235

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Well, here we are, at the end of another year. I have nothing profound to say at this point; I'm going to leave that up to you. We spent 2014 watching the U.S. slide further into chaos and self-destruction; it's a good bet we'll see more of the same during the next twelve months. As a group, we Wafers could retard the process, if the American public would only listen to us; but as we all know, there's not much chance of that. Onward and Downward! That's all we can say.

Happy New Year!

mb

So Much for That

Dear Wafers,

So Much for That is the title of a remarkable novel by Lionel Shriver, which you might want to put on your Xmas Reading list. It has two important points to make:

1. The U.S. is a violent, depressing country filled with people who are not very bright; who are, at the most basic level, selfish and cruel; and who stopped being human a long time ago.
2. Hitting the road is the only intelligent response to this state of affairs, and if there is any way you can escape, it's essential that you do so. (Shriver herself moved to England.)

The book is bursting with brilliant passages. Here are two of my favorites:

"There's something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn't get any better and it's still shit. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but...it's a sell...I must have forty different 'passwords' for banking and telephone and credit card and Internet accounts, and forty different account numbers, and you add them up and that's our lives. And it's all ugly, physically ugly. The strip malls...the Kmarts and Wal-Marts and Home Depots...all plastic and chrome with blaring, clashing colors, and everyone in a hurry, to do what?"
"[He] was born into a country whose culture had produced the telephone, the flying machine, the assembly line, the Interstate highway, the air-conditioner, and the fiber-optic cable. His people were brilliant with the inanimate--with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with plastic that would survive a thousand years. With sentient matter--the kind that can't help but notice when a confidant suddenly drops off the map the moment the friendship becomes inconvenient, disagreeable, demanding, and incidentally also useful for something at last--his countrymen were inept...these people had never been taught how to behave in relation to a whole side of life--the far side--that had been staring them in the face since they had a face...these shabby specimens of the species..."

"After us," wrote Yeats a hundred years ago, "the Savage God." Looks like He has finally arrived.

mb

The American Sage

Dear Wafers:

A short while ago a Mexican journal asked me to write an essay on Lewis Mumford; which I did, and it just got published in Spanish translation. I thought you guys might want to read the English original. As follows:

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was one of those rare American geniuses whom almost no one paid attention to during his lifetime. The United States has a tradition of ignoring (or even ridiculing) those talented individuals who have been critical of its dominant culture—unbridled materialism and individualism—and who have offered an alternative to it, one that might be called spiritual and communitarian. Indeed, in my book Why America Failed, I argue that the reason America failed was that it consistently marginalized the representatives of the alternative tradition, from Capt. John Smith in 1616 to Emerson and Thoreau and Vance Packard and John Kenneth Galbraith down to President Jimmy Carter in 1979 (a number of congressmen believed Carter was actually insane). Lewis Mumford quite clearly belongs on this list, and most Americans who bothered to read him, during his lifetime, regarded his views as “precious” or “quaint”—well-intentioned, but out of sync with the real world. It should come as no surprise that by the end of his life Mumford, who began his career as a kind of “utopian realist,” had become a pessimist, and a fairly depressed one at that.

And yet, the remarkable thing is that when one reads his work today, one can’t help being struck by how sane it all is. To those who contend that Mumford’s ideas are irrelevant to the real world, I can only respond: “real” on whose definition? “Real” according to Goldman Sachs, whose goal is to amass trillions of dollars (to what end?)? “Real” according to Google, which seeks to digitalize and virtualize us out of (human, physical) existence? Mumford was not one of those who held that “progress” consisted of the latest gadget, the latest innovation, and he surely concurred with Octavio Paz, that we need to clarify what we mean by that word. If Mumford’s world view seems, at times, a bit medieval, we might want to remember that much was lost in the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity: craftsmanship, a deep appreciation of beauty, community, silence, and above all, a sense of spiritual purpose. It was this collection of values that Mumford stood for, and that he struggled to preserve or reintroduce into modern American life. His “failure” as a supposed fuddy-duddy or hopeless romantic was, to my mind—given the integrity of his work—a great success; America’s (material) “success” has proven to be, in the fullness of time, a colossal (human) failure.

What, then, was Mumford about? His career as a writer began in the context of the go-go capitalist era of the 1920s, with a book called The Story of Utopias,which criticized the Western utopian tradition as one-dimensional, projecting futures based purely on technological development. This was followed (in 1926) by The Golden Day, which took its theme not from the leading lights of the time, e.g. Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor, but from Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West argued that the northern urban culture of Europe was a “Faustian” world, characterized by bigness and rationality, eventually to be dominated by the soldier, the engineer, and the businessman—as America is today. This, said Spengler, marked the end of true civilization, and all that it could look forward to was fossilization and death. Mumford repeated this argument, but with an important twist: he believed the trajectory could be reversed, based on a revival of regional and organic life. A few years earlier, he helped found the Regional Planning Association of America, whose goal was to promote the “garden city” concept of the British town planner Ebenezer Howard. This emphasized limited-scale communities that would combine home and work in a single locale. These were not suburbs in the usual sense of the term; no commuting would be involved. (Mumford once described the American suburb as “a collective effort to live a private life.”) The towns would be surrounded by farmland and forests, and be community owned. As opposed to the dominant culture, that of hustling and the acquisitive life, these centers would promote the good life, which he said “means the birth and nurture of children, the preservation of human health and well being, the culture of the human personality, and the perfection of the natural and civic environment as the theater of all of these activities.” People would enjoy a sense of belonging, a relationship to nature, and be able to pursue meaningful work.

If all of this sounds utopian, it is important to note that such a community actually got built (in 1928), Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, designed for workers and the lower-middle class. It still exists, after a fashion. The houses are small, and front inward, toward a common green area. It still retains a village atmosphere, and constituted a real break with the model of commercial real estate development. Mumford lived there for a number of years, as did the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mumford later described the time as the happiest years of his life. Writing in the New York Times in 1972, Ada Louise Huxtable remarked:

"Public ownership of land, one of the basic premises, made possible a planned community, rather than speculative piece-meal exploitation…It was simple physical planning—the kind of humane, paternalistic,thoughtful layout that dealt clearly and primarily with a better way to live."

“Un-American,” in short; quintessentially Green. Of course, it eventually became a privately owned haven for the upper-middle class, as it got overtaken by the juggernaut of the dominant culture, which apparently nothing can stop. Wal-Mart, not Sunnyside Gardens, would carry the day.

For Mumford, all of this turned on Americans acquiring a different set of values. The nation, he wrote, needed to slow down the pace of industrialization and “turn society from its feverish preoccupation with money-making inventions, goods, profits, [and] salesmanship…to the deliberate promotion of the more human functions of life.” If Mumford was heir to Spengler, he was also in the lineage of Henry David Thoreau. Thus in Technics and Civilization (1934), says the historian David Horowitz, Mumford “envisioned the replacement of an age over-committed to technology, capitalism, materialism, and growth by the emergence of a humane, life-affirming economy based on the values of regionalism, community, and restraint.” Democracy, Mumford wrote a few years later, could only be reinvigorated by substituting spiritual pleasures for material ones; by an “economy of sacrifice.” He urged his readers to turn away from the American Dream, which he called a “deceptive orgy of economic expansion.” Instead, they needed to commit themselves to “human cooperation and communion.” Utopianism indeed.

