No to nostalgia

Why should I want to return

to a time where even when I occupied that time

I wanted to go back to another time

more previous,

and so on, like my head in barbershop mirrors,

endlessly deferring to its own

earlier version. What is the use of nostalgia?

—Jeffrey Skinner, from “Darwin’s Marathon.”

Pumpkin

Since it's pre-Halloween week, I feel obligated to pay tribute to the pumpkin.

Instead of buying a real pumpkin I get an image of it. But my chosen pumpkin has a cute profile.

Sans the Mark Bittman context in which it appeared (another wearisome food-nanny admonition to Americans to cook this nutritious vegetable instead of hollowing it out for candles), looks like an old-world, somewhat charming, gentleman-pumpkin.

What a pity were this lovely pumpkin to be carved and emptied of flesh and seed and made into a placeholder for cheap carbon-monoxide emitting candles.

I prefer a whole pumpkin over one that is cruelly mangled.

I recently read the simile which compared somebody's violently beat-up face in terms of a "Jack-O-Lantern."

This put me off of the idea of a "carved" pumpkin.

Orwell inverted

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, Napoleon, the totalitarian pig says "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz turns the Orwellian dictum on its head by saying that "Some Are More Unequal Than Others" in America:

While rags-to-riches stories still grip our imagination, the fact of the matter is that the life chances of a young American are more dependent on the income and wealth of his parents than in any of the other advanced countries for which there is data. There is less upward mobility — and less downward mobility from the top — even than in Europe, and we’re not just talking about Scandinavia.

He means to say that inequality, like totalitarianism (where those in positions of absolute political power assume moral superiority above the rest), is not only a moral problem for our society, but a problem of social justice as well.

Unequal distribution of wealth intersects with unequal distribution of political power, as in contemporary America, according to Stiglitz, money holds the key to political power:

The fabric of our society and democracy is suffering. The worry is that those at the top are investing their money not in real investments, in real innovations, but in political investments. Their big contributions to the presidential and Congressional campaigns are, too often, not charitable contributions. They expect, and have received, high returns from these political investments. These political investments, exemplified by those the financial institutions made, yielded far higher returns than anything else they did. The investments bought deregulation and a huge bailout — though they also brought the economy to the brink of ruin and are a source of much of our inequality.