The Racial Thing

29 October 08
“Jesse Jackson is not the Emperor of Black People!” - Token Black
“He told my dad he was.” - Stan Marsh

(In general I am not a fan of posts that come with music, but in this case I think it applies well enough to make an exception.)

There is a very good chance that in less than a week the United States of America will elect a black man as President.  Nobody knows what that might mean because it’s a unique event in our history.  It is, in a way, a little scary; the same way that anything unknown, even something I badly want to happen, is a little scary.  The important question is: how will people react?

There is an intractable problem whenever one tries to discuss race in this country.  Racism is considered an absolute taboo, as it should be.  But everybody, black or white, brown or yellow, old or young, male or female, is at least a little bit racist.  It is impossible to see someone without noticing the color of their skin and that alone leads to all kinds of other little judgments, some of which are, inevitably, racial or cultural.  Those judgments may be instantaneous and involuntary but they exist and so all of us are at least a little bit guilty of judging others by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character.

That is the uncrackable nut of the problem.  Every individual has their own unique experience of race in America and it always falls short of the colorblind ideal.  We invent stereotypes as a necessary if distasteful shorthand, but they inevitably paint people inaccurately.  All we know for sure is that things are better today than they were twenty years ago, and they were better then that they were twenty years before that, and so on back until at least Reconstruction.  That experience tells us that twenty years from now things will (hopefully) be better than they are today, and twenty years after that they’ll (hopefully) be even better until at some point racism becomes truly inconsequential.

Of course many people are more than just a little bit racist, and the proof is in the fact that the Secret Service felt it prudent to begin protecting Barack Obama in the spring of 2007.  (Since that time there have been at least two groups of people arrested on suspicion of plotting against him.)  Nevertheless, here we are less than a week from Election Day and the black candidate is significantly ahead in pretty much every metric we have, including actual votes.  Thoughts then turn to questions like “Yes but what does it mean?” and “Okay, but what are the practical, day-to-day implications?”

Those questions are probably unanswerable, at least for a while; all we know for sure is that it’s big.  It might be big in that it fundamentally changes the way a lot of Americans see each other.  Hopefully Barack Obama will be a successful president, but even if he is merely a middling one the dire fears coming from the right these days won’t come true.  Will that fundamentally alter inherent racial assumptions?  There are a lot of white people in this country who live in overwhelmingly white areas and can easily go for long stretches between minority sightings, what impact will this have on them?

It’s also possible that electing a black president is big simply as a marker for the continuing evolution of our society from one where laws separated people at birth to one where someone’s racial background is an afterthought (or no thought at all).  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are now older than most Americans; as people who grew up after the struggle to get those laws passed come into power will having a minority president be seen as something that was just bound to happen sooner or later?  The number of First Black Xs (astronaut, Supreme Court Justice, Super Bowl winning coach) is ever decreasing, is it possible this is just one more in course?

My own guess is that it will be hailed as historic immediately, but that we won’t get a good feel for how it really matters for a year or two.  One of the more entertaining aspects of this general election campaign has been watching the anti-Obama sentiments border on, and then sometimes cross over into, outright racism.  How will those people react to the daily reality of President Obama?  After all, the American President is probably the most famous and televised person on Earth; having an image of (non-athletic) black success be inescapable for four (eight!) years may be a more powerful thing than we can imagine.

Take, for example, this wonderfully American exchange reported to FiveThirtyEight.com two weeks ago:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

(Incidentally, it is okay to use the word “nigger” when you’re quoting like that.  Inserting a few asterisks is juvenile self indemnification and only serves to make the word itself more powerful, not less.)

That story sounds almost too good to be true, but for someone like me who has spent a lot of time in the Red parts of Blue states that story has the real ring of truth.  (They convincingly stood by it in a later post.)  When it’s just us white people around it is easy to encounter “I’m sorry and I know I shouldn’t feel this way but . . .” feelings.  Of course, when push comes to shove it doesn’t apply to the black guy you go fishing with, or the guy you hang out with in the break room at work.  It’s always some other black people.

That is the best description I can give for racism in America.  There are certainly the out and out nazi shitheads, but they’re a fringe unworthy of serious attention.  Most people, though, will give anyone a chance regardless of creed or color.  It is those ordinary Americans, who are often a little bit more racist than they’d like to be, who, I think, will benefit from having Barack Obama in their lives.  I include myself in that category and I think in their honest moments a lot of other people, pink and brown, black and white, yellow and red, would as well.  The image below says it all (via Politico):

Only in America

Only in America

End Note: It is possible that Obama’s race will cost him this election.  You can go back and forth about The Bradley Effect versus The Cellphone Effect versus The “Your Likely Voter Model Sucks” Effect until you’re blue in the face, but we won’t know for sure until next week.  I find those sorts of things interesting to read but ultimately frivolous.  This particular set of circumstances is unique, and not just because there’s a black candidate.  There is a president with historically low approval ratings, there is an ongoing financial panic, there are two wars being waged, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  Remember, N Always = 1.

I’m an American who was raised in America and lives in America and based on my American experience I don’t think this country is still racist enough to deny the presidency to Obama on account of his melanin content.  I could be wrong about that, and there’s certainly nothing about my experience that makes it a better or worse predictor of the nation as a whole than anyone else’s, but when the available data is shaky at best you’ve got to go with your instincts.  Mine say that it’ll cost him some votes but it’ll add some too and in the end he’s still very likely to win.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, I Love America, Racism, The Art of the Possible, equus altus morium | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

A Malingering Process

26 October 08
“That just kept goin’, huh?” - Krusty the Klown

Barring something truly hideous or shocking in the next nine days the election has become what everyone thought it would be two years ago: a Blue year.  This raises an interesting question which, sadly, will be completely ignored because way too many people stand to make money by ignoring it.  What, exactly, was the point of having a two year long presidential campaign?

