by Bertrand Russell (1932)

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e., of advertising.

From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men’s thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity.

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist.

The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry. This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous.

Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. To this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.

I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment—assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage- earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: “I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.” I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry.

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that [those] who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover, their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits.

But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

by Susan Faludi

A few years ago, if you traveled up Van Nuys Boulevard to the 4500 block, you could meditate, like Ebenezer Scrooge, on the hollow murmurings and frenzied forebodings that are the ghosts of American commerce, past and future. This particular business strip belongs to the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles, which means it could be anywhere. The east side of the street displays the flattened state of things to come: a block-long mini-mall parking lot lined with consumer franchises—a Blockbuster Music store, a Baskin-Robbins, a Humphrey Yogart outlet, a General Cinema twoplex next to large signs announcing, coming soon, a General Cinema ‘‘Multi Theater Complex’’ offering a unique movie going experience with five more screens, bigger and better. Across the street, on the west side, is the past, and crumpled newspapers and discarded Baskin-Robbins cups skitter up and down its crud-caked sidewalks. At the boarded-up entrances to former hardware stores and shoe-repair shops, where tradesmen’s tools once clattered, clouds of gnats hover, making loitering un- pleasant. The small independent businesses have abandoned the field. On the day I first passed through here, even a thrift store bore a “for lease” sign.

Only one veteran remains open for business, tucked away on a second floor, up a well-worn set of stairs. Behind an unmarked door lies a room the size and shabby complexion of a one-man private detective agency from another era; dust-covered vertical blinds quiver in the stale air circulated by a floor fan. A frayed gray-blue carpet with a permanent crease down the middle is held down by two chipped desks, each with an over-flowing ashtray and a five-line phone, which blinks and rings ceaselessly from nine to six. The company sign with its blue globe logo has presided over the street for most of the firm’s nineteen years, an exemplar of discreet advertisement from a more decorous time: Figure Photography Films. Wanted: Figure models for immediate placement. 986-4316. Suite 203. The ad belongs to the World Modeling Talent Agency, central casting for the nation’s pornographic film, video, and magazine industries.

I began to get a glimmer of the landscape the new young men of modern porn were struggling to traverse: a treacherous terrain that had more to do with work than sex, more to do with gender identity than genital excitement. It was also a terrain more relevant to the larger working male population than most men would care to contemplate.

The agency has survived, despite the old-fashioned propriety of its sign, by accommodating the forces unleashed across Van Nuys Boulevard. In a world where desire is packaged in videocassettes or DVDs and marketed in malls, where self-worth is quantified by exposure, World Modeling has become the last-chance opportunity for a generation desperately seeking “immediate placement.” It is a backstage door to the current American dream and an emergency escape hatch for some who find themselves capsizing in a reconfiguring American economy. Which is why, by the last decade of the century, World Modeling would become a mecca beckoning not just women but men. More men, in fact, than women; more men than this industry of feminine display could even begin to absorb.

Every two or three months, the hopeful troop here for “talent call,” a day when prospective “new talent” can market themselves to porn filmmakers and photographers, and old talent can refresh their connections. Talent call is by invitation only; otherwise, World Modeling would have to rent out the Hollywood Bowl to process the hordes of hopeful performers who phone here daily. On this particular day, fifteen minutes after the agency’s doors opened, the stairs, the hallways, the main room, and an adjacent balcony were already dense with bodies. In this sea of fishnet and spandex and Nautilus-assisted torsos, the hopefuls darted about like nervous but directionless schools of fish seeking sustenance. There was an overpowering smell of tanning oil and cheap cologne, and, above it all, a ceaseless din, the sound of forced laughter, as from strangers trapped at a cocktail party—in this case, without the cocktails.

In the dead center of this restless throng, one job applicant stood motionless, his slacks neatly pressed, his shirtsleeves rolled back to display ever-flexed biceps. He was a thirty-ish young-old man with a tanning-salon bronze, a buzz cut, and a smile gamely plastered on his face. He cracked his knuckles methodically as his searchlight eyes roved the crowd for a welcoming face—he found none—and scanned the framed glossy photos of moneymaking stars on the agency’s walls, none of whom were male.

“This is my first time,” the aspirant, who identified himself as Damon Rose, told me. He had been trying to get the agency’s attention for two years now, he said. He did not, on the face of it, seem the type to be pursuing a career in porn. The son of a conservative San Diego orthopedic surgeon, he possessed, at the age of thirty-one, a sociology degree from the University of California at San Diego, an enrollment certificate from the executive MBA program at Pepperdine University, and a recently expired real estate license to practice in the state of California. “All my education is for naught,” Rose said. It had landed him a job as marketing director for a surfboard retailer, which yielded him an income insufficient to meet his student-loan payments. The selling of his own physique, on the other hand, had proved more remunerative; his résumé included, so far, basic training as a Chippendales dancer, three years in which he ran his own “male-exotic-dance service for women,” and, most recently, a modeling assignment for a phone-sex ad. He posed naked underwater, cradling a telephone receiver.

“I was born to do this,” he said repeatedly, rehearsing his enthusiasm in preparation for the audition he hoped to land in one of the agency’s two tiny back rooms, where production company executives had set up camp for the afternoon. After several failed attempts at “making contacts” in the main room, Damon Rose joined the crowd outside one of the closed doors in the back. But he was passed over again and again as the door flew open, a voice boomed, “New girl, please!” and another spangled woman elbowed by him. A despairing Rose turned to the closest actress, who was shellacked in hair spray and leaning against the wall. “You want to give me some pointers?” he appealed. She looked him over grudgingly, as if she were doing him a favor to lift her eyelids. “Just get it hard,” she said. Then she turned on her heel and vanished.

The other men in the hallway kept their distance. Stag films may once have served as the male-bonding glue of bachelor parties, but today, at least in the occupational end of modern porn, male performers face each other with Darwinian teeth bared, aware of their endangered status. “Actresses have the power,” Alec Metro, one of the men in line, ruefully noted of the X-rated industry. He had sold mattresses previously, he said without irony, and before that worked as a firefighter, an occupation he claimed to have lost to the forces of affirmative action. “No one said it, but it’s known they are looking for more minorities and women,” he said bitterly of the all-white fire department in his hometown, which, he asserted, had rejected his application when he had tried to transfer from the San Jose Fire Department. But if he hoped to escape “reverse discrimination,” he was already divining that porn might not be the ideal career choice. Female performers can often dictate which male actors they will and will not work with. “They refer us,” Metro said. “They make more money than us.” Porn, at least porn produced for a heterosexual audience, is one of the few contemporary occupations where the pay gap operates in women’s favor; the average actress makes 50 to 100 percent more money than her male counterpart. But then, she is the object of desire; he merely her appendage, the object of the object.

By now, the door to the back room had opened and slammed shut in Damon Rose’s face five times. He wouldn’t let it happen again, he vowed. When the next new girl was ushered in, Rose slipped in right behind, riding her sequined coattails. Inside, the porn production scouts sat on a foam-spitting couch and folding chairs. They barely glanced up as Damon Rose made his pitch. Maybe it was his voice, straining to please, that dampened their interest. Or maybe it was his look. Jack Stephen, of Cinderella Productions, muttered to me behind his hand: “We get these beautiful buffed guys, but they can’t do it. They’re just fluff. These new guys come apart like a bad suit.”