Mumford struck a (somewhat) more realistic note in The Condition of Man (1944), a book that was influenced by his study of the late Roman Empire. It was precisely the unwillingness of the Roman people to look at their way of life, he said, a way of life founded on “pillage and pilfer,” that led to the fall of Rome. This must not happen to America, he cried; and as with the construction of Sunnyside Gardens, Mumford took his philosophy into the streets. Working with other activists in 1958, he was able to stop Robert Moses, New York City’s controversial urban planner, from constructing a four-lane highway through Greenwich Village. (Jesus, the thought of it!) In an essay he wrote the previous year, Mumford skewered those Americans who allow their cities to be trashed, à la Moses, and then go on holidays to Europe to enjoy beautiful, historic urban centers. But he did see the handwriting on the wall. By 1975 his comment on the American city was, “Make the patient as comfortable as possible. It’s too late to operate.”

Following his inspiration, however, there was at least one city that tried to protect itself from the dominant corporate-commercial model, namely Portland, Oregon. Portland’s success in doing so can be attributed to Mumford’s long-range influence; indeed, the city’s urban planners (in the 1970s) drew specifically on the garden city concept. Mumford had delivered a speech to the Portland City Club in 1938, and also submitted a memo entitled “Regional Planning in the Northwest,” which regional advocates still quote. The memo recommended the construction of a series of “urban inter-regions,” which involved the greening of the city core and the connection of greenbelt towns so as to ease congestion. Portland, Mumford wrote, would need a regional zoning authority, which he referred to as “collective democratic controls.” The mayor of Portland, Neil Goldschmidt (elected in 1972), brought a number of these proposals into his administration, and Mike Houck, charged with setting up a Metropolitan Wildlife Refuge System there, appealed to the legacy of Mumford in his plan to design an interconnected system of natural landscapes, which would include a network of “greenways” to bring people together. In 1992, the Metropolitan Service District published A Guidebook for Maintaining and Enhancing Greater Portland’s Special Sense of Place, which included a reprint of Mumford’s lecture to the City Club.

Much was accomplished in Portland, as a result. The city rezoned, so as to create diversity-of-income neighborhoods. While other cities were busy building expressways, Portland tore down an old four-lane highway and reconnected the town with its waterfront. In 1975, it cancelled a planned freeway that would have devastated part of the city and set up a light rail system instead. It also established an Urban Growth Boundary that forbade the building of commercial projects beyond a certain point. Buildings were required to have their display windows at street level, and a cap was put on the height of high-rises and the number of downtown parking spaces. The business district has parks full of fountains and greenery, and the downtown area is vibrant, replete with bars and cafes. Of course, some of this got rolled back beginning in 2004, when Oregon voters passed a referendum to abolish many of the state’s land-use regulations—a defense of individual property rights, or so they believed. But with Mumford’s ideas in mind, Portland made a definite attempt to move in an “un-American” direction.

Mumford, in the meantime, kept writing. In Technics and Civilization he had argued that the technological model of “progress” required human beings to submit to the cult of the machine. In the Middle Ages, he pointed out, technology was used in the service of life, e.g. the building of cities or cathedrals. But in the “paleotechnic era,” starting with the Industrial Revolution, the defining idea was to bring all of human experience under a technological regime, a program that would ultimately throw life out of balance. Mumford picked up this thread many years later in The Pentagon of Power, in which he asserted that the American “megamachine” was based on a poisoned arrangement, namely that the individual could enjoy the benefits of techno-capitalism if he or she pledged unquestioning allegiance to the system. (This argument was recently updated for the digital age by Dave Eggers in his brilliant, depressing novel, The Circle.) The solution, said Mumford, was obvious: reject the myth of the machine, and the whole structure will collapse like a house of cards. By this time, however, Mumford didn’t really believe Americans were capable of such a shift in values, and like Heidegger, stated (at least in private) that only a miracle could save us. “I think, in view of all that has happened in the last half century,” he wrote to a friend in 1969, “that it is likely the ship will sink.” This is exactly what we are witnessing today.

But the story is not quite over, as it turns out. As America “settles in the mold of its vulgarity/heavily thickening to empire” (Robinson Jeffers, 1925), other forces are stirring. Every day, more and more people are coming to realize that ecologically speaking, there are limits to growth, and that the configuration of late capitalism is politically unstable. As one urban designer has written, “sustainable society will come because the alternative is no society at all.” It is more than likely that we shall have to change our basic values not because we are especially virtuous, but because there will be no other choice.

When Mumford published the first volume of The Myth of the Machine, in 1967, Time Magazine branded it a call to return to Neolithic culture. This is, of course, the kind of quip designed to get potential readers of the book to dismiss it out of hand. But the word “return” is not entirely inaccurate. When Mumford wrote that the good life means “the birth and nurture of children, the preservation of human health and well being, the culture of the human personality, and the perfection of the natural and civic environment as the theater of all of these activities,” he was not referring to Neolithic civilization, but certainly to a civilization that antedated the culture of techno-capitalist frenzy, and that has been all but erased by what came after. He was also referring to the elements of life that human beings simply can’t live without—not in the long run. If some form of restoration is no longer possible, then the future is no longer possible, when you get right down to it. “Utopian realism” may turn out to be our only hope.

Stirrings such as these have been going on for some time now. In 1975 the American writer, Ernest Callenbach, published a book called Ecotopia, which is clearly in the alternative tradition I described above. It was rejected by no less than 100 publishers; Callenbach had to publish it himself, after which it sold more than 1 million copies, becoming a kind of underground classic. He died in 2012, and shortly after, his literary agent discovered an unpublished essay in the files of his computer. The last two paragraphs read as follows:

"All things 'go' somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi—the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

"There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn… to put unwise or unneeded roads 'to bed,' help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth."

What can one say? The future may prove to be a Mumfordian one, whether we like it or not; and after all those decades of being marginalized, Lewis Mumford may, in the end, have the last laugh.

©Morris Berman, 2014

Interview with the University of Southern Maine

Dear Wafers:

This interview (in 2 parts) was recorded a couple of weeks ago, and recently aired on YouTube. Hope you enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXh0seZ-iZs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuxo80hBlrI

231

Wafers-

Well, time for a new thread. What shall we talk about this time around? My mind is as blank as Mittney's, so you guys will have to carry the ball. I suppose we could do an in-depth analysis of Lorenzo Riggins' candidacy for 2016, or the fact that Sarah Palin persistently refuses to reply to my marriage proposals, or the annual number of puma-related deaths in Costa Rica; but I'm going to leave it up to you.

Wafers Rule!

-mb

Our Success Is Legendary

Wafers!

Far be it for a modest soul such as myself to brag, but I think, at this point (the 230th post), it might be time for a little horn blowing. Yes, I know: there are only 138 registered Wafers on this blog, and I'm always saying how minor we are in the larger scheme of things. Which I'm sure is true. But consider these incontrovertible facts: since the inception of this blog in April 2006, we have received almost 1.5 million hits; and last month alone, nearly 38,000. So while few are active, millions drool. They want to be Wafers, but are not sure how to go about it (the trollfoons, of course, don't have a clue, simply because they are trollfoons). But that's OK. It's nice to know that we have a rather vast, and appreciative, audience, one that is fully aware that this is the only blog worth following.

Today, of course, is the 13th anniversary of 9/11. When I consider how much more wretched and stupid and brutal we've become since that event--well, it's quite overwhelming. Al-Qaeda succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, because our reaction to the attack was 100% self-destructive--played into their hands perfectly. And now, of course, Cheney is back as an unofficial adviser, and Obama is replaying the same self-destructive script with ISIS, for reasons I laid out pretty clearly in A Question of Values. He's little more than a puppet on a string, as are nearly all of our fellow countrymen and women, who are basically unconscious. Wafers watch the nation doing the very things destined to push it down the tubes, and shake their heads. Remember when George Costanza decided to do the opposite of everything his instincts told him, and as a result everything turned around for the better? Well, my friends, the U.S. is definitely not going to go that route. It will pursue its instincts to the grave, which is what we are witnessing on a daily basis. Like an alcoholic, the U.S. will "hit bottom" on the other side of death.