Barack Obama and John McCain announced their presidential bids in February of 2007.  That’s eleven months before the first primary votes and twenty one months before Election Day.  What was happening in February of 2007?  Well, the Democrats had just gained control of Congress the month before, Bush the Younger had recently shelved the Baker-Hamilton Iraq report and decided to send more troops instead, and the economy was in okay shape.  Bear Stearns chief US economist was quoted in the 2 February 2007 New York Times saying that the manufacturing sector “is poised for stronger growth” and “There’s a lot more to this economy than housing and cars.”  The day before McCain formally announced his presidential bid Lehman Brothers announced that it had paid its CEO $40.6 million dollars.  That is the environment in which these men began their presidential bids.

Obviously things are going to change over that much time and maybe there’s some benefit to seeing what the candidates do in reaction to new developments, certainly you don’t want to just pull a nominee for president out of a hat two months before the election.  But the world in 2007 is not the world in which the election is to be held.  The conventional wisdom in 2007 was that McCain’s campaign was dead and Hillary Clinton had irresistible advantages for the Democratic nomination.  2008 now sees Hillary Clinton as a failed candidate who ran an incompetent campaign while John McCain swept in and won the Republican nomination when the moral and business conservatives split their votes between Mike Huckabee (who?) and Mitt Romney.

There may be some regret of those decisions these days, and not only because McCain is behind in the polls.  The economy was certainly an issue back at the beginning of the year, but no one knew it was going to be like this, and economics is clearly McCain’s weakest issue.  Thanks to the ridiculously front loaded primary schedule McCain had the nomination in hand before Bear Stearns went tits up in March.  There are probably a lot of Red supporters who would appreciate having had the selection of the nominee a bit closer to the actual election.

On the other side the Blues didn’t finalize their nominee until June, and if you’d told someone in January that that was going to happen they’d have laughed at you and then concluded that surely a primary of that duration would doom (Doom!) the party’s eventual nominee.  That also looks to have been foolish overreaction.

It’s certainly important who the President of the United States is, every person on the planet is going to be affected by the outcome of the election next Tuesday.  But where is it written that having a year long selection process results in the best candidates?  If anything, the opposite is true.  It exhausts the candidates, causes the parties to select someone before they can even make informed guesses about what the defining issues will be, and the cartoonish coverage sours the non-political junkie portion of the public on the whole process.  No one benefits except the minority of people who are political junkies and the journalists and bloggers who feed their addiction.

These aren’t topics which are on the minds of a great many people nine days away from the election.  But it might be worthwhile to take a step back from today’s daily bric-a-brac and consider just how worthless most of the daily bric-a-bracs were last year.  This is especially true because the loser’s party is going to begin the selection process again about seven seconds after this one is finished.  Choosing nominees and presidents is important, but that doesn’t mean it takes two years to do the job properly.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, John McCain, Systems Analyst, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Low Risk, High Reward

22 October 08
“Is this legal, man?” - Jimbo Jones
“Only here and in Mississippi.” - Principal Skinner

An Obama Administration will have many messes to clean, many mistakes to correct.  None of them are going to be easy to fix, but some are simpler than others.  One of the simplest, and one that will quickly yield tremendous benefits, is the immediate closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.  Getting the hell out of Iraq and implementing an Afghanistan policy that isn’t self defeating (which may also mean getting the hell out) are equally vital, but those are projects that are simply beyond the scope of the first few days or weeks of an Administration.  Closing Guantanamo, on the other hand, can be done almost immediately.

There are roughly 140,000 American troops in Iraq and roughly 34,000 in Afghanistan; by contrast there are, as of last month, “approximately 255” prisoners left in Cuba.  We now know that most of the men originally sent to Guantanamo were either of no intelligence value or completely innocent.  Even if all 255 of the remaining prisoners are hardcore terrorists who need to be incarcerated in maximum security facilities it’s impossible that either the military or the federal penal system lacks the capacity to hold them.

Of course, all 255 of them aren’t hardcore terrorists.  We know at least one of them, Salim Hamdan, was a lowly driver and has a sentence set to expire in January.  We also know that seventeen of them, ethnic Uighurs from China, are so non-threatening that a federal judge recently ordered them released in Washington.  Since they’re caught in the legal netherworld where the Bush Administration only obeys court decisions it approves of they’re still down in Cuba, the judge’s order having been stayed on appeal.  In Hamdan’s case the Administration simply declared that it wouldn’t release him upon the completion of his sentence, even though he was tried and sentenced in their own crooked military tribunal system.

In fact, that tribunal system is so crooked that its own prosecutors won’t go along with it.  Just yesterday came word that charges against five men had been dropped.  From USA Today (via Raw Story):

Some of the harshest words came last month from the very man who was to prosecute the five men against whom charges were dropped.

Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld said during a pretrial hearing for a sixth detainee this month that the war-crimes trials are unfair. Vandeveld said the military was withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense in that case, and was doing so in others. He resigned over his concerns.

The simple fact is that Guantanamo has become more than an embarrassment; it’s a detriment to every American interaction with the wider world.  It is a powerful and renowned symbol of everything that’s gone wrong.  Its original purpose was to be a place where American law did not reach, but the Supreme Court has steadily eaten away at that insane notion.  Because many of the men have been tortured, and the cases against them are most likely flimsy to the point of transparency without evidence produced by torture, the current Administration fears putting them state side lest they be forced to release them.  The Administration’s position, through all the years, can basically be boiled down to one simple, abhorrent notion: we can do whatever we want with these men.  Convicted and served your sentence?  You stay until we say so.  Innocent and ordered released?  You stay until we say so.  Guilty but we’re afraid to put you on trial?  You stay until we say so.

If the Bush Administration were going to continue for a further two years or longer this convoluted legal grinding could conceivably continue that entire time.  (Indeed, Bush the Younger recently rejected a State Department proposal to close the place.)  Instead our new president will have a brief window to order the place closed forever and bury the stain and stigma with Bush the Younger and the rest of his failed presidency.

