Phthursday Musings: Close to the Hedge

The GameStop saga has petered out. But the legacy will endure. And indeed I have more to say about it.

But what with all this talk of hedge this, hedge that, and since I don’t want to hedge my thoughts about hedge funds, I thought it might be better to engage in some rhyme time first. Oh, and I needed some help. You’ll find META-SPIEL’s first guest contributor this week.

Friends: Yes, we are close to the hedge.

A few weeks ago I was tipped off to this series at Stereogum, where a man named Tom Breihan, who is clearly even more insane than me or you, has taken it upon himself to review every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100.

The occasion of my being tipped off was the publication of the piece about the song which reached #1 on July 26, 1986: Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”.

The video for “Sledgehammer” is perhaps the ultimate cultural touchstone of 1980s America. It is gratuitously excessive, overwhelming for the sake of being overwhelming, and the whole thing is just a colossal phallic metaphor. (Nevermind that Peter Gabriel himself isn’t American.)

The entry on “Sledgehammer” was posted less than six weeks ago. There have been 16 more entries posted since then, and good lord, what a strange year 1986 must have been to live through. Peter Cetera is on the list twice.

I’m not sure what Mr. Breihan gets paid to write all of this madness. I can’t believe he truly knew what he was getting himself into. I’m also surprised that I hadn’t heard about all this much sooner. Somehow he’s also sneaking in “bonus tracks” along the way. I hit the LOAD MORE button many times and by my count there were 224 songs on the screen when I decided I couldn’t hit it any more. Somehow I went back precisely far enough to land on my birth week.

Keep in mind that the #1 song in the country for the day you were born could mean either the song which made it to #1 as of the beginning of the week, or, the song which made it to #1 based on its showing that given week. Using the latter rule, my song is “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)” by Rod Stewart. Using the former rule, it’s “Rock’n’Me” by Steve Miller. I would much prefer “Sledgehammer”.

Speaking of a sledgehammer, here is a fabulous picture, stolen from Wikipedia, which doubly informs this week’s theme:

My dear friend Rachel is a botanist. I decided I needed her help this week. But instead of asking for help in a more civilized manner, I went about it in a much more cavalier fashion. (This exchange has been lightly edited.)

Would you like to humor a terrible idea for a few minutes today?

Mayhaps.

How do you feel about sedge?

Sedge? As in, sedges? The group of plants?

Indeed that sedge.

How do I feel about them?

I know you know about sedges, but what do you think about them?

I like them, they are an under recognized, diverse, and interesting group of plants.

What might you say are their most becoming qualities?

Very curious where this is going.

They’re super diverse - some are beautiful or graceful, others are tiny and cute, many are obscure.

Are any palatable to humans? Are they harvested anywhere or do they just sort of hang out, as plants do?

Have you ever heard of “tiger nuts”? Sometimes solid in health food stores. They’re underground structures of a sedge. Otherwise I’m not aware of sedge consumption, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were examples I’m unaware of.

I can think of examples of human uses of rushes (a related but different group of plants), for cordage, candle wicks, etc.

If you were to bring a sedge home, what might you name it?

Lol Phil

I would call it by its name???

Wtf are we talking about here

[At this point I gently broke the news as to what this was all about. But Rachel is a professional. She wasn’t done.]

Like any other kind of obscure thing, some plant people love sedges.

Some of them call themselves “sedge heads” and I have a friend who made a t-shirt mocked with a Grateful Dead shirt with a sedge achene on it. I can’t find a pic, but it’s silly.

[At this point she went and grabbed her most closely available copy of H.S. Pepoon’s Flora of the Chicago Region.]

This is rude:

A practically useless family!

:(

Like I said, rude. They’re super important for soil stability / development, especially in woodlands, and some have really close relationships with ants.

Lots of things get called sedges that aren’t sedges.

At this point everything trailed off, with many more questions having been raised than answered. Why had I never heard of tiger nuts before? What bug crawled up H.S. Pepoon’s butt about sedges? Who are these sedge heads?

And chufus. I couldn’t stop thinking about chufus. What a wonderful word. So I looked it up, and stumbled upon this wackadoodle page from a defunct blog called Horicultural History, which included this magical image:

I mean, look at how freaking happy those people are who have just left the chufus table. (Also, look at how terribly plump that pig is.)

Now get this: chufus is actually the source of tiger nuts (aka earth almonds) and these were readily available in 1899 at “Buckbee’s seed store, Rockford Ill.”

As it so happens, Buckbee Street in Rockford is a block north of Broadway. Until today it had never occurred to me that Buckbee might have been an actual person as opposed to, say, an upholstery tool. Little did I know! It turns out that the Buckbee Seed Warehouse is at 620 Buckbee St., just a couple of blocks from where my grandparents’ laundromat was, and just a few blocks from my old elementary school. Rockford, it seems, was something of a seed capital; and there is a rich history to the the Buckbee family in Rockford, including a congressman!

It’s true: all stories really do seem to come back to Rockford somehow.

Now I really want to try some tiger nuts. Thanks, Rachel!

So you all know that I think Twitter is a cesspool. Still, there’s often some, um, nugget of intrigue to be mined.

Now the thing about Twitter is that if you decide you’re going to follow 7,000 people, you can do that, with the result that you hav no prayer of a coherent feed. Oh, maybe the algorithms there understand some way to prioritize things, I don’t know.

Twitter claims I have 246 followers. I suspect a couple of them are bots. Many of them look to be people I interacted with like 13 years ago. Whatevs.

I think though that the most famous person who follows me is David Gedge, front man and mainstay of long-standing English indie band The Wedding Present. It seems that at some point he must have just started following anybody he could find who ever listened to a Wedding Present song. I have no idea how he made such a determination, but that’s okay, he was right.

There was this period of time toward the end of my run as Music Director at WESN (our college radio station) where we had taken to scheduling overnight playlists, and songs which happened to make it onto those playlists I heard all the time, and sometimes they feel as familiar to me as songs I’ve heard on classic rock radio for 30+ years. One such song is The Wedding Present’s “Montreal”. For all I know this isn’t even a popular Wedding Present song. Isn’t it weird how random things like this can be? I think I know this song inside and out, and I think I would not immediately recognize another song by the band. And I like the band and have listened to multiple of their albums over time.

Anyway, I probably would not have mentioned this whole silly thing under any other circumstances.

This does, however, provide a segue to something else involving WESN: Pirate Geography.

After grad school, I resumed my radio show GOAT-SPIEL. At some point I decided I wanted to record some program spots about when GOAT-SPIEL was, but of course, I couldn’t do this in any ordinary fashion, so I came up with a gimmick: a series of educational spots ostensibly about geography, hosted by the internationally famous pirate-turned-geographer Greenbeard.

These were terrible, distended, convoluted jokes, which involved me poorly talking like a pirate, and providing information which was partially factual and partially farcical.

The final installment, #12, was a piece of cultural geography, wherein Greenbeard talked about how a person could go to Tynset, Norway and see the world’s largest chair sledge. Naturally, it devolved into Greenbeard making fun of Vikings.

With the caveat that I did not spend hours on end on this, at first I could only find one reference on the web to this thing, on a page which I think is trying to get us to buy a 1999 book / CD-ROM guide to fishing on the River Glomma. Absurdly I also found a reference to Tynset being the site of the world’s smallest chair sledge.

After digging more, though, what I realized is that they don’t usually call it a chair sledge, they call it a kicker. And so here it is, the world’s largest chair sledge / kicker, with a more typical model in front for scale:

In the process of looking this up, I also found the Tynset coat of arms, which I share with you now because it’s super hip, and destined to be the logo for the next company that enters the winter wear space:

I like to imagine that the Tynset moose is thinking, hmm, where shall I find some chufus?

When my littlest sister was little and first talking, she didn’t pronounce our names correctly, because she was little and first talking. Some consonant sounds come later than others! The two th sounds might come later. Kids often say dad before mom because d is easier than m. And ssss might not come at first either.

And so, I was Bah, which was a shortened form of Brother.

My other sister was Jedgee. Or, for short, just Jedge.

Okay, okay, I’ve strung out the gimmick long enough.

On to the hedge.

I’ve never gone and just bought a share of stock. I honestly do not know how to do so. I mean, yes, I can go online and figure it out! But I’ve never done so.