But enuf o' that. Let me give you a brief update of my own (modest, as always) little activities, and then sign out. As follows:

1. The Spanish translation of SSIG is about to appear. My editor and I are working on the illustrations at present, sorting out what the artist sent us, and trying to work up a mock-up of the final version of the text. I anticipate an Oct. or Nov. publication, followed by a "lanzamiento" in Mexico City, probably at a major bookstore such as Gandhi or El Pendulo. All of you hispanohablantes living in the DF, please take note.

2. The Japan book grinds on. Publisher and I have an almost-finished pdf of the text (it's a long mother: something like 500 pages); illustrations are (again) the current concern. My photographer is trimming, cropping, tightening (resolution) and etc.; and then there is the matter of the index, which is no small thing. I'm hoping for a Thanksgiving release, but it may be Xmas, at this rate. With a little luck, the debut will take place in Portland (OR) in December, but March is frankly another possibility, depending on scheduling possibilities at Powell's or wherever. Stay tuned, chicos.

3. On Sept. 24 I fly to Costa Rica to give a public lecture on the 25th, followed by 3 days of workshops at the Universidad de La Salle. Public lecture is open to all you hispanohablantes in the area; workshops are for grad students pursuing doctorates in history/psych/political science and the like.

So let us carpe diem and all that, as we sadly put summer behind us and embrace the changing leaves of fall. Life goes on; and Wafers, by definition, are at the cutting edge.

Love you all, mes amis-

-mb

229

Dear Waferinos-

I guess it's time for a new thread. Unfortunately, I have no great insights to offer at this point; my mind is as empty as that of Rom Mittney's. At least he has his haircut to fall back on.

It is thus difficult to counsel you in any way, assuming you would want or need my input. All I can suggest is that you consult your post-it every morning; it's a good way to start your day. You might also want to read Dave Egger's book The Circle, for a depressing/astute portrait of America today.

Wafer on, Wafer on, Voltaire, Rousseau! (Blake)

-mb

Is This What Senility Looks Like?

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes!)-

Recently drove out to the gym I belong to, on the outskirts of town. En route, I stopped at an Oxxo (convenience store) to get a machine-generated cappuccino and an oatmeal-cranberry cookie. I sat outside in the little patio area they have, drinking my coffee and eating my cookie, and humming a few bars from Strauss' Viennese Waltzes. And suddenly, I looked up: I realized that I was incredibly happy. Just sitting outside a convenience store, watching the traffic, and there I was, in a state of undifferentiated bliss.

Of course, this could be the onset of full-blown mental illness, but who am I to complain? In terms of equivalent experiences (I later reflected), only the following could come close (not necessarily in order of ecstatic quotient):

1. Getting laid. 2. Playing tennis. 3. Eating Szechuan pork at Blossom's in Mexico City. 4. Pounding a trollfoon into the ground until only his head is showing, and then jumping up and down on the head. 5. Smoking a Havana cigar. 6. Porking out at Canter's in LA. 7. Sitting in the Place des Vosges in Paris, on a nice fall day, and watching the artists painting various parts of the square.

There are probably a few more I'm missing, but I can't think of them right now. (Wafers are encouraged to add to this list or provide their own.)

Meanwhile, I trust all of you are doing well. Keep in mind that you are Wafers, the best people on the planet. Well, in the universe, really.

hugs, berm

Love and Survival

When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.

-The Dalai Lama, Nobel acceptance speech, 1989

By late July, 2014, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had been living in Mexico for almost eight years with Washington, D.C., license plates on my car, and if I wanted to apply for permanent resident status in Mexico, which I did, I would have to drive up to a Customs station at the border and “nationalize” my car, i.e., get Mexican plates. Frankly, I have never cared what passport I was carrying, or what driver’s license plates I had, as long as I could move around freely; but as I had no intention of returning to the U.S. except to visit, it seemed that the time was ripe for sorting things out with Mexico. The plates would enable me to become a permanent resident; or so my immigration adviser told me.

A little background info here: when I moved to Mexico in 2006, I was quickly “adopted” by a family in the town where I set up shop. It has been a very close relationship; I drop in on them at least once a week, and they would, and have, give(n) me their left arm if I needed it. I have already described (in A Question of Values) how they showed up in full force at the hospital, an hour away, where I had surgery in 2009, literally sleeping in my room to make sure the nurses were taking good care of me. Now, in the case of the placas (license plates), my “hermana” Raquel (not her real name) had a niece in the border town where the Customs office was located, whom (Raquel said) knew everyone and would be able to help me with the whole nationalization process. So, off I went.

Before continuing with this story, I need to say that just “coincidentally,” I was at the time reading a book by Dean Ornish called Love and Survival. It’s an intriguing study, arguing that there is much evidence to show that being immersed in a network of loving relationships significantly prolongs one’s life, strengthens one’s immune system, counteracts illness, and so on. It was first published in 1988; in the intervening years, I doubt Ornish’s data managed to impact the American medical profession in any serious way. As Ornish makes clear, this is not how the profession thinks. But let me review some of his stats and examples, in any case.

■The Roseto Study

This is an examination of an Italian-American town in eastern Pennsylvania that was found to have had a very low mortality rate for heart attacks during the first thirty years it was studied, as compared to two nearby towns. Citizens of all three towns smoked, ingested cholesterol, and in general exhibited the same physical behaviors that would be expected to impinge on human health, at roughly the same rates. But what Roseto had that the other two towns didn’t was close family ties and very cohesive community relations, including a host of traditional values and practices (religion included). However, in the late sixties and early seventies, all of this broke down. Roseto saw a loosening of family ties and a fragmentation of community relations. Concomitant with this was a substantial increase in death due to heart disease. The mortality rate rose to the same level as that of the two nearby towns.

■The Ni-Hon-San Study

This was an examination of 11,900 Japanese individuals who lived in Japan, as compared to those Japanese who had immigrated to Honolulu and San Francisco. Scientists found that the incidence of heart disease was lowest in Japan, intermediate in Hawaii, and highest in California. The closer they came to the American mainland, in other words, the sicker they became. None of this was related to differences in diet, blood pressure, smoking, cholesterol levels, and so on. The crucial factor was the degree to which each group retained a traditional Japanese culture. The Japanese-Americans who maintained family ties and community had a rate of heart disease as low as those living in Japan, whereas the most Westernized group had a three- to-fivefold increase in same.

■Ornish recounts several other studies with similar results, all indicating that beyond any physical factors, social and emotional factors—love, in a word—were No. 1 in promoting health and longevity. As an aside, I should mention a study conducted by William Vega of U.C. Berkeley that found that Mexicans living in the United States had twice the rate of mental illness as Mexicans living in Mexico:

http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/1021/immigrant.html

It really comes down to the way we live.

This brings me back to my adventure with the license plates. I expected it to take two days; I wound up staying with the family of Raquel’s niece, “Brenda,” for nearly a week. The Mexican bureaucracy is something to behold, possibly worse than that of India. Just when you think you’ve got all your ducks in a row, one more obstacle pops up for you to deal with. Clearly, this was not going to be a two-day operation.

But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I don’t think I was quite prepared for what I was about to experience. Despite the fact that the family had Raquel’s word for it, that I was a fabulous guy (and who, really, could deny it?), I was a total stranger to these folks: we had never met. Yet from the moment I arrived at the front door, I was folded into the warmth of Brenda and her family as though I had been living next door to them for twenty years. It kind of took my breath away. The love that permeated this family was both dense and palpable, and I was suddenly part of it. They were literally kissing and hugging each other (and me) almost constantly. The small children related to me in the same way, not at all afraid of a strange adult, as is usually the case with American (i.e., U.S.) children. There was a coffee mug in the house that had the word “Family” printed on it (in English), with slogans like “celebrates together,” “eats together,” “laughs together,” “stays together”—a gigantic cliché, except that this family was living that cliché. If this were a U.S. sitcom, it would be regarded as a joke, a kind of satire. But this was no fantasy of some nonexistent loving community in New York, along the line of Friends. No, this was the real enchilada. (In fact, I suspect shows like Friends are popular because they depict what Americans badly want, but cannot have.)

It also turned out that family connections extended to the local bureaucracy. Without this, I could have wound up spending a month or so with Brenda & Co. (which would have been fine with them). But because business relations and official relations are not (as in the U.S.) contained in sharply different categories from family relations, Brenda was able to finesse the bureaucracy and get the job done. Within a week I had the plates, even though on the official level the obstacles were formidable. Once again, I was amazed at how the family went all out for me, ignoring their own schedules, schlepping me from one government office to another, and translating the bureaucratese into normal Spanish for me. Since they didn’t expect a peso for their efforts, I was beginning to wonder if I would ever be able to repay them. But they weren’t thinking in those terms, in any case.

A few vignettes may serve to drive home the point.

■Three doors down from Benda was a neighbor, “Elena,” who lost her daughter-in-law in a car crash fourteen months before I visited, and who (since her son was working full-time) took the two surviving grandchildren in, to raise by herself. As luck would have it, several months after that her husband of forty-one years died, and she was left alone with the two kids. Brenda’s family then swung into action, basically taking Elena and the children into their house. Elena came over several times a day, and often slept over with her grandchildren. I wish to emphasize that there was no blood relation between Elena and Brenda or her family. She was “merely” a neighbor. In the U.S., people typically don’t even know the names of the people living next door to them.

■While I was there, Brenda’s brother-in-law and his wife, who were currently living and working in China, were back in Mexico for a month’s holiday. After they came over, and after the usual flurry of hugging and kissing, “Emilio” gave each of Brenda’s kids 200 pesos. The next day, Brenda told me that “Ricky,” her seven-year-old, had wanted to give her the 200 pesos. “I don’t need it, Mami,” he said to her, “and I know you have to struggle a lot.” Brenda told me it was all she could do to keep from crying. I tried to imagine a U.S. child doing something similar, but I couldn’t. The data on the sharp decrease in empathy in America during the past three decades are well-established.

■Half an hour ago, while I was sitting in the living room writing this essay, Ricky came through, went to the kitchen, fetched himself a popsicle (bolis) out of the fridge, and then asked me if I wanted him to get me one. This to a foreigner sixty-three older than himself, whom he knew for all of three days.

■Emilio, his wife, and I had a long and interesting discussion about life in China. They were extremely intelligent and articulate; it was the kind of discussion that is generally hard to have in the United States anymore, because Americans are, by and large, not very articulate, not particularly interested in other nations, and given to “thinking” in slogans. On another occasion, Brenda’s husband, “Jorge,” said to me: “I mean no disrespect, but can you tell me why the United States always has to go to war with someone? And why it supports Israel, which is massacring women and children in Gaza?” Why indeed. Should I have replied, “Because we are a collection of ignorant, and quite violent, people, who are suffering for lack of the kind of family life you and Brenda have, and thus need to hurt other human beings as a result”? But of course, I respected his honest questions, and we had a good discussion of issues that most U.S.-persons don’t give a damn about.

Brenda told me that every time she goes to the U.S., she has the impression that Americans believe that Mexicans sit around under trees wearing sombreros and drinking cerveza all the time. But that’s only part of the stereotype, of course; overall, it’s that Mexicans are backward, inferior, living a million miles from the “progress” exhibited by the go-go capitalism of their northern neighbors. And yet, what is the family and social life of that “superior” civilization? A divorce rate of 50 percent; kids who are abandoned, both emotionally and literally; the highest number of single-person dwellings of any country in the world; the greatest amount of antidepressant use of any country in the world; and—as many studies have by now affirmed—a large population living lives of quiet desperation. In the occasional “world happiness studies” that appear from time to time, Mexico typically ranks in the top five, whereas the U.S. is much farther down the list.

All of this is not to suggest that life in Mexico is perfect. It’s not, by a long shot, and an annoying bureaucracy is a minor issue compared to the poverty, corruption, and racial bias that are depressingly rampant in Mexican society. But on the interpersonal level, the country has got things right. It does celebrate family, as that coffee mug says; its priorities are not ones of hustling, trying to make huge amounts of money, being “important,” or getting “ahead” (of what, exactly?). I have a saying I like to repeat, from time to time, that in Mexico nothing works and everything works out, whereas in the United States, everything works and nothing works out. That’s been my experience after eight years of living here.

So yes, dear reader, I got my plates. But that was the least of what I got. Gracias, Brenda; voy a regresar.

©Morris Berman, 2014

American Buffoons on Parade

STELLA AWARDS

For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald's in New Mexico , where she purchased coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right? That's right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head. So keep your head scratcher handy.

Here are the Stellas for year 2013:

SEVENTH PLACE

Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son. SIXTH PLACE

Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles , California won $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor's hubcaps. FIFTH PLACE

Terrence Dickson, of Bristol, Pennsylvania, who was leaving a house he had just burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for Dickson, the automatic garage door opener malfunctioned and he could not get the garage door to open. Worse, he couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the garage to the house locked when Dickson pulled it shut. Forced to sit for eight, count 'em, EIGHT days and survive on a case of Pepsi and a large bag of dry dog food, he sued the homeowner's insurance company claiming undue mental Anguish. Amazingly, the jury said the insurance company must pay Dickson $500,000 for his anguish. FOURTH PLACE

Jerry Williams, of Little Rock, Arkansas, garnered 4th Place in the Stellas when he was awarded $14,500 plus medical expenses after being bitten on the butt by his next door neighbor's beagle, even though the beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. Williams did not get as much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle might have been provoked at the time of the butt bite because Williams had climbed over the and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun.

THIRD PLACE

Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, because a jury ordered a Philadelphia restaurant to pay her $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her tailbone. The reason the soft drink was on the floor: Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

SECOND PLACE Kara Walton, of Claymont, Delaware, sued the owner of a night club in a nearby city because she fell from the bathroom window to the floor, knocking out her two front teeth. Even though Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the ladies room window to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge, the jury said the night club had to pay her $12,000, plus dental expenses.

FIRST PLACE

Ms. Merv Grazinski, of Oklahoma City , Oklahoma, who purchased new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, from an OU football game, having driven on to the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly went to sleep in the driver's seat while the cruisecontrol was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her$1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Ms. Grazinski has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.

These people are your neighbors!

225: The Greatest Blog on Earth

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Can anyone doubt it? There are millions of blogs out there, but only one worth reading: Us! The Waferblog is the creme de la creme; what more is there to say?

Anyway, now that we've beaten the subject of GMOs into the ground, until all of us are ready to scream with boredom, I figured it was time to move on. As I write, the U.S. continues to crumble, and the president, a colossal horse's ass, continues to look more and more like the utter nonentity that he is. He tours the country, breaking wind through his mouth, as Umberto Eco said in another context. Meanwhile, the 'progressives', with their heads wedged firmly in their rear ends, are excited about Hillary and how she's going to change everything as of 2017; or else they are excited about how they are going to change everything, preferably starting tomorrow. I tell you, if you are into humor, it's a great time to be alive.

O&D, amigos; O&D.

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224

Dear Wafers:

Time to start a new post, I guess. We need to leave discussions of a future Mittney presidency, the pros and cons of marriage, and the Hedges-Ketcham flap, behind us, and move on to greener pastures; unless, of course, you guys wanna continue discussing those things. Personally, I'm hoping that comments for this particular post will focus on a possible Lorenzo Riggins/Latreasa Goodman candidacy in 2016. If such a campaign materializes, I want to declare right now that I shall work relentlessly to get these cutting-edge intellects installed in the White House. Our country deserves nothing less.

Anyway, let me talk about upcoming events. Well, there really aren't too many, and my mind is as vacuous as an empty washing machine. In a month I turn 70, so there's no denying it any longer: I'm old, and as the army of critics I have out there have repeatedly insisted, completely senile. At this point I can do little more than drool and grunt. Which means you guys need to take everything I say, as of a month from now, with 6 pounds of salt. Dementia is not a pretty thing.

Despite my severe mental incapacity, the Universidad de La Salle in Costa Rica invited me to do a public lecture and give a 3-day workshop there during Sept. 25-27. So all you hispanohablantes who are into punishing yourselves for 3 days, feel free to come down. (Actually, the workshop is only for doctoral candidates at the university, so you would only be able to attend the public lecture. No vale la pena, clearly.) But if any of this gets recorded, I'll post the links on this blog. (Angloparlantes might wanna use these to practice your Spanish, though I'm obviously not the best source for this.)

On other fronts, work on the Japan book progresses slowly, as I devote myself to shepherding it through the publication process. The book has more than 20 illustrations, so you have to crop these, get the right resolution, obtain permissions to reproduce, etc. etc. Fun stuff. Hopefully, the book will see the light of day before Xmas rolls around. Stay tuned.

As spring turns into summer, I want to remind all Wafers that an important part of the Wafer code is to have fun. I mean fun beyond watching the US slide into increasing violence and stupidity. So I hope you all are taking time to smell the roses, and devour corned beef sandwiches with cole slaw and Russian dressing. Finally, keep in mind that the world is divided into Wafers--the best people on earth--and everyone else. We are Wafers, amigos; nothing can stop us now. Let us continue to celebrate Waferdom, the only true spirituality left on the planet today.

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Our Exciting Future: 2016

Dear Wafers:

It's kind of fun, watching the American media getting all worked up about the 2016 presidential election, 2+ years in advance. As if it mattered, who was in the White House. As if the important national decisions emerged from a mouthpiece of the corporations, the banks, and the military, as opposed to originating with the corporations, the banks, and the military, themselves. And if the media are clueless, so are the American people, of course, who get very exercised over the differences between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. (One party is insane, and the other is full of shit.) Well, as I keep telling you guys, the American people aren't exactly a collection of Einsteins.

Nevertheless, I confess that I got all hot and bothered myself over the following article that just appeared on cnn: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/19/poll-romney-the-frontrunner-in-2016/?hpt=hp_bn3

The fact is, I was brokenhearted, two years ago, when Mittney lost. He is my kinda guy, really: a walking haircut with nothing underneath it. America deserves no less, imo. And what's the alternative, really? Hillary, a major yawn. What is she? A lackey of the imperial state, who knows who her friends are (the corporations, the banks, and the military). All we can expect--and she's likely to win, sad to say--is an extension of the Obama presidency; which is to say, ad hoc crisis management, to no purpose at all. She's a tedious person; every time I see that depressed, pasty face in the news, I think of 3-day-old cottage cheese.

The tragedy of Mittney is that no one really understood that he stood for absolutely nothing at all, and at this juncture in American history, when decline is the inevitable order of the day, that's a good thing. Who better to lead us into the American "future," namely nowhere, than a Nowhere Man? He keeps saying he's not a candidate anymore, but if polls have him as the GOP "frontrunner," maybe he'll reconsider. Yes, he's a moron; but Hillary is a douche bag. I know whom I'd rather have leading us into the abyss. And so it is with some fervor, I hope not entirely futile, that I feel compelled to cry out:

COME BACK, LITTLE MITTNEY! WE LOVE YOU! DON'T FAIL US IN OUR HOUR OF NEED!

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The Empty American

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

In 1955, we had The Quiet American (Greene). Then in 1958, The Ugly American (Lederer). I think it may be time for The Empty American, by yours truly. Basic argument: We have no moral center, and believe in nothing except 'progress' and making $, so we fuck over other countries that have genuine spiritual content, out of an unconscious frustration that our way of 'life' doesn't really work. Honestly, it's like a cosmic joke, conceived by an evil god.

On the other hand, I just may run off to Pakistan and become a dervish. That book would be called: Give It a Whirl.

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Thoughts on a Rainy Day

Who are we, really? Does anyone really know him- or herself? Buddhists say that personality is a ghost, that the self is an illusion, but it strikes me as being a pretty real illusion (whatever that means).

Here's an odd story. When I was in elementary school, I had a friend named David, and this friendship lasted from ages 5 to 16, when his parents moved away and David wound up at a different high school. The next time I saw him was in 2000. Apparently, I did some TV show (c-span, maybe) about the Twilight book, and David caught the show, contacted me, and we got together in Upstate NY, where he was then living. He had become a physician, had been a rebel, attacking the whole corrupt system of insurance and HMOs. Not popular with his colleagues, as you might imagine. He was also an early champion of the MRI, when there was a lot of doubt about introducing it. Anyway, he made a dinner reservation for us just down the street from our old elementary school (which had burned down years ago; this was its replacement), and after dinner we walked around the small building, smoking cigars despite the light drizzle that had started to come down.

Now you have to understand that from my own perspective of myself—from elementary school running through college (but not in grad school, which was a whole different ball of wax)—I was a nerd. I was heavily nerdile, with interests that were not 'cool'. I was not ironic or hip, in the accepted American style; girls had no interest in me, for the most part, and I had very few friends. This left me a stranger in a strange land; and from a fairly early age I had a hard time identifying with America, or relating to Americans, most of whom struck me as obtuse. Conversations with them were boring, at least for me; who cared about the new Mustang, or the World Series (they did, obviously)? (Revenge of the Nerds is one of my favorite movies, as you might expect.) But given the social context, and the fact that children and teenagers are in the process of developing their identities (and even their frontal lobes), I was very much conflicted by the reality that I didn't fit in: simultaneously wanting, and not wanting, to be part of the mainstream. As Goethe once observed, adolescence is funny only in retrospect.

Anyway, there we were, David and I, walking around our old elementary school, when he suddenly said to me, completely out of the blue, and apropos of nothing: "You know, when we were kids, you were my hero." "Yeah, right," I replied. What kind of crap was this? "No," he said, "I'm serious. The fact is that you made knowledge, and learning, cool. At age 7 you were reading poetry and playing chess. Who does that, at age 7?"

I was literally thunderstruck. How was this possible? I mean, I'm sure most of the kids around me regarded me as completely square, someone you don’t bother giving the time of day to. And here's this old pal telling me that I was a role model for him! He obviously knew me, or saw me, in a way that was very different from the way I saw myself. I stood there, in the rain, trying to rethink my childhood, which had suddenly taken on a whole new dimension.

Just so you know, before I go on with this story: a year later David got cancer, and took a room at the NIH in Bethesda. I was working in DC during those years, so every Friday after work I would drive up to the hospital in Maryland and sit with him, talk with him for a few hours. I thought he would make it, pull through, but he didn't: he died in 2002, and then, with a heavy heart, I drove 12 hours through a blinding snowstorm to Upstate NY for his funeral. My real sadness, however, was rather selfish: here I get reunited with an old friend, after all those years, and after only one year of renewed friendship the Universe takes him away. Shit.

