Bolano!

A RANT

We hear now from every segment of the literary Establishment, including from the bistro Bolsheviks at N+1, all about Roberto Bolano. Bolano. BOLANO!

Yet I tell you Bolano is shit. Bolano is nothing. Bolano was involved in a Latin American underground literary movement that never accomplished, in ideas or action, one-tenth of what was accomplished THIS decade in this country by the literary rebels in the ULA.

The only reason the name Bolano was discovered and promoted by U.S. literary Overdogs was as a way to co-opt and obscure the more immediate problem-noise of the ULA; of literary revolution HERE. After all, when resurrected Bolano was not only safely distant, he was safely DEAD.

We see literary pods (meaning: without thought) like Francine Prose reviewing Bolano's latest book and admitting, though she doesn't really like it, that at least this time it's a book she's able to read. What she's saying beneath her posturing is that Bolano is stultifying, Bolano is boring, yet by reviewing the book for a major publication she's taking it seriously. She's implicitly endorsing Bolano-- the propaganda project of Bolano-- in a way she would never acknowledge American literary rebels in groups like the ULA.

Why is this?

It's solely this: That Bolano has been approved by the Machine to which Francine Prose like a brainwashed drone is wholly obedient.

Is this what we want from literature? The tired noddings of unmoving bureaucrats and bureaucracies? Should not literature represent the wild loud sound of active rebellion, contention, and actual change?

If we burn down the moldy institutions of an imprisoned art, and chase out the obedient black-robed overseers, THEN we'll honor the authentic, unco-opted spirit of Roberto Bolano.

Connect the Dots

1.) Writer/former CIA operative Peter Matthiessen admits the Paris Review was founded with CIA money, but just can't seem to remember the details!

2.) Matthiessen just won the National Book Award.

(Winston Smith sitting teary-eyed on a park bench?)

Another "Nation" Problem

A major problem with The Nation magazine, supposed revolutionary mouthpiece of the People, is that it's isolated within the walls of Aristocracy on the island of New York, and so is out-of-touch with the needs of the American public.

To maintain relevance in a time of change, the mag's editors need to move out of the Imperial City. I suggest they relocate to Detroit, once-great center of labor, industry, and the working class. There is no more relevant spot to be. A magazine which claims for itself the mantle of radical change should reside no other place. (Much open office space!)

Why N+1?

Why have I been attacking the jet-set lit journal N+1?

Last year the Guardian (UK) named the ULA and the N+1 gang as the only rivals to McSweeney's as major literary movements on this side of the Atlantic. The literary rebellion is in competition with these people.

The battle is a battle of art but also of ideas-- especially as N+1 portrays itself as a collection of intellectuals. The question is: which cause is the more attractive option for the future of our literature? Which carries the stronger magic?

N+1 is little different from McSweeney's-- just another branch on the establishment tree. They're not thinkers, but regurgitators: "retailer of second-hand opinions," or well-credentialed mediocrities.

THE REALIZATION
Someday N+1's editors will realize we won't be living at the poles North and South in twenty years, that they've been putting into their stuffy pub cockeyed nonsense. They'll look in the mirror and exclaim, "We're idiots!"

Change

A lot has been said with the word "change" of late. The question remains whether we're going to have real structural change-- or see that the word has been used instead to express a few cosmetically-new faces but nothing deeper. Change has to mean changing the machine underlying the faces.

With lit-blogs we've seen a parade of wannabe-apparatchiks (Maud Newton, Mark Sarvas, Ed Champion) who've held the same artistic philosophy as those in literary power. Beneath their tissue-paper swipes at the fluffy margins of the Machine, the goal of the lit-bloggers was always to sell out AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. Many of them have.

The fundamental question for writers, editors, and critics remains this:
Are you satisfied with the art as it stands; do you think it's in fine shape-- or do you not believe, as I believe, that it can be better?

Who Owns The Nation?

For a couple years now The Nation magazine has been proclaiming in large ads that they're owned by nobody. If that's the case, there should be no hindrance to the entire staff stepping down in order for working class writers to fill their positions, as per my previous suggestion. I hope they hurry. Already, by their failure to embody change, they've set a negative example for the new Obama administration. First to go should be Laura Flanders, who's an upper-class Brit anyway. Surely there are plenty of out-of-work Americans to take her place!