In the case of true terrorists, especially those like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who had a hand in the 11 September attacks, there should be more than enough non-torture evidence to put their ass on trial in front of a New York City jury with great confidence that they’ll end up locked away for however many decades it takes them to die old and forgotten.  Only the cleansing process of putting these men through federal court can begin to wash off the stink of this shameful affair.

Closing Guantanamo is the kind of simple administrative act that a new President could undertake immediately.  Simply removing the prisoners from Cuba and expediting the process of either repatriation or settling them here in America would confirm the righteousness of the new President in the eyes of the world, begin the process of healing our government’s self inflicted wounds, and start us all on the road back to sanity.  If it stays open much past January though it will become the new President’s mess.  Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Guantanamo Bay, Habeas Corpus, I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, Salim Hamdan, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible, Torture | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Waiting for Sheriff Bart

19 October 08
“Hello Mr. Halper, I’m calling from MoneyBank credit services department.  I was wondering if you had a chance to read the threatening letter we sent you?” - MoneyBank Services Representative
“Dahh . . .” - Bart Simpson
“Because you sound like a mature responsible person who wouldn’t want an unpaid credit card bill to spoil all his hopes and dreams for the future, dreams such as home ownership, boat ownership and event attendance.  Now, when can I tell my supervisor, Mr. Robinson, to expect payment?” -  MoneyBank Services Representative

Near as I can tell the credit freeze currently squeezing the economy is a result of a kind of financial HIV.  Collateral Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps and all other manner of financial chicanery allowed everyone to lend money to anyone; but things got so out of hand that now no one knows how much they owe and how much they own.  As a result, if I lend money to you I’m not only lending money to you, I’m lending money to everyone you’ve ever lent money to.  Nobody trusts anybody and as a result nothing gets done.

And so we had stories like this one from Wednesday’s New York Times detailing the federal government’s basically forcing nine private banks to take taxpayer money and start using it to get things moving again.

The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States trooped into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department at 3 p.m. Monday. To their astonishment, they were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left.

. . .

But by 6:30, all nine chief executives had signed - setting in motion the largest government intervention in the American banking system since the Depression and retreating from the rescue plan Mr. Paulson had fought so hard to get through Congress only two weeks earlier.

It was as though the American government was waving a magic wand over these banks, absolving them of their bathhouse sins and promising that no one else will be allowed to die.  That’s all well and good, but what happens if no one trusts the guy with the wand?

Henry “Hank” Paulson, whatever one may think about him or his performance as Secretary of the Treasury, is on his way out.  His job won’t formally end until three months from tomorrow (probably), but his authority is going to evaporate in just two short weeks.  The same goes for his boss, our beloved president, Bush the Younger.

From his imperial and godlike throne in the White House, on Air Force One or inside your television set the President can seem like an all powerful figure.  Of course, he isn’t; but his omnipresence means that he and his minions frequently get blame and or credit for swings in the economy over which they have very little influence (and certainly no control).  Obviously over the long term the policies of a president have tremendous effects on the economy, but on a month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter basis there usually isn’t much he can do.  As luck would have it, this is not a usual time, in finance or politics.

Consider stock indexes.  Stock market averages are not the world’s most informative numbers if you want to gauge the overall health of the economy, but they are very useful when it comes to determining the psychology of the world’s moneyed classes.  Recently they’ve been all over the map, creating and destroying trillions of dollars of value seemingly without regard to the status of bailouts or bank rescues.  For the last several weeks stock markets, from Tokyo and Hong Kong to London and New York, have been alternately plunging and surging, sometimes within the same day’s trading.

None of the private actors trust each other because each one of them is worried that the other guy’s case of finance HIV is worse than his own.  There is only one entity large enough and secure enough to pacify things and restore trust.  Unfortunately it’s getting ready to put up an “Under New Management” sign because the last guys sucked.

As long as those guys are still in charge nothing of long term substance can be done, even if anyone still trusted them (no one does) it wouldn’t matter because after eight years nobody respects their judgment.  Depending on how you want to count, Paulson has flip-flopped on what to do anywhere from four to six times in the last month alone.  The reputation he spent a lifetime building has been shredded by a mere two years in the employ of George W. Bush.  When this is all over he’ll probably share a rueful drink or two with Colin Powell, Paul O’Neill, and everyone else who had their credibility pissed away by that man.

In the meantime the financial institutions of the world will just have to hold their collective breath and wait for the new management to arrive.  Regardless of what form that management takes, even if McCain won and went so far as to rehire Paulson, no one is going to trust the American government until after November 4th.  Having the world’s largest financial actor essentially paralyzed can only be exacerbating the current problems and you don’t need to know anything about economics to see that.

In the meantime, don’t let the doom and gloom articles get you down too much, nor the “hey it might be working” variety overly cheer you.  The air is thick with uncertainty right now and it isn’t going to clear until we have a new president (elect).  So chill out for a couple of weeks and we’ll see where we are then.

Side note: I always knew the Bush Administration’s fuckups would come crashing down on them some day.  I way off on the timing, but I knew it would happen sooner or later.  As much as I’d have liked to see him impeached two years ago, if the economy was going to melt down it couldn’t have happened at a better time.  Please don’t screw this up Mr. Obama.  We’re counting on you.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, America's Elite, Barack Obama, CDOs, Credit Default Swaps, Economics, Hank Paulson, Institutionalized Stupidity, John McCain, Systems Analyst, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

And Now, Our Main Event . . .

15 October 08
“Well, we’re still on, three hundred and forty-six consecutive hours, and all because of one little boy who . . . who won’t let me stop!” - Krusty the Klown

In just three short weeks the 2008 election will be over (probably).  If we’re all very lucky sometime around 11:00pm Eastern Standard Time on November 4th the television networks will put up flashy “Obama Wins” graphics and the long nightmare of George W. Bush will finally have a (somewhat) happy ending.  If things are really going well we might even get to watch some of the Red Senators who sleazed their way into office during the war hysteria vote in 2002 go down to defeat.  I’m looking at you Messrs Chambliss, Coleman and Sununu.  But I’m getting ahead of myself; we’ve still got nearly three weeks of genuine political engagement to enjoy.

