively respond well to something and then build up a rationalization around it. I think this makes for some very interesting and innovative thoughts/ideas, but this also seems to offend and repulse a lot of people (e.g. your defense of being primarily attracted to Japanese women.) What are your thoughts on all of this?  Do you feel like it’s the duty of an artist to be a provocateur?

Hypnoprism cover

Momus: Yes, I’m an aesthete. I respond first to things on that level, a “blink” level of reflexive attraction or repulsion. Actually, I think my life is structured around the ramifications of orgasm, the sublimated bubblings and percolations of orgasm through cultural areas. And yes, it’s probably all too obvious to people that my philosophy, such as it is, got tacked on to “things that make me come” — either literally or figuratively — as an afterthought, a post-rationalisation that I nevertheless insist on in a slightly guilty way (while pretending to be bold and unapologetic). That’s probably rather infuriating. I’m very strongly marked by a post-protestant north European mindset — one you might find stupidly expressed in the British tabloids, or intelligently in Kierkegaard’s Either / Or — which is structured tensely and productively around the dialectic between prurience and prudishness, the aesthetic and the ethical, amorality and guilt, Saturday night and Sunday morning, sensation and will, penis and brain.

I think people would be entitled to get annoyed by “he only likes that because it makes him come” if I held some kind of authoritative position, wielded power, claimed objectivity, and so on. In fact I do as much as I can to make that impossible, using (maybe over-using) the “unreliable narrator” device, posing whenever possible as a dissolute and untrustworthy character, dressing weirdly, contradicting myself, working in art. I think that in art my most horrible vices can be virtues.

Rumpus: Your Wikipedia page says that you are “obsessed with identity.” Even though I’ve been following your work for a long time, I’ve never understood exactly what that phrase is getting at. What are your thoughts on “identity”?

Momus: I had nothing to do with the writing of that page, and I have no idea who did. So I don’t quite know what they meant. I’m actually very bored with Identity Politics, which seems to have undermined and displaced the politics of collectivity and the politics of class, particularly in American and British universities, during the neo-liberal period. What I do in my work is play games with identity, perhaps in order to prove that it’s fluid and fake and doesn’t really matter very much. I privilege pre-cut, shallow identities over faceted, nuanced, psychological identities. Masks over faces. For instance, in my Book of Jokes the characters are The Molester and The Murderer, and a father and a son. You don’t really need to know more about them than those roles. Yes, role is a much better word. Roles and masks. “Momus is obsessed with roles and masks”. The thing is, whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry was probably an American, and Americans — mired in individualism — prefer to think in terms of identity than in terms of roles and masks. An American would never have called a novel “Confessions of a Mask”.

Rumpus: There seems to be a lot of “faux-nostalgia” among very young people for the 1990’s (an admiration for a decade they didn’t experience/weren’t really aware of.) In the 90’s you seemed to be living a very exciting life in the art worlds of Tokyo and New York City. What can you tell us about the 90’s, good and bad, that you think people would find interesting?

Momus: I was asked recently to write a piece about Tokyo pop in the 90s and turned it down rather rudely saying I was totally bored by the subject. Perhaps it’s still — for me — in the shadow of what I’ve called “the anxious interval”. I haven’t yet had my impulse to revive it. It may come. For me, right now, the 90s represent what Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance”. A bubble feeling. Because money was around, I got drawn into making commercial music. I had hits, and lived, surrounded by gadgets and designer trinkets and girls, in a penthouse pad in London. Some of my website writing from that era really disgusts me now. It’s like “dahlings, I went to a super art party, Tracey Emin was there, it was so glamourous”. Actually, I get the same disgust now when I read Andy Warhol’s diaries (or, rather, listen to Bob Colacello’s autobiography on Ubu.com). What an idiot Andy Warhol was in the 1970s! Just completely superficial and supine before money. I know that money and success could easily have made me idiotic. I don’t like that person. In the 90s I almost became him. I believed in America, I liked the fact that there was this asshole president making lots of money and getting lots of blowjobs, just like I was. I believed in digital culture. I believed in glossy product design, high-concept London restaurants. I liked the West.

Now, in contrast, I think the internet is boring and reductive, I’m quite anti-Western, I live in a slummy part of an Asian city, I’m into the positive side of poverty, I think the best design is amateur and shabby, I like the idea of ignoring commercial culture and abstaining completely from high status purchases, I’m into the valuable estrangements of austere highbrow art. I can barely stand pop music any more. All I listen to for pleasure is ancient Japanese folk music, on crackly vinyl. Then again, when you make pop a guilty pleasure you make it strong. Pop will rush back periodically. Many happy returns of the repressed.

Rumpus: You mentioned in a comment on Marxy’s blog about how despite Japan being a collectivist society, it’s producing a wide array of innovative fashion styles, unlike in the individualist West, where according to you, everyone mostly tries to look the same. It was an interesting comment to me because in individualistic cultures we tend to have an idea of collectivist cultures as being very stifling, creatively speaking. What do you see as being the benefits of collectivist societies with regards to art, and creativity, generally?

Momus: All societies are collectivist, it’s just that some pretend not to be. So in the West we get tied in knots trying to explain why rebels and hipsters all rebel or stay hip in such narrow, glib and repetitive ways. And occasionally we wonder whether there really is a place outside society, or whether that “maverick” space is actually also in society, and just has a different name. The question of originality matters to me, but I’m also a relativist. What looks like originality at one level can look like conformity at another. Japan is very group-oriented, very conformist, very collectivist, almost like a communist or fascist society in some ways. At the same time, it’s a very eccentric country, and very ambitious, organised and productive. People who dismiss Japan are foolish. There was just a very good article in the New York Times by Eamonn Fingleton — the inspiration for a character called Declan Singleton in my Book of Japans — about how Japanoclasts are misguided. Other countries should be so lucky as to have Japan’s “problems”.