Damon Rose was speaking to them earnestly: “I’ve only done one thing through Ron Vogel—for phone sex—but otherwise I’m a virgin. But I’m—” The producer Mitch Spinelli interrupted, “Thank you, Damon,” eyes craning over his shoulder for the next prospect. The porn producer and actor Steve Drake called out, “New girl, please!”

Damon Rose slunk out shamefaced, flung back into the masses in the main room, where I spotted him busy converting hurt to aggression. He had sneaked up behind an actress and grabbed her breasts. She shook him off, then turned to appraise his pectorals. “Your boobs are bigger than mine,” she said. He laughed uncertainly, then wandered off, his face sunk in despair.

In the agency’s main room, barely visible on a low side table tucked behind a stack of porn magazines and a shedding ficus plant, sat a large snifter glass. It contained not brandy but dollar bills. A handmade label taped to it said “For Cal.” It was a collection plate of sorts for one of the generation of actors who “cared too much.” Cal Jammer had succeeded where Damon Rose could only aspire. And two weeks before, he had committed suicide, at the age of thirty-four.

Somewhere between the 12th Annual Adult Video News Awards ceremony, which coincided with the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and an afternoon spent with Bill Margold, self-appointed “daddy” to many porn actors, a month later, I began to get a glimmer of the landscape the new young men of modern porn were struggling to traverse: a treacherous terrain that had more to do with work than sex, more to do with gender identity than genital excitement. It was also a terrain more relevant to the larger working male population than most men would care to contemplate.

The young men’s how-I-got-here stories were of a piece. They had all bailed out of sinking occupational worlds that used to confer upon working men a measure of dignity and a masculine mantle but now offer only uncertainty. Steven St. Croix (who, like every porn actor, adopted a name to go with his new persona) went to vocational school to be a mason, but all the job openings he found involved busing tables or washing dishes. Stripping, then porn acting, gave him a livelihood, and “recognition.” Julian St. Jox was an Army Airborne Ranger, but once he entered civilian life he found that his job as a bartender wouldn’t pay the rent. “Porn pays the bills,” he said. Vince Voyeur, twenty-nine, worked for four years as a forklift mechanic, one of the men who “built things,” he said, before realizing that such men belong to a rapidly receding past.

“Who knows who builds things? Who cares?” Bill Margold said to me as we sat in his cat-hair-strewn apartment a month later. Margold, who was fifty-two, joined the porn industry in 1969, and moved from scriptwriter to performer to unofficial papa of distressed porn stars. He invited despondent actors here to hug one of the scores of teddy bears he had collected for this purpose. As we spoke, a perpetually yowling tomcat called Pogo competed for his owner’s attentions, storming from chair to chair, his switching tail knocking porn glossies and adult magazines to the floor. It used to be, Margold said between fruitless efforts to shush the cat, that you proved your manhood by building things. “That was the artisan mentality. That doesn’t exist anymore. We live in a microwave- oven mentality. Before you even think about it, it’s already there on the table. It’s all too fast now. There’s no time to even watch it be created.” In a microwave-ready culture, building is “not proving anything.” The “new Paul Bunyan,” Margold said, was the man who displayed his big ax. “Better to wield the ax than create from what the ax has cut, because that’s the center of attention.” Young men flocked to porn, he said, to become that new “woodsman,” the industry’s term for a reliable male performer—the lumberjack whose penis was his hatchet.

Of course, the porn industry has its old-fashioned artisans, he assured me. Cal Jammer, in fact, had been one, an electrician, set designer, and general handyman as well as a performer. Margold had met Cal Jammer on the set of Aussie Exchange Girls, and he recalled Cal’s eager, almost desperate need to please. “Basically he was a sheepdog that didn’t know when to stop licking your hand.” Margold jerked his head in the direction of the caterwauling Pogo. “It’s like this cat, essentially, only this cat is not as good-natured.” At that, the cat made a lunge for Margold’s chest, and the exasperated porn daddy hurled Pogo into the kitchen. Returning to his chair, Margold turned pensive and glum. He stared silently into a far corner of the room, where the evening shadows were stealing across a row of teddy bears.

“I lament that I wasn’t there for Cal,” he said finally. The night after Cal’s death, Margold got two calls from anguished performmers, one at two and the other at three in the morning, wanting to know why Cal did it and if they should do it, too. Margold had set up a hot line the year before, after the suicide of the female porn star Savannah. Porn actresses’ committing suicide was a concept the industry veterans understood; they’d seen it before. But for a male actor to despair, to exit the stage so violently—what did it mean? When did they begin to care so much? And why, this winter, did the men of porn care so much about Cal Jammer, a man whom most of them found irritatingly clingy and had known only casually, but whose name now provoked teary diatribes, fists slammed into walls?

A money-shot man wouldn’t be paid much in the nether reaches of porn, where he’d do most of his work, but he could take pride in the fact that it was his masculine prowess on display, pumping away like a well- oiled machine. The money-shot men considered themselves the last work- ingmen of America. They were defending traditional manhood by showing that the one irrefutable proof of genetic maleness was up and running.

Cal Jammer—or Randy Potes, as he was called until he entered the business—was one of five boys of a navy veteran turned physics professor and a mother who worked at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys. When he was still young, his parents divorced and his father retreated from their lives. More recently, the GM plant had closed and his mother had gone back to community college for “retraining.” The brothers all had trouble finding work; the most successful became a school janitor. Cal’s strength and dexterity lent themselves to skilled labor and athletics. He worked on construction crews, installed solar panels, and, when he wasn’t working, surfed and Jet Skied. In the late eighties, he got work building sets for a porn-photo studio, began modeling there, and soon thereafter became obsessed with finding his place before the camera. He could see that what counted was not building the stage but appearing on it.

Cal’s journey from the Santa Clarita Valley, where he grew up, to the San Fernando Valley was a short one, but his other journey—from building sets to posing on them, from being a golden boy on California’s surfing coast to being a man marketing himself as the very image of a California surfer—was epic. The riptide of celebrity culture, whether it surged over pornography or professional sports, aerospace corporations or magazine offices, seemed to be reversing an ancient force field, and the “male gaze” felt its strength ebbing before the rising power of the woman on display. In truth, that gaze had never given men more than a fleeting sense of power, just as being gazed upon still gave women only an illusory power. But these were fine distinctions to men like Cal Jammer. For them, it was plain that the “feminine” ornamental occupations they had disparaged had become employment oases. It was like consigning the Indians to the barren desert, only to discover oil on the reservation.

The advent of cheap video production introduced a wedge that now threatens to break the porn world in two. “There’s going to be two ends of the business,” porn actor turned director Buck Adams said. “It’ll be those who are doing ‘The Project’ and those who are doing the garbage. And there won’t be any middle ground. And that’s when I think this situation might get even more scary.” While the corporate porn makers were raking in breathtaking profits, the low end was morphing into “the flesh eaters,” Adams said. “One half of the industry is eating itself, eating each other’s legs off.” He waved his arms in frantic praying-mantis motions. “More, more sex, sex, sex, sex! And sell it for a dollar ninety-eight and sell ten bazillion copies of it, and make six cents a tape and we are going to make fifty dollars at the end of the month!” What scared him most was the effect on the male talent. “There’s getting to be a real wide gap in the performers. Either you’re bitchin’, got everything, and you are in, or you’re just missing one piece so you’re out.”

