Mutual Ignorance

25 January 12
“Gentlemen, we’ve got to sink this Lisa Lionheart doll, and fast!  It’s time to call in a favor from Washington.” – Malibu Stacy Executive
“Yes.  Yes, I understand.  I’ll take care of it personally.” – Congressman
“Dad, did you hear something?” – Lisa Simpson
“I-unno.” – Homer Simpson

After last Wednesday’s unprecedented strike and the Congressional panic it induced, the internet – roughly speaking – took something of a victory lap.  Some of these were better than others, but most had the decency to point out that the struggle was far from over.  Even among that sober strain, however, fundamental stupidity about politics in early 21st Century America seeped through the cracks.

The day after the blackout, TechCrunch ran a guest post by a guy named David Binetti, whom they described as:

the CEO and co-founder of Votizen, a consumer technology company based in Mountain View, CA, focused on giving voters a greater voice.

Binetti notes the size of the protest as well as the remarkable turnaround in the fortunes of SOPA and PIPA; but he loses the tether to real politics rather quickly when he uses the success of the blackout to argue against more sustained internet lobbying in Washington.  His operating assumption is that, should the vile ideas in SOPA and PIPA ever rear their heads again, the internet will come down from its mountaintop fortress, kick some ass, and then order will be restored.  This indicates a level of ignorance about how Congress works on a par with Congress’s ignorance about how the internet works:

In truth, for SOPA this is more likely a retreat than a surrender. The fight will continue, and here’s where things will really get interesting. Professional lobbyists are no doubt approaching the venture capitalists who have supported the anti-SOPA movement, explaining in compelling terms why they will need to have effective representation, a permanent organization to support their interests, and a budget to match the $50M+ coffers held by the MPAA. Most inside the Beltway are likely to interpret yesterday’s activities as a flash in the pan, will hunker down to wait out this phase, and insist that this is a K-Street battle that must be fought on K-Street.

This is understandable — arms merchants, more than anything else, want people shooting at each other — but doing so would likely be a mistake for the movement. If the tech community plays the lobbyist/money game and hires its own lobbyists, then it is playing on their opponent’s game on their opponent’s turf.

Instead, they should see what is happening in this rising opposition to SOPA in more familiar terms; namely, that the political industry itself is under massive disruption, and this is just the beginning. Once the population at large appreciates its newly found influence and starts to see that getting involved really does make a difference, it is likely to generate more activity and activism, leading to greater results. In fact, I believe historians may look back on SOPA as an early example of a new era of political engagement based on social media, much as how the 1964 Daisy ad precipitated a new era of political activity based on television.

That is hopelessly childish and the exact opposite of what champions of the internet as a medium should be doing.

People who just dip in and out of the news have the impression that Congress has debates, and then every once and a while there’s a big vote, and those things are talked about by informed people.  But that isn’t how Congress works at all.  Whenever it’s in session, Congress is voting.  It’s voting on things no one cares about, it’s voting on things that will never be reported by anyone outside of the Congressional Record, it’s voting on amendments to amendments and the movement of bills within committees.  Congress is always voting, which is why the spectacular protest theory of pressuring Congress will always lose to the steady, day by day, cocktail by cocktail, vote by vote theory of pressuring Congress.

There is no rule anywhere that says that the various provisions of SOPA and PIPA have to be placed in one big bill that the internet can take notice of.  Little things can be slipped into a budget bill here, a farm appropriation there, and the only way to keep an eye on those things is to pay very well connected people a shitload of money to have your interests always at heart.  It’s not pretty, and it’s even less democratic, but for now that is the way that things work.

Consider 1964, which Binetti invokes as a similar dawn of a new era.  The big legislation of the day, Medicare, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, didn’t get passed because Lyndon Johnson gave a speech or Martin Luther King led a march.  They got passed because of ground level lobbying and organizing by labor unions, activists, and deep pocketed organizations that knew how to make members of Congress squirm.  Moreover, those things took sustained effort over years, not just one spectacular event.

Wikipedia cannot maintain that kind of engagement.  It doesn’t have the budget or the personnel.  It isn’t a site designed to foster political engagement, and neither is Reddit or Tumblr.  Those sites, the uncountable others that went on strike last week, and most importantly their user bases, simply aren’t designed with constant Congressional action in mind.

To his credit, Binetti’s startup “Votizen” is geared toward that kind of relentless pressure.  But in addition to only being a tiny startup, it’s also roughly three thousand miles off target:

Contact
Votizen
548 Market Street
San Francisco, Calif. 94104

The only way to keep an eye on Congress is to have a constant physical presence in Washington, D.C.  There is no alternative.  Hands need to be shaken, aides and members of Congress need to be harassed and taken out to lunch.  Meetings and hearings need to be attended.  And all of this needs to happen year round.

The proponents of SOPA, PIPA, and all the anti-internet provisions they still hold dear understand this.  Here’s the MPAA’s contact page:

Contact Us
Washington, D.C.
1600 Eye St., NW
Washington, D.C. 20006

They list nine other cities on that page, but Washington is right at the top.

The internet is a wonderful long distance communication tool, and last Wednesday’s blackout was a spectacular and wonderfully effective display of that.  But if you want representation in the U.S. government, even if all you want is to be left alone, you need to be in Washington, greasing the right palms, all the time.

Leave a Comment » | SOPA/PIPA, The Art of the Possible, The Information Superhighway | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Russian Is Cut

22 January 12
“That cactus is right!” – Homer Simpson

Four years ago, South Carolina did more than any other state to set up McCain-Obama, the best possible matchup.  And while Mitt Romney is still the most likely Red nominee – even after last night’s Palmetto drubbing – if he is going to lose, this is pretty much how it has to happen.  The South is the stronghold of the Reds, and no one can ascend to the Throne of Skulls without its support.  Eyes turn to the Sunshine State, and the guy many in the byline brigade thought unstoppable needs a win.  If Mittens loses in America’s Wang, he’s in serious trouble.

The political press will be filled with stories about just that for the next week and a half, but the only important consideration is whether or not Romney’s support in Florida collapses the same way it did in South Carolina.  If that happens, then at the very least we’re in for a long nominating process, and we ought to have a good idea about how that’s going by next weekend.  In the meantime, it’s worth pondering the man who’s making Mitt sweat through his high thread count magic underwear.  He’s #94 in your programs, but #1 in your heart: Newt Gingrich.

Even by the standards of all the Not Romneys who came and went over the last six months, Gingrich is improbable.  To sober eyes, he has more strikes against him, personal, ethical, and otherwise, than the rest of the pretenders put together.  His campaign operation is just this side of non-existent, he’s disliked by a majority of the voting public, his ideas are the definition of hackneyed, and he looks like a bridge troll.  Despite all that, he is the preference of his party’s true home.  New Hampshire is unlikely to be in the Red column this November, Iowa even less so.  South Carolina, however, wouldn’t vote Blue even if George Wallace came back from the dead.

That’s why Mitt’s South Carolina problem – and his potential Florida problem – are his electoral weaknesses writ small.  He can’t get to 1600 without the quarter of the population that never stopped backing Bush the Younger.  And those Americans don’t trust him, and never will.

Make no mistake, they want that black – black! – son of a bitch kept away from the state china, but they also don’t think milquetoast Mittens is the man to do it.  Their televisions and radios tell them that Barack Obama is unpopular and hated; their friends agree.  The mid-term elections support this idea.  So why not Gingrich?  The man hurt Clinton better than any other Republican, and that matters more to them than all the divorce lawyers and jewelry clerks in the world combined.  For them, Gingrich is easy to picture as Mighty Casey, poured into his uniform and bat in hand, stepping up to the plate.

Those are the people who gave Gingrich his big plurality in South Carolina, and while they will punch the Red ticket regardless of who’s on it, they’d prefer a champion.  In that regard, Gingrich is baggage free.  He’s back after a decade of irrelevance, still fighting.  The insults, the jokes, the pain, all of it works in his favor.  For people who believe that they’re restoring America, he couldn’t be better fit.

Mitt Romney may yet hang on to win this thing.  And the issues and economy that will tip the scales in November are still unclear.  But while Mittens can be the nominee, he can never be their champion.  The question now is whether or not that matters.

Leave a Comment » | 2012 Election, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Republican Presidential Primary, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Other People’s Rules

18 January 12
“Stop it, you two, this is Thanksgiving, so glue friendly or I’ll take your glue away and then no one will have any glue to glue with!” – Homer Simpson
“Dad, this isn’t about glue.  It’s about territoriality.  He only wants the glue because I’m using it.” – Lisa Simpson

For the first time in its eleven year history, Wikipedia is deliberately offline today.  The site that, more than any other, believes in making reliable information free to everyone has deliberately disabled itself to protest the potential stupidity of the American government.  It’s been joined by many others, everything from big name sites like Boing Boing and Reddit down to little personal blogs.  You’ve got to give the noxious twins of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act credit for one thing, they’ve made the great, brawling cacophony of the internet angrier and more unified than it has ever been.

That alone is a worthwhile moment in the still fresh history of humanity’s most expansive tool, and there are a lot of ways it can be interpreted.  Charitably you can see it as a protest of the informed and active against the ignorant and lazy, of people who work to make life better for others against those who would use their position to benefit themselves and their free spending colleagues.  Less charitably you can see it as a chest thumping exercise in self congratulation, the amorphous internet community openly declaring that it really is smarter than everyone else.

It goes almost without saying that I tend toward the former view, but that’s why the latter interpretation, pushed by bought off politicians and the shamelessly mendacious idiots they serve, is more interesting.  There really are people of great power out there who think that fucking with DNS – the good faith backbone of the system that supports almost every major transaction we conduct – is a good idea.  That’s like forcing people to legally change their names for a speeding ticket, and so what if no one ever gets their mail again.

Of course, it’s actually worse than that.  They think that mentioning something should be the same as doing something.  That’s like imprisoning someone for mentioning crime.  They think that freezing the money of a group is an appropriate response to unpopular speech.  That’s like bankrupting someone for saying the emperor has no clothes.  They think helping people conceal themselves from the worst governments on Earth should be punishable because someone, somewhere, might see a movie without paying $8.95.  Worst of all, they want all of these measures to be enforced not through the courts or by the government, but by private organizations and whatever vicious dogs they see fit to hire.  Oh, and it stands almost no chance of actually curbing intellectual property piracy, in the U.S. or elsewhere.

There’s a reason these two bills have sparked such universal and vitriolic opposition.  They are fundamental attacks on not just the internet, but on the very idea that someone else doesn’t have a right to tell you what you can and cannot say.  That these attacks come in the form of authorizing one private entity to tell another to shut the fuck up or else is simply a sign of the times.

Like so many other political battles of this day and age, it’s about those who already have.  In this case, it’s media companies who publicize television shows, movies and music wanting to keep things going the way they have been.  They’re afraid of the future because it might mean less (though nothing close to penury) for them, and they’re perfectly willing to burn down everything else if it means stopping that from happening.

It’s the same story that’s characterized our politics since the dawn of the Republic, and it’s grown wildly out of control in the last few decades.  Whether you’re talking about banksters keeping their unjustifiable and enormously expensive tax loopholes (carried interest, anyone?), the insurance industry writing itself into health care reform as a legally required skimmer, extractive industries exploiting the government to avoid paying for the things they take out of the ground and the messes they leave behind, or any other large, established and deep pocketed group, the government is at an historic level in terms of ease-of-bribing.  The specifics vary – the last time the media colluders got this excited it was yet another copyright extension – but the overall pattern is always the same.  A small group, a veritable special interest, gets favorable treatment for the government at the expense of everyone else.

When called on this, as they have been to an impressive and heartwarming degree on SOPA and PIPA, their response is always the same: trust us, we know what we’re doing and you don’t.  They’re lying, of course.  They always are.  Environmental regulations won’t bankrupt the oil industry anymore than minimum wage laws bankrupt small businesses or financial regulation cripples banks.  Nor, for that matter, has on-line piracy substantially hurt movies, television or music.  It isn’t just that the problem is smaller than they say, it’s that the problem might not exist at all, and it certainly isn’t worth blowing up the internet to not fix a non-problem.

Today there’s been a real fight against censorship and for free speech, and it’s nice to have corporate behemoths like Google on the side of the good guys.  But while messing with the internet arouses more attention than most of these fights do, it’s important to recognize that this is just another battle in the very old war of a tiny group reaching into everyone else’s lives for their own narrow benefit.  If SOPA and PIPA die, then that’s a real accomplishment.  And if, when they are inevitably resurrected (and this isn’t the first time the media cowards have tried this) they are defeated again, those too will be real accomplishments.  But amid the cheers, it should be noted that this is a rare win for the public good, and that these sorts of fights shouldn’t have to be this damn hard.

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

A Moment of Clarity

15 January 12
“I work like a Japanese beaver!” – Homer Simpson
“Oh, really?  I came to see you three times today.  Twice you were sleeping and once you were kicking that ball of electrical tape around.” – Marge Simpson

The main political internet brushfire this week wasn’t New Hampshire.  It was the pathetic, hat in hand, please-sir-can-I-have-some-more, The New York Times public editor genuinely questioning whether or not the most respected newspaper on the planet should actually do its fucking job.  As anyone even vaguely familiar with how the world works west of the Hudson River would know, the mealy mouthed clarifications didn’t help matters.  A resounding “Yes!” arose from the masses, and Paul Krugman – cited in the original post – was studiously silent.

That the Times should hold its news stories to at least the same verifiable standard that Wikipedia uses is blitheringly obvious and no further endorsement is necessary.  But beyond the snarky affirmatives, consider what doing that would mean for the Times, and what it would mean for the rest of the establishment media that looks up to the Times the same way the rest of the Ivy League looks up to Harvard.

