Why CNN Is Worse Than Fox News

8 February 10
“I’m sorry little girl, we don’t just put people on teevee . . . unless of course they’re replying to an editorial.” – Channel 6 Station Manager
“Uh, I am.  I’m strongly opposed to proposition, uh, 305.” – Lisa Simpson
“You’re against discount bus fares for war widows?” – Channel 6 Station Manager
“Uh, you bet I am.” – Lisa Simpson
“Okay.  Makeup!” – Channel 6 Station Manager

It is neither difficult nor uncommon for the ideological dishonesty that pervades Fox News to be exposed.  Just this week the intrepid Jon Stewart was on there criticizing them on their own network.  Last weekend Paul Krugman personally confronted Fox News president Roger Ailes with one of the innumerable examples of his network’s commitment to right wing spin at any cost.  (Ailes is no slouch, he ignored Krugman’s example and went right back to his talking points.)  Outside of its core audience you’ll have little trouble convincing someone that Fox has a distorting effect on the news, misinforms its millions of viewers, and is as uncaring about the damage it does as a far gone alcoholic.  But while Fox News may not have any integrity, they do have a viewpoint.  CNN has neither integrity nor a viewpoint, and that’s why they do considerably more damage to our politics than Fox does.

Whatever else can be said about Fox News they advocate for a point of view that is common to millions of Americans.  They spread and reinforce that viewpoint, no doubt about it, but it would still exist without them.  And while they push their ideological narrative in the shallowest possible ways (through mindless repetition from the mouths of skinny blond women), that is less a conscious choice than it is a natural consequence.  Their kind of messages work best in the shallow end of the news pool.  (Last week we saw what happens to those talking points when they are dropped in the deep end.)  CNN, on the other hand, seems to traffic in shallow gossip news for no reason other than vacuous emulation.

CNN’s wholesale adoption of endless “analysis” in place of actual news or reporting is a gimmick without a motive.  They try to present themselves as objective and even handed (“we’ve got people from both sides!” screams their advertising), but eschew the intellectual heft and gravitas that those things require.  Consider the embarrassing incident from last year when they fact checked a Saturday Night Live skit while rarely or never doing the same to their actual guests.  If they wanted to be trusted by the public that’s the kind of thing they’d be doing all the time.  But that would mean they’d need to abandon the petty back and forth that has become their bread and butter.

They have excellent production values, talented on air employees, and plenty of budget for research and fact checking.  If CNN had a daily program dedicated to comparing the statements made on the three political channels to verifiable facts it would set them apart from the crowd.  It would also give them a genuine claim to being what political journalism is supposed to be: impartial.  But these days CNN prefers the appearance of impartiality that comes with staffing and booking an equal number of lefties and righties, which is why they’ve got the empty suit that is Wolf Blitzer on for three hours, five days a week (plus an hour on Saturday) with a show whose title implies perpetual emergency.

That wholesale desecration of anything that could be called journalism can in some way be justified if you’re advocating for a position.  But it cannot be justified if your primary claim is that you’re the middle of the road network.  The entire premise of CNN is a contradiction: we do political journalism right by not doing it all.

What’s so galling about this is that no national outlet save The Daily Show ever gives CNN the same level of coal raking that Fox gets.  For proof, we can look to The Daily Show itself.  On November 3rd of last year Stewart et al. ran one of the most brutally accurate satires of CNN ever to grace television.  It was largely ignored by the left side of the internet and as of this writing that specific clip on thedailyshow.com has been viewed 116,011 times.  Two days later, on November 5th, Stewart did an impression of Fox News’ latest star, Glenn Beck.  That item was linked in more places on the left side of the internet than I can count and as of this writing that clip has been viewed 871,050 times.

Partly we can chalk this up to the combined star wattage of Stewart and Beck, but there’s something more as well.  From Media Matters on down the reality based community takes glee in pointing out the foibles of Fox News.  They represent the enemy and it feels good to expose their hypocrisy and aversion to facts.  But Fox will always be that way because that is the very purpose of having a right wing network.  CNN is just as bad but their mushy lack of an ideology makes them a less satisfying target, even though there is at least some hope of redeeming them should the critical fire ever be trained more heavily their way.

Fox argues in their chosen way, that’s their prerogative and while it serves their base it has little appeal to the majority of Americans.  But CNN lowers the entire debate by engaging in the same sensationalist crap while cloaking it in claims of impartiality.  The existence of the former is probably unavoidable (if Fox News ever went under something would replace it), but the latter is a bleeding wound on the way we conduct politics in this country.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, CNN, Fox News, Institutionalized Stupidity, The Vast Wasteland | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Um, . . . What He Said (Part 3)

3 February 10
“Stockdale, if we don’t deliver this pizza in thirty minutes it’s free.  What’s the holdup?” – Ross Perot
“Gridlock!” – Adm. Stockdale

The current sense amongst people whose political opinions I respect is that if the Blues cannot get anything significant done with numbers as favorable as these then we really are all doomed.  The knee jerk reaction to this grim but increasingly plausible conclusion is to slather blame on Barack Obama, feckless Congressional Blues, really anyone with a D anywhere near their name.  That’s understandable and certainly at least partially true, but there’s a shallowness to it that I find disconcerting.

Then I read two excellent posts at James Fallows’ blog.  They were messages he received from “someone with many decades’ experience in national politics”.  The first begins:

“GOP member: ‘I’d like this in the bill.’

“Dem member response: ‘If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?’

“GOP member:  ‘You know I can’t vote for the bill.’

“Dem member:  ‘Then why should we put it in the bill?’

“I witnessed this myself.”

There is considerably more at the original post, but the really disheartening stuff comes in the follow up post from the same anonymous person:

“A closely related development fascinates and infuriates me, partly re the GOP and partly re the press.  In the Senate, the GOP votes against cloture.  But when the Dems finally manage to get the 60 votes, lots of GOP senators typically vote for the bill on final passage.  “What’s up with THAT?” I’ve asked several times.  In the past, if you opposed a bill getting to a vote on the floor, typically (admittedly not always) you would also oppose it IN the vote on the floor.  That was the only reason to oppose it getting to the floor – because you opposed it!  The answer, I’ve been told several times (by Democratic staffers, who don’t seem at all surprised or perturbed), is that a lot of Republicans don’t want to be on record as voting against a bill they believe the public or their constituents favor.  Huh?  Trying to kill it without a vote is somehow safe politically, but voting against it on final passage is not?  Now that, I submit, is an anomaly the blame for which we can lay at the feet of the much-diminished news media, and the shortcomings of the Senate Democrats.”

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for your modern media-political complex!  Not only are Red senators allowed to act like spoiled children, they’re able to get away with it scot free.  If you have any interest in how the American government works (or doesn’t) read both posts in full.

None of the above absolves Obama, Congressional Blues or the rest of our only non-insane political party.  But if Fallows’ correspondent is correct then they are facing something genuinely new under the sun.  Which is another way of saying that for once the hoary old canard “nobody could’ve predicted” is in some way true.  They expected resistance, but they expected it within the usual framework of Congress.

The only question that remains is what, if anything, they can do about it.  Because they have nine months (and probably two years after that, but that’s just my guess) with Congressional majorities but no Senate super majority.  I don’t know enough about how the Senate operates to know whether or not the Blues can find a way to circumvent or short-circuit this kind of exploitative obstructionism.  But if a way cannot be found then we have a far bigger problem in this country than budget deficits, health care costs, and wars no one seems to want to talk about.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Captured by the System

31 January 10
“Dad, please for the last time I beg you: don’t lower yourself to the level of the mob!” – Lisa Simpson
“Lisa, maybe if I’m part of that mob I can help steer it in wise directions.  Now, where’s my giant foam cowboy hat and air horn?” – Homer Simpson`

One of the most encouraging and refreshing things about Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House was the way he and his operation consistently distanced themselves from the torrent of knee-jerk gossip that passes for mainstream political news.  When hyper-plugged-in observers would fret and panic over the latest meme the campaign itself seemed to float above all that, uninterested in such patent silliness.  That calm, measured approach to campaigning was on display during the long primary and during the general campaign.  “Hillary won Texas and Ohio!  Obama has faltered!” cried the bedwetters, meanwhile the Obama campaign quietly pointed to the delegate totals and went about their business.  “Financial panic!  Come together for the good of the country!” screamed reactionary mandarins, no campaign “suspension” for us, said Obama.

The studied lack of interest in the ups and downs of remorselessly nonsensical discourse has faded since Obama and his people took control at 1600.  Some of that was to be expected, no one moves to D.C. without becoming at least slightly more vacuous.  And the “para-government” remains wired for Red ideas and Red talking points.  But where was the calm repetition of facts during the media shit storm of August?  Where was the rejection of demonstrably stupid political posturing when it comes to “spending freezes”?  It is impossible to follow the news and not get the sense that the Administration has begun to buy into the premise that this kind of background noise should be treated with anything but contempt.

That is not a good thing.  To take but the most prominent example we’ve had a health care “debate” conducted almost entirely between people who a) already have health insurance and b) stand to be taxed one way or another for reform that would benefit the overwhelming majority of Americans.  Even worse, that “debate” was probably 3% policy and 97% bombastic horseshit.

On Friday Glenn Greenwald was howling into the wind about what an indelible disgrace it is that people who spent years lying (and getting paid to lie) about the Iraq War are still treated with enormous respect.  Here’s the nut of it:

I’m periodically criticized for an “angry” tone in my writing, which I always find mystifying.  I genuinely don’t understand why anger should be avoided or even how it could be.  What other reaction is possible when one looks around and sees the government leaders who committed these grave crimes completely unburdened by any accountability and treated as respectable dignitaries, or watches the Tom Friedmans, Jeffrey Goldbergs, Fred Hiatts and other unrepentent leading media propagandists who helped enable it still feted as Serious and honest experts, or beholds the current Cabinet and Senate filled with people who supported it, or observes the Michael O’Hanlons and Les Gelbs and other Foreign Policy Community luminaries who lent trans-partisan credence to it all continue to traipse around still pompously advocating for more wars that never touch their lives?

What other reaction indeed?  Tom Friedman is perhaps the most influential foreign policy pundit in the country, and yet on the primary foreign policy question of the last decade he was more than just disastrously wrong.  He kept defending his disastrously wrong position for years in such an intellectually empty way that a term for perpetual war denial was named after him.  And he’s got a lot of company.  That the opinions of totally discredited people are accorded serious respect is more than a little disconcerting.

The same illogical and sad dynamic is at work when it comes to energy, health care, economic policy . . . anything.  It was probably too much to ask that all the foolish poobahs be tossed out and banished from teevee at once.  They are as well entrenched as any successful parasite.  But it shouldn’t have been too much to ask for the Administration to refuse to play their games.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Self Interest vs. Stupidity

27 January 10
“There there dear, we’re all in shock.  I thought he’d two-time you for a while first.” – Patty Bouvier

I am a cynic.  I have been a cynic since before I knew what the term meant.  Most of the time my cynicism leads me to conclusions that prove out (or at least appear to prove out).  And when my cynicism does lead me astray it seems to most often be due to my overestimation of the people involved.  For example, for much of Bush the Younger’s second term I was convinced that sooner or later he would face a massive insurrection from Congressional Republicans.  I figured that they would value their own cushy government jobs over his and toss him overboard in an effort to save their own skins.  Sadly their stupidity trumped their self interest.