Politics is everyone’s business but only a minority of people follow it on a year round basis.  Attention from the broader public bubbles up a little during the primaries (more so this year than usual owing to race/gender novelty and the fact that both parties had genuinely open contests), spikes during the conventions, and then slowly builds as we get closer and closer to Election Day.  As that fateful Tuesday approaches a great swell of general interest overwhelms the usual background blather of talking heads, op-ed columnists and on-line prognosticators.  Then we vote, and then it’s over and the cycle begins again.

I count myself among that overly interested minority and a feeling I’ve encountered a lot lately amongst my fellows is one of fatigue.  In person, in print and on-line I’ve heard people basically saying, “At this point I just want it to be over” or something to that effect.  It’s an obnoxious and exasperating sentiment.  Paying attention to stories about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, Mitt Romney’s bizarro memories of his dad and Martin Luther King, Barack Obama’s gutter-balls, John McCain’s green screen challenge, New Yorker covers and all the other campaign moments little noticed outside of the echo chamber doesn’t mean jack squat come October.  Expending serious energy and emotion on such obvious trivialities is just plain dumb and yet smart people do it anyway, that’s the exasperating part.  But it’s the whiff of entitlement and superiority that comes with thinking the election is almost passé that makes it obnoxious.

This is the good stuff, when ordinary Americans perk up their ears and make their decisions.  Just because you made up your mind for Obama or McCain months ago doesn’t make you any better or cooler than someone who hasn’t.  You can see this nonsense expressed best in the reaction to the debates.  Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill and Tom Brokaw came in for a lot of criticism for letting the candidates basically just recite their talking points.  And the candidates were derided for doing little more than regurgitate half digested chunks of their stump speeches.  Why is that considered an inappropriate thing for them to do?  The reporters and pundits who’ve heard it before are not the primary audience; the people who haven’t been paying attention are.  When else are these four people going to get to be on all three networks plus cable?  Mock Sarah Palin all you want for wanting to avoid the “filter” of the media, but on this, at least, she’s correct.  It’s a powerful opportunity to talk to the American people and to squander it trying to appease an empty suit like Tom Brokaw would be borderline negligent.

The debates are a great way for candidates to communicate to voters because it requires almost no effort on the part of the voters.  All Sally Housecoat and Johnny Lunchpail have to do is turn on the television and they can evaluate both candidates at the same time.  It’s two for the price of one.  Indeed, post debate polls have shown significant gains for Obama which means that it’s new to somebody, and those somebody’s votes are just as legitimate and count just the same as someone who rushed off to blog about how dumb the level of discourse was.

Yes the debates are conducted on about an eighth grade level, so what?  Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, for Pete’s sake.  He knows how to write, speak and think on the highest levels of the English language.  McCain’s certainly not going to win any academic contests, but whatever else you want to say about the man he’s clearly not a dunce.  (Unlike, say, the current President, who quite probably is a dunce.)  I’ve seen what I thought were reliable statistics that the average adult literacy level is about what’s expected of an eighth grader (sadly, I could not find an on-line citation to back me up).  If that’s even close to true it means that Obama and McCain were pitching their remarks right at their intended audience.

Bitch about the idiocy of pundits and columnists all you want, but don’t for a minute think that every word that comes out of candidate’s mouth isn’t carefully weighed and considered.  The vocabulary might not impress the Oxford Dons but knowing your audience is far more important than sounding smarter than the other guy.  If you want to say that we do a poor job of educating people I’ll agree with you; and expecting modern American citizens living in the twenty-first century to be able to converse on the same level as a recent high school graduate doesn’t strike me as unreasonable.  But if I may paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to the polls with the electorate you have, not the electorate you might want.

We’re three weeks out and I promise you that three weeks after it’s over the popular attention will again recede.  The NFL playoff picture will be taking shape, Oscar hopefuls will be flooding the googolplexes of America and the holiday season will be upon us.  It is only now, in this precious little window, that we get to see the true political nature of this country.  After that it’s right back to untestable opinion polls and op-ed speculation for two whole years.

This is when we get to see our American polity for what it truly is, no virtues pretended, no vices hidden.  Glorious victory or agonizing defeat are close at hand so whatever you see or hear these next three weeks (passionate advocacy, ugly racism, earnest belief), you know it comes from the heart.  Politics is usually a sideshow, right now it’s the main event; enjoy it while it lasts.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, John McCain, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Americana

12 October 08
“Look at the fear in his eyes, listen to the quiver in his voice, he’s a little boy lost in a game of men.” - Lisa Simpson

The last week of the presidential campaign can only be described as the “Countdown to ‘Nigger’”.  Rallies featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin became so vitriolic that McCain himself felt compelled to pull things back a bit on Friday by telling his own supporters that they didn’t need to be scared of an Obama presidency.  (That the attacks apparently haven’t been effective didn’t make it any easier to do.)  Prior to that humiliating moment it was only a matter of time until either violence broke out or that most vile of American racial insults was picked up by a microphone.  The generally accepted explanation for this ugly turn is that the Red campaign, led by Palin accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists”, began all but explicitly race baiting its supporters and things snowballed from there.  The racism on display cannot be ignored, but keeping the White House white isn’t the primary motivation behind all that anger.

Things really got rolling with a Dana Milbank piece in Tuesday’s Washington Post.  The two most newsworthy incidents were a black network employee being verbally abused (a “racial epithet” was used and he was told to “sit down, boy”) and someone in the crowd yelled “Kill him!” (it’s unclear whether this was in reference to Obama or William Ayers, the ex-radical Obama’s had some association with).  The buildup continued as video of McCain and Palin speaking through shouts of “terrorist” and “treason” began to make the rounds.  Despite the remarks being obviously audible neither of them broke from their prepared remarks.  (McCain, at least, flinched and winced; Palin just kept on going.)  From the left and the right the commentariat condemned these words and the tactics that led to them and everyone was waiting for the dread word “nigger” to drop, or, worse yet, report of some politically motivated hate crime.

