the inverse kingdom

Traditionally, creditors wielded more power than debtors. Creditors charged exorbitant interest, resorted to intimidation and violence, and seized land and possessions of their debtors.

Strangely enough, today in America, if you’re willing to take a loose definition of creditor and debtor, the debtors often wield more power than the creditors. This idea was suggested in Jacques Ellul’s Money and Power in application to the modern corporation: … the ancient reality of the superiority of the creditor. Obviously in our society, the debtor is often much more powerful than the creditor. The corporation cannot be compared with the hundreds of shareholders who compose it.

To further complicate matters, the corporation is not an individual and a corporation does not just consist of its shareholders or its board of directors or its employees. It takes on a life and a spirit of its own. And then we find ourselves faced with an unwieldly monster whose actions and decisions can have enormous impact on our lives.

The injustice of the debtors’ superiority is what angers us so much about the AIG bonuses as billions of taxpayer dollars trickle into the banking system.* I feel sympathy for Edward Liddy and those who received bonuses who were not directly responsible for credit default swap transactions that were the downfall of AIG.** Yet I am also outraged at the debtor’s entitlement—but it’s not Edward Liddy nor the bonus recipients who are the actual debtors to America, it’s AIG the corporation. And how do we understand how AIG’s employees are both part of and yet distinct from the corporation? And as a result, though they may have no personal wrongdoing related to the credit default swaps, they may have to uphold the moral responsibility of a powerful debtor before less powerful creditors.

So for better or for worse, the 90% tax may get passed and we may feel a little bit better.*** But the larger problems still remain unsolved…



* Compared to the total amount lent to AIG, the bonuses were a drop in a bucket. Dealing with large amounts of money can have two contrary psychological impacts—either you start penny pinching and counting every little cent or you figure since the debt is so large, little savings won’t make a big difference in the long run. Clearly in this case, the American public as the creditor feels the former. No creditor would like to see a debtor living the good life if there is no evidence of repayment.
** I’m sympathetic to the fact that many of them are the wrong target of the angry mob. That being said, I personally find large bonuses rather distasteful wherever, but that stems from a larger critique of American capitalism and compensation.
*** Has it been passed already? I don’t think I’ve been paying that close attention to the news in the last few days.

the tyranny of private enterprise

History has always been one of the hardest subjects of me to understand. It’s either a muddle of events that I cannot understand or a simplistic narrative that I do not believe. Perhaps I relate to how Hayden White sees historical narrative: “translations of facts into fictions” as “the events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and highlighting of others”.

The motives and actions of presidents and prime ministers, of ambassadors and representatives. The handshakes made behind closed doors and the secret chain of command through bureaucractic institutions. What story can you spin out of the sparse paper trail of letters, memos and communiqués? Or out of Obama’s Blackberry log? What do you believe?

I have been making an effort to learn history better, since I have been, historically, rather ignorant of it, precisely because I couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until I read two books, the Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills and funny enough, the children’s book , A History of US All the People that history finally began making sense.*

These books presented history or insisted that we study history from a more sociological standpoint—looking at the impact of historical events on the consciousness of individuals in society. I don’t really care about what country was a world power or what conferences and negotiations took place, but I am fascinated about how people living in that country felt amidst the whirlwind of headlines and changes. And recently, I’ve also become intrigued by what history has to say about various philosophical questions: How do you reconcile order and liberty? Equality and freedom? Justice and law?

This newfound fascination came as a result of a book recommended to me by my husband, called Commager on Tocqueville (one of the benefits of marriage is that you get more books and if you’re lucky, your husband has similar tastes to yours). Despite a somewhat self-preoccupied and unenticing title, the book is excellent. Commager assesses American history in the last century through the set of questions raised by Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French aristocrat who wrote about America in Democracy in America (who I vaguely recall having to read in my US AP History class). Tocqueville primarily was concerned with democracy – especially the tensions raised between liberty, order and equality. In Commager’s words:

Would democratic majorities destroy liberty? Would centralization of power, which democracy made almost inevitable, prove incompatible with liberty? Would individualism—so ruthlessly being exercised on the vast North American continent- be compatible with either democracy or with liberty? And what of justice? There can be no liberty without justice and no justice without order. Can individualism tolerate order? Can democracy be trusted to safeguard justice?

Published in 1993, Commager’s conclusions still speak relevantly to what is happening today:

... in the interaction between two forces that (Tocqueville) himself thought the most powerful: majority rule and individualism. He was fearful that majoritarianism would take over the surrender to its natural propensity for tyranny with catastrophic consequences. In that event, it was not the majority that imposed its will on desperate minorities, but the spirit of individualism and private enterprise that permeated majorities and persuaded or seduced them into supporting even the most extreme manifestations of private enterprise. The danger today is no more from majority tyranny than it was in the 1930s when Tocqueville first sounded the alarm. It is rather in that excess of virtue of individualism that we now call private enterprise, but which is no longer private but public, and which, for that matter, is no longer very enterprising. The operation of military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific complex is an example of this. This group or complex does not constitute a majority, but it appears to represent a majority. And to speak for it, it does not formally exercise what we call tyranny, and as for all its triumphs and conquests, these have been brought about legal means and are not therefore tyrannical. But its character and conduct takes on more and more the character of tyranny. In all this, Tocqueville’s fears may yet be vindicated.

I wonder how history will write this past year—the demise of banking as we know it, the economic crisis, the first black president, the new uneasy alliance between banks and government.... What is happening? What does it mean? And how does all of this make us feel? Do we feel powerless as each company announces its own round of layoffs? Do we feel hopeful because there is now a president who seems to be intelligent and concerned about the people and because we may be able to rebuild new and better institutions? Or do we feel angry, ready to charge forth with our pitchforks and flames, because this military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific-governmental complex has failed to demonstrate that it knows what it is doing, though it has justified its privilege and power on that very basis?



*So I am attempting to link to Goodreads more often, rather than Amazon. After all my ranting and railing about large corporations and all my lamenting about the demise of small bookstores, I really should stop giving Amazon free advertising. At the very least, I should sell out and have them pay me.
** For a progressive/liberal reading of American history, I recommend Commager on Tocqueville over Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States of America. This post was originally intended as a rant against Howard Zinn, but I decided to write something more positive instead…

America's welfare state

“the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world… multitude of men… incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives…”

“That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild… It seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking all the trouble of living… It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

“…everyone wants to be free; everyone wants to eat… Everyone does indeed want to be free: free from bureaucratic control, free from burdensome taxation, free to exercise and enlarge the area of private enterprise. Everyone does indeed want to eat: the poor want welfare, the aged want security, the ill and the handicapped want medical care, parents want education for their children, consumers want protection.. The rich, too, want to be fed. They believe in private enterprise and delude themselves that corporations are somehow private rather than the product of very special privileges granted by the state and to be enforced by the state… When coal miners are in trouble they recommend government takeover. When railroads and airlines are in trouble they persuade the government to subsidize them, at least the bankrupt ones… We have developed not only a welfare state with all of its bureaucracy for the poor, but a welfare state for corporations and business interests as well. Clearly the most completely socialized ingredient in our economy is not the poor who are on welfare, but the complex that President Eisenhower first publicly identified as the military-industrial, which we can now see embraces as well labor, banking, the scientific community, and the academy. If these want governmental protection and aid, as clearly they do, they must take for granted big government, big bureaucracy and centralization. Those who yearn to diminish the powers of government must learn to lower their expectations from government, to restrain their demands on nature, to temper their insistence on endless growth and progress that is almost entirely material.”

~ Henry Steele Commager, Commager on Tocqueville, 1993

*I’m really scraping as far as blog posts are. I just can’t bring myself to write anything. I did, however, like my husband, cave in and start a twitter account. I have yet to determine whether or not I will update it regularly or whether or not I like the whole affair. It feels all a bit too suspiciously trendy to me, but perhaps 150 character posts will be more palatable to my creative tendencies. It also fondly reminds me of those good old AIM profiles and away messages I used to check. I guess Twitter is its syndicated version.

the inflection is near

I feel like I haven't posted anything substantial here in awhile. In any case, Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times about this recession marking an inflection point in the way that we think about the economy. (I suspect that you've already read it since it's currently Number 1 on the popularity list for "Most emailed"). Perhaps in the future, we will no longer measure the health of the economy in terms of growth, but rather in terms of flow (sustainability and reproduction). Friedman has a way of finding witty little catchphrases and analogies to describe current events, which for some reason I find annoying, despite the fact that they are generally intelligent and helpful in explaining the matter at hand. Perhaps I am jealous :P

In any case, now that I am done rambling, here are some notable excerpts from the article:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

speedy swallowtail shawl

It’s been hard, but I’m trying to rely less on knitting patterns. Browsing blogs and ravelry and knitting magazines, I am always finding pattern after beautiful pattern that I would like to knit. It's much easier to follow a pattern without thinking, than it is to try to design something on my own..

But I'm trying to challenge myself to design my own patterns. To do the tedious swatching, the fussy calculations and force myself to learn the basic architecture of different garments instead of relying upon printed instruction. My hope is that it can move my knitting more away from the realm of passive consumption (more patterns, more books, more yarn) to the realm of active engagement and creation.*

So here’s my first design-- though to be honest, it’s really just a pattern alteration. More photos can be found on its ravelry page. My grandma has been very sick in the hospital and I needed something quick to knit up to give to her as a gift. Taking inspiration from Ysolda’s Ishbel, and the Wool Peddler’s shawl, I kept the majority of this shawl plain, but added in the border and edging from the Swallowtail Shawl, a row of gathered stitches (inspired by the Miranda Triangle Shawl from Knitted Lace of Estonia) and some garter rows for distinguishing the different patterns. I thought this would take me atleast a month but I finished in about 10 days! Thanks to season 1 of Star Trek and my need for distraction from my ongoing crisis about what to do with my life.

The pattern instructions are below. In order to follow them, you also need to download the Swallowtail Shawl pattern from Evelyn Clark's website.

Gathered stitches (worked over 3 stitches)
K3tog but do not slip these stitches from the left needle, yo, then knit the same 3 stitches together again, then slip all 3 stitches from left needle. (From Knitted Lace of Estonia)

Follow Swallowtail instructions up until the end of row 6. Be sure to place marker where indicated on the chart.

Starting row 7:
On all RS rows: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2.
On all WS rows: Knit 2, Purl until last two stitches, knit 2

Knit until you reach 207 stitches, ending on a RS row (207 stitches - 1 middle stitch + 103 stitches on each side)

Next WS row: knit 2, purl 1, knit until 2 before the marker, purl 1, purl 1 (center stitch), Slip marker, purl 1, knit until 3 from the end, purl 1, knit 2

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2.

WS row: Knit 2, Purl until last two stitches, knit 2 –> you should end with 211 stitches (1 middle stitch + 105 stitches on each side)

RS row: Knit 2, YO, knit 2, make gathered stitches until 2 stitches before the marker, knit 2, YO, slip marker, knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit 2, work gathered stitches until the last 4 stitches. Knit 2, YO, knit 2. --> you should end with 215 stithces (1 middle stitch + 107 stitches on each side)

WS row: Knit 2, purl until last two stitches, knit 2.

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2. --> 219 stitches

WS row: knit 2, purl 1, knit until 2 before the marker, purl 1, purl 1 (center stitch), Slip marker, purl 1, knit until 3 from the end, purl 1, knit 2

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2. --> 223 stitches

WS row: Knit 2, Purl until last two stitches, knit 2

You are now ready to begin the Lily of the Valley Border 2. You should 223 stitches on your needles. The chart has you working the pattern over 219 stitches to begin with. In order to adjust for the extra four stitches in each row, knit an extra stitch in the following places in the chart:
- After the first YO
- Before the YO right before the center stitch
- After the YO right after the center stitch
- Right before the last YO

Purl these extra stitches on the wrong side row and place them in the same locations on the RS row.
The pattern will not be noticeably different.

After completing Lily of the Valley Border 2, you should have 243 stitches on your needles.

RS row: Knit 2, YO, Knit until Marker, YO, slip marker, Knit 1 (center stitch), YO, knit until last 2 stitches, YO, Knit 2. --> 247 stitches

WS row: knit 2, purl 1, knit until 2 before the marker, purl 1, purl 1 (center stitch), Slip marker, purl 1, knit until 3 from the end, purl 1, knit 2

Now you are ready to begin the Peaked Edging chart. You will have 247 stitches on your needles instead of 239 as called for in the pattern. In order to adjust for the 8 extra stitches, make the following adjustments. It helps to mark it on your chart—it will make it a lot more easy to understand.

All WS rows: just purl the extra stitches.

For rows, 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 of the chart, knit 2 extra stitches:
- After the first YO
- Before the YO right before the center stitch
- After the YO right after the center stitch
- Right before the last YO

From rows 11, 13, 15, work additional stitches as following:
- Knit one extra stitch after the first YO
- Knit one extra stitch after the first sk2p
- Knit one extra stitch before the sk2p right before the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch before the YO right before the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch after the YO right after the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch after the sk2p right after the center stitch
- Knit one extra stitch before the last sk2p of the row
- Knit one extra stitch before the last YO of the row.

This adjustment will make the peaked edging slightly wider on the side and center peaks, but is not very noticeable.

For the RS row before the bind off,
K2, yo, k9, yo, k1, *yo, k7, yo, k1; repeat from * until 11 stitches remain, yo, k9, yo, k2.

Bind off as indicated in the pattern.




*This is not to say that I won’t knit any commercial patterns at all—in fact, there is still a lot I need to learn from them and I will probably still rely heavily on them—but I need to delve into them deeper and understand them better. What exactly distinguishes the different cast-on techniques? How does a short row work? How does this pattern writer construct a sweater? What are alternate ways to do it?
** Speaking of exercises in futility, Yarn Harlots’ multiple attempts at casting on the 600+ stitches for the Miranda Triangle Shawl can only make me cringe. I would have given up after try #2. I still have not had the heart to unravel my rasta fari hat.