And so it is with mixed feelings that I anticipate this evening’s Presidential Address.  On the one hand it has been heartening to see the Obama Administration at least appear to realize that their opposition is wholly disingenuous and uninterested in anything but winning at the ballot box.  On the other hand their chosen vehicle of theatrical political symbolism is the wildly irresponsible “spending freeze”.  That most recent fallacy-du-jour is financially insignificant when excluding Medicare and the War Department.  Yet it is also politically tone deaf for the simple reason that mouthing a provably stupid Red fallacy does nothing but reinforce the illogical foundations upon which it rests.

Being in favor of “deficit reduction” is akin to being in favor of puppies, sunlight and blowjobs.  It is a meaningless position open to anyone.  The question is not whether you think the American government should balance its books, but how the American government balances its books.  A “spending freeze” that excludes all but a tiny slice of the budget ignores the how completely, it’s like saying the Titanic needed more life preservers.  Yeah it might help, but the overall horror isn’t going to be seriously affected.

So if they’ve truly adopted a nonsensically puny “spending freeze” that is both bad politics and bad policy, where does that leave us?  Well, on the bright side it means that they may finally be willing to adopt the kind of crass political whoring that is probably required of any modern Administration.  On the dark side there’s the whole thing about this particular crass political whoring not having a snowball’s chance in hell of working.

And on that note my cynicism reaches the end of its road.  I don’t have enough facts to reach a supportable conclusion.  Nor do I have inside information on the people, the dynamics, or the thinking of either the Obama Administration or the Democratic Party in general.  I do know that the current political situation is untenable.  The Reds represent a minority of the population (via) and yet continue to obstruct anything and everything.  Either they will win enough seats in Congress to assume control of one chamber or the other, or the Blues will wise up and begin pushing them aside with base disregard.

Tonight’s speech is not a make or break moment for the Administration.  Barack Obama is going to be with us for quite a while and the midterm elections are still a very long ten months away.  But sometime between now and then the Blues are going to have to make a choice.  They are either going to abandon the facade of bipartisanship, do what they can, and let voters judge them on what they’ve done, or they are going to turtle and let voters judge them on what they haven’t done.  Self interest predicts the former, stupidity predicts the latter.  I would only point out that the latter is what cost the Reds the government.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Political Nipple Piercings, Discuss!

24 January 10
“Bazooka Duke says ‘Chew on this!’” – Duke Phillips

With the massive exception of Wolf Blitzer few media celebrities epitomize the half inch deep, three inches wide nature of mainstream political discourse better than George Stephanopoulos.  He is transparently in love with everything about himself, from his looks to whatever he does that passes for thinking.  Yet he clearly considers himself something approximating a serious, well informed sage of our times.  Stephanopoulos revels in, and is a heavy contributor to, the nanosecond nature of politics-as-theater.  He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that such things are silly at best, distracting at worst, and utterly uninteresting to the overwhelming majority of Americans.  He is as loathsome an example of his kind as any you will find.

It was therefore particularly enjoyable to read the following passage from a recent London Review of Books piece about Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes”.  Discussing Stephanopoulos’ breathless 1999 memoir:

Speeches got written at the last moment, policy was endlessly being reformulated, old enemies were reached out to while a train of new enemies was picked up along the way. Stephanopoulos describes how important physical proximity to the president was – having your office a few yards nearer to the Oval Office than the next person was crucial – and he lets us know that he got close.

[…]

Stephanopoulos is now a talk-show host, occasional journalist and, like everyone else, a blogger. Nevertheless, it comes as a shock reading The Clinton Tapes to discover just how little George mattered to Bill during the time when Bill meant so much to George. Stephanopoulos hardly features at all in these write-ups of a series of nearly 80 taped conversations Taylor Branch had with Clinton over the course of his presidency. On the few occasions he does get noticed it is as a minor irritant and something of a buffoon.

Oh how lovely it is when reality intrudes on the ego trips of our media elites.

I have only just begun to get into “The Clinton Tapes”, but in the wake of the hysterical reactions to the Massachusetts election this past week I found this from the book’s first chapter, discussing the lay of the land from the Clinton White House in October of 1993, particularly insightful, worrying and encouraging:

Clinton said Dole spoke of the opposition’s job not as making deals but rather making the president fail, so he could be replaced as quickly as possible.  In fact, he said Dole himself started running for president within ten days of Clinton’s inauguration.  “Every time he goes to Kansas,” remarked the president, “he stops off in New Hampshire on the way.”

That first sentence from the early 1990s has an eerily prescient ring here at the dawn of the 2010s, doesn’t it?

Of course the two things, sensationalist media and Red obstructionism, feed off of each other.  Stephanopoulos’ brand of coverage thrives when a pseudo-political figure like Sarah Palin publicizes non-existent “death panels”.  Both do a disservice to everyone but themselves when they use their fame in service to such things, but they are handsomely rewarded for it so there’s little chance they are going to stop.

That bleak sentiment is more or less the conclusion of Ken Aultta’s article in the most recent New Yorker.  (Sadly it is not freely available online.)  He recounts the various media missteps of the Dear Leader’s first year and paints a very grim portrait of political journalism driven by the profitable vortex of gossip gratification.  The best part is right at the start when Obama, in a speech that unsurprisingly got little teevee attention, used Walter Cronkite’s funeral to call out the press for being a pack of shallow whores:

Cronkite’s standard, Obama said, was “a little bit harder to find today,” when journalism lapses into “instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories Walter disdained. . . . ‘What happened today?’ is replaced with ‘Who won today?’ The public debate cheapens.”

The great mass of citizens (a majority, I suspect) who have the good sense to not care about the Mean Girls of politics would agree.  But they are not a lucrative audience.  Most of them cannot afford dick pills or starter class luxury cars and while they certainly watch television it not of the political variety.  Their inattentive mass counts for very little in a Nielsen survey of reportorial outlets.

In the end that is what matters, that is what drives our discourse: desirable demographics.  It is the great media hypocrisy of early 21st century America, easily as illogical as the obsession with sexual “purity”.  The people who watch the cable shows, who listen to the talk radio, who are fans of politics as surely as there are fans of football teams, are not representative of the body politic.  They are a pathetically tiny minority.  But through viewership they support the “news”, through clicks they consume the gossip, and they are the only audience that whores like Stephanopoulos care about pleasing.  According to Auletta Obama is aware of this and trying to change it, but the power of the Oval Office, whatever glamour it may hold, is insufficient.

Technovangelists believe that the internet will deliver us from this vapid and uncoordinated conspiracy.  I hope that they are correct.  In the meantime we will have to continue the slog, continue our most precious arguments in inferior mediums.  But none of that is news.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Even More Shameful Shit

20 January 10
“Oh, and the president was arrested for murder.  More on that tomorrow night or you can turn to another channel.” – Kent Brockman

In 2006 three murders were committed by unknown US government employees at Guantanamo Bay.  As you’d expect the incident was covered up, with the deaths being played off as a group suicide.  All this came to light in a genuine bombshell, 100% must read article by Scott Horton in next month’s Harper’s (it went online Monday).  The serious and well document charges contained therein have already met with the usual formulaic and easily falsified denials.

If we had a national political dialogue that was even vaguely honest or sane this story would be front page news.  Not only because it’s a terrible and public breach of what we like to think of as our national character, but because it involves the most fundamental aspects of “terrorism” and “national security”, supposedly two of the gravest issues of our time.  Guantanamo, like it or not, is probably the most famous prison camp in the world and it is regarded with outright horror just about everywhere but here.  All by itself it is a potent symbol of the United States as precisely the evil caricature propagated by extremist groups.

Closing that prison would do more to enhance the security of American citizens than almost any other single action.  (Well, closing it and atoning for it would do more, but we can only expect so much in our domestic political environment.)  And yet that eminently sane course of action has been repeatedly delayed and postponed for reasons that can be charitably described as “irrelevant” and accurately described as “fucking stupid”.

Read the Horton article, read it in its grisly entirety.  And before you return to the regular parts of your day, commit this to memory: the US government murdered three foreign nationals who were almost certainly completely innocent of any wrongdoing.  It did not happen accidentally with a bomb or a missile, but up close and personal.  Remember this fact the next time someone tells you about the dangerousness of the Guantanamo prisoners, or the violent nature of Islam, or the inherent righteousness of our anti-terrorism policies.

Yes these murders happened under Bush the Younger, but many of the policies that led to them are being continued by his successor for political reasons.  The only way fatal stupidities like these will stop is when that political rationale goes away.  And that will only happen when our counter-terrorism policies are publicly understood to be massively counter productive.  Do your part to protect America, remember the murdered and spread the word any way you can.

Leave a Comment » | Guantanamo Bay, I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, Obama Administration, Sophomoric Imperialism, War on Terror | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Reality Still Has a Liberal Bias

17 January 10
“Whatever, that’s like five years from now.” – Eric Cartman
“Yeah, who cares?” – Stan Marsh

As the health care opera wends into its (hopefully) final act a fatalistic sentiment has been cropping up more and more.  This feeling has been given new vigor by the possible Red upset in Massachusetts’ special Senate election on Tuesday.  Should Scott Brown win and finish the rest of Ted Kennedy’s term the extremely watered down but nevertheless hugely beneficial health care bill will be thrown – yet again – into doubt.  In the event he prevails Tuesday the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments will be deafening.

I obviously don’t know who is going to win on Tuesday.  Nor do I know what’s going to happen in November.  But I would like to point out that right now the most likely scenario is that sometime in the next year, possibly Tuesday possibly in November, the Blues are going to lose one or more Senate seats.  (It remains a mystery why you see the number sixty so often next to the word “Democrats” when one of those is that notoriously amoral prima donna Joe Lieberman and a few more hail from Red states and are more conservative than liberal in their voting patterns.)  Assuming that happens the Democrats will be faced with a rather stark choice: rewrite the Senate’s lunatic filibuster rules or watch any and all legislating grind to a halt.

What they chose to do, whether or not rewriting the rules is even a realistic possibility, is basically unknown.  Even experienced Washington hands couldn’t give you good odds for the simple reason that we are in an unprecedented situation.  Frustration is running very high and that can make for interesting times.

But I take comfort in something George Carlin once said: “Even in a fake democracy people oughta get what they want once in awhile”.  That has long struck me as one of the most profound and insightful comments about our politics ever uttered.  Our system of representative government, in all its various formulations going all the way back to when white people started getting off the boats four hundred years ago, has always favored the Haves over the Have Nots.  But every once in a while something meaningful is accomplished, otherwise the system would’ve collapsed in on itself long ago.

And if Scott Brown wins on Tuesday and that dilapidated but important health care bill dies with his victory speech, so what?  It won’t alter the two realities that have been colliding on the Democrats ever since Obama took office last year.  The first is that they have a natural majority in terms of the voters (this is especially true as disenchantment with the Republican Party remains high).  The second is that there are still enough Reds running around Washington to obstruct things.  With each passing election the voters themselves get younger, darker and more liberal on social issues.  There is no future in the current configuration of the Republican Party.  All it means is more suffering in the meantime, and while that’s not a good thing it’s hardly the end of the world.