The Milbank piece appeared the morning of the second debate.  Heading into Tuesday evening the big question was whether or not McCain would raise Ayers or any of his other “Who is Barack Obama?” attacks on live national television with Obama himself ten feet away.  He didn’t, not directly or even by allusion, and the tone at the rallies became even uglier.  The original video of this, captured from a cable news channel, has been taken down, but this being the Age of Everyone Has a Camera, I found a different version on YouTube:

That guy complained about how “mad” he was about how things were going and the crowd stood up and applauded.  The people in that crowd were desperate for McCain and Palin to attack Obama harder than they already had and the knee jerk reaction to that and other similar incidents is to see these crowds as angry, bordering on hysterical, and more or less outright racist.  The same goes for the people in this video.  Titled “The McCain-Palin Mob” it was filmed and posted by a site called blogger interrupted and has already had more than a million views:

It’s certainly understandable to see these people as little more than racist Ohio morons talking about Obama’s “bloodlines”.  But to do so is dismissive of the more fundamental cause.  There are doubtless some out and out racists but for the most part those people aren’t inherently opposed to the idea of a black president.  They don’t subscribe to quackery about Negroid Man being inferior to Caucasoid Man or some shit like that.  Rather, they see a very scary world which has only grown scarier in the last few weeks as the financial crisis has imperiled the economy and John McCain’s chances.  Remember that for the people at these campaign events the term “Wall Street” doesn’t connote wealthy conservatives, it connotes wealthy liberals.

Who are these people?  They’re the conservatives caught in the squeeze.  You can go to pollingreport.com and see Bush’s job approval rating hovering in the mid twenties and the right track/wrong track numbers in the mid teens.  There’s roughly a ten point discrepancy and even if the polls are off by a few points you’re still talking about millions of Americans caught in that overlap.  These people still believe in Bush but also think the country is going to hell in a hand basket; they are the people you see on YouTube ranting about Obama’s election leading to terrorism.  It comes out as racism (against black people or Arabs/Muslims which to them are the same thing) but it isn’t fundamentally motivated by racism.  They think the only thing standing between them and ruin these last seven years has been George W. Bush and they don’t think McCain is up to the task.

Castigating these people as being an angry racist mob is incorrect and frankly unjust.  The Americans in that line, the ordinary citizens in those riled McCain/Palin crowds, aren’t bad people and the fundamental emotion that’s roiling them into such a frothing rage isn’t anger or simple racism; it’s fear.

Government fear mongering has been part of the background noise of American life for seven years now and this is the inevitable result.  Every time the terror alert level goes up or down national anxiety builds.  Every time an official says discussing our eavesdropping policies helps al-Qaeda it scares people just a little bit more.  Every time water boarding or any of our other torture techniques are discussed it reminds people that scary men are out there and we have to do terrible things to protect ourselves.  Government officials, all the way up to Bush the Younger, say that orange alerts deter attacks, that illegal wiretapping catches terrorists, and that torturing people has saved lives.  The fact that these statements are provably false doesn’t prevent millions of people from believing them.

Put yourself in their shoes for a moment, these people really believe that there are terrorists lurking everywhere and it’s only the forthright President who’s kept us safe.  As if that wasn’t bad enough the economy, which hasn’t been kind to most of them lately, now looks set to head off a cliff.  Bush the Younger seems to feel the same way, from Saturday’s New York Times:

“He said that if it was going to happen at all, he was glad it was happening under his presidency, because he had a good group of people in D.C. working for him,” Dru Van Steenberg, one of several small-business owners who met with Mr. Bush in San Antonio earlier this week. The president expressed the same sentiment, others said, during a similar private session in Chantilly, Va., the next day.

“He said that whoever was going to take over in January was going to have a huge crisis on their hands the day they come into office,” Ms. Van Steenberg added. “He thought by this happening now, that perhaps everyone could see signs of improvement before the next president comes into office.”

It’s easy to dismiss those sentiments as the ramblings of a broken president who isn’t fit to care for a houseplant much less the United States of America, but millions of people feel the same way.   When popular majorities and most of his own party just want him gone it’s all too easy to forget that there are a lot of Americans who are going to be sorry to see him leave office.  Those people are not often commented upon but they’re the same people who go to McCain/Palin rallies and yell at the candidates for not being tough enough on a man they see as the embodiment of their fears.

They’re terrified right down to their cores and not just because a black man is about to become President (though that doesn’t help).  They’re terrified because for the last seven years the government of this country has been going out of its way to terrify them into fearing Muslims, liberals and the very notion of having anyone but George W. Bush in the White House.  If four years ago John Kerry had held a poll lead similar to what Obama’s is now we’d have seen a lot of this same ugliness.  The fact that Obama is black, that he shares a middle name with a recently deposed Iraqi dictator and that his last name is one consonant away from being the same as our nemesis exacerbates things, but the underlying cause here isn’t simple racism.  It’s the fear mongering that the executive branch has been practicing.  Its victims need sympathy, not scorn.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Bush the Younger, I Love America, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Systems Analyst, The Art of the Possible, Unintended Consequences | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Blurst of Times

8 October 08
“I can’t believe it; we won another contest.” - Marge Simpson
“The Simpsons are going to Delaware!” - Homer Simpson
“I wanna see Wilmington!” - Lisa Simpson
“I wanna visit a screen door factory!” - Bart Simpson

All good things must come to an end.  Yesterday, the eleventh, and as far as I’m concerned final, season of The Simpsons came out on DVD.  Yes, there have been many episodes broadcast since the Season 11 finale in 2000, but they bear only the most superficial of resemblances to what was once known simply as The Simpsons.  In terms of intellect and humor what is broadcast these days is a hollow shell, just one more vacuous television program distinguishable from the others only by its noble history.  If the current episodes premiered today under a different title (as, say, The Thompsons) it would be cancelled inside of a month.  At this point the show is little more than Zombie Simpsons, the heart and the brains went out of it a long time ago.