I wasn’t raised to “believe” in the stock market. I was never around anyone who talked about how any particular stocks were faring. I was fascinated by numbers as a kid, and I can recall sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table looking at the business section of the paper, but all of those numbers may just as well have been temperatures from around the world, or batting averages for minor leaguers. They didn’t hold any particular meaning.

I also learned nothing about “how the stock market works” in elementary school, or junior high, or high school, or college, or grad school. Sure, I could have taken an econ class in college. I was actually signed up for one! I went the first day, and it seemed horrifying. I dropped it and took African American history instead.

My dad had a job throughout the ‘90s and he had a 401k through that job. At one point there was some kind of market fluxuation. I don’t remember what year. I don’t remember why. My fuzzy recollection is that something happened where 401k values went down quite a bit and didn’t fully rebound, but the stock market itself didn’t take a hit. I might have the details wrong, but the point is, what little exposure to “investment” that our family had was one I learned not to trust very much.

By the time I graduated college, I was well on my way to being what most people would understand as hardcore left-wing. Ralph Nader’s campaign in 2000 struck all of the right chords for me because when he talked about runaway corporate power, it fit precisely with things my dad had long been talking about. It also fit with an upbringing where stocks were someone else’s business. My grandparents were small business owners. While it wasn’t explicit, what I recognize that I had internalized was the idea that small business was on one side, and bigness was on the other side, and while I had a sense of “big government”, what I really came to understand was that corporate America was antithetical to small business America, and the reason government was problematic was because it kept taking the side of the big guys over the little guys. (A lot of this sentiment was bolstered by my degree path, as I learned a lot about things like the Sherman Antitrust Act and the rollout of regulation in the early 20th century. Government regulation, even when intended to reign in abuses of large corporations, has often been written or applied in a manner much easier for the largest corporations to meet.)

I ran for State Representative in 2004 as a Green. At one point I was invited to sit down with the editorial board of the Pantagraph, the local paper in Bloomington-Normal. Everyone understood the Pantagraph to be a small-c conservative paper. So when I got in there, I talked about my grandparents, and how Green politics were directly informed by a strand of traditional conservative American politics. I may even have used the term “Eisenhower Republicans”. It blew their minds. I didn’t get an endorsement, but in the editorial where they endorsed the incumbent, they devoted more lines to how impressed they were with me.

The GameStop affair has gotten me to thinking about all of this. The more I’ve read about what all has happened and how much certain Wall Street types have lost their minds, and the more I’ve seen certain politicians and pundits and journalists and bloggers try and come to grips with it, the more I’m convinced that this whole thing is re-exposing something fundamental which got swept away during the Trump years.

We lose track that Occupy Wall Street and all of the rheotric about the 99% versus the 1% came about during the Obama years. We lose track for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that people were so unbelievably weird in how they talked about Obama himself. But the Clinton-Trump election really blew this thinking up.

Hillary Clinton was never able to be a champion of the 99%. There are a lot of complicated reasons for this, but even if you got past all of the rest, the bottom line was that her husband sold the country out to Wall Street, and so that wasn’t something she could simply repudiate; and her predecessor, confronted with the reality that big finance had almost destroyed the economy through greed and corruption, outright punted on attempting to hold anyone accountable. Many, many people were severely damaged by the malfeasance of elements of Wall Street during the 2007-8 downturn, but the effective political agreement was to do nothing about the perpetrators.

There remained - and still remains - latent anger at what happened to the country and how nobody was held accountable. That anger is comingled with a lot of other grievances, some of them fair, some of them bullshit. The bottom line though is that there are millions of people who had good reason to feel like they were being cheated, and that nobody was really doing anything about it.

We bought our first house in 2011. By a sheer stroke of luck, we bought in when the market was at its absolute lowest. We bought our house for almost exactly what the sellers had paid 10 years earlier. They had, in effect, gained zero equity in 10 years. We were not out to screw anybody; we just flat out got lucky.

Our sellers weren’t screwed though. At the same time that they were selling in a down market, they were buying in a down market. For them, the market downturn was essentially a wash. Then when the market rebounded, they regained equity in their new house.

Still, a whole lot of other people were absolutely screwed. They saw the value of their homes take a much bigger hit than our sellers. People who bought condos in 2006 were underwater on them by 2011. Sometimes they were able to wash like our sellers. But sometimes not. Many people simply wound up underwater. And many of those people had to outright walk away from their homes.

Everybody knows someone who took a hit. That creates a certain layer of shared anger at “the system”, even if it’s not one that is necessarily thought of in those terms.

And a lot of those people who washed - well, things might have been looking really shaky for a while. Some of them were underwater for a while before the rebound came. We’re talking about millions of people for whom a vague sense of “economic anxiety” was hovering in the background. Not quite the same way that the Great Depression affected the thinking of so many Americans for decades to come. But the impact is there.

But just as there was never any fallout for Wall Street’s role in bringing the economy to its knees, there was also never any real political fallout. There couldn’t be, because there was a bipartisan neoliberal consensus defining Washington. There was such overwhelming agreement on high level economic policy that the Republicans were left free to pursue extremism in other ways. The Democrats were actually moving slightly to the left by this time - Dodd-Frank isn’t great, but it’s left of where the Clintonites were in 1999 - but because of the way modern politics has developed, any motion on the part of the Democrats made them susceptible to attack, nevermind how much farther to the right the Republicans were careening.

When 2016 rolled around, nominal Republican economic policy was so incoherent that erstwhile favorites for the nomination were left with absolutely nothing to offer. (I’m thinking especially of Jeb! but also more broadly the entire array of lousy candidates.) I submit that many Republicans deeply distrust and nevertheless admire Wall Street. Or, more to the point, they tacitly admire it even while they deeply distrust it. That can be a complicated position for a traditional Republican to navigate, and I think it was especially so in 2016.

Trump, of course, was different. Trump too deeply distrusts and nevertheless admires Wall Street. Think of all the people who seemed to actually believe the nonsense that Trump could and would be effective because he was a successful businessman. Well, think of it like this: A man isn’t a bureaucracy. A singular person can’t be big like a corporation is, or like government is. A small business owner could therefore, supposedly, find more to identify with in Trump than they could find in, say, the CEO of an oil company. (We have to set aside the actual reality here that Trump was not a successful businessman and think more in terms of how easy it is to spin certain kinds of narratives.)

Trump, playing the role of businessman, was therefore absurdly able to get away with dabbling in variations on populism. And since he was the candidate of the Republican Party, it was the Republicans - not the Democrats - who were able to carry populist thought with them through the general election, right at a time when populist sentiment was in the upswing. Go back to the formation of the Populist Party in the late 1800s and look at their moments of ascendence; the sentiment was already there, there was a major financial crisis in 1893, and everything culminated in the 1896 election when William Jennings Bryan gave his “Cross of Gold” speech but William McKinley won anyway. Trump effectively captured the new populist moment, and he had a perfect foil in Hillary Clinton.

(An aside about 2016. I’m in the camp of people who strongly believe that, had he been the Democratic nominee, Bernie Sanders would have won in November 2016, precisely because I think he had much more deeply tapped into traditional populist sentiments. If you want to argue that Sanders was the equivalent of Bryan, though, I’m all ears. All that said, because the populist moment was gone, replaced by outright fear and hatred, I look back now and doubt that Sanders could have won in November 2020. This parenthetical I put out there for future consideration; it might be the most controversial thing I’ve written for some META-SPIEL readers!)

I dwell on the circumstances of the 2016 election and how Trump played people because I think there’s something important in all of as applies to the GameStop affair.

Consider this basic narrative: A bunch of enlightened individual investors beat crooked hedge fund managers at their own game. The system had to get engaged to stomp the little guys.

Or this one: Those hedge fund guys who were crying were actually trying to bankrupt GameStop so they could profit off it… same kind of thing they always do.

In turn there are further elaborated narratives available; for example, about how “they” tried to shut down trading (“proving” that the “cheaters” are “scared”); and about how “they” have “friends in high places” (“proving” that there’s “corruption”); and so on.

You know whose those narratives appeal to? Everybody.

Everybody goes for a story like “Those big guys screwed me over!”, “They didn’t care about the little guy but we showed them!”, “DAVID GOLIATH BLAH BLAH”, etc.

Average people don’t want to be losers, right? But everybody loves the underdog, even though the underdog, by definition, is a likely loser. Everybody wants to believe they have a chance, that they too can be a winner.

But also, a lot of people believe something a little fuzzier. Something inbetween “I don’t have a chance!” and “They won’t give me a chance!” and “They’re taking my chance away!” Where a person falls on that spectrum, I suspect, is correlated with whether a person buys into zero-sum thinking. Are chances finite? They always give someone else the promotion. They won’t give me a chance. Or are chances essentially infinite? Everyone should be able to go to college, because everyone should have a chance.

GameStop is an imperfect metaphor for anything. But the name is already a metaphor, and the accepted definition of that metaphor is wildly up for grabs. Specifically, it’s up for grabs politically.

You can say that Redditors stood up to corporate greed. Oversimplification? Yes. But nugget of truth? Absolutely. Now take that, and build upon it. Speak out more sharply against other things that entities like hedge funds do and how damaging they are to the economy. Keep whipping up public sentiment. Make a lot of politicians claim to have a position about “what to do with hedge funds”.

Consider this as well. There are a lot of people who think, more or less, you can’t do anything about the big banks. You can try to curb the excesses but they just are what they are. “Too big to fail”, right? Well, people who think that way are all over the political spectrum - they include people who just see that kind of corruption as a fixed cost of business, whatever; and they also include people who are just overwhelmed by fighting the big guy.

Now consider the narrative that you can do something about the big banks and that the Redditors have shown a way. Wow, people on the Internet brought those hedge funds to their knees! Now they don’t seem so invincible. They seem a little… susceptible?

This is an opportunity to articulate things like how sometimes government needs to step in save these banks from themselves… that what those hedge funds have been doing may or may not be technically illegal but really shouldn’t have been allowed… that we know when they get too wild with their bets it can cause ripple effects in other parts of the economy (psst like what happened in 2007)… in short, make a strong case for regulation. For the idea that the real big out there is Wall Street, big finance, etc. Do nothing less than reframe the way in which the relationship between big business and big government gets talked about: that government has to get involved because the companies are beginning to make decisions for themselves about governance and we’re not asserting our authority. You don’t think there are a lot of people out there who are being fed a particular line right now about Facebook and Twitter restricting free speech? The time is ripe for pithy statements like this:

“What they do just shouldn’t be legal.”

“We’re going to do something about the hedge funds.”

And then do it. Go after white collar crime like never before. Keep batting around major finance policy changes to push the narrative beyond what the Republicans can control. (Imagine, Illinoisans, if the argument could have been made that the big anti Fair Tax people were “the rich hedge fund people” - specifically Ken Griffin. Imagine demanding that politicians give Ken Griffin’s money back.)

These are the discursive approaches I think Democrats need to make. Take control of the narrative - not the narrative of the original GameStop / Reddit story, but rather the narrative of the social story that will absolutely endure. It may endure only as a weird trivia question, or maybe “GameStop” will have staying power like “Enron” to mean something broader than just any one company or scandal.

One reason I think all of this is important is because I think all of this not only appeals to a large subset of conservatives but because it is a way in which the Democrats can stake conservatism as opposed to reactionism.

The strain of conservatism I inherited from my grandparents, which still informs much of my take on the world, is for me completely consistent with progressive and even some socialist thought. A base distrust of bigness is at its core anti-corporate, or at least anti-corporatist. It is not at its core anti-government, because although government is big, government is also us, not them. If you make the sell that the Redditors are akin to small fry, you know, small business owners… and the hedge funds are the corporate non-face tearing long standing companies apart… you can establish the idea that the Democrats are the party of the little guys - including the small business owners.

Is it all a stretch? Well, is it? I’m not convinced that it’s so far-fetched. I think the biggest question is whether the Democrats have the political will. And while I find that dubious, I’m not so sure it’s impossible. I think it can be pursued. The political narrative can be moved right now. Progressives should try to seize upon this.

In a nutshell (though not a tiger nut shell… tiger nuts are actually underground structures of a sedge):

now, take the wicked funds of hedge

and pound them with a legal sledge

or push them off the licit edge

upon a Norwegian chair sledge

(and don’t be an ultramaroon

like chufus chump H.S. Pepoon)