None of which is to say that the Reds are to be underestimated in any given election.  They remain very potent and competitive.  But the overall trends remain very much against them and there’s no evidence whatsoever that those are about to change.  The people will get at least some of what they want, whether it happens sooner or later is the only real question.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Tragedy of Arnold Schwarzenegger

13 January 10
“Maria, my mighty heart is breaking.  I’ll be in the humvee.” – Rainier Wolfcastle

There is no denying that California is fubar.  The state’s political institutions simply no longer function and as painful as 2009 was, it looks like 2010 is going to be even worse.  Setting aside the real human costs of that failed government there is a larger political failing, one that extends beyond California.  That failure is the one of the Republican Party to be anything but the Party of No.  To see what it has wrought we need look no further than the man who has presided over the final act of California’s self destruction: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger had the background, the charisma, the money and the timing to potentially take the Republican Party in a new direction.  He chose not even to try.  Instead he bent over backwards to appease the state’s hard right fiscal lunatics.  During the recall campaign his plan for cleaning up the state’s budget, already a mess in 2003, was to chant the words “waste”, “fraud” and “abuse” over and over again.  Even though the numbers indicated that those were minor problems – at best – he and his supporters seemed to think those three bugaboos accounted for all of the states financial woes.  (Fiscal magical thinking of this kind is still prevalent amongst aspiring Republican office holders.)

Schwarzenegger kowtowed to these easily disproved budgetary fantasies for the same reason that all politicians do: they’re just plausible enough to help win an election even if they’re outright false.  The reality is that the California government is starved for revenue and requires super majorities to raise any kind of taxes.  But there are just enough Republicans (largely from the state’s archly conservative interior) in the legislature to prevent any kind of sane financial action.  That the state as a whole is as Blue as they come and that the Democrats are firmly in control of both halves of the legislature doesn’t matter.  The result is a real life experiment of what snake oil salesman Grover Norquist famously called “starve the beast”.  The results aren’t pretty and are likely to cost the state’s taxpayers considerably more money over the long haul as the government crumbles beneath their feet.

Schwarzenegger’s willingness to indulge the fiscal fedaykin has been his and his state’s undoing.  It’s also what makes him such a tragic figure because if ever there was a conservatively minded guy who could’ve stood up to this self destructive orthodoxy it was him.  Here was a guy with an absolutely perfect biography.  He’s an immigrant who made it to the peaks of American society, and that’s a story that always causes American hearts to swoon.  He can’t be accused of being a girly man because he’s literally the antonym for it.  He’s rich, he’s famous, he’s good looking.  He could’ve been the leader they needed, but instead he became yet another victim of right wing political correctness.

Now Schwarzenegger is stuck in the unenviable position of being the governor who took the shine off the Golden State.  Despite his enormous personal popularity he never attempted to lead them towards genuine fiscal responsibility and now it’s too late.  The hard core are all that’s left, both in California and in the country at large.  The party he sought to lead is tearing itself apart because its philosophical purity has prevented it from doing anything that could be called governing.  It’s a genuinely dangerous failure, because a non-insane Republican Party is something the country needs.

But let’s end on a high note.  The day after the election, long before the current nightmare, The Daily Show pretty much nailed it.  Jon Stewart asked Steve Carell (“live” from California), what the mood was like at Terminator HQ on the morning after.  Carell’s response:

“Well in a word Jon, the mood here is one of devastation.”

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican Party, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

A Man of His Time

10 January 10

“Your appearance is comical to me.” – Martin Prince

The last week or so saw Michael Steel’s chairmanship of the Republican National Committee go from merely entertaining to sublimely revealing.  If he were doing this as a performance art project it would be the Mona Lisa of performance art projects.  But he seems to take himself quite seriously and what makes the whole thing so enlightening is the reaction of Republican leaders to Republican style leadership.

Steele has, in essence, run the RNC the same way the Bush Administration ran the country: poorly.  To be more specific, he appears to enjoy his public role a lot more than he does the boring details (via) of what is essentially a managerial job, views book riches resulting from his official position as a given right, and seems immune to any kind of awareness about how foolish he appears to others.  And there’s no sign of him slowing down.  He’s managed all this in less than twelve months on the job, and in an off year at that.  There’s no telling to what heights of the absurd the pressures and rigors of an actual election year might push him.

It’s not all for show, of course.  Steele is nominally in charge of one of only two major political parties in the most powerful country on Earth.  His decisions, good and bad, literally have global importance.  So in theory we should be asking what kind of impact his Bush-esque style of leadership will have on election results.  But it’s far too early in the year to pretend that serious analysis of November is possible.  It seems safe to say that Steele’s leadership won’t help the Reds, but whether or not it will matter is an entirely different question.

So in the meantime we can all sit back and relax, confident that the man leading the Republican Party is no hypocrite.  He studied their methods very carefully and has applied that winning formula to the Party itself.  That some of the Party’s other leaders are objecting is only natural.  Bush the Younger’s approval ratings got into the low 20s at one point.  Entrenched and incompetent leadership is a bitch, and in this case it couldn’t happen to a more self destructive group of people.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Little Things (Lots and Lots of ’Em)

6 January 10
“Well, I can’t argue with the little things, it’s the little things that make up life.” – Hank Scorpio

The health care bill winds on, the Underwear Bomber has nitwits in a twist, massive financial bailouts continue, and the planet may be doomed.  Those are all big stories where the Obama Administration and the rest of the ruling Democratic Party, depending on your mood and inclination, can be faulted or credited, praised or damned.  But all is not big news.  In fact big news is only a tiny minority of what’s actually going on.

With that in mind I’d like to draw your attention to two small and relatively unrelated stories that I happened across here in the first week of the new decade.  The first comes from the Associated Press.  It relates the newfound vigor of the Labor Department under Hilda Solis:

Solis made a splash in October when OSHA slapped the largest fine in its history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery.

Garnering less attention, she just finished hiring 250 new investigators to protect workers from being cheated out of wage and overtime pay. She also started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate. And she is proposing new standards to protect workers from industrial dust explosions — an effort the Bush administration had long resisted.

The article goes on from there, but I think you’ve got the flavor: The departed Bush Administration gutted the Labor Department and ran it into the ground at the expense of everyone but management at companies like BP.  Now things are getting better.

The second example couldn’t be farther from the Labor Department, it’s about nuclear weapons.  Our nuclear policy is still based on outdated Cold War paranoia.  This is dangerous, expensive and wholly unnecessary.  The changes being proposed include eliminating our redundant and pricey nuclear bombers and declaring an eminently sensible “no first use” policy towards the Bomb.  The Armchair Generalist sums it up:

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you start with the fact that we aren’t facing the Soviet Union and that there are other regional adversaries who have or may develop nuclear weapons. A “no first use” policy would significantly decrease tensions between the two major superpowers, not to mention encourage greater cooperation. The idea of retaliating against chemical or biological weapons with nuclear weapons was always asinine – it was when President Clinton’s administration developed the policy, and it was when President GW Bush’s administration continued it.

I am betting that the Air Force won’t even object too much about the idea of eliminating the bomber leg of the triad. They could start thinking about retiring the B52 bomber from its strategic bombing mission, the maintenance of which has been costly.

Brining even a little sanity to the War Department was never going to be easy, but it’s underway and it doesn’t look like complete tokenism.

If I were willing to put more time into this little hobby of mine I’m sure I could come up with more examples.  The overall point wouldn’t change much however: the Obama Administration is vastly more competent and less insane that its predecessor.  We can obviously see that in a lot of big ways.  If Bush the Younger were still in office for the Underwear Bomber, for example, he never would’ve admitted that the system had any problems, nor acted to calm people instead of terrify them.

But where the good is not so easily seen is in myriad little ways.  Enforcing labor laws is one of those things that has a positive impact on the people and the economy as a whole, but that doesn’t generate headlines very often.  Turning our nuclear policy away from confronting ten foot tall Ruskies saves money and reduces tension all over the planet.  We don’t call these things “Administrations” for nothing, heading one of the world’s largest and most powerful bureaucracies is an awesome but unglamorous job.  The Executive Branch may never run perfectly or hum smoothly, but it doesn’t have to grind to a complete halt and be left to rust as it was during most of the last decade.  Little things can add up.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Time Capsule

3 January 10
“I have frozen myself so I may live to see the wonders of the future.  Thaw me out when robot wives are cheap and effective.” – Jasper’s Freezer Note

Sometime very early in the 1990s, possibly in 1990 itself, there was a commercial on television that depicted New Year’s Eve 1999.  It imagined a slightly futuristic cityscape, complete with a smattering of the flying cars that were so ubiquitous in 20th century depictions of the 21st century.  I do not recall what the ad was for, probably a telecom firm or an investment bank or some other such thing, but I remembered the commercial all through the 90s as 1999 kept getting closer and closer.  Neither the futuristic city nor the flying cars ever showed up.

Recently I found myself thinking about that ad for the first time in a long time as the Naughts wound down and the 2010s (“twenty-tens”) loomed.  The end of a year is a time for both looking back and predictions; but the end of the decade is really only a time for looking back.  Trying to predict what the world will be like in ten years is so foolish as to be pointless.  Other than that the Earth will be warmer there aren’t many things we can say with even a little bit of confidence.  So rather than engage in some useless predictions for what life will be like at the end of this decade, I thought it’d be better to put down how things were as it began.

Here at the dawn of the 2010s it’s tough to be optimistic about global warming, which is too bad because it’s far and away the most important problem facing the species.  We don’t know what’s going to happen, we just know that it’s going to be worse than it could’ve been and that we ignored it for far too long for reasons which will seem lunatic to future generations.  We might think our way out of it yet, but right now it doesn’t look like we’re going to get off without millions if not billions of people suffering considerably.

We’re also under the Administration of the country’s first non-white President.  Given the demographic trends that was probably an inevitability, but it’ll be interesting to see how it’s remembered.  With the exception of the right wing showing its racism a little more openly than usual, less than a year after he was inaugurated you don’t hear much about it.

Speaking of the right wing, I can’t wait to see what happens to them this decade.  They’re poised to continue losing the culture wars and it’ll be interesting to see where the aristocratic party hangs its hat next.  As glacial as the progress on homosexual rights has been in terms of legislation, everywhere else gay acceptance is racing forward.  Right now it’s very difficult to imagine an America in 2020 that is more restrictive on homosexuality than the one of 2010. What’s the next thing the right wing higher ups can use to distract their rank and file?

If the righties wanted to do something useful they might turn their gaze towards keeping technology optional for the average American.  Few would dispute that the Naughts saw technology make life a lot easier in a lot of ways.  But the price of that (besides the monthly bill for wireless and internet) is a life lived in the open.  Text messages have become a romance language with the unfortunate side effect of being subject to subpoenas.  Unless one takes serious precautions potential employers can now peer into your personal life on-line in ways that would’ve shocked people just a few years ago.  That’s a tradeoff many are willing to make in exchange for all the benefits, but increasingly it’s one people are being forced to make.  It’s becoming uncommon or downright impossible to pay for things in untraceable cash.  Much of our business culture outright requires being constantly accessible.  It’s one thing to not want to change with the times, it’s quite another to be more or less forced into surrendering basic rights just to live one’s life in a semi-normal way.

Finally, as I sit here typing on the final day of the NFL regular season, it’s difficult to see the league relinquishing its unquestioned mastery of the American sporting scene.  In the realm of scripted entertainment 3D has become the accepted wave of the future.  Of course, 3D has been the wave of the future before and has always died the ignoble death of all fads.  But if Avatar can rule the box office like an angry pagan god, if the technology has moved 3D beyond the realm of the merely novel, then maybe this time it’s here to stay.  (Are ordinary people willing to wear stupid looking glasses while watching television at home?  They’re willing to wear stupid looking cell phone accessories in public, so why not?)  I’ve no idea what will actually happen of course, but at this moment it at least seems possible.

So who knows?  And if anyone is reading this in or around January of 2020 (doubtlessly on some fantastic piece of hardware), hello from the past!  I hope the decade went well and that I’m still alive.  Good luck with the 2020s, I’m sure you’ll need it.