Anyway, fast-forward now from age 7 to my early 20s, when the Vietnam war was in full swing. Once again, I was aware of my own strangeness, in America. Sure, many Americans demonstrated against the war, but percentage-wise it didn't amount to much: most were for it, until we were clearly losing the battle. Very few saw through it, realized it was a neo-colonial war in which we were using our sophisticated military technology to pound a peasant people, who had no beef with us and certainly did not constitute a threat, into the dirt. But it went beyond that. Ho Chi Minh was a Gandhi-type figure, a great statesman and intellect who wrote poetry. America has no comparable figure—George Washington is not really in the Ho/Gandhi category, it seems to me. And America’s contemporary leaders, like LBJ and Nixon, were gross, vulgar, and violent. Can anyone imagine them writing poetry? I realized I felt a closer bond to Vietnamese peasants (who do read poetry, in fact) than to the folks around me, with whom I was supposed to feel connected, but didn't. And what I found during my recent trip to Vietnam was just that: a very gentle, very gracious people, with (amazingly enough) no bitterness toward the US, although we murdered 3 million of them and tortured tens of thousands. As a people, they are about as far apart from Americans as one might imagine. Now back home, I've been reading Neil Jamieson's book, Understanding Vietnam, and here's what he says:

"It is very difficult for Westerners, especially Americans, to apprehend how significant poetry can be as an expressive mechanism in society. For many of us poetry has connotations of elitism, obscurity, impracticality. Few of us read poetry, and fewer still have a real appreciation of it. But in Vietnam this is not the case. Many Vietnamese read poetry with enjoyment, commit it to memory, and recite poems to each other with unfeigned enthusiasm. Everyday speech is liberally sprinkled with poetic allusions. Even the poor and the illiterate imbibe deeply of a rich oral tradition that has incorporated much that originated in the written literature of the educated elite. Poetry has been and remains much more popular and important in Vietnam than in the United States."

As an example, Jamieson cites the immensely popular poem by Phan Khoi, "Old Love" (1932). The author tells how he was not able to marry his true love because of restrictive social mores, which required both of them to agree to the marriages that their respective parents had arranged. In a very real sense, their lives were destroyed. And then, 24 years later, quite by accident, they run into each other. The poem concludes:

"Twenty four years later... A chance encounter far away... Both heads had turned to silver; Had they not known each other well, Might they not have passed unknown? An old affair was recalled, no more. It was just a glance in passing!

...There still are corners to the eyes."

And this is the real truth of our lives, what shimmers for us at the deepest level of our being. The real revenge of the nerds is the life that goes its own way, that is not hip, one that the mainstream—at least in America—will never understand. A peripheral vision, if you will. Yes, my friends, there are still corners to the eyes.

©Morris Berman, 2014

Our Man in Hanoi

Wafers-

Just arrived in Hanoi, managed to arrange a date with Jane Fonda for later this week at the Jane Fonda Institute. Am very excited about this, although she says that before we engage in any hanky-panky, she needs to know the state of my involvement with Sarah Palin. "You explicitly wrote on your blog," says Jane, "that you were intending to marry Sarah and copulate with her on an ice floe in Alaska, among the meese, and with Ed Meese present." I assured her that I had long since withdrawn my marriage proposal to Sarah, regarded Ed Meese as a douche bag, and had eyes only for her (i.e., Jane). Men are so fickle, as the Waferettes on this blog can surely attest to. Anyway, I'll let you know how all this turns out.

Meanwhile, I got picked up at the airport by my host's assistant, and as we left the area there was a big sign that said: CA CAC CA. I kid you not. I took this to be a comment on Obama's foreign policy. Then, as we entered the city, another sign said HOT DUNG. This I regarded as a comment on the contents of the cranium of the average American citizen. I'd like to add that there was another sign that said LOON I BINH, referring to how the Vietnamese viewed the US in general; but unfortunately, that sign is yet to be erected. But clearly, we are dealing with a very smart population (here, of course, not in the US). Anyway, stay tuned; more will be revealed.

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219: Konnichiwafers

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Things to do in Tokyo:

1. Interview otaku(nerds). They really are adorable. I may even move here and become one, though it's not likely that anyone will ever refer to me as adorable. 2. Give lectures at the U of Tokyo (later this week). 3. Eat fugu, or blowfish. Word has it that this is called Japanese roulette. Apparently you die from it if improperly cooked, and half the time it's improperly cooked. I guess it's a macho sort of thing. I may wimp out, stick to salmon.

Stay tuned, more to follow. Migi, hidari, masugu!

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218

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Time to start a new discussion; or continue the old one, if you prefer. What was it, anyway? Something about the Ukraine, and a Yuppie...I forget. My brain gets softer by the day; I can't even remember what I had for breakfast. Anyway, nothing profound to say at this point. Just remember that you are Wafers, and wear your T-shirts proudly. And don't forget to start the day by consulting your post-its.

I leave for Japan in less than two weeks. For those of you who will be in Tokyo on April 17-18, I'll be speaking on the Komaba campus those afternoons. Most of this 'holiday' is actually work: lots of interviews to conduct, that sort of thing, so I can complete my book on Japan, which will probably never see the light of day anyway. (BTW, I'll try to stay in touch with the blog during April 10-May 15, but it'll necessarily be touch and go. Please bear with me if things slow down a bit.) I may just run it off on a laser printer and distribute free copies at Times Square, what the heck. And after that, I might pull a Roth, and say: enough! No more writing. I'm moving to eastern Oregon to run a rhubarb farm. Many years ago, in fact, Roth calculated that for every 75 serious readers in the US who died, they were replaced by one. We now see the results of that ratio all around us.

But it's a great spectacle, collapse, n'est-ce pas? I'm sorry that Ovomit didn't botch the Ukraine thing more than he did, but perhaps we're not yet ready for a full-blown Suez Moment. Never fear: 2014 will give us much to gasp about, possibly even a return of Sarah (my true love) to public life. Or Mittney? Wouldn't that be a hoot. All of us keep saying, after each verkakte event, Well, it can't get any dumber than _______. And then--it does! I'm telling you, kids, we have much to look forward to.

kiss kiss

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A Collection of Degraded Buffoons

A few years ago I read a monograph by Sara Maitland called A Book of Silence. Lately, I’ve been thinking how precious silence is, how little of it exists in the U.S., and how I now have an abundance of it in my own life; so I decided to reread the book. Here’s a bit of text worth thinking about:

“In the Middle Ages Christian scholastics argued that the devil’s basic strategy was to bring human beings to a point where they are never alone with their God, nor ever attentively face to face with another human being….The mobile phone, then, seems to me to represent a major breakthrough for the powers of hell—it is a new thing, which allows the devil to take a significant step forward in her [sic] grand design. With a mobile, a person is never alone and is never entirely attentive to someone else. What is entirely brilliant about it from the demonic perspective is that so many people have been persuaded that this is not something pleasurable (a free choice) but something necessary.”

Everywhere you go in the U.S., you see Degraded Buffoons on phones. People talk on them while driving cars (resulting in lots of accidents, including fatalities), or while running down the street. You go into a café, and half the clientele are either on phones or on laptops, distorting what used to be a social experience, or a private creative experience (reading, writing), into a hustling experience—a rude hustling experience. The issue of people never being attentive to another person is so obvious: I’ll be talking with someone, their phone rings, and they completely forget that they are having a conversation with me and immediately go off on some diatribe with someone a thousand miles away. There is not even the faintest awareness that this is rude beyond belief. Indeed, it’s a good example of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to call “defining deviancy down”—that over time, what used to be regarded as vulgar becomes the norm. We’re pretty much at rock bottom by now.

