Angels, Gods, and Satellites
Dear interwebz,
Just a poem.
Angels, Gods, and Satellites
or
My Head in the Heavens
In space without the gravity, no pain,
No sadness great and weighty on the earth,
Can touch a man, at heaven’s height.
No tear can fall, no droplet trickle
Down a cheek in soft catharsis.
We are higher here than humans,
And see the sun more clearly,
See how small our planet is.
They feed us from the darkness,
Willingly, and we return, and cry
Upon the surface of the earth.
But higher, far from this pock-marked
Planet, scarred by starfalls,
We only feel a sudden sting, then pass on,
What would be a tear fails to form,
For nothing falls in the heavens,
But only from them, if our fuel fails
And we come crashing, all aflame,
To the surface of the earth, a star,
At last our free-fall of twenty years terminating
With gravity reclaiming her long-levitating
Sons and daughters. As we fall,
And the gravities pile in heaps,
And our momentum builds, the heatshield
Breaking, tears tumble upwards,
Spattering in a sizzle on the ceiling.
I cry quite literally to heaven,
As I plummet, the cosmonaut returned.
Sincerely,
-L
An Eternal Shouting Match Part II
II.
ARMINIUS:
“I will shed it on the morrow,
Your blood and the blood of yours,
All the smooth-cheeked men
Whose lines will soon be tested,
Assessed for its hue, compared
To yours, brother: I think that yours
Is honor-bound to be nobler, brother,
More like the hue of this ancient river,
Which I know once warmed your heart.”
FLAVUS:
“I know a southern river now,
I have gone by bridge and boat
Freely across the Tiber, and when
A man has gone that way,
He does not oft return.”
ARMINIUS:
“Then when the sun is visible,
When I see it over the pines,
I will look for the plume on your helm.
If your hair is hidden by that plume,
If the blonde I know you wear
Is covered in the bronze and red,
Then I may send a certain doom
To visit you on the river: but
If I see your links of gold,
Your nature’s worth displayed
To beckon back the sun:
Then shall I withhold, and know
That you remain my brother, my blood,
And let you across the river.
But otherwise, good brother,
I demand you do not fight,
When battle begins in the morning:
For ten thousand men may die,
And Varus may find new legions
To command through the murk
In which he unhappily lingers,
New brethren to bring unwelcome death.
Know this, brother, it is not courage
Brings a man or a legion beyond
This river, this edge of the Empire:
No man for courage comes here,
But only for desire, for a drive
That pushes him up to death,
Maybe even beyond, brother.
You knew it once, so know again:
The forests hide a thousand roads
And all of them go to separate deaths,
And all those roads surely lead to death.
Every road in the world shall die,
Even the finest roads of Rome will die,
Though they be worshiped in a thousand years,
Still someday they must die:
But the forest of hell, my brother,
Where families dart arrows between
The once-friendly trunks?
That goes on forever, brother,
That goes on forever and ever.”
An Eternal Shouting Match
Dear interwebz,
Studying WWI and WWII right now, German nationalism scares me. And yet they really do have cool stories. One such cool story is that of Arminius and Flavus, two Germanic brothers. Arminius led a coalition of Germans that challenged Rome, Flavus served Rome as an auxiliary. Supposedly, just before the Battle of Weser River, when Arminius’ Germanic coalition was at its height, Flavus and Arminius caught sight of each other across the Weser River. They exchanged words in a story recounted by Tacitus. The story has been lionized by German nationalists, with Arminius representing the great German volk-hero.
Arminius and Flavus need to be humans again, rather than symbols of Germanic vs. Latin culture. These are two brothers at war. Arminius and Flavus can stand as symbols of nationalist struggle. Or they can be icons of human difficulty, of the many ties of faith and loyalty that draw us. I have not accomplished this re-envisioning. But it’s a start. This is the first half of the poem. I will post the second half later.
An Eternal Shouting Match
ARMINIUS:
“My brother, my blonde brother,
Across the river, my brother in Rome:
How does the treeless land seem to you,
How are the rocks, the tame stone,
The shields of similar hue
Which, when men bleed, do not
Change from that noble sacrifice,
Being legion-red already?
And how, oh my brother,
How is my wife, who carries
In her womb my son as yet unborn:
Does my brother care for them
While the Father of the treeless lands
Oversees our happy family?”
FLAVUS:
“Your eyes were always crazy, brother,
Across the river, my brother,
Hiding there with broken eagles
Deep in the blue-green forest.
Rome treats Thelnelda well,
And would as well to you, to yours,
Even the issue of your loins,
If you would but make a peace,
Swear an oath, call off these dogs
That now surround you, hungry
For the blood of Roman men
And for their neighbors across the Rhine.”