The modern male porn actor confronted an impossible career obstacle course. He could try to make it as a money-shot man, a “pop face ’n’ go” guy of hydraulic regularity, known for his heroic capacity to come on a dime. A money-shot man, or “Mr. Wood,” as Buck Adams called him, wouldn’t be paid much in the nether reaches of porn, where he’d do most of his work, but he could take pride in the fact that it was his masculine prowess on display, pumping away like a well-oiled machine. The money-shot men considered themselves the last workingmen of America. They were like “blue-collar people, welders,” another porn actor turned director, Paul Thomas, told me. They were defending traditional manhood by showing that the one irrefutable proof of genetic maleness was up and running. “We’re the last bastion of masculinity,” Bill Margold, a proponent of the in-the-toilet variety of porn, insisted. “The one thing a woman cannot do is ejaculate in the face of her partner. We have that power.”

But if a male performer really wanted to rise, if he wanted to become a “star” in what Buck Adams called “The Project,” instead of one of the welders in “the garbage,” wielding the punisher simply wasn’t enough. Big-budget porn demanded of its male actors not just sexual performance but cosmetic adornment. The men who rose to the top were those men who could compete with the women in their own realm, not ejaculate in their faces.

A porn shoot is an intricately delineated ecology. Directors, while still more or less on top, have increasingly been challenged by the rise of the “contract” and “box-cover girls.” With the advent of video, the box, not its contents, generally sells the product, which means that the box-cover girl can sometimes trump her supposed bosses. The big porn companies court this woman’s favor by offering her a generous contract (by porn standards) in return for “exclusivity.” While the number of highly paid box-cover girls is small, their presence seems vast and domineering to male actors, who speak resentfully of the women’s rising fees and prima-donna airs. The contract girls at Vivid, another industry giant, are perceived as the most indulged; I’d heard them referred to as the “Vivid Queens.” “In the porno chain of command,” actor Jonathan Morgan said to me bitterly one evening over drinks, the contract girl “can choose who she wants to fuck, where she wants to fuck, the script that she wants to fuck in, what day they are going to fuck.”

Unlike the top female performers of the 1970s, such as Georgina Spelvin (The Devil in Miss Jones) and Marilyn Chambers (Behind the Green Door), who actually styled themselves as actresses and sexual adventurers, the contract girls are undressed-for-success career women, making a calculated professional move that will get them into and out of the porn film industry as quickly as possible and inflate their long-term salaries as exotic dancers. “They are purely mercenary,” porn star Nina Hartley, who belonged to the earlier era, said of those she contemptuously called “postfeminist princesses”; she viewed them as hypocrites who got financial independence by playing to retro male fantasies. “They are very traditional. They are not sexual revolutionaries.” With the explosive growth of table- and lap-dancing stripper clubs, large numbers of dancers have realized that they can quadruple their income simply by appearing on a few porn box covers. They then become “feature dancers” who return to the circuit to make as much as $10,000 a week. This kind of windfall is not available to men, with the exception of a few gay porn stars.

By choosing an erection as the proof of male utility, the male performer has hung his usefulness, as Jonathan Morgan observed, on “the one muscle on our body we can’t flex.” The beautiful woman in a porn film applies her glamour from a bottle and she’s ready; the man must wait for an erection to happen, an agony known in the business as “waiting for wood.”

Under the directors and the contract girls is the reliable “male talent,” fewer than thirty regulars whom the industry can count on for on-call erections. Male actors are generally paid by “the scene,” as it is decorously called. No ejaculation, no paycheck—though some of the more sympathetic filmmakers offer a kill fee. The pressure is too much for most male performers. As much as the Bill Margolds might wish to portray porn acting as the last arena of the traditional male work ethic, getting it up isn’t the kind of work in which industry guarantees rewards. Quite the contrary, by choosing an erection as the proof of male utility, the male performer has hung his usefulness, as Jonathan Morgan observed, on “the one muscle on our body we can’t flex.” The beautiful woman in a porn film applies her glamour from a bottle and she’s ready; the man must wait for an erection to happen, an agony known in the business as “waiting for wood.”

Ranked just beneath the upper tier of male “talent” is a seething, ever-changing mass of B-girls or “fill-in girls,” many of whom either stumble onto the set hollow-eyed and strung out or don’t bother to stumble in at all. They are endured as the necessary bane of porn’s existence, and disparaged behind their backs—or eventually fired. Below the B-girls, way below, are the new male wannabes, who, if they don’t perform, are immediately sent packing. Finally, at the very bottom, the lowest of the low, are the “suitcase pimps.” These are the husbands and boyfriends who claim to be “managers” or “marketing directors” for their eminently more marketable mates. Increasingly, they insist not only on a cut of their women’s wages but a spot in the camera lights as well.

Off on a side track is the far less hierarchical and more jaundiced society of the technical crew: camera operators, assistant directors, box-cover photographers, and the various production assistants known as “crew hogs.” Some are young film-school graduates who discover upon graduation that they can go to Warner Bros. and carry coffee or report to 4-Play Video and start as a senior editor. On the set, their moods range from affectlessness to acid sarcasm, both a protective pose and a reasonable response to the fact that watching sex performed for a camera quickly becomes dreary.

The exploitation of the male” in the adult business, Nina Hartley told me, “is very distinct, in that he must cut off his dick from his heart.” This wasn’t as true in the days when the porn world was more of a community that sustained a certain collegiality and longer-term relationships. “Now, it’s much more assembly-line nature.” And those who can’t shut their hearts and minds off, she said, get chewed up in the gears. Cal Jammer “had a heart to break,” and it was still connected to his penis.

Much to his frustration, Cal often found his erections held hostage to his feelings. But he also didn’t want the pile-driver reputation. He wanted to be, or at least thought he wanted to be, more of a box-cover boy. And, to a certain extent, he succeeded; it was rare for a male actor to make it onto the box, and Cal had more box appearances than most. He even headlined in a video take-off of Batman, which was to be his big break. However, the video, wretched even by porn standards, was recalled soon after its release over a copyright-infringement dispute.

Cal compensated for his lack of cocksmanship by marketing himself around the industry as a carefree, windjammin’ California boy. He sank substantial sums into the development of his aura: the most expensive sports gear, Jet Skis, speedboat, sports car, the fanciest fluorescent surfer duds, gym and tanning-salon member-ships. Porn actor Cid Morrison recalled Cal buying two-hundred- dollar sunglasses one day, just “because he thought they gave him ‘a different look.’” The surfer-boy image buoyed his career to some extent, but it did not reflect a more personal quest, one that drove him to buy a condo at the earliest opportunity and furnish it as befitted not a beach-bum bachelor but a fifties nesting couple. He assembled all the trappings of middle-American family life as advertised in family magazines: the camping gear, the barbecue pit, the volleyball net. “He really wanted to be a father, a husband,” said Katina Knapp, was the office manager at the soundstage where Cal was the master builder and served as his maternal confidante for many years. “He never mentioned his father, but he was very into family.”

