Just finished reading a good student essay on Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” quoting a source saying that the poem does not indicate so much the conservative bent of the poet’s mind as his disinterest in politics altogether.
The essay reminds me that, with few exceptions, lack of interest in politics is a large part of what conservatism is.
Politics is the science of acquiring or challenging power to effect change in a society.
Liberals seek power ostensibly to liberate people from undue coercion and limitation of their natural rights … by the state, by the church, by the “tyranny of the majority” (to cite de Tocqueville and Mill), by the wealthy or otherwise super-privileged, and, more recently, by corporations.
Liberals, unlike anarchists, look to the state “to secure these rights” (to cite the Declaration of Independence) … even from coercion by the state itself—theoretically the function of divided government and the Bill of Rights. In doing so, they often extend the influence of the state over private lives in ways that alarm anarchists, libertarians, and, for that matter, a lot of people who don’t know what to call themselves.
Libertarians and anarchists consider themselves the “true” liberals—either seeking to radically limit the powers of the state or transfer those powers to syndicates, unions, communes, or other small working communities of choice—or, for anarchic purists, to each and every individual to fend for herself or himself.
A keen interest in politics drives all these people.
It drives reactionaries, too. Like liberals, libertarians, and anarchists, reactionaries want to acquire power to change society—more particularly, to re-acquire power to change society back—or return it to traditional points of authority: the aristocracy, the patriarchy, the monarchy or dictatorship, and/or God (or those acknowledged to be God’s vicars or proxies).
About the only groups of people who find no need to care about politics are those who believe change is unnecessary, because for them the status quo is good enough already, or those who believe change is impossible or out of the control of ordinary individuals.
Into the latter group I clump together cynics and opportunists, who see power strictly as a playground. Although they lack political ideals (or at least have set them aside as impractical), they follow the forms of politics, not so much to change society, but rather to enrich or empower themselves.
I would also include in this group those who have burned out or lost hope.
Such conservatism, like the poet Wordsworth’s, may derive from horror and outrage at the excesses or hypocrisies of past revolutions and idealism. The French Terror, for instance, moved a good many English romantic idealists to the right in Wordsworth’s day. Most, I dare say, simply threw up their hands and shrugged their shoulders.
Of course, the former group, who actually like things as they are, are the true blue (or red) conservatives. Their disinterest in politics is meant either to leave well enough alone or to preserve their own interests, which are embedded in the status quo. This is the group most properly called “conservative” and its values are those of the average American—quite literally “average”—all criticism, discontent, idealism, or sense of moral irony burned away in the crucible of the arithmetic mean.
I emphasize “average” because most individuals are not average. Most people want at least some aspect of the society they live in to change, but their values are offset by other people’s values and thus usually neutered … in opinion polls or in election years. It is only when the sum total of individuals in society is statistically processed and redistributed that we have the “average” American, who is, as I said, basically conservative … and largely a mathematical fabrication.
The people we normally think of as “conservative” are actually “reactionary” … at least on most issues. They want to return to the good old days … before Roe v. Wade, feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, R-rated movies, rap, the Second Vatican Council, Playboy, the New Deal, and Watergate.
Up to and including a fair share of the recent election, reactionaries have been effective in mobilizing the truly conservative side of American society, largely by appealing to its fear of change, even though the reactionaries want change as much as the liberals and the radicals do.
The liberals and the radicals at least have history on their side. The change the reactionaries want, though, is undocumented in the annals of history. Even the dark ages of the medieval era, the most successful instance of backwards change in history, were different from whatever preceded the classical world.
It is America’s conservative nature that, wisely or too cautiously, demands that its politicians be moderate, promise not to change things too much, or make concessions to opposite interests at the same time.
I think these demands are overly cautious. With rare exceptions, America since World War II has feared the future. It lost or hugely diminished its supplies of frank vulgarity, iconoclasm, can-do spirit, audacious laughter, and big-heartedness, replacing them with political correctness, teleprompt pieties, victim mentality, canned laughter, and identity politics.
As a culture, we have chosen “no” over “yes.” That choice is the heart of conservatism—even when it calls itself compassionate or moderate, even when it thinks it’s progressive.
Of course, no-politics does not equal no change in society. No-politics simply relinquishes the power of change to the corporate-owned media, corporate-funded politicians, and elites who take government loans but won’t lend any money back to you and me.
If the last eight years has taught us anything, it is the essentially destructive nature of choosing beer-drinking buddies as Presidents (especially those who reportedly kicked the hooch 20 years ago) or mistaking escapism and deliberate ignorance for liberation and innocence.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
God, Blacks, and Homos
In 1970 I sat in a school assembly at a private Christian high school in Hialeah, Florida, to hear a biblical defense of its policy of excluding black students—a policy that had begun to be an issue for many of the white students.
The first explanation was general—that God intended the peoples of the world to be separate and pure—first evident in Noah’s famous curse against his son Ham, traditionally believed to be the father of the African races: “Cursed be Canaan [Ham’s son]; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9.25). This chestnut had also been used in the antebellum Baptist churches of the South to defend the enslavement of black Africans. Now it was used to defend segregation.
Further, the speaker pointed out that, throughout the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to keep themselves separate from the inhabitants of the land He has given to them. God Himself promotes racial division—even genocide—to ensure that Israel will remain morally and ethnically “pure.”
The speaker also pointed out that blacks had their own churches and thus were capable of forming their own Christian schools, if they liked, separate but equal. The speaker even boasted that our school contributed generously to a number of black congregations around Dade County.
Last, the speaker invoked the apostle Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: “I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean. But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died” (Rom. 14.14-15).
The speaker affirmed that, for himself, nothing was actually “wrong” with intermingling with people of other races, but there were brethren of tender consciences who could not abide the presence of black people in their white church, and it was out of consideration for these weaker Christians, so easily offended and grieved, that the racial divide ought to be maintained.
The irony here is explosive. The quoted passage, in its whole context, is in fact a direct rebuttal against the Old Testament teachings of separation. Paul is calling for Jews and Gentiles to come peaceably and lovingly together. And he further urges the Roman churchgoers to welcome minorities into their midst and accommodate their somewhat overwrought dietary scruples. But here our speaker used these words to defend racial discrimination as a sop to the bigots, for whom integration was indeed “unclean”—though, of course, the speaker himself was no bigot, he assured us.
On this same occasion, a classmate of mine rose to her feet to support the speaker’s reasoning. Her voice quavering, she too quoted scripture, “‘What communion hath light with darkness?’” What could be clearer? God wants whites and blacks to be separate.
So, this week, I’m reminded of the compassionate conservatives and God-fearing Christians who, without an ounce of hate for gay men and lesbians, so they say, chose to deny basic rights and legal privileges to homosexuals, i.e. marriage and adoption—on the grounds of certain parts of the Old Testament that condemn sexual impurity (almost as much as the scriptures condemn racial impurity and promote genocide)—and vote in policies not only for their own inbred, paranoid congregations and schools, but for the whole state of California (or Florida, or Arizona, or Arkansas).
And further they defend this singularly un-Christlike action by claiming to defend the children, as well as the tender-conscienced bigots, failing to consider that perhaps one in twelve of those children will grow up to love his or her own sex—and that easily one in three of those bigots have sex hang-ups that would make the average hooker blush.
The more “liberal” among them, including our new president elect, his competition, and the current President, offer the consolation of civil union—separate but equal-ish. Some, like Governor Palin of Alaska, pat themselves on the back for disagreeing (however un-emphatically) with extremists who would grind the gays down into the mud.
How do these righteous souls justify their anti-gay rhetoric?
They are God’s people, easily grieved and offended, protective of their children and their weaker brethren.
They are the majority and can do what they damn well please to minorities (even if, in other respects, they too are minorities).
They have the right not only to disapprove of and condemn other peoples’ lives, they can, within whatever legal boundaries still exist, persecute and destroy those who live such lives …
And—this itself must be some kind of miracle of divinely regenerating love—while their boot heel rests on the brow of the despised homo, they can proclaim themselves to be God’s martyrs for righteousness, abused, persecuted, and unjustly reviled … by the makers of South Park.
The first explanation was general—that God intended the peoples of the world to be separate and pure—first evident in Noah’s famous curse against his son Ham, traditionally believed to be the father of the African races: “Cursed be Canaan [Ham’s son]; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9.25). This chestnut had also been used in the antebellum Baptist churches of the South to defend the enslavement of black Africans. Now it was used to defend segregation.
Further, the speaker pointed out that, throughout the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to keep themselves separate from the inhabitants of the land He has given to them. God Himself promotes racial division—even genocide—to ensure that Israel will remain morally and ethnically “pure.”
The speaker also pointed out that blacks had their own churches and thus were capable of forming their own Christian schools, if they liked, separate but equal. The speaker even boasted that our school contributed generously to a number of black congregations around Dade County.
Last, the speaker invoked the apostle Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: “I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean. But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died” (Rom. 14.14-15).
The speaker affirmed that, for himself, nothing was actually “wrong” with intermingling with people of other races, but there were brethren of tender consciences who could not abide the presence of black people in their white church, and it was out of consideration for these weaker Christians, so easily offended and grieved, that the racial divide ought to be maintained.
The irony here is explosive. The quoted passage, in its whole context, is in fact a direct rebuttal against the Old Testament teachings of separation. Paul is calling for Jews and Gentiles to come peaceably and lovingly together. And he further urges the Roman churchgoers to welcome minorities into their midst and accommodate their somewhat overwrought dietary scruples. But here our speaker used these words to defend racial discrimination as a sop to the bigots, for whom integration was indeed “unclean”—though, of course, the speaker himself was no bigot, he assured us.
On this same occasion, a classmate of mine rose to her feet to support the speaker’s reasoning. Her voice quavering, she too quoted scripture, “‘What communion hath light with darkness?’” What could be clearer? God wants whites and blacks to be separate.
So, this week, I’m reminded of the compassionate conservatives and God-fearing Christians who, without an ounce of hate for gay men and lesbians, so they say, chose to deny basic rights and legal privileges to homosexuals, i.e. marriage and adoption—on the grounds of certain parts of the Old Testament that condemn sexual impurity (almost as much as the scriptures condemn racial impurity and promote genocide)—and vote in policies not only for their own inbred, paranoid congregations and schools, but for the whole state of California (or Florida, or Arizona, or Arkansas).
And further they defend this singularly un-Christlike action by claiming to defend the children, as well as the tender-conscienced bigots, failing to consider that perhaps one in twelve of those children will grow up to love his or her own sex—and that easily one in three of those bigots have sex hang-ups that would make the average hooker blush.
The more “liberal” among them, including our new president elect, his competition, and the current President, offer the consolation of civil union—separate but equal-ish. Some, like Governor Palin of Alaska, pat themselves on the back for disagreeing (however un-emphatically) with extremists who would grind the gays down into the mud.
How do these righteous souls justify their anti-gay rhetoric?
They are God’s people, easily grieved and offended, protective of their children and their weaker brethren.
They are the majority and can do what they damn well please to minorities (even if, in other respects, they too are minorities).
They have the right not only to disapprove of and condemn other peoples’ lives, they can, within whatever legal boundaries still exist, persecute and destroy those who live such lives …
And—this itself must be some kind of miracle of divinely regenerating love—while their boot heel rests on the brow of the despised homo, they can proclaim themselves to be God’s martyrs for righteousness, abused, persecuted, and unjustly reviled … by the makers of South Park.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Everybody’s Tearing Up
Yep, hearing that Obama had definitely won the day on Election Tuesday, I teared up. Couldn’t help myself. Really. I saw the magic number, 270 electoral votes, had been reached, and the waterworks just sprang.
The vote appeared momentous, not just because on some level it can be taken to symbolize a triumph over centuries of bigotry and injustice in this nation, but also because it promises to reconcile America with the world.
Everybody’s tearing up.
YouTube will soon have to offer tissues for every deeply moved celebrity or wannabe celebrity posting footage of going verklempt when or shortly after he or she first heard the happy news.
The extra-sensitive may even take their show on the road—finding moments in any conversation during the next few days to recall the moment they heard the announcement and go misty-eyed all over again—or, failing in that, simply and reverently affirm that they, too, like Colin Powell, wept—or very nearly almost wept—when they heard that Obama will be our next President.
These are moving times—and the prevailing gauge to validate our choices, our votes, our sincerity, is our feelings. America has elected somebody named Barack Obama as President, somebody a shade or two darker than the previous 43 US Presidents, somebody who can pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly.
A friend who stayed up late that night to watch Obama’s acceptance speech complained, but ever so reticently, that she was disappointed at how “cold” the President Elect appeared. He must have been very tired after months (years!) of campaigning, she offered by way of explanation. Still, she said, he had looked a lot more “kindly” before he won. Perhaps it was dawning on him what a load of shit he was inheriting from the previous administrations.
I’m reading today of gay activists who are tearing up, too. Tears tinged with a hint of hurt and betrayal, even anger, mixed with their pride in a new America capable of rising above the issues of race. Gay activists who worked hard to elect Obama but found their own causes, same-sex marriage and adoption rights, slapped down in four states—and by the same good people, black and white churchgoers, who voted against bigotry to elect Barack Obama.
Dan Savage wrote in his blog on Wednesday:
“African American voters in California voted overwhelmingly for Prop 8, writing anti-gay discrimination into California's constitution and banning same-sex marriage in that state. Seventy percent of African American voters approved Prop 8, according to exit polls, compared to 53% of Latino voters, 49% of white voters, 49% of Asian voters.
“I'm not sure what to do with this. I'm thrilled that we've just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can't help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren't mutual.
“I do know this, though: I'm done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they're out there, and I think they're scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.” (1)
The issue, of course, is not so much race as it is fear, ignorance, and hatefulness, which know no racial boundaries, but often find sanctuary among the righteously monotheistic. And, of course, black homophobia poses the biggest problem for black gay men and lesbians.
My previously mentioned friend tried to reason with me over my own disappointment over the failure of Obama supporters to care about the civil rights of homosexual men and women, saying that justice needed to arrive first for the blacks, the women, the Hispanics, etc., before it could trickle down to the queers (not her word choice, of course)—out of respect to the chronology of historical injustices.
But I disagree. In 1624, just five years after the first slave ship arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, the first American sodomite, Richard Cornish, was executed, also in Jamestown (2). And nearly a 100 years earlier, in 1530, further south in Panama, Balboa fed 41 native-American sodomites to his dogs, “a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard,” so wrote a contemporary, Antonio de la Colancha (3). Even if we take a number according to history, as we stand in line waiting for social and political justice, gay rights should be at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights for all.