It’s not as though Season 11 is some sterling collection, the golden age of The Simpsons ended in Season 7 with “Marge Be Not Proud”, but there are good episodes in it and the finale, “Behind the Laughter”, would’ve been a decent way to end things.  Instead, of course, it staggered onwards, descending into the unwatchable crap we have today.  Many things have gone wrong over the years, the constant overreliance on Homer getting hurt (in increasingly convoluted and elaborate ways), ever more intrusive and hackneyed celebrity appearances (often playing themselves), and stories that grow more outlandish and bizarre with each passing season.

Speaking only for myself, the most devastating change has been the increasingly self-aware nature of the characters.  Homer, and to a lesser extent Bart and the rest of the cast, have devolved from American Everybodies into messy caricatures of themselves who are all too aware of their special status.  What originally made Homer Simpson a great character was his very ordinariness.  He was an everyman, the low brow guy working the dead-end job to support the kids who don’t particularly love and or respect him.  The same was true for Marge the unappreciated housewife, Bart the undisciplined troublemaker and Lisa the overlooked overachiever.  These were recognizable characters and it carried through to the supporting cast.  Now Homer is invincible and he knows it, the rest of the cast even treats him with special deference.

Let me give you an example.  In Season 5 Homer goes to college in order to keep his job, and when the Dean gets hit by a car he has to go to the hospital and the plot turns on the event.  In Season 11 Homer is asked to house sit Burns’ mansion (for some reason), becomes a party boat captain (for some other reason) and ends up fighting pirates and floating back home on a raft made of his dead friends (you get the idea).  This is obviously a selective example but the difference is undeniable.  The Dean getting hit by the car takes less than a second and has real consequences, the “action” on the boat goes on for half a minute for no real purpose.  Oh yeah, and Britney Spears (at the height of her popularity) guest stars as herself.

I could go on in that vein but there’s no point.  Either you know what I’m talking about or you don’t.  To catalogue just how bad things have gotten I was all set to bite the bullet and suffer through some of the new season for examples of the awfulness that is modern Simpsons.  The first two episode descriptions were not encouraging:

Sex, Pies and Idiot Scrapes (28 September) - When Homer is given $25,000 bail after his participation in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade fight, he and Ned team up to be bounty hunters; Marge takes a job at a bakery, unaware that it sells erotic cakes

Lost Verizon (5 October) - Bart takes a cellphone discarded by Denis Leary and starts making prank calls pretending to be him; when Marge squeals on Bart to Leary, he tells her to turn on the phone’s GPS tracker so she can track him, but Bart attaches the chip to a bird headed to Peru

You couldn’t sum up the general problems any better.  In the first Homer gets another new job (as a bounty hunter no less, I’m sure there’s an oh so thrilling chase and that he absorbs tremendous damage); in the second it’s celebrity cameo time once again!  Fortunately I was spared the indignity of having to watch them when this clip of Homer voting (presumably from this year’s Halloween special due on November 2nd) was leaked online:

Long story short Homer goes to vote for Barack Obama and the voting machine changes his vote to one for John McCain.  It’s a funny concept but even in this short clip you can feel them stretching the gag to fill the time in way classic Simpsons never did.  At first Homer is directed to a voting booth much too narrow for his ample frame.  As a cheap gag he tries to fit for a few seconds (accompanied by some rubbery Foley effects) before being directed to the “double wide” handicapped booth.  Homer votes for Obama and the machine counts it for McCain and it’s funny.  But it doesn’t end there, oh no.  It goes on for another thirty seconds in which the machine inhales Homer, a massive pool of blood spreads on the floor, and then Homer’s mangled corpse is ejected.

I certainly appreciate the dig at Ohio but much of the sequence feels like overwrought filler.  That’s a subjective judgment on my part, as is my low opinion of the countless episodes I endured before I finally quit watching the new ones, but Homer’s on screen for barely sixty seconds and yet there are two drawn out jokes about him being fat or getting hurt.  I realize that this clip is from a Halloween episode so rules don’t really apply, and I have no idea how this fits into the larger plot of the segment, but it’s still indicative of just how thin the humor has become.

The Simpsons was once great and profound and my opinion that it is no longer either of those things is just that, my opinion.  But does anyone out there seriously believe that it’s the funniest show on television anymore?  Does anyone out there seriously believe that it’s the smartest show on television?  Those contentions were once all but inarguable and now even asking the questions is laughable.  The early seasons were lightning in a bottle, the right show (written, voiced and animated by the right people), for the right time on the right channel in the right context and they set an impossible standard, but what goes up on the air now isn’t just substandard, it’s sad.

By a happy coincidence tonight is the fall premier of the reigning grand champion of television comedy.  South Park, which is now in its twelfth season, is still going strong.  It has the occasional weak episode, but has there been any episode of The Simpsons from the last decade with as much pop culture panache as “Trapped in the Closet”?  Or as keen a take on a controversy as “The Passion of the Jew”?  Or as many wall-to-wall gags as the “Imaginationland” episodes?  Please.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Simpsons needs to die.  The current episodes are over-animated, under-thought out and mediocre to the core.  They aren’t worthy of the name.

Think of the Children! (end note):

Two weeks ago I was sitting in a Panera Bread café/bakery/whatever the hell that place is.  It being Panera there was a clutch of teenagers in the next booth.  The company was mixed and the tone of the conversation sounded both friendly and flirty.  The bench seats were filled so one late arriving male pulled a chair up to the booth.  I didn’t directly witness what happened but after they’d been there for a half hour or so there was a small commotion.  Amidst still friendly banter the kid in the chair then got up and went to the bathroom, apparently to tend a minor injury.