Soon after he began acting in porn, Cal found a ready-made family and persuaded them, for a time, to move into his domestic bower. He met Cameo, a single mother, on her first porn shoot; the video was Behind You All the Way. Cameo, who had just divorced and moved to Los Angeles from Colorado, needed a home for herself and her five-year-old son. Cal, as she recalled, was eager to play the gentleman and protector, opening doors, taking her arm. When her ex-husband stalled in sending her son to Los Angeles, Cal gallantly flew to Colorado to act as a bodyguard while she retrieved her child.

There were, however, some less appealing aspects to his traditional family-man performance. “He was very strict about the way I kept the house,” Cameo told me. “It had to be absolutely spotless.” He also didn’t want her to return to college. In fact, he didn’t really want her to work at all, but he desperately needed her income to help pay his mortgage and utility bills, so he let that part of the Father Knows Best picture slide for a while.

Cameo’s own vision of family life was more informed by feminism than fifties television. “Everything was always his and I just said, How can I marry someone and have an equal relationship with somebody where everything is his?” While she first found his desire to shield her from porn employment “really sweet,” after a while, she began to suspect it was only a “double standard—and I’m going nowhere. I didn’t move two thousand miles away from home to be a servant.” Eventually, without his knowledge, she signed a contract with Arrow Film and Video, requesting a two-thousand-dollar advance so she could put down a deposit on her own apartment. “I finally just had to go behind his back. [Otherwise,] I would have always constantly been under his thumb and there in that apartment to clean it forever.” When Cal heard about Cameo’s contract with Arrow, he stormed onto her set. He found her in the makeup chair and “threw a big stink.” Then he charged into the parking lot and let the air out of her tires.

In the wake of their breakup, Cal began to have more problems “breaking down on the set”—the male talent’s euphemism for a lost erection. His insecurity was not exactly diminished by the relentless jeering from other male actors, who needled him about momentary softness, tormented him with speculations about his girlfriend’s infidelities, or simply made fun of his latest hairdo. No matter how much the taunting tore at him, Katina Knapp recalled, “he kept it all inside. He always tried to be cheerful.” From time to time, the situation would become too much and Cal would go back to building sets. But set design provided little in the way of money or recognition, and soon he would be badgering directors for another shot, until one day someone would need a stunt dick and there he’d be, ready to get back into the game. This on-again, off-again dance continued for several years, the apprehension that caused him to flee the stage being the same that caused him to return. “Cal’s whole perspective was fear of male performance anxiety,” Cid Morrison said. “That was his life force.”

Now remember what I told you,” Nick East said as he greeted me at the door of his apartment in 1995, a one-room guest cottage in North Hollywood which you entered from an oil-stained back alley cluttered with trash cans. “This apartment is not a reflection of who I am.” He dropped onto a couch and reached for the remote control, desultorily flip- ping channels on a giant TV screen, his only possession of any significance. East once shared an apartment with Cal Jammer, at a point when Cal was between women, but he said he was still too upset about the death to talk about that time, and became angry when I pressed it. What he wanted to talk about was lost manhood. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “The definition of a man is gone.” In Nick East’s history of gender relations, the golden age was the forties and fifties, when, “if a man said something, women took him at his word and acted accordingly.” The man had a job that lasted and a wage that went farther than a weekly run to the A & P. At the center of Nick East’s dream of a Happy Valley past was a father who would take care of them all. “Back when my dad was able to support three children and a wife who didn’t work and buy a house when he was twenty-three . . .” was how a typical Nick East sentence began. What made that possible? I asked. “Because the workforce was not flooded with females,” he said, suddenly angry. “The government tricked our women into working and women became men.”

Nick East’s father was an electrician, a dedicated union man. Nick grew up in the Midwest, the youngest of three children. He tried to follow the work formula of his father’s generation: directly out of high school he joined the navy, then quickly got married and left the navy for family-wage employment. But the jobs he found in civilian life could barely support him, much less his wife. He sold cars, then copiers. “That’s all I did,” he said. “I sold things.” His wife moved back in with her mother in California and found a job at a dental-products firm. Nick went looking for a factory job, figuring, based on his father’s experience, that it would pay better. But the manufacturing world that he ran up against no longer manufactured a middle class. He worked in an aluminum plant that was hiring only nonunion labor; his job was to “ream out” siphon tubes, seven days a week, twelve hours a day. “I make more now,” he noted.

He drove to California to reclaim his wife, but she wasn’t interested in being reclaimed. He moved to Ohio, where his mother and stepfather lived, but couldn’t find steady work. Finally, he held his nose and took a job at Burger King. The night after his first day on the job, he had a nightmare: “They had locked me in a Burger King and made me work there.” The next morning, the image of Burger King incarceration still vivid in his imagination, he found himself immobilized by panic before the franchise doors. “So, I returned my uniform at the drive-through window.” Soon after, he moved to California and auditioned at World Modeling.

“That was 1991—four years!” Nick East said. In today’s market, that rated as a job with longevity. “The business saved my life. It gave me something to go on with.”

As Nick surfed through the channels, he hit the Playboy program; glancing over, I jolted in my seat. “Hey, that’s you!” He shrugged. “What movie is it?” I asked. He didn’t know; he’d made too many to keep track. “I’m always on TV.” His voice held no enthusiasm. “I’m on every day of the week.” He stared blankly at the image of his thrusting hips. “I know I’m nothing. Though most of the world has seen my face, I’m nothing because I didn’t do anything.”

If he was on TV every day of the week and still thought of himself as “nothing,” I asked, then what must Cal Jammer, who was a mere spear carrier by comparison, have thought of himself? But Nick was not interested in exploring the connections between celebrity culture and male despair. As far as he was concerned, there was only one force behind his former roommate’s suicide: his wife. “Cal’s death, it was over a woman,” he said flatly. The relevant facts, as he saw it, were these: Cal’s wife “asks him to get out of the business. He got out. She wanted a divorce. She got into the business…. As someone told me, Cal said, ‘This is for you, babe,’ and shot himself in the head.” At the funeral, Nick said, “I didn’t pay last respects because I would have had to walk by her.” He leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes for a moment. “She tortured him, which is the way that the sexes have changed.”

Nick reached in back of the couch and, much to my surprise, pulled out a Bible. He had been reading it lately, he said, because he was looking for “direction,” thinking about quitting the business, and working on a memoir “about the way home.” He wanted to read me his favorite passages and so turned to John, chapter 14. “‘I will not leave you desolate,’” he read, his face catching the light of his own image still flickering on the Playboy channel. “‘I will come to you.’” He paused, then turned to chapter 10. “This is the most intense part of the Bible. ‘My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no man is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.’”

I borrowed his memoir-in-progress to read that night. It turned out to be less an account of a life than a mystical wish fulfillment fantasy, in which a “guardian angel” materializes one day as Nick is driving cross-country and promises to be his divine guide through life. The angel first appears to a grateful Nick East in the clothes and guise of his own father.

Cal could build anything. Cal’s the one who did this whole living room.” Buck Adams turned and swept his hand across a vast empty expanse of white carpet and marble veneer. It was another porn house, down to the white couches, but on a grand scale, on the top of a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Most of the rooms were empty and some of the construction appeared unfinished, as if the contractor had abandoned the project three-quarters of the way through.