I remember, a number of years ago, having a leisurely lunch with my then girlfriend at an outdoor café in Philadelphia. We were the only customers, and it was a nice balmy afternoon. Suddenly, some bozo runs up to the café, his cell phone rings, and he yells: “This is Joe Blow! What can I do for you?” This is what I mean by a Degraded Buffoon—a man reduced to nothing but hustling. He doesn’t say, “Hi, this is Joe Blow, how are you? What’s happening in your life?” No, it’s “Let’s do business!” Nor does it bother him to be disturbing a couple having a quiet lunch six feet away from him—fuck everybody else, I’m Joe Blow! Hard to describe how stupid he looked: crew cut, hatchet face, a bundle of tension. And I thought: yes, this is America, my friends; this rude, stupid piece of trash is who we really are.

Shortly after her cell phone discussion, Ms. Maitland takes up the topic of how (quoting Ernest Gellner) “Our environment is now made up basically of our relationships with others.” Not our relationship with a larger spiritual reality, or with nature, or with ourselves. No, it’s always with others, as though this were the only source of happiness. Kind of sad, when you consider how thin those relationships typically prove to be. She continues:

“This idea, that we feel ourselves to be happy and fulfilled only when we are interacting with other people, creates a dissonance with the equally popular mythology that stresses individual autonomy and personal ‘rights’. If I need interpersonal relationships and I have a right to what I need, it is obviously very difficult to have relationships of genuine self-giving or even of equality. However, this problem is not addressed, is indeed concealed, within popular culture. The consequence of this, almost inevitably, is the creation of an increasing number of lightweight relationships—relationships that appear to connect people, but are not vulnerable to the requirements of love, and therefore tend to lack endurance and discipline.”

This is an interesting observation: that friendship requires love and—horror of horrors!—staying power, discipline. When I left the U.S. (thank god), I think I had a total of three or four genuine friendships, after all of those decades of living there. One thing I discovered about Americans was that they have no idea of what friendship really is, and that it does take love, endurance, and discipline (effort, in short). These are alien concepts to Degraded Buffoons. “Lightweight” is precisely the right word here. Over the years, I noticed that it was not uncommon for people to disappear from my life, and the lives of others, overnight, and without so much as a word of explanation. In a few cases this even happened after a year or two of knowing someone, having had dinners together, having had (I thought) meaningful discussions. And then: poof! They’re gone, and apparently could care less. If you live in a world of noise, cell phones, and hustling, why would any one person mean anything to you? And this is the norm, in the U.S., my friends; what I’m describing—you all recognize this—is hardly aberrant.

What kind of lives are these? What kind of empty, stupid lives? People in a rush, people blabbing inanities on cell phones, people who have no idea what silence is and who probably fear it; people who can’t begin to imagine what love, endurance, and discipline consist of. These are what we call Degraded Buffoons.

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The WAF Paperback Edition, At Last

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

It took just about forever, and the listing is as yet incomplete and somewhat botched, but the paperback edition of Why America Failed is finally up for sale on Amazon as a print-on-demand book. It has a new cover, which I thought you guys might get a kick out of, and mistakes from the hardcover edition have happily been corrected. Anyway, you all already have copies, I know, but you might want to tell your friends. Obviously, they are going to need one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-America-Failed-Imperial-Decline/dp/149233393X/ref=sr_1_18?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394485519&sr=1-18&keywords=morris+berman

Arriba!

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215: I Miss Mittney

Hola Wafers!

As we were approaching 200 messages on the last post, I thought it was time to start a whole new discussion. But about what? I have no idea. I'm still collecting rejection letters from publishers for my book on Japan; I still can't manage to get the paperback edition of WAF up and running on Amazon, tho' they tell me it's imminent; and rumor has it that the Pulitzer committee will once again be by-passing me for their annual award. It's not entirely clear why I shouldn't shoot myself, and there are, of course, millions of people across the U.S. who would be only too glad to assist me in that endeavor, and who (as you know) have the firepower to do it. Packin' heat, as they say, tho' I'd prefer to be taken out by a drone. More prestige, I guess.

On the bright side, I leave for Japan/Vietnam in a month, to give some lecs at the U of Tokyo and complete some interviews for my Japan book. (Will give you all a report on the new rage that is sweeping the nation, corned beef sushi.) Also, after years of tendonitis in my right ankle that refused to heal, it finally did, and I'm back on the tennis courts--one of life's greatest pleasures (my forehand is still a little stiff, however). I've already sent Andy Murray a telegram, to the effect that there's a new sheriff in town. So it ain't all bad.

Another bright spot is the trolfoons, who simply won't go away. I feel like I'm playing Whack-a-Mole with them, but it's actually kind of fun. To see how little learning takes place with these morons is one of the high points of each day (or every other day).

As for the title of this post: well, it sounds odd, but it's true: I do miss the guy. To see that haircut walking around, with nothing underneath it, and spouting nonsense: honestly, it's guys like Rom that made America what it is. Though it's quite clear that that clown in the White House ain't a bad second, in that category. To have a president who stands for nothing, in a country that seems to stand for even less (well, OK, genocide, plutocracy, widespread internal violence, militarization of the nation, destruction of the poor and the vulnerable, fear and hatred of the Other, and Kim Kardashian's buttocks--but let's leave all that aside for now)--how can this not bring a warm feeling to the hearts of all Wafers? Clearly, we have much to celebrate.

Let us, then, enjoy our Waferdom, and move boldly into the future. Wafers Rule!

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The Code of the Wafers

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Many people have asked me what it takes to become a Wafer; what is the "Wafer Code," so to speak, or what are the basic characteristics of a Wafer. I understand their eagerness, because the world offers no higher status than Waferdom. Many lurk on this web site, yearning to be Wafers, and many more are, as we all know, trolfoons: they don't have the elementary courtesy or emotional intelligence to approach the site politely, and so get condemned to Utter Darkness. They keep knocking on the door, gnashing their teeth, but to no avail. They are essentially anti-Wafers, the lowest of the low. Many others are like those who press their noses against the windows of an elegant restaurant, seeing all the Beautiful People inside, wishing they could join in the fun, but somehow cannot cross over into Waferdom. (This is, after all, the only blog in the entire world worth paying any attention to.) My heart goes out to them, and it is for this reason that I feel the need, after 7.5 years, to set out The Wafer Code, explicitly, for all to see.

1. Wafers recognize that 99% of those around them, if they are living in the United States, are basically stupid and nasty. This is not said so much as a judgment as a description: it's simply the way things are, and these things are not going to change any time soon. Wafers know this, and they accept it.

2. The lives of Wafers are driven by knowledge, not fear or fantasy. They are living in reality, in short, not drowning in the mass illusions of contemporary America.

3. Wafers are serious about their lives. They are not here on this earth to waste time, to piss their lives away on other people's agendas, as are most Americans--right up to and including the president. Their goals are truth, love, and joy, and they are dedicated to pursuing them.

4. Finally, Wafers feel sorry for non-Wafers, and if they can, try to help them. They recognize, of course (see #1), that most cannot be helped; but if they come across someone who shows signs of potential Waferdom, of awakening to the the three points mentioned above, they try to fish them out of the drink, so to speak, and set them on the path of dignity, intelligence, integrity, and self-respect. Noblesse oblige, that sort of thing.

Anyway, there you have it: The Wafer Code. As the saying goes, although many may be called, few are chosen. Let us, then, continue on the Sacred Path of Waferdom. Life offers no greater achievement.

mb

The Bizarro World

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

You all know how much I like the Seinfeld show (“Call Marla Penny to the stand; Marla Penny!”), and some of you may have read the essay in A Question of Values entitled “A Show About Nothing,” which argues that the scripts are actually an indictment of the American Way of Life as being antisocial, perhaps even anti-human. This climaxes in the final episode, in which the Gang of Four is arrested for violating a (nonexistent) “Good Samaritan” Law in Massachusetts, which purportedly requires citizens to help people in distress. Nothing, of course, could be further from their minds, and so they wind up getting sentenced to a year in jail. They are shown to be callous, indifferent to the plight of their fellow human beings, and always mocking other people—which, it turns out, is how they relate to each other as the norm. Yes, the jokes are hilarious, but they are also nonstop. Practically every remark Jerry et al. make to one another is a dig, a put-down, a bit of witty repartee at the other person’s expense—thrust and parry, all the time. If these were one’s friends, I’m thinking, it would be exhausting to be in their company for more than an hour. One is either defending oneself or attacking someone else, and this is the essence of the “dialogue.”