Routinely using paragraphs like the one the public editor suggested – “The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.” – would cause the Paywalled Lady a lot of grief.  It would lead to enough talk radio dudgeon to cause a few subscription cancellations, it would be the de rigueur topic of cable gossip news for days (and likely become a running theme), and it would give even the clumsiest Red politician a roaring applause line.  The Times is, of course, long accustomed to right wing criticism, but this would be a new order of scorn.  Fact checking Red politicians in the Times might lead to the same thing happening in other coverage, and that makes it a declaration of war.

The fantasy-based worldview of the American right has long preyed on the good faith assumptions of the press.  As the evidence mounted against things like supply side economics and abstinence only sex ed, the Reds simply refused to budge, made up their own truthy statistics, and dared big city reporters, who think of regular America as an extended scene from Hoosiers and are feel guilty for not living there, to call them on it.

It certainly helps that most media companies are owned by billionaires, but the self deceiving Dudley-Do-Right naivete of mainstream reporters, and their cloyingly childish cynicism, is the main problem.  The awful cocktail party guest list of “analysts” that CNN touts as the best in the business is evidence enough of that.  Which all means that if the Times follows through on fact checking speeches, it means not only going to war with the professional right wing, it means humiliating and rebuking all of those other journalists in the press pool.

Reporting and publicly commenting on the news is and always has been fraught with ethical conundrums.  Even the simple and unavoidable act of deciding what gets covered and what doesn’t opens one up to charges of bias.  The vestal virgin attitude of outfits like the Times are naive at best and war enabling at worst, any crack in them is a welcome sign.  Now if we could just get television news to start fact checking something other than Saturday Night Live, we might really be getting somewhere.

Leave a Comment » | Print is Dead, Systems Analyst, The New York Times | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Perennial Killer Silence

11 January 12
“Nothing beats a stroll in cattle country.  Hi, I’m Troy McClure!  You may remember me from such educational films as ‘Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun’ and ‘Firecrackers: The Silent Killer’.” – Troy McClure

As the Granite State anti-climax echoes among the politically engaged today, heavy with themes about the inevitability of Mitt Romney and the last stand of the Not Romneys in South Carolina, there will be no room for any discussion of the small text box that appeared on page A9 of yesterday’s New York Times:

The Department of Defense has identified 1,853 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations.

Yesterday’s announced toll was seven men, ranging in age from 20 to 44.  (You know, voters.)  And, of course, neither the Times nor any other news outfit is keeping careful track of the number of Afghans killed, though it seems safe to assume it was greater than seven.

Whether or not Romney can wrap things up in the next couple of weeks, it’s becoming undeniably clear that our shooting war in Afghanistan is going to be a total non-issue in the 2012 election.  It remains a war that’s been forgotten despite the fact that even the most optimistic estimates say we’re still going to be fighting it for at least another two years.  Nor are there any indications that it will be an electoral issue in 2014 or 2016.

The Iraq War got its moments in the electoral spotlight in 2002, 2004 and 2006, and had a strong supporting role in 2008.  Even though Afghanistan was going on during that time, it could never outshine its younger sibling.  The most attention it got in 2008 was when Obama used it as cover for his position on ending the Iraq War, citing his desire to continue it as proof that America’s first black President wouldn’t abandon our long tradition of bombing brown people.  Now that Iraq is behind us, Afghanistan has no avenue to break through a bad economy and the studied indifference of both parties.

In a year that will see countless television ads, innumerable political discussions and speeches, and probably three live debates between President Obama and his opponent, Afghanistan is likely to get no more than a bare minimum of attention.  A journalist or op-ed piece will bring it up from time to time, but no one in a position to do so is going to press either of the candidates on any of the war’s intractable problems: the hapless Karzai government, the unsustainably huge and still ill trained Afghan army, the continuing deterioration of our relations with Pakistan that the war causes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Both parties have the same position, as unchanging as it is bloody and naive: that in a couple of years the Afghan government and army will be able to take everything over and then we’ll be able to leave.  In a very cynical sense that’s true.  Since we’re unable to have a discussion about alternatives, we are very likely going to continue propping up that government for a couple of years before slinking off in the middle of the night like we did in Iraq.  Of course, the country is equally very likely to collapse again into civil war and chaos whether we leave in 2012, 2014 or sometime later.  But even though that’s what pretty much everyone expects to happen – how is Afghanistan supposed to pay for that huge army? – no one is going to talk about it.

As a sign of the times, that silence is not particularly novel.  Ignoring the Afghan War is an American pastime that’s been going on almost as long war itself.  But whether we finally depart the field in 2014 or later, it’s going to be a war that was never an American political issue.  It’s the longest war in our history, but neither starting it, continuing it, nor ending it will ever have been the main issue in an election.  In the meantime, there will be a lot more text boxes in The New York Times, silently keeping score.

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

Tabling a Debate

8 January 12
“I’m not saying it won’t work, I’m just saying it’s dishonest.” – Marge Simpson
“Well, if we agree, then why are we arguing?” – Homer Simpson

There’s an old saw about academic fights that says that the reason they can get so vicious is because there is so very little at stake.  The same rule generally applies to internecine quarrels on what can broadly be defined as the American Left.  A particularly nasty such spat has erupted recently as Ron Paul made his Quixote-like charge to relevance in Iowa.  Paul’s toxic positions on things like the Civil Rights Act, women’s health, and minorities generally rendered all praise of him heretical to some.  Others, most notably Glenn Greenwald, whose uncompromising nature will always make him a lightning rod for this kind of attention, have said that Paul is the only major national political figure raising any kind of serious objection to the Terror Wars, and that for that alone he is doing something valuable.

Greenwald himself ran down the whole thing, complete with links to many of his critics, a few days ago, and there’s no point spinning any of those lines out any further.  At one point in his exhaustive post he quotes criticisms from Kevin Drum, and concludes:

But the most important point to make about Drum’s response is that he never bothers to identify the alternatives to Paul’s candidacy when it comes to challenging these bipartisan pieties. If Paul is such an inadequate vehicle for having these ideas heard — and everyone pointing to the benefits of Paul’s candidacy, especially on the Left, understands perfectly what his faults are — why doesn’t Drum unveil the roster of national political figures with a serious platform who are making these points instead?

The answer is obvious: there are none.

This is the real nub of the issue, and it’s what spawns these kinds of fights.  Among the tiny handful of politicians with real national stature, and at any given time there’s probably less than a dozen of them, there isn’t a single one other than Ron Paul who seriously objects to things like imprisonment without trial, unlimited eavesdropping, and our policy of undeclared war anywhere in the world.  To be sure, Paul’s advocacy on these issues comes with a lot of problems and isn’t nearly as strong as it could be, but he’s leaps and bounds better than anyone else.  Just as importantly, he’s actually willing to debate and discuss his positions in front of voters, which makes him a damn sight braver than most.

Looked at in that light, debating the relative shortcomings of Ron Paul is a red herring.  The real question is how do we get someone who isn’t a fringe candidate to make some of the same points he’s making?  How do we get a viable presidential contender who doesn’t think we can spy on our own people willy-nilly?  Who doesn’t think that it’s none of the public’s business where America sends its commandos and bombers?  Who is willing to point out that America is safer now than at any point in history and that the national security fears that so pervade our discourse are a naked emperor?

Right off the bat we can strike the Reds from this question.  The idea that a viable Republican presidential contender, now or in 2016, wouldn’t slavishly adhere to the Terror Wars is laughable on its face.  And even if there was such a person, he’d come with the same kind of poisonous domestic baggage as Ron Paul.  No, the candidate has to come from the Blue team, and one way or another there’s going to be a Blue opening in four years.

Starting from that, the useful course of action, the one with the highest chance of actually changing some of our disgusting national security policies before mid-century, is to make sure that caring about these issues is important in the 2016 Democratic nomination.  If Paul’s popularity is indicative of anything, it’s that there is a real constituency for an anti-Terror Wars, anti-Drug War candidate.  Any Democratic politician espousing such heresy would be sure to make Wolf Blitzer, David Gregory and the rest of the coiffed airheads nauseous, but there’s no denying that there is a significant foundation of support there for someone who is willing to make the argument.

Sadly, Barack Obama isn’t going to do that, but on pretty much every other issue he is far and away the best option in this fall’s election.  That roadblock to progress causes a lot of frustration, which manifests itself in those nasty but meaningless Lefty fights.  But the undeniable fact is that the next opportunity for actual change will be the 2016 Democratic nominating contest.  Debating the nuances and niceties of 2012 is a meaningless exercise because as far as the Terror Wars go, there isn’t a choice to be made.  But there will be soon, and that’s where the time, effort and conversation should be focused.

Leave a Comment » | 2012 Election, 2016 Election, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Sometimes Satan Cloaks Himself in Truth

4 January 12
“Homer, I’m as permissive as the next parent.  I mean, just yesterday I let Todd buy some Red-Hots with a cartoon devil on the box.” – Ned Flanders

The people of Iowa are waking up to a Santorum-Romney hangover this morning, and the political gossip press is a whirling dervish of pointless analysis.  Romney’s reflexive mendacity is so well established and documented that people hardly notice when he ups the ante.  Santorum is just now getting attention, so his batshit is a bit more novel, but since he’s been Google famous for years it doesn’t seem as though there is anything new under the Red sun.

Indeed, there may not be, but that doesn’t mean a good phrase can’t crystallize those old, messy ideas into a few razor sharp words.  And the ever eagle eyed Amanda Marcotte caught just such a sharp edge yesterday:

“You know, it’s so honest,” Sister Dorothy told Hoffman after reading it, “but sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth.”

“Satan cloaks himself in the truth.” I can’t think of a better summation of right wing attitudes about basically everything. No matter if truth conflicts with their ideology, because Satan is behind that truth. If you see how the candidates are campaigning, you’ll see that “Satan cloaks himself in truth” is basically their mantra. Everyone is clawing past each other to see who can demonstrate their fealty to right wing myth over truth.

It doesn’t come much clearer than that, though Marcotte errs slightly in not including the “sometimes”, which allows Sister Dorothy to pick and choose the things she likes and doesn’t like.  Hypocrisy is rarely consistent, it prefers to be selective.  This is how anti-evolution people justify taking antibiotics.

What makes “sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth” so descriptive is the way it allows righteousness, piety, and a general attitude of disdain, disgust, and resentment to flow freely.  It’s the inverse of the old saw of “god told me”.  Instead of inspiring action, it’s used to oppose others.  It’s also a much cleaner way of getting to the heart of that not quite disagreement between Corey Robin and Mark Lilla, which John Quiggin at Crooked Timber wrote up on Sunday.  Quiggin basically sides with Robin:

Robin’s thesis is that claims like Oakeshott’s about conservatism (and also, those of Hayek about classical liberalism) are nothing more than a mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.

I think this is broadly correct.

[…]

There is an accidental association reflecting the fact that, taking the last two or three centuries as a whole, the ruling class has mostly been losing ground.

But Quiggin’s general agreement with Robin masks something a bit deeper:

The crucial test comes in periods such as the Bourbon restoration, or the neoliberal resurgence of the last thirty years or so, when the direction of change is reversed. Genuine conservatives in these circumstances seek to preserve those advances that have been embedded in the way society works (such as the New Deal in the US).  Conservative politics on the other hand, is dominated by reactionaries seeking to restore (an idealised version) of the status quo ante, and gains the support of those with a radical disposition (Newt Gingrich is an ideal example).  It’s certainly possible to find examples of the first kind (the “Wets” who resisted Thatcher for example) but they are clearly in the minority.

This is where Satan’s truth cloak comes in, because it is the peculiar wildcard of culture that has found its widest expression here in the New World.  This is why it’s a lot easier to find whole movements within self described conservatism that are open about their desire to roll back decades old civil rights than it is to locate even a single conservative individual who is serious about preserving those gains.  How many pro-choice Reds are there?  How many black Republicans are there?  How many stood up – even just symbolically – for centuries long enshrined civil liberties while they’ve been effectively stripped from American Muslims?

It’s tribalism, pure and simple; and in a very un-“conservative” way it’s a tribalism based on resentment.  The nun who sees Satan, the Prince of Lies, as someone who can use the truth to further his evil schemes may be a dupe, but she knows for sure who is and isn’t on her side.  The specific reasons for that are probably complicated (and the general perception of anti-choice people as being either anti-sex or sexually frustrated seems basically accurate), but the resentment in “sometimes Satan cloaks himself in truth” is as clear as a bell on Sunday morning.

Without speaking to Thatcher’s Britain or that damned French Revolution, in modern America the resentment within the right wing is a strictly cultural phenomenon.  It’s about people who feel that their tribe has been losing, not because they’ve been out of power (Jebus knows they haven’t been), but because all their power hasn’t gotten them what they really want.  Non-white immigrants can’t be kept out.  Women are still allowed to have sex.  Gays keep coming out of that closet.  Black kids are still allowed in the schools.

Those are the main battles of the culture wars, and conservatives have been losing them left and right for so many decades that they can’t even keep track of their defeats any longer.  That’s literally true in the case of Rick Perry, who forgot recently that Lawrence v. Texas was argued while he was governor.  And while the country at large greeted Lawrence with yawns (just another wacky Southern state with a weird old law on the books), imagine what that decision looks like to those resentful right wingers.  Sodomy!  The sin for which Angry Old Testament God destroyed two entire cities is now protected by the United States government.  It’s no wonder these people are convinced the apocalypse is coming.

Rick Santorum, the newly minted Not Romney, openly hates Griswold v. Connecticut, which was decided just eleven years after Brown v. Board of Education, which itself came just six years after that unelected Communist Harry S. Truman desegregated the military.  And let’s not even get started on Roe v. Wade, which twenty years of uninterrupted Republican appointments couldn’t get overturned in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

And while all that was happening, the culture at large marched on, increasingly brazen in ignoring their howls of outrage.  Once upon a time there was the Hays Code and the Legion of Decency, to say nothing of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which scared the holy hell out of anyone in movies and television.  It wasn’t that long ago that it was a scandal to see a swear word or more skin than faces and hands.  Now all that’s left are the increasingly toothless Parents Television Council and those leering perverts at the MPAA.  Nudity is acceptable even on commercially supported shows and you can get away with saying “fuck” in PG-13 movies.  Why, women will often wear things in public that don’t even conceal their – gasp – bra straps!

All that power, all those elections won, and all they have to show for it is a few restrictions on abortion that fall almost entirely on the poor and a Drug War that overwhelmingly hurts minorities.  Those are certainly nice things to have if you’re the resentful type, but it doesn’t get sodomites off your television or your radio.  It doesn’t keep harpy lesbian Hillary Clinton from being the most admired woman in America for over a decade.  And even those last strongholds are weakening.  With a majority of American adults now favoring legalized marijuana, the Drug War is starting to crack.  And even Mississippi, the Mordor of the conservative resentment, soundly rejected an anti-choice referendum last fall.

As Santorum nemesis Dan Savage wrote yesterday (via):

what does it tell us about this moment in the struggle for LGBT equality that even homophobes like Elizabeth and her dad perceive a political risk in being perceived as homophobic?

Just eight years ago Bush the Younger made gay bashing a big part of his election strategy.  Now even people who are willing to say they think contraception should be illegal and that any orgasm that can’t result in a pregnancy is “counter to how things are supposed to be” – which by definition includes every time two women or two men have ever gotten it on – has a daughter who feels the need to lie about having right wing gay friends to avoid sounding too much like the bigot she clearly is.

It’s no wonder Satan needs to cloak himself in truth.  Sister Dorothy’s allies have used up all the lies, and they did it because no matter how much they rig the tax code, squeeze the poor, or punish women, they know that the world they want to live in is already gone, if it ever existed.  Santorum, Romney and the rest of them will pound and holler to keep the fantasy going in exchange for a few votes, but even if one of them (or someone like them in 2016, 2020, etcetera) slimes their way into 1600 doing so, he won’t be able to deliver on his cultural promises any more than Nixon, Ronnie or Bush the Younger did.

Leave a Comment » | 2012 Election, equus altus morium, Humping Is Fun, I Love America, Republican Presidential Primary, The Art of the Possible, War on Drugs | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Perpetual Nature of Conservative Reactions and Right Wing Apocalypses

1 January 12
“I promise you zombies more raw human flesh than any President since Roosevelt!” – Duke Phillips

The most hopeful conception of the political conflicts of our time is that, three or four decades from now, rational people will look back on our arguments and foibles and conclude that we were harmlessly deranged.  After all, what technologically modern people could reject the plainly obvious?  In everything from carbon dioxide to human papillomavirus, the arguments of the day are wildly divorced from undisputed facts and our actual problems.  The grotesque contradiction of our age is that we live in a world of unprecedentedly effective technology and use much of it to belittle, undermine, and deny the advances that make our world possible.

The classic example of this is people who reject the teaching of basic biology in schools but make use of it every time they go to the doctor.  But modern hypocrisies extend far beyond that, in everything from economics to health care to energy collection, there are powerful forces arguing for a rejection of the kind of thinking that got us to this luxurious, healthy, eight-decades-of-life-expectancy plateau we call home.

In no place is this more starkly apparent than in the petulant foot stomping of the Red nominating process, which will finally get underway for read this week.  Pick an issue.  Economically they ignore history and evidence to debate one another’s fealty to Arthur Laffer’s napkin.  Biologically they consider anything more modern than bloodletting heresy.  Mathematically we cry about social programs that are multiple decades from distress while villainizeing net positive aid to Americans in need.  Physically we rehash settled arguments over whether or not carbon dioxide retains atmospheric heat.

What all of these masturbatory exercises have in common is that they are heretical to anything that can be called evidence based reasoning.  Denialism masquerading as ideology is the mark of the day, and we have become so well practiced in it that we hardly notice.

Perfectly illustrating both the angry toddler nature of our discourse and its grim realities is Mark Lilla’s review of Corey Robin’s right wing takedown book The Reactionary Mind.  Lilla, an admirably overeducated academic, is slightly peeved that Robin doesn’t share his fine, nuanced appreciation of the intellectual underpinnings and centuries long consequences of the French Revolution and all that it entails for proper noun Western Civilization.

Eyebrows should always raise at the mention of Louis XVI’s downfall.  The French Revolution has had a curvaceous and husky voiced appeal to academics since boarding schools were invented.  The combination of that many competing philosophies with that much blood and sex gives far too many uniform escapees a wistful eye twinkle, as though the event were the buxom twenty-something who instructed them in the ways of love while they were shy sixteen year olds.

But Lilla’s review, while justifiably scathing about Robin’s hideously swollen historical simplifications, is laughably weak on Robin’s home turf of modern conservatism.  It takes an astounding case of rose tinted glasses to refer to Robert Bork as “once-sober”, or George Will as “reality-based”.  To anyone who is vaguely cognizant of American politics and hasn’t suffered a recent head injury or infection of Washington, the beard and the bowtie can’t hide the fact that both men can make only the meanest and most self serving claims to anything other than intellectual duplicity.  By trying to tie them into a long strain of reactionaries, Lilla commits the same sin of gross oversimplification of which he has accused Robin.

Lilla errs in tracing the rise of the apocalyptic right wing to disillusionment with the Great Society.  Today’s right wing is the intellectual heir of the guys who thought Franklin Roosevelt was bringing down the Republic, of the people who sincerely believed that those hopeless fops in Moscow had cunningly infiltrated every office of government up to and including that oval shaped one.  They thought the country was falling apart since the income tax was instated, and today’s dizzying catalog of right wing villains, everything from labor unions and feminists to Muslims and the Environmental Protection Agency, is simply the natural outgrowth of that unlimited paranoia.

Robin sees Western history as a conflict between those who have and those who don’t; he doesn’t distinguish between how the rules are rigged in each era and place.  Economically, racially, sexually, etcetera, his story is about the many ways the game is tilted against those who aren’t already running it.  Lilla sees the same tale of woe and conflict and says that many of the combatants Robin describes are motivated by little more than fear.  Be it fear of change, fear of a future after change, or simple fear of a future without change, Lilla sees a world in which defense of the status quo and a want to return to an older status quo (real or perceived) are motivated by the same impulse.

But where Robin’s history is crudely mashed, Lilla ignores the intellectual backflips used to justify the injustices against which Robin’s heroes struggle.  Noted posh-head William F. Buckley, whom Lilla cites explicitly, was for segregation and legacy college admissions long before the oft cited radicalization of American politics.  Buckley could be right and wrong about this and that, but you could be sure to find him on the side of people who looked, sounded and socialized in much the same way he did.

Ultimately, the two of them agree on the idea that the Red politics of the moment are paranoid, disconnected from reality, and totally insane.  Lilla’s not wrong when he writes:

The same faith has been expressed in the Republican presidential candidate debates, where the contenders compete to demonstrate how many agencies they would abolish when in office (if they remember their names), how many programs they would cut or starve, and how much faith they have in the ingenuity of the American people to figure it out for themselves once they’re finished. What’s so disturbing is that they don’t feel compelled to explain how even a reduced government should meet the challenges of the new global economy, how our educational system should respond to them, what the geopolitical implications might be, or anything of the sort. They deliver their lines with the insouciant “what, me worry?” of Alfred E. Neuman.

But he is wrong to draw a distinction between the “conservatism” of old time European aristocrats who wanted to hold on to what they had and the “conservatism” of the culture warriors (sincere and less so) who comprise the Republican presidential field.  Both are conservative in that they want the people in charge to remain so, and both are apocalyptic in that they see burning the world around them as being better than losing the authority to which they cling.  But ultimately they’re all in it for the same reason, to further themselves within a ruling elite, a project to which the messy, ill informed foibles of the electorate have always been an impediment.

Lilla stumbles because he’s trying to parse the motivation to rig democracy from the mechanics of rigging democracy.  There are plenty of differences between 18th Century French aristocrats and the editors of The Weekly Standard, but both groups boil down to the same nub, a belief that selecting the assholes in charge is too important to be left to their lessers.  The crazed state of the about to begin Red nominating contest is a pitch perfect example of that.  The whole thing is less about what candidates would do with power and more about how they would exclude the wrong people from getting it.

The entire affair has the intellectual depth of a beauty pageant, except that instead of competing to see who looks best in a bikini, they’re trying to outdo one another in sheer meanness.  That why they don’t feel the need to explain what any of their actions would mean in the real world where science applies no matter how much they wish it away.  The point isn’t rolling back cultural revolutions, it’s about making sure that the right people remain in charge.  Everything else is filler; always has been, always will be.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

What Is ESPN?

28 December 11
“Cheer up, so you’re not good at sports.  It’s a very small part of life.” – Marge Simpson
“Sports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports.” – Homer Simpson

A few weeks back, The New York Times ran a story about what they called a “sports tax”, which basically boils down to this:

But ESPN is also far costlier than any other channel, earning about $4.69 a month for each cable and satellite household in the United States, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. Next year the firm expects ESPN to cross the $5 a month threshold for the first time (the next highest is TNT, at $1.16 this year).

Every household in the country that pays for television service also pays for channels that they don’t ever watch.  ESPN though, is the only one that’s so expensive that it could qualify as its own line item on your bill, which is why the Times basically felt it was okay to use the word “sports” as a synonym for “ESPN”.

Five dollars a month isn’t nothing, especially at the low end of the economic ladder, but it’s a minor cost overall.  But the culture of sports is something that people spend a lot of time and thought on, something that affects pretty much everyone directly or indirectly to the equivalent of a lot more than a fiver per month.  ESPN is more than a pricy channel, it’s a private company that enjoys an unparalleled primacy over the sprawling and complicated public pastime known as “sports”.  And in terms of culture rather than cash, ESPN is practically a monopoly.

ESPN, which began as merely a cable channel, is now a gargantuan attention machine that will use anything that can vaguely be described as athletic competition to generate revenue.  Beyond that, they’ve taken the art of talking about sports to new heights.  In these days of hour long pregame shows and endless afternoon gab fests that seems as natural as can be, but it was once considered nuts.

People watched sports, why would they want to watch other people just talk about sports?  But it turns out that a lot of people do want to watch others talk about sports.  It’s the “soap opera for men” idea that’s kept professional wrestling going all these years applied to non-scripted events.  There’s drama, revenge and redemption; old friends falling out or competing against one another.

They’ve made sports as much about personalities as it is about points, and in the meantime have made themselves into the indispensible conduit for both.  That in turn means that they’ve done something more impressive than simply pile up an all but uncountable stack of money.  (Though they’ve done that too).  It means that they’ve constructed an unending fountain of cash, of which that $5 per household head tax they’ve levied on the entire country is just one component.

However financially impressive that achievement, it does raise two troubling and ongoing problems.  The first is the obvious conflict of interest in both covering and promoting the same subjects.  The second is the inevitable question of what does and doesn’t get coverage, and the implications that has for both sports and for culture more generally.

The most spectacular recent instance of the first remains last year’s “The Decision”, an unwittingly voyeuristic display of ego stoking crassness on the part of both its subject and its producers that is unlikely to be equaled any time soon.  But incidents of lesser visibility happen all the time, and they’re the primary reason ESPN goes through ombudsmen at such an astonishingly fast clip that earlier this year they elected to outsource the entire fig leaf production department to a Florida non-profit precisely no one cares about.  This is what happens when an institution plays at journalism while paying its bills courtesy of its own subjects.  Remember, once upon a time legitimate news organizations had a strict rule about not paying for stories.  Well, all ESPN does is pay for stories, which makes it, in effect, the world’s largest tabloid.

The second problem is related to the first, but more troubling in its long term implications.  Not only does ESPN have enormous influence over who and what gets coverage, but they’re in bed financially with basically all of them.  In the short run that means giving fluff coverage or simply ignoring unflattering stories about systemic stories.  (Hello NFL and concussions!)  In the longer run though, it means ESPN has a billion dollar plus financial investment in the success of certain leagues and sports at the expense of others.

Eighty years ago, boxing and horse racing were American sports royalty.  Today boxing is a niche sport and horse racing is the exclusive provenance of silly rich people who like to get dressed up and drink together.  Both faded from the scene for a variety of reasons, but neither of them had an ally as powerful as ESPN to prop them up when the public began to yawn.

That’s a very worrisome long term effect because it cuts both ways.  ESPN not only pays for and promotes sports that are profitable, but sports that are profitable to ESPN.  To take just two recent examples, the last fifteen years or so have seen the rise of both mixed martial arts and Major League Soccer from nothing into endeavors that are profitable and self sustaining.  But both have received only minimal attention from the self proclaimed world wide leader in sports.  That’s a problem, because any new sport isn’t necessarily in ESPN’s interest if it has the potential to cut into existing ones.

By so dominating “sports”, ESPN has accrued to itself the power of cultural arbiter that used to be diffused across the entire country, from local papers and television stations to simple conversations about what matters when two people are shooting the shit.  That is an enormous change, akin to replacing the relatively freewheeling culture of books with the top down monoculture of television or movies, and it’s happened virtually without public comment or notice.

ESPN star Bill Simmons has joked on occasion that he’d like to be made “sports czar” or some such, and it’s kinda funny.  But in effect ESPN already is the sports czar.  They dictate which opinions and stories get the most play, which sports are deemed important, and, just as importantly, which ones don’t and aren’t.  Given the importance we place on sports, that’s an awful lot of power for a single group of people.  At the moment it doesn’t show any signs of abating, but it’s worth keeping an eye on, and it’s worth remembering that what’s good for ESPN isn’t necessarily good for sports.  The two aren’t actually synonyms.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Reducing: An American Pastime

25 December 11
“I am going on a diet.  From this day forward, I pledge there will be no pork chop too succulent, no donut too tasty, no pizza too laden with delicious toppings to prevent me from reaching my scientifically determined ideal weight!  As God as my witness, I’ll always be hungry again!” – Homer Simpson

The scenario is so common it ought to be a cliche.  Some batch of scientists comes up with a study that suggests something about weight loss and nutrition in humans.  A bunch of mostly ill informed journalists misunderstand the findings and write them up with misleading headlines.  Then someone shits out a book with a catchy title, and before you know it a new diet craze or exercise fad has been born.

The life cycle of a diet Americanus is the main subject of Susan Yager’s book “The Hundred Year Diet: American’s Voracious Appetite for Losing Weight”.  Starting early in the last century, the idea that it was unhealthy and unattractive to sport more than the bare minimum of lipids on one’s person took hold of the American consciousness.  The country has been on a diet ever since and Yager’s book is as close to a comprehensive chronicle of that history as you’re ever likely to find.

For example, in a sentence that could have spewed forth from the laziest politician or pundit any time in this or last century with hardly a modification, in 1952 the American Medical Association announced (with grand, anti-Communist panache) that “Overweight among American business executives is threatening destruction of the nation’s productive capacity and free enterprise system.”  Similar warnings have been sounded for any number of reasons ranging from military readiness to economic competitiveness, our current “obesity epidemic” is just the latest iteration.

In Chicago in 1920, the city health commissioner recruited twenty-five overweight women to get thin.  It was such a successful media circus that, not to be outdone, a female newspaper columnist recruited twenty-five men for the same public shaming.  A similar contest was then held in New York City, this time with fifty participants of each gender.  Thirty years later, Bonnie Prudden, who died earlier this month at the age of 97, rose to fame and started an exercise hysteria by declaring that America’s kids were failing basic physical fitness.  Her report came out in 1955, in what we now think of as the halcyon days of neighborhood kids playing outdoors all day.

You can look back to literally any period of American history since the rise of scientific medicine and industrial food production and find a panic over national obesity.  Even nine decades ago there was already a rich history of fads and fanatics peddling ways to “reduce”.

As a result the book does suffer from an almost hyperactive need to jump from one topic to the next.  Not only are the chapters extremely short, sections within chapters are sometimes little more than a few paragraphs.  Diet fads and equipment, along with the names of their clever creators, are listed at a breathless pace, but little is done to tie them together or situate them in the overall picture of dieting in America.

That’s simply the unavoidable result of the fact that America has, for more than a century now, been awash in ways to reduce.  For every pill and supplement there’s a lunatic contraption that claims to help you exercise while you sit on your ass.  Every contorted diet plan that demonizes some foods and lavishes praise on others has a doppelganger that reverses the emphasis and promises the same wondrous results.  The silver lining to that quick pace and lengthy list is that when you look at all of them together like that the absurdity is more apparent than a supermodel’s rib cage.  Things that can sort of seem plausible if taken on their own are revealed to be variations on wild quackery.

Unfortunately, despite the entertaining and exhaustive catalog of fads and fopperies, The Hundred Year Diet shortchanges some of its own conclusions.  Specifically, there are two concepts which surely deserve a bigger mention than the relatively brief ones they get in the book.  The first is the way weighing less is something that will always be extra difficult and bordering on impossible for some segment of the population.  The second is the still primitive nature of our understanding of how nutrition affects individuals.

The former point is one that Yager can’t bring herself to gloss over entirely, but it’s clearly something she doesn’t like bringing up.  Yes, it’s true that as a population we are much heavier than we used to be, and it’s true that there are a great deal of negative health consequences associated with that.  One need look no further than the expensive and potentially debilitating effects of our high rates of Type II Diabetes to see that.

But some percentage of the population, for reasons ranging from genetics and conditions in utero to levels of gut bacteria and who knows what else, simply cannot lose weight the same way most of the population can.  This is closely linked to the ugly cultural realities of being less than twiggy in America, in everything from social shaming to reduced earnings and job opportunities.  There aren’t a lot of Americans who think to themselves, “I’ll get that better job/person-to-sleep-with if I just start eating more Oreos”, whoever wants to be the next fat guy on Saturday Night Live obviously excepted.

The sad fact is that we still don’t have a way to identify people who can carry extra pounds safely from those who can’t, nor do we have a way to differentiate those who can’t lose weight from those who simply eat too much and don’t get enough exercise.  While we can say with great confidence that most people will lose weight if they develop better exercise and eating habits, there isn’t a reliable way to know what specific tactics will work better for one person or another.  Even something as seemingly simple as understanding what causes one person’s metabolism to speed while similar diet and behavior cause another’s to slow remains mostly beyond our grasp.

Nor are the limits of our nutritional knowledge restricted to being baffled by the differences between how much weight one person gains versus another on the same diet.  Even calorie counts, those seemingly solid numbers which are the sacred bane of dieters from coast to coast, are probably wildly off the mark (via).  The realization of the paltriness of our understanding is disconcerting in a lot of ways.  Even people who don’t exercise and eat right are usually confident that if they start, those numbers will guide them along the way.

But what’s clear based on more than a century of “scientific” diets, different ways to measure people, and slick quackery all aimed at slimming people down is that numbers are overrated.  For a society that runs on numbers that is a confusingly counterintuitive conclusion.  After all, we use numbers to track everything from money to yards after catch.  The computers we spend huge chunks of time using are basically just big collections of ones and zeros.  Hell, counting is practically the first thing we teach to our blank slate offspring.

Translating that fetish for numbers into the realm of weight loss and nutrition seems natural as can be.  You can buy fancy electronic scales that will measure your weight and body fat down to a decimal place, but in doing so we overlook how poor our data is, how fat the error margins on our instruments, how little will still know about the genetic differences between individuals and their interactions with their environments.  It looks smooth and modern and reliable, but a quick glance at a century of history of diets and reducing makes a hollow mockery of that idea.

Given that all those unknowns fit smoothly into Yager’s general point that diet fads are about as scientific as other fads, it’s a shame she doesn’t engage them more.  All those specific numbers, be they weight, BMI, or calorie counts, are all but useless information.  Calorie counts are notoriously inaccurate and the BMI scale is likely skewed such that some purportedly healthy BMIs are associated with more health problems than some heavy ones considered unhealthy.

Most disastrous for mental and physical well being, however, is the relentless focus on weight in pounds.  It’s a number almost everyone knows about themselves, and yet it’s far too specific for the kind of day-to-day self regulation most people need.  Gaining or dropping ten pounds is, from a health point of view, almost always meaningless, and yet we’re constantly inventing new ways to track ourselves down to a tenth of a pound.  No wonder the country is always on a diet.

Smart phones and internet sites that track your diet and training are just the latest incarnation of yesteryear’s contraptions and systems.  When we pretend that the “science” of twenty or forty years ago is laughable while ours is advanced we ignore the fact that twenty or forty years from now people will think our science is only marginally less primitive than we do theirs.

The reality is that we have only a very rough outline of what numbers like weight, cholesterol, and body fat mean.  We have an even rougher outline of how the nitty-gritty details of our myriad biochemical processes operate.  And our understanding of how those processes vary and affect individuals is so skeletal that it doesn’t even qualify as an outline.  Some day you may be able to get a quick and inexpensive blood test that will analyze your genes and all those different microorganisms to which you are a host and say something like, “Eat all the pizza you want, but avoid butter like the plague and go swimming three times a week”.  But we are very far from that day.

In the meantime, we can only continue to plod along with what we do know while being aware of all that we don’t.  For the majority of people, eating less and exercising more will work.  It may not cause you to lose enough weight to fit into unrealistic pants, it may not cause you to turn heads poolside, but it will likely make you as healthy as you can be.  What you don’t want to do is torment yourself over holiday eating, make grand resolutions tied to specific numbers, or spend money on books and systems that all boil down to basically the same idea, eat less and exercise more.

End Note: As if to prove Yager’s point, a Google search for “hundred year diet” produces her book on Amazon as the #1 result.  The #2 result is “The Hundred-Year DIET: Guidelines and Recipes for a Long and Vigorous Life”, yet another entry in the long quest to remain thin and healthy through poorly understood nutritional rituals.

Leave a Comment » | Book Reports, Personalized Stupidity, Susan Yager, The Hundred Year Diet, Weight Loss | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The End of (Part of) the War

21 December 11
“Don’t get discouraged, Dad, only four vertical miles to go.” – Bart Simpson

The stealthy, unannounced withdrawal of the last American troops in Iraq was done in the dark of night and witnessed, fittingly enough, only by one of our robot warriors, high in the sky.  There were no sweets and flowers, no cheering crowds, no dramatic helicopter takeoffs.  The expected sort of reactions have followed, too many to list of the “we won”, “it wasn’t worth it”, “Bush lied” and other genres that have become all too familiar over the last nine years.

In particular, Gary Kamiya wrote a better than average lament for the lost and demand that we honor them by not forgetting how the mess came about.  He’s rightly pissed off that this incalculable failure – of American government, American institutions, of basic human decency – has been greeted here at home by overwhelming indifference leavened only by a disgraceful minimum of decorum.  If anything, he puts too sunny a face on our dreamlike denial.  He writes:

To truly honor those brave men and women in uniform – and, even more because there are more of them — the millions of Iraqis whose lives we destroyed, Americans need to look unflinchingly at this dreadful war.

They need to look at the ignorant, twisted and duplicitous men and women who started it, at the institutions that failed to stop it, and at their own complicity in it. Above all, they need to look at its terrible toll.

Nobody wants to think about Iraq. It was a mistake, and no one wants to dwell on mistakes. There are times when national forgetting is healthy. But this is not one of them. We need to remember.

What Kamiya ignores is that we can only fail to remember things that have stopped, and if there’s one legitimate excuse for America yawning as one of its most disastrous wars ever comes to a close, it is that the war is not truly over.  Plenty of anti-war people have been calling the end a sham by noting that, despite the flag ceremonies, we still have a gargantuan embassy, enough mercenaries to conquer half of Africa, and a small contingent of “trainers”.  (And that’s before you start talking about the openly floated possibility of a later expansion of military ties.)  Those things are all true, but they are also little more than trimming.  America still has a three course meal of shit yet to eat.

The real war, the Terror Wars, aren’t even close to over.  The end of the Iraq War is a totemic milestone in the struggle to end the rest of them, but the road ahead is very long indeed.  Despite our official withdrawal from the land between the rivers, the Terror Wars are still going strong in at least three major theaters: Afghanistan, the “homeland”, and wherever the CIA and the military are operating drones and special forces teams.

Those three wounds are still bleeding in ghastly ways.  They are un-sewn gashes that cost billions, kill thousands, and, worst of all, poison the best aspects of America.  In light of them, what needs to be remembered above everything else is that the Iraq War was never about Iraq, not as a country, a place, or a people.  The Iraq War was about America.

Just as no grand strategy for Anbar or heroic action in Tikrit could have won or lost the Iraq War, no effort of the Army or Marines can pacify Afghanistan.  Just as no amount of tortured prisoners could ever crack the insurgency, no brilliant intelligence coup can stop the shadowy parts of our government from launching raids and missiles in corners of the world that are worthless to everyone who doesn’t live there.  Just as killing and capturing Hussein and his nearest and dearest couldn’t turn the tide in Baghdad, no master plot can ever be foiled that will let sanity return to airports or convince the government that spying on its own citizens is useless, immoral, and self defeating.  Since there isn’t a real enemy to beat, there are only our fears and our reactions to the monsters we think are under the bed.  The Terror Wars, in all their incarnations, are about America, American choices, and American fuck ups.

The Iraq War was mostly an American fever dream, a mass, national hallucination of hubris, glory and fear.  For Iraq, the final echo of that dream can be seen in the empty comments flowing from high officials about how we’ve left Iraq with our heads held high . . . in the middle of the night without telling anyone.  That war is over, and it seems unlikely any American Administration, Red or Blue, will muster the stupid to wade back in.

But for the three remaining components of the Terror Wars, that hallucination persists.  Airport security and domestic surveillance continually reach new heights of expensive absurdity, and no one can give an answer as to why other than mumbling something about “threats”.  Abroad, we’re still freedom bombing many parts of the world in the pursuit of various villains, essentially none of whom have ever demonstrated the ability to attack American civilian targets.  And, of course, there’s Afghanistan, where we’re a good three or four years away from finally tucking our tail between our legs and departing, most likely in the dead of night just as we did in Iraq.

The great work of ending the war – all the Terror Wars – remains mostly undone and is no sure thing.  Getting out of Iraq is only the beginning.  And if no one is happy about it, if no one wants to talk about it or remember it . . . well, that’s to be expected.  The fearful and deluded proponents of the Terror Wars saw themselves suffer a great defeat with the American withdrawal; they’re hardly in gregarious mood.  The rest of us saw only progress in a task that is far from complete and that remains dauntingly difficult, all but the most circumscribed celebrations are unwarranted.

The blood and the bullets remain an abstraction for most of the American public, several removes from lives that have their own problems and pleasures.  For them the Terror Wars are about degradations at the hands of police and security, about jingoistic political commercials and anxiety stoking news coverage, about taxes, bullshit, and internecine conflicts over everything from religion and race to football and politics.  That is the real war, the fight for the American people’s faith in the Terror Wars, and it is in no risk of being forgotten.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Percentages

18 December 11
“So, it seems like we have enough people now, when do we start taking down the corporations?” – Stan Marsh

Writing at TomDispatch, Barbara and John Ehrenreich have produced one of the calmest and most cogent explanations of why “the 99%” has emerged as a resonant political idea.  Their take is generally hopeful, but they’re worried that traditional divisions among the non-super-rich will derail whatever political momentum the Occupy movement has built:

If the “99%” is to become more than a stylish meme, if it’s to become a force to change the world, eventually we will undoubtedly have to confront some of the class and racial divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so patiently, respectfully, and always with an eye to the next big action — the next march, or building occupation, or foreclosure fight, as the situation demands.

That’s broadly true, but it takes the slogan of “99%” too literally.  Obviously, the Ehrenreichs don’t actually think that everyone below a certain income threshold is going to start agreeing with one another, and they’re correct that the 1% and their stooges in politics and media will look to exploit any division among lesser people who share economic interests.  However, and this is a big however, the ultimate effect of America’s newfound sense of class solidarity will depend chiefly on the ballot box, and that’s something which simply cannot be quantified at this time.

Despite what some of Occupy’s more ardent participants may believe, revolution is not on the verge of coming to the United States.  Capitalism isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Wall Street.  Reigning in the excesses of both is clearly warranted, but that means reforms, not a new system from the ground up, and that means winning elections, both primaries and generals.

That’s why the Occupy movement’s general distaste for electoral politics is a much bigger weakness than a reawakening of “class and racial divisions”.  It’s rhetorically useful to discuss “the 99%”, but in terms of the major changes that need to be made to reestablish the middle and working classes, to say nothing of making America a humane place to be poor, the far more important percentage is 51.

That’s grating to a lot of people, in no small part because the Democratic Party is lousy with bought out 1% whores.  (Yes, Senator Schumer, we’re looking at you.)  But that’s what primary elections are for.  They aren’t sexy, they aren’t as emotionally satisfying as camping out with cool, like minded people, but they’re also the ticket to getting real things done.  Credible primary threats also have the added feature of keeping incumbents responsive to their base once they are in office.  As the old saying goes, “more and better Democrats” really is the only path forward.

None of that means that the Occupy movement hasn’t done truly useful things by focusing cultural attention to the rapacious crimes of Jamie Dimon and company.  Democrats have been talking about benefits going to the top 1% since the 2000 election, mostly ineffectively.  In just a couple of months the dirty Occupy hippies made the point better than the establishment Blues did in more than a decade.

That’s a real accomplishment, and calling it a “stylish meme” undersells it greatly.  But the threat to continuing to make progress isn’t primarily the cultural divisions, it’s that all this energy won’t translate at the ballot box over many election cycles.  If at this time next year the Reds are preparing to move into the White House and retake the Senate, then all the media stories about inequality in the world won’t matter a damn because inequality will be about to get much worse.  The same will be true two years after that, and two years after that, and so on.  A burst of publicity is a very good thing, but without sustained electoral pressure it won’t amount to anything.

Leave a Comment » | I Love America, Occupy Wall Street | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Red Through Blue

14 December 11
“You’re looking at her through a father’s eyes.” – Marge Simpson
“Well, if I could gouge out somebody else’s eyes and shove ’em into my sockets, I would.  But to me, she’s beautiful.” – Homer Simpson
“That is so sweet.” – Marge Simpson

Writing on The New Yorker’s main blog yesterday, journalist and practiced political observer Jeffrey Toobin wrote a slightly more intellectual incarnation of the “Why is the Red field so weak?” article that has appeared in just about every serious publication in the country, as well as less esteemed outfits like Kaplan Test Prep Daily and the company that prints kids menus for Big Boy.  In a bit of wishful liberal thinking, he draws a comparison between 2012 and the Johnson landslide in 1964 by noting that the positions the candidates have taken are all wildly unpopular with the vast majority of people who aren’t the rabid core of the Red chimera.  His rather hopeful conclusion is:

Small government, low taxes, racial resentment—the Goldwater platform was the Reagan revolution in embryo. The voters were not yet ready for it. There is, in short, a lesson about both the long and the short run in the election of 1964. In the long run, a campaign based on unpopular ideas may change the country forever. In the short run, the fate of a platform of uniformly unpopular ideas—like that of the Republicans in 2012—is more certain. It loses.

That’s a pleasant thought, and it’s not necessarily wrong.  But Toobin painted himself into a corner from which his conclusion doesn’t provide an exit a couple of paragraphs earlier.  Citing a list of issues ranging from gutting Medicare and overturning Roe to getting gays back into the military closet, Toobin points out that these things are enthusiastically totemic beliefs with dyed in the wool Reds but unpopular in the general population.  He wonders:

What makes this collective embrace of the unpalatable so peculiar is that the Republican candidates, as well as most Republicans, are positively obsessed with winning the 2012 election. They revile Obama and desire, above all, his ouster. In light of this, wouldn’t they seek out the broadest possible coalition for defeating him? Apparently not. Rather, the working Republican hypothesis seems to be that the damaged economy will trump any specific stand on the issues. Americans will embrace the Republican candidate simply to punish Obama for failing to cure what ails the economy. In this environment, even the Republican id will be an easy sell.

Toobin is overlooking something there, though it’s a mistake everyone makes sooner or later.  Everything starts out swimmingly: Republicans want Obama out, “above all”.  But the very next sentence “wouldn’t they seek out the broadest possible coalition for defeating him?” is a classic case of seeing Red America through Blue eyes.

Toobin thinks that the tea baggers and their ilk are so convinced that the economy will doom Obama that they’re willing to risk a less appealing candidate for the sake of ideological purity.  Multiple polls, however, point to a different conclusion: the Reds think Gingrich is a better candidate against Obama than Romney.  In other words, they’re willing to go with the unpleasant doughboy gargoyle because they think he’ll do a better job than Mittens of convincing America that their idiotic ideas are good policy.

What that points to isn’t an electorate that’s made a rational calculation about the economy sucking and the electoral implications of that.  It points to an electorate caught in a feedback loop, aided no doubt by the 2010 results, that tells them that their ideas are actually far more popular than they really are.  Toobin is too knowledgeable and too rational to see them doing anything but making a mistake, but that’s because he isn’t one of them.  He’s trying to put an inherently irrational movement into a rational framework (“working Republican hypothesis”).

The reality is that the Reds are plunging forward at full speed with their unpopular ideas because they think those ideas will win at the ballot box.  Trying to explain to them that 2010 was more about turnout than people turning against Obama is a futile exercise.  They see confirmation of something they dearly need to believe, that the country at large hates Obama as much as they do, and no amount of facts, figures, and rhetoric is going to change that.  When Sarah Palin asked how the “hope-y change-y stuff” was working, these are the people for whom she was speaking.

The obvious caveats here are that we still don’t have a Red nominee, the actual election is eleven months away, and a lot of things can change.  But what isn’t going to change in that time is the death grip the delusion of mass popularity has on the Red ummah.  Any election analysis or evaluation related to 2012 has to keep in mind that the base of the Republican Party sees Obama as illegitimate, unpopular, and weak, and their own ideas as perfectly simple, wildly acclaimed, and self evidently awesome.  That is the world in which they are operating, and if you want to understand why they think nominating someone who’s against child labor laws and wants to lower taxes on the rich is a political advantage, then that’s the lens through which you have to look.

Leave a Comment » | 2012 Election, Republican Presidential Primary, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Tragically Common Climate Comedy

11 December 11
“Would it help if I told you you’re not responsible for Krusty’s death?” – Lisa Simpson
“Yes!  Yes, it would.” – Bart Simpson
“Well, I can’t.  You’ll just have to learn to live with your mental problem.” – Lisa Simpson

About a decade ago, after climate change had become an undeniable reality but before anyone in a position of real authority would admit that urgency was needed, there was already a huge gap between what the scientists and experts were saying and what the politicians and diplomats were saying.  In an odd way, this gap was comforting.  Yes, climate change was serious, but it wasn’t yet an immediately pressing concern.  And since governments aren’t usually suicidal, it didn’t seem unreasonable to think that as it became more urgent, more avenues for action would open.

But a funny thing happened.  As ice kept melting, violent weather kept increasing, and the probable climate change scenarios grew ever more dire with ever more data, at least some politicians and diplomats began to take it seriously, yet the gap between what the realists were saying and what the governments were saying actually got wider.  The latest example of this cataclysmic failure of homo sapiens came amid an emergency, thirty-six hour extension of the latest U.N. climate talks in Durban, South Africa.  After staying for a day and a half amid much acrimony, they managed to reach a token agreement.  The result of that extraordinary effort?  An agreement to try super hard to come to a real agreement by 2015.  The BBC has the definitively absurd detail:

The conclusion was delayed by a dispute between the EU and India over the precise wording of the “roadmap” for a new global deal.

India did not want a specification that it must be legally binding.

Eventually, a Brazilian diplomat came up with the formulation that the deal must have “legal force”, which proved acceptable.

It’s become a reflex among climate hawks to say that we’ll never be able to explain to future generations why we didn’t act in time to save millions, if not billions, of lives.  Silliness like that is why.  The South African International Relations Minister who gaveled the conference to a close after that stunningly pointless 36th hour compromise declared, “We have made history.”  She may well be right, but with each passing year it looks increasingly like it won’t be in the way she intends.

The goal of this historically toothless pledge to talk more (as though the issue would disappear if no further talks were agreed upon) is to limit global warming to a mere two degrees centigrade by the end of the century.  But people with calculators and relevant data say that, even assuming everything goes perfectly from here on out:

The Climate Action Tracker estimates that global mean warming would reach about 3.5°C by 2100 with the current reduction proposals on the table. They are definitely insufficient to limit temperature increase to 2°C.

A two degree increase at century’s end, by the way, would already be catastrophically deadly and destructive.  As you start nudging that number closer to four, you get into scenarios where heavy drinking is about all you can do:

There is a widespread view that a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organised global community, is likely to be beyond “adaptation,” is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable (i.e., 4 degrees C would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level).

That, boys and girls, is the premature death of billions of people, most of them today’s children and their eventual offspring, and that’s the optimistic outcome of the agreement in Durban that “made history”.  Harsh numbers like that are why diplomats patting each other on the back for staying an extra day and a half are such a hideous farce.  Humanity is trapped in a burning building, and its leadership is currently congratulating itself on crawling into a closet when it should be running for the front door.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for that, and plenty of it falls squarely on the shoulders of a few large dom corporations and their subs in various governments.  It also doesn’t help that the United States, far from leading the fight, has been actively retarding it, even under Obama.  But just as the concerns of the Cold War seem silly in hindsight, all our problems with corporate corruption and disingenuous climate denier campaigns will be outdated foppery thirty years from now when Bangladesh is drowning, Phoenix is a ghost town, and massive agricultural shortages are the norm.

The only good news is that we’re still in denial.  A true mobilization of government, industry, and private citizens could pull us together, juice our economies, and crater our carbon emissions.  We still have no idea of how much we’re capable should the warranted political will ever materialize, but at the moment the absence of that knowledge is the only legitimate hope.  Agreements like the one in Durban this weekend are bad jokes.  But hey, on the bright side, anything that gets the audience to start seriously booing could be a good thing.

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

Mainstreaming

7 December 11
“Marge, what can we do?” – C.M. Burns
“Well, you could give them healthier snacks, theme days . . .” – Marge Simpson
“You mean like, Child Labor Day?” – C.M. Burns
“Actually, I was thinking of Funny Hat Day.” – Marge Simpson

Gary Kamiya has recently made a welcome and charging comeback onto Salon, the latest of which is about some of Richard Hofstadter’s lesser known essays and the infantile mewling that passes for right wing political discourse.  Towards his conclusion he writes:

The only thing holding it together is free-floating anger, a sense of dispossession and an outraged feeling of betrayal — the same memes that Hofstadter traced throughout American history.

Adorno’s portrait of the repressed, father-fixated, emotionally rigid authoritarian personality also offers an uncannily accurate take on the contemporary American right wing. Although his study was flawed by an overly schematic Freudian framework and methodological issues, its findings have been confirmed by some subsequent studies. And even if Adorno’s psychological portrait does not apply to all right-wingers – the mainstreaming of extreme right-wing thought means that for some of its adherents, hating the government has simply become a day job – it captures the right’s belief system with remarkable precision.

The basic architecture of this is familiar to anyone who’s read up on the post World War II history of the American right, but Kamiya glasses over what is easily the biggest difference between the 1950s-60s (when Hofstadter was writing his prescient essays) and today.  The keyword there is “mainstreaming”, and that is the development that, more than any other single factor, has allowed the peculiarly American strain of authoritarianism to flourish in something as previously sober as the Red nominating contest.

At virtually every level of American politics ideas that were once the province of the John Birch Society fringe, people that never really thought Nazi Germany seemed so bad anyway, have been given mainstream acceptance.  In the oft ignored realm of foreign policy this means the belief that no expenditure is too great if it can be justified by conjuring some foreign threat.  The same goes for curtailing civil liberties and making sure the wrong people are kept under control; there’s no line that’s not worth crossing if it will keep, in the government’s odious lexicon, the “homeland” “secure”.

What really animates them, however, are domestic issues of economics.  Specifically, they fantasize about rolling back anything, up to and including Social Security and the 16th Amendment (that confiscatory federal income tax), that makes America less recognizable to the likes of Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan.  As ringmaster Gingrich recently learned, this includes things like child labor laws, which everyone except those with right wing sticks up their asses long ago considered settled.  It’s been a full century since odious sentiments like this . . .

“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits for working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it’s illegal,” he explained last week in Des Moines.

. . . could be made in public with a straight face.  That they’ve come out quite literally defending Scrooge is just another manifestation of the ancient hubris of the propertied updated to modern times.  The real question isn’t where these ideas came from, read John Locke on the poor to see just how old ideas about the subhuman nature of the lower classes really are, but why they’ve suddenly come roaring back into popular discourse after having been banished so thoroughly so long ago.

There are a lot of factors at play there, but the one that’s invoked so often that it’s become a cliche is the keystone of them all: media failure.  The egregious examples of this are littered about in such great number that one need look back no further than Monday to find several true whoppers:

- The woefully misnamed PolitiFact once again wallowing in contrived neutrality and studiously ignoring its own ideological blind spots.

- The innumerate gossip rag Politico holding a nice party for itself to praise a mathematically incoherent healthcare plan supported by one of its main sponsors (via).

- PolitiFact again, this time flagellating themselves at the altar of Broderism.

That’s just the most indefensible of this week’s roster, and it’s only Wednesday.

Grotesque double dealing like this happens so routinely that just keeping track of it would be a full time job.  And let’s be clear, no one is accusing the Fourth Estate of taking cash under the table, there would be a modicum of honesty to that.  Instead they’re taking checks over the table and assuring themselves that their moral fiber is of such stern stuff that the BMW, television time, and ego stroking access that comes with it can’t affect them.

So in place of pointing out that ending Medicare is exactly what Paul Ryan is advocating, they leap to even the flimsiest of language to say, well, that’s not precisely, literally what he said.  Instead of making their job ferreting out the truth of obfuscatory statements, they’ve taken it upon themselves to defend those statements as not really meaning what they plainly mean.  It’s not just that they’ve stopped doing their job; it’s that they’ve begun actively working against the cause they once upheld.

More than anything else that’s what lets vile (and often not so subtly racist) statements into the mainstream.  Time was, saying that you wanted to make poor 9-year-olds scrub toilets because otherwise they’ll never learn to work got a person tarred, feathered, and strapped to the front of the nearest outbound locomotive.  That’s not just an idea that the Republican Party of the 1950s would consider abhorrent, that’s an idea that the Republican press of the 1950s would consider abhorrent.  These days it gets you praised as a serious thinker by people whose own 9-year-olds have private tutors.

The corruption of the press in this way is at least as damaging to both the American citizenry and the American government as the legalized corruption of lobbying and unlimited money as “speech”.  Hofstadter identified the raging right wing id and many of its motivations, and those are indeed useful things to understand if the beast is to be put back into its cage.  But authoritarian fringe sentiments have always existed, going back to before the Revolution.  They’ve been let loose and mainstreamed now in large part because the people who were supposed to be watching stopped, and no one was watching them.

Leave a Comment » | I Love America, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Pat McCarran Lives

4 December 11
“Just miles from your doorstep, hundreds of men are given weapons and trained to kill.  The government calls it the ‘Army’, but a more alarmist name would be, the Kill-Bot Factory.” – Kent Brockman

There was much tumult this week as the Senate, in a move that was brazenly craven even by its spineless standards, inserted language into a war funding bill that would allow the military to arrest American citizens inside the United States if they are suspected of “terrorism”.  This is the epitome of tyrannical law, and the only reason it’s allowed to pass is because everyone debating it assumes that it will only ever be used against scary Muslims.  What’s worse, as Glenn Greenwald comprehensively documents, is that the small pissing contest that broke out between the Senate and the White House over this abomination is only about who gets to have the power to do this, not about whether or not this kind of power is actually abhorrent to American values:

In sum, this bill would codify indefinite military detention, but the actual changes when compared to what the Executive Branch is doing now would be modest. That’s not a mitigation of this bill’s radicalism; it’s proof of how radical the Executive Branch under these two Presidents has already become.

[…]

In that regard, the “debate” over this bill has taken on the standard vapid, substance-free, anti-democratic form that shapes most Washington debates. Even Democratic opponents of the bill, such as Mark Udall, have couched their opposition in these Executive Power arguments: that it’s better for National Security if the CIA, the Pentagon and the DOJ decides what is done with Terrorists, not Congress. In other words, the debate has entailed very little discussion of whether these powers are dangerous or Constitutional, and has instead focused almost entirely on which of Our Nation’s Strong National Security Experts should make these decisions (one of the few exceptions to this is Rand Paul, who, continuing in his New-Russ-Feingold role on these issues, passionately argued why these powers are such a menace to basic Constitutional guarantees). In sum, the debate is over who in the National Security Priesthood should get to decide which accused Terrorist suspects are denied due process, not whether they should be.

The powers that be have already decided that American law enforcement is too gelded by those pesky sheets of parchment in the National Archives to effectively combat whatever it is that passes for “terrorism”.  All they’re really doing is trying to outdo one another in legalese evasions of the truth of what they’re doing.  Charles Pierce gets to the nut of the Senate’s fearful tittering:

They passed a “compromise amendment” that leaves the question of detaining Americans in this fashion open to whatever it is now — which is to say, whatever the Supreme Court will say it is, some day down the line.

Come to think of it, even more disgraceful than the fact that the U.S. Senate seriously argued this issue is the fact that the U.S. Senate decided not to decide at all. This is a hard question, but it’s not riding up to Omaha Beach in a LCM. This is the hardest thing senators have to do, not because their lives depend on it, but because, if they vote a certain way on it, somebody will make an attack ad against them, and someone else might say mean things about them on the radio. This is the only kind of decision that the members of the Senate get paid to make. I admire anyone’s ability to make the measured choice of whether it was more cowardly to make the argument, or to determine that it’s not your job to settle something so vital to the Constitution that you swore up to uphold. You want to know why Ron Paul is still going to poll 17 percent of the electorate three weeks after he’s dead? There’s your reason.

What both Pierce and Greenwald are describing here are the results of the fundamental divorce between the effects of policy in the real world and the way it’s made in the fantasy world of high level media, politics, and business.  The poobahs arguing over which one of them has the proper method for ignoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights exist in a bubble that is peopled with venal defense lobbyists, knuckle draggingly stupid consultants, and myopically amoral political hacks who will turn anything into an attack on someone’s patriotism.  In that world, we are pressed on all sides by a dire threat and the specter of another devastating attack looms over everything.  In the real world, life goes on more or less as it always has provided you or your community doesn’t fall under the increasingly paranoid and unrestrained gaze of our police state.

The assumption baked in to these disgraceful abnegations of Congressional and Presidential oaths to uphold the Constitution is that, wink wink, nudge nudge, only the right people will ever be affected by them.  No different than the scapegoating of German Americans during World War I, Japanese Americans during World War II, and anyone who ever said a stray word about capitalism during the last hundred years, these laws are passed on the implicit understanding that they will never affect the right people.  Authorizing the military to snatch American citizens with no regard to their rights is as surely an eliminationist tactic as Sarah Palin or Bush the Younger taking about the disgusting concept of “Real Americans”.  It’s a line drawn across the American body politic with apple pie and baseball on one side and a heavily inked tattoo that says “Here be Monsters, Treat Them Accordingly” on the other.

The spark of hope at the bottom of this vile box is that these legal contortions are still considered necessary.  Whether or not the people in the national security bubble like it, there is still a strong core of Americana that believes in jury trials, the rights of the accused and that flag waving is no excuse for Constitution shredding.  As hard as so many have worked to make the Terror Wars seem endless, the American people are tired of them, and likely to grow more so as time passes.  Here’s hoping people still get what they want.

Leave a Comment » | I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, War on Terror | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The View from Islamabad

30 November 11
“What’s the difference between Pakistan and a pancake?  I don’t know any pancakes that were nuked by India!  Ha ha.  What, too soon?” – Future Krusty

Imagine for a moment that it is the sooner-than-you-think future.  China is richer and more powerful than America.  They have also, by some dastardly means just short of war, managed to partition Alaska into two halves.  (Presumably this happened because Sarah Palin wasn’t around to keep an eye on the Bering Strait.)  America’s largest state is now split in two along a disputed and heavily armed border, and though the United States plainly considers this illegal and says so at every opportunity, the wider world derides it, subtly and less so, as a petty concern.

Add to that perpetual spring of outrage and humiliation an outright war in Mexico.  Some other foreign power, for the sake of argument let’s say that it’s the European Union, is involved in a long and fruitless guerilla war there.  And while the United States is nominally allied with them, it isn’t participating directly.  Despite that, the war frequently spills over the border, causing havoc in the Southwest and turning a long and rugged swath of the country into a festering wound.

For years, the Europeans have been operating covertly in parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to attack what they say are Mexican guerillas who’ve fled over the border.  In the process they routinely kill American citizens with airstrikes, totaling several thousand per year.  They call these things accidents and offer apologies and compensation, but entire families have been wiped out.  Cookie baking grandmas, working fathers, and their bubbly cheerleader daughters all dead because a single European pushed a button.  Worse, these civilian deaths at the hands of an allied foreign power show no sign of slowing down, much less stopping.

The Europeans have promised to be out in a few years, once their puppet government in Mexico is stable enough to withstand the drug cartels that were the original rationale for their invasion.  But progress is slow, and the new Mexican government is likely to be weak and corrupt.  The European withdrawal seems unlikely to end the fighting, just European participation in it.  Once they leave, Mexico is set to remain a collapsed and volatile country that will cause all kinds of headaches for America and her citizens.

Then just recently, EU gunships fired on an American border post near Douglas, Arizona, killing two dozen soldiers.  The post was marked on EU maps, but the Europeans bombarded it from the air for two hours, claiming they took fire from the location.  The American soldiers had strict orders not to fire, and the local commanders are swearing that they didn’t loose a shot.  The Europeans offer a “full investigation”, but that’s a phrase that has lost all meaning after years of dead civilians.

How do you feel?

Leave a Comment » | Afghanistan, Pakistan, Places Other than America, Sophomoric Imperialism | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Grand Bargains

27 November 11
“Do you think you can get the dental plan back?” – Lisa Simpson
“Well, that depends on who’s a better negotiator, Mr. Burns or me.” – Homer Simpson
“Dad, I’ll trade you this delicious doorstop for your crummy old danish.” – Bart Simpson
“Done and done.” – Homer Simpson

As the backlash over the brutal, proto-fascist tactics of the police against the peaceful Occupy protesters has gathered momentum and turned into a great meme, there’s been a small counter-backlash.  Mostly it’s coming from minority and other long term activists who are understandably pissed that the kind of rough police treatment non-whites routinely experience is only gaining media attention because some white kids on a university campus got pepper sprayed.  (For people who’ve been paying attention, particularly to the failed war on recreational chemistry, this is not a surprise.)  And while there is and likely always will be a double standard in how our politics and our media treat problems that affect the poor and the brown compared to those that affect the white and affluent, there is a larger issue here.

The Occupy movement’s focus on economic inequality is well justified, since more and more of the pie has been flowing to the (usually undeserving) extremely wealthy over the last several decades.  But as any reader of Larry Bartels or Rick Perlstein knows, the major reason those inequalities have been allowed to grow so large is the grand bargain between money warriors and culture warriors.  The much fairer tax rates of the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson era upon which so many of the 99% now look so fondly were only dismantled with the help of middle class resentment at women and minorities being allowed to become full citizens.

So while it’s true that the 1950s and 1960s were a much more economically equal time, it must always be kept in mind that in every other respect they were grossly unfair, particularly to anyone who didn’t happen to be a straight white dude.  It’s no coincidence that the price for correcting the one kind of inequality was an increase in the other.

Modern, tax slashing, safety net destroying, fuck-everyone-who-ain’t-rich conservatism grew out of resentment toward the New Deal and opposition to World War II.  After the Great Depression, the brutal capitalism advocated by FDR’s opponents was distinctly unpopular.  That lasted right up until the Civil Rights movement and desegregation gave the very rich a way to convince large numbers of people to vote against their own economic self interest.  Even the anti-choice movement, which is becoming more and more open about hating contraception as much as it hates abortion, sprang forth when rich white assholes got pissed off that the government began withholding funds to private schools that were still whites only in the 1970s.

With young bucks and single mothers to demonize, the right wing began to dismantle the regulatory and tax structures that had made America so unstoppably prosperous.  Anti-union policies became more effective, progressive taxes like those on income and capital gains were scaled back in favor of regressive taxes like those on sales and payrolls.  The end result was always the same: more money from the working man, less from his boss.

It was the political bargain of the last century, and we’re still reeling from its effects well into this one: organized money and organized bigotry working together to return America to McKinley Administration.  Along the way the middle class, thinking itself safe, repeatedly voted in favor of these things.  It would never have occurred to the California voters that made Ronald Reagan their governor because they were angry at hippies and minorities that he and his descendents would bankrupt their state, make their university system affordable to only the few, and allow the roads and bridges to crumble.  They didn’t realize that the policies that they liked were vulnerable to the same kinds of attacks as the ones they didn’t like.  It took forty years, but now the monster they loosed has finished everything else and is coming for them.

Which brings us back to Officer Pepper Spray, and the shock, shock I tell you, that has greeted his casual brutality.  While it’s undeniably hypocritical that mean, prejudicial, and often fatal police tactics are only getting this kind of attention because they’ve begun affecting white people, what’s new?  The Occupy movement got started because the anti-everyone-who-isn’t-a-millionaire crowd got so much of what they wanted over the years that white people solidly in the middle class began realizing how close to the abyss they really are.  The college degree that used to be the ticket to a decent life is increasingly out of reach, and that’s one of the reasons students at places like UC Davis are so upset.  But like the police brutality, that’s just policies that originally only targeted the poor and the brown finally reaching the white middle class.

State support for education has been on the wane for a long time and, like everything else that’s been on such a wane, was originally done in such a way that it didn’t affect the right people.  But underlying it all is that grand bargain between the moneyed and the bigoted, and if you doubt it talk to anyone with a Z at the end of their name in Arizona or Alabama.  Breaking that is going to mean that people who’ve been hip to the unfairness of modern America for a long time are going to have to get used to allying with people whose situations have allowed them to be ignorant of it.  We don’t have the numbers without them.

Leave a Comment » | I Love America, Occupy Wall Street, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Why “Super 8” Sucks

23 November 11
“Once in a great while we a privileged to experience a television event so extraordinary it becomes part of our shared heritage.  1969, man walks on the moon.  1971, man walks on the moon again.  Then for a long time nothing happened.  Until tonight.” – Krusty the Klown

I can’t vouch for the particulars of the marketing budget, but it does seem that Super 8 is getting a more aggressive rollout on home video than even most summer popcorn movies.  I’ve seen ads in a couple of different mediums and the marketing has been unusually aggressive in the you-must-own-this-movie-because-it’s-a-classic variety.  The DVD cover image even goes so far as to have two typically asinine critic quotes on it, the second of which sets the oxymoron to 11 by declaring it “An Instant Classic” (capitalization in the original).

While I’m loath to hold the marketing of a movie against it, the “instant classic” in this case is no mere coincidence or decision by low level home video people.  Ever since Super 8 came out last summer, it’s been billed as a movie that will transport audiences back to the heady days when Steven Spielberg made nothing but great movies, and the film itself rolls around in that selling point like a pig in shit.  Unfortunately, Super 8, while a decent enough popcorn flick, misses that mark wildly.

The movie was written and directed by Hollywood darling J.J. Abrams as an open love note to the truly classic lot of 1980s kids movies that came out in the years after Super 8’s 1979 setting.  There are elements of everything from The Goonies and The Monster Squad to Explorers and even Flight of the Navigator.  Lurking over everything though is the immense, bulbous headed shadow of Spielberg’s genre defining smash E.T..

Like E.T., Super 8 involves a group of plucky American kids who accidentally encounter an alien.  Also like E.T., Super 8’s real bad guys are the government agents who are bent on exploiting the alien for their own purposes.  Unlike E.T., Super 8 suffers from two crippling problems that will prevent anyone from caring about it long term.

The first problem is easier to explain but no less damaging for being so: the alien couldn’t be more generic.  For most of the movie it’s an amorphous blob of dark computer graphics.  Then at the end it is revealed to be a standard screen alien that’s a vaguely reptilian, vaguely insect looking collection of limbs and leathery skin.  It lacks even a single distinguishing characteristic and is in every way an unremarkable digitally generated movie monster.

It’s so forgettable that could be the computer generated alien from a dozen other films and so closely resembles the monster from Cloverfield (which Abrams produced) that the average movie goer probably couldn’t tell them apart in a lineup.  This is a stunning failure for a movie so directly aimed at nostalgia.  Goonies has Sloth and the pirate ship, The Explorers has the tit-a-whirl, and E.T. has, well, E.T.  Each one of them is iconic and memorable in a way that any movie geek can recognize on a t-shirt even twenty-five years later.  Super 8’s creature is nothing like that; the movie doesn’t even have a defining image.  There’s nothing like Elliot riding his bike in front of the moon, or even something as simple as the Truffle Shuffle or “Hey you guys!”.

The second problem is that Abrams is making a movie for adults rather than a movie for kids.  That may seem like a minor point, but many of the movie’s shortcomings stem from this crucial flaw.  Today’s adults love those 80s kids movies because they saw those movies when they were kids.  Most people born before about 1975 don’t share Abrams’ (b. 1966) love of these films because they were already past the target demographic when the films were released.  You almost have to see those movies as a kid to fall in love with them the way Abrams wants people to fall in love with Super 8, but Super 8 isn’t endearingly simple and childishly earnest the way his source material is.

Instead, Super 8 is every inch the sophisticated modern summer movie: ironic, self aware, violent and much scarier than the average 1980s PG rated movie.  It attempts to simulate childish wonder and give adults who were kids in the 1970s and 1980s the same thrill they got from seeing the originals for the first time, but it feels like the replica that it is because it’s clearly aimed at the adults those kids grew up to be rather than the children they once were.

This misaimed focus is apparent in basically every aspect of the movie.  There’s the slightly too mature love story, where, despite their teenage fumbling, our two leads have the weary apprehension of dating scarred adults.  There’s the knowing self awareness of the various members of the kid group, the fat kid understands his role as well as the nerd and the pyromaniac.  The lead even has an intuitive grasp that he’s going to have to bond with his father sooner or later.

The most damaging expression of this is simply the setting of the film.  Abrams has made a period piece, different only from a 19th century or 1950s costume drama in the specifics of the hair and the clothes.  To the ten-year-olds who should’ve been his target audience, 1979 is as far removed as 1959 or 1859.  One of the big reasons E.T. and all those other 1980s movies are still beloved today is that the kids watching them when they came out identified with them.  Elliott and others like him were ordinary kids who acted like much of the audience, but for someone born post-2000, Super 8 is more like watching a slideshow of your parents’ childhood.

Super 8 isn’t a bad movie, but neither is it a memorable one.  The alien is just another video game creature and the movie is just another big budget summer flick.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but since Super 8 tries consciously and so very hard to be an iconic classic, one can’t help but walk away feeling a little disappointed.

Leave a Comment » | Movies, Super 8 | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Time Warner, the NFL Network, and Net Neutrality

20 November 11
“Hey, we’re making enough money, right?” – Doomed Costington’s Executive

Despite it being dedicated to far and away the most popular sport in the land, and despite the fact that an unremarkable cable hookup has more than enough bandwidth to carry it in high definition, the NFL Network remains unavailable on the nation’s second largest cable provider, Time Warner.  For Thursday night’s Jets-Broncos game, many Time Warner subscribers were given a brief reprieve to this blackout when a local station agreed to carry the NFL Network’s feed for the evening.  The NFL is as aggressive in its marketing as its on field product, and during the first half the broadcasters took a moment to alert those viewers to all the wonderful upcoming games they were going to miss, and might they want to talk to their cable provider about that?

They went ever further in the second half.  During another brief break in the game the announcers came on and actually put up a list of television providers who carry the NFL Network, then they mentioned out loud that NFL Network was carried on such fine systems as Dish Network, DirecTV, and AT&T’s U-verse.  The message was less than subtle: Time Warner is screwing you, NFL fan.

In the grand scheme of things, that a few fans can’t watch football on Thursdays isn’t that big of a deal.  But beneath the surface of this dispute, which has been going on for years, is a preview of our bleak future if serious net neutrality rules aren’t adopted and viciously enforced.  Minus the theatrics, the NFL-Time Warner dispute is two multi-billion dollar corporations arguing over money, and the result is that millions of ordinary people are denied what they want to watch on television, even though they already pay one of those companies a hefty monthly bill to deliver television services.

It isn’t written anywhere that Time Warner cable has to carry the NFL Network, and since Time Warner cares far more about its bottom line than it does about its customers’ satisfaction, they are more than willing to screw them over for a few measly million football dollars a month.  What makes net neutrality so wonderful is that it reverses those priorities.  Though existing for a different technical reason than cable television, net neutrality prevents an entity like Time Warner internet from behaving the way Time Warner cable has been.

As odious internet laws that erode neutrality, wire the system for destructive and ineffective copyright protections, and generally make the internet more like cable television wind their way through more and more countries, it’s worth asking some of those Time Warner customers if they’re happy with what they’re getting.  It’s also worth remembering that while the vile Stop Online Piracy Act currently sitting in the House is dead on arrival at the moment, should the Reds take the White House and the Senate next year, it or something worse is all but certain.

As evidenced by the NFL-Time Warner fight, cable television is a racket (many customers have no real choice of provider) where giving people what they’re paying for is so far down the list of priorities that you need a lawyer’s magnifying glass to see it.  The internet isn’t like that yet, and unless you know a lot of people who love their cable company and look forward to messages on their computer saying “This site cannot be displayed from your location”, it would be best to keep it that way.  Otherwise we’ll all end up as worthless little figures being told to call our provider to register our displeasure, as if a few complaints mattered in the least.

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

Ad Busted

16 November 11
“Even as I speak, the scourge of advertising could be heading toward your town.  Lock your doors!  Bar your windows!  Because the next advertisement you see could destroy your house and eat your family!” – Kent Brockman
“We’ll be right back.” – Homer Simpson

In the wake of the Occupy movement’s first big taste of serious police action in New York City (and in a lot of other cities), it’s worth recalling the context of where the Occupy movement came from: Adbusters.  Like Occupy, Adbusters is a kind of loose agglomeration of generally left wing people who see too many things wrong with the world to not do something, even if something is a small a thing as reading a magazine.  It’s also concerned, as its name indicates, with what its current about statement refers to as “the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.”  It continues:

Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons.

What makes this different from what mainstream discourse thinks of when words like “environment”, “pollutes”, and “ecology” are invoked is the specific and repeated discussion of the “cultural” and “mental” aspects of the environment.  For Adbusters, it isn’t enough to keep old growth forests from being knocked down or to address climate change, a truly healthy “economy and ecology” also require us to examine the mental effects our culture of consumption has on us.

It’s not just about lusting after the car with the designer interior or your neighbor’s vibrator that plays “O Come, All Ye Faithful”; it’s about the ancillary effects – externalities, if you will – of that desire.  Advertising has always been designed to blast a small hole of inadequacy in you if it’ll make you slightly more likely to purchase a given item in an attempt to repair the breach.  The great George Meyer described advertising like this back in 2000:

“I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.”

That is precisely what the Adbusters people are talking about when discussing the cultural and mental aspects of the environment and the commercial forces that influence them.  Advertising spews enormous amounts of the finest bullshit money can hone, and the effects of it radiate into our relationships, thoughts and feelings long after the campaign has ended and the products have been recalled or discontinued.

The result of that damage is, not to be overly dramatic, human misery.  People who might never have felt bad about some topic suddenly feel self conscious or stressed that the wrong brand of X in the cabinet or Y on their clothing means that other people think less of them.  Not being able to afford enough or the right kind of something becomes, even if just in a tiny way, an indictment of one’s entire life.  Nor can it be alleviated by purchase of the product, because the vast majority of them don’t live up to their promises.

And while there’s a case to be made that advertising in general keeps the economy from grinding to a halt and all of us from living in ditches, on an individual level advertising is almost exclusively a negative.  It isn’t often that you hear someone say, “I’m really glad I saw that ad”.  It happens, not everything for sale is crappy, but it’s rare.

Worse, an individual’s exposure to advertising has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few decades.  Once upon a time advertising was limited to relatively confined spaces: television and radio broadcasts, billboards, newspapers and magazines.  But the last twenty years or so have seen advertising creep into ever more corners of modern life.  The ads are on buses and benches, before and during the movies, written into the names of stadiums and charities, even on the products that the other advertising already got you to purchase.  And that was before internet ads took off.

Remember, ads are extremely crafty messages that have been rigorously designed and scientifically refined to catch your eye, make your ears perk up, and rattle around in your brain.  And the space people are allowed to be safe from those assaults is shrinking all the time.  To be sure, there’s no guarantee that mental energy and time expended in the absence of ads would be “better” spent, but it does represent a profound shift in the way people think.  And that shift has been foisted on them with essentially no public debate or examination into whether or not such a thing is harmful.

Adbusters and Occupy object to that passive acceptance, and while the levels of rejection will vary depending on the individual, they have a point.  The immediate aftermath of the Occupy crackdown has focused on whether or not the occupation in Lower Manhattan is over, whether or not the political energy will dissipate, and whether or not Occupy can or will be folded into the existing political left the way the Tea Party was folded into the political right.  But perhaps the more lasting question is whether or not ideas like “Buy Nothing Day” can spread beyond the activist fringe.

It seems very unlikely that large scale rejection of consumerism is coming to a prosperous suburb near you.  But even a little bit of pushback from non-activists in that direction would be something new; which is why, despite this morning’s four column headline, the New York Times story most relevant to the Occupy movement’s goals may have ran last Friday.  The Occupy Wall Street movement is only mentioned in passing, but “Thanksgiving as Day to Shop Meets Rejection” is about a general repudiation of the post-Thanksgiving shopping madness by its most ardent practitioners.

Much like regular pollution, the kind of mental and cultural pollution Adbusters objections to doesn’t affect people equally.  But if people like those in the Thanksgiving article, who’ll admit to spending thousands of dollars on Black Fridays past, are starting to feel saturated in it, then a turning point may have been reached.  We’ll see.

Leave a Comment » | I Love America, Occupy Wall Street | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Drug Blinders

13 November 11
“Prohibition?  Pfft.  They tried that in the movies and it didn’t work.” – Homer Simpson

Even by the increasingly low standards of the former Atlantic Monthly, the article currently up at their website entitled “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police” is grossly subpar.  The premise is a sound one, namely that police officers aren’t soldiers.  But the article elides so many unpleasant truths that by time it arrives at its point there’s hardly anything left.

For starters, it seems to think that the militarization of American policing began with the 2001 terrorist attacks.  But the original SWAT team was founded before the World Trade Center had even been completed.  And small town police forces have been acquiring military weaponry ever since the Cold War ended and army surplus made M-16s and the like cheap.  That happened just a few years after the government began militarizing its doomed “War on Drugs”, the continuation of which has done far more to drive the militarization of the police than the fantastic terrorist scenarios beloved by dimwitted politicians and unimaginative screenwriters.

The article starts promisingly enough, with a brief account of the Pima County SWAT team’s murder of an Iraq vet back in May.  Jose Guerena’s house was attacked during a botched drug raid.  Though Guerena had nothing to do with drugs and never fired a shot, the SWAT guys hit him sixty times.  Sixty.  It goes almost without saying that no contraband was found and the sheriff’s office began lying its ass off immediately after the echo faded.  Guerena was just a guy living in a neighborhood that has been turned into something resembling a combat zone by our manic obsession with recreational chemistry.

Instead of pointing out that he was the latest in a long series of civilians killed at the hands of our militarized drug warriors, the Atlantic article completely loses its thread.  It doesn’t note that raids like this one have been happening since long before anyone heard of anthrax or al-Qaeda, nor does it deem worthy of mention that the odiously misnamed Patriot Act has allowed the drug warriors greater leeway to torment the civilian population.  It speaks exclusively in the studied language of the equally misnamed “War on Terror”.

The authors do a decent job of cataloging all of the neat military toys and cool soldier training that the cops have gotten since 2001, but completely ignore both the staggering cost of those things as well as their essentially complete failure to ever be used against actual terrorists.  They’re criticizing an approach to law enforcement that involves heavy weapons being present at all times, but that is the limit of their curiosity.  Asking how long its been happening?  Nah.  Wondering if those slick weapons have ever justified themselves?  Nope.  Even mentioning the self defeating policies that are the root cause?  Not a chance.

While there’s nothing in the article that’s outright factually incorrect, there’s also nothing factually incorrect in pointing out only that a house is on fire when men are also spraying it with flamethrowers.  Talk about the fire all you want, but if you studiously ignore the guys causing it then you aren’t so much informing your readership as you are misleading them by omission.

The journalistic banality of this article isn’t what makes it remarkable.  After all, carping about the police and society’s problems in general is the bread and butter of serious journalism.  What makes this one so stunning is the way it opens with a drug raid and then completely forgets drugs.  So persistent and total is the media blind spot for the drug wars that even in an article that begins with two paragraphs about a drug raid the topic is absolutely ignored.

It’s true that American policing has been wrecked in the last few decades.  It’s also true that a symptom of that is the way “peace officers” are now armed so heavily that an average city’s police force could conquer a small country.  Neither of those are good things, and talking about them is important.  But doing so with drug blinders on is a waste of time and pixels.  It’s like describing chemotherapy as a hair removal system.  In the strictest sense it’s true, but in context it is so misleading that it’s functionally false.

Leave a Comment » | equus altus morium, Illegal Drugs, Institutionalized Stupidity, War on Drugs | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Unhappy Nation

9 November 11
“Hey, no one termers!” – Guard
“You too, huh?  Hey, I know a good yogurt place.” – Jimmy Carter
“Get away from me, loser.” – Bush the Elder

Yesterday’s elections must have been very decent for the good guys if even Firedoglake pronounced it “a pretty good night”.  Maine decided not to make it more difficult to vote, Iowa tacitly endorsed same sex marriage, Arizona tacitly rejected overtly racist immigration laws, and Mississippi shot down a misogynistic law so anti-choice that even a lot of anti-choicers were against it.  The headline win came in Ohio, where a citizen referendum (that took a lot of political ground pounding just to get on the ballot) destroyed Governor John Kasich’s efforts to make Ohio more like those crippled “right to work” states south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Naturally, last night’s animal entrails are already being interpreted by the priests for any sign into what next November may hold (which is all anyone really wants to talk about anyway).  The Washington Monthly put their haruspicy right in the opening paragraph:

Going into Election Day 2011, the conventional wisdom said that voters would offer some clues about prevailing political attitudes and what’s to come in 2012. As the dust settles on last night’s results, if the conventional wisdom is right, Republican optimism about next year is badly misplaced.

Not to be outdone, Salon this morning set its interpretation right into the subhead and headline of its lead story:

This is what GOP brand poisoning looks like

In Ohio and elsewhere, Tuesday’s election results offered troubling signs for Tea Party conservatism

The Paywalled Lady, ever demure, tried to confine itself to speculating about the speculation . . .

Labor’s victory in this important swing state comes a year before the presidential election, and policy makers and political strategists will be studying ballot initiatives for clues to voter sentiment in 2012.

. . . but spent the last half of its article discussing the pros and cons of seeing the Ohio vote as an omen.

To be fair, the Ohio win certainly looks good for Barack Obama’s reelection chances.  No one is going to confuse him as the anti-labor candidate, and last night the Ohio Blues got 2.1 million people to the polls in a year that’s both non-Presidential and non-midterm.  By comparison, last year’s democratic gubernatorial candidate received just 1.8 million votes, and in the massively better attended 2008 election Obama won the state with just 2.9 million.  To get such a huge number of voters in an off-off-year election is a very impressive feat.

Of course, there’s no guarantee those people are going to vote for Obama next year.  Many of them are likely Red union members who voted their pocketbook and aren’t receptive to messages from the President.  And if the economy continues to suck, or if Europe precipitates another full blown financial panic just three years after the last one, no amount of union hall politicking will save Ohio for Obama.

But while trying to divine 2012 before the calendar has even flipped over is fun and generates pageviews, the more concrete message here seems to be one of continuing and possibly mounting frustration.  The 2006 and 2008 elections were decisive rejections of the assholes in charge because they had managed to screw things up so badly that ordinary people were suffering.  The 2009 elections continued the trend in a minor way, 2010 in a major one.  Now 2011 has kept the streak intact.

Politics always being local and difficult to discern objectively what all this points to is impossible to say with any real precision, however it does lend credence to the overarching idea that the political system and the creatures that inhabit it are failing in a fundamental way.  That doesn’t mean that there’s a revolution coming or any kind of flippant nonsense like that.  (Sorry, Occupy people.)  But it does mean that people remain unhappy with the way things are being run despite massive turnover of elected officials in the last half decade.

The hopeful side to this is that reversing last year’s catastrophe next year will lead to things getting better.  When in power, the Reds continue to govern from fantasy land, and until they become able or willing to drop their ideological rejections of discernable reality their governance will fail miserably.  And make no mistake, yesterday’s votes were a top to bottom rejection of what the Reds did with their win last year: no to union busting, no to voter restriction, no to warped abortion laws.  Whether or not that translates to Blue wins in next year’s vastly more important contests is an open question.  But, partisan labels aside, last night the electorate rejected unworkable Red ideology.  That’s a good sign.

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

Anti-American

6 November 11
“Ironic, isn’t it, Smithers?  This anonymous clan of slack jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail.  That’s democracy for you.” – C.M. Burns

Precisely one year from today, millions of Americans will vote in the 2012 election.  Despite having voted in previous elections, many more, the exact number is unknown and the subject of much speculation, will not.  In the last few years, before and after the catastrophe in 2010, many states have passed laws that make it more difficult for Americans to vote.  I’m going to repeat that, because it is perhaps the most disgusting thing happening today.  American legislatures are passing laws that make it more difficult for people – Americans – to vote.

There’s nothing novel or un-American about keeping people from voting, of course.  This country was founded by people who wanted to be able to vote on their future, but for as long as it has existed, American voting has been restricted by those who think they are wiser than the rest.  Though such restrictions have come in many guises, they are always based on the unholy trinity: race, gender and property.  The betters of our society, whatever the fashionable guises, have never been comfortable with the rest having a real say in things.

In our time that base, neverending anti-Americanism has hidden itself behind the fig leaf of “voter fraud”.  Under that flimsy justification, a number of states have passed odious laws whose barely concealed purpose is to keep the wrong people from being full Americans.  However couched in modern language, it’s the ancient argument that some people are unworthy to have a say in how we run things in this country.  Behind it is and always has been a distrust of other Americans.

That distrust has always and will always lead us into trouble.  America is its best self when everyone is involved, when, to use the parlance of our times, everyone has skin in the game.  And while there have been several elegant denunciations of this rancid trend’s modern revival, Ta-Nehisi Coates got to it better than anyone.  Taking a run around the monument heavy part of D.C., with his life, his parents’ lives, and his son’s life swirling in his head around a ton of American history, he belted out something magnificent.  I do it injustice to quote it even at length, but here it is:

Out there, on the Mall, among the monuments, in this state, it all came at me, the recent readings of American history, my own movements through  life and congealed into the oddest thing — an intense pride in country. I spend much of this blog discussing race, and teasing at the problems of American history. I think that it would be easy to see in that a scornful, pessimistic and cynical view of the country. On the contrary, I was much more scornful and pessimistic in my nationalist days. It’s easier to attack the alleged fallacies of American democracy in the abstract. I’ve found it increasingly harder to do when measuring the country against the breadth of human history.My roots are radical and nationalist. I regularly depend on the skepticism gifted to me by the radical/nationalist tradition, still my cynicism has been dulled by my excursions into history.

I don’t know if “American Exceptionalism” means much in this age, but it did, once. In The Feminist Promise, Christine Stansell notes that in 1850, America was the last standing democracy in the Atlantic world. That claim must be qualified by the broad swath of Americans — blacks, immigrants women — who were disenfranchised. At the end of the 19th century, Stansell notes that Utah and Colorado were two of the only places in the entire world where women could vote. The hackneyed notion that “America is a beacon for democracy” is usually deployed in arrogance. But in the time of Abraham Lincoln, it was a demonstrable fact.

I think of my parents born into a socially engineered poverty, and I think of their children enjoying the fruits (social mobility) garnered by the nonviolent, democratic assault on that social engineering. And then I consider that for centuries, over the entire world, if your parents were peasants, you were a peasant, as were your children.

I think it is proper to be proud of that change. I would not argue for a pride that insists America has worked out all of its problems, and evidences that work by exporting its institutions via tank and bomber. I would argue for a studied pride, a gratitude, that understands all that was sacrificed, that we could have easily tilted the other way, that the experiment is still, even now, fragile, and remains in constant need of the lost 19th century concept of improvement.

That sentiment is what these vote suppression laws are an affront to, that is what makes them anti-American.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Pat Buchanan’s Book Is Stupid, But His Readers Aren’t

2 November 11
“The snow’s melted, we can go outside again! . . . I don’t like the looks of those teenagers.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson

Life is far too short to spend reading Pat Buchanan books, but his latest screed contained so many nursing home doozies (pining for segregation, fretting over the future of “White America”, taking Martin Luther King out of context) that it caused a brief media spasm and Talking Points Memo did it anyway.  The result was “Twelve Pretty Racist Or Just Crazy Quotes From Pat Buchanan’s New Book”.  A few choice excerpted excerpts:

If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities. That might explain why black folks have trouble getting a cab. Every New York cabby must know the odds, should he pick up a man of color at night.

That’s a nice twofer there, racism and statistical ignorance.  Moving along:

Perhaps some of us misremember the past. But the racial, religious, cultural, social, political, and economic divides today seem greater than they seemed even in the segregation cities some of us grew up in.

Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.

That’s an impressively high contradiction to sentence ratio.  And finally:

Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to “insure domestic tranquility” and “make us a more perfect union”? Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?

That appears to be the thrust of the book, modestly titled, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025”.  And while I wouldn’t presume to review a book I’ve no intention of reading, I think it is fair to say that Buchanan speaks for a lot of people.  He won the New Hampshire primary in 1992, garnered half a million votes in the general in 2000, and his book is currently the #95 selling book on all of Amazon, and #3 in politics.  Buchanan is very clearly afraid of something, as are a great many on the right.

What’s got him worried?  Primarily the fact that he sees the America he knew as a kid (he turns 73 today) disappearing in favor of one that looks weird and scary to him.  If that sounds, as TPM said in their headline “Pretty Racist”, well, that’s because it is.  Buchanan is saying, quite plainly, that America was better off when it was a lot whiter.  But it’s dismissive to end the discussion there.

Behind pointing the finger at border jumping brown people and black people who should’ve been content with separate but equal lies a great deal of fear, in Buchanan and in plenty of other American conservatives.  And while that fear is often racially motivated and quite irrational, it’s also understandable.

As with most things, this can partly be blamed on the subservient pack of illiterates we call the press corps.  It is very much their fault that, while violent crime rates are at near historic lows, the fear of crime is as high as it’s ever been.  Scary re-enactments, pictures of missing white girls, and whole channels full of crime stories feed an utterly unjustified perception of how dangerous our society is.

Beyond that, though, is what Buchanan is getting at: America has changed radically within the memory of many of its citizens.  It’s not just big things like ending segregation and giving women the right to proper medical care, it’s thousands of little things like swear words on television, couples living openly in sin, and billionaires who wear blue jeans.  When Buchanan was growing up in the 1940s, respectable men wore ties and hats everywhere, women often weren’t allowed into public buildings unless they were in a dress, and two men caught in sexual congress could be arrested.

On top of that, Buchanan is Catholic, which means he can remember a time when the Church was one of the most powerful institutions in the country, all services were held in Latin, and bishops and cardinals all but ran many towns and cities.  Protestants of his age can, if so inclined, still find plenty of old time religion.  Buchanan is stuck with a Church that is a shadow of itself, wracked by scandal, and hopelessly liberal compared to the one in which he was raised.

The world has changed enormously in his lifetime, and like a lot of other people he has a hard time with that.  That isn’t surprising, and for reasons of pure tribalism (nothing Obama or Pelosi says will help) it may be impossible to assuage those fears in any meaningful way.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth redirecting the conversation a little, because while Buchanan himself is likely beyond mollification, a lot of the people for whom he speaks aren’t.

That’s why things like dishonest portrayals of Social Security’s solvency (it’s fine, but you wouldn’t know that reading Kaplan Test Prep Daily) and doom and gloom articles about crime rates (actually down) are such a problem.  They’re ratcheting up the fear for people who are already afraid.  While there are certainly things to be worried about, the things Pat Buchanan is worried about, including the unfamiliar culture of modern America, aren’t among them.  Pushing back on that won’t convince him of anything, but it might sway a few of the people who think he’s on to something.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, Pat Buchanan, Republic of Fear | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

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