Buck Adams took me through the house, showing me Cal’s handiwork. “Cal was a very responsible guy in a lot of ways,” Adams said. “He was very normal. He had this very big view of how things should actually work. You know, you work hard every day and in the end you will be rewarded…. But he was finding that just isn’t true nowadays. It gets you a lousy stinking little paycheck, and that’s that. That’s where it ends.”

Buck Adams had the exaggerated gestures and oversized voice of a country Texan, which he was, though one suspected that his home-on-the-range act had been pumped up considerably since his arrival in Los Angeles. A boxer turned porn actor, he retained the bantam strut of a man forever preparing to enter the ring. His sister, the porn star Amber Lynn, pulled him into the business after neither boxing nor working as a bouncer seemed to be leading him anywhere. “For the first three to four years in the business, I was ‘Mr. Wood,’” Buck Adams said, flexing a biceps. “No talk. Just a cowboy.”

Several years ago, Adams started directing videos, bigger-budget numbers with car and helicopter chases; he invented a new genre, “action porn.” By his own admission, he liked to “blow things up,” on camera anyway, and his signature film formula became the car wreck followed by the wrecking of the sheets. But he was working on a very different kind of film now. It was the story of the porn star Savannah’s suicide; she shot herself soon after an auto accident that scarred her face. “I don’t even show the car wreck, which would’ve been a natural. I mean, I lived to do things like that.” At some point in the last few months, he had lost his appetite for cinematic explosions. He had almost lost his appetite for the business altogether. Cal’s death had left him shaken, sobered. On this morning, he looked pale and drawn, the ride-’em-cowboy persona barely limping along. If he was more haunted than most by Cal’s suicide, he had his reasons. He was the last to speak to Cal, moments before his death.

“The big problem with this business,” Buck Adams said, seated cross-legged on the floor of his living room, adrift in the open sea of shag, “is there’s less and less story.” On the low end of the market, where the “flesh eaters” prowled, all that was left was a random and hastily assembled flow of images. “My God, they can make a video in one day for about four grand. Sometimes they even try to shoot two movies in one day for seven or eight grand. It’s absolutely incredible. People are just rolling through like cattle. Say nine words and fuck the whole piece together. They shoot it on a home-movie camera with two idiotic lights like somebody would work on your car with. And they actually release them, like this ‘movie.’ . . . It’s heresy.” With the story line gone, he said, “looks is all there is to it. It’s making the actors feel isolated to the visual aspect.” Of course, the “story” had always been threadbare, even in porn’s Golden Age. Still, that thin veneer of narrative had provided an emotional fig leaf; without it, the performers felt painfully exposed. “For the actors, it’s really tough. They’ve taken away your one big justification for who and what you are: your work.””"

From the extended online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt. Adapted from “Waiting for Wood,” a chapter from Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male (William Morrow & Company, Inc.).

“Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds.”

In 1996, I started a radical political zine in Chicago called LiP that evolved into a full-fledged all-volunteer North American magazine published from 2004-2007.

LiP, always printed on 100% recycled paper, with worker-owned or union printers, never grew beyond a print-run of 9,000. The magazine was devoted to politicized intellectual honesty, and it had no allegiance to any “ist,” no programmatic plan or unified theory for the people, no interest in electoral politics, and quixotically challenged dogma from points all across the political spectrum.

In early 2005, We decided to confront head-on many progressive and radical sacred cows. The result was The Constructively Negative Sacred Cows issue, and it was, for us, a popular and critical success, with daring critique and analysis of things ranging from gender-essentialized feminism, the organic foods industrial complex, the problems with gay marriage (and gay assimilation), and more.  I’m pleased and gratified, several years later, to see how contemporary and relevant a great majority of the magazine still is. I’m even more pleased to share the complete issue, in PDF form, here, with readers of LOUDCANARY.

EDITOR’S LETTER

This issue began, I admit, as nothing more than a wicked gleam. What fun, our thinking went, to go after ideas and beliefs held all too precious by those of us interested in creating a better world. After all, what place does the sacrosanct have in matters of critique and strategy?

We’re defining sacred cows here in the broadest, non-Hindu-specific sense: ideas and entities that are—in the immortal words of one of our favorite reference books, the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary—“often unreasonably immune from criticism or opposition.” It’s our contention that such immunity is unnatural, and that this breed of cow, left untoppled on its pedestal, produces only stagnation, rigidity, and a slavish devotion to convention. The world as we know it exists in a constant state of flux. So should our ideas.

Of course, one implied aspect of the sacred cow metaphor is slaughter, which is usually perceived as a negative enterprise. How, we asked ourselves, could we organize an entire issue around such a thing without succumbing to relentless negativism? Nobody likes the asshole who attacks but never creates. We agree. Criticism may be vital and useful, but if it doesn’t lead anywhere then it’s just so much self-satisfied snark. And here at LiP, we’re certainly never snarky or self-satisfied. Not us. No, never.

Of course, one implied aspect of the sacred cow metaphor is slaughter, which is usually perceived as a negative enterprise. How, we asked ourselves, could we organize an entire issue around such a thing without succumbing to relentless negativism?

The following 93 pages are a kiss disguised as a slap. When Lisa Jervis takes on gender essentialist feminism in her customarily cranky fashion, the intent is to help prevent those who care about a vibrant, emancipatory feminism from racing into a painful cul-de-sac; Matt Bernstein Sycamore’s gleeful evisceration of gay marriage as a Trojan horse for conservative values seeks to keep our eyes on the prize of true liberation; Michael Muhammad Knight asks if heresy might just be the highest calling for the spiritually inclined; Jennifer Whitney’s informed assault on the moribund aspects of Independent Media Centers is, above all, a plea for better grassroots media; and the pairing of interviews with neoprimitivist Derrick Jensen and naysayer of catastrophism Iain Boal intends to spark debate about our fundamental hopes for humanity and the planet.

This theme proved so lush and savory that we had to expand, from 80 pages to 96. We just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to look at how industrial and consumer forces have made a travesty of organic food standards and labeling. We found ourselves powerless over the impulse to do an entire interview with hip hop journalist Jeff Chang in which we ask him absolutely nothing about music. And for years we’ve been awaiting an excuse to run our adaptation of Susan Faludi’s late-’90s ruminations on porn, work, and male identity.

Those are just some of the sterling examples of the inspired analysis you’ll find in this issue. Their incisive excellence reflects the passion and intelligence of our writers and artists as well as our editors, all of whom volunteered their efforts to the project.

We think we’ve transcended the role of mere gadfly with this issue. I sincerely hope you agree.

—Brian Awehali

READ THE FULL ISSUE >

(From the extended online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt)

It is not just the amount of overall rise that is of concern. Storm surges will increase dramatically in strength if baseline sea level is higher. Hurricanes and typhoons have already increased significantly in strength and duration, an effect scientists attribute to climate change, and this is expected to continue. More than 10,000 people have been killed in storm surges in the Bay of Bengal alone in the last 300 years, and such surges could increase exponentially in the coming years. This means that the watery ends of Miami, Tokyo, New York, Mumbai, Shanghai, Jakarta, and Dhaka are not just possible, but actually likely.