Leave a Comment » | Tomorrowland, Undiscovered Country | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Most Profound Decade-In-Review Piece You Will Read (Unless I’m Wrong, Nobody Trusts Me, or No One Listens to Me)

30 December 09
“What else is on?” – Bart Simpson

Cory Doctorow, one of the driving forces behind one of the world’s best websites once wrote a book about a post-scarcity society.  (A “post-scarcity” society is one in which, Star Trek like, resources are not limited.  Housing, food and other necessities have become so cheap as to be universal regardless of other considerations.)  In the book material goods have essentially no value and reputation trumps everything, and though I’ve not read it that concept got me to thinking.  For everything else the naughts gave us and took away from us, they did do the one thing that was promised in the nineties: set information free.  We’re rapidly approaching a post-scarcity world when it comes to the dissemination, if not the creation, of knowledge and opinion.  Simply by typing in http//something you can find almost any piece of information you want.

The rub is that all such information is of dubious provenance.  Even the most well established of facts have counterarguments waiting at a different URL.  We have evolved into an on-line society where trust is more important that verifiability.  For example, there is overwhelming evidence that men have landed on the Moon, but if you are inclined to distrust that there are plenty of counterexamples that project the same level of aesthetic authenticity.  So even though it’s not true, you can still verify that the moon landings were faked.

For a less data bound example let’s look at two of the most prominent American men on the internet, Paul Krugman and Andrew Sullivan.  Krugman’s record of foretelling almost every disaster that befell this country the last ten years is unequaled amongst nationally prominent pundits.  I read his columns and his blog consistently, not because I always agree with everything he says but because he always gives clear reasons for what he’s saying and he’s willing to admit when he’s wrong.

Sullivan, on the other hand, seems to surf ever so slightly ahead of the wave of public opinion and stands by even his most disastrous decisions years after the fact.  What this means is that I don’t often read Andrew Sullivan.  I don’t trust him.  Even if he wrote something I agreed with or found persuasive I’d need confirmation from other sources before I changed my mind or placed a lot of confidence in it.  But since sources I do trust are just a click away my time is better spent just reading them and ignoring Sullivan completely.

Some will agree with my conclusions about those two examples, others will not.  And neither Krugman nor Sullivan has much at stake in my opinion of them.  But regardless of these specific examples the mechanism at work here is basically universal when it comes to the way we operate on-line.  Vast internet fortunes have been made on trying to systematize trust (Digg, Amazon reviews, etcetera), but ultimately it is a personal choice.  Any site can come with a pretty face, any site can look professionally designed, any site can shout credibility.  But reputation is more important than those things because everything else can be faked or equaled.  The many thousands of words I read of Sullivan’s (going back probably fifteen years now) before I decided I didn’t trust him are what can’t be faked.  And despite Krugman’s sterling track record if he went off the deep end and starting making wild, evidence free accusations tomorrow I’d quickly stop reading him too.

But to stop reading him I don’t have to cancel a subscription or wait for some executive to cancel his show.  I can just click elsewhere because there’s a plethora of other high quality commentary and analysis out there.  This is one of the most important developments of the naughts; for the way politics operates in this country it might even be the most important.  It’s one thing to talk about the rise of on-line political participation in everything from fundraising to blogging to organizing.  It’s novel and it’s an easy story to tell because all you have to do is describe the new technology.  But the deeper principal is one that says everyone is only as good as the last thing they wrote.  It’s much more difficult to hide behind a reputable masthead and a good editor these days, and in ten years it’ll be even harder.

I try to keep my technovangelist leanings in check so I won’t go so far as to say that this is an unmitigated win, but it’s got a lot to recommend it.  A world of infinite options means that your reputation has to stand up to constant scrutiny.  And building and maintaining a reputation requires care, thought, and hard work, just the things one should look for in a source of information.

Leave a Comment » | The Information Superhighway | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Security Theater Goes to Eleven

27 December 09
“Okay everybody, let’s see some big smiles!  Just relax and let the hooks do their work.” – Ned Flanders (Unquestioned Lord and Master of the World)

Teachers, prison guards and drill sergeants know that the best way to truly break the spirit of one of their charges is to enforce an innumerable number of petty rules: eyes forward at all times, stand behind this line, hands folded in just such a manner.  If those untrustworthy humans being kept in check are constantly monitoring each and every aspect of their behavior they are less likely to do anything out of line.  It is a crude and cruel system, but it is effective at the only thing for which it is striving: authoritarian order.

The restrictions being imposed upon airline passengers are inching ever closer to those kinds of brutal, draconian methods.  Yesterday came word that in response to the attempted incendiary incident in Detroit on Friday more pointless and restrictive rules are being implemented for air travel.  The full extent of the new rules is not yet clear (it is a holiday weekend, after all).  However the stupidest of them has to be a new restriction on personal items during the flight:

But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

Now if someone manages to bring an explosive on board they will be forced to attempt to detonate it more than an hour away from the airport.  I feel safer already, don’t you?

It’s one thing for new travel punishments to be irrational and illogical, but this takes the cake for being utterly and completely pointless.  It does nothing to prevent someone getting a weapon on board; it does nothing to prevent someone attempting to use a weapon on board.  I’m going to repeat that because it’s at the very heart of this matter: It does nothing to prevent someone getting a weapon on board; it does nothing to prevent someone attempting to use a weapon on board. It just means that it’ll be harder to do so within an hour of landing.  Even by the remarkably dense standards of security theater, this one takes the cake.

It also bears more than a passing resemblance to the kinds of petty torments used to restrain everything from fourth graders to hardened criminals.  Am I still allowed to gesture with my hands while I speak with the person next to me, or must they be at my sides at all times?  How long until talking itself is banned?  And what does “personal effects” mean here?  Are magazines and books so terrifying that they must be stowed?

I’ve long said that the only way to truly secure an airliner would be to strip search everyone and make us all fly naked.  Thanks to technology we’ve already gotten most of the way to naked, but now even that isn’t harsh enough.  Now we’re going to restrict what you can do inside the pipe to pass those long and stressful hours.

What’s so interesting about this new nothing-on-your-lap-for-one-hour knuckle-rap is that it so starkly demonstrates what the real motivations are.  Security is always pushing for more and more ways to restrain the people it is purportedly protecting.  But at least in the past the restrictions were in some tiny way tethered to a potential physical threat (however ludicrous or improbable).  Now even that fiber of reason has been snapped in favor of something that is exclusively about punishment and intimidation.

There are only two questions remaining.  First, is this the rule so insane (and detrimental to wealthy trans-continental passengers) that it finally causes a real public pushback?  Second, if the answer to the first question is no, what’s the next rule going to be?  Because so long as the kabuki rules are allowed to keep tightening without serious objection from the public (and their bought out representatives), there will be new, ever more restrictive rules.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

In Defense of Avatar’s Dialogue, Plot and Racial Politics

23 December 09
“Nobody expected you to fall in love with Smurfette.  You went to learn from them but instead you became one of them!  Right?  Fought against your own kind, when you knew we’d stop at nothing!” – Wendy Testaburger

Note: Lots of Avatar spoilers below.

For starters let’s acknowledge that these are secondary and tertiary discussions, at best.  Avatar is fundamentally a big budget action movie the primary focus of which is spectacle.  In that it succeeds enormously and I don’t think many would disagree.  But there have been a lot of complaints about the other aspects of the film and it’d be a pity to let them go unchallenged.

Before we get to that though, there is a less acknowledged success for which Avatar must be commended.  Secondary to spectacle (and this is where most big movies lose themselves), even the biggest film must have a coherent story and follow its own rules.  The “rules” thing is one that is all too often ignored by explosion oriented films (Michael Bay’s and Joseph Nichol’s are probably the two worst examples from this year).  The essential properties of a character or device (especially important in a science fiction environment) shouldn’t change for no reason to serve the immediate scene (e.g. the Transformers are alternately extremely delicate or extremely tough, the machines John Connor/Batman fights seem to vary from being ruthless killers to utterly incompetent).  Avatar doesn’t change its rules willy-nilly; it uses the rules of its world to drive its story (e.g. Jake Sully has to hide the trailer where he controls his Avatar, the shared neurons of all the living things on Pandora allow them to communicate with each other).  There are many fantastic and unbelievable things on Pandora, but they don’t change just because the movie needs to resolve a plot point.  The story works within the world in which it is set and that makes Avatar fundamentally more solid, and, if you will, believable than many of its would be competitors.

Naturally there are criticisms, particularly of the simplicity of the story.  Cinematical summed them up well:

As advanced as the concepts are, stories filled with clichés and clunky dialogue. No one will dispute Cameron’s mastery of the visual and conceptual aspects of filmmaking, but in terms of dialogue and character development, his films often leave much to be desired. In Avatar, Cameron crafts quite a few howlers or ham-fisted lines of dialogue, and embraces a number of boilerplate movie catchphrases (the most egregious of which is probably “you’re not in Kansas any more”). Not to mention the story has been told dozens of times before in dozens of similar ways: scrappy soldier goes undercover in an alien (or foreign) environment only to fall in love with the culture he’s investigating, ultimately facing off against his former superiors. Plug in Native Americans and you’ve got Dances With Wolves, or mobsters and you’ve got Donnie Brasco.

This strikes me as rather unfair.  It’s true that “stranger in a strange land” is an oft used story structure.  But there’s a reason it gets used a lot: it’s a pretty good one.  It allows the movie to show the audience the strange new land through the eyes of someone similar to them.  The Na’vi have a reason for revealing their world and their secrets to Jake Sully.  It may not be one of filmmaking’s most original stories, but it is one of filmmaking’s most original worlds.  The story structure makes sense within the setting and the fact that it’s been used before doesn’t mean that it can’t be used effectively and originally, especially when what’s being shown off is something as large and varied as Pandora.

Saying that these kinds of stories “leave much to be desired” is a cheap and almost meaningless criticism.  Beowulf involves a hero from outside who comes to save a people.  The “Divine Comedy” has a stranger being taken through terrible and wonderful places.  Shakespeare stole almost all of his stories but he recounts them with such artistry that we can’t help but love them.  There are only so many ways to tell a story and James Cameron picked the one he thought best fit the science fiction universe he created.  Knocking him for that is tantamount to searching for a problem.

As for the dialogue, I can’t help but notice that most of the complaints about the phrasings are about military banter.  “You are not in Kansas anymore” seems to take the lead in terms of most cited example.  (That the line has been in a number of the advertisements can make it seem like a bigger part of the movie than it really is.)  In The New York Times Manohla Dargis cites Jake Sully’s macho declaration “Yeah, who’s bad”.  These lines are not going to cause anyone with a literature degree to swoon, but that’s beside the point.  Chest puffing military jargon is not supposed to sound layered and clever to civilian ears, it’s supposed to sound one dimensional and hard assed, which it does.  High testosterone speech is perfectly appropriate to the militaristic setting.  (Besides, if the various mercenaries in the film were spouting nuanced lines that showed how deeply they thought then Cameron would be criticized for making his mercs talk like warrior poets.)

As for the contentions that Avatar is racist, or at least racially boring, well, now we’re getting into thornier intellectual territory, but here too the criticisms fall short and miss the point.  First up, io9 complaining that we’ve seen this before and it’s no more fun this time around:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

That it’s nothing novel to have the white guy taking over the tribe is true.  But by dismissing it on the grounds that it’s a racial fairy tale (and a white guilt palliative) as old as the hills is to dismiss the cautionary aspects that Cameron has writ so large and bright across his screen.  It may be tiresome to see “alien” cultures portrayed through a white guy, but it was white culture that created the bombs that can vaporize us all.  It was white culture that clumsily industrialized the world to the point that we’re slowly killing ourselves.