ARMINIUS:
“I cannot call them off, my brother,
For they have licked up fire
From the river that burns in winter heat:
It burns with the blood of Varus,
The blood his sword lapped up
Out of him when he fell upon it.
We lap it up, we drink it up,
We drink the river, the fire,
The blood that runs across
The outward-facing palm
Of our home, our land: yours!”
FLAVUS:
“Not mine, brother, for now at last
I am Roman, and raise a sword for them,
Entrusted with a cause that proves
What color is my blood, for
I shall make it flow, maybe, tomorrow.”
Sincerely,
-L
Why Economics is Stupid
Dear interwebz,
Let’s have a brief chat about housework. Housework has been defined in much Marxist thought as unproductive labor. Strictly speaking, most orthodox economists have disagreed with the idea of “unproductive labor,” though the idea is enjoying a comeback. Typically, mainline economists assume that people use their time efficiently (yes, economists are that stupid); so they don’t presume to suggest that people would be better off sleeping more or less or working harder or less hard. Peoples’ preferences reign supreme.
So, consider housework. We spend lots of time doing daily tasks. Some are useful. Some are inane. But let’s make another economist-sized assumption, and assume that all housework is useful: from making the bed to sweeping the floor to mowing the lawn to obsessing over how to arrange the cups in the cupboard, all housework is productive.
But… you don’t get paid. And you don’t directly lose anything (besides your dignity) for quite a while, or at least until you get fired because you have mold on your clothes. But that’s a pretty distant future.
Thus, all that work you do is economically… invisible. Irrelevant. No measure of GDP will ever capture it. No studies will be published assessing whether housework training improves job efficacy. People may ask questions about inequality of housework, but mostly as a personal rather than political issue.
Now imagine a world where everyone stops doing their own housework. Everyone has more free time. Most people use it to invest in other things they like better. A few people become professional housework do-ers. They get paid to do housework. Their labor is economically meaningful. Whatever labor they did before is either no longer done, or done by former houseworking people.
Assuming nobody makes any gains due to increased efficiency of work (unlikely; specialization probably would create efficiency), the same amount of work is being done by the same amount of people– except more people are getting paid. The GDP expanded. A new market has been opened. Hallelujah! Economic growth.
But not really. The same products are around at the end of the day. And, though maybe specialization led to greater efficiency… we all know that “hired help” still requires an investment of time from the “hirer.” When the repairman comes to your house, it takes your time too. And your money.
Moreover, those gains from specialization which exist seem most likely to accumulate around those people whose career paths are least disturbed: not the house workers, but the people doing less house work. They probably saw a larger marginal benefit to more work than to housework. If we make egalitarian assumptions about peoples’ capabilities, that means the houseworkers take a sub-optimal position. Probably some housework must be “done twice.” However, it seems unlikely that the lag-time for transitional unemployment, skills learning, and other imperfections will be negligible; it will probably be a significant deadweight loss to the economy, but one that will be concealed, as it is a non-monetary input into the monetary labor itself, hired housework, which is new.
In sum, this apparent “economic growth” isn’t any growth at all. It is just paying people to do what was originally done for “free.” It might yield benefits from specialization. Maybe, but not inherently, especially in an already highly specialized economy.
This is economic growth only in that it moves some numbers around. But those numbers do not seem proportionate or in any way rationally tied to where the growth actually occurred, and don’t reflect the lost growth of the now housecleaners’ previous “efficiency” at their career.
In sum, measures like GDP are useful. But only so far. The ideal way to maximize GDP would be prohibition of imports, rapid monetary expansion, monetization of every social interaction, and high government spending. Few of us, however, feel that we should have to exchange money for every conversation, be forbidden from buying iPods, have the values of our savings eroded out from under us, and have the government own our houses. And most of us recognize that these tools for “increasing GDP” don’t actually mean very much.
There is a fun substitute for GDP: RGDP, or Real GDP. All it means is GDP, adjusted for inflation. But, again, there are so many other confounding factors. Housework isn’t the only service or product that exhibits the phenomenon of sporadic monetization. Pastoral services, counselling, financial advice: all form meaningful economic activities… and all are often entirely outside of economic data. Or consider prostitution and black market activities.
For an idea of just how big some of these things are, the “statistical discrepancy” for alternate measures of GDP in the US has been around $100 billion for several years. And that’s assuming the comparative measures are perfectly accurate, which they aren’t.
Conclusion: Take any economics based on statistical indicators and values with a grain of salt. We don’t know what we’re talking about.
Sincerely,
-L
They That Slumber
Dear interwebz,
Just another poem. This one’s in meter. Yay.