Their ends might come from the sea, something like this:

…or from the sky, like this:

(The already disappearing island of Kiribati is, of course, already f–ked.)

Even if we stabilize carbon emissions immediately—an impossible task given global political and economic forces—we will still see significant or even catastrophic sea-level rise for centuries to come.

Many people still consider the anthropogenic aspects of climate change to be merely theoretical, and regard dire climate change forecasts like those limned in this pithy blog post as alarmist, worst-case scenario scaremongering. (Among this group, you most likely can find a good number of people who believe in things like “intelligent” design and Norse origin mythology, too…)

But consider that all modern coastal development and industrialization have taken place under a period of temporary sea level stability, which would not likely have been maintained long term even without the anthropogenic effects of climate change accelerating sea level rise. During the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, sea level was about 120 meters lower than today—and the average temperature then was only four to seven degrees Celsius colder! In the Pliocene era three million years ago (at least 2.5 millions years before homo sapiens even appeared) sea level was forty meters higher than today.

We, you see, are only blips in the deep-time soup of the planet.

Or maybe it would be better to say deep-time slime. Why? Because climate change—largely inevitable and natural, but quickened by human industrial activity—is not only making oceans higher and warmer, but also more acidic, a trend which could have sweeping ramifications. As the pH of the ocean drops, the calcium carbonate creatures that range from zooplankton to shellfish have a harder and harder time making their shells.

(If you’ve never considered the considerable beauty of zooplankton, click below to see a slideshow of images by Ernst Haeckel, many of which depict zooplankton called radiolaria):

There have already been significant reductions or changes in calcium carbonate creatures because of acidification, with effects resonating up the food chain. If this continues, scientists envision the oceans becoming more and more populated with jellyfish, algae and slimy, more genetically basic creatures—it has been called “the rise of slime.”

So taking these trends to their most extreme long-term conclusion, we can envision our terrestrial world being swallowed up by epic storms and the slow-motion apocalyptic rise of ocean waters filled with primordial slime…as humans retreat and fight each other over increasingly scarce food and fresh water.

Kill your horror. After all, it’s only natural and very likely inevitable. Besides, as the always forward-thinking writer, William S. Burroughs once wrote, contemplating human mortality, mutation from that which we call human, and the possibility of space exploration: “We’re all here to go.”

—with reporting by Kari Lydersen

by Clare Lacy (from the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow)

Human civilization supposedly thrives on order and predictability; it means that people will obey traffic laws and pay their taxes, show up to work on time, and keep their word. Predictability gives us a sense of order, and order lends itself in varying degrees to unity, to nationalism, to legality, and to community. Whether we like it or not, much of our lives are governed by these ideas of order and predictability, and by our assumptions that these ideals are universal and natural. And indeed, nature does follow its own order with periodic population swells, predictable animal behavior, and food chains, but in attempting to mimic or find equilibrium with natural conditions, humans never seem to be able to get it quite right.

With all variables seemingly accounted for, chaos often predominates over predictive systems, and we are left wondering what clue we are missing in our search for order in natural systems. In every field of inquiry, scientists have come up against certain problems that until the advent of chaos theory were written off as unsolvable.

These bugs in the system were most often attributed to inaccurate equipment and unforeseen or unknown variables, and were generally written off as anomalies. Such anomalies could be found in everything from weather simulators to the rhythms of dripping faucets, in everything that we took for granted to be steady, linear, and predictable. But systems don’t tend toward predictability and sameness, according to chaos theorists: While they do seem to follow certain patterns, a “sensitivity toward initial conditions” (many of which seem to be outside the power of humans to detect, or control) means that the exact same thing will almost never happen twice.

These conditions could be as simple as an extra number after a decimal in a mathematical calculation, or vague enough to be still unidentifiable by humans. It is these sensitive initial conditions, chaos theorists believe, that nature depends on for genetic diversity and adaptive behaviors that lead to evolution; in looking for predictability, the connection that scientists were missing was the presence in every field of a point in linear systems where things become disorderly. Chaos theorists began exploring and graphing the similarities between these forms of disorder, as well as the boundaries of their behaviors. Graphed one way, a line representing seemingly random disorder in a given system seems to spiral into chaos; graphed another way, it outlines a distinct and repeating form, but never along the exact same path.

It is this unique dissimilarity that makes for the instantly recognizable forms of fractals, of snowflakes, and of the leaves of ferns, and for the uniqueness of each of these from others. Not only was it a new and uncharted area of science, but it was universally applicable, and cast new light on old problems.

The initial resistance from the scientific community toward this idea of an underlying order in problems previously dismissed as unsolvable was strong. Not only did it call to mind past failures at further exploration, but it sorely impeded the ability of scientists to play god. The idea that there is a certain amount of chaos or sensitive dependence on initial conditions theoretically meant that if we could just figure out what those conditions were, we could duplicate any system. On the other hand, if we couldn’t identify those conditions, we would have to acknowledge the presence of a code that we could not crack; it was not complete chaos, but neither was it order in which we could interfere.

If chaos theory has a general lesson to impart to us, it’s that uniformity and conformity are literally unnatural. In monoculture crop plantations, large tracts of land are planted with the cloned seed of a single “perfect” organism. In the event of disease, there is no genetic variance among these identical plants that may include a predisposition to resistance, but the reaction has been to deal with this outcome through large amounts of pesticides. Forest fires spread easily through trees of one species planted over clear-cut areas; generally, one pine tree is planted for every tree in a diverse forest that is cut down (or so the propaganda goes). Grown close together with no variety of height and spacing, natural fires are suppressed until the buildup of underbrush leads to widespread fires that rage out of control.

To the extent that societies must find equilibrium with the natural world and its principles, it’s worth noting that we tend to see differences rather than similarities, and to miss overarching, sometimes monstrously obvious themes. Aberrations from the “normal” brand us as malcontents, troublemakers, or threats of various ilks. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and a whole slew of other mentalities spring from a denial of the natural diversity of the universe. It is a problem that affects our society beyond the scientific community, and will continue to do so as long as we attempt to impose an order that disregards the world’s natural and observable affection for unique dissimilarity.

For nature, chaos theory tells us, deviation is the norm.

Birds, who once were dinosaurs, could take over the world (again) if they wanted to. And not just in the movies, a la Hitchcock’s 1963 terror, The Birds. (If you haven’t seen the movie, check out this well-edited one-and-a-half-minute version of it.)

In Kagoshima, a city on the southern island of Kyushu, in Japan, crows have just recently been on the attack: destroying power lines and fiber optic cable, stealing candy and bloodying children’s faces, and outwitting human “crow patrols” by building decoy nests. It was also reported recently that crows had been caught on film making tools, a behavior previously thought restricted to humans and some primates.

You see, birds are smart: They make tools, have sentries, navigate by magnetism, sense impending geophysical events and, of course, they can fly.

The whole birds-were-once-dinosaurs thing is one of those boggling things that just seems so obvious once you think about it or, really, just look at birds for a bit.

