On Junk

Buy buy, says the sign in the shop window.
Why why, says the junk in the yard.

— Paul McCartney

In the 14th century, the English word junk meant "old rope." British boat builders repurposed junk as caulk, threading it throughout hulls to ensure they didn't leak. The word was borrowed from the Latin iuncus, meaning "reed."

The meaning of junk was extended over the next three centuries to include any "nautical refuse;" and, by the 19th century, to include any "refuse you can reuse." Trash—an Old Norse word meaning "deadfall"—was worthless, junk was not.

Junker, meaning a "beat-up car," is an Americanism that came into use in the 20th century. I once asked my late father-in-law, a native Mississippian, why Southerners always kept junkers in their front yards. He patiently explained that, in the South, when cars ceased to work, they automatically became storage lockers for spare parts.

Up North, where I grew up, we were less practical: we hauled junkers to the junkyard. And we called them not junkers, but jalopies. Jalopy is another 20th century Americanism. In the 1920s, longshoremen in New Orleans called the abandoned cars they shipped to the junkyards of Jalapa, Mexico, jalopies. The name stuck.

I now live in the North again, in a pretty subdivision with an HOA. The HOA prohibits jalopies; indeed, it prohibits many things, and homeowners can only change their yards and houses with the express permission of an Architectural Control Committee.

I'm not currently a member of the committee, but I would love to be. Were I a member, I would print business cards bearing the title "Commissioner of Good Taste." That's a job I've wanted for as long as I can remember.

Italians have Commissioners of Good Taste. They work for regional governments and ensure local builders and residents don't junk up the piazzas and side-streets of their picturesque, ancient towns. 

If Italy can have Commissioners of Good Taste, why can't my HOA? I'd make it my mission to apply the brakes to what Edith Wharton called the "general decline of taste," and would use the power of my office to arrest shoddiness in all its manifestations—beginning with junk journalism.

Today I encountered this dreck in the morning news: "Governments in several countries used the pandemic to consolidate control, squashing opposition press or social media."

The journalist should know you squash a bug, but you quash an opponent. Squash means "to flatten;" quash, "to suppress." 

The Secret of Trash

My life is, in a sense, trash.

— John Updike

When I was 17, hoping to find treasure, I picked Bob Dylan's trash.

The songster lived that year in the uppermost story of 94 MacDougal Street, a Greenwich Village townhouse he owned.

The plastic bag I nicked from Dylan's curbside—a perfectly legal, if unseemly, act—contained nothing but soiled Pampers, dirty paper towels, and kitchen-table scraps. Not a single abandoned lyric, guitar pick, or harmonica holder. I quickly tossed the foul-smelling bag into a public trash receptacle nearby.

This month Sotheby's will auction a 15th-century Ming dynasty bowl valued at $500,000. The owner, an anonymous picker, bought the bowl—one of only seven known to exist—at a Connecticut yard sale for $35. The picker had the "good eye"—and good luck—my 17-year-old, treasure-hunting self lacked.

All trash may be trash, but some trash is also treasure. The secret is to pick the right trash.

A man named Paul Moran once picked John Updike's trash after seeing the late writer deposit two plastic bags in the garbage bin in front of his Massachusetts home.

Moran found a batch of honorary college degrees Updike had received—all in pristine condition—and decided then and there to make a routine of picking Updike's trash every Wednesday.

Moran's routine soon led to him to amassing an enormous collection of Updike memorabilia that included discarded drafts, old love letters, Christmas cards, vacation photos, utility bills, receipts, canceled checks, White House invitations, floppy disks, address books, eyeglasses, and worn-out clothing.

When the author discovered Moran was picking his trash, he took steps to thwart him, but they didn't work. Moran returned every Wednesday until Updike died in 2009.

“I was sort of tormented by my activity,” Moran told The Atlantic in 2014. “It was a compulsion, an obsession. But I thought it was a justifiable one. I would have done the same thing if Picasso was living down the road."

Moran's treasures today reside in a rented storage unit in Austin. 

Mine lie buried in a landfill in Canarsie. 

One Man's Meat

Cows are delighted.

University of Tokyo researchers have grown beef in a lab, reports Nature.

While only a tiny morsel, the steak-like object paves the way to large-scale, lab-grown beef production.

Scientists' past efforts to grow beef in a lab have produced only a mince no discerning consumer would eat.

But the Tokyo University team has matched the real thing, growing cow cells in long strands that resemble muscle fibers.

When the researchers stimulated the cultured cells with electricity, the strands contracted, the way real muscles do.

“We have developed steak," lead researcher Shoji Takeuchi says.

Takeuchi's team plans next to introduce fat and blood into the morsel, "to make the meat more realistic."

No one has tried eating the product, because the University of Tokyo's bioethics committee has yet to approve that step.

My Two Cents

A wealth tax is popular among voters for good reason: because they understand the system is rigged to benefit the wealthy.