They That Slumber
They that slumber, they that sleep,
And have no life– Beyond themselves,
Don’t they listen, don’t they hear,
Insensible to wind and whim?
Crying loudly, helping not;
A man like me? I’m small today.
Bigger, stronger, acting wise,
But surely broke– A Christian man.
Empty silence, calling us,
Still hiding the Apocalypse.
Failing falters, failing fails,
A hoping heart! It heals, prevails.
Hoping, striving, waking wild,
I smell the night– The leaves are falling.
Instant seeming, instant quick,
A sudden breath– Awake, oh Soul.
Waking, rising, seeing light,
At last, reborn, rechristened well.
Walk in nightfall, open eyes,
You see the dark–
But will you answer it?
Sincerely,
-L
Love Me, Read Me
Dear interwebz,
Completely coincidentally, this blog isn’t the only place I publish. I also publish my thoughts elsewhere.
I’m the opinion editor, and was the conservative columnist, for Transylvania’s student-run newspaper, The Rambler. You can find every article that pertains to me or that was written by me here:
You should read it. Then leave comments about how much you love reading my columns. That would make my bosses love me.
Sincerely,
-L
The Battle of Tours
Dear interwebz,
Just a poem. Life is hectic. I’m not even sure anyone will read the whole poem, given it’s a bit on the longer side. I hope you enjoy the parts you read.
The Battle of Tours
They rebirthed a term for you,
From the old hammer state,
You counseled by a hammer too,
Born of shield-breakers, empire-eaters,
Will-benders: you bound the continent
In the Latin way, a Frankish lord.
The southern folk divided broke,
They bent their backs to Berber strokes,
And fed the camels of the south,
Their freedom the finest fodder.
Did not your hammer break them?
Surely, that was mercy, a grace
On Odo the Great: for the hammer-king
Would fall, and falling make the breaking,
And breaking make the birthing
Of that age of mayors’ manners
And the sword against the scimitar.
Gaul was Gallic then, ne French,
And you a Frankish lord defended still,
And still you held upon the hill
For days, a week, a Sabbath’s time
In wait you held phalanxine in the cold.
The Moors would there in the wood
Find Frankish marrow unmalleate.
Horseless they had called you,
The horseless Christian rabble:
But horseless men may hammer,
If their wills be welded strong,
Wielded in old wisdom’s fist:
And horseless heroes should unseat
The camel-backed Cordovans
Who came charging to the hillcrest.
And there on the forest fringe,
The cavalry was felled, fast and fey,
Five-on-five, and ten-on-ten,
They were broken on that deathly hill,
Where Christian skulls kept vigilance,
Lifted up to view the vandal horde.
For out of Africa they came, the Cordovans,
By boat and ship and wing of spirit’s breath,
Upon the centers of the Christian cause they came,
They settled by cathedrals, they settled in the books,
They settled in the echoing lands,
All sapped of their Christians. And some
They drove by force of arms, and some
They broke by long lamenting, and some
They never broke, but drove beyond Narbonne,
Where on a cold and tree-topped hill,
They stood across the Paris path,
Betwixt the Saracen and the Sea.
There Charles broke the thousands,
The tens of thousands he stayed,
There a Christian lord held back the tide,
By his cavalryless courage kept
Europe Christian through the darkness.
Nor was he King of ruthless kind,
Nor was he Consul of the reasonable
Romish folk, but a Steward of the House,
The protector of a king-departed’s memory.
Ever have we Christian men been all that stands
Between the bitter claims of mastery
And the poetry of remembrance; by the Hammer,
We have stood, by the Nails,
We have stood, on the Hill,
We have stood, where the Crossroads
Passed at the feet of the Hammerer,
Charles the Hammer of God
We have stood and bled and died,
Age on age we died and loved upon the hill,
In oath to our lord the Hammerer.
* * *
Now Tours has not been taken,
But the towers have been toppled,
And what bells yet ring are empty-shelled.
Now Poitiers is pagan, prepost’rously,
And all the Frankish lands are under threat.
And where is the Hammer, where the Hill;
Where the wall of shields? They were common folk,
A levy of Christian souls, called in action
As was fitting to the time: led by a lord
Of lesser claim and title, ringed by
A royal number of disciplined guardians.
And the horns of the hunt of heaven
Ring still in long and soulful resonations
In the ears of all who set themselves to the soil,
Quiet the six-billion beckonings that distract,
And heed those few voices that age the years,
The dim and distant ring and thud
Of Hammer, of shield, of Nails, of sword,
The Trees upon the Hill, and the Blood
That hallowed that eternal sight.
Sincerely,
-L