As the multicultural roster of names on the credits make clear, what’s being portrayed here is no longer “white” culture.  It’s an increasingly multi-hued “Western” culture which sits astride the globe and is crashing blithely into its own apocalypse.  Dismissing the movie’s message because it targets that most influential (and lucrative) of audiences is narrow minded to the point of being reactionary.

James Cameron has never been pro- or anti- “military”, or pro- or anti- “corporate”, whatever those things may mean.  The one thing he has been is anti-military-corporate, or if you prefer the more common phrasing, anti-military industrial.  From The Terminator (1984) to Aliens (1986) to The Abyss (1989) to – especially – Terminator 2 (1991),* Cameron has always had dire, dire consequences resulting from the mixture of military arms and profit seeking.  Avatar fits quite snugly into that tradition.

And it is in that anti-military-industrial context that the racial aspect of Avatar needs to be placed.  Similar to this summer’s excellent District 9, Avatar grafts a well known racial subtext onto an alien species with, as Scott Eric Kaufman from Lawyers, Guns and Money puts it, “the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head”.  But to call it racist because it requires the white guy to become one of the tribe is a simplistic reading of an already simplistic plot.  Kaufman’s charge, that Avatar is racist because it sees no way for humans and aliens to coexist, is just factually incorrect:

The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different. They do not belong to the planet and therefore there is no possibility for peaceful coexistence.

The Na’vi don’t resist the humans because they’re different, they resist because the humans attacked their home.  Plain and simple.  There’s even a scene, when Avatar Jake first goes to the Na’vi village, where the old shaman woman explains to him that the humans do not listen because (and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember it exactly) their cup is already full of knowledge.  (Which, by the way, was a nice piece of dialogue.)  The Na’vi tried to understand the humans, the humans didn’t listen (and, to some extent, vice versa).  Whether they did so out of arrogance, or greed, or both is irrelevant; neither side views coexistence as a fundamental impossibility.

The inability of the two sides to get along comes about because the humans want access to a mineral deposit underneath the home of Na’vi and are willing to place military force in the service of a for profit venture.  Nowhere is it stated that this particular deposit is the last one, only that it’s particularly large and desirable.  It doesn’t need to be taken, humanity won’t die without it.  There is simply a resource that the military-industrial force sees as obtainable, regardless of other considerations.

Sigourney Weaver’s scientist character understands – and dies for – that tragedy.  She knows that her research is only possible because of the profitability of the venture, but she at least believes that it’s possible for both sides to, in some minimal way, get along.  Her humanitarian (if that is the right word) instincts are overridden by a profit hungry corporation that feels invincible because of its perceived military superiority.  The message here isn’t that the white man has to redeem the savages, or that corporations are inherently evil, or even that environmentalism should trump all other concerns.  It’s that marrying military might to profit seeking is inherently short sighted and leads inevitably to calamity.  That it comes wed to an old fashioned racial fable is a storytelling necessity, even in what we like to think of as our relatively enlightened time.

Cameron is what he has always been, a supremely capable filmmaker whose talent for spectacle is so great that it causes everyone to take notice of and dissect what he has done.  Here he tells a simple story in a grand manner, pairing it with the worthwhile message that placing violence in the service of profit is a terrible thing.  To focus on the racial history he piggybacks on, to quibble with the jargon, to scoff at a story that has been told before, all of these complaints wither before the scope of this movie.  Avatar is a monumental achievement, one that uses its technical supremacy to tell a good and simple parable in a manner that will garner it the widest possible exposure.  It knows its audience, it understands its context, and it will make enormous sums of money.  It is a perfect slice of our time.  Avatar is moviemaking at its most grand, profound, and memorable, a spectacle so great it demands attention.  Piddling complaints have their place in its wake, but only as the most buried of footnotes.

*Terminator 2 is, very quietly, maybe the best anti-war movie that has ever been made.  That it is never mentioned as an anti-war movie is a tribute to just how sneakily good it really is.  Not only does it terrorize its audience with the only semi-realistic depiction of nuclear holocaust in any major motion picture, but it concludes with a plea for simple human understanding so earnest and heartfelt that it cannot be anything but sincere.

End Note: Plenty of the politically natured criticisms of Avatar have perhaps revealed a bit more than they intended by assuming that the movie’s super valuable mineral is a stand in for oil.  The io9 piece linked above did this (“a mineral called unobtainium that can serve as a mega-energy source.”), as well as that great South Park episode I quoted (“one smurf-berry can power the school for two months!”).  To be fair, Parker and Stone were working before the movie came out, and it’s at least possible that the press kit or other promotional material refers to it as an energy resource.  But the movie itself leaves the purpose of the mineral deliberately unknown.  It never reveals what it does or why it’s so valuable.  Pressing that blank slate into service as an oil metaphor is a careless criticism.  It’s an understandable assumption, but it says more about the pre-conceived political notions of the person using it than it does about the movie itself.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, Avatar, James Cameron, Movies | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Depth of the Hole

20 December 09
“Now, the first order of business is to blame everything on the guy before me.” – “That Guy” C.E.O. of Planet Express

It is a truism of all of our lives that it is far more difficult and time consuming to create than it is to destroy.  A tower of children’s blocks takes a few seconds of careful placement to arrange but takes only a fraction of a second and a clumsy swipe to knock over.  Hours of work repairing or constructing an automobile or a computer can be negated by a moment’s carelessness.  A tree that takes years to grow can be cut down in a matter of minutes.  Buildings erected and reconstructed with detailed plans and meticulous labor can be blown up through the messy application of enough force.  Oil deposits that took millions of years to accumulate can be used completely in only a couple of centuries.  Destruction is fundamentally easier and quicker than creation.

It is with that grim constant in mind that I read the following two stories in Thursday’s New York Times:

Intelligence Improperly Collected on U.S. Citizens

That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy

The first is yet another reminder that the bad old days of Nixonian surveillance are back again.  Telephone conversations, e-mail messages, anonymous tips, anything is enough to have unelected bureaucrats begin sniffing through your life.  The Fourth Amendment lies protected in the National Archives yet seems to have little jurisdiction outside of the display case.

The second is about the unbelievably shoddy and haphazard nature of our water supply.  Clean water laws are in many cases decades out of date and operate as though no new products or chemicals had been introduced since the seventies.  Even worse, during the last eight years (the term “Bush Administration” is curiously absent though alluded to several times) the government agencies tasked with protecting our water were cast adrift, so to speak.  This in essence forces millions of Americans to play a kind of Russian roulette.  The odds are heavily in your favor that you will never suffer any kind of ill effects from your water.  However, the bullets (in this case, things like bladder cancer) are no less lethal for being extremely unlikely to hit you.

These are just two examples (and both are just subsets of larger already well known issues), but they and the countless others like them point undeniably to one conclusion: this country is in bad shape.  Far worse shape, in fact, than even relatively well informed people generally believe because the scope of the rot is literally inconceivable.  Almost every aspect of our unbelievably diverse and highly specialized society is some kind of dire straits, from food to roads to science to education to economics to politics and back again.  It’s too much for any one person, but we can say with some certainty that we’ve got problems.

None of these problems are insoluble.  (The drinking water can be fixed, the overreach of the surveillance state can be rolled back, etcetera etcetera etcetera.)  But neither are they quickly soluble, either because the rot is too great, the vested interests too powerful, or some combination of the two.  It is going to take time to fix them, which means that a lot of people are going to suffer in very real ways in the meantime.

So let us be plain about why these types of sacrifices are necessary: Bush the Younger did tremendous damage to this country, its people and its politics.  (The backlash against the “blame Bush” argument has already begun amongst the true believers on the right, but, like most of their crusades, it’s based on stubborn rhetoric and a strict ignorance of facts.)  He, with a lot of help, dug us into a very deep hole, one from which we cannot escape quickly or easily.  It’s going to take years.

Leave a Comment » | Barack Obama, Bush the Younger, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Taking the Good with the Bad

16 December 09
“Don’t I at least get to call my lawyer?” – Steve Sax
“You watch too many movies, Sax.” – Lou

If there has been one benefit to the interminable health care drama it is that the Obama Administration’s announcement that prisoners from Guantanamo Bay are going to be moved to Illinois managed to sneak largely under the radar.  The details are relatively straightforward.  Illinois built a maximum security prison that it’s never really used.  The Feds are going to buy it, renovate it, and turn it into Gitmo North.  (And kudos to whoever made sure all the media photos of the place show it with snow.  It both reinforces the idea of bringing them out of the Caribbean and still makes the place seem harsh.  It’s excellent imagery.)

Like much of Obama’s policy when it comes to restoring the basic rule of law in this country this move is a welcome one, but on an almost microscopic scale.  As always Glenn Greenwald has the must read piece (bold his):

Critically, none of those moved to Thomson will receive a trial in a real American court, and some will not be charged with any crime at all.  The detainees who will be given trials won’t go to Thomson; they’ll be moved directly to the jurisdiction where they’ll be tried.  The ones moved to Thomson will either (a) be put before a military commission or (b) held indefinitely without charges of any kind.  In other words, they’ll have exactly the same rights — or lack thereof — as they have now at Guantanamo.

[…]

The sentiment behind Obama’s campaign vow to close Guantanamo was the right one, but the reality of how it’s being done negates that almost entirely.  What is the point of closing Guantanamo only to replicate its essential framework — imprisonment without trials — a few thousand miles to the North?

Indeed.  If we’re still going to be imprisoning men without trial (or with trials of dubious validity) we’re still pissing all over one of the founding concepts of American liberty.  The geography of it, while a vast improvement, doesn’t seem to bear much on the heart of the matter.

Barack Obama bears a lot of the blame for trying to improve – instead of abolish – Bush Administration policies that are legally questionable and morally abhorrent.  But he does not bear it all.  It is we, the American people, in whose names this is being done.  And it is we, those very same humble people, who are so ambivalent about our basic civil rights:

(If pollingreport.com, an otherwise wonderful site, has a way to permalink certain polls I haven’t found it yet, so this will have to do.)

Bloomberg Poll conducted by Selzer & Co. Dec. 3-7, 2009. N=1,000 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.1.

“What do you think would be the best way to handle prisoners currently detained at Guantanamo: put them on trial as alleged criminals in U.S. courts, put them on trial before military tribunals, or detain them indefinitely without trials, either at Guantanamo or somewhere else?”

U.S. Courts Military Tribunals Detain w/o Trials Unsure
21% 57% 10% 12%

USA Today/Gallup Poll. Nov. 20-22, 2009. N=1,017 adults nationwide. MoE ± 4.

“Do you think it would be better to hold Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial in a civilian criminal court or a military court?”

Civilian Court Military Court No Preference (vol.) Unsure
36% 59% 2% 3%

There are other polls with slightly different numbers but the overall conclusion is pretty bleak: a solid majority of Americans are utterly unconcerned about these kinds of gross violations of our basic legal principals.

The above numbers are the true damage of terrorism.  Twenty men (19 in airplanes plus whoever was behind the anthrax letters), aided and abetted by seven and a half years of deliberate federal fear mongering, have frightened us away from the better angels of our nature.  That can (and probably should) be publicly lamented, but it’s an undeniable political fact.

Obama’s decisions on indefinite imprisonment and kangaroo military courts have been shameful in the extreme.  There is no denying or sugarcoating that, they are a disgrace.  That he had a chance to make a clean break and chose not to makes it doubly frustrating.  However, his actions are at least politically understandable.