So while I too feel swept away by my emotions this week—not least of all because we are still stuck with 76 more days of George W. Bush—it’s imperative that we regain our clear and unclouded eyes to face the issues the country yet faces—wars, a tanked economy, crumbling infrastructure, greed, cynicism, and, yes, bigotry against homosexuals.
Obama’s election is not, after all, a happy Hollywood ending—it is the beginning of something, something that I hope will contain moments of glory and triumph, while inevitably burdened by a great deal of cultural warfare, moral equivocation, and, dare I say it, politics as usual.
***
(1) Savage, Dan. “Black Homophobia.” Slog 5 Nov. 2008. http://slog.thestranger.com
(2) Goodheart, Adam. “The Ghosts of Jamestown.” New York Times 3 July 2003.
(3) Qtd. in Williams, Walter L. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Pg. 137.
The vote appeared momentous, not just because on some level it can be taken to symbolize a triumph over centuries of bigotry and injustice in this nation, but also because it promises to reconcile America with the world.
Everybody’s tearing up.
YouTube will soon have to offer tissues for every deeply moved celebrity or wannabe celebrity posting footage of going verklempt when or shortly after he or she first heard the happy news.
The extra-sensitive may even take their show on the road—finding moments in any conversation during the next few days to recall the moment they heard the announcement and go misty-eyed all over again—or, failing in that, simply and reverently affirm that they, too, like Colin Powell, wept—or very nearly almost wept—when they heard that Obama will be our next President.
These are moving times—and the prevailing gauge to validate our choices, our votes, our sincerity, is our feelings. America has elected somebody named Barack Obama as President, somebody a shade or two darker than the previous 43 US Presidents, somebody who can pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly.
A friend who stayed up late that night to watch Obama’s acceptance speech complained, but ever so reticently, that she was disappointed at how “cold” the President Elect appeared. He must have been very tired after months (years!) of campaigning, she offered by way of explanation. Still, she said, he had looked a lot more “kindly” before he won. Perhaps it was dawning on him what a load of shit he was inheriting from the previous administrations.
I’m reading today of gay activists who are tearing up, too. Tears tinged with a hint of hurt and betrayal, even anger, mixed with their pride in a new America capable of rising above the issues of race. Gay activists who worked hard to elect Obama but found their own causes, same-sex marriage and adoption rights, slapped down in four states—and by the same good people, black and white churchgoers, who voted against bigotry to elect Barack Obama.
Dan Savage wrote in his blog on Wednesday:
“African American voters in California voted overwhelmingly for Prop 8, writing anti-gay discrimination into California's constitution and banning same-sex marriage in that state. Seventy percent of African American voters approved Prop 8, according to exit polls, compared to 53% of Latino voters, 49% of white voters, 49% of Asian voters.
“I'm not sure what to do with this. I'm thrilled that we've just elected our first African-American president. I wept last night. I wept reading the papers this morning. But I can't help but feeling hurt that the love and support aren't mutual.
“I do know this, though: I'm done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they're out there, and I think they're scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.” (1)
The issue, of course, is not so much race as it is fear, ignorance, and hatefulness, which know no racial boundaries, but often find sanctuary among the righteously monotheistic. And, of course, black homophobia poses the biggest problem for black gay men and lesbians.
My previously mentioned friend tried to reason with me over my own disappointment over the failure of Obama supporters to care about the civil rights of homosexual men and women, saying that justice needed to arrive first for the blacks, the women, the Hispanics, etc., before it could trickle down to the queers (not her word choice, of course)—out of respect to the chronology of historical injustices.
But I disagree. In 1624, just five years after the first slave ship arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, the first American sodomite, Richard Cornish, was executed, also in Jamestown (2). And nearly a 100 years earlier, in 1530, further south in Panama, Balboa fed 41 native-American sodomites to his dogs, “a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard,” so wrote a contemporary, Antonio de la Colancha (3). Even if we take a number according to history, as we stand in line waiting for social and political justice, gay rights should be at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights for all.
So while I too feel swept away by my emotions this week—not least of all because we are still stuck with 76 more days of George W. Bush—it’s imperative that we regain our clear and unclouded eyes to face the issues the country yet faces—wars, a tanked economy, crumbling infrastructure, greed, cynicism, and, yes, bigotry against homosexuals.
Obama’s election is not, after all, a happy Hollywood ending—it is the beginning of something, something that I hope will contain moments of glory and triumph, while inevitably burdened by a great deal of cultural warfare, moral equivocation, and, dare I say it, politics as usual.
***
(1) Savage, Dan. “Black Homophobia.” Slog 5 Nov. 2008. http://slog.thestranger.com
(2) Goodheart, Adam. “The Ghosts of Jamestown.” New York Times 3 July 2003.
(3) Qtd. in Williams, Walter L. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Pg. 137.
A Silver Cloud with Rust Lining
Me, I’m elated by Barack Obama’s win. I wasn’t one to be dazzled by every aspect of the man’s style and certainly not all his stances, but in the last months I came to feel he has the makings to be the best President this country has ever seen—and the nadir George Bush reached in the last eight years makes Obama’s promise shine all the brighter.
The Bush Administration have brought the country low—bankrupt, globally despised, torn between two wars, baselessly arrogant, fearful (no, terrorized … and by its own government!), stripped of essential civil liberties, and contemptuous of the poor, the aged, and the ill.
Whether I’m right or wrong about Obama right now, he needs to be great just to offset the mess we’re all in. More to the point, it is the American people, as a whole, who need to exhibit greatness, for no elected official, however novel or charismatic, can do the work of rebuilding the nation’s character.
My hopes, such as they are, are wrapped on the new President’s being everything I think he can be.
Still, for me, though, the great disappointment—in the midst of my current high—is that California appears to have passed Proposition 8, negating the court’s decision earlier this year permitting lesbians and gay men to marry whom they please. Arizona and Florida have passed similar measures, either banning or reinforcing an existing law banning same-sex marriage. Arkansas voters decided to ban gays from being able to adopt children.
As speaker after speaker recalls Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream at what one hopes can be the dawn of a better America this morning, we must face the truth that electing a mixed-race President is a gigantic step forward, indeed, but pushing others back down at the same moment reveals that America has yet preserved its ugly side—in its homophobia and religious fear and bigotry.
The Bush Administration have brought the country low—bankrupt, globally despised, torn between two wars, baselessly arrogant, fearful (no, terrorized … and by its own government!), stripped of essential civil liberties, and contemptuous of the poor, the aged, and the ill.
Whether I’m right or wrong about Obama right now, he needs to be great just to offset the mess we’re all in. More to the point, it is the American people, as a whole, who need to exhibit greatness, for no elected official, however novel or charismatic, can do the work of rebuilding the nation’s character.
My hopes, such as they are, are wrapped on the new President’s being everything I think he can be.
Still, for me, though, the great disappointment—in the midst of my current high—is that California appears to have passed Proposition 8, negating the court’s decision earlier this year permitting lesbians and gay men to marry whom they please. Arizona and Florida have passed similar measures, either banning or reinforcing an existing law banning same-sex marriage. Arkansas voters decided to ban gays from being able to adopt children.
As speaker after speaker recalls Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream at what one hopes can be the dawn of a better America this morning, we must face the truth that electing a mixed-race President is a gigantic step forward, indeed, but pushing others back down at the same moment reveals that America has yet preserved its ugly side—in its homophobia and religious fear and bigotry.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
I Voted, Didn’t I?
CNN.com reports that damp ballots due to rainy weather today caused problems in key swing states like Virginia and my own state, North Carolina. In Cleveland, Ohio, another key state, the ballots didn’t include the part for voting for a President. Three precincts in Missouri received the wrong registration lists this morning. Robocalls and e-mails told voters in Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas to vote tomorrow—a repeat of the tactic Republicans used in the last two or three elections to trick black voters, generally assumed to vote Democratic. Lines were 375 voters long in Atlanta today (1).
Who wants to stand in line for ten hours to vote? By all definitions, the American voting machine has declined to third-world standards.
I may not be able to trust my memory on this, but I don’t remember national elections having so many fuck-ups 30, 20, even 10 years ago. Sure, I heard reports of “fixed” elections and “stuffed” ballot boxes, but nothing like the routine travesty voting has been since 2000.
It’s not as if voting is a brand new institution here. We Americans should be old pros at this by now. The 2005 legislative elections in Iraq ran more smoothly than today’s elections in the USA.
A colleague at work blames the fact that elections depend too much on volunteerism to manage the voting process. “Amateur hour,” he calls it, shaking his head in disbelief. This is not the Special Olympics, folks; it’s American democracy. Surely, the states can round up enough dough somehow to improve their voting procedures and infrastructure—perhaps by selling World’s Finest Chocolate bars door to door or something.
Attempts to interfere with American citizens’ right to vote—through political dirty tricks, or brain-numbed hooliganism, or simple finger-in-the-nose incompetence—should be branded as treasonous and prosecuted accordingly.
Isn’t voting the lynchpin of democracy? If it is, what does it say about 21st-century Americans that we are so bad at it now?
American public officials, elected or not, who can’t manage the relatively simple matter of ensuring every registered voter’s right to vote on election day every two years cannot be trusted to balance the economy, to protect our borders, to maintain public roads and highways, or to ensure our other civil rights as citizens.
I shouldn’t have to look at the purple thumbs of Iraqi voters with envy, people.
I don’t for a second buy officials’ excuses that they have been “surprised” by the large voter turnout this year. Please. If McDonald’s can serve over 47 million customers every goddamned day (2), with minimal glitches, the states should be able to prepare themselves for whatever numbers of voters show up once every four years to elect a President.
Failure to operate an efficient, just, and equitable election process is tantamount to proof that a state’s bureaucrats are not competent enough to keep their jobs. Fire the nincompoops. Period.
***
(1) “Scattered Problems Reported in Historic U.S. Vote.” 4 Nov. 2008. CNN.com.
(2) “FAQs.” McDonald’s Canada. http://www.mcdonalds.ca/en/aboutus/faq.aspx.
Who wants to stand in line for ten hours to vote? By all definitions, the American voting machine has declined to third-world standards.
I may not be able to trust my memory on this, but I don’t remember national elections having so many fuck-ups 30, 20, even 10 years ago. Sure, I heard reports of “fixed” elections and “stuffed” ballot boxes, but nothing like the routine travesty voting has been since 2000.
It’s not as if voting is a brand new institution here. We Americans should be old pros at this by now. The 2005 legislative elections in Iraq ran more smoothly than today’s elections in the USA.
A colleague at work blames the fact that elections depend too much on volunteerism to manage the voting process. “Amateur hour,” he calls it, shaking his head in disbelief. This is not the Special Olympics, folks; it’s American democracy. Surely, the states can round up enough dough somehow to improve their voting procedures and infrastructure—perhaps by selling World’s Finest Chocolate bars door to door or something.
Attempts to interfere with American citizens’ right to vote—through political dirty tricks, or brain-numbed hooliganism, or simple finger-in-the-nose incompetence—should be branded as treasonous and prosecuted accordingly.
Isn’t voting the lynchpin of democracy? If it is, what does it say about 21st-century Americans that we are so bad at it now?
American public officials, elected or not, who can’t manage the relatively simple matter of ensuring every registered voter’s right to vote on election day every two years cannot be trusted to balance the economy, to protect our borders, to maintain public roads and highways, or to ensure our other civil rights as citizens.
I shouldn’t have to look at the purple thumbs of Iraqi voters with envy, people.
I don’t for a second buy officials’ excuses that they have been “surprised” by the large voter turnout this year. Please. If McDonald’s can serve over 47 million customers every goddamned day (2), with minimal glitches, the states should be able to prepare themselves for whatever numbers of voters show up once every four years to elect a President.
Failure to operate an efficient, just, and equitable election process is tantamount to proof that a state’s bureaucrats are not competent enough to keep their jobs. Fire the nincompoops. Period.
***
(1) “Scattered Problems Reported in Historic U.S. Vote.” 4 Nov. 2008. CNN.com.
(2) “FAQs.” McDonald’s Canada. http://www.mcdonalds.ca/en/aboutus/faq.aspx.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Happily Ever After
Next month I’m going to Barbara and Shane’s wedding. I’m excited. For the first time in my life, I’m attending a wedding where both bride and groom are good friends of mine. The wedding will take place in a historic church not far from the Old Town Square in Prague, a city I’ve been itching to visit for years.
The ceremony will be religious, and the happy couple will have to renounce sins they don’t believe are really all that bad to receive absolution they don’t really believe in.
Still, they will be joined together in the eyes of God, the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, local law enforcement, and, most importantly, the Mormons and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, who take seriously the superstitious mumbo-jumbo that the happy couple will repeat good-naturedly for the sake of a pretty and personally significant occasion in their lives.
For most of human history, marriage has been a private matter, between two families or between two individuals.
Until the seventeenth century, the Church accepted the validity of a marriage so long as a couple claimed that they had exchanged vows, even in private without witnesses—though “licit” only if they were confirmed in and by the Church (1).
In the Renaissance, some European nations began to require “legal” or civic recognition of marriage, mainly to maintain the authority of parents over their children’s destinies and thus keep inheritable titles and estates under a patriarchal thumb.
For most of US history, states required marriages to be “registered,” like births or deaths, but exerted little or no management over who was officially or legally married. Later, in the early twentieth century, some US states began to “license” marriage as a means to prevent or de-legitimize interracial unions (1).
In the 1950s, when most adults of a certain age were married, licensed marriage became an expedient way of qualifying individuals for legal privileges and institutional benefits (1). The downside of this practicality was that these privileges and benefits were denied to those who were unmarried … or whose relationships fell outside a state’s legal definition of a marriage.
Forty-one years ago, Loving v Virginia (388 US 1) ended all race-based discrimination in state marriage laws—thus ending a 40-year history of anti-miscegenation laws, principally in the South.
It is now time for marriage to be loosed altogether from its ties to the state. Individual places of worship should be able to consecrate whatever relationships they deem sacred, without government interference, provided the arrangements are consensual. Such matters are the business of the congregation and religious hierarchy ... and should not be subject to public scrutiny or approval.
Neither should the government deny civil rights and legal privileges to individuals who have no such relationships—or whose relationships are entirely secular, unblessed by any God.
Current state ballots contain proposals for new and stricter legal hoops that states can require ostensibly free individuals to hop through before they are allowed the same privileges and rights a favored few can acquire at the comparably cheap price of $50 (in North Carolina, less than I pay annually to own a dog).
This is unjust and un-American.
