Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Tue, 21 Jul 1992 18:13:10 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Goodbye, Long Island (19): Tomcat's gone away [conclusion]

   Long Island woke today to find the Tomcat gone, and there is not a dry eye
in either Prefix or Suffix counties. Newsday was wrapped in a Special Section
whose front page read GOODBYE, LONG ISLAND showing the last of the beloved F-14
bombers flying from the Calverton plant toward Patuxent River Naval Air Station
down in Maryland where some good little boy or girl will have it stuffed down
his or her stocking this Xmas. "To those who built it, the F-14 wasn't just a
machine, it was family," says Newsday. Now the question is what to do with the
Family Plot, which is what is left: I say, sink it.
   "'In a very real sense, it is the end of aviation on Long Island,' said the
region's master planner, Lee Koppelman [who is also Professor of Political
Science, down the hall]. 'The very linchpin is gone.'" Newsday said.
   ****
   One vending machine to the Left, where it should be, the grey austere New
York Times revealed, to the morbidly curious, the insane, or anyone else who
wished to know, the details of Ross Perot's economic program for his presiden-
tial candidacy should the past week ever get shot over by a different video
camera crew on another network from an Alternate Universe. "The plan, about
50 pages long, included many steps long regarded by economic experts as
necessary and by political experts as untenable,..." (Steven Greenhouse in The
New York Times)

   The plan inter alia would have called for a rollback of the tax-subsidiza-
tion of the rich, a measure radical enough to possibly persuade many to
emigrate to more sensible Britain, where John Major's Tories still do things
the old armenian way. There would also be an increase in tax on gasoline,
enough to increase the per gallon at the pump price by 50%, over five years.
This would have its effects not merely on the federal deficit but on the
relative subsidization of the railroad vs the trucking industries, mass transit
vs private car, capital goods vs truck manufacturers who are also the car
manufacturers, housing construction, land use, suburb vs city, air pollution,
and everything however indirectly related to it in society. The effects would
have been abetted, for instance, by a *limitation on tax deduction to the first
$200,000 of a mortgage on a house*, a revolution in house construction tax
subsidies. There would have been direct federal expenditure, from the increased
tax revenues, of research and development as well as infrastructure. [Clinton's
plan by contrast calls for $200 billion in increased expenditure without
corresponding tax increases.

   It is now certain that had Perot not shucked off the guidance of Ed Rollins
and the Hal Riney advertising agency of San Francisco, hence not slipped in the
polls, and had something like this been proclaimed with fanfare and bugles one
week ago, it would have absolutely without any doubt at all blown the
Democratic Party to bits. Even if Perot thereafter climbed down on it. Because
it is far more "redistributional" - Robin Hood take from the rich give to the
poor and all that - than anything Clinton dared to adduce. It would have blown
the cover of the Rightist Democrats (Democratic Leadership Council) who are
grouped around, as noted, The New Republic, the Clintonist weekly mouthpiece,
which as also noted was most vitriolically lacerating Perot while the Real
Clinton, that is, the *televised* Clinton, was keeping mum about there being
any such orgasnism as Perot. The two bad-boy phonies, Brown and Jackson, would
have been vindicated, and the measly, paltry couple of tens of thousands of
demonstrators in the streets would have been joined by friends, wouldn't it
have been a riot, as I said. [Note: For office-buiding incendiaries,
Anarchists, insurance-fraud specialists, Mafia torchmen, and others in that
line of work, we have *vacant office space* in New York City, overbuilt during
the speculative 1980s, sufficient for the next 46 years at current rates of
growth.]

   Note that Perot had been able to come out of nowhere, like Batman, for the
simple reason that nobody knows anything about corporate bosses, even their
names, who is not paid to be an expert on who is who doing what in business,
which entails reading the insufferably boring business press: The Wall Street
Journal, The New York Times Business Section, Barrons, Economist, Business
Week, Forbes, US News and World Report, Fortune, to mention only the exciting
stuff, usually to make big bucks or Marxist theory (or, as is true with one
professor here, both). Yet these CEOs wield more power than anyone in the
country except Cabinet secretaries; more than some of them, even.

   We have seen here a social structure with intractable structural problems
in its economy generated by obsolete institutions which are irremovable, such
as the irrational commitment to wage labor after the contrived demise of
manufacturing industry, at least within the national confines of the United
States. To this has been added the micro-rational, that is, the ratial uses to
which each computer or other office machine is put, yet macro- or aggregate-
irrational use of computers and office machinery in general, which had the
effect of interacting with the sturctured dependence on wage labor and wasteful
consumption of human labor such that, in the words of a socially critical Los
Angeles comedy group The Firesign Theater, "Increased spending power causes
harder work for everybody! And more of it, too!"

   Office work, in that low-wage office temporaries were a bargain, the unit
cost of office work constantly fell with the prices of computers and telecom
equipment, microprocessors, software, and so on, and it was impossible to put
a rational pricetag on anybody's salary, expanded till it burst. Now it is in
free fall for equally non-rational reasons. The pardon-the-expression CREATIVE
POSSIBILITIES of The New Capitalist Society are meanwhile going underexplored.

   Three weeks ago the front page of the Business Section (Section 3) of The
Sunday New York Times featured a 28-year-old Microsoft Vice President and
Software Engineer who had made several million dollars, he cannot be bothered
with keeping track of exactly how many million dollars, doing what to him is
sheer fun. He works practically all the time, lives in a house shared with
others of his kind, and thay all live in what you would all recognize as
"graduate student squalor." This man cannot be bothered with taking his
valuable recreation-work-time off to squander money on luxuries. (One
possibility is, since women are known to shun the computer business in general
because of its rabid sexism, he's creating the female of his species in the
laboratory. Which reminds me very much of "Computer Lust" by Donna Gaines, in
the Village Voice three years ago. Read her new book, from her PhD Dissertation
at Stony Brook, immediately. Donna Gaines, whom I could once easily outwrite
when I was employable, now thinks I have "potential." She's the most famous
product of the SUNY Stony Brook Sociology Department's graduate program. She
has also written the first sociology dissertation wherefor the MOVIE RIGHTS
have been sold. No, no, this is true! Objectively empirically observably true!]

   This is one possible clue to what I advocate as the organizational structure
for the New Capitalist Society: I call it, "PIGPEN OF CREATIVITY." What IS
creativity, anyway? Gee, that's a toughie. Anybody out there have any ideas?
Possibly ideas are obsolete. I tried, in my clumsy boring fashion, to inquire
of FNORD-L@UBVM, New Ways of Thinking List, and they had no ideas, that is the
one certain thing I found out. Also, they refuse on principle to think. The
listowner, who is 23, is possibly too old, should step down in favor of a
younger Thing. Kids today, I just don't know.

   To the Japanese, Creativity is whatever Japanese hierarchical-authoritarian
socially-disciplined methods are no good at. They infer for some reason that
the US is better at volume manufacturing of Creativity than Japan, and in the
usual Japanese fashion are plowing massive efforts into Research and
Development to figure out how we do it, then make it in Japan at much lower
prices and better quality control. Lotsa luck, I say.

   There are other possibilities as to what Creativity is. Do something
Creative and tell me about it. It's tougher than you realize. The word
Creativity, actually, is so debased that "Creative" is what they call an
Upper Middle Class child who is too stupid and crazy to be otherwise
positively esteemed.

   Get to work on it. Or else. Or else what. Answer below.

Daniel A. Foss
thanking you all for having been such a wonderful studio audience, you didn't
drown out the laugh track once.
------------
ANSWER: "Sooner or later you'll own Generals." There's a little bit of Bolivia
in every nation.