“Rahonavis is a primitive bird from 80 million-year-old rocks of Madagascar. Despite being more bird-like than Archaeopteryx, raven-sized Rahonavis retains some distinctive theropod features, including the distinctive slashing claw used to murderous effect by Velociraptor in the film Jurassic Park. Velociraptor is thought to be about as close as a dinosaur gets to being a bird without actually being one.”

It’s interesting. I was talking to my mother about birds a while back, and when I mentioned their ability to navigate by magnetism and, I’d heard, listening to underground rivers, she said: “Yeah, with their lodestone.” I’d heard the word “lodestone” before, but never knew what it meant. When I asked, she said it was like a magnet in their heads that let them find their way.

My mom sometimes shares wisdom that I’m fairly certain I should not believe. For example, that if buttercups turn your chin yellow you like butter, that Santa Claus actually exists, or that the world began just a few thousand years ago, just like the Bible says.

But anyway: Lodestones. Mom spoke of it as a kind of known thing, but I went looking online, and science, as so often seems to be the case, only recently caught up with known things.

The discovery in 2004 of tiny deposits of a mineral called magnetite (lodestone) in the beaks of pigeons and bobolink (a North American songbird) biased the debate [about how birds navigate] towards the hypothesis that birds can read Earth’s magnetic field (image).

* * *

So, do the math; birds can fly, solve problems, make and use tools, organize, and navigate by magnetism. Why do they put up with us? Against all reason, birds must like us. Despite modern industrial chicken “farming,” despite our erecting cell phone towers that disorient them, wind farms that sometimes clobber them, or mountains–continents!– of trash that poison them, they must just like us anyway, you know, the way you might love that guy who sometimes gets mad and beats the crap out of you. Like that.

It wouldn’t be because they’re meek or physically incapable of carnage, either. Check out just one type of one species, the golden eagle: flying down and killing a deer :: or strategically hunting goats by knocking them off of cliffs.

That’s the only possible explanation for why they haven’t already devoured us, pecked us underground, or made pinnipeds of us. They must enjoy watching humans. Who knows? Maybe the second most popular leisure activity among birds is peoplewatching. I suppose a few — buzzards in particular — must also possess a gustatory appreciation for people and our reputedly pork-like flavor.

Their feelings toward us must be very complex. After all, in addition to lodestones, they possess specialized limbic systems in their brains, necessary for true emotional behavior. Outside of birds, this system only exists in the higher vertebrate species. So things like rage, fear, and curiosity are not merely anthropomorphic projections when it comes to birds. They really do have distinct personalities. They also have gender-bending, “promiscuity” and sometimes engage in illogical risky behaviors.

I wonder what finally set the crows of Kagoshima over the edge?

POSTSCRIPT: Cosmos Online also just reported on findings of the fossils of previously unknown species of giant feathered tyrannosaur–Yutyrannus huali–in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, in China.

by Brian Awehali

Despite this, last night I was reconsidering my aversion to the Chinese outdoors, wondering if I was being paranoid. Sunlight is still moderately healthy. And after all, I drink heavily filtered water, wash any fresh vegetables I buy several times (they recommend using diluted bleach as well, but I refuse to trade one poison for another), and I live, sleep, run and work out in a heavily insulated building with industrial grade air filters going 24/7.

I also drink lots of coffee, which I seem to remember reading somewhere renders me all but impervious to cancer.

But then, after my coffee, any anticarcinogenic confidence I had evaporated when I sat down to check email and a friend of mine had forwarded on a ghastly article entitled “Made in China: Cancer Villages,” by Lee Liu, from Environment Magazine. The article goes into great depth about China’s unprecedented levels of cancer and the “grow first, clean up later” approach to industrial development driven largely by the forces of economic globalization.

The article itself is superb: well-written, clear, and thoroughly researched. Worth reading. Here are some highlights:

Various forms of Chinese media and Internet sources have reported a total of 459 cancer villages across 29 of China’s 31 provincial units, the two exceptions being Tibet and Qinghai.

In the past 30 years, death rate due to lung cancer increased by 465 percent and has become the most deadly cancer in China. Cancer, the number one cause of death in urban China, accounts for 25% of deaths.

Liu’s report continues:

Water contamination from industrial pollution is believed to be the main cause of cancer villages, and there is a close relationship between China’s major rivers and the location of cancer counties.

Because Chinese media and academic journals are governmentally controlled, their reports tend to be conservative about politically sensitive and negative subjects. However, there have been no reports disputing the cancer-village phenomenon.

The lack of reports disputing the cancer catastrophe is genuinely surprising to me, but this does not mean that the press freely reports on these matters, or that citizens have much power to do much about it:

Local protests are sometimes organized and run by village leaders, mostly likely the village’s secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) branch committee, the village’s top leader. Dou Xian, CCP secretary of the Douzhuangzi Village, led a six-village (three from Tianjin and three from neighboring Hebei) alliance to fight against polluters, many of which were later shut down by the government. For telling the media how many villagers had died of cancer, Wang Linsheng in Shenqui, Henan, was fired as Huangmengying village’s CCP secretary and was accused of “leaking State secrets,” a very serious crime in China.

China appears to have produced more cancer clusters in a few decades than the rest of the world ever has. Liu’s report cites several major factors for this: A “grow first, clean up later” approach to development, enormous rural-urban disparities that leave extremely poor farmers and others in the countryside to drink straight from highly polluted rivers, a lack of free media and democratic ability (to publicize the issue and, then, to protest and militate for change), lax environmental laws and corrupt courts that rarely punish polluters, and — this the most relevant for people outside of China — economic globalization:

Industrial pollution would have been less severe if China were not the world leading manufacturer of chemical products. Globalization may also be related to the income and consumption disparity. China’s suddenly wealthy are inspired by the lifestyle of the wealthiest people in the world. High-end luxurious goods are readily available, and their shopping habits and changing tastes are reshaping global trade flows of flashy cars, gold, elephant ivory, and dried seahorses. Availability of those goods and the possibility of migration to a more developed country push for a never-ending demand for wealth, and China’s elite are firm supporters of the “grow first” development policy.

Liu’s fine report stays properly focused on China, but it’s worth noting just how interconnected the planet’s systems are. You cannot have dozens of Grade-5 toxic rivers flowing through a country this large without that poison leaking into the system, seeping throughout the oceans and all marine life, metasticizing through the atmosphere, and permeating simply everything. My point in saying that is not to point an alarmist finger at big bad China, but to underscore how we are all, for better or worse, in this together. We in the Western world honed and perfected the industrial processes most to blame, and we erected the market forces, system of economic globalization, and blind worship of materialism now very much driving the Chinese industrial cancer juggernaut.

Yes, we. Us. We’re to blame. For not using even the feeble democratic mechanisms our badly listing society still places at our disposal. For letting our government sell us out at Copenhagen. For letting rich people and corporations hijack our governments and economies while we all went on participating in this mistakeholder economy. For worshipping a materialistic way of life that’s quite clearly not sustainable in a world without one have for every hundred or hundred thousand have-nots. For driving cars once it’s well-known how hideous they are from almost every angle. For plastic, for television.