Upon his return the female in the booth who had been adjacent to him apologized; I think her flirtatious horseplay had gotten a little out of hand.  Resuming his seat in the chair the kid said, “You made me bleed my own blood.”  My immediate reaction was to think “excellent usage” and then I felt a small swell of pride in our youth as the entire group got the reference and laughed.  At most this kid was seventeen which would make him about negative two when that episode was first broadcast.

There is hope.  The kids are alright, and good Simpsons always shines through.

No Comments » | South Park, The Simpsons, The Vast Wasteland | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Easier, More Seductive

5 October 08
“Marge, I’m feeling a lot of shame right now.” - Homer Simpson
“I’m hearing that you feel a lot of shame.” - Marge Simpson

Yoda was right.  The dark side is easier and more seductive, but it is not stronger.  It’s easier to torture a man into telling you what you want to hear than it is to sit down with him and just keep talking until he reveals the truth.  It’s sexier to declare someone evil and feel your oats by dominating him than it is to see him as a human being whose actions, however reprehensible, were motivated by something.  When Dick Cheney memorably said, “We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will.” he was committing America on a course of action as counterproductive as it is destructive.

Well into The Dark Side, Jane Mayer’s superlative account of the torture policies of Bush the Younger, we learn about a hideous concept known as “learned helplessness“.  Apparently, if you subject a dog to enough random electrical shocks it will eventually stop jumping to relieve the pain, it will even cease crying or yelping; torment it enough and it will just lie there, passive and broken.  Doing that to a dog is morally questionable, to say the least.  It should go without saying that the idea of breaking a person like that should never even be considered, especially not by a country like the United States of America which, until this decade, had a long and commendable tradition of treating prisoners with the utmost humanity and all possible generosity.  George Washington started that tradition; George Bush ended it.

As a direct result of his orders and the torture conducted by agents of our government enormous and unknown amounts of time and money were squandered.  Innocent men were tortured, sometimes to death, and guilty men, men with blood (American and otherwise) on their hands, can now be seen as victims.  Justly punishing them has become more difficult (because “evidence” gained by illegal means is not admissible) and it is very likely that no lives were saved.  Welcome to the dark side.

Mayer has been writing on this subject for The New Yorker for years and the depth of her knowledge is displayed on every page.  It’s a small tragedy, amidst many greater ones, that anyone should ever need an easy and confident grasp of such stomach turning crimes, and yet much remains unknown.  As far as we know the Bush Administration didn’t use random electrical shocks on its prisoners.  But there is still a shroud of mystery over the secret prisons known as “black sites” and at this point would it surprise anyone if it came out that they had been connecting men’s testicles to the wall outlet?  That’s the depth to which we have sunk, nothing can be reasonably ruled out any longer.

The chief villains of The Dark Side are Vice-President Dick Cheney and his ideologue sidekick David Addington.  The 11 September attacks seem to have fundamentally changed both men from mere conservatives into ideological zealots as fanatical as any suicidal hijacker.  Cheney, Addington and a few others (most notably “torture memo” author John Yoo) genuinely believed in the “they hate us for our freedoms” canard and once a fallacy so absolute became their article of faith there was no dissuading them.  They saw the detainees under their control as agents of a movement which possessed the power to destroy America and the motivation to do so.  Looked at in that light their actions are understandable even though they can never - under any circumstances - be condoned.

The book isn’t a complete downer though.  Throughout there are tales of reasoned resistance, mostly from conservative Republicans within the Administration and the Defense Department.  The “few bad apples” theory which was used to exculpate everyone above the rank of toilet attendant of the Abu Ghraib crimes appears to hold water.  It’s just that the few bad apples tended to be evenly distributed up and down the chain of command.  There were vicious, inhuman interrogators on the front lines but there were also vicious, inhuman supervisors and vicious, inhuman bosses behind them.  Ashcroft, and especially Gonzales, were weak willed and disinterested, both were repeatedly subverted, ignored or steamrolled by Cheney and Addington over anything of consequence.  Rumsfeld simply didn’t care.

The Dark Side is a slog to read, no doubt about that.  But it’s not the screams of tortured men echoing off every page that makes it tough, though there is some of that; it’s the plodding bureaucratic progression of American torture that makes it so hard to stomach.  The birth of an unconscionable monstrosity is documented step by step, memo by memo.  Bad ideas which began as little more than thoughts on the computer screens of high ranking officials end up caging men like dogs and torturing them to death.  The undeniable sense of revulsion and nausea at the illegal and immoral acts being approved and practiced is almost matched by the creepy Brazil-1984 logical contortions used to justify them.  Suffice it to say that things have gone badly awry once a top White House lawyer is reduced to looking up the words “severe” and “pain” in the dictionary.

These men knew that what they were doing was illegal and while they plainly didn’t give a shit they couldn’t simply ignore the law for fear of ending up behind bars themselves.  That laws against torture exist for exactly this reason, to forbid and prevent this behavior even in the most trying of times, seems never to have occurred to them.  In their arrogance they fell back on illogical justifications and comforting euphemisms.  Those men were not prisoners; they were detainees.  They were not being tortured; they were subjected to enhanced interrogation.  Etcetera etcetera etcetera.

The actions and policies of our government detailed in The Dark Side are physically and morally disgusting but since their direct effects have largely fallen on non-Americans they are amongst the most neglected of Bush the Younger’s many crimes.  That man is responsible for so much damage, so many deaths, so much loss, that the public has come to its own learned helplessness moment.  At this point what’s one more scandal?  One more impeachable offense?  One more waste of life and money?

As a start though one of things an ordinary person can do in the face of this kind of inhuman behavior is to simply use the proper words.  Those who torture other human beings cannot be allowed to hide their crimes in a fog of language.  “Torture” is a hard word, “murder” is a hard word; they are especially hard when connected with offices and institutions which in better times we rightly respect and revere.  But “torture”, “murder”, and the like are the only words that can be honestly applied here and one should not flinch from using them.