For all the pomp and celebration last year we are still living in Bush the Younger’s America, and likely will be for years.  We are still living in a society that is scared.  We shouldn’t be, the horrors the Bush Administration routinely invoked were almost completely fictional and the bogeymen they threw away in Guantanamo were mostly innocent bystanders.  But we are.

That fear is dissipating, if nothing else the last two elections proved that much.  But it is far from gone and in the meantime getting a little good with the bad may be the best we’re going to get.  If nothing else, successfully housing these men in Illinois will inch them closer to their day in real court by proving to Americans that they aren’t so dangerous that they must be held on an island far from the US.  Unclenching the American sphincter will take time and each little bit, no matter how odious it remains, has to be counted as progress.

Leave a Comment » | 2012 Election, Barack Obama, Guantanamo Bay, Institutionalized Stupidity, Military Tribunals, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible, War on Terror | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

An Enduring Taboo Cracks Just a Little Bit

13 December 09
“And try and stop Pablo’s people from using drug money to buy arms from Lee’s countrymen who will in turn sell them to Yuri’s people so that they can ethnically cleanse the rest of this nauseatingly diverse grab bag of genetic party favors you call a family.  So now you understand, yes?  You all hate each other.” – Stewie Griffin

It’s December and as surely as that means Christmas music and year-in-review pieces it also means jewelry commercials on NFL football.  This year’s crop have been the usual mess of half baked yet improbably romantic situations.  A prosperous looking couple will be curled by the fire, or strolling down a ridiculously festive and prosperous street, or in some other impossibly romantic context when he reminds her of his love with some chemically inert metal and minerals.  She becomes as smitten with him as when they were newlyweds.  The end.

The hard and fast rule of this stupid and unvarying genre is that the couples be not only wealthy looking, but white.  (There’s certainly a logic to that, most of the country’s rich people are white after all.  Though you’d think it wouldn’t kill them to throw in an East or South Asian now and again.)  To call these commercials behind the times is a massive understatement.  Each one is a thirty second window into a lily white America that not only doesn’t exist now, but never existed period.

Most television commercials don’t insist on total whitewashing the way the ossified jewelry ads do, but that doesn’t mean that they’re much less racist.  On the contrary, they’re obsessed with race.  Tokenism was practically invented by teevee ads as a way to avoid dealing with race.  The clientele at a store, the revelers at a party, really any large group depicted in an ad will have its multicultural contingent carefully calibrated to achieve the least offensive mix possible.  It is the very essence of intellectual dishonesty, promoting cosmetic solutions and cover-your-ass based reasoning.

We can know this about them by what they don’t show us.  For despite all the different colored people the one thing you never see is a biracial couple.  If you see a man and a woman paired in a commercial, they will inevitably be the same color, whatever the product in question.  The diversity is a lie.

Then a few weeks ago I saw this add for blue jeans:

I’m not a television historian, so maybe this isn’t the first time this has ever happened, but it is the first time I can remember seeing a biracial couple in a major television campaign.  Not only is it a black man actually kissing a white woman (the very heart of the taboo), but the ad is trying to sell jeans by placing them in the context of authentic Americanism.  It’s an appeal to the greatness of the American people and they’re placing the freedom to love anyone front and center.  (None of this has a damn thing to do with blue jeans, of course, but for our purposes today that’s beside the point.)

It’s been more than four decades since Loving v. Virginia and little over a year since we elected our first half-black president, so we can see how long unspoken racism like this can take to fade.  And it seems unlikely that we’ll get a mixed race couple in a jewelry ad any time soon.  But it did happen, I saw it on national television, and that deserves a little recognition.

Leave a Comment » | Advertising, I Love America, The Vast Wasteland | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Denying the Future

9 December 09
“Welcome to the future, human slave!” – Bender

Over the last couple of days there was some discussion amongst some of the deans of the liberal side of the internet about just what it is that motivates climate denialism.  On Monday Digby asked:

Can someone explain to me why these people hate this climate science so much? I mean, I get that they don’t like gays and think women should stay barefoot and pregnant. I understand that they hate taxes that pay for things that help people they don’t like. Evolution — yeah, that’s obvious.

But global warming? Why? Is it all about their trucks or what? I just don’t get where the passion comes from on this one.

To which Amanda Marcotte replied:

Arguing with conservatives about this, I’ve been informed that the entire scientific community around the world (and all their millions, perhaps billions of supporters) is in cahoots to pull this sham because that means they get more federal research money.  I wish I was kidding.  That’s the entire motivation for this worldwide conspiracy.  Never mind that any scientist willing to sell out his soul in order to get paid would go immediately into global warming denialism, where the real money for no work is at.

[…]

I’m forced to conclude that it’s because denying the reality of global warming achieves the central goal of wingnuttery: pissing off the liberals.  And boy, is it effective!  Those liberals sure get steamed when they think about how reckless behavior will result in millions of unnecessary deaths.

Paul Krugman, whose inbox is apparently flooded with more than the usual vitriol whenever he writes about global warming, then expanded things a bit:

The anti-global-warming people are just filled with hate for anyone who suggests that maybe, just maybe, the vast majority of scientists are right.

And that in turn suggests that annoying liberals isn’t the whole story; no, they’re not enjoying themselves.

What I think is that we’re looking at two cultural issues.

First, environmentalism is the ultimate “Mommy party” issue. Real men punish evildoers; they don’t adjust their lifestyles to protect the planet. (Here’s some polling to that effect.)

Second, climate change runs up against the anti-intellectual streak in America.

Marcotte then responded to that and brought the whole thing in for a landing:

But honestly, I agree with him on this.  The wingnut tent is a big tent; there’s lots of room for various levels of speckle-shooting rage as well as smug fake superiority.  Krugman suggests that the twin motivations of misogyny (since environmentalism is a feminized “Mommy Party” issue) and anti-intellectualism drive the resentment that fuels the denialism.

[…]

Finally, the question is, why pay all this attention to motivation?  Who cares why they’re wrong, when the main thing is that they’re wrong?  The answer is very simple—knowing how the opposition works and what motivates them helps us craft our response.  If denialists were intellectually honest people arguing in good faith, then the key would be to sit them down and show them the data.  But since the motivation is based in an irrational need to believe that liberals are wrong on this, no matter what, then there’s not much we can do to argue with them.  Having a “debate” about this, much like having a “debate” about any scientific fact or theory that wingnuts take issue with, isn’t going to happen. The strategy has to be based around exposing their lies and trying to win over the scientifically illiterate mushy middle.

(For the sake of completeness, Digby’s other two posts in this vein are here and here.)

“Pissing off the liberals” and a reflexive disdain for intellectualism can both be filed under the general Red vs. Blue structure of much of what passes for discussion in this country.  Those are indisputably significant factors, but there’s more to it than just resentment.

It’s worth remembering that modern right wing thinking, what we speciously call conservatism (though on a strictly dictionary level it’s more aristocratic than conservative), arose as an opposition movement.  It was opposed to Roosevelt and the New Deal, it was opposed to American involvement in World War II, it was opposed to Civil Rights, the Great Society, Medicare and everything else that defined the bipartisan “liberal consensus” of post-war America.  It is an intellectual framework that is fundamentally opposed to any kind of modernity that doesn’t look like The Jetsons (where George is the breadwinner, Jane goes shopping, and the closest thing to a minority is a robot maid).

The essential conservative self conception is that liberals are naive.  All the data in the world, about evolution, about homosexuality, about incarceration rates, about contraception, about anything up to and including global warming, doesn’t do you a lick of good in an argument because their gut tells them its too fantastic to be true.  It’s certainly accurate to call it “anti-intellectual” as Krugman does, but that doesn’t paint the full picture.  It’s anti-modern, of which anti-intellectualism is an important part but by no means the whole.

More than any other single issue global warming feels to them like an ideological justification for making the world a more modern (aka liberal) place.  (That there is more money to be made in combating global warming than there is to be made in ignoring it, that lifestyles may not need to change much if at all, doesn’t hold any water because it strikes them as more fanciful naivete.)  Most people with a conservative bent don’t care enough to go on-line and complain about things (Marcotte’s “mushy middle”), they live their lives and pull the Red lever every two or four years.  They’ve made their peace with homosexuals living openly in big cities, with minorities in high profile positions, and with a lot of other things their parents and grandparents wouldn’t have liked at all.  But global warming is too expansive a concept to be safely contained within a ghetto or inside a television set.  Confronting it threatens to drag their entire world (literally) into the modern age, whether they like it or not.

When you get right down to it these people are afraid of the future and afraid for the future; and not without good cause.  Global warming is fucking scary.  Nuclear weapons are scary too, but that threat is contained in the hands of others.  Global warming is the people’s apocalypse.

It’s the ordinary “pull the lever every two years” folks who feel like they’re being blamed for selling their children short.  Even worse, the people doing the blaming are the same naive fools they already don’t trust.  The out and out climate denialists are merely at the far end of the give-a-shit curve, but the foundation of that misguided skepticism lies in an essential distrust and dislike of the modern world.  (Even conservatively minded people who’ll concede that global warming is real will often downplay it, seeing it as something that’s not as urgent as it’s made out to be.)  Climate denialism isn’t about pissing off liberals or anti-intellectualism, it’s not even entirely about Red vs. Blue.  It’s about rejecting the existence of a problem because the only solutions to it are modern and liberal.

Leave a Comment » | Climate Denialism, Global Warming, Systems Analyst | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Handicapping the 2020 Presidential Field

6 December 09
“Choke on that, causality.” – Professor Farnsworth

Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin have both been in the news lately.  A man Huckabee pardoned while he was governor of Arkansas shot and killed four police officers in Washington State.  Palin released a book to widespread attention.  Both events caused the political noise machine to try and figure out What It All Means in terms of its favorite topic: presidential campaigning.

To call this a complete waste of time is to understate the case.  Handicapping the 2012 Republican presidential field at this point is about as useful and possible as handicapping the 2020 presidential field or the 2016 Teen Choice Awards.  The most glaring problem is the fact that we have no idea what the political landscape of late 2011/early 2012 (when the selection will happen) will look like.  Will Barack Obama be considered “vulnerable” because of problems with the economy or the wars?  Or will he be considered all but invincible because those things have gone relatively well?  Who knows?  In the former case the nomination may attract a wide and diverse field; in the latter case you might see fewer or weaker candidates because the perceived odds of success are so long.  All we’re certain of is that there’s going to be a race; everything else is unknown.  It’s like trying to predict the winner of the Kentucky Derby before the horses have been born.

Beneath even that fundamental problem though the wildly premature presidential masturbation has an even deeper flaw.  Notice anything about who is being discussed?  Over here there’s Mitt Romney (private citizen).  Next to him are Huckabee (private citizen) and Palin (private citizen).  All of these people are famous politicians, they all became so through failed national campaigns, but none of them is a sitting governor or senator.  This is an unspoken, albeit understandable, flaw anytime someone purports to be seriously analyzing whether or not recent events have enhanced or degraded Person X’s presidential chances.  People dependent on pageviews, circulation and/or Nielsen ratings for their living have an easier time selling stories about people who are already household names.

There are forty sitting Republican senators and twenty-two sitting Republican governors, but going through that largely unknown roster would be too boring even by the dull standards of cable news even though it seems likely that the next Red nominee for President will come from their ranks.  You have to go back to 1980 and Ronald Reagan to find a Red nomination that went to someone other than a sitting governor, senator or vice-president.  Obviously that’s at least partly due to the fact that the Reds have had a lot of incumbents in that time.  But in December of 1997 (which is as far from the 2000 election as we are now from the 2012 election), Bush the Younger was still in his first term as governor of Texas and wasn’t being talked about nationally at all.