(Be sure to stay up-to-date with my other major lit blog at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com)

White Christmas?

THE BIG CON

While I'm all for reasoned environmentalism, including technologies like windmills and high-speed trains, I'm also leery of con artists. I'm beginning to suspect that global warming is a giant scam.

Ever see the Bing Crosby movie "White Christmas," made more than fifty years ago? Do you recall the plot?

An innkeeper up in Vermont is going broke because Christmas approaches and there's been NO SNOW. None at all. Sunny skies everywhere. If the movie were made now the characters would be frantic about global warming. They'd be singing, "It's all our fault!"

I become suspicious when advocates of the global warming "crisis" don't behave as if there's a crisis. Keith Gessen continues jetting back and forth to Moscow or Paris. No big deal for him. I wonder if he reads his own journal: "grave danger" "billions of us will die" "a disastrously diminished future" "devastated" "catastrophic" etc. etc. But after all, Gessen's cousins live in Moscow, and he wants to say hello.

This year white Christmas came very early, which doesn't mean there's global warming or global cooling. It's just the weather.

New York versus Detroit

TRUST NO ONE IN NEW YORK

I hope people who live in the heartland recognize how quickly Secretary Paulson bailed out his banking buddies at Citigroup, yet won't approve a bridge loan for companies which actually produce goods-- not just paper-- and are the backbone of this nation's industrial strength.

Too much power, of all kinds, has been concentrated in New York City-- including with print media and publishing. I'll say again and again: decentralize. Decentralize!

(The last twenty years has seen a transfer of wealth from working people to the rich; from middle America to the east coast. The government is now accelerating this.)

More N+1 Folly

The intellectual elitists at N+1 are holding soirees for their new issue, #7. I hope it has more intellectual credibility than their last issue, which is a disaster on all fronts.
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A blog put up a link to my recent post about N+1, "Intellectualism versus Intelligence," with no comment other than using for the title a quote from my essay about a "minor, temporary increase" in global temperature. For the intellectual who put it up, the quote was used for a giant smirk to the Indoctrinated Crowd saying, "Look how absurd this person is, because he doesn't think as WE do."

Yes, I would be absurd, if I'd been sitting writing the statement with the temperature 80 degrees outside one week before Thanksgiving. But it's not 80. It's below freezing. Tonight will go down to 19. This past summer in Detroit was as mild a summer here as I've ever experienced-- and I've been around for awhile! So who's absurd?

The noteworthy thing about the N+1 gang, for all their many many degrees and awards, is their lack of basic intelligence. Their attempts to be original-- as in Marco Roth's suggestion to lower the voting age ("--the young will probably not vote as a bloc at all")-- end only in comedy. What they ARE the best at is thoroughly absorbing the details of their indoctrination.
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There are two kinds of intellectuals.
1.) THE THINKING INTELLECTUAL, who sees the world clear-eyed, questioning his premises and adjusting his ideas based on experience and evidence on hand.
2.) THE THEORY INTELLECTUAL, who sees the world not as it is, but through the prism of indoctrination.

N+1's ideas are expressed through labels, categories of postmodern or post-postmodern, to post-post-post-postmodern. They're forever the earnest and unthinking grad students wanting to seriously know into which pre-labelled box any stray thought or person can be dropped.
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The most egregious part of N+1 #6 is the editors' call for benign tyranny to deal with the global warming "crisis." As the working class and American industry are being destroyed, I hope that in their new issue the editors have backed away from their stance.

Campaign for Social Justice

GIVEN the progressive victories in the political realm, we should expect fundamental CHANGE coming first from progressive organizations themselves. They have the opportunity to set an example; in so doing, to truly live their principles.

I therefore call on the entire staff of The Nation magazine to resign on January 21st, 2009, to be replaced by working class writers, including those represented by the literary underground. Laura Flanders should likewise resign as host of The Nation's radio show.

The Nation is the strongest voice calling for new protest movements to ensure that real societal change will occur. Change means overturning conditions which give positions and forums only to the most privileged members of this society. Nation staffers, who are among those overprivileged, can show by their actions that this will no longer be a caste-based country; that there will be a return to democratic access to speech, with equal opportunity for all.

Note to Undergrounders

Two questions for literary undergrounders:
-Can an aggressive campaign to change literature be reactivated?
-Should it be?

Those who dropped from the literary rebellion have to ask themselves what's been accomplished by withdrawing from the fight. Have literary mandarins with whom you have nothing in common embraced your books and writings?

It's difficult to compete with a closed-minded, billion-dollar literary monolith when you have no resources and use outmoded tactics.

The public has voted for dramatic change. We have an opportunity to call literary progressives to live up to their ideals, for the benefit of American literature.
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My task in the short-term is to establish King Wenclas Promotions as a vehicle for my ideas. It will be operating at times through names like "Front for Literary Change," or such. Other writers will be invited to participate, including ULAers and OW people. Whether they do or not is up to them.
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As for me, it dawned on me that I'll have no peace even when stepping away from the fight. We had the Rebellion Stage One. It may be time for Stage Two-- especially as so much even of the original plan was left undone.

p.s. See related post at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

Many great posts will be appearing at this blog, so stay tuned.

Propaganda

ONCE one notices that the publishing companies are flooding America with blatant propaganda, from "Clique" and "Gossip Girl" books to historically-distorted celebrations of Marie Antoinette, it's an easy step to realize that the bulk of so-called mainstream print media coming out of New York is propaganda. Magazines like Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, New York, et.al, are the blatant variety. A pseudo-authoritative New Yorker is more subtle, but still the carefully-constructed product of our nation's carefully-selected media aristocrats.

The huge Conde-Nast and Time-Life skyscraper empires are propaganda machines, their headquarters our Ministry of Information, multiplied. Those who lead these entities aren't Publishers, or Editors, but in truth, Propaganda Ministers, far more skillful than the primitive Joseph Goebbels variety. Their mission, likewise, is to create and celebrate an Overclass not entirely of breeding, not yet anyway (that's coming with genetic engineering), but of caste and money.

ULA Shake-Up

It appears that the ULA's former #2, S.K.-- who moved to the top of the list a year ago when I was marginalized-- has himself dropped from Active to Supporter status. Which is curious. S.K. didn't like my strategy, but never presented an alternate vision.

This leaves the ULA's book guy in control. He's been the defacto power in the group anyway; in many respects has earned that spot. The disagreement between him and myself is fundamental. The new #1 doesn't believe the group needs a quarterback, that it can move ahead regardless. This leaves him, because of his power base, IN EFFECT calling the shots. I wish him luck.

As for myself, I'm building a new platform for my activities, King Wenclas Promotions. I'll have more to say about this in future posts.

I remain a sideline supporter of the Underground Literary Alliance, a kind of ULA-In-Exile. We have the same goal, but with different notions about how to get from here to there. I retain unshakeable faith in my ideas and talents.

Intellectualism vs. Intelligence

To test my fairness, I began reading a David Foster Wallace book at a chain bookstore, "Interviews with Hideous Men" or such. The writing was hideous. I made it as far as the third piece.

The first "essay" was a cutely written brief piece of nonsense. The second was extended description of a famous poet in a swimming pool. It went nowhere. By the third piece (whose theme, setting, or plot I can't recall) I realized that DFW was the ultimate graphomaniac, producing verbiage in endless sentences that would make Thomas Wolfe cringe in embarrassment.

It reminded me of a man I saw once in a diner in Detroit, a crazy man in a booth talking to himself without pause. The man suffered from some kind of mental disease that caused every thought he had to be verbalized-- and the thoughts never stopped. At first it was striking-- "Look at that crazy man"-- and for a few minutes it was entertaining, but soon enough it became irritating and then maddening, so that I was happy to get away from it. There was a sparkle of words to the thoughts at times but mostly it was disordered nonsense.

I had a vision afterward of the man in a room somewhere on a chair, pontificating to the walls, for hours, forever, without stop.

Unfortunate David Foster Wallace likewise had a mind which couldn't be turned off. (The malady to a greater or lesser extent afflicts many of us who write.) Was there any peace for the man in his waking hours? With such colliding madness in his head, how could he rest? He eventually turned off the spout the only way he knew how.

INTELLECTUALISM
DFW's writing passed for intellectualism but there was little intelligence to it. His satire consisted of superficial toyings with superficialities. Everything was surface.

We see in today's literary world a ton of intellectualism, but the thrust in fact is anti-intellectual, AGAINST meaning and truth. The posings are an avoidance of logic.

An example of the anti-intellectual trend of the current lit world is the journal N+1, which I've tried very hard to like, and failed at the effort.

Issue #6 for instance was an outpouring of stupidity. There's no other way to put it. The issue showed an ignorance of basic economics. The editors predicted "the end of oil," seeming not to realize (could they be that stupid?) that the supply of oil is a function of the amount of effort and money people are willing to spend to retrieve it. Or, the supply at $100 a barrel is more than at $20 a barrel. If it means uncapping wells, drilling deeper, or in places currently closed off, using new technology, or retrieving shale oil-- at the right price the possibilities are endless. There's an enormous amount of oil left on this planet. If the editors had a sense of history-- remember the 70's?-- they'd realize it. Much of the oil price spike was due not to a lack of supply so much as the devaluation of the dollar (oil is priced in dollars) which occurred to fund an expensive war.

Global warming? A minor, temporary increase in global temperature sends the N+1 gang into hysterics. They become like the out-of-control passenger in the 1969 movie "Airport": "We're all going to die. We're all going to die!" There's a certain narcissism or extreme egoism involved in believing the end days are here now-- that everything will finish in your brief lifetime. Because you're special.

Not only illogic, but contradictions throughout. The most environmentally hysterical of their group, Chad Harbach, was their web editor. It's curious to me that the YouTube generation is so mad about global warming. Do they realize the amount of juice used by the Internet; especially streaming video? Google and Yahoo are moving closer to greater electricity sources. How many power plants will have to be built to accommodate YouTube? Yet these are environmentalists! (Meanwhile the gang jets regularly to Europe.)

As for N+1 fiction, it's beyond stupidity. Try to find a trace of an idea in it. In some cases, intellectualism-- but without exception even when posing as intellectuals the characters are narcissists obsessed with their own glib wonderfulness, with narrow focus, and about as much understanding of how the civilization operates as a hamster-- or as much as the N+1 editors themselves.

A Conspiracy Theory

LOGIC tells me that the recent spike in oil prices was due to a sharp drop in the U.S. dollar caused by government borrowing in order to finance an expensive war. However, there's another possibility. . . .
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What if a multi-billionaire, operating through intermediaries, drove up the oil price in order to get his guy elected U.S. President? We know that huge sums of money backed Obama, who outspent McCain near the end by a factor of five to one. The oil price shock was the first of a series of economic bad news which discredited Bush once and for all; the trigger for all that followed.

The candidate for this mysterious billionaire would have to be an extreme ideological partisan, in personality utterly ruthless, with a track record of disrupting countries and markets through speculative maneuvers; moreover, having the funds to accomplish the plan.

Does such candidate exist? Yes: George Soros.

A subsidiary benefit from the oil price spike for Soros and his allies is that it humbled the auto companies, turning them away from gas guzzlers toward environmentally friendly cars-- perhaps leaving the federal government in control of the industry as a result. This fits with the Obama plan to end all use of fossil fuels within ten years.
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Others may have already posited this theory elsewhere on the Internet. The idea is obvious. Anyway, it'd make a great scenario for a novel!

Gossip Page

Here's some gossip that was forwarded to my new Literary Corruption Hotline at happylit@yahoo.com, as an in-line attachment. I don't know the original source and can't vouch for the tidbit's authenticity, but here it is:
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Latest insider "it" boy Roberto Bolano was feted by the insiders at Farrar Straus and Giroux last night -- huge crowds spilled out onto the street although it is unlikey that they were there for love of literature. Most likely they had heard about the event via the hipster website myopenbar.com and came to get wasted. The usual crew of insiders were there to celebrate the dead Mexican's latest formless mess, 2666: Loren Stein of FSG, Liesl Schillinger o fthe New York Times Book Review, Alex Abramovitz of Feed magazine, Eric Banks of Bookforum, Michael MIller of Time Out New York, Cary Goldstein of Twelve Books. A writer from the Economist was seen conducting interviews with writers who blithely prattled on while hipsters waited on line for free booze like high school seniors at a keg party. Writers spotted included John (unreadable insider) Wray, Jonathan (overrated insider) Lethem, and Rick (uber insider) Moody. Some lovers of literature were heard to inquire if "Roberto" (who has been dead for years) was here yet.
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Note to those who send me material:
Please let me know if I can repost it, and whether you wish to be attributed for sending it.
I also look for more than gossip, including dropped dimes, hard news, and warm trails to be followed.

p.s. I intend for this blog to become temporarily more exciting, so stay tuned. I've also unleashed www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com again, and will be posting as well on a few of my other blogs.

More Roger Hodge

I've had comments from readers of this blog saying they didn't read into Roger D Hodge's November Harper's Notebook piece, "Creative Destruction," what I did. I wonder what they read.

Hodge says, about the campaign-- about which he was clearly an unobjective partisan-- "--one can also join the battle by repeating the rumors about John McCain's Alzheimer's meds or the Sarah Palin sex tape." In his concluding remark, in reaction to an Obama quote that "you can't just make stuff up," Hodge replies, "Oh yes, Barack, we can."

What does that sound like to you? Could he possibly be advocating lying?

Keep in mind that Hodge is the same individual who has justified plagiarism in Harper's pages. I don't see a lot of standards. Do you?

Global Hysteria

The gloabl warming hysteria of these times will be found to be more a psychological problem than a physical one, as it's spurred by a neurotic boozhie fetish for absolute cleanliness.

It's a key point for America's intellectuals. Once they realize they've been scammed by the media and the educational system on this issue, they'll question the rest of their brainwashing.

At Versailles

This nation's aristocrat liberals-- think Arianna Huffington, Garry Trudeau, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Lewis Lapham, Graydon Carter, Tina Brown and the like-- live on a kind of well-guarded intellectual estate, inside a marvelous stone palace surrounded by generous well-manicured gardens alongside stables of horses, with grooms and coachmen-- and ladies-in-waiting-- there to serve their every whim.

The palace contains halls of mirrors where the aristocrats admire their ruffled sleeves, or ruffled dresses with low-cut bodices; their silk handkerchiefs, gold snuffboxes, and powdered wigs; assuring themselves they're the best, because sunlight at the place forever smiles down at them.

Yet in the back of their undeveloped minds lurks a sliver of unease. They glance down cautiously at the iron gates which surround their high estate, beyond the clean lawns, and realize a world is out there which they know little about, and are surely not part of.

To confirm themselves of their preciousness they pretend to want change. "Change! We must change this country!" Trudeau, Lapham, and vanden Heuvel insist, strenuously waving their silk hankies and silk fans for emphasis. "We're such radicals!" they sniff. "On the side of the peasants. Or, at least, in sympathy with them!" They talk up the populist cause, as servants circulate hors d'oeuvres.

To prove their wondrous generosity, the estate liberals have now appointed a new manager of the house and the grounds, a man of color; moreover, educated at the best aristocrat schools to ensure his reliability; his sympathy with them. The gates open; the new man begins the long walk up the hill toward them. At the sight the aristocrats gather on the lawn to applaud.

What will the new man bring?

Will he merely rearrange the portraits in the antechambers, and take better care of the horses?

Corruption Hotline

The new literary tip line for King Wenclas Promotions is now ready at happylit@yahoo.com

Literary news and gossip are wanted, anonymously or otherwise.

Literary Bankruptcy III

THE PROOF of everything I and my colleagues have been saying about the lit-world is evident on the Aristocratic Literary Society site:

www.accompaniedliterarysociety.org

What passes for American literature today is an insulated, unrepresentative clique of pretentious snobs existing within castles of privilege at the edge of the country on a superwealthy island named New York.

Literary Bankruptcy II

The noteworthy point about Roger D Hodge's November Notebook in Harper's is how the mask has dropped from the intellectual establishment. Hodge reveals the utter ethical and moral bankruptcy of his crowd's ideology. He has no belief in truth over falsehood, right against wrong. His sole principle and highest value is the expediency of the moment.

Can we believe anything in Harper's? No.

Change?

We should all congratulate the new President, whatever our forebodings, and trust he'll maintain liberty, and bring justice and equal opportunity for all.

Literary Bankruptcy I

A 3-PART REPORT ON LITERARY TOTALITARIANS

My first example of literary bankruptcy is a brief mention by Tom Beller and Oliver Broudy in George Being George-- a new biography of a literary aristocrat. Broudy and Beller describe the ULA's 2001 debate with literary elitists at New York's CBGB's. Neither commentator has the slightest interest in presenting the truth of what happened. Instead they engage in the usual slur that undergrounders are "bad writers," because we're not automatons and don't write in approved Manhattan Machine style. That we write at all (an endeavor clearly above our station; an art reserved for rich guys like them) is considered "sad."

Sad to me is the narrow attitude admitted to by two unexceptionally gifted apparatchiks who live in a social and intellectual prison which is extraordinarily limiting; whose marbled walls they have no interest in climbing, and no ability to climb if they had the inclination. The mediocre Aristocrat, given every-- EVERY-- advantage in his life from Day One, is the Hero of their truncated tale, because he was able to say one word-- "Nonsense!"-- in a faux-impressive way, but was unable, due to his truncated intelligence, to say anything more. His performance that afternoon was a fit metaphor for his literary class, including the similarly limited Broudy and Beller. One word! Impressively spoken, signifying nothing. Establishment literature is an impressive facade of glossy covers and carefully wrought words promoted through every Overdog millionaires' institution and soiree available, a well-spoken patrician word, but like cardboard stage scenery nothing can be discovered in back of it.

Broudy and Beller would sit well as bureaucrats at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984, in that speaking the truth is the least of their concerns. They're incapable of being honest with the reader, or themselves. (How do such exclusionary hacks stomach themselves?) If any of their crowd were interested in the truth, rather than pushing standard upper-class propaganda glorifying the narrowness of their privileged and insular world, they'd release the film of the event taken by the Maysles brothers. Then we'd know who won the debate, and how exciting it was.
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(The sad thing about George Plimpton is that, unlike Broudy and Beller-- cheaply malicious stage-play stooges as dense as Guildenstern and Rosencrantz-- George knew he lived in a bubble, and so was forever trying to break out of it. He'd never had to fight for daily survival, as many fight their entire lives for it. And so George constructed brief artificial tests of his character.

His debate with the ULA was part of this. He was so out of his depth amid a pack of street dogs it was pathetic. Like a chained wolfhound behind mansion walls he could only bark stupidly, "Nonsense! Nonsense!"

George Plimpton was a tourist in this world, skimming across its surface but never plunging madly into it. The superficiality of his writings shows this.

You want a sad sight? Try the image of Plimpton setting off fireworks at his estate, seeking any kind of stimulation against the boredom of his privileged existence.)

Reason to Vomit

See http://www.accompaniedliterarysociety.org/

Which should more accurately be called the Aristocratic Literary Society. It's kind of a bizarro-universe, 180-degree difference from the Underground Literary Alliance.

Understanding the Enemy

One of the more misguided ways to attack myself is to accuse me of class resentment. We've seen with the example of Sarah Palin that class resentment comes from the other side-- from privileged intellectuals who fear and scorn upstart, outspoken whites.

Their embrace of Obama, on the other hand, is part of a paternalistic psychodrama where liberals love to identify with the oppressed. Obama is never going to accuse THEM of being the oppressors-- and anyway they implicitly believe they can control this nation's minorities through their own innate goodness. (Their special status-- they believe in nothing so much as this.) The mentality of the missionary-- the essence of racism. They implicitly believe in this society's hierarchies; that the hierarchies won't change.

I'm speculating. What we know for sure is that the plutocracy is backing Obama, not the other guy, which we all should find curious.

Whither the underground? Our task is to not get sucked in by either side of the establishment game. The liberal intelligentsia backing Obama are the same people who exercise totalitarian control over literature in cities like New York and Philadelphia. They control the institutions and power centers and will look to strengthen their power centers-- which will, however, whatever the election outcome, continue to weaken.

Understanding Anarchism

THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION about anarchism, or any state of free society approaching it, is equating anarchism with irresponsibility, chaos, and licentiousness. The reverse is the case. To exist without Big Brother government, individuals will have to be MORE responsible and cooperative in their voluntary actions and relationships. It's a vastly different state of mind from that represented by the rich-kid liberal-Left, who believe we should be thumbsucking five year-olds in a sandbox watched over by the all-encompassing state. To construct an even more gigantic federal government than what we have, will further encroach on our freedoms, as well as only increase the vertical hierarchies of society.

(p.s. The biggest lie going is that perpetrated by Thomas Friedman with his "flat earth" terminology. With the rise of the global economy, the world is becoming more centralized and more hierarchical, the bureaucracies more top-heavy, and the decision-making more tops-down; the gaps between rulers and ruled greater, with said rulers having ever more power. As is being seen with the financial situation now.)