Imagine a $1,900 Berluti Loafer

stamping on a human face --forever.

As I have said on this blog many times (and as George Carlin said long before me), if you want to understand Chicago politics, or big business, corporate media, academia or, really, any large, modern institution that has been captured by the "New Capitalism" philosophy of perpetual disorientation, perpetual dislocation, and pauperization of the great majority of society at the bottom in order to indulge the perpetual winner-take-all, zero-accountability ideology of the tiny, privileged minority at the top...you have to understand the Two Commandments:

1. There is a club.
2. You ain't in it.

(Above, various participants at the 2009 Futures of Modernity Symposium wrap a lot of insightful language like "risk is a consequence of elite solidarity" around the subject.)

So many of the tragic and infuriating failures of modern American life are created by this simple, binary state of affairs, which is why, on all the many occasions I have worked this idea into an essay, I have never intended it to be taken as hyperbole, but as a plain and literal truth of our age. And as Blue Gal and I began working up subjects for this week's podcast (and possibly next week's, because I am a friggin' chatterbox) it surfaced again as one of the topics we are probably going to touch on under the general heading of the Preconditions of Reform. Not the desirability of reform -- I assume anyone with functional frontal lobes and access to the news of the day can see that our culture is horribly broken -- but the principles on which any hope of effective and humane reform depends.

And so to pre-iterate (tm) what you may hear in tomorrow, or next week (or never, if my constant swearing and uncontrollable Charlie Callas feernt-feernt effects

render that portion of the recording unusable) I do not believe that fundamental reform is possible if we do not return virtues like honesty, duty, excellence, experience, responsibility, labor, craft, patience and honor to positions of respect at the center of our civic and economic lives. These virtues do not come from On High; they are all learned behaviors, which means they must be deliberately manufactured, transmitted and reinforced by our cultural, political and media institutions.

Take a good, hard look at the leaders you see -- the ones that actually affect your life, from your boss to the CEO of multi-billion dollar, transnational corporations -- and ask yourself to what extent they actually embody traits like honesty, duty and a commitment to excellence, and to what extent they mouth those words due to social obligation, but will betray those ideals at the drop of a hat, or the whiff of a marginal increase in their bottom line.

Take a good, hard look at the institutions that intersect with your life and ask yourself to what extent they embrace and reward experience, labor and craft.

Take a good, hard look at the authorities who have real power over your life and ask yourself if you believe that, behind closed doors, they behave honorably, responsibly and patiently.

In a culture where these virtues are publicly and privately practiced and rewarded with the same kind of zealousness that the Right now rewards Sarah Palin for being a wincingly-ignorant, amply be-titted demagogue, or that Wall Street rewarded Lloyd Blankfein for being a rapacious, economy-wrecking vampire...then reform is possible.

In a culture where these virtues are merely ritually and perfunctorily intoned in public, while they are openly scorned and evicted from the corridors of power, this is what the future looks like:



A $1,900 Berluti loafer stamping on a human face — forever.