Proposition 8 in California and the Florida Marriage Amendment seek to perpetuate legalized inequality, denying lesbians and gays the right to marry whom they please.
Even if these propositions fail, state marriage laws in general remain discriminatory against the single and “illicitly” coupled.
I urge everyone in every state to vote against statutes that would make current injustices more firmly entrenched—and work towards a system of distributing benefits without regard to one’s marital status, religious affiliation, or conformity to community standards of behavior.
Vote no on Proposition 8. Vote no on the Florida Marriage Amendment. Speak now or forever hold your peace.
(1) Coontz, Stephanie. “Taking Marriage Private.” New York Times 26 Nov. 2007.
The ceremony will be religious, and the happy couple will have to renounce sins they don’t believe are really all that bad to receive absolution they don’t really believe in.
Still, they will be joined together in the eyes of God, the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, local law enforcement, and, most importantly, the Mormons and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, who take seriously the superstitious mumbo-jumbo that the happy couple will repeat good-naturedly for the sake of a pretty and personally significant occasion in their lives.
For most of human history, marriage has been a private matter, between two families or between two individuals.
Until the seventeenth century, the Church accepted the validity of a marriage so long as a couple claimed that they had exchanged vows, even in private without witnesses—though “licit” only if they were confirmed in and by the Church (1).
In the Renaissance, some European nations began to require “legal” or civic recognition of marriage, mainly to maintain the authority of parents over their children’s destinies and thus keep inheritable titles and estates under a patriarchal thumb.
For most of US history, states required marriages to be “registered,” like births or deaths, but exerted little or no management over who was officially or legally married. Later, in the early twentieth century, some US states began to “license” marriage as a means to prevent or de-legitimize interracial unions (1).
In the 1950s, when most adults of a certain age were married, licensed marriage became an expedient way of qualifying individuals for legal privileges and institutional benefits (1). The downside of this practicality was that these privileges and benefits were denied to those who were unmarried … or whose relationships fell outside a state’s legal definition of a marriage.
Forty-one years ago, Loving v Virginia (388 US 1) ended all race-based discrimination in state marriage laws—thus ending a 40-year history of anti-miscegenation laws, principally in the South.
It is now time for marriage to be loosed altogether from its ties to the state. Individual places of worship should be able to consecrate whatever relationships they deem sacred, without government interference, provided the arrangements are consensual. Such matters are the business of the congregation and religious hierarchy ... and should not be subject to public scrutiny or approval.
Neither should the government deny civil rights and legal privileges to individuals who have no such relationships—or whose relationships are entirely secular, unblessed by any God.
Current state ballots contain proposals for new and stricter legal hoops that states can require ostensibly free individuals to hop through before they are allowed the same privileges and rights a favored few can acquire at the comparably cheap price of $50 (in North Carolina, less than I pay annually to own a dog).
This is unjust and un-American.
Proposition 8 in California and the Florida Marriage Amendment seek to perpetuate legalized inequality, denying lesbians and gays the right to marry whom they please.
Even if these propositions fail, state marriage laws in general remain discriminatory against the single and “illicitly” coupled.
I urge everyone in every state to vote against statutes that would make current injustices more firmly entrenched—and work towards a system of distributing benefits without regard to one’s marital status, religious affiliation, or conformity to community standards of behavior.
Vote no on Proposition 8. Vote no on the Florida Marriage Amendment. Speak now or forever hold your peace.
(1) Coontz, Stephanie. “Taking Marriage Private.” New York Times 26 Nov. 2007.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Hodgman: "Do I like Obama, personally?"
John Hodgman of The Daily Show speaks to the A.V. Club about Barack Obama:
"Do I like Obama, personally? I do. Do I think he's got good policies? Look, I'm like everyone else, I hope so. They sound good. They sound like something I believe in, so I think based on his performance and the way that he has run his campaign, I feel that it is reasonable to feel confident that he is going to take the same discipline and smarts and lack of drama and apply them to the very serious issues today and I think that makes him a good choice for President. Do I think that his candidacy is historic? Sure, that's exciting too, but what I think it's really amazing that he exists in the same world that I also inhabit and no other political candidate lives in that world right now. They live in a made-up world that is not reality. I think that that's why you see Obama surging right now. It's that the people like the fact that Obama lives in the world that they live in."
"Do I like Obama, personally? I do. Do I think he's got good policies? Look, I'm like everyone else, I hope so. They sound good. They sound like something I believe in, so I think based on his performance and the way that he has run his campaign, I feel that it is reasonable to feel confident that he is going to take the same discipline and smarts and lack of drama and apply them to the very serious issues today and I think that makes him a good choice for President. Do I think that his candidacy is historic? Sure, that's exciting too, but what I think it's really amazing that he exists in the same world that I also inhabit and no other political candidate lives in that world right now. They live in a made-up world that is not reality. I think that that's why you see Obama surging right now. It's that the people like the fact that Obama lives in the world that they live in."
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Remedial Class Warfare
Today conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan reprints a fascinating quote from Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism, a paternity which, if not already ascribed to Smith, I so ascribe now, even if the kid is a bastard:
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor . . .. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess . . .. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
--The Wealth of Nations (1776)
The same quote has appeared this month in the New Yorker and Slate. So—with the recent “heroic” efforts in Washington to save the old coots who, just weeks before, were turning widows and orphans out of their foreclosed homes—something Smithian must be in the air—or rolling in its grave.
Still, to McCain and Palin these words must smack of “spreading the wealth” and socialism. That the rich might in fact owe something to the common good, other than the obligation to become even richer, is really not a revolutionary idea. Even knights and their ladies in the Middle Ages felt some obligation to the burghers and peasants—some small Christian beneficence to go along with the daily kick in the balls.
In a day or two, perhaps, Obama the Socialist will take his place alongside Obama the Terrorist, Obama the Elitist, and Obama the Clueless Neophyte, all failed fabrications of the McCain campaign—whose identities are as superficially imposed as those of Malibu, Far-Out, and Harley-Davidson Barbies ™.
Unfortunately, Obama poses less of a threat to dog-eat-dog capitalism than I would like. As mentioned by others better informed than I, Obama’s contributors are the same corporate entities contributing to McCain. Still, Obama marks an improvement over Bush (and McCain), if only on the “hope” that he won’t further ransack the economy to pull the obscenely wealthy up to the stratosphere by their Sorrell Custom Boots.
What have I against the wealthy? you might ask. Envy, I’ll admit when I don’t mind what the bad light does to my skin tones.
But seriously, folks. Charles Koch, to pick a random example from cyberspace, net worth $19 billion, co-founder of the conservative Cato Institute (1), may in fact be a fine fellow, someone I’d have a beer with. I doubt it, but my point is I don’t know for certain.
And, sure, $19 billion sounds like a lot of money, but that’s short of what banks made off just overdraft fees in 2007 (2). Really. Shame on me, then, for indulging in divisive and unpatriotic class warfare when I complain that the same federal government that can’t be bothered to sufficiently fund education and health care, which apparently don’t benefit all of us to the same extent that overdraft fees do, only blinked (and just barely) at the thought of spreading $700 billion over the nation’s banks in exchange for their distressed assets. (And I’m not holding my breath for any of that money to trickle down to me.)
Republicans decry the “death tax” (i.e. estate tax), which would reduce the inheritances of $10,000 or more by 18% and up (to 55%), usually not applicable when the inheritor is a spouse or charity. But this is unearned income. Sure, it would be nice to get it all, I understand that, but at the risk of joining what McCain adviser Phil Gramm this summer called a “nation of whiners” (3), I think it would be nice if I could keep the 33% the fed and state pull from my earned income—this from a government that can’t even rescue poor flood victims off their roofs in a timely manner.
See, I don’t particularly mind paying taxes to the government, but I would like to see that money turn up in observable improvements and maintenance to the nation that belongs to all of us, in public works, schools, public transportation, hospitals, and so forth, not in the pockets of Halliburton (to name but one grating example).
I am no economist. I am not a capitalist. I am not a legitimate member of Bush’s “ownership society.” But I don’t think I’m a stinking Red, either. Still, if the fabulously wealthy want the real Joe Six Packs, along with Joe the Plumber and other Joes, including me, to have any kind of empathy for them—or simply anything less than class-centered loathing and hostility—I suggest that the holders of wealth—individuals and corporations—begin seriously to ante up for “the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
***
(1) Farrell, Andrew. “America’s Energy Billionaires.” 7 Oct. 2008. Forbes.com.
(2) Mogul, Matthew. “Consumers to Get Some Relief from Overdraft Costs.” 11 Oct. 2007. Kiplinger Business Resource Center.
(3) Hill, Patrice. “McCain Adviser Talks of ‘Mental Recession.’” Washington Times 9 July 2008.
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor . . .. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess . . .. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
--The Wealth of Nations (1776)
The same quote has appeared this month in the New Yorker and Slate. So—with the recent “heroic” efforts in Washington to save the old coots who, just weeks before, were turning widows and orphans out of their foreclosed homes—something Smithian must be in the air—or rolling in its grave.
Still, to McCain and Palin these words must smack of “spreading the wealth” and socialism. That the rich might in fact owe something to the common good, other than the obligation to become even richer, is really not a revolutionary idea. Even knights and their ladies in the Middle Ages felt some obligation to the burghers and peasants—some small Christian beneficence to go along with the daily kick in the balls.
In a day or two, perhaps, Obama the Socialist will take his place alongside Obama the Terrorist, Obama the Elitist, and Obama the Clueless Neophyte, all failed fabrications of the McCain campaign—whose identities are as superficially imposed as those of Malibu, Far-Out, and Harley-Davidson Barbies ™.
Unfortunately, Obama poses less of a threat to dog-eat-dog capitalism than I would like. As mentioned by others better informed than I, Obama’s contributors are the same corporate entities contributing to McCain. Still, Obama marks an improvement over Bush (and McCain), if only on the “hope” that he won’t further ransack the economy to pull the obscenely wealthy up to the stratosphere by their Sorrell Custom Boots.
What have I against the wealthy? you might ask. Envy, I’ll admit when I don’t mind what the bad light does to my skin tones.
But seriously, folks. Charles Koch, to pick a random example from cyberspace, net worth $19 billion, co-founder of the conservative Cato Institute (1), may in fact be a fine fellow, someone I’d have a beer with. I doubt it, but my point is I don’t know for certain.
And, sure, $19 billion sounds like a lot of money, but that’s short of what banks made off just overdraft fees in 2007 (2). Really. Shame on me, then, for indulging in divisive and unpatriotic class warfare when I complain that the same federal government that can’t be bothered to sufficiently fund education and health care, which apparently don’t benefit all of us to the same extent that overdraft fees do, only blinked (and just barely) at the thought of spreading $700 billion over the nation’s banks in exchange for their distressed assets. (And I’m not holding my breath for any of that money to trickle down to me.)
Republicans decry the “death tax” (i.e. estate tax), which would reduce the inheritances of $10,000 or more by 18% and up (to 55%), usually not applicable when the inheritor is a spouse or charity. But this is unearned income. Sure, it would be nice to get it all, I understand that, but at the risk of joining what McCain adviser Phil Gramm this summer called a “nation of whiners” (3), I think it would be nice if I could keep the 33% the fed and state pull from my earned income—this from a government that can’t even rescue poor flood victims off their roofs in a timely manner.
See, I don’t particularly mind paying taxes to the government, but I would like to see that money turn up in observable improvements and maintenance to the nation that belongs to all of us, in public works, schools, public transportation, hospitals, and so forth, not in the pockets of Halliburton (to name but one grating example).
I am no economist. I am not a capitalist. I am not a legitimate member of Bush’s “ownership society.” But I don’t think I’m a stinking Red, either. Still, if the fabulously wealthy want the real Joe Six Packs, along with Joe the Plumber and other Joes, including me, to have any kind of empathy for them—or simply anything less than class-centered loathing and hostility—I suggest that the holders of wealth—individuals and corporations—begin seriously to ante up for “the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
***
(1) Farrell, Andrew. “America’s Energy Billionaires.” 7 Oct. 2008. Forbes.com.
(2) Mogul, Matthew. “Consumers to Get Some Relief from Overdraft Costs.” 11 Oct. 2007. Kiplinger Business Resource Center.
(3) Hill, Patrice. “McCain Adviser Talks of ‘Mental Recession.’” Washington Times 9 July 2008.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Third Debate
In its pre-show to the third Presidential debate, CNN predicted that Obama would "try to avoid any gaffes" and McCain, behind in recent polls, would probably try to find a way to change that fact. Tonight's debate would be unique, CNN assured me, because the two candidates would be seated, at a table, facing each other (1).
Wow.
The reality-show framework of modern political campaigning foregrounds situation, unique challenges, and viewer response. The focus used to be the candidates’ personalities and character—before that—though perhaps only in some mythical past—the emphasis was on national issues and, um, actual debate.
Perhaps in the near future we can hope to see candidates in an even greater variety of telegenic settings--lying prone in a potato field, answering telepathically broadcast questions while disco dancing, or holding a tribal hall meeting on an island where fashion models eat live slugs.
In the third debate, moderator Bob Schieffer prodded the two candidates to criticize each others’ campaigns and choices of running mates. No doubt in hommage to Jerry Springer.
McCain complained that Obama’s ads misrepresented his positions and tied him unfairly to George W. Bush. McCain even managed to lob a zinger, chiding Obama, “If you wanted to run against George Bush you should have run four years ago.”
Obama pointed to McCain’s and Sarah Palin’s inadequate responses to their audiences’ rabid jeering of Obama’s name—shouting, not kindly, “traitor” and “kill him.”
But Obama's most conspicuous response was to laugh quietly yet derisively at McCain’s bluster.
This debate had the icky feeling of 90 minutes spent at a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving—with McCain playing the self-pitying elder barely containing his rage at others’ lack of deference to age and reputation—and Obama playing the mocking teen, shaking his head in disbelief at the elders’ passive aggression and blindness to nuance.
Though McCain criticized Obama’s campaign for unfairly linking him with Bush, McCain’s main tactic in this debate was to enumerate Obama’s associations with people like Bill Ayers, Hugo Chavez, and Congressman John Lewis. So, I take it, guilt by association is bad only when directed against McCain.
Clearly, McCain knew he needed to do something to bolster his flagging poll numbers. He attacked Obama’s strengths—insinuating that the Illinois senator’s oratorical skills were deceptive, while lacking sufficient skills to drive the point home.
He also introduced a semi-fictitious character, Joe the Plumber—no relation to Joe Six Pack or to me—based on a real person who apparently had spoken with Obama at a recent Democratic rally.
