Captured by the System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Self Interest vs. Stupidity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Political Nipple Piercings, Discuss!

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Even More Shameful Shit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality Still Has a Liberal Bias

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Tragedy of Arnold Schwarzenegger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Man of His Time

10 January 10

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Little Things (Lots and Lots of ’Em)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Time Capsule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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