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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Security Theater Goes to Eleven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a Comment » | Airport Security, Institutionalized Stupidity | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

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

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

Note: Lots of Avatar spoilers below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Depth of the Hole

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

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

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

Intelligence Improperly Collected on U.S. Citizens

That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Good with the Bad

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Enduring Taboo Cracks Just a Little Bit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denying the Future

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

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

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

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

To which Amanda Marcotte replied:

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handicapping the 2020 Presidential Field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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