— Elizabeth Warren

Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to soak the rich by taxing the 100 thousand richest Americans two cents on every dollar of their net worth.

While Congress bickers over spending $1.9 trillion for Covid-19 relief, Warren's "wealth tax" would over 10 years raise at least a trillion dollars more than that amount.

Warren wants to target the funds to education and child care.

Reactionaries—true to form—are screaming "property theft!"

But is it theft, when you soak the rich?

The slang term soak, which originated in the early 19th century, meant to "extort." English-speakers would refer to dishonest merchants as extortionists who soaked customers.

The phrase soak the rich came into English a century later, when James Warburg, a banker and critic of FDR, used the phrase to describe the president's populist income-tax proposals. 

Soaking the rich meant "stealing rich folks' property" for redistribution among the poor.

But philosophers would say you can't really steal money from the rich, any more than, say, Robin Williams could steal jokes from fellow comedians. 

Like a joke, money isn't property: it's an intangible. (A joke can't even be made theft-proof by insisting it's "intellectual property;" another standup can simply change the joke's setting and claim it's new, as Milton Berle often did.)

You might object and insist that, although it isn't physical property, an intangible like a joke can be owned—and therefore stolen. 

However, to argue as such would be to assign a special status to intangibles (i.e., they're "nonmaterial property"), an argument that opens to the door to a lot of absurd legal and moral claims—for example, that other people with your first name have stolen your name; or, worse, stolen your identity.

Soaking the rich comes down to depriving them of intangibles by denying them a few digits on a bank account, while helping millions of low- and middle-income Americans struggle less to educate and care for their children. 

But the rich cannot stand seeing even a few electrons behind a spread sheet evaporate, because with that disappearance not their tangible possessions, but their power, lessens. And power is what it's really about.

Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Downton Abbey have conditioned us to think the super-rich love only leisure and luxury. 

But make no mistake: it's dominion they love—dominion they garner largely on the backs of others.

Comedian Bob Hope once said of Milton Berle, "He never heard a joke he didn't steal." 

Jack Benny—known himself to steal from Berle—defended the practice, claiming, "When you take a joke away from Milton Berle, it's not stealing, it's repossessing."

Elizabeth Warren isn't stealing from the rich, either; she's repossessing.

That's my two cents.

Fauxbohs

 

In a magazine article about the home of interior designer Dallas Shaw, I encountered the unfamiliar term gypset.

"With this gypset-style approach, Shaw started with her favorite room," the article said.

A Google search shuttled me to the website of travel writer Julia Chaplin, where I found the definition.

"I coined the term gypset (gypsy + jet set) to describe an international group of artists, entrepreneurs, surfers, seekers, and bon vivants who lead semi-nomadic, unconventional lives." Chaplin writes. 

"They are people I’ve met in my travels who have perfected a creative approach to life that fuses the freelance and nomadic ways of the mythologic gypsy with the adventurous freedom of the jet set."

Martha Stewart-like, Chaplin has built an empire around the so-called gypset lifestyle, replete with branded clothing, books, excursions, and events.

While gypset describes the lifestyle, its practitioners are bohos, Chaplin says, free-spirited folks who are "nomadic entrepreneurs," and who plan the path to bohemianism with precision NASA would envy.

It ain't easy being laid back.

Chaplin's term inspires me to coin my own: fauxboh.

A fauxboh is a fake bohemian, someone who spends a fortune to look non-materialistic; uses a travel agent to book a spiritual journey; and works all day long to appear a carefree slouch. 

A fauxboh is the 2020s' version of the 1960s' plastic hippy, only better traveled. 

A fauxboh should not be confused with a fauxbo, a well-off poseur who dresses like he's homeless and penniless; in short, a fake hobo.

Nor should the term be confused with FOBO, the "fear of better options" that cripples most college applicants, job seekers, home buyers, and diners at Denny's.

Finally, a fauxboh should not be confused with a bobo, the term coined by journalist David Brooks to describe a bourgeois bohemian. 

A bobo is a well-heeled yuppie with a guilt complex. When he shops, he "shops organically," to offset the carbon footprint his five cars, two homes, and jet ski, snowmobile and motorboat leave; and when he buys, he "buys American," to compensate for the fact he outsources all his business to Mumbai. A bobo is a big-spending bohemian.

All these terms raise the question: who were the original bohemians?

The answer: gypsies.

Parisians were the first to call artists and dilettantes “bohemians,” in the early 1800s. But they borrowed the term from the one they'd been using for 400 years to label gypsies, the stateless Roma.

Banished from India to wander Europe and the Middle East for centuries, in 1423 the Roma were granted citizenship in the Kingdom of Bohemia. 

When they were cast out of the kingdom 274 years later, the gypsies migrated to France. 

The French called the Kingdom of Bohemia La Boheme, and the strange and nomadic newcomers from that land les Bohemiens.