The Rag Blog

CONSERVATIVE HEARTLAND TOWN APPRECIATES JOBS PROGRAM

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2010

At the east end of town, at the foot of the hill
Stands a chimney so tall that says “Aragon Mill.”
But there’s no smoke at all coming out of the stack.
The mill has shut down and it ain’t a-coming back.

Well, I’m too old to work, and I’m too young to die.
Tell me, where shall we go, My old gal and I?
There’s no children at all in the narrow empty street.
The mill has closed down; it’s so quiet I can’t sleep.

Yes, the mill has shut down; it’s the only life I know
Tell me, where will I go, Tell me, where will I go?
And the only tune I hear, is the sound of the wind
As it blows through the town,
Weave and spin, weave and spin.

— Si Kahn, “Aragon Mill”

President Obamacomes to town

On a cold and sunny Tuesday morning Air Force One flew into the Grissom Air Base just north of Kokomo, Indiana, carrying President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Just two days before Thanksgiving the presidential team had programmed a trip to highlight job stimulus successes in this declining factory town in North Central Indiana. Democratic leaders, outgoing Senator Bayh, and Congressman Joe Donnelly were part of a delegation to welcome the visitors.

According to press reports, bigger welcomes than from politicians were noted among Kokomo UAW workers and children from local elementary schools. Kokomo is one of Indiana’s small manufacturing towns dominated by the auto industry (along with Anderson, and Indianapolis).

Kokomo, with a population of only 46,000, houses 10 parts plants operated by General Motors, Chrysler, and Delphi. As recently as 1990 Indiana was ranked tenth in union density, largely due to auto and steel plants around the state. Kokomo’s UAW Local 685 played a pivotal role in the campaign to pressure Indiana Congressmen to vote “no” on NAFTA in 1994.

Because of declining manufacturing and the crisis in the auto industry, unemployment in Howard County (where Kokomo is located) topped out at 20.4 per cent in June, 2009. With the federal program to save the auto industry and various stimulus packages to save local jobs, including Kokomo fire stations, unemployment has been cut to 12.7 per cent. Jerry Price, president of UAW local 685 representing three Chrysler transmission plants pointed out that “The bailout has meant the survival of Kokomo.”

The White House reported that a Recovery Act grant of $89 million helped open a plant to make parts for hybrid vehicles. Also Chrysler invested $300 million in transmission plant renovation leading to the retention of 1,000 jobs. In addition, government funds stimulated the opening of 12 new businesses in the city’s downtown, including Sweet Poppins, a popcorn shop.

Tashia Johnson-St. Clair, the shop’s owner, said the downtown area used to be like a ghost town. After the government funds stimulated new businesses downtown, she said: “It’s absolutely beautiful. It looks like a scene off a TV show.”

The Kokomo Tribune noted in muted terms the general appreciation of Kokomo residents for the government’s job saving and creation programs:

The workers, many of whom undoubtedly voted to end the president’s Democratic House majority two weeks ago, applauded the speech, particularly when both Obama and Biden referenced the news that the American automakers are gaining market share for the first time in 24 years.

Critics of the Obama/Biden visit

Not every Hoosier politician or activist appreciated the presidential visit or the policies it was trumpeting. Governor Mitch Daniels was too busy to attend the Kokomo celebration. Indiana state party chairman Murray Clark said that members of the presidential team “are here today to cherry pick a single success story: at worst, it further proves how out of touch this administration is with an electorate that sent a clear message on Nov. 2.”

Local Tea Party activists condemned Obama’s stimulus policies arguing that businesses should be allowed to fail, rather than “throwing money” at them. (Labor activists have concluded that Kokomo would have been destroyed as a city without the emergency assistance.)

Perhaps the most telling commentary appeared in an editorial in the Lafayette Journal and Courier on Monday, November 29, 2010. It denied that Kokomo’s economic rejuvenation should be seen as an indicator of a more general economic recovery. The editorial reminded readers that Kokomo still had almost 12 per cent unemployment and the state and nation close to 10 per cent unemployment.

The Journal and Courier argued that the accolades and pep talks provided by Obama and Biden were misguided. What the president should have done was to “discuss how he planned to work with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives to reach compromises for job creations… Tuesday’s visit was a missed opportunity for Obama to celebrate Chrysler’s investment in Kokomo while reassuring workers across the country how he planned to create jobs working with a split Congress.”

The Kokomo dilemma

As the song says, “The mill has shut down: it’s the only life I know.” Under capitalism production and reproduction of life requires work — wage labor — for most people. Jobs are central to life. But in an era of financialization and economic crisis jobs are declining, workers are pitted against each other worldwide to work for less, and with declining incomes demand for products declines. Towns and cities are destroyed by lack of investment. The industrial base of the Midwest has been in decline for years. Whole regions of countries have experienced economic devastation. And employed workers everywhere live in fear for their economic security.

Government stimulus packages don’t resolve the growing contradictions between the shift toward jobless economies, declining wages, and reduced demand for goods and services. But they do provide relief for those who suffer. Kokomo, Indiana, is a success story. It needs to be replicated all around the country. And tales of successes need to be heralded from coast to coast.

The political dilemma, however, is reflected in the newspaper editorial cited above. Critics of government efforts to create and maintain jobs, such as reflected in this editorial, rather than encouraging greater efficiencies and improvements in government programs, demand the Obama administration “reach compromises” with political opponents who have made it clear they will never work with the administration.

The dilemma the Kokomo story poses for progressives is how to force the administration and its allies in Congress to fight for job creation programs in the face of an opposition that is inalterably opposed to these goals.

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In his revealing essay, Bruce Melton tells us that there is a serious disconnection between climate science and the public’s knowledge of climate change — a “fundamental blindness” he calls it. The information being discovered by the scientists is staggering — the evidence in the academic literature is overwhelming — but the means to mine this information out of the academic jargon and deliver it to the people is lacking. Bruce says we are now facing what scientists call “dangerous” or “catastrophic” climate change that “threatens our very existence on this planet.”

MUSIC HATH CHARMS TO SOOTHE THE STINKING BREATH

A recent revelation: rehearsing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, I was in the cello section mentally drooling over the carpet of harmonies we were laying down under the solo violin during the gorgeous slow movement. Not much to concentrate on other then how very beautiful this moment was.

As I breathed in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn, I realized that this music, this moment, and others like it, were SPECIFIC antidotes to the poison spewing from the mouths of politicians. I realized too, that without my frequent hits from the music inhaler I would probably be dead, or at least reduced to zombiedom. My life’s balance was suspended between the poison of politics and the healing of music, which interaction created a space for my writing.

I had long been aware of “the healing power of music” inasmuch as it was the arena of “music therapy” and the tool of music therapists. But I had never been so acutely aware of its specific purgative and remedial effect.

Coming up soon are Beethoven’s two birthdays, December 16 and December 17. As one of the characters in my novel, Insect Dreams, says: “Extraordinary people do extraordinary things.” (Not to be coy, there are two different documents with two different birth dates. I celebrate both.) And this week, too, Donna and I begin rehearsals for a New Year’s Day performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which will hopefully become a tradition here in Burlington. In any case, Beethoven is often on my mind.

It’s somewhat predictable, then, that the combination of Beethoven, music, and healing would find its way into my writing. I want to share with you this week a particularly ridiculous scene based on a particularly amazing piece of music–a movement of the A minor String Quartet which Aldous Huxley called “proof of the existence of God”. The movement was labeled by Beethoven “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Gesenenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”–a “Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Godhead, in the Lydian Mode”.

Beethoven was known to have serious stomach problems which bothered him increasingly as he aged. I put this all together and came up with the following note in my recent novel, The Annotated Nose.

The hero, Alexei Pigov, has become the Glenn Gould of the accordion. He is befriended by a fellow lab tech, William Hundwasser, who exploits and markets his strangeness, creating from him the public figure of a medieval plague doctor come to heal The Contemporary Plague. Here he is in Hundwasser’s lab, experimenting with Beethoven on Hundwasser, and Herman, the tarantula:

44. Studying tarantellas and subtly applying them was my first experience of being a healer. Hundwasser kept several in a terrarium in his lab as a conversation starter for the “pretty young things in their white lab coats” he enjoyed cultivating. I began with one named Herman.

Herman was a dancin’ fool. He (?) would jump out of hiding — or hibernating, or estivating, or whatever tarantulas do for sleep — at the first peep of the accordion, and would then stand thoughtfully, taking the music into his ganglia. Then he would begin to sway, and after a minute to dance, and to dance appropriately to whatever I was playing, almost in rhythm, but definitely fast for allegros and slowly for adagios. When I stopped, he stopped — and waited. He could outwait me. When I left, I would just leave him there, waiting.

I figured if an insect person could react this way, with so few nerve cells, human persons must be able process such signals with far more complex consequences than simply dancing.

As you probably know, Beethoven suffered from chronic abdominal problems and severe intestinal inflammation. Fortunately Hundwasser suffered similar symptoms. An experiment was staring me right in the face. The famous Heilige Dankgesang in the A minor quartet, the “Holy Song Of Thanks From A Convalescent To The Godhead“, was written after recovering from a serious bout with abdominal pain. Surely the tones, the great ideas of that movement, beyond being “proof of the existence of God” (Huxley), the successive integrations of disparate elements, must have something to do with disease, and with (Beethoven’s) stomach disease in particular. It was worth a try.

I made an accordion arrangement of the three adagio sections, and played them daily to Hundwasser during lunch break. We used the animal room for privacy. He just sat and listened. I suppose the rats listened too, but I had no parameters to measure the effects on them.