The fact that the dialogue is, in fact, quite funny manages to hide the fact that the relationships are aggressive, competitive, and even bellicose in nature; which is how Americans of every stripe tend to relate to one another, though typically without the humor (let’s face it: we’re a grim lot). This is daily fare in the U.S., which is probably why the rates of loneliness, depression, mental illness, homicide, screen addiction, and drug use are off the charts. (In terms of dollar-volume sales, 67% of antidepressants sold worldwide are purchased by Americans—who constitute roughly 4.5% of the world’s population. And this is leaving illegal drugs aside, in which the nation is literally drowning. Then if you add in alcohol….) I’m amazed, over and over again, how folks who disagree with something on this blog, or something I said, are literally unable to simply state: “I disagree, and here is the evidence for my views.” Oh no; that practically never happens. It would be un-American; it could lead to genuine dialogue. Instead, they almost invariably show up in War Mode, enraged, sarcastic, parading themselves like peacocks—the whole nine yards—and then get even more enraged when I refuse to post their fulminations (clearly, I’m not willing to engage in “dialogue”!). The entire nation seems to be a collection of children, and certainly, of flawed human beings. And it’s not likely to change anytime soon, here on this blog or in “normal” conversations out in the larger society. It’s as though it were part of our DNA.

Besides the Seinfeld “Finale,” one other episode stands out in my mind as reflexive, i.e. as commenting on the nature of the interactions itself. It’s called “The Bizarro Jerry,” in which Elaine meets three friends whose mode of relating to one another is 180 degrees from what she is used to. She can’t get over it: Kevin, Feldman, and Gene are loving and supportive of one another. They fight to see who will pay for the check in a restaurant, each one wanting to treat the others. They buy each other groceries, or tickets to cultural events. They read, they think, their lives have actual meaning. They put cash (bills!) into the cups of homeless people. And so on. She can’t help it: she defects. In one memorable scene, when the two groups of three confront each other in the street, she looks first at her old companions, then at her companions-to-be, and the difference is so great that it’s obviously a no-brainer. Why hang out with people who are completely self-serving, who care about nothing but themselves, as opposed to those who are genuinely kind, genuinely selfless? So she switches teams.

But the transition proves to be more complicated than she anticipated. As the writer of this particular episode, David Mandel, explains, Elaine is too flawed for her new group; “normal” behavior with these folks, such as goes on with Jerry et al., is something they find offensive. Instead of trying to fit in, she is rude and domineering. She raids Kevin’s fridge without asking, kicks the door shut with her boot, throws her purse any old place, and when given a ticket to see the Bolshoi with them, yells “Get out!” and shoves Kevin in the chest so violently that he falls backward onto the floor. They aren’t interested in having a barbarian (read: typical American) in their midst, and so they reject her. Her stay in the Bizarro World proves to be fairly brief.

Of course, Mandel felt the need to make the alternative group a bit extreme in a goody two-shoes kind of way, for the sake of comic effect. Which works: their love for each other is finally so sugar-coated that it is cloying, claustrophobic—nuts in a different way. The show would have been much less funny without this contrast—or perhaps, not funny at all. And that’s the point. Had the alternative group been just your (truly) normal, non-American bunch of folks, such as I have experienced all over Latin America, for example, then the indictment of American society would have been out in the open: depressing rather than comical. Roll back the exaggeration, tone down the sweetness, and you would have healthy, non-American interactions, in which people do care for one another, are supportive in conversation, and are not living in competitive little narcissistic bubbles that they erroneously take to be the world norm. In which case, we would see the American psyche for what it really is: warlike, severely disturbed. The jokers who show up on this blog in War Mode literally can’t help themselves; it’s what they were raised to do from birth. Elementary courtesy is not really part of the American repertoire. We are degraded and debased;trolfoons.

A year or two ago, I think it was, one of you Wafers posted a link to a YouTube video in which some guy walks around the streets of an American city with a clipboard, stopping people and asking them whom they thought we should go to war with next. Every single person interviewed, including a university professor, named the country of their choice: Iran, Syria, China, etc. Not one of them said, “We shouldn’t go to war with anyone.” Not one. Now that is the Bizarro World.

©Morris Berman, 2014

The Judith Regan Show

Shalom Waferim v'Waferot! (If anyone knows the Arabic male and female plurals of Wafer, let me know and I'll start with them next time. Shukran!)

I did this interview with Judith Regan over the phone (she's based in NY) on Saturday morning. It's 35 mins. long, and she's a very sincere interviewer. I was happy I managed to get in a reference to Kim's buttocks, but (sadly) not to deli meats. Maybe next time. Anyway, downloading it is a bit complicated. First, click on this, or put it in your browser:

https://www.hightail.com/dl?phi_action=app/orchestrateDownload&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hightail.com%2Ftransfer.php%3Faction%3Dbatch_download%26send_id%3D2458848592%26email%3Ded907aebdc7a0a1d47dd050ebaaeaee5&s=19105&cid=tx-02002208350200000000

Then click on Download, then on Open. It should take about 7 mins. for the audio to come on. Enjoy!

mb

211: "Le style, c'est l'homme meme"

Hola Waferinos, and hope u.r. all doing well. The quote is from the Comte de Buffon. Or as a female cousin of mine said years ago, regarding all the awful men she was meeting: Style is content. Let that be the thought for the day. Meanwhile, remember that we are Wafers: Nothing can stop us!

210

Ah, Waferinos! Here we are again, starting yet another post. Hope you're all staying warm.

Trolls and buffoons seem to have (temporarily) crawled back under their rocks, for some reason. They tend to attack in waves, so sooner or later I expect more flak from the poopy-heads. I've also been musing on a way to combine them, conceptually: trolfoons? Wafers are invited to suggest names for these pathetic creatures, folks who have made America the great nation that it truly is.

Other than that, my mind is once again the proverbial wind tunnel, so I leave it to you guys to lead the way in terms of sterling conversation.

-mb

209

Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Time to move on to a new post. Only 8 days into the new year, and we are blessed by a few contributions from trolls and buffoons. Ya gotta love 'em; or at least, *I* do. They are what makes this country great.

Of course, I'd love to post something intelligent here, but as in the past, my mind is a wind tunnel; it resembles that of G.W.Bush. What a thought. But I'm up to my eyeballs these days, muchachos: trying to get the pb edn of WAF finished and online on Amazon, and then there's the last chapter of the Japan book...don't ask. Other events you Wafers might be interested in:

-A publisher in Athens wants to translate SSIG into Greek. Greek, I say. Next thing you know, I'll be giving lectures at the Parthenon, between large platters of dolmades. Just call me Zorba.

-The Spanish trans of SSIG, "De paja a oro," should be out by spring. More lectures, but this time punctuated by chiles en nogada.

-Moving rt along: I'll be doing a phone interview (again, on SSIG) on the Judith Regan Show (based in NY; pastrami this time?) the morning of Jan. 25. For those of you who can't hear it live, not to worry, I'll post the link.

-Departure date for Tokyo: April 9. I was also invited down to Vietnam, so I'll spend a few days in Hanoi. I keep wondering if the Jane Fonda Institute of American Studies is still functioning, after all these years.

Sayonara, Chicos; try to stay warm.

-mb