It’s certainly possible that Palin, or Huckabee, or any of the rest of the gang from the Red catastrophe of 2008 could be the 2012 nominee.  That none of them has actually won an election recently may not hold them back at all.  Really, anything’s possible.  So for the next two years remember that anything that bills itself as analysis of this topic is a complete fraud and a waste of time.  Anything else you might care to do with your time, up to and including absolutely nothing, is time better spent.

Leave a Comment » | 2012 Election, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

In the Valley of Political Expediency (and Death, don’t forget the Death)

2 December 09
“The first robot president won by exactly one vote.” – Leela
“Ah yes, John Quincy Adding Machine, he struck a chord with the voters when he pledged not to go on a killing spree.” – Bender
“But, like most politicians, he promised more than he could deliver.” – Professor Farnsworth

He gives good speech.  We knew that already, but there’s really no doubt about it.  In a little more than a half an hour he can remind us why Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, make his commitment of additional troops seem like the only rational course of action, and throw a (potentially significant) bone to those of us who see little to no future in America’s Afghan adventure.

Setting aside the pretty rhetoric and measured delivery there were really only two important things in that speech.  The first is immediate and leaked so long ago that it almost doesn’t qualify as news: the addition of more American troops.  (In the speech itself Barack Obama was at pains to also emphasize the renewed focuses on the civilian side of things and working with Pakistan, but those will inevitably be drowned out, in more ways than one, by the troops.)  The second is father off, but if Obama sticks to his rhetoric it has the potential to have the greater long term impact: the frank acknowledgement that at some point soon American involvement in Afghanistan must begin to end, and not at some hazy future date many years off, but in a measureable time that we can see clearly from the present.

He mentioned July of 2011 as the time at which American troop levels would begin to wane.  That is a mere twenty months from now.  (Twenty months ago he had not even secured the Democratic nomination.)  The freshmen amongst those stone faced cadets will be preparing to start their junior years at that point.  Of course the manner in which he mentioned the date was as tenuous as possible.  It is not the kind of written deadline we have with Iraq, nor is it a date by which the war itself would end.  Saying that in twenty months we’ll begin to end things is rather like an alcoholic saying that in a year and a half’s time he’ll begin cutting back.  There have been too many false dawns and broken promises already for so intangible a statement to be automatically given much credence.

But those previous falsehoods were not Obama’s, and while he cannot escape them entirely he also shouldn’t be expected to bear them fully.  Besides, we already know what will be said between now and then.  Over and over again, from now until that gossamer deadline twenty months from now, the fools who believe in war without end will say “How can you think of ending it now, right when things are going so great/terrible?” (It doesn’t matter to them.)  The rest of us will be saying “What’s done is done, now can we please get the hell out of here?”  The only question is the proportion of voices on one side versus the other.  If the preponderance is the latter, as seems likely to be the case (one has a hard time imagining seriously renewed enthusiasm for this war amongst the general population) then this may prove to be a masterstroke.

Effectively tripling the number of American troops in that country in his first year is not a small decision.  But however dubious the prospects of this renewed Afghan effort, it was a political necessity for him and he built in enough wiggle room to provide him with wide latitude as events develop.  If he is willing for that date to have meaning, and make no mistake it will take an enormous amount of will on his part, then it will have meaning.

The real question is whether or not he’ll be able to resist the unchanging urgings of the war crowd that victory is just around the corner.  The political pressure on him will be enormous, no matter what happens next November.  But if he wants to face the voters in 2012 with Iraq in the books and Afghanistan headed for a defined end date, then he can do so, provided he sticks to his guns.  That’s the window he opened last night, for himself and for all of us.  If he means it, if he can resist the pressure to continue, if can avoid being intellectually seduced by promises of future progress . . . if, if, if.  That’s not much, but it’s not nothing, and it has the potential to be a very big something.

Leave a Comment » | 2010 Election, 2012 Election, Afghanistan, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Cellular Decade

29 November 09
“I’ve been hoping I could find something that would be named after me.” – Principal Skinner
“And you’ve never found anything?” – Bart Simpson
“Once, but by the time I got to a phone my discovery had already been reported by Principal Kohoutek.  I got back at him though, him and that little boy of his.  Anyway, that’s why I always keep a cellular phone next to me.” – Principal Skinner

The decade in review pieces have begun to crop up, but there’s one reminiscing topic I’ve yet to see, and which I don’t think I am going to see: cell phones.  My sneaking suspicion is that most of the people writing the decade in review pieces had a cell long before the calendar turned over to triple zeros and don’t really think of it as a last-ten-years kind of development.  But it wasn’t until the beginning of this decade that those little things became utterly commonplace.  Of all the changes in the past ten years perhaps nothing has affected the way ordinary Americans live their lives more than cell technology.

At the beginning of the decade cell phones were still basically a luxury item.  Having one no longer meant that a person was a movie star or a drug dealer, but it wasn’t yet uncommon for someone not to have one.  Neither the phones nor the plans were cheap and the quality of the calls was awful.  There were “roaming” charges (remember those?) if you tried to use it more than about fifty miles from home.  And even the most expensive plans generally had minute restrictions that were extremely tight.  In short, it wasn’t yet something that many people could use as their primary telephone.

Of course, even that last word – telephone – is becoming something of an anachronism.  Now a telephone call is just one of a wide range of communication techniques that can be performed from just about anywhere.  With more and more cellular devices offering full internet access (and with the ever increasing variety of ingenious ways engineers have created to allow a tiny device an almost PC-level of control) the dream of having everything on the go is within reach.  (Whether or not that’s a good thing is a discussion for another time.)

It can be almost difficult to remember now, but there was life before cell phones.  Families at amusement parks had to set a place and time to meet rather than just arrange something as the day developed.  Car crash victims might lie on deserted roads until someone got to a phone and called the authorities.  Even the simple act of having a conversation with someone out of town was a serious commitment as long distance charges (remember those?) were nothing to sneeze at.  All that’s gone.  Pizza can be ordered on your way home from the movie.  Lunch arrangements can be changed on the fly.  Talking with someone on the other side of the country is routine and unremarkable.  At the store and wondering which item to purchase?  Call it in.

Cell phones have become ubiquitous.  Not that long ago being able to communicate from anywhere was the stuff of science fiction, now it’s an (almost) indispensible part of modern life.  And their true power only began to be realized once almost everyone had one.  Everyone being accessible from anywhere is perhaps the biggest change in the way day to day life is conducted since . . . what?  The automobile maybe?  It’s that level of societal change.  And it happened in almost the blink of an eye.

None of this is news.  And in 2019 we’ll look on even the smartest of today’s “smart” phones as laughably primitive.  But a fundamental aspect of our lives has changed and it happened so quickly we rarely ever talk about it.  Seems worth mentioning, though.

Leave a Comment » | Cell Phones, Systems Analyst | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Eyes On the Ball

25 November 09
“I don’t agree with his Bart killing policy, but I do approve of his Selma killing policy.” – Homer Simpson

Approximately 69 million people voted for Barack Obama last year and in doing so, whether they like it or not, each one also voted for a continuation of the Afghan War.  That’s not the way we generally think about it, but it’s true.  Obama never made any secret of the fact that he was planning on continuing the Afghan War.  Oh sure there were the usual campaign “specifics” which were hotly debated at the time and then forgotten six seconds after the networks declared a winner, but his general position couldn’t have been clearer.

I happen to be among the people that think his campaign position on Afghanistan was little more than cynical political calculation.  By campaigning for a renewed focus on the Afghan War Obama largely immunized himself from typically brainless politico-speak charges that he’s just a namby-pamby, weak-kneed, limped-dicked liberal.  But it came at a cost, one that must be paid in the blood of American troops, Afghani troops, and Afghani civilians.

By positioning himself as the right man to win, whatever that means, in Afghanistan Obama played into and reinforced one of the more insidious falsehoods of Bush the Younger.  For seven and a half years the most powerful man on earth scared the living fuck out of American citizens with frightful Muslim bogeymen.  While he was at it he also endlessly propagandized the myth of fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.  That sentiment is both bloody and ludicrous, but it’s so pervasive that in a radio interview last week I actually heard an active duty soldier parrot it back.  Like it or not that lie and the political sentiment behind it are still out there and still very powerful.

Obama bought into that while he was running for office and thus his rhetoric on Afghanistan remains politically gung-ho even as the casualty filled realities of staying there make themselves plain.  Yesterday the amusingly information free catchphrase-du-jour was “finish the job”, but I’m quite certain that there will be more euphemisms before that war winds to a close.  Whatever the fashionable terminology though, the government of Hamid Karzai will continue to be supported by American troops.  Anything less feels to many Americans like an invitation to catastrophe.

About the only consolation to be taken from the above is that Obama is only wedded to the Afghan War politically whereas his predecessor was wed to it both politically and personally.  If by some unholy miracle Bush the Younger were still president he’d be defending everything that had ever gone on there as part of some master narrative of tough guys with flinty grimaces on the cusp of winning the day.  Obama at least seems to view Afghanistan as the mess that it really is instead of some perverted presidential passion play.  So while he’s politically trapped himself into continuing it, quite possibly for his entire current term, he doesn’t seem fond of it.

That’s the only silver lining as we prepare for what everyone fully expects is a speech on Tuesday where he will announce his second escalation of the Afghan War in less than a year.  Most serious political and military observers view this decision as essentially a guarantee that the war will continue in some form or another through the 2012 election, still almost three years away.  (Unless, of course, we’re imagining miracles and this small, unilateral increase in troops is just what it’ll take to pacify untold thousands of square miles and untold millions of angry people.)  Granting that such agreed upon certainties can often be wrong, things don’t look quite as bleak in the long run.

As implausible as it now seems that this waste of lives and money will end before the next presidential election, assuming Obama keeps his job it seems just as implausible that he would blithely hand this war off to his successor in 2017 as it was handed to him in 2009.  In 2012, with the credibility that comes from ending the Iraq War without the dire predictions of right wingers coming true, pledging to end the Afghan War in a sensible way will be enormously easier.  As I said above, Obama doesn’t like this war; he doesn’t see continuing it as demonstration of his genital confidence.  He simply needs it for political purposes.

Whatever number of extra troops Obama announces is almost irrelevant.  (Other than to the troops and the Afghanis, of course, but nobody cares what they think anyway.)  The ending of the wars of Bush the Younger is dictated by the timetable of our presidential elections.  Two in one term was simply too much to ask of a country as misled as ours.

Leave a Comment » | 2012 Election, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Bumps In the Night

22 November 09
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to appear in a tortilla in Mexico.” – God

Ever get the feeling that somebody’s watching you?  Of course you do.  Everyone does.  Upon feeling this, have you ever looked up or around only to see that you are correct?  Again the answer is almost certainly “Yes”.  Towards the end of Supersense: Why We Believe the Unbelievable”, Bruce Hood tells us that approximately 90% of people believe that they can tell when someone is looking at them.  90% is a big number, it includes people who are religious and irreligious, men and women, smart and stupid, short and tall.  But it’s false.  You have no means of detecting when someone is looking at you if you can’t also see them.  None.  You’re just more likely to remember the few times you were correct instead of the many you weren’t.  Yet nine out of ten people think they can detect something that isn’t there; nine out of ten people think they have a supernatural ability.  Why?