Basically, what I learned from Japan is that creativity isn’t solely the domain of individual artists or inventors. Groups can be creative too. It took me a while to realise this, but when I did it made me happy, because it resolved an apparent conflict between two of the things I hold most dear: collectivism and creativity. I think you can say that Japan is capable of producing both the cliches of the manga industry and the originality of someone like Yuichi Yokoyama, whose quirky abstract mangas depend for their impact on twisting the conventions of mainstream manga. It’s not like Yokoyama defies manga, or appears courtesy of divine lightning.

Rumpus: In the past you have talked a lot about “post-men” and “post-feminism.” What are your current thoughts on these concepts? I imagine you are very aware of the “herbivore men” trend in Japan. What are your thoughts on this? Could you give a general account of how you feel about Japan and the differences between how the West views gender and feminism? In the past you’ve talked admiringly of what you’ve referred casually to “femininity-ism” which seems to me to be similar to “lipstick/stiletto feminism.” Can you go into your thoughts on this?

Momus: I was very marked in the 1980s by feminism. A lot of my 80s work was gender-utopian, in the sense that I would happily — I should add “guiltily” — have seen men relinquish power and let some kind of matriarchy replace them. My way of hastening this was to reveal the innermost workings of the male mind, and show it in the worst possible light. Don’t trust men! Don’t trust me, I’m one! It was a deconstructive project. As a club to beat people with, Marx seemed shrunken and soft in the 1980s, but Freud was still a knobbly cudgel. So I flailed away, to rather little effect.

In Japan, because people don’t believe in things “outside of society”, gender roles haven’t been deconstructed. No Japanese woman I’ve talked to has ever wanted to be associated with feminism. Here, you embrace the mask of gender and relish it. Women want men to be men, not surrogate women, and vice versa. The “herbivore men” thing, like the “hikikomori” thing, has been overblown. It’s a marginal phenomenon, and really just confirms the norm that in Japan most men, and most male role models, continue to be very masculine. My Japanese girlfriend often says to me “You’re too passive!” She definitely wants me to be more macho and rewards me when I am. So I’m now inclined to think 1980s gender role deconstruction was a waste of time. I’ve resigned myself to my essential maleness, and I get on well with women who’ve come to terms with the specific power they have as women. Is that “lipstick feminism”? I actually prefer women without lipstick. I’m also with Ariel Levy in the rejection of so-called Raunch Feminism — empowering pole-dancing and so on. I prefer maypole-dancing.

One thing I find interesting about you, Marie, is your honesty about your responses to pornography, about how PC porn is completely unexciting. And I think in retrospect my 1980s strategy “to show men behaving badly as a way to undermine male power” is just another piece of post-rationalisation on my part. I just wanted to show men behaving badly, period. Because it was sexy.

Rumpus: What artists are you most excited about, currently, that you wish more people were aware of? You’ve said before that most of your favorite artists are women. Who is your favorite female artist, and why do you like her so much? What is your advice to young female artists (funny, sincere, or whatever)?

Momus: I think my friend Misaki Kawai might be the female artist I’m most impressed by at the moment. There’s something very primal and childish about her, yet strong-willed and elegant. She travels constantly, in places like India and Nepal and China. She dresses very well. She has a restless, humourous energy. Her boyfriend Justin Waldron is like her enabler and manager, organising and structuring things so that her impulsive and intuitive energy doesn’t have to be chanelled, diluted or disturbed. I really admire people who can preserve the spontaneity, charm and confidence of a 5 year-old, and Misaki seems to have managed that. I also really admire people who remind me of the spirit of the 1960s — the hippy trail, experimentation, colour — and Misaki has something of that about her too. She’s a free spirit, a force of nature.

Rumpus: You’re about to turn 52. What are your thoughts on aging? Some of the things you’ve written have suggested an acceptance of aging, but you are also famous for respecting and admiring youth. Do you worry about losing relevancy? Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Finally, to quote a Tweet, “what is with [“Gen Y”] and Momus?” Are you proud of proving a set of cultural references, inspiration etc to so many young artists (most famously Vampire Weekend and Ariel Pink)?

Momus: There’s good and bad in ageing. My brain used to be full of secondhand experiences, and my model of reality was unreliable because I wasn’t quite sure who to trust. Now it’s full of my own experiences, gathered all over the world, and I trust it more. I can just sit still and think of the people I’ve known, the places I’ve been, the experiences I’ve had, and it’s brilliant entertainment. And while it’s horrible to age and weaken and lose your hair or feel your sexual appeal waning, I wasn’t particularly attractive when I was young, so in some ways I think I’ve improved with age. Also, I think artists who are avant, underground, spiky and ugly aren’t seen to age in quite the way cute mainstream artists do. Yes, it matters to me that there are younger people who understand and appreciate what I do. Ariel Pink recently suggested we collaborate, which meant a lot to me, even if we never actually follow through on it. It really matters to me that people tweet that they’re listening to my records or reading my books, or that I said something that interested them. I want to matter, and keep mattering, and keep being an important part of the lives of strangers, although I know better than ever now that I can reach only a few illuminated, broadminded, perverse and adventurous souls. I have no idea where or who I’ll be in ten years, but I hope — I know — I’ll still be producing things. One thing I never seem to do is dry up.

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