Friday, October 3, 2008

The unemployed, the gambler and the whore

by the Sandwichman

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me."

"The 'keep smiling' on the job market adopts the behavior of the whore who, on the love market, picks up someone with a smile." -- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

In the past decade, he has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. "Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John's life," says John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino.

"The capitalist who gives himself over to fate at the gaming table is replicating in his leisure his activity of gambling on the stock market during the 'work' day, but this parallel is for Benjamin less revealing than the characteristic 'futility, the emptiness, the inability to complete something' which connects the gambler and the machine laborer..." -- Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore"
Jobs are vanishing at the fastest pace in more than five years with pink slips likely to keep stacking higher in the months ahead, an urgent signal the country may be careening toward a deep and painful recession just as Americans prepare to elect a new president.

"The closer work comes to prostitution, the more inviting it is to describe prostitution as work -- as has long been true in the argot of prostitutes. The convergence here proceeds with giant steps under the sign of unemployment; the 'keep smiling' on the job market adopts the behavior of the whore who, on the love market, picks up someone with a smile." -- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Key words: unemployed, gambler, whore. Google the title of this posting and at the top of the list is a JSTOR file of Susan Buck-Morss's 1986 New German Critique essay, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering." This is not some clever google-bomb. It simply reflects that the deep connection between financial speculation, John McCain's craps addiction, unemployment and Sarah Palin's ostentatious winking is nothing new.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Palin's wink was at once ostentatious and surreptitious. What is the generally accepted meaning and intention of such a device? The surreptitious aspect is designed to signal to some that they share a secret and that secret has much to do with the sincerity of what is takiing place at the moment. The ostentatious aspect is to assure that the greatest number of viewers are taken into the circle of friends who share the secret. Of course at that point there is little that is any longer a secret. Palin made a more concrete effort to differentiate herself from both Biden and Ifel when she cleaarly stated that she was not obliged to answer the questions as asked, but to respond on her own terms regardless of relevance to the question or immediate topic. The wink to the audience becomes the suggestion, the signal, "I'm talking to you guys and gals out there." So who's being taken in by the ruse and who is the ruse directed at? In effect there is nothing genuine in the presentation.

Sandwichman said...

Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. say no more. Say. No. More.

I would love to do a mashup of Sarah Palin's winking and the Nudge, Nudge skit from Monty Python.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDFGa0juCM&NR=1

An excellent suggestion. There is more than one rendition.