McCain leveled his eyes directly at the camera to speak to “Joe,” promising him to be a better President for the working man than Obama would be.
Not particularly effective to begin with, the chat with “Joe” became so bizarre that Obama himself began, tongue in cheek, to address McCain’s imaginary friend, too.
The thrust of this tactic was, it seems to me, to pander to traditionally Democratic, white, blue-collar workers with reservations about Obama, based on—no secret here—Obama’s skin color.
As in the previous two debates, Obama seemed the more confident and poised of the two—blamable only for, if anything, a detectable air of condescension and, at his worse, the dreary, nerdy sing-song I associate with Jeopardy contestants.
And, again, McCain’s almost constant blinking worked against any attempt the senator might have been making to appear to be telling the truth.
In fact, I sensed something a little bit creepy in McCain’s mask-like affect, a failure to convey humanity—or a working nervous system.
On some level, McCain may have succeeded in tapping into some Americans’ fears that Obama supports terrorism, wants to “spread the wealth” (i.e. "is a commie") by raising taxes and gas prices, conducts “class warfare,” and is too inexperienced (having never traveled to Colombia, for instance) and too black to be President—all the while denying that he would stoop to such tactics.
But my call is that Obama won three out of three here, conveying in each of the debates a steady calm, intelligence, and consistency nowhere apparent in his opponent.
(1) Hornick, Ed. "Obama, McCain hope to woo undecideds in debate." CNN.com. 15 Oct. 2008.
Wow.
The reality-show framework of modern political campaigning foregrounds situation, unique challenges, and viewer response. The focus used to be the candidates’ personalities and character—before that—though perhaps only in some mythical past—the emphasis was on national issues and, um, actual debate.
Perhaps in the near future we can hope to see candidates in an even greater variety of telegenic settings--lying prone in a potato field, answering telepathically broadcast questions while disco dancing, or holding a tribal hall meeting on an island where fashion models eat live slugs.
In the third debate, moderator Bob Schieffer prodded the two candidates to criticize each others’ campaigns and choices of running mates. No doubt in hommage to Jerry Springer.
McCain complained that Obama’s ads misrepresented his positions and tied him unfairly to George W. Bush. McCain even managed to lob a zinger, chiding Obama, “If you wanted to run against George Bush you should have run four years ago.”
Obama pointed to McCain’s and Sarah Palin’s inadequate responses to their audiences’ rabid jeering of Obama’s name—shouting, not kindly, “traitor” and “kill him.”
But Obama's most conspicuous response was to laugh quietly yet derisively at McCain’s bluster.
This debate had the icky feeling of 90 minutes spent at a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving—with McCain playing the self-pitying elder barely containing his rage at others’ lack of deference to age and reputation—and Obama playing the mocking teen, shaking his head in disbelief at the elders’ passive aggression and blindness to nuance.
Though McCain criticized Obama’s campaign for unfairly linking him with Bush, McCain’s main tactic in this debate was to enumerate Obama’s associations with people like Bill Ayers, Hugo Chavez, and Congressman John Lewis. So, I take it, guilt by association is bad only when directed against McCain.
Clearly, McCain knew he needed to do something to bolster his flagging poll numbers. He attacked Obama’s strengths—insinuating that the Illinois senator’s oratorical skills were deceptive, while lacking sufficient skills to drive the point home.
He also introduced a semi-fictitious character, Joe the Plumber—no relation to Joe Six Pack or to me—based on a real person who apparently had spoken with Obama at a recent Democratic rally.
McCain leveled his eyes directly at the camera to speak to “Joe,” promising him to be a better President for the working man than Obama would be.
Not particularly effective to begin with, the chat with “Joe” became so bizarre that Obama himself began, tongue in cheek, to address McCain’s imaginary friend, too.
The thrust of this tactic was, it seems to me, to pander to traditionally Democratic, white, blue-collar workers with reservations about Obama, based on—no secret here—Obama’s skin color.
As in the previous two debates, Obama seemed the more confident and poised of the two—blamable only for, if anything, a detectable air of condescension and, at his worse, the dreary, nerdy sing-song I associate with Jeopardy contestants.
And, again, McCain’s almost constant blinking worked against any attempt the senator might have been making to appear to be telling the truth.
In fact, I sensed something a little bit creepy in McCain’s mask-like affect, a failure to convey humanity—or a working nervous system.
On some level, McCain may have succeeded in tapping into some Americans’ fears that Obama supports terrorism, wants to “spread the wealth” (i.e. "is a commie") by raising taxes and gas prices, conducts “class warfare,” and is too inexperienced (having never traveled to Colombia, for instance) and too black to be President—all the while denying that he would stoop to such tactics.
But my call is that Obama won three out of three here, conveying in each of the debates a steady calm, intelligence, and consistency nowhere apparent in his opponent.
(1) Hornick, Ed. "Obama, McCain hope to woo undecideds in debate." CNN.com. 15 Oct. 2008.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Using Meanness for Good, Not Evil
I inherited a mean streak from my mother—a tendency to be critical of my betters and unpleasant precisely in those situations where deference and conciliation are demanded.
I would be quite happy to be a wealthy man, but fail to see the logic of paying someone no better than I am 636 times my salary. I don’t really care what the job is; it can’t actually be worth that much more than what I do. Period.
In my life, I have rarely had kind words for wealthy people. Wealth is something I just can’t respect, in and of itself. (By contrast, beauty or a sense of humor, all by itself, counts for a great deal with me.)
I am also not the guy who will ever say these words: “Let’s vote again to make it unanimous.” I don’t get it, frankly. We weren’t unanimous. Some of us wanted this, and others wanted that. We decided on a vote to settle it—so it’s settled, but clearly some of us did not get our way. Why pretend different? Deal with the reality.
If we decided to settle the matter with three tosses of a coin, would we then have to pretend that a 2:1 divide was really 3:0?
I am not an etymologist, but “mean” meaning “low, degraded in behavior” seems related to “mean” meaning “average”—and “kind” meaning “noble and good” seems related to “kind” meaning “of the same type.” Who would come up with such a moralized dichotomy of “mean” and “kind”?
Well, the old aristocracy, that’s who. For them, the “average” human being was despicable. What right-thinking lord would want to be thought of as merely ordinary? And “kind” simply meant, for them, “like us”—our kind. That is, better.
Later, the middle classes acquired some posh, and nobody wanted to be “mean” anymore, not even the poor, who were demonstrably less than average—in wealth, education, position, prestige, power, health, and autonomy, at least.
Noblesse oblige became mandatory even for the ignoblesse.
Whoever dismissively spoke of the “lowest common denominator” must have had the same idea. “Lowest” kind of puts “common” in its place.
None of this is metaphysical. Being mean won’t send you to hell, though it may make a lot of people tell you to go there.
Sarah Palin comes off as mean, but I don’t fault her for it. When she identifies with Joe Six Pack and pit bulls, she’s talking about “salt of the earth” people—who will never be accepted by their betters as “our kind.”
Governor Palin is inept, coquettish, dull-witted, mendacious, venal, superstitious, and narrow-minded, for which I have to admit I despise her a little—on top of which, she’s wealthy, which doesn’t help her in my book—but none of this is related to her being mean.
Molly Ivins was mean, so was her pal Ann Richards, who, if there was any justice in the world, was the governor who should have had a crack at being VP. Jonathan Swift was mean, but a greater defender of the Irish people never existed—and he wasn’t even Irish. Mark Twain was mean, too, Twain, the quintessential American patriot, who famously once quipped, “All right then I’ll go to hell.”
The Democrats who refused to support Howard Dean four years ago because he hollered like a common yahoo got the four more years of George W. Bush that they deserved.
For a classless society, America puts a whole lot of stock in being classy. Being mean—belligerent, cantankerous, and unpleasant—is the only way a lot of poor people got anything out of this world.
I’m mean. It’s the only thing my mother gave me that I haven’t had cause to regret. I hope I use that meanness more for good than for bad, more realistically I probably just break even, but every now and then we need somebody to cut through all the crap of being nice and proper. I’d like to offer my services.
I would be quite happy to be a wealthy man, but fail to see the logic of paying someone no better than I am 636 times my salary. I don’t really care what the job is; it can’t actually be worth that much more than what I do. Period.
In my life, I have rarely had kind words for wealthy people. Wealth is something I just can’t respect, in and of itself. (By contrast, beauty or a sense of humor, all by itself, counts for a great deal with me.)
I am also not the guy who will ever say these words: “Let’s vote again to make it unanimous.” I don’t get it, frankly. We weren’t unanimous. Some of us wanted this, and others wanted that. We decided on a vote to settle it—so it’s settled, but clearly some of us did not get our way. Why pretend different? Deal with the reality.
If we decided to settle the matter with three tosses of a coin, would we then have to pretend that a 2:1 divide was really 3:0?
I am not an etymologist, but “mean” meaning “low, degraded in behavior” seems related to “mean” meaning “average”—and “kind” meaning “noble and good” seems related to “kind” meaning “of the same type.” Who would come up with such a moralized dichotomy of “mean” and “kind”?
Well, the old aristocracy, that’s who. For them, the “average” human being was despicable. What right-thinking lord would want to be thought of as merely ordinary? And “kind” simply meant, for them, “like us”—our kind. That is, better.
Later, the middle classes acquired some posh, and nobody wanted to be “mean” anymore, not even the poor, who were demonstrably less than average—in wealth, education, position, prestige, power, health, and autonomy, at least.
Noblesse oblige became mandatory even for the ignoblesse.
Whoever dismissively spoke of the “lowest common denominator” must have had the same idea. “Lowest” kind of puts “common” in its place.
None of this is metaphysical. Being mean won’t send you to hell, though it may make a lot of people tell you to go there.
Sarah Palin comes off as mean, but I don’t fault her for it. When she identifies with Joe Six Pack and pit bulls, she’s talking about “salt of the earth” people—who will never be accepted by their betters as “our kind.”
Governor Palin is inept, coquettish, dull-witted, mendacious, venal, superstitious, and narrow-minded, for which I have to admit I despise her a little—on top of which, she’s wealthy, which doesn’t help her in my book—but none of this is related to her being mean.
Molly Ivins was mean, so was her pal Ann Richards, who, if there was any justice in the world, was the governor who should have had a crack at being VP. Jonathan Swift was mean, but a greater defender of the Irish people never existed—and he wasn’t even Irish. Mark Twain was mean, too, Twain, the quintessential American patriot, who famously once quipped, “All right then I’ll go to hell.”
The Democrats who refused to support Howard Dean four years ago because he hollered like a common yahoo got the four more years of George W. Bush that they deserved.
For a classless society, America puts a whole lot of stock in being classy. Being mean—belligerent, cantankerous, and unpleasant—is the only way a lot of poor people got anything out of this world.
I’m mean. It’s the only thing my mother gave me that I haven’t had cause to regret. I hope I use that meanness more for good than for bad, more realistically I probably just break even, but every now and then we need somebody to cut through all the crap of being nice and proper. I’d like to offer my services.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
My Facebook Conservatives
One "mixed blessing" of Facebook is that I have been reacquainted with people I knew 30-40 years ago in my fundamentalist, conservative past.
It puts me in the odd position of having to come out of the closet all over again, and then, inevitably, I get involved in debates over whether Obama is an anti-American Muslim, whether Western society persecutes Christians (surprising, how many fundies STILL see themselves as persecuted), and whether Republicans or Democrats are to blame for the shithole America has become.
I haven't heard from any of that crowd in over two weeks, so I may have pissed the last of them off, though I've maintained a fair and reasonable tone in pointing out the lapses in logic and the absence of evidence in their arguments. Well, maybe not--I did tell the Obama-is-a-Muslim person that only slobbering idiots believe that story.
Also, for some reason, the only students of mine who have signed me on as a Facebook friend are conservative and Christian, but they, having had me in class recently, must know I can pick over their bones for supper, so they never raise the issues of politics or religion with me directly.
Oddly, my chief appeal for the past 15 years as a college English instructor has been to conservative, religious students. Perhaps they perceive my strictness as authoritarian and take an immediate masochistic shine to me. Sometimes I think it's the Flannery O'Connor factor, that the grotesqueries of that mindset are still somehow apparent in my bearing and speech, even though I no longer actually have that mindset.
Sometimes I think they like that when I disagree with them, I don't attack them personally (except, on rare occasions, to say that only "slobbering idiots" believe the sorts of things they believe).
And sometimes I think they sense a kindred spirit--somebody who's been where they are and escaped—and, though right now they have absolutely no consciousness of it, they would like to escape, also.
Conservatives prefer to play with a stacked deck in argument--they hardly ever simply look at evidence with an open mind and deduce their positions from the available facts. Instead, they like to approach the facts with a prefabricated position already in place. Typically, they enter an argument with a handful of strong factual evidence that supports their claim, but almost never can defend the representativeness of their evidence (i.e. their facts are usually "exceptions," not "typical cases") and almost never can integrate their evidence into a consistent and coherent big picture. (Fundamentalist Christians, especially, have got so used to accepting inconsistencies in their dogma that they are usually blind to the inconsistencies in their politics.)
The irony that for the past 20 years almost all terrorists are ultra-conservative escapes most conservatives--who prefer to imagine that Bill Ayers and the Weathermen and perhaps even the Symbionese Liberation Army are still major threats to the security of the nation.
But the so-called Islamo-fascists are pro-life, anti-gay, anti-feminist, God-first, country-first (not even a contradiction in a theocracy), pro-preventive war (“the Bush doctrine”), pro-shock-and-awe (i.e. terrorism), and pro-strategic-use-of-torture.
American-born terrorists target abortion clinics, gay nightclubs, and black churches, not the Elks Lodge or Macy’s. Ann Coulter once quipped, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times building” (1). Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Olympics Centennial Park, as well as an Atlanta lesbian bar, became a folk hero for a large number of conservative Southerners, one of the reasons the FBI gave for its having taken seven years to find and apprehend him (2).
Despite all this, conservative wags like Bill O’Reilly continue to paint liberals (and the left in general) as the “friends of terrorists.”
My old conservative acquaintances are upset with me when I point out such inconsistencies in thinking. Oddly, they are less upset to find out that I’m homosexual and godless (hardly blinking, apparently, at the thought of my frying for an eternity in Hell).
The cut-off point for their tolerance appears to be when they hear I’m voting for Barack Obama. That I consider myself considerably to the left of Obama on almost every issue, including war, the death penalty, and “family values,” is, to my conservative friends, quite beyond the pale.
(1) Gurley, George. “Coultergeist.” New York Observer.26 Aug. 2002.
(2) “Profile: Eric Rudolph.” 14 Apr. 2005. BBC News.
It puts me in the odd position of having to come out of the closet all over again, and then, inevitably, I get involved in debates over whether Obama is an anti-American Muslim, whether Western society persecutes Christians (surprising, how many fundies STILL see themselves as persecuted), and whether Republicans or Democrats are to blame for the shithole America has become.
I haven't heard from any of that crowd in over two weeks, so I may have pissed the last of them off, though I've maintained a fair and reasonable tone in pointing out the lapses in logic and the absence of evidence in their arguments. Well, maybe not--I did tell the Obama-is-a-Muslim person that only slobbering idiots believe that story.
Also, for some reason, the only students of mine who have signed me on as a Facebook friend are conservative and Christian, but they, having had me in class recently, must know I can pick over their bones for supper, so they never raise the issues of politics or religion with me directly.
Oddly, my chief appeal for the past 15 years as a college English instructor has been to conservative, religious students. Perhaps they perceive my strictness as authoritarian and take an immediate masochistic shine to me. Sometimes I think it's the Flannery O'Connor factor, that the grotesqueries of that mindset are still somehow apparent in my bearing and speech, even though I no longer actually have that mindset.
Sometimes I think they like that when I disagree with them, I don't attack them personally (except, on rare occasions, to say that only "slobbering idiots" believe the sorts of things they believe).
And sometimes I think they sense a kindred spirit--somebody who's been where they are and escaped—and, though right now they have absolutely no consciousness of it, they would like to escape, also.
Conservatives prefer to play with a stacked deck in argument--they hardly ever simply look at evidence with an open mind and deduce their positions from the available facts. Instead, they like to approach the facts with a prefabricated position already in place. Typically, they enter an argument with a handful of strong factual evidence that supports their claim, but almost never can defend the representativeness of their evidence (i.e. their facts are usually "exceptions," not "typical cases") and almost never can integrate their evidence into a consistent and coherent big picture. (Fundamentalist Christians, especially, have got so used to accepting inconsistencies in their dogma that they are usually blind to the inconsistencies in their politics.)
The irony that for the past 20 years almost all terrorists are ultra-conservative escapes most conservatives--who prefer to imagine that Bill Ayers and the Weathermen and perhaps even the Symbionese Liberation Army are still major threats to the security of the nation.
But the so-called Islamo-fascists are pro-life, anti-gay, anti-feminist, God-first, country-first (not even a contradiction in a theocracy), pro-preventive war (“the Bush doctrine”), pro-shock-and-awe (i.e. terrorism), and pro-strategic-use-of-torture.
American-born terrorists target abortion clinics, gay nightclubs, and black churches, not the Elks Lodge or Macy’s. Ann Coulter once quipped, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times building” (1). Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Olympics Centennial Park, as well as an Atlanta lesbian bar, became a folk hero for a large number of conservative Southerners, one of the reasons the FBI gave for its having taken seven years to find and apprehend him (2).
Despite all this, conservative wags like Bill O’Reilly continue to paint liberals (and the left in general) as the “friends of terrorists.”
My old conservative acquaintances are upset with me when I point out such inconsistencies in thinking. Oddly, they are less upset to find out that I’m homosexual and godless (hardly blinking, apparently, at the thought of my frying for an eternity in Hell).
The cut-off point for their tolerance appears to be when they hear I’m voting for Barack Obama. That I consider myself considerably to the left of Obama on almost every issue, including war, the death penalty, and “family values,” is, to my conservative friends, quite beyond the pale.
(1) Gurley, George. “Coultergeist.” New York Observer.26 Aug. 2002.
(2) “Profile: Eric Rudolph.” 14 Apr. 2005. BBC News.
Friday, October 10, 2008
The Decline in Logical Argument
The most crippling aspect of modern democracy is the decline in logical argument.
Logical argument was the invention of the Greeks, along with theatre (once used to bolster the free flow of ideas), philosophy, and Western democracy. All four of these contributions to civilization are posed against the blind acceptance of (or faith in) the dictates of authority and power.
In the first century of the American nation, political debates were actual debates—with set positions argued for and counter-arguments defended against. How great would it be now for seekers of high office to debate a single issue, such as the role of the middle classes in American society or the best policy towards foreign dictators!
At one time, argument permeated the social scene, with party invitations’ commonly instructing invitees to bone up on set topics in preparation for speaking on them with other guests. The middle-brow Circuit Chautauqua, nineteenth-century traveling shows, featured lectures on various topics from prison reform to memory improvement, mixed with band music and Metropolitan Opera singers, followed by question-and-answer sessions involving members of the community.
Much is made of the role of Faith in early American culture, but seldom is Argument credited for promoting progress and establishing America’s character and self-confidence. Ultimately, it was argument, not faith, that abolished slavery, expanded voting rights, and established the 40-hour work week.
By argument, I do not mean shouting people down. I do not see argument in the harangues of Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly. I would not count the glib sarcasm of Stephen Colbert and Al Franken, entertaining and valuable as it is, as argument. Oprah Winfrey, though a goddess of common sense, mainly exhorts and inspires—she rarely, if ever anymore, uses her show as a meeting-place for opposing opinions, as the old Phil Donahue and Dick Cavett shows used to do (and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher still attempts to do).
Argument requires a forum, where differences in opinion are expected, respected, and encouraged in the interest of forming a more complete understanding of the issues under debate.
Argument requires clarification of the dividing lines between opposing positions. It requires a focus on logic and facts as proofs for the rightness of one’s position.
Argument requires that probability, not certainty and not mere possibilities, be put to the test, “proof” meaning, quite simply, the test that an opinion is put to—by speakers and listeners alike.
Today America is full of opinions, but few Americans know how to back them up. Few Americans feel comfortable expressing their opinions, convinced that blithe agreeableness is preferable to taking a position—while others think that bull-headed pontification requires no further explanation or proof.
Things have gotten so bad that to take any position at all more complicated or unusual than what can fit on a bumper sticker smacks of extremism—or crackpotism.
The old adage forbidding discussion of religion and politics at the dinner table has now morphed into “Let’s just agree to disagree,” a more polite way of saying, “Shut up—I’m not interested in your reasons for disagreeing with me.”
Now that nobody expects anyone to back up anything he or she says in public, all kinds of bullshit pass for intelligent commentary these days. Idiocy is justified on the grounds that idiots sincerely believe in their idiocy.
Sincerity and good intentions are things we cannot evaluate or judge from outside. Facts, logic, and clarity of expression are things we can observe and make judgments on. As long as sincerity counts more than proof, humanity will not see further progress.
The sincerity of your belief and hope for the future is admirable, but what exactly are you saying, and how can you back it up?
Logical argument was the invention of the Greeks, along with theatre (once used to bolster the free flow of ideas), philosophy, and Western democracy. All four of these contributions to civilization are posed against the blind acceptance of (or faith in) the dictates of authority and power.
In the first century of the American nation, political debates were actual debates—with set positions argued for and counter-arguments defended against. How great would it be now for seekers of high office to debate a single issue, such as the role of the middle classes in American society or the best policy towards foreign dictators!
At one time, argument permeated the social scene, with party invitations’ commonly instructing invitees to bone up on set topics in preparation for speaking on them with other guests. The middle-brow Circuit Chautauqua, nineteenth-century traveling shows, featured lectures on various topics from prison reform to memory improvement, mixed with band music and Metropolitan Opera singers, followed by question-and-answer sessions involving members of the community.
Much is made of the role of Faith in early American culture, but seldom is Argument credited for promoting progress and establishing America’s character and self-confidence. Ultimately, it was argument, not faith, that abolished slavery, expanded voting rights, and established the 40-hour work week.
By argument, I do not mean shouting people down. I do not see argument in the harangues of Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly. I would not count the glib sarcasm of Stephen Colbert and Al Franken, entertaining and valuable as it is, as argument. Oprah Winfrey, though a goddess of common sense, mainly exhorts and inspires—she rarely, if ever anymore, uses her show as a meeting-place for opposing opinions, as the old Phil Donahue and Dick Cavett shows used to do (and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher still attempts to do).
Argument requires a forum, where differences in opinion are expected, respected, and encouraged in the interest of forming a more complete understanding of the issues under debate.
Argument requires clarification of the dividing lines between opposing positions. It requires a focus on logic and facts as proofs for the rightness of one’s position.
Argument requires that probability, not certainty and not mere possibilities, be put to the test, “proof” meaning, quite simply, the test that an opinion is put to—by speakers and listeners alike.
Today America is full of opinions, but few Americans know how to back them up. Few Americans feel comfortable expressing their opinions, convinced that blithe agreeableness is preferable to taking a position—while others think that bull-headed pontification requires no further explanation or proof.
Things have gotten so bad that to take any position at all more complicated or unusual than what can fit on a bumper sticker smacks of extremism—or crackpotism.
The old adage forbidding discussion of religion and politics at the dinner table has now morphed into “Let’s just agree to disagree,” a more polite way of saying, “Shut up—I’m not interested in your reasons for disagreeing with me.”
Now that nobody expects anyone to back up anything he or she says in public, all kinds of bullshit pass for intelligent commentary these days. Idiocy is justified on the grounds that idiots sincerely believe in their idiocy.
Sincerity and good intentions are things we cannot evaluate or judge from outside. Facts, logic, and clarity of expression are things we can observe and make judgments on. As long as sincerity counts more than proof, humanity will not see further progress.
The sincerity of your belief and hope for the future is admirable, but what exactly are you saying, and how can you back it up?
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
W-villes
Seventy-nine years ago this month the stock market crashed big, just a year after the election that won Herbert Hoover the Presidential election. The US economy seized up, and the Roaring Twenties died down to an asthmatic wheeze. Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929.
As Commerce Secretary in Calvin Coolidge’s Presidency, Hoover had gained visibility in ’27, through his quick, effective, and humane response to the Great Mississippi River Flood, which breached levees, swamped millions of acres, and made thousands of people homeless.
A pro-regulation, anti-laissez-faire Republican, President Hoover revoked private oil leases on government-owned land, closed tax loopholes for the wealthy, and unsuccessfully pushed for lower taxes for low-income Americans. He worked hard for Native American rights, reversing a long history of abuses—not least of all, he chose Charles Curtis, a descendant of Native people, raised on the Kaw reservation, as his Vice President.
By today’s standards he would probably be called a liberal—or, at the very least, a compassionate conservative.
Still, he supported volunteerism over government intervention to address the nation’s vexing social problems—as wealth accumulated into the hands of fewer and fewer of the privileged. To assuage Americans’ fears of losing jobs to immigrants, he forced half a million Mexicans to return to Mexico—accomplishing on a smaller scale (roughly one-fortieth) what right-wingers today dream of. Under his watch, the crash of the stock market became the single worst financial disaster in US history.
Strange and somehow funny, isn’t it, how, despite 80 years in between, the issues that have dominated the George W. Bush Presidency mirror—in distorted funhouse fashion—those that occupied the Hoover White House?
Bush, of course, is famously anti-regulation, pro-oil, and slow to respond to natural disasters. But it’s interesting how the issues facing these two Presidents cut across each other.
When the Great Depression struck, people who lost their homes built ramshackle shacks and erected tents, building neighborhoods of impoverished men, women, and children in public areas of the major US cities, from the Port of Seattle to Central Park in New York.
Charles Michelson, chief of publicity for the Democratic National Convention back then, dubbed the impromptu housing projects “Hoovervilles.”
Howard Zinn wrote of this period,
“A socialist critic would … say that the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable, and blind to human needs. The result of all that: depression for many of its people, and periodic crises for almost everybody. Capitalism, despite its attempts at self-reform, its organization for better control, was still in 1929 a sick and undependable system.” (1)
This past spring, BBC News covered new tent camps—dubbed “Bushvilles”—popping up across the nation as a result of the rash of mortgage foreclosures. The parallels are, of course, startling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnOOo6tRs8
Nobody wants a replay of the Great D, and it’s unfair to single out the Bush Administration for blame on problems that have been in the making bipartisanly for decades—though arguably Bush et al. have blithely pushed matters over the edge.
Bush’s “ownership society” seems to be crashing on our never-too-terrorized-to-go-shopping heads.
(1) Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper, 2003.
As Commerce Secretary in Calvin Coolidge’s Presidency, Hoover had gained visibility in ’27, through his quick, effective, and humane response to the Great Mississippi River Flood, which breached levees, swamped millions of acres, and made thousands of people homeless.
A pro-regulation, anti-laissez-faire Republican, President Hoover revoked private oil leases on government-owned land, closed tax loopholes for the wealthy, and unsuccessfully pushed for lower taxes for low-income Americans. He worked hard for Native American rights, reversing a long history of abuses—not least of all, he chose Charles Curtis, a descendant of Native people, raised on the Kaw reservation, as his Vice President.
By today’s standards he would probably be called a liberal—or, at the very least, a compassionate conservative.
Still, he supported volunteerism over government intervention to address the nation’s vexing social problems—as wealth accumulated into the hands of fewer and fewer of the privileged. To assuage Americans’ fears of losing jobs to immigrants, he forced half a million Mexicans to return to Mexico—accomplishing on a smaller scale (roughly one-fortieth) what right-wingers today dream of. Under his watch, the crash of the stock market became the single worst financial disaster in US history.
Strange and somehow funny, isn’t it, how, despite 80 years in between, the issues that have dominated the George W. Bush Presidency mirror—in distorted funhouse fashion—those that occupied the Hoover White House?
Bush, of course, is famously anti-regulation, pro-oil, and slow to respond to natural disasters. But it’s interesting how the issues facing these two Presidents cut across each other.
When the Great Depression struck, people who lost their homes built ramshackle shacks and erected tents, building neighborhoods of impoverished men, women, and children in public areas of the major US cities, from the Port of Seattle to Central Park in New York.
Charles Michelson, chief of publicity for the Democratic National Convention back then, dubbed the impromptu housing projects “Hoovervilles.”
Howard Zinn wrote of this period,
“A socialist critic would … say that the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable, and blind to human needs. The result of all that: depression for many of its people, and periodic crises for almost everybody. Capitalism, despite its attempts at self-reform, its organization for better control, was still in 1929 a sick and undependable system.” (1)
This past spring, BBC News covered new tent camps—dubbed “Bushvilles”—popping up across the nation as a result of the rash of mortgage foreclosures. The parallels are, of course, startling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnOOo6tRs8
Nobody wants a replay of the Great D, and it’s unfair to single out the Bush Administration for blame on problems that have been in the making bipartisanly for decades—though arguably Bush et al. have blithely pushed matters over the edge.