That, broadly speaking, is the question that occupies Hood’s book and it’s a damned good one.  Even atheists tend to be superstitious; they’ll avoid walking under a ladder, or tossing salt over their shoulder, or, in one of Hood’s favorite examples, donning a sweater that was once owned by a murderer.  On the surface this would seem to be strange, why would a person who explicitly does not believe in supernatural forces care in the least about wearing a perfectly good sweater just because it had once belonged to a murderer?  But he describes with fascination, and a hint of glee, that once told of the sweaters provenance people will shrink from it, skittish even about touching it, much less donning it.

Hood is an expert on cognitive development and that is where he finds his explanation.  He describes how the human mind is wired for intuition, which basically boils down to finding patterns, even where none exist or there isn’t remotely enough information to rationally detect one.  This is where the killer’s cardigan fits.  Most people don’t know even one sweater wearing murderer, much less more than one.  The sweater is therefore both novel and associated with something bad.  The intuitive part of the mind shrieks an alarm (new + bad = avoid) even as the rational part of the mind says that the killer is in prison and the sweater isn’t the least bit dangerous.  Trusting rational thinking over intuition like that isn’t easy.  Doing it all the time is close to impossible, hence superstitious atheists.

Hood goes to great lengths to point out that while such things are irrational, they are also perfectly natural.  He goes through numerous examples of experiments with child development, demonstrating how kids think and how that thinking changes as they grow and their brains develop.  One of them asked children about how animals came to be.  If you ask five- to seven-year olds they’ll either say that god made them or that animals have always been like that.  If you put the same question to ten- to twelve-year olds, you’ll get a mixed response of religion and evolution, depending on their home environment.  But if you ask eight- and nine-year olds you’ll get a very creationist account of how things came to be, regardless of whether they have religious or irreligious parents.  In short, a part of our brains are hard wired to see purpose, whether or not there is any.  That wiring is naturally present in childhood and sticks with us as we grow.

Another example Hood cites is that of the Auld Sod Export Company, which sells authentic dirt from Ireland to sentimental Americans.  Hood points out that due to US import restrictions the sod has to be sterilized before it can be imported, thus the dirt is just that, dirt.  It contains no seeds, nor essence of life, nor any bacteria; it is clean enough to eat.  Yet for plenty of people this dirt is special enough, “sacred” as Hood describes it, to be worth purchasing.  Even though there is no natural difference between this dirt and dirt geology deigned to place elsewhere, the intuitive part of the brain places an importance on it.

Since all people harbor those same thinking mechanisms, Hood argues that trying to be completely rational is both impossible and, more importantly, anti-social.  Recoiling at the killer’s sweater demonstrates to other people in the room that you too abhor murder.  Purchasing Irish dirt displays your affinity for the Emerald Isle.  Every group of people, no matter how small or large, holds certain things sacred, holds certain ideas to be above a rational cost-benefit analysis.  If we did not, we would have no means of bonding with other people, and as a social animal we need that almost as much as we need food.

It is that last point, that the sacred makes the social possible, to which Hood devotes the final, tiny chapter of this book.  Quite frankly it would’ve been nice if he’d expanded that part a bit.  Through more than two hundred well footnoted pages he builds a clear and convincing argument about the inherent nature of superstitious belief, of seeing patterns where there are none, of confirmation bias bedeviling us all.  But only at the end does he touch on ideas like the social importance of things like sacred Irish dirt and murderer’s sweaters.

If our reactions to some things, positive or negative, are a form of social glue, what else does that tell us about ourselves?  Could the strictly rational itself ever become sacred?  If everyone possesses some intuitiveness and some rationality, what kinds of social and environmental factors push people more towards one than the other?  Hood doesn’t really address these issues in the book, and while there’s a plainly obvious reason for that – he’s dealing with a lot of sacred cows and wants to keep his book on firm scientific ground – it still would’ve been interesting to get his take on some of the more open ended questions that are raised by his conclusion.

Nevertheless, “Supersense” is one of those rare books that can put a lot of past experiences into a new light in an “Oh, that’s why I felt that way that one time” kind of way.  Books and articles about how the brain functions often do that sort of thing, but rarely are they as comprehensive as this one.

Leave a Comment » | Book Reports, Bruce Hood, Supersense | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Shawl

18 November 09
“I forgot to clean the lint basket in the dryer.  If someone broke in to the house and did laundry it could start a fire!” – Marge Simpson

There has been much – and much publicized – Red hang wringing over the decision to have Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other guys (whom nobody cares nearly as much about) stand trial in a federal courthouse New York City.  There’s been enough of this absurd theater, which so self evidently oxymoronic that it can only really be described as “belligerent worrying”, to support half an episode of The Daily Show.  There’s obviously a lot of comedy to be had in the sight of chest thumping wanna-be warriors cowering in fear of a heavily shackled man, to say nothing of the easily mocked hypocrisy of serially over-reacting nimrods like Rudolph Giuliani.  But there’s more to it than just the usual right wing cant of nouns, verbs and “9/11”s.

That refrain, so effective for so long, is fading into history right before our eyes.  That is an unambiguous positive for the country as a whole.  However, for those who’ve long seen it as their best rhetorical weapon it is a disaster of world changing proportions.  This goes not only for office seeking members of the Republican Party, it runs straight down from them through the entire electorate.  The 2001 attacks, which have been culturally shorthanded as “9/11”, were more than just a political weapon to be wielded by Bush the Younger and his adoring supporters.  “9/11” was a cultural phenomenon that dwarfed any fad in recent history.

It was on t-shirts and bumper stickers, in popular songs and on television.  It provided an all encompassing justification for American nationalism at every level from televised Washington talk shows to barbershops, barstools and beauty salons.  Every time someone’s conservative uncle went off at a family picnic the entire cultural force of “9/11” was there to back him up.  In every conversation about the wider world between teenagers (some of whom would grow up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan), “9/11” was there.  Long after the rubble was cleared and the victims mourned, “9/11” stayed.  It quickly became less a terrorist attack and more a revival movement, perhaps the greatest America had seen in a century or more.  But like the Great Awakenings, like the drive to prohibit alcohol, indeed like all revival movements, this one cannot sustain itself.

The first hard evidence that it was petering out was probably the 2006 election results.  But it wasn’t until the last presidential campaign, especially as Giuliani became more and more of a cartoon, that speculation began in national media circles about how we were now living in a post-post-9/11 world.  Cutesy phrasing aside, that was an astute point and now we’re seeing it put into reality.  This is also part and parcel of why closing Guantanamo is such a bugaboo for terror crazed nationalists.  Guantanamo is for prisoners of war, if it’s closing doesn’t that mean the war is ending too?

Putting Mohammed on trial in New York (and, as nobody but Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, even that still isn’t good enough) is the beginning of the end for the cultural fad of “9/11”.  The event that everyone at the time agreed “changed everything” actually didn’t change very much at all.  For people who go for kitschy “9/11” porn, like bald eagles with tears in their eyes, the 2001 attacks delivered on the failed apocalyptic promises of Y2K and those “Left Behind” books.  It was the ultimate in righteous justification, but it wasn’t the apocalypse; after all, here we are eight years later.

None of the above is to suggest that there aren’t millions upon millions of Americans for whom the culture of “9/11” is still roaring along.  There are; but there are less of them this year than there were last year and next year there will be even fewer.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?  He’s just a name, albeit one that has the renown and malice of a spook story to significant chunks of the country.  So long as he’s in legal limbo in some exotic tropical prison the myth of the all-capable terrorist mastermind can continue.  But when he’s carted off to some anonymous, out-of-sight/out-of-mind concrete box, no different than any other convicted murderer, that’s when his name will fade.

It is in the interest of right wing politicians and their blabbering surrogates to object to that outcome.  It will cost them a powerful bogeyman and erode the culture of “9/11” (which they have so egregiously exploited) even further.  And so we are left with their belligerent worrying.

Leave a Comment » | 11 September, Guantanamo Bay, I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, Military Tribunals, Obama Administration, Sophomoric Imperialism, Torture, War on Terror, equus altus morium | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Legacy Costs

15 November 09
“If we quit now we’ll never know how badly they’re gonna beat us.” – Homer Simpson

There is an almost papal quality to watching the anticipation of Barack Obama’s decision on a new Afghan strategy.  The leaks and rumors are flying fast and heavy, but in the meantime there’s no deadline on his decision (Red charges of “dithering” fell flat) so all the chattering classes and the byline brigade can do is watch the White House for the white smoke that will mean we have a new Afghan strategy.

What I haven’t seen pointed out anywhere is that the only decision he could make that would actually qualify as Big News is one of the few he is explicitly not considering: a withdrawal of most or all of American troops from Afghanistan.  Whether he sends 40,000 more troops or just three extra guys named Ted the Western effort in Afghanistan is going to continue.  There is a very strong case to be made that setting a deadline on American involvement and beginning the process of winding down the war is the right thing to do, in both military and humanitarian terms.  But those arguments have no place to be heard because the most compelling reason for continuing the war is, and remains, domestic American politics.

I’ve said that before, now comes word that I’m not the only one that thinks so.  This is from a short piece by Garry Wills in the current New York Review of Books:

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.

Indeed.  But Wills confines himself to speculation about Barack Obama as a one term president.  What he doesn’t address (like I said, it’s a short piece) is what effect that would have on the (presumably) Republican 2012 victor.  If the Reds won back the White House on the strength of charges about Blue weakness on “terrorism” and other “national security” type questions they would be almost compelled to send the American military gallivanting around the globe in search of those ever elusive Bad Guys.  In other words, a withdrawal from Afghanistan that was so politically costly to Barack Obama as to make him a one term president could very result in more war, not less.

It is nauseating conclusion, that American troops must die on the far side of the world so that foolish Americans at home can be kept away from the levers of power.  But it is inescapable.  A Red victory in 2012 would be seen, by the victories party and by much of our hackneyed media, as a vindication of the theory of perpetual war, of making America safe by forever fighting abroad.  The damage they could wreak with that righteous sense of fresh vindication and political justification is almost beyond imagining.

None of that will come as any comfort to those whose lives will yet be lost or shattered as Obama plods ahead in Afghanistan.  That goes for Americans, Afghanis and other alike.  But those future casualties, however certain they may be, shrink to insignificance when placed next to the corpse pile amassed by Bush the Younger.  That man did tremendous damage to this country, its people, and its politics and there isn’t enough political genius in the world to mend it in a mere four years.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with history can tell you that not everyone who dies for their country dies gloriously for their country.  Sometimes they die in pointless avalanches of shit, or in ill conceived gambits by incompetent superiors, or simply by vicissitudes of chance.  The history of war is the story of the young dying for the mistakes of their elders.  The walking dead of Afghanistan, those who will die (or be shredded) between now and the exhaustion of the conflict, are just the next in that tragic line.

At this point, when America and the world are already waist deep in blood, gore, severed eyeballs and destroyed lives, it’s better to wade through to the certain shore than grasp for an early exist and risk falling head first into the mire.  Make no mistake, that is the danger of a one-term Barack Obama.  It can be couched in the polite terms of The New York Review of Books, but everything we know about Obama’s likely opposition in 2012 means more war, more waste and more death, especially if one of the main points of contention is that Obama “lost” Afghanistan.  One sounds closed-mindedly partisan when saying that, but it doesn’t alter the facts or the stated attitudes of the opposition.

Obama’s only political vulnerability on Afghanistan comes from looking weak.  Those of us up in the gallery can only hope that he’s savvy enough to keep himself in office without getting in too deep.  Passing zero wars onto his successor isn’t enough; he has to do it in a way that keeps the number at zero after he’s out of office.

Leave a Comment » | 2010 Election, 2012 Election, Afghanistan, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

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