Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  Our language is free. It is unprivatizable. The ability still to use words artfully has become the mark of poor people, minority people, everyday people, and writers and intellectuals: those who cannot afford the image, and exist in a shared older world without it, or who deliberately refuse it.

  Hip-hop has its memory intact. The gat a thug pulls from his waistband reawakens the Civil War and the Gatling gun. The skrilla that Southern rappers accumulate in 2010, cash money, remembers the scrip in which blacks were paid under the sharecropping system. In the official United States, our presidents since John F. Kennedy and our public figures and broadcasters have taught themselves not to be able to speak the rich American language. What has come out of the mouths of recent leaders, until Obama, seemed like the result of brain damage. What is expressed on Fox or CNN, on the twenty-four-hour news, exalts the image above language. It puts the image above real news, which is, in a democracy, whatever transpires in the community of the people.

  Underneath the stupefying official loss of the language, there has been an accumulation of riches kept on the wrong side of those redlines by which realtors and city developers kept blacks and whites apart. All the old American words were collected in the row houses, terraces, and projects. Here is what happens to the genius of the People when ignored.

  My grandmother spoke at home an American English rich in allusion, quotation, joke, formula, words borrowed from native Yiddish and acquired from neighborhood Spanglish, brought home from popular culture and the street, a vernacular far richer than the trimmed-down English she used in her job as a switchboard operator and receptionist and the standard English her children and grandchildren learned. When she became most animated, telling a good story, her “he ain’t” and “I says” were let out most, her “errors” saltier and more precise than the proprieties she knew perfectly well.

  I find it tempting to imagine the old language up on shelves at the tops of closets, in bottom drawers, between bed frames and mattresses, in the bins of old lumber rooms, and the small words tangled with the screws, switches, twine, and hardware of which every household has its collection, the pins and the buttons. But of course the words must have been in constant use, in the speech and stories that don’t make it onto TV: carried on in the Republic, in the world of whatever constitutes and sustains the true American People (and not the one evoked by the newscasters and spokesmen).

  It may be better to think of the old language as belonging to one of those buildings one sometimes hears about, from an earlier phase of the last century, built in an era of a different conception of the People and its needs—or its deserts—or reclaimed from a rich elite who had earlier moved out. A decrepit or unassuming edifice with, in its basement, a swimming pool, there all this time, statued with classic Greek heroes and goddesses in marble, and gold-trimmed, and lapis-lazuli-lined between the pristine underwater tiles, marking the lap swimmers’ lanes. A public pool, remnant of the old metropolis, or a forgotten property turned over to new residents.

  Here, in hip-hop, is a language spoken by ingenious people who can take some earned pleasure in America, by what she has left for us, and what We the People or our ancestors have made. Why should it be that those who were least cared for, most left behind, should find their way to making and keeping something most classical, valuable, intelligent for America? Why are they alone the bearers of our language when most everything official conduces to mutism?

  [2010]

  —

  I stopped practicing, in the end. I still listen, admire, and enjoy. I try to sing along, a bit (only when I’m alone, still). I could say that I listen with new ears, because I learned technical difficulties of the art. Really, I regained my old ears. Instead of it becoming easier to identify with hip-hop, I remember why it’s always been complicated as well as desirable. I remember where I am, in old uncertainties. They’ve gained historical ballast, but no resolution.

  I also knew, even as I was writing, that I was trying to comprehend a history that had reached some completion and was being superseded. I could tell that Kanye and others had blown wide open what constituted the genre. I had Drake’s first EP on my iPod and didn’t know what to make of it. Soon even commercial hip-hop was drawing in electronic dance music, private musing, monomania, and gloom. The verbal art evolved away from dexterity, speed, and articulation, to rediscover slowed, slurred, and processed voicings, shouts, and chants. It seemed the new openness also obliged hip-hop to have to tolerate superstardom for Macklemore and Iggy Azalea, white rappers of dubious provenance. So five years’ passage have shaped a new constellation.

  The hardest thing to explain is why this impulse came to me after Obama’s election—what that meant. I’m one of the people who felt that Obama’s presidency mattered also because he’s black. This was a gift beyond the rightness of his politics and the undoubted greatness of the man. It seemed miraculous in part because it seemed to mean that at least one half of my fellow voters weren’t as racist as I’d feared, or that racism in some places still allows advance in others.

  The feeling I had at his election was that I ought to change, too. I ought to learn something. Admittedly, it took a strange form—even derisory: It doesn’t sound good to ask what practicing Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di” had to do with the first American president of African descent. I hope it will take other forms. Obama’s silence over these eight years has inspired other black speech, I think, unveiling what he couldn’t say—in Black Lives Matter, most powerfully. Maybe I’ll have new chances to learn. I have some friends who are very sophisticated political thinkers; I think I’m a simple one. For me, I often think the only real political question is “Whose side are you on?” and I have to struggle always to remember it, as everything flows from that.

  [2015]

  * * *

  * “Nigga” emerged as an alternate orthography so that rappers could write down what was being said in rap without printing the unprintable word. This spelling was supposed to speak of fraternity, not hatred, though at first it principally gave artists a way around record-company strictures for titles and track listings. It would become a word of its own, like “brother” (meaning, specifically, a black man). But it would remain unsayable for whites. (My Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged resolves the problem in this way: “nigga—n.; by alteration; plural niggas also niggaz: AFRO-AMERICAN—used chiefly among Afro-Americans; usually taken to be offensive when used by others.”)

  IV

  GUT-LEVEL LEGISLATION, OR, REDISTRIBUTION

  (THE MEANING OF LIFE, PART II)

  One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How. Are you to be filed next to Mother Jones and Z and American Spectator in the back row, or with The Nation and The Weekly Standard and the American Prospect up front? Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party? Within the party, a position? If not a position, an issue? The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious.

  The furious political detractors need “responsibility,” which in their hands is a fiction of power. If you question the world from an armchair, it offends them deeply. If you believe you run the world from it, it exalts them—because you have bought into the fiction that justifies their elitism. These commentators who have no access to a legislative agenda and really no more exalted basis for political action than that of their ordinary citizenship (but they do not believe they are ordinary citizens) bleat and growl and put themselves on record for various initiatives of Congress over which they have no influence and upon which they will have no effect. To be on record is to be “politically responsible” in that false sense. No rebuke is made to the process of opinionating itself—this ritual of fomenting an opinion on everything, and so justifying the excited self-stimulation of a class of unele
cted arbiters who don’t respect the citizens within themselves.

  “What do you stand for! What will you do!” Legislatively? Are you kidding? Well, there is something one can do, without succumbing to the pundits: for the day when the Congress rolls up to our doorsteps and asks for our legislative initiatives, maybe it is up to every citizen to know what is in his heart and have his true bills and resolutions ready. Call it “political surrealism”—the practice of asking for what is at present impossible, in order to get at last, by indirection or implausible directness, the principles that would underlie the world we’d want rather than the one we have.

  • Principle: The purpose of government is to share out money so that there are no poor citizens—therefore no one for whom we must feel guilty because of the arbitrariness of fate. The purpose of life is to free individuals for individualism. Individualism is the project of making your own life as appealing as you can, as remarkable as you like, without the encumbrances of an unequal society, which renders your successes undeserved. Government is the outside corrective that leaves us free for life.

  • Legislative Initiative No. 1: Add a tax bracket of 100 percent to cut off individual income at a fixed ceiling, allowing any individual to bring home a maximum of $100,000 a year from all sources and no more.

  • Legislative Initiative No. 2: Give every citizen a total of $10,000 a year from the government revenues, paid as a monthly award, in recognition of being an adult in the United States.

  The redistribution of wealth can be unnerving whenever it comes up, and most unnerving to those who have least wealth, because they have worked hardest for every dollar and can’t afford to lose it.

  But redistribution comes in two steps, and when you look at the steps it’s not so unnerving. The first step was already accomplished last century. It was the permanent establishment of a graduated income tax, one of the greatest triumphs of civilization. A consensus was built to grade taxation to equalize the relative pain of taxation for each income earner. A little money is as useful to a person with little money overall as a larger sum is useful to a person with lots of money—and so, for equal citizenship, they carry an equal burden. Tax them proportionately the same, and everyone pays the same stake for government with the same degree of sacrifice.

  The second step is our task in this century. It is an active redistribution to help dissolve the two portions of society whose existence is antithetical to democracy and civilization, and which harm the members of each of these classes: the obscenely poor and the absurdly rich. Each group must be helped. That means not only ending poverty, but ending absurd wealth. Obscene poverty doesn’t motivate the poor or please the rest of us; it makes the poor desperate, criminal, and unhappy. Absurd wealth doesn’t help the rich or motivate the rest of us, it makes the rich (for the most part good, decent, hardworking, and talented people) into selfish guilty parties, responsible for social evil. It is cruel to rig our system to create these extremes, and cast fellow citizens into the two sewers that border the national road. For all of us, both superwealth and superpoverty make achievement trivial and unreal, and finally destroy the American principles of hard work and just deserts. Luckily, eradicating one (individual superwealth) might help eradicate the other (superpoverty).

  —

  True property is that which is proper to you: what you mix your hands into (Locke), what is characteristic of you and no one else, and would change state in anyone else’s possession. It is your clothes, your domicile, the things you touch and use, the land you personally walk. Property is the proprium, a possession that becomes like a characteristic; it starts as if it could belong to anyone, and comes to be what differentiates you. If it wears the mark of your feet and the smudge of your fingertips, your scent and your private atmosphere, then there is indeed something special and inviolable about property, even where it has come into your hands inequitably, by inheritance or a surfeit of income. The diamond worn at the throat every evening must share a certain protection, under the law, with the torn cloak that keeps some shivering person warm.

  This is distinct, however, from all wealth that is not capable of being used in the ordinary necessities of a life or even the ordinary luxuries. From any wealth that cannot be touched or worn or walked every day by its possessor, which neither comes from nor enables the mixing-in of hands but always and inevitably exists as a kind of notional accumulation of numbers, the protection of the proprium withdraws. When you have more houses than you or loved ones can live in, more cars than you can drive; more income in a year than can be spent on what you or your family can actually use, even uselessly use; then we are not speaking of property anymore, not the proprium, but of the inappropriate and alien—that which one gathers to oneself through the accident of social arrangements, exploiting them willfully or accidentally, and not through the private and the personal.

  —

  Thus the rationale for restricting income. Inequality will always exist, but in itself it is something different. One has to recognize that while the proprium may be passed down in nonmonetary forms, too—in the peculiarities of your genetics from your parents; in the heirloom, dwelling, tool, or decoration that wears the traces of hands and breath—income always comes as a consequence of arrangements of the community, via the shared space of trade, the discussion and rules, the systems of investment, and all the voluntary associations of society, of which the largest association is government.

  A rich person—continuing to draw $100,000 a year in income—stays rich, but puts part of it into his own home and bank account and part into the needs and luxuries he may actually use. This sum will be converted reasonably into the proper, the personal, without any absurdity. A superrich person, however, who takes in $1 million, $10 million, or $100 million, will not and can never spend it on any sane vision of the necessities of life, at least not without a parasitic order in which normal goods (a home, a dinner) are overpriced (by the existence of those who will compete to pay for them) and other goods are made to be abnormal and bloated (like the multiacre mansion). The social system allocates the extra $9,900,000 mistakenly. Reallocated, it would do much more benefit in a guaranteed citizens’ income for many individuals in households with total incomes both above and below the median (now about $45,000 per household). But this is without—and this is very important—doing any harm to the formerly superrich person; if anything, it may do him a great benefit.

  (And it should also be without any person or office to decide to whom money should be allocated. The goal is an automatic mechanism and universal good, not a form of control. Everyone must be given an equal sum, the $10,000, to help him be free. And that must include the rich top earner of $100,000—to keep him free, too, with the opportunity, through all the years of his adulthood, to change his life.)

  —

  The threat from those who oppose this line of thought is that, without “incentives,” people will stop working. The worst-case scenario is that tens of thousands of people who hold jobs in finance, corporate management, and the professions (not to mention professional sports and acting) will quit their jobs and end their careers because they did not truly want to be bankers, lawyers, CEOs, actors, ballplayers, et cetera. They were only doing it for the money! Actually they wanted to be high-school teachers, social workers, general practitioners, stay-at-home parents, or criminals and layabouts.

  Far from this being a tragedy, this would be the greatest single triumph of human emancipation in a century. A small portion of the rich and unhappy would be freed at last from the slavery of jobs that aren’t their life’s work—and all of us would be freed from an insane system.

  If there is anyone working a job who would stop doing that job should his income—and all his richest compatriots’ incomes—drop to $100,000 a year, he should not be doing that job. He should never have been doing that job—for his own life’s sake. It’s just not a life, to do work you don’t want to do when you have other choices, and can think of something better (and hav
e a $10,000 cushion to supplement a different choice of life). If no one would choose to do this job for a mere $100,000 a year, if all would pursue something else more humanly valuable; if, say, there would no longer be anyone willing to be a trader, a captain of industry, an actor, or an athlete for that kind of money—then the job should not exist.

  The supposed collapse of the economy without unlimited income levels is one of the most suspicious aspects of commonplace economic psychology. Ask yourself, for once, if you believe it. Does the inventor just not bother to invent anymore if inventions still benefit larger collectivities—a company, a society—but do not lead to a jump in his or any other inventor’s already satisfactory personal income? Do the professions really collapse if doctors and lawyers work for life and justice and $100,000, rather than $1 million? Will the arts and entertainment collapse if the actors, writers, and producers work for glory and $100,000? Do ballplayers go into some other line and stop playing? If you’re panicking because you can’t imagine a ceiling of $100,000, well, make it $150,000. Our whole system is predicated on the erroneous idea that individuals are likely to hate the work they have chosen, but overwhelmingly love money. Presumably the opposite should be true. Even the really successful trader must love his work in some way—he enjoys the competition, temporarily measured in money, and the action and strategy and game of thought and organization, which are his life’s calling. And all this glory could be pursued in a society in which he took home only $100,000 from this sport of kings—and he, and all of us, might be better off.