I do believe I could rant for pages about all the ways this was utterly predictable and heartbreakingly avoidable. But I won’t. I’ll just say that chickens coming home to roost isn’t just a phrase for Malcolm X to invoke as the inevitable payback for slavery and repression of Black Americans, or for Ward Churchill (among others) to use to describe the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It’s just about the right phrase for describing how the cancer of us — us being those actively engineering or “merely” participating in globalized industrial capitalism — will most certainly get ours. And we’ll drag millions, probably billions, of poor and largely blameless people (and animals) into an early mass grave with us.

Chickens coming home to roost.

Would that it were not so.

* * *

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The “Capitalist Pyramid” illustration at the top is a famous Industrial Workers of the World (Wobbly) poster from 1911. The IWW was unique in many ways, not least because it was the only union that welcomed women, immigrants, and black Americans into the same organization. I led off this post, ostensibly about industrial criminality and health issues in “communist” China, with the Capitalist Pyramid to make a point about power, independent of facile ideologies or propaganda. China is not a communist state, anymore than the United States, strictly speaking, is a democracy. Sorry: you can call a plutocratic oligarchy where 1% own 99% “democracy” if you want, but I won’t be joining you in such foolishness. I think there’s a lot to recommend an anarchist understanding about states, the nature of power, government, and people: states exist to monopolize force and monetize and extract labor from their subjects. From this perspective, the core distinctions to be made between China and the United States are not about “freedom” but about scale and respective terms of engagement with economic globalization.

This post was first published on April 29, 2010

Bernard Loomis (July 4, 1923 – June 2, 2006), the marketing genius who did far more than anyone else to help transform children’s television programming into a promotional arm of the toy industry, died of heart failure at the age of 82.

Largely through his introduction and marketing of dolls, action figures, and products including Chatty Cathy (the first talking doll), Barbie (measurements: 39- 21-33), The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Baby Alive (who “realistically” pooped when fed), Play-Doh, The Man from Atlantis, Care Bears, and the entire Star Wars action figure collection, Loomis’ efforts helped spawn a “toyetic” world of “entertainment multiplexes.” Every company he worked for became the world’s largest toy company during his tenure.

Loomis entered the world on July 4, 1923, in the Bronx, and claimed that his father, a Russian immigrant who “dabbled in show business and generally failed to make a living as an itinerant salesman of woolen goods,” never bought toys for him. Such deprivation led him to create a baseball simulation game based on a deck of cards and memorize the Lionel train catalog.

The young Bernard was not the only one of his generation to grow up toyless. “The Great Depression…made it impossible for most people to buy a lot of toys, and the war had the same effect,” according to a 1986 Atlantic article about the industry. “When prosperity returned…the modern toy industry was born as well. Propelling it toward maturity were the two great engines of postwar American culture: television and plastic.” 

It was his vision for the fusion of those two engines that launched Loomis’ career and earned him the moniker “The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning.” In 1968, while working for Mattel, Loomis was assigned to market Hot Wheels, a new line of miniature toy cars. He created the first animated series based on a toy property, which premiered on ABC on September 6, 1969. The FCC (at the behest of a now-defunct competitor, the Topper Corporation) declared that the Hot Wheels series was not entertainment, but “a 30-minute commercial for Hot Wheels.” ABC cancelled the series in 1971.

Loomis was predictably critical of the FCC’s ruling. “It is not fair for anyone to judge that ‘you can’t do that because you started out as a commercial product rather than a different kind of commercial product,’” he protested. “The original Disney or Snoopy cartoons were commercial products. They were done for the purposes of making money, selling films and selling newspapers. And to say we can’t broadcast a TV show because we did the toys at the same time, rather than sequentially, is nonsense.”

Loomis persevered in his efforts and, in 1980, collaborated with the American Greetings card company (who’d found that strawberries were the most popular element on greetings cards) to foist the television special Welcome to the World of Strawberry Shortcake onto prime-time television with nary a peep from the FCC—despite the fact that the show was but one part of a marketing empire that also included toys, games, and hundreds of licensed products.

Loomis was not merely a deft businessman who pulled himself up from his modest beginnings by his very own bootstraps. If that were the case, his might merely be one more hackneyed story in the thick annals of USAmerican free-market folklore. What truly distinguishes Loomis is his absolutely central role in robbing children’s entertainment of any motive but profit.

“Manufacturers create a fantasy world, and this has led to a very sophisticated relationship between them and the child,” said Loomis in an interview from the mid-90s. “We are now in the business of multiple sales to the same children in the same fantasy.”

Perhaps Loomis’ own daughter, Debra, aided by her proximity to the world’s premier marketer of children’s toys and entertainment, understood only too well the falseness of a fantasy constructed entirely for the purpose of “multiple sales.”

She never watched Saturday morning cartoons.

—Brian Awehali

From the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt

Comparisons to the more fabulous and generally less professional wing of the futurist community—palm, tarot and crystal ball readers, millenarian apocalypticists, Miss Cleo—are tenuous at best. Frankly, most divinators aren’t terribly interested in manufacturing the future in ways broadly aligned with the interests of corporate and government elites. And no self- respecting divinator would be caught dead using “strategic foresight,” “competitive behavior anticipation,” or any other such tool of the more employed wing of the futurist camp. There’s just no life in it.

To combat the professionals, and after failing to generate any predictions of our own that weren’t predictably bleak (and not all that useful) we advertised online for someone with real divination skills, and sifted through about 200 responses before settling on Victor, who mostly makes his living now as an online gambler. The predictions Victor gave us certainly aren’t “professional” in any sense of the word, but we were somewhat surprised—and frequently dismayed—at his prognostications…

• Your brand new high-def, drug-enhanced holo-television will still have nothing interesting on.

• Shortly after animal-human hybrids gain equal rights, cat people will quickly rise to the rank of de facto aristocracy, much to the consternation of humans and hybrids alike.

• The average life span won’t change, but some people will live to be 150 while others die at 30.

• New music will be made available only in the form of ring tones. Enthusiasts who seek out complete songs will be referred to as “completists.”

• Corporate consolidation will continue. In 2030, Disney will finally buy Apple and Russia.

• You’ll be able to record and edit a feature-length film on your phone, but you still won’t be able to get reliable reception.

• Bill Clinton’s disembodied head in a jar will host a hit talk show. His recurring guest host will be Al Sharpton.

• Oxygen bars won’t seem all that stupid anymore.

• The Rapture will be scary, but it’ll get rid of all the Christians and leave a lot of nice vacant housing available.

• Contraception will be unnecessary because everyone will be born sterile. Access to fertility drugs will be restricted and prohibitively expensive. Wealthy families will have multiple children as a sign of extravagance and wealth.

• Microsoft paraphernalia will be very retro.

• Taking everyone by surprise, giant pandas will overrun the Earth.

• News will be photoshopped onto the daily adpaper.

• The tourist trade will boom in the underwater cities of Amsterdam and Venice.

• “FTMTF post-op pre- transition soft butch” and “björk” will officially become the eleventh and twelfth genders.

• US schools will merge with Sony-Nintendo, and bundle 6th through 9th grades with any purchase of Grand Theft Auto Tasmania.

• Paper-based “magazines” will be rare and really, really cool; hipsters will collect them, like they once did vinyl-based “records.”

• The existing global capitalist order will descend into chaos as its own unsustainable operating instructions and increasingly disruptive climatological forces take their course.

This piece is part of the extended online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt.