Prisoner number 175113

The widely acclaimed «Maus: A Survivor's Tale» is about Vladek Spiegelman, Auschwitz prisoner number 175113. Maus was created by Vladek's son, Art Spiegelman, and features not just Vladeks experiences during the Second World War, but also the relationship between Vladek and Art in the 1970s and early 1980s. A newspaper from Pomerania, Germany wrote the following in the mid-1930s:

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed....Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal....Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

Trying to depict the Holocaust in a comics book is probably not easy, and Art Spiegelman spent more than a decade drawing it. The result, however, was one of very few comics that should be on the curriculum for «Living in a society 101».

No News Day

News are supposed to be news, so everything static and unchanging is mostly left out. In the case of poverty and hunger, this principle implies that it has to be devastating hunger, as opposed to «normal» hunger, before it's «news».

However, this doesn't affect growing, at least not when the thing growing is a polar bear. When polar bears «change» from being cute, small cubs into man-eating carnivores, it's «news». Even though the fact that cubs and puppies ends up being adult animals has been common knowledge for at least as long as I can remember.

Therefore, the fact that what we usually refer to as «growing» also - shockingly - has had an effect on the polar bear Canoute, and that the «cute cub has become a bloodthirsty predator». The «news» article about juvenile growth in polar bears is the most read article at Dagbladet.no for the last 24 hours, with the title: «Here Canoute tries to take a bite of a three-year-old».

(The Canoute picture is a facsimile from Dagbladet.no)

Sisyphean storytelling

In Narration and Knowledge, professor of philosophy Arthur C. Danto contends that the task of the historian is to find meaning in history by mapping or describing the relationship between events. Danto calls these descriptions narratives. Without these narratives, these stories connecting the dots of history, we'd never be able to find any meaning at all. As such, narratives are to events what generalisations are to objects.

Without generalisations, everything would be particulars. That is, there wouldn't exist any trees, just a lot of similar-looking thick, brown trunks covered by a collection of green leaves. Or. Without generalisations, there wouldn't be trunks and leaves either, or colours. So instead of trees, we would have a lot of objects it would be hard to understand.

One example are leaves in the fall. Say that I owned a tree, and the leaves suddenly started falling off. I would probably be heartbroken because my tree was dying. Also, seeing that the exact same thing happened to other trees wouldn't help a bit, because I didn't know all the other trees were the same species and that it was perfectly natural for trees to loose their leaves each fall.

Danto continues his theory of narratives by claiming that as time goes by, previous events will have to be continually redescribed in a way that incorporates all the new events. The reason is that new events never can be fully understood without knowing what preceded them, while old events never can be fully understood without knowing what followed them.

Now, it should be said that this redescription is not only a task of historians, it is a task of everyone. This is because every new thing that doesn't fit into an old narrative giving it meaning, has to be put inside a new narrative before we can understand it. Naomi Klein writes about this in The Shock Doctrine:

[I]n North America, the September 11 attacks were, at first, pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative of anything that could bridge he gap between reality and understanding. Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make sense once again.

At the same time, the narratives we have can be wrong. For example, my tree could be an evergreen, and its «leaves» falling could really be because it was dying. In that case, believing the narrative that trees drop their leaves in the fall would have led me astray. Furthermore, the frightening narrative of 9/11 being the «Pearl Harbour» of a «huntingtonian» Clash of Civilizations was wrong, and has been proven so over the last few years as, with Klein's words, the «shock wore off».

Two-thousand-and-eighty

The Ultimate Guide to getting the book «Two-thousand-and-eighty»

1. Buy «Nineteen-eighty-four» by George Orwell
2. Strike out all occurences of the number «1984»
3. Replace with 2080

And here we go again. The orwellian future is still not past.

(If you know Norwegian, you can read about it at this page.)

Wikipedia Advertisement Day

The Canadian magazine Adbuster is the main promoter of the Buy Nothing Day, which is a «24 hour moratorium on consumer spending - participating by not participating». The Buy Nothing Days is usually in the end of November.

A similar one-day-concept is the Norwegian TV-channel TV2's free-ads-for-non-profits-day, which is usually at Christmas day and sometime at easter, either Maundy Thursday, Good Friday or Easter Day. On these days non-profit organizations gets to show their commercials on TV2 for free.

Turning things around, I'd like to put forward the idea that Wikipedia could have one advertisement day each year. We could call it the «Wikipedia Advertisement Day». If Wikipedia were ever about to run out of money, this would be an interesting remedy. It would remind all the users that Wikipedia is actually free, and at the same time it would not (necessarily) «commercialize» Wikipedia beyond return (which I'm afraid ads year-round would do...).

The Second Road to Serfdom

If you turn too much to the right, you'll end up walking in a circle. Thus, the best way to get from one place to another is to walk straight. But this strategy only works if you're heading in the right direction. Also, there might be some sort of obstacle in front of you. In that case, you have to turn a little to the right (left), walk past the obstacle, and then turn to the left (right) to get back on track.

When Friedrich Hayek (mentor of Milton Friedman and hero of the neoliberals) wrote his (in)famous book «The Road to Serfdom» in 1944, he forgot that serfdom lurks not only on the left side of the path, but also on the right side. There are more than one road to serfdom. Hayek's argument is as follows:

«The authority directing all economic activity would control not merely the part of our lives which is concerned with inferior things; it would control the allocation of the limited means for all our ends. And whoever controls all economic activity controls the means for all our ends and must therefore decide which are to be satisfied and which not. This is really the crux of the matter. Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.»

And he's right. Economic control is total control. But the solution is not, and Hayek also saw this, to refuse all sorts of planning. What must be done is to plan for competition, and to keep all powers - economic, political, physical - away from the market so that the market can be free. He writes about this in a discussion about a superior political power. We don't need «more power in the hands of irresponsible international economic authorities», he writes, but rather «[t]he need is for an international political authority which, without power to direct the different people what they must do, must be able to restrain them from action which will damage others».

At the same time, it's more or less impossible to avoid all sort of authority, dominance, and leverage. In the end, even the political power whose sole responsibility it is to restrain the distortion will itself be an authority liable to distort. Which is why there exists more than one road to serfdom. One of the best examples of this is probably Pinochet's Chile. Pinochet seems to have turned so far to the right that his only obligation (following Hayek in «The Road to Serfdom», at least, Milton Friedman might have disagreed), i.e. to restrain political power, turned into not only a distortion and a brutal hunt for dissenters, but all out war on anyone even thinking of criticizing the regime.

Globalizing the drive-through - Revisited

As this is not really a new blog, it's about time to revisit a posting from the old Elbo Spiff. I'll start with «Globalizing the drive-through» from April 18th, 2006. Fittingly for a blog about mingling human societies, it's about the obscurity and «everywhereness» of globalization:

The New York Times recently reported that McDonalds has begun experimenting with the outsourcing of drive-through ordering.

The voice you hear at the squawk box comes not from an employee inside the restaurant but from a call center hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. The order is then relayed to the front of the very restaurant where you are bodily present and filled as usual. A man who wants a Big N' Tasty in Wyoming and a woman who wants an Egg McMuffin in Honolulu may be placing their orders with the same teenager in California.

With liberalization of service sectors and the end of technological barriers to long-distance telephone calls, it was only a matter of time.

But where, you might think, and the New York Times did, is the surprise? The Times writes:

There you sit, perhaps miles from home, idling in a car that was manufactured almost anywhere, burning gasoline refined from a substance pumped out of the ground who knows where and shipped, in all likelihood, across the ocean to be trucked to the station where you last filled up. Meanwhile you're talking to your best friend on your cell phone - and who knows how that works or where those signals go? - or listening to satellite radio beamed down from space. Yet what's really on your mind is the food they're getting together for you inside that McDonald's, made from cattle that once lived anywhere and potatoes that grew someplace else, all of it relayed from some way station in the McDonald's supply chain. (1)

(1) The New York Times