Bush’s “ownership society” seems to be crashing on our never-too-terrorized-to-go-shopping heads.
(1) Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper, 2003.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Second Debate
Cindy McCain reportedly said today that Obama has “waged the dirtiest campaign in American history.” Well, at least she limited it to American history, sounds more believable that way, perhaps.
This coming from the wife of the man whose 2000 South Carolina campaign was torpedoed by the Bush/Rove cadre, who spred the rumor that their adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually her husband’s love child with a black prostitute?
So, how does all this work, exactly? You just say stuff, out loud, that you pulled out of your butt, knowing that, whatever it is and however little evidence you could give to back any of it up, someone somewhere is going to hear this shit and believe it? And, not to worry, in a month’s time, no, wait, in a week, no, in three days, you can deny you ever said a word of it?
So here’s the strategy, as I understand it—and for this Karl Rove gets to be called a “genius,” albeit an evil one?—one, say stupid shit; two, see who picks up on it; three, get pollsters to calculate how the public is responding to it; and then, four, drop it if nobody picks up on it, or spin it if somebody pays it some attention—in which case: (a) if the public can see through the bullshit (rarely happens in time for it to matter much), you claim to be misquoted, or, better, persecuted by the media, or, more likely, (b) if the public buys it, you run with it for all it’s worth.
So I watched the second debate, a cold Stella Artois in my hand, my apolitical, irreligious, non-portfolio-bearing, and perfectly beatific little dog curled up beside me like a Helvetica comma—just to watch the dirt fly.
I wondered how many times Obama was going to say he agrees with McCain this time. Dirty.
I wondered how many times McCain was going to call Obama naïve and inexperienced to his face, and Obama would just stand there and take it. Ooh, Barack, you make me feel nasty.
I watched the debate on CNN only because I had watched the first two debates on CNN.
This one, unlike the other two, was formatted as a “town hall” meeting. It’s no more a real debate than the other kind—the candidates still pretend simultaneously that they didn’t hear the question and that they have in fact already answered the question, only YOU weren’t paying attention. In fact, unlike a real debate, these debates put the burden of proof on the audience—can you eke out any substance from this shit?
In terms of style and ease, Barack Obama won the evening.
Obama stepped close to the studio audience to answer the first question (about the economy); McCain stepped even closer. Later, Obama paced the semicircle to look every audience member in the eye; immediately after, McCain followed suit. I envisioned that in just a matter of minutes both candidates would be cuddling up in somebody’s lap. It didn’t happen, but the sense of competitive chumminess was unmistakably thick in the air.
This was theater, folks, mixed with the giddy tension of a tough job interview. Obama took it in stride, warming up as the debate wore on. McCain did fine, too, though exhibiting less grace than the Democrat. He wasn’t awful, but he smelled of self-pity, desperate and ingratiating chuckles, cloying obsequity, and flop sweat.
Obama spoke to the promise of the future and the importance of fairly sharing the burden of recovery and progress. McCain repeated his record in the Senate—in curiously vague terms: he’s done “a lot” and he’s made unpopular choices, disliked by his own party almost as much as by the Democrats.
And, oh yes, he would not raise taxes.
Obama responded, pointing out that the current tax code benefits the wealthy much more than ordinary workers. He urged revising taxation, lowering taxes for everyone making less than $200,000 a year, including the majority of small businesses.
Short of exchanging actual blows, Fight Club style, the two candidates, especially Obama, were more lively, more aggressive than they were in the first debate, especially on the issue of foreign policy.
Granted, I have already decided my vote is going to Obama. But I found it difficult to follow almost everything McCain had to say tonight. Obama made impressions and gave me something to think about. McCain used the same old lullabies—weak in specifics and coherence, rich in bumper-sticker-style cant, fleshed out with the same inflated language THE BIG LEBOWSKI mocked so effectively in George H.W. Bush’s speeches: “This aggression will not stand.” He even repeated, word for word, his sound bites from the first debate, e.g., looking into Putin’s eyes and seeing three letters: K G B.
Historically, though, these debates usually have little impact on how people intend to vote. I’ll be surprised if this one is an exception. No doubt McCain supporters can find something endearing in their candidate’s fumbling, dry-throated responses to fairly direct questions. These supporters may likewise judge Obama harshly for his talkiness and phlegmatic serenity, typifying his manner as “elitist.”
But, setting aside partisanship, or trying to, I find it hard that anyone could judge the results differently than I do: For flexibility and agile intelligence, Obama was the winner tonight. McCain, though not disastrous, and in spite of decades of public service, seemed unready, unprepared, and unfocused.
This coming from the wife of the man whose 2000 South Carolina campaign was torpedoed by the Bush/Rove cadre, who spred the rumor that their adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually her husband’s love child with a black prostitute?
So, how does all this work, exactly? You just say stuff, out loud, that you pulled out of your butt, knowing that, whatever it is and however little evidence you could give to back any of it up, someone somewhere is going to hear this shit and believe it? And, not to worry, in a month’s time, no, wait, in a week, no, in three days, you can deny you ever said a word of it?
So here’s the strategy, as I understand it—and for this Karl Rove gets to be called a “genius,” albeit an evil one?—one, say stupid shit; two, see who picks up on it; three, get pollsters to calculate how the public is responding to it; and then, four, drop it if nobody picks up on it, or spin it if somebody pays it some attention—in which case: (a) if the public can see through the bullshit (rarely happens in time for it to matter much), you claim to be misquoted, or, better, persecuted by the media, or, more likely, (b) if the public buys it, you run with it for all it’s worth.
So I watched the second debate, a cold Stella Artois in my hand, my apolitical, irreligious, non-portfolio-bearing, and perfectly beatific little dog curled up beside me like a Helvetica comma—just to watch the dirt fly.
I wondered how many times Obama was going to say he agrees with McCain this time. Dirty.
I wondered how many times McCain was going to call Obama naïve and inexperienced to his face, and Obama would just stand there and take it. Ooh, Barack, you make me feel nasty.
I watched the debate on CNN only because I had watched the first two debates on CNN.
This one, unlike the other two, was formatted as a “town hall” meeting. It’s no more a real debate than the other kind—the candidates still pretend simultaneously that they didn’t hear the question and that they have in fact already answered the question, only YOU weren’t paying attention. In fact, unlike a real debate, these debates put the burden of proof on the audience—can you eke out any substance from this shit?
In terms of style and ease, Barack Obama won the evening.
Obama stepped close to the studio audience to answer the first question (about the economy); McCain stepped even closer. Later, Obama paced the semicircle to look every audience member in the eye; immediately after, McCain followed suit. I envisioned that in just a matter of minutes both candidates would be cuddling up in somebody’s lap. It didn’t happen, but the sense of competitive chumminess was unmistakably thick in the air.
This was theater, folks, mixed with the giddy tension of a tough job interview. Obama took it in stride, warming up as the debate wore on. McCain did fine, too, though exhibiting less grace than the Democrat. He wasn’t awful, but he smelled of self-pity, desperate and ingratiating chuckles, cloying obsequity, and flop sweat.
Obama spoke to the promise of the future and the importance of fairly sharing the burden of recovery and progress. McCain repeated his record in the Senate—in curiously vague terms: he’s done “a lot” and he’s made unpopular choices, disliked by his own party almost as much as by the Democrats.
And, oh yes, he would not raise taxes.
Obama responded, pointing out that the current tax code benefits the wealthy much more than ordinary workers. He urged revising taxation, lowering taxes for everyone making less than $200,000 a year, including the majority of small businesses.
Short of exchanging actual blows, Fight Club style, the two candidates, especially Obama, were more lively, more aggressive than they were in the first debate, especially on the issue of foreign policy.
Granted, I have already decided my vote is going to Obama. But I found it difficult to follow almost everything McCain had to say tonight. Obama made impressions and gave me something to think about. McCain used the same old lullabies—weak in specifics and coherence, rich in bumper-sticker-style cant, fleshed out with the same inflated language THE BIG LEBOWSKI mocked so effectively in George H.W. Bush’s speeches: “This aggression will not stand.” He even repeated, word for word, his sound bites from the first debate, e.g., looking into Putin’s eyes and seeing three letters: K G B.
Historically, though, these debates usually have little impact on how people intend to vote. I’ll be surprised if this one is an exception. No doubt McCain supporters can find something endearing in their candidate’s fumbling, dry-throated responses to fairly direct questions. These supporters may likewise judge Obama harshly for his talkiness and phlegmatic serenity, typifying his manner as “elitist.”
But, setting aside partisanship, or trying to, I find it hard that anyone could judge the results differently than I do: For flexibility and agile intelligence, Obama was the winner tonight. McCain, though not disastrous, and in spite of decades of public service, seemed unready, unprepared, and unfocused.
Frenzy
A year ago I complained about Barack Obama leading a gospel show around South Carolina in a bid to attract black Christian voters in the South.
The idea of a Presidential candidate headlining such a gathering struck me as an inappropriate splicing together of state and church—way beyond simply speaking at an already scheduled church meeting—and exacerbated by the fact that the show closed with ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin reciting a 15-minute prayer, praising God for saving him from the homosexual lifestyle.
The string of events and Obama’s clueless responses to gay men and women pissed off by the spectacle remain the bone I’ll just have to swallow next month when I vote Democratic.
But what to make now of the reports I hear about the John McCain/Sarah Palin tour?
Apparently, the Republican candidates are now speaking before hysterical, roiling, hyena-like crowds of true believers that only Nathanael West could have done justice to.
Today in Jacksonville, Florida, Sarah Palin misrepresented Obama’s remarks on US troops in Afghanistan as attacks, triggering one guy in the audience to yell, “Treason!”
Yesterday, speaking in New Mexico, John McCain rhetorically asked, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” to which somebody in the crowd shouted angrily, “Terrorist!”
McCain heard the remark (as evident on the YouTube video of the incident—at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvXf9AUHTqM), he grimaces slightly, but he is unwilling or incapable of responding to tone down the level of crazy.
On Monday, at a rally in Washington, when Palin raised the issue of Obama’s associations with Weathermen co-founder Bill Ayers, somebody in the crowd screamed, “Kill him!”
While Barack Obama and Joe Biden criticize McCain’s positions while demanding respect for the man and his patriotic self-sacrifice (ad nauseam, I might add), McCain and Palin seem to savor the fact that their crowds boo the very name of Obama—and that’s when they’re being relatively polite.
A year ago Obama went slightly off the rail, crusading like he’s Billy Graham. Who would have imagined that this year the Republican candidates would be trying to reenact the 1969 Free Concert at Altamont?
The idea of a Presidential candidate headlining such a gathering struck me as an inappropriate splicing together of state and church—way beyond simply speaking at an already scheduled church meeting—and exacerbated by the fact that the show closed with ex-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin reciting a 15-minute prayer, praising God for saving him from the homosexual lifestyle.
The string of events and Obama’s clueless responses to gay men and women pissed off by the spectacle remain the bone I’ll just have to swallow next month when I vote Democratic.
But what to make now of the reports I hear about the John McCain/Sarah Palin tour?
Apparently, the Republican candidates are now speaking before hysterical, roiling, hyena-like crowds of true believers that only Nathanael West could have done justice to.
Today in Jacksonville, Florida, Sarah Palin misrepresented Obama’s remarks on US troops in Afghanistan as attacks, triggering one guy in the audience to yell, “Treason!”
Yesterday, speaking in New Mexico, John McCain rhetorically asked, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” to which somebody in the crowd shouted angrily, “Terrorist!”
McCain heard the remark (as evident on the YouTube video of the incident—at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvXf9AUHTqM), he grimaces slightly, but he is unwilling or incapable of responding to tone down the level of crazy.
On Monday, at a rally in Washington, when Palin raised the issue of Obama’s associations with Weathermen co-founder Bill Ayers, somebody in the crowd screamed, “Kill him!”
While Barack Obama and Joe Biden criticize McCain’s positions while demanding respect for the man and his patriotic self-sacrifice (ad nauseam, I might add), McCain and Palin seem to savor the fact that their crowds boo the very name of Obama—and that’s when they’re being relatively polite.
A year ago Obama went slightly off the rail, crusading like he’s Billy Graham. Who would have imagined that this year the Republican candidates would be trying to reenact the 1969 Free Concert at Altamont?
Friday, October 3, 2008
Another Message to Tim (re: Politics, Religion, and Secularism)
Tim
Yep, I was pretty apolitical back when you knew me. I consider myself still apolitical, though a wee bit more informed on the subject of politics.
You’re right that our church nurtured a good amount of our political thinking for us, such as it was.
I don’t think I turned even remotely political until the 1980s, when I was shocked to discover that the progressive liberalization of society I had witnessed up till then was not a natural, unaided progress, that it could in fact be suddenly reversed … and erased.
The “moderate” politics of America appears to be the product of a number of different factors, including the two-party system, cultural distaste for “tension” of any kind, and mass elections’ blunting effects on strongly defined ideology. Tradition, too—the golden mean, etc.
But shifts do occur and extremists sometimes can rise high in the ranks of power—though these generally have to be disguised as moderates. The modern Republican seems like the Democrat of the 1960s to me—and, to some extent, vice versa. And I see no conceivable way that Abraham Lincoln could win either party’s nomination in 2008. Doesn’t smile enough, no jokes in the Gettysburg Address, his wife is nuts, flip-flops on the issue of slavery.
I agree with you (and Foucault) that science, politics, etc., are constrained by the ideologies and values of the ages and cultures in which they exist.
Religion, as well. I see few points of connection, for instance, between certain branches of American evangelicalism today, with their focus on optimism, self-fulfillment, success, the nuclear family, and patriotism (products of capitalism, utilitarianism, and nationalism), and the evangelical faith of, say, John Bunyan in the 17th century. So even a reasonably consistent set of doctrines, traditions, and rituals can be massaged to fit today’s models of mass communications and consumer culture—just as Bunyan's faith was shaped by his century's ideas about individualism, relative indifference to suffering and death, social hierarchies, and the personality-shaping powers of phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile.
Secular science is not pure, obviously. I worked for a few years as a science/medical writer/editor (slash/slash) and was somewhat appalled to find that corporate-funded science was dominated by concerns over proprietary rights to the extent that it was believed that "facts" could be owned. So that in one case a pharma company discovered through research that one of its products had less than a beneficial effect and chose not to publish that finding—thus denying the larger scientific community of useful, perhaps critical, information. Pure science in the Enlightenment was imagined to be unownable, but not so in an "ownership society," like ours.