Hundwasser, however, had lots of parameters. Or, like the hedgehog, one big parameter: the number of Rolaids he popped each day. It took a week or so before R began to drop. From an average of 20 to an average of 12. On weekends, no music, R rose again. Come weekdays, it began to fall by Tuesday. In a sustained three week experiment, no days off, R fell to 3, then climbed to 12 again with a week off. We were on to something.

Neither of us had the time for a full and lasting cure, but after we stopped the experiment, he bought a record of the Budapest playing it, and has used that routinely to calm his symptoms. Saves him money on Rolaids, and he can listen while washing the dishes during the rare moments that he washes the dishes.

Flush with success, I looked more closely into the tarantella situation, the Antidotum Tarantulae. I would need to study the phenomenon first hand.
But there aren’t a lot of tarantula bites in Manhattan. There aren’t many tarantas [women bitten by tarantulas] to whom I could offer treatment — especially if it were just an experiment by a newbie. What to do?

Herman to the rescue! I could get him to bite me, and then, in the heroic tradition of the great doctors and medical researchers, I could try to cure myself. I admit such research is small potatoes compared to the guy who shoved a catheter into an arm vein and guided it up into his heart, or the guys from Walter Reed’s team who invited malaria mosquitoes to bite them, so they could test drugs, or even the guy who gave himself ulcers so he could prove it was bacteria that caused them. Small potatoes unless I died. But I know that though tarantula bites were toxic, they were not often fatal.

And of course, we have to remember Dr. Curt Conners, aka, the Lizard in Spiderman Comics, who lost his arm in a war, and experimented with reptilian DNA to try and grow it back, a great example of be careful what you wish for: the therapy caused him to mutate into a creature half-human and half-reptile. He became a villain, too, and even uglier than I am. I wondered if I might turn into a tarantula person — from the saliva — but it wasn’t very likely.

I knew this self-experimentation would be looked down upon at the Berg Institute for Experimental Physiology, Surgery and Pathology, even though experimental physiology, surgery and pathology was exactly what I was doing. So it was 1 A.M. when I let myself into Hundwasser’s lab, took Honey [his accordion] out of her case, and aroused Herman with the traditional slow, lamenting introduction to Borodin’s Polovetsian Dance #2, “The Wild Dance of the Men”. Out he came on cue, staring at me through the Adagio, and when the fast part started, gave a shiver, and went into nothing short of a frenzy, leaping high off the terrarium floor, doing 90º, 180º, 270º, and 360º spins in the air, landing on his feet, rolling over on his back, and dragging himself miraculously by hyper–extended forelegs reaching up, over and behind his head, engaging the sand. It was so amazing, I almost forgot what I had come for. He must have been a Polovetsian spider, or at least have Polovetsian blood, perhaps from the Russian steppes.

When the both of us stopped to get our breaths, I thrust my left arm into the terrarium, and, though normally a pacifist, he leaped at it, and sunk his fangs in midway between wrist and elbow. Good Herman! I had to pull him off. Within a minute and a half, I was, as they say, possessed by the spider.

Though being somewhat atypical myself, I was that night afflicted with all the typical tarantula bite symptoms: feelings of prostration, anguish, psychomotor agitation, clouding of my sensory apparatus, difficulty standing, stomach cramps, nausea, paresthesia, muscular pains, extraordinary itching, and best and worst of all, vastly heightened sexual desire. I took a cab home; the cabbie thought I was way-drunk.

Lying in my bed, I felt wounded and weary, and aware of the deep tediousness of all things. Still, after a short sleep, I was able to drag Honey out of her case, and begin a medly of tarantellas I had learned.

Somewhere toward the end of the 1490s, the great Neopolitan scholar Alessandro d’Alessandro described the treatment of stricken tarantas by the local folk musicians: “they play different dances according to the nature of the poison, in such a way that with the vicitms entranced by the harmony and fascinated by what they hear, the poison either dissolves inside the body and dissipates, or else is slowly eliminated through the veins.” And with (wouldn’t you know it?) one of the Neopolitan tarantellas, I could feel just that effect, a veritable exorcism, a return to life, possibly to love. By the next day I was weak, but feeling basically normal via my iatromusical practice.

Plague doctoring is not so much different, though I suffer less, and my patients suffer more.

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According to results from a standardized international test, U.S. students just aren’t making the grade. The results in reading, science, and math showed students from China far in the lead, with U.S. students placing 17th, 23rd, and 31st in the respective subjects. In other parts of the world education is taken more seriously, and with funds for education being cut here, and the growing power of the far right and the injection of religion and propaganda into the educational system, we have a recipe for even more failure.

David McReynolds was 12 when Japanese aircraft began an attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and he recounts how he felt and how his family reacted to the attacks and to the ensuing war. “I know that on Monday, when I went to Junior High School,” he reports, “I felt special pride as I saluted the flag. Any questions I might have about flags and patriotism would be many years ahead.”