Cause Everybody Hates a Tourist.

So this book is out there:

After reading Nickle and Dimed, recent college graduate (and dude) Adam Shepard is “not particularly impressed with the victim mentality” of Ehrenreich’s book. He decides to do a simple experiment – move to a random city with $25, and see if, one year – 52 weeks – later, he has a car and apartment and some money in the bank. No help from friends/family, etc. He collects his story, full of the zany, but with really good hearts, homeless people he meets at a shelter, overcoming stuff, etc., in a (from reviews) earnest and not mean-spirited book called Scratch Beginnings. This summarizes it, if you are interested.

In general, people who worry about the safety net do not worry because white, college educated men in their early 20s with no health problems, families or criminal records can’t make it. But, whatever. You’re ability to take it seriously will probably depend on your ability to take this summary of his sacrifices seriously:

Sacrifice was the name of the game — delaying gratification — and I recognized that early on. I had immediately eliminated wants versus needs. Immediately.

Cable? That’s $50 a month and it’s not that difficult to find some good shows on network television.
Cell phone? $100 a month back in my pocket. If I had a business to run, I would need one, but as a mere laborer, it was easy to go without.
Clothes were bought at the Goodwill, and all of my household products were generic brands.

Food was my kryptonite, and I had to pay special attention there. I used to love going out to eat, and when I eat, I eat like a horse. Couldn’t do it, though. Chicken and Rice-A-Roni dinners were substituted for trips out to simple bars and grills ($20 a pop at a minimum). To be honest with you, though, it was more fun to concoct various meals than it was to go out. I bought a book on cheap, easy meals from the Thrift Store and it was like a Bible of sorts for me while I was in Charleston.

Seriously, a $100 phone bill? Here’s the fun part. Remember how this was a 52 week experiment? Well, ummm, from here:

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family.

The verb “quit” is too precious. “It was fun being poor for a while; I met a lot of interesting people and made rice-a-roni. But someone is sick, so that being poor stuff has to stop. I’m out – make sure to facebook me!” I’m wondering if this guy is Andy Kauffman or something, it almost feels like the perfect gag on the audience. But I doubt it.

So being poor isn’t bad if you don’t have a victim mentality and can not be poor on short notice. Check. And yes, in case you were wondering, this was just an elaborate setup for me to post William Shatner singing “Common People.”

I love how (2m30s) Joe Jackson has to harmonize his part with Shatner performing his lines in the key of Shatner Acting. Brilliant.

Bunny Ranch Nation

It’s interesting, in the aftermath of the Spitzer scandal, to watch people debate on what they think of prostitution. It gets a lot of people confused on what a policy stance should be, especially people who are uncomfortable with (a) knee-jerk libertarianism, (b) faux-moral condemnation, or (c) the government having prohibition on what consenting adults can do with their bodies, especially related to sex.

Two things of note, related.

1) From the libertarian post above:

Legalizing prostitution expands it, the argument goes, and also helps pimps, fails to protect women, and leads to more back-alley violence, not less.

Name one industry that has been characterized by more violence and mayhem when it was legal than when it was illegal. For that matter, name one job, other than being a mercenary, that involves as much violence as, say, the drug trade1. You can’t, because this argument makes absolutely no sense. Violence goes hand-in-hand with illegal industries because there is no legal way to enforce contracts, and because people engaged in illegal activity are understandably reluctant to report other crimes that took place during their malfeasance.

“Legalizing it would make it safer for the women.” Makes sense on the first approximation. However what legalizing it in practice (and I might argue in theory) for the USA means making it safer for the pimps. Having a giant regulatory apparatus would add a fixed cost, in cash and in time, that would give a huge advantage to business operators and people with money up front – ie, pimps, who would naturally want a big cut of what a woman earns in this capacity. See some horror stories from Las Vegas in this regard. It would be like what Tony Soprano does – give us a cut (ie taxes) and you can set up an escort shop on our property. I’m skeptical that that would translate into a safe or respectable work atmosphere (whatever that may look like).

Also, is there a real incentive to go on the books? At the very high and low end of prostitution, you would see incentives to keep it hidden. Either because the clients have too little or too much – that article, by Venkatesh, is shocking – money, and wouldn’t want to pay the fees or have their names on the record. Or the women won’t go on the books – there would be legal liabilities to hiring drug addicts from a company’s point of view, and elite girls, per the article linked right before, are paid in part of secrecy. In other words, we’d have the same problems we have now, but on a much larger scale. (Also, obviously, it would make it safer for the men hiring).

Also, as to the “enforce contract” portions of the libertarian critique (which is powerful in other contexts), is that the biggest problem would be rape, and it is sadly clear how that would pan out. Rape trials are ghastly spectacles for women as it is; I can’t see courts turning favorable to the testimony of a prostitute saying she was raped by a client.

2) I have been disappointed by not seeing much from the wonkish side of the blogosphere (including, surprisingly, from Cato). The best, and it is pretty good, is from here. I think he’s very negative on the Swedish model, which is surprising (it’s way better than what we have now):

I used to think the most promising approach was Sweden’s. There, prostitution is considered “an aspect of male violence against women and children” and treated as such. Legislation, passed in 1999 as part of a broader “violence against women” bill, partly decriminalized the selling of sex while making the buying of sex illegal (pimping was already outlawed). On the other hand, prostitutes are still punished in various ways—known sex workers can lose custody of their kids, for one. And although the bill provides funds to help prostitutes who want to get out of the business, many sex workers say the aid is inadequate. Worse, because prostitution is not supposed to exist, there are now fewer drop-in health centers available for sex workers.

The actual effects of the law are still murky. Prosecutions of male buyers and johns went up dramatically, and street prostitution in Stockholm has dropped by two-thirds since 1999. But it’s unclear whether the sex trade was simply pushed underground, as was originally feared. Official statistics give conflicting answers. Some studies estimate that the total amount of prostitution has remained unchanged, although one Stockholm non-profit estimated that about 60 percent of prostitutes took advantage of the social service funds and succeeded in getting out of the business. My sense is that there’s just not a lot of reliable data here.

I think it’s unfair to force causation of the sex trade going online to a bill that just happened to be passed in 1999. It was likely that the sex trade would go online anyway, regardless of any bills passed. It’s now all over craigslist in places that hasn’t necessarily taken an aggressive stance one way or the other.

I’m still not certain how the law should change. Your thoughts?

We Have Hyper-Man!

Also, if we want to talk about trippy geek art, let’s take a quick moment to check out the 1st Half of this review of 1950s DC comics from The Comics Journal. Mort Weisinger, chief editor of DC at the time, was (as legend has it) undergoing psychoanalysis, and following sessions would immediately brow-beat his writers/artists into making the comics he oversaw one giant Freudian nightmare of abandonment and neurosis written into the midcentury landscape:

Of course, a lot of Silver Age DC has an unhealthy, neurotic air. The Flash doesn’t just find himself with a giant domed head — people laugh at him for it. Batman has to go limping out of town, ragged and feeble, and behind him a massive orange sun is setting; not only that, but it’s lopsided. DC covers back then had a weakness for rejection. Marvel heroes might get beaten, but DC heroes were denied love. They were humiliated and betrayed, exiled, told no one needed them now (“We Have Hyper-Man!”). Marvel heroes knew they would have their ups and downs with the public. DC heroes existed to be paragons, the best face of authority; society’s love was built into the deal. Then the deal would get revoked and the poor hero would find himself denounced as a failure or hypocrite. Fingers drawn by Neal Adams would point at the supposed hero…

A child’s basic reality is that his family and friends either want him or don’t want him. Young kids don’t experience much in between, or at least don’t process it as such. They feel either loved or unloved, and the second is a very dramatic event indeed. Hence somebody like Julius Schwartz, who sounds like a pugnacious but healthy character, could have his neurotic covers for Flash and Batman. But I’m willing to bet that Mort Weisinger used the gimmick more often and more brutally. He could dream up quite elaborate situations just to show someone being shit on. Superman floats, helpless as a ghost; enlarged Kandorians are unwittingly about to destroy their home, and not only can Superman not warn them, he has to listen as they take time out to say mean things. (“We’ll never free you from the Phantom Zone, because for years you pretended there was no way to enlarge our bottle-city!”) Or we have a cover showing Superman in a headlock, trapped there by a bruiser using one arm, and the bruiser has a little half-smile tugging at a corner of his mouth. This is an imaginary story set on Krypton, so Superman doesn’t have his uniform and we recognize him by his curl and the red-blue color scheme of his clothing. In the background, a man holds up the Superman uniform (with a clothes hanger). “You win, Knor-El! By defeating your brother, Kal-El, you’ve gained the right to wear this uniform! From now on, you’ll be earth’s Superman!” The man, of course, is Jor-El, Superman’s father, and he has his own tucked-mouth little grin.

When you look at it, there is a lot of people pointing and laughing at the DC heroes on those covers. Seeing them now is a bit kitchy, but all the abandonment terrors (“we don’t recognize you anymore Jimmy Olsen!”) along with midcentury life’s meaning collapsing away, aimed at millions (and millions read it) of children in that era is a trip to think about. Bringing back the odd landscape of Freud and nonsense is something Grant Morrison is trying to do with the fantastic All-Star Superman. Superdickery has a lot of fun, related stuff.