I reject, though, the idea that secularism is a sort of religion, just as I would reject a claim that atheism is a form of belief in God. Secularism means outside religion. So either secularism simply does not exist at all, so we have no tension here whatsoever, or the word has no meaning—in which case, also, there is nothing really to say about it. (Similarly, if religion is to mean EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS, it too becomes meaningless.)
But if it has meaning, whether one likes it or not, and whether one subscribes to it or not, it means "not religious."
I accept that driving a car to work or eating a ham sandwich or shampooing the dog can all be imbued with religious or spiritual significance—but I think that that significance has to be applied from outside the actions themselves. In themselves, they are secular—with no intrinsic religious importance. They are also apolitical, with no intrinsic political importance, though, again, such importance can be imputed to them, if one so desires.
I don't think all values are religious by nature. My appreciation of beauty, for instance, is a matter of values—and though I love a great deal of religious art and music—and sense the "transcendent" in beautiful things—my sense of their beauty does not have to be grounded in doctrine, ritual, or creed.
Likewise my sense of justice, or duty, or compassion, or purpose.
I have every confidence that an atheist can be a person of high moral values, and a priest can be a person of low values, and vice versa. Religion (doctrine, creed, ritual) does not effect even a uniform sense of values—I know Christians who are appalled by the values of other Christians.
A common sense of decency is not religious, nor is it the prerogative of religion to differentiate between good and bad, right and wrong. Religion, like politics, science, and education, can partake in decency—but not own it. I've known quite a few people who were no less scoundrels for being deeply, sincerely religious. The ancient Greeks had little difficulty separating their social sense of right and wrong from the irrational and immoral doings of their gods and goddesses.
But you're right (or at any rate I agree with you) that we ground our beliefs and disbeliefs in narrative and ideology—and, as Foucault suggests, these come to us through our culture, our historical epoch, maybe especially our language and the other forms that knowingness assumes.
I do not equate organized religion with irrationality and intolerance. Or try not to. And a secularist can be irrational and intolerant.
My point is only that religion does not have dibs on a sense of purpose or the narrative arc one perceives in his or her life—or on deep feeling and a sense of transcendence—so I disagree with Barack Obama when he identifies religion with “the moral underpinnings of our nation.”
I think the nation’s values derive from the Enlightenment—liberty, equality, fraternity—and unalienable human rights—and basic to those values is an acceptance of the plurality of other values and beliefs held by Americans and an accommodation of the resulting tensions, as conflicts of interest thus inevitably arise.
As for me, I have hardly any grasp on the cause, nature, or purpose of the universe, and am pretty sure I don’t need one. And, if I had it (as I once thought I did), I’m still not convinced that it would significantly weigh in on how I drive my car too carelessly, eat a sandwich too fast, or wash my dog too seldom.
Joe
Yep, I was pretty apolitical back when you knew me. I consider myself still apolitical, though a wee bit more informed on the subject of politics.
You’re right that our church nurtured a good amount of our political thinking for us, such as it was.
I don’t think I turned even remotely political until the 1980s, when I was shocked to discover that the progressive liberalization of society I had witnessed up till then was not a natural, unaided progress, that it could in fact be suddenly reversed … and erased.
The “moderate” politics of America appears to be the product of a number of different factors, including the two-party system, cultural distaste for “tension” of any kind, and mass elections’ blunting effects on strongly defined ideology. Tradition, too—the golden mean, etc.
But shifts do occur and extremists sometimes can rise high in the ranks of power—though these generally have to be disguised as moderates. The modern Republican seems like the Democrat of the 1960s to me—and, to some extent, vice versa. And I see no conceivable way that Abraham Lincoln could win either party’s nomination in 2008. Doesn’t smile enough, no jokes in the Gettysburg Address, his wife is nuts, flip-flops on the issue of slavery.
I agree with you (and Foucault) that science, politics, etc., are constrained by the ideologies and values of the ages and cultures in which they exist.
Religion, as well. I see few points of connection, for instance, between certain branches of American evangelicalism today, with their focus on optimism, self-fulfillment, success, the nuclear family, and patriotism (products of capitalism, utilitarianism, and nationalism), and the evangelical faith of, say, John Bunyan in the 17th century. So even a reasonably consistent set of doctrines, traditions, and rituals can be massaged to fit today’s models of mass communications and consumer culture—just as Bunyan's faith was shaped by his century's ideas about individualism, relative indifference to suffering and death, social hierarchies, and the personality-shaping powers of phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile.
Secular science is not pure, obviously. I worked for a few years as a science/medical writer/editor (slash/slash) and was somewhat appalled to find that corporate-funded science was dominated by concerns over proprietary rights to the extent that it was believed that "facts" could be owned. So that in one case a pharma company discovered through research that one of its products had less than a beneficial effect and chose not to publish that finding—thus denying the larger scientific community of useful, perhaps critical, information. Pure science in the Enlightenment was imagined to be unownable, but not so in an "ownership society," like ours.
I reject, though, the idea that secularism is a sort of religion, just as I would reject a claim that atheism is a form of belief in God. Secularism means outside religion. So either secularism simply does not exist at all, so we have no tension here whatsoever, or the word has no meaning—in which case, also, there is nothing really to say about it. (Similarly, if religion is to mean EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS, it too becomes meaningless.)
But if it has meaning, whether one likes it or not, and whether one subscribes to it or not, it means "not religious."
I accept that driving a car to work or eating a ham sandwich or shampooing the dog can all be imbued with religious or spiritual significance—but I think that that significance has to be applied from outside the actions themselves. In themselves, they are secular—with no intrinsic religious importance. They are also apolitical, with no intrinsic political importance, though, again, such importance can be imputed to them, if one so desires.
I don't think all values are religious by nature. My appreciation of beauty, for instance, is a matter of values—and though I love a great deal of religious art and music—and sense the "transcendent" in beautiful things—my sense of their beauty does not have to be grounded in doctrine, ritual, or creed.
Likewise my sense of justice, or duty, or compassion, or purpose.
I have every confidence that an atheist can be a person of high moral values, and a priest can be a person of low values, and vice versa. Religion (doctrine, creed, ritual) does not effect even a uniform sense of values—I know Christians who are appalled by the values of other Christians.
A common sense of decency is not religious, nor is it the prerogative of religion to differentiate between good and bad, right and wrong. Religion, like politics, science, and education, can partake in decency—but not own it. I've known quite a few people who were no less scoundrels for being deeply, sincerely religious. The ancient Greeks had little difficulty separating their social sense of right and wrong from the irrational and immoral doings of their gods and goddesses.
But you're right (or at any rate I agree with you) that we ground our beliefs and disbeliefs in narrative and ideology—and, as Foucault suggests, these come to us through our culture, our historical epoch, maybe especially our language and the other forms that knowingness assumes.
I do not equate organized religion with irrationality and intolerance. Or try not to. And a secularist can be irrational and intolerant.
My point is only that religion does not have dibs on a sense of purpose or the narrative arc one perceives in his or her life—or on deep feeling and a sense of transcendence—so I disagree with Barack Obama when he identifies religion with “the moral underpinnings of our nation.”
I think the nation’s values derive from the Enlightenment—liberty, equality, fraternity—and unalienable human rights—and basic to those values is an acceptance of the plurality of other values and beliefs held by Americans and an accommodation of the resulting tensions, as conflicts of interest thus inevitably arise.
As for me, I have hardly any grasp on the cause, nature, or purpose of the universe, and am pretty sure I don’t need one. And, if I had it (as I once thought I did), I’m still not convinced that it would significantly weigh in on how I drive my car too carelessly, eat a sandwich too fast, or wash my dog too seldom.
Joe
Thursday, October 2, 2008
VP Debate
I decided to watch the Biden-Palin debate tonight just to see how maddening it could be.
I suspected that Biden could have a hard time of it. Why? Just too many ways he could blow it. He stepped up to the podium with greater expectations behind him—with a reputation as an experienced politician and debater.
I could not have had lower expectations of Palin. She had little to lose. Not much of a political record to attack. A political reputation, such as it is, as speedily thrown together as a Tastee Freeze franchise.
Since both candidates have a tendency to blurt out chopped word salads when cornered, the prospects of an enlightening debate did not look bright.
Biden’s best bet tonight was to put Palin on defense. As we have seen over the past weeks, on those rare occasions when she consented to an interview, Palin turns to mush when faced with skepticism or even direct questioning on matters of fact. On offense, she can be offensive, even funny.
Biden did nothing to throw Palin off tonight. Both candidates probably addressed their constituents effectively, but, to my eyes, Biden won the evening—clear, assertive, yet restrained, and demonstrating much more flexibility of mind than Palin, who obviously strained to turn her remarks towards rehearsed talking points.
Palin, all nervous energy and betcha’s, enthusiastically inflected every rambling sentence as if she were describing how to make a Halloween costume for your pet. Surely, some viewers might find such chirpiness endearing, but I heard loud and clear the shrill scolding tone underneath.
Biden pointed up McCain’s inconsistencies, Obama’s strengths, and Palin’s failure to respond directly to the questions posed. He exhibited, in fact, the kind of assertiveness I would like Obama to have shown in his debate last week. I’d give him major points for turning the talk to Iraq and health care, perhaps the two most important issues the nation faces, apart perhaps from the faltering economy.
As Palin laid on her folksy routine thicker and thicker, Biden flashed dazzling smiles that suggested genuine amusement at Palin’s high-strung style. I believed him when, in his closing remarks, he expressed pleasure in getting to meet her at last.
Palin conveyed more competence here than she has been able to show over the past month. She was most effective early in the evening, foregrounding historic differences between Biden and Obama, particularly concerning the war in Iraq. Biden, in turn, effectively drove home that McCain’s foreign policy views are inseparable from Bush’s.
Both candidates firmly oppose “gay marriage.” On same sex couples’ rights, Palin backed away from the moderator’s suggestion about extending Alaska’s policy of civil rights for gays and lesbians to the nation as a whole. She urged “tolerance,” instead—though, oddly emphasizing that many of her close, respected friends disagreed with her on this point. Why the eagerness to identify intolerant homophobes in her inner circle?
Palin succeeded, in her rambling, sometimes shrill way, in presenting herself as a positive, bright politician. However, nothing she said suggests that she’s prepared for high federal office. Nervously speeding through her talking points, she could not convey much sincerity or self-assurance; to her credit, she was well prepared, but the preparation was all too close to the surface.
Biden, however, was a revelation, presidential in his bearing, keen in his knowledge of foreign policy and sympathetic to the hardships working-class Americans have felt in the past eight years.
If either debater proved the worthiness of his or her VP nomination and reflected well on the judgment of his or her running mate, it was Biden.
I suspected that Biden could have a hard time of it. Why? Just too many ways he could blow it. He stepped up to the podium with greater expectations behind him—with a reputation as an experienced politician and debater.
I could not have had lower expectations of Palin. She had little to lose. Not much of a political record to attack. A political reputation, such as it is, as speedily thrown together as a Tastee Freeze franchise.
Since both candidates have a tendency to blurt out chopped word salads when cornered, the prospects of an enlightening debate did not look bright.
Biden’s best bet tonight was to put Palin on defense. As we have seen over the past weeks, on those rare occasions when she consented to an interview, Palin turns to mush when faced with skepticism or even direct questioning on matters of fact. On offense, she can be offensive, even funny.
Biden did nothing to throw Palin off tonight. Both candidates probably addressed their constituents effectively, but, to my eyes, Biden won the evening—clear, assertive, yet restrained, and demonstrating much more flexibility of mind than Palin, who obviously strained to turn her remarks towards rehearsed talking points.
Palin, all nervous energy and betcha’s, enthusiastically inflected every rambling sentence as if she were describing how to make a Halloween costume for your pet. Surely, some viewers might find such chirpiness endearing, but I heard loud and clear the shrill scolding tone underneath.
Biden pointed up McCain’s inconsistencies, Obama’s strengths, and Palin’s failure to respond directly to the questions posed. He exhibited, in fact, the kind of assertiveness I would like Obama to have shown in his debate last week. I’d give him major points for turning the talk to Iraq and health care, perhaps the two most important issues the nation faces, apart perhaps from the faltering economy.
As Palin laid on her folksy routine thicker and thicker, Biden flashed dazzling smiles that suggested genuine amusement at Palin’s high-strung style. I believed him when, in his closing remarks, he expressed pleasure in getting to meet her at last.
Palin conveyed more competence here than she has been able to show over the past month. She was most effective early in the evening, foregrounding historic differences between Biden and Obama, particularly concerning the war in Iraq. Biden, in turn, effectively drove home that McCain’s foreign policy views are inseparable from Bush’s.
Both candidates firmly oppose “gay marriage.” On same sex couples’ rights, Palin backed away from the moderator’s suggestion about extending Alaska’s policy of civil rights for gays and lesbians to the nation as a whole. She urged “tolerance,” instead—though, oddly emphasizing that many of her close, respected friends disagreed with her on this point. Why the eagerness to identify intolerant homophobes in her inner circle?
Palin succeeded, in her rambling, sometimes shrill way, in presenting herself as a positive, bright politician. However, nothing she said suggests that she’s prepared for high federal office. Nervously speeding through her talking points, she could not convey much sincerity or self-assurance; to her credit, she was well prepared, but the preparation was all too close to the surface.
Biden, however, was a revelation, presidential in his bearing, keen in his knowledge of foreign policy and sympathetic to the hardships working-class Americans have felt in the past eight years.
If either debater proved the worthiness of his or her VP nomination and reflected well on the judgment of his or her running mate, it was Biden.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Apocalypse on Sale
If Ronald Reagan gets credit for the fall of communism, who will history credit with the fall of capitalism?
The economic boom that followed World War II was quite clearly a fluke, a one-time windfall, God’s blessings on America, if you will, for killing Hitler. Capitalism has been propped up by false bravado since 1979, when the federal government saved the Chrysler Corporation with $2 billion in guaranteed loans.
After the wave of assassinations in the 1960s, arguably triggered by economic forces as much as by social upheaval, the seams showed through in the 1970s. Long gas lines and higher food prices led to discontent—and fear of a dismal future. Jimmy Carter’s call for a toned-down feeding frenzy—wear a sweater indoors to cut energy costs, he urged us—cost him a second term.
In the 1980s, everybody was encouraged to live on credit—I even vaguely recall a magazine article that (seriously) recommended credit-card spending as a form of investment for the future, since, the author reasoned, the dollar would never be as valuable as it was then, so the interest due would never out-value the products purchased (depending, of course, on the long-term value of the purchases).
The Reagan years were the years of DYNASTY, DALLAS, and LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS on TV—all variations on the theme of luxury—a sort of Grand Guignol devoted to conspicuous consumption. They also saw the resurrection of VANITY FAIR magazine, which had folded in the middle of the Great Depression, significantly. It was the era of baby boomers and yuppies, young urban professionals with new MBAs and jet-black BMWs with a “Baby on Board.”
(Looking back, it’s clear that Brett Easton Ellis’s AMERICAN PSYCHO is the definitive account of the eighties’ shark frenzy—the gym-toned young exec as serial killer, merging the decade’s two most potent archetypes.)
Reagan’s America was officially a consumerist paradise. Productivity was down, homelessness was up, social services drastically cut, including military veterans’ benefits and tax breaks for educators. All there was left of American culture was shopping—and product placements in every sort of media and on every available space.
It was the full flowering of credit and investment firms and big pharmaceutical companies. Just say no to drugs, indeed! Fuck a cure for cancer—just get rid of my bald spot and make my dick stay preternaturally hard!
The real payoff for Reagan’s “voodoo economics” (a term invented by George H.W. Bush when he was feeling less cordial towards the Gipper) was the Clinton years in the 1990s, or perhaps we should call them the Microsoft years. Computer technology took off, rewiring American business while at the same time facilitating the outsourcing of American jobs to nations where smart labor came cheap and making nearly every aspect of American finance, amusement, and life totally dependent on silicon technology—a technology which, more than any previous one, rapidly obsolesces … by its very design.
It was a radical new capitalism. More money could be made in buying and selling stocks than in actually producing something. (In entertainment, Mel Brooks’ 1968 film THE PRODUCERS proved prescient. Artistic failure was the new gold. Financing, insuring, and merchandising were where the big bucks could be made in Hollywood and Broadway.)
The success (still mostly symbolic in a nation newly riddled with panic attacks, ADHD, hostile takeovers, and bankruptcy) became enshrined in the fact that, when Clinton left office in 2001, the US federal government had a surplus of $237 billion.
Today, though, our national debt hit the $10 trillion mark.
Yes, capitalism is crumbling fast. The attacks of September 11, 2001, sent shockwaves through the world, but Hurricane Katrina, four years later, was the object lesson that brought it all home for many Americans—as we watched our government helpless in offering assistance to its citizens in need—and witnessed levels of desperation and futility we had assumed were the special property of the so-called “Third World.”
America is turning into a Third World nation—or, on a grander scale, the whole world has re-entered the Middle Ages—extremes of wealth and poverty reintroduce us to feudalism in its latest form, while troops campaign in the Middle East to fight Crusades and Holy Wars all over again; at home, religious superstition and mythography dominate scientific fact and reasoning; literacy declines, replaced by images and icons; we enshrine our values and beliefs in cathedrally impressive shopping malls and adjacent cineplexes with as many silver screens as stations of the cross; and once-free people cry out for great men to lead and protect them, quite willing to set aside democracy and personal liberties … all to save them from the devils within and without.
Can you tell me why A.J., in the last season of HBO’s THE SOPRANOS, found William Butler Yeats’ words so haunting?
“The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Yes, I can.
The economic boom that followed World War II was quite clearly a fluke, a one-time windfall, God’s blessings on America, if you will, for killing Hitler. Capitalism has been propped up by false bravado since 1979, when the federal government saved the Chrysler Corporation with $2 billion in guaranteed loans.
After the wave of assassinations in the 1960s, arguably triggered by economic forces as much as by social upheaval, the seams showed through in the 1970s. Long gas lines and higher food prices led to discontent—and fear of a dismal future. Jimmy Carter’s call for a toned-down feeding frenzy—wear a sweater indoors to cut energy costs, he urged us—cost him a second term.
In the 1980s, everybody was encouraged to live on credit—I even vaguely recall a magazine article that (seriously) recommended credit-card spending as a form of investment for the future, since, the author reasoned, the dollar would never be as valuable as it was then, so the interest due would never out-value the products purchased (depending, of course, on the long-term value of the purchases).
The Reagan years were the years of DYNASTY, DALLAS, and LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS on TV—all variations on the theme of luxury—a sort of Grand Guignol devoted to conspicuous consumption. They also saw the resurrection of VANITY FAIR magazine, which had folded in the middle of the Great Depression, significantly. It was the era of baby boomers and yuppies, young urban professionals with new MBAs and jet-black BMWs with a “Baby on Board.”
(Looking back, it’s clear that Brett Easton Ellis’s AMERICAN PSYCHO is the definitive account of the eighties’ shark frenzy—the gym-toned young exec as serial killer, merging the decade’s two most potent archetypes.)
Reagan’s America was officially a consumerist paradise. Productivity was down, homelessness was up, social services drastically cut, including military veterans’ benefits and tax breaks for educators. All there was left of American culture was shopping—and product placements in every sort of media and on every available space.
It was the full flowering of credit and investment firms and big pharmaceutical companies. Just say no to drugs, indeed! Fuck a cure for cancer—just get rid of my bald spot and make my dick stay preternaturally hard!
The real payoff for Reagan’s “voodoo economics” (a term invented by George H.W. Bush when he was feeling less cordial towards the Gipper) was the Clinton years in the 1990s, or perhaps we should call them the Microsoft years. Computer technology took off, rewiring American business while at the same time facilitating the outsourcing of American jobs to nations where smart labor came cheap and making nearly every aspect of American finance, amusement, and life totally dependent on silicon technology—a technology which, more than any previous one, rapidly obsolesces … by its very design.
It was a radical new capitalism. More money could be made in buying and selling stocks than in actually producing something. (In entertainment, Mel Brooks’ 1968 film THE PRODUCERS proved prescient. Artistic failure was the new gold. Financing, insuring, and merchandising were where the big bucks could be made in Hollywood and Broadway.)
The success (still mostly symbolic in a nation newly riddled with panic attacks, ADHD, hostile takeovers, and bankruptcy) became enshrined in the fact that, when Clinton left office in 2001, the US federal government had a surplus of $237 billion.
Today, though, our national debt hit the $10 trillion mark.
Yes, capitalism is crumbling fast. The attacks of September 11, 2001, sent shockwaves through the world, but Hurricane Katrina, four years later, was the object lesson that brought it all home for many Americans—as we watched our government helpless in offering assistance to its citizens in need—and witnessed levels of desperation and futility we had assumed were the special property of the so-called “Third World.”
America is turning into a Third World nation—or, on a grander scale, the whole world has re-entered the Middle Ages—extremes of wealth and poverty reintroduce us to feudalism in its latest form, while troops campaign in the Middle East to fight Crusades and Holy Wars all over again; at home, religious superstition and mythography dominate scientific fact and reasoning; literacy declines, replaced by images and icons; we enshrine our values and beliefs in cathedrally impressive shopping malls and adjacent cineplexes with as many silver screens as stations of the cross; and once-free people cry out for great men to lead and protect them, quite willing to set aside democracy and personal liberties … all to save them from the devils within and without.
Can you tell me why A.J., in the last season of HBO’s THE SOPRANOS, found William Butler Yeats’ words so haunting?
“The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Yes, I can.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Plan B
I find that I can’t depend on Plan A, so I have only a Plan B. Plan A almost always depends on flashy but fallible equipment and high levels of coincidence or unprecedented cooperation. Sure, it sometimes works, often spectacularly, but you can’t beat Plan B for consistency and reliability.
When you have Plan A, you have to dream up a Plan B anyway, for backup. But why bother making two plans? One to step in when the first one flatlines? Sure, it sounds smart, provided you have time to concoct two plans—hell, time permitting, why not three or four plans?
In a pinch, lose the fancy buffer, and go right for dependable Plan B. Plan A is just to impress the investors anyway.
Speaking of investors—the government is now talking through alternatives to the failed $700 billion bailout. McCain went to the trouble of putting his campaign on hold (or at least announcing that he was doing so) so that he could rally the troops behind the bill, which failed yesterday, thanks to his fellow Republicans.
McCain blames Pelosi and the Democrats for the failed plan—but clearly most of the naysayers were his Republican colleagues, whom he’ll be expected to finesse, if elected. Of course, the same applies to Obama—he supported the bill, as well—but he at least did not make a big show about saving America’s economy. Then again, unlike McCain, he didn’t bankrupt his own campaign a year ago and have to scare up new money to pick up the pieces.
Rich man that he is, McCain holds $200 thousand in credit card debt. I know jackshit about economics, but I think I know as much as this guy does.
But here’s the catch. With the clear understanding that economics is several miles above my head, I sort of think the Republicans were right to vote against the bill—but not for the reasons they give.
First, I’m deeply distrustful of the “crisis” rhetoric surrounding the President’s and others’ presentation of the plan to help failing credit markets. It’s the same impulse buying we jumped at to get ourselves in Iraq, give the White House powers to spy on US citizens, and switch off checks and balances, making the Presidency even more unilaterally powerful than it’s ever been in our history. Act now, we’re told, there’s no time to think things through.
Second, certain wording originally in the bill should set off warning signals about what the Bush people are up to. Namely, “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” No oversight? This from the same folks who brought us the crisis in the first place?
Third, I’m pretty sure once we’ve plied them with our tax money, the investment firms will want to make a show of acting more fiscally responsible, to prove themselves worthy of the kind gesture. How will they do this? I suspect, by downsizing low-level employees and tightening screws on the poor slob billpayers who have tried to borrow within their means and diligently repay their debts—at a fat interest.
Sort of like 1979 and Chrysler all over again--$2 billion in government guaranteed loans, with which Chrysler cleaned its slate by paying off only 30% of its debts and then promptly fired 42,600 hourly wage workers, along with 20,000 salaried white-collar employees—eventually allying itself with European carmakers, shifting some auto production to Austria.
Surely, a lot of people must understand this mess much better than I do. What do I know about money? But something in my gut (and, at bottom, that’s all this blog is about: my suspicions, not based on a keen understanding of markets) tells me to beware of Bush when he cries panic, when he begs for cooperation. It smells too much of his and his pals’ old tricks.
Besides, I need to hear what color-threat code we’re at for financial disaster. Have we actually hit orange yet?
When you have Plan A, you have to dream up a Plan B anyway, for backup. But why bother making two plans? One to step in when the first one flatlines? Sure, it sounds smart, provided you have time to concoct two plans—hell, time permitting, why not three or four plans?
In a pinch, lose the fancy buffer, and go right for dependable Plan B. Plan A is just to impress the investors anyway.
Speaking of investors—the government is now talking through alternatives to the failed $700 billion bailout. McCain went to the trouble of putting his campaign on hold (or at least announcing that he was doing so) so that he could rally the troops behind the bill, which failed yesterday, thanks to his fellow Republicans.
McCain blames Pelosi and the Democrats for the failed plan—but clearly most of the naysayers were his Republican colleagues, whom he’ll be expected to finesse, if elected. Of course, the same applies to Obama—he supported the bill, as well—but he at least did not make a big show about saving America’s economy. Then again, unlike McCain, he didn’t bankrupt his own campaign a year ago and have to scare up new money to pick up the pieces.
Rich man that he is, McCain holds $200 thousand in credit card debt. I know jackshit about economics, but I think I know as much as this guy does.
But here’s the catch. With the clear understanding that economics is several miles above my head, I sort of think the Republicans were right to vote against the bill—but not for the reasons they give.
First, I’m deeply distrustful of the “crisis” rhetoric surrounding the President’s and others’ presentation of the plan to help failing credit markets. It’s the same impulse buying we jumped at to get ourselves in Iraq, give the White House powers to spy on US citizens, and switch off checks and balances, making the Presidency even more unilaterally powerful than it’s ever been in our history. Act now, we’re told, there’s no time to think things through.
Second, certain wording originally in the bill should set off warning signals about what the Bush people are up to. Namely, “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” No oversight? This from the same folks who brought us the crisis in the first place?
Third, I’m pretty sure once we’ve plied them with our tax money, the investment firms will want to make a show of acting more fiscally responsible, to prove themselves worthy of the kind gesture. How will they do this? I suspect, by downsizing low-level employees and tightening screws on the poor slob billpayers who have tried to borrow within their means and diligently repay their debts—at a fat interest.
Sort of like 1979 and Chrysler all over again--$2 billion in government guaranteed loans, with which Chrysler cleaned its slate by paying off only 30% of its debts and then promptly fired 42,600 hourly wage workers, along with 20,000 salaried white-collar employees—eventually allying itself with European carmakers, shifting some auto production to Austria.
Surely, a lot of people must understand this mess much better than I do. What do I know about money? But something in my gut (and, at bottom, that’s all this blog is about: my suspicions, not based on a keen understanding of markets) tells me to beware of Bush when he cries panic, when he begs for cooperation. It smells too much of his and his pals’ old tricks.
Besides, I need to hear what color-threat code we’re at for financial disaster. Have we actually hit orange yet?
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Paul Newman 1925-2008
My earliest memories of Paul Newman are of him wrapped in a terry-cloth towel in (what was it?) HARPER or THE PRIZE. His pecs and shoulders damp and fresh out of the shower. For months the words “terry cloth” meant sex to me.
I also remember him, a bit later, open-shirted as a krazy beatnik painter, channeling Brando and Kerouac, in WHAT A WAY TO GO!
Before Brad Pitt, six-pack meant Newman.
The iconic image of Newman is the HUD poster. I saw the movie only on TV, but, all respects to Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas, and Brandon de Wilde, the movie was all Newman’s—bristling machismo, boy-manly arrogance, attracting and repelling with the same brooding looks.
It’s the poster Joe Buck takes with him to NYC in MIDNIGHT COWBOY.
And then, somewhat later, Newman made an even deeper impression on me when I discovered he was also a stage and film director, a political activist, a racecar driver, and a saucier.
He was a sort of Renaissance man, a master of many talents. He embodied Hollywood liberalism in the same way he embodied “cool," in a gentle, self-effacing way—so that nobody ever mistook him for seeking a career in politics (though maybe he should have).
His late acting career showed that he had lost none of his diamond-like intensity with age. His Sidney Mussburger in the Coen brothers’ THE HUDSUCKER PROXY is a fine comic villain—vain, opportunistic, slick, the decadent ghost of the can-do spirit. His sinister turn as crime king John Rooney in ROAD TO PERDITION presented us with a nightmarish father figure, self-justified and ruthless, a man whose cynicism and greed have caused him to loath even those he thinks he loves.
Paul Newman died yesterday. Cancer. He was a class act.
***
“I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being ... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.” –Paul Newman
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