It is always aggravating when someone tells you that a book is so important that you just have to read it.  This is especially true of books like The Dark Side, which are serious, political and downright sad.  So I’ll close by simply saying this, you don’t need to read the whole thing but at least take a stab at the first chapter.  Entitled “Panic”, it’s eleven pages long and is the most condensed and coherent explanation of how the Bush Administration went from being the amusingly incompetent bunch we knew in the summer of 2001 to the monstrously destructive cabal we know today.  Responsibility ultimately rests with Bush the Younger, but the blame can be justly fixed on Cheney, Addington and a few others who lost it in a crisis and dishonored themselves, their offices and the United States of America.

If, sometime in the next few months (Christmas is coming), you find yourself in a bookstore, or even just at a mini-mall which happens to have a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, spend fifteen minutes with the first chapter of The Dark Side.  If you’re not a bookstore fan you can read it on-line at Barnes & Noble’s site.  Just click the “See Inside” link on the left hand side; you don’t even need an account with them.

Pretending these bad things didn’t happen won’t make them go away, and ignoring them does a disservice to the people who fought against and exposed them.  They are the true patriots and when America stands to reclaim her honor it is they who will be celebrated as heroes.

No Comments » | Book Reports, Bush the Younger, David Addington, Dick Cheney, Guantanamo Bay, I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, Jane Mayer, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible, The Dark Side, Torture | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Treat the Heart Attack, But Don’t Forget the Cancer

1 October 08
“Homer has many, many horrible problems.” - Springfield General Hospital Doctor/Veterinarian

It is natural to forget dull aches for flashes of sudden pain, and our vaunted twenty-four hour media can only keep so many stories in the air at once, but lost amid the continuing shit storm of attention devoted to finance and the economy is a potentially very important day in Iraq.  Today is the day the Shiite Iraqi government begins to assume command authority and financial responsibility for the Sunni militias who have been put on our payroll over the last two years.

The militias, variously referred to as part of the “Sunni Awakening” or as the “Sons of Iraq” depending on the currently fashionable euphemism, are thought to be responsible for a great deal of the post-invasion insurgency.  After several years of futility trying to capture or kill them the decision was made, roughly in autumn of 2006, to begin simply paying them not to attack American forces.  From that time to this, a period which has seen a tremendous drop in the amount of violence, they have been working directly with Americans and getting paid directly by Americans.  As of today those responsibilities will begin to transfer over to the Iraqi government.

Some of the Sunni fighters will doubtless be incorporated into the government’s security forces.  Others are probably beyond the point of reconciliation with the Shiite government.  As with any plan in a war this one looks good on paper, carries enormous risks and nobody knows how it’s going to turn out.

There are some things we know for sure though.  No matter how often the decrease in Iraqi violence is cited by politicians as a profound turning point whenever the military talks about those same security gains the word they always use is “fragile”.  Pick your prominent American flag officer and you can find them using that word, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen in March, “fragile, delicate and tenuous”, then Iraq commander General Petraeus in April, “fragile and reversible”, and newly minted Iraq commander General Odierno two days ago, “it’s a fragile state”.  Those fragile security gains were, near as anyone can tell, almost entirely the result of this policy of paying off the Sunni militias.  Today that policy comes to an end:

Al Qaisi swears that he won’t report to the Iraqi Army, despite the fact that he and his men are among the 50,000 or so Sunni militiamen who gave their names to the Iraqi government for registration.

A man with a gruff face and a sharp tongue, al Qaisi said he speaks for a series of armed groups and for some 30,000 men across the country who once fought American troops and the Iraqi government. He’s an ally of the U.S. military now, but if he’s betrayed he’ll become an enemy of the Americans again, he said.

The plan is certainly not doomed to failure but there’s an awful lot riding on there being a significant reconciliation between Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government and these well armed and veteran Sunni militias.  The article quoted above also mentions that the US Army has plans to continue the payments should the Maliki government fall down on the job.  (One assumes the money is ultimately coming from American coffers either way.)  So it’s not as though we’re cutting these men loose, but as there’s still no agreement on the status of American forces in Iraq beyond December 31st it’s hardly a stable situation.

Like its Southeast Asian predecessor, the Iraq War has had its public ups and downs but none of them have ever altered the fundamental flaw, namely that American troops are caught in what amounts to a civil war.  In this case the civil war has undergone something of a lull in the last year but the chances for serious political reconciliation remain low.  The warring parties are still in close proximity, extremely suspicious of each other and armed to the teeth.

As we hand the Sunni militias off to the Shiite government it’s worth remembering that, financial crisis or no financial crisis, there were publicly trumpeted signs of hope in Iraq right before the last presidential election.  The razing of Fallujah, just after the ballots were cast, exposed them for the illusions that they truly were.  A lot has happened in the last four years but we were then and are now: an unwelcome presence in an unfriendly land.

A Brief Note on the American Politics of Iraq:

For the moment the economy has blown Iraq out of the water as the major issue of the campaign.  That change is largely credited with the profound shift towards Barack Obama in the polls these last few weeks and much as I like to dump on polling in general this close to the election it usually starts to firm up.  Two Public Policy Polling reports from this week show Barack Obama ahead in Florida and North Carolina (both PDFs).  PPP is nice enough to allow free public access to some of the internal data and “Economy and Jobs” led “War in Iraq” as people’s number one issue 64%-15% in Florida and 64%-10% in North Carolina, no other issue was in double digits.  Amongst those people who rated Iraq as their top issue Obama led 54-43 in Florida and 49-42 in North Carolina.

Both are traditionally Red states with large military presences; it stands to reason that the people who care most about Iraq in those states are heavily comprised of active duty military and their friends and family.  Combine those numbers with the fact that Obama had (as of August) outraised McCain 6:1 from military personnel serving overseas and it looks safe to conclude that those most directly involved with Iraq have had just about enough of it.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Iraq, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos