Literary Insufficiency

 

It irks me that San Francisco's prestigious Commonwealth Club and CSPAN's Book TV gives time to AEI's Charles Murray, the infamous author of The Bell Curve, to plug his latest travesty, In Our Hands. Mr. Murray now says what we should do is abolish Social Security, Medicare and all the rest, in favor of granting everyone a $10,000 annual income. This is a more extensive guaranteed annual income proposal than what Nixon nixed, but it has the same purpose: abolishing the Welfare State.

What bothers me is twofold: first, they don't invite me (or anyone else) to present an opposing view (practically no one else is defending the Welfare State these days) and, second, Mr. Murray's claims of priority are false. His is not a new idea. Old ideas become new ideas and are pushed to the fore, because a monied elite can make it so.

The Siren of Slime has slipped to #2 on NYT's non-fiction hardcover best selling list, a number which suggests the content. How does she do it? It's easy for Conservatives to game the system. NYT depends upon known bookstores to provide sales information. NYT does not take a statistically valid random sample of book sales, nor does it rotate its sample or verify sales with publishers and distributors. NYT's list is carefully intended to be an indicator of what the elite, the cognoscenti, are reading lately, based on legacy notions of where those people are located. I believe California, for example, is severely under-represented in NYT's sample, whereas New York and Washington D.C. are over-represented. Conservative organizations, such Regnery Publishing, AEI, Heritage and other "think tanks", place large orders of targeted books at NYT sampled bookstores. Some of these books are then turned around, redistributed or resold on the open market. Many of them are sold over a longer period to their members and supporters. Some of them are just trashed (hopefully recycled, even if that means saving a tree). The purpose of this strategy is to create a bandwagon effect. Even among book readers, most people are attracted to market leaders for several reasons.

This strategy is carried out for hardbound sales, not usually for paperbacks. That is because the cloth bound edition is more expensive, so considered more prestigious. If it costs more, it must be worth more, think the gullible, so it must be worth reading. Traditionally, paperbacks are reprints, throwaways, usually available a year or so after the cloth bound edition. That practice reflected the sales strategy of selling to the rich first, thus recovering the extensive costs of printing, advertising and distributing a new product. But that thinking is old fashioned: it no longer holds. The profit margin is actually higher on paperbacks than cloth bound editions. Many authors - especially on the Left - are choosing to publish lower cost paperbacks while printing only small nunbers of cloth bound (library) editions. This idea follows the Russian tradition of samizdat, which was invented to defeat the repression and persecution of Tsars and Commissars. Paternak, for example, like his hero Dr. Zhivago, was widely read in Russia by samizdat. This website is form of samizdat. In that spirit, it is worth noting that Al Gore's book, An Inconvenient Truth, is #1 on NYT's non-fiction paperback best seller list. People vote with their feet.

Consider that, in volume, a hardcover book costs much less than $10/copy to print, sometimes as little as $2-3. 25,000 hardcover books sold is usually a best seller, because - most people don't know this -  the total extent of the literati in the United States is less than 100,000 people. Serious books seldom sell even 10,000 copies. So, a simple calculation shows that an investment of about $250,000 can swamp the book market, putting a book at the top of the charts for weeks or months. For Conservatives, this is nothing. On the other hand, for me, and for most liberal organizations, that's a lot of money. This is how Conservatives put their stuff before your eyes, and sweep away all contrary information.

Book sales are also an excellent example of how the alleged Capitalist system works. The so-called market is managed, meaning manipulated. It is impossible to determine what people might have done, in the absence of rigging. There is no "free market."

A small point: I quoted "think tanks" because that is how they are hyped. Actually, most of them are components of a Ministry of Propaganda, which have been cleverly designed to mimic academia. Propagandists want to take advantage of the still-respected academic aura, while destroying any meaningful academic content. The further outrage is that those organizations are supposedly "non-profit," so tax-exempt. The inspiration for think tanks was the Cold War and books like Hermann Kahn's On Thermonuclear War. Both sides of the Cold War determined it wasn't safe to leave studies to the academics. Left to their own devices, walled off and shunned by society, academics have invariably come up with outlandish ideas. Einstein and others invented what Hitler called "Jewish Science." Andrei Sakharov and Robert Oppenheimer had serious doubts about the uses the powers had for their inventions, so they were muzzled. Academia embarrassed the military and militarists in many countries, particularly during the 1960s, in their opposition to colonial wars. Academia continues to undermine the Great Leaders in Beijing and Washington D.C. by pointing out Inconvenient Truths. So, it is dangerous and undesirable for ruling elites everywhere to leave unguided thought to the people. Thus, the think tank.

The plans of those operating reincarnations of Pravda are aided and abetted by the functional illiteracy of the population. Figuratively, the ruling classes still want to keep them 'down on the farm, ' where provincials are out of sight so out of mind. The masses are regularly fed slops which they eagerly suck up, because that feed has been cut, diced, flavored and sugared so as to be almost irresistible. Of course, eventually Soylent Green is not good for anyone, but the decrease of life is slow, almost unnoticeable. It's the old story of the frog who never jumps out of the pot.

For me, the foregoing is supported by L&F's page statistics. An increasing fraction of L&F's regular readers sign on from Canada, China, all over Europe, and elsewhere in Asia and Russia. When the search engines and webbots are taken out, perhaps half of the regular readers are not residents of the United States. I am not surprised, as I think my views and outlook are probably well aligned with intellectuals and literati in Europe, and to a lesser degree with those in India and Asia. I am no longer surprised to receive complaints and comments from American acquaintances that my writing is too complicated (or complex), requires too much background reading (or understanding) and, anyway, just isn't interesting. The leading suggestions I get from my American friends is that my popularity would increase (dramatically) if I would write trash romantic novels, adventure stories or almost anything about gratuitous sex or violence. Cowboy and Indian stories ("westerns") are also popular. (Experiment: Compare fiction and non-fiction book sales numbers on amazon.com.) Sometimes I wish I could addle my brains and lifestyle to accommodate my compatriots, because it would be nice to have the money. But I cannot do it, if only because I find attending McDonalds and places like that poisonously unpalatable.

At least I have reached the point where I do not delude myself: in a country pulled around by the nose, writing books is unlikely to influence the outcome.