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Monthly Archives: September 2010

Shirkers

“Hey, that thing’s going kaka cuckoo.” – Carl
“Who cares?  It’s Homer’s problem.” – Lenny

Via Armchair Generalist, comes a piece from Stephen Biddle in which he makes the face meltingly obvious, yet for some reason controversial, point that war is influenced by domestic politics (just ignore the fact that he’s citing one of Bob Woodward’s always dubious “quotes”):

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, quotes the president expressing concern about the domestic political implications of military strategy in Afghanistan: “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party,” he tells Sen. Lindsey Graham in defending his decision to announce July 2011 as the date for the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals. Some have denounced this as evidence that the president is endangering the nation by putting politics ahead of military necessity. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, for example, described the president’s quote as “some of the most cold-blooded, cynical, grotesquely political manipulation of national security that I think we’ve ever seen.”

Like most of Washington, I haven’t read the book yet. So I don’t know the full context of the quote. But I do know that it’s no sin for a president to consider the domestic politics of military strategy. On the contrary, he has to. It’s a central part of his job as commander in chief.

First of all, being called “cold-blooded” and “grotesquely political” by John Bolton is quite a complement.  Praise from Caesar is praise indeed.  The only thing I’d change there is replacing the wishy-washy “a” in the last sentence; “the central part of his job” is far more accurate.  Because while Biddle is correct that balancing domestic politics and military strategy is explicitly a part of the President’s job, he’s being naive in a sixth-grade-government-class kind of way when he goes on to talk about Congress defunding a war:

Waging war requires resources — money, troops, and equipment — and in a democracy, resources require public support. In the United States, the people’s representatives in Congress control public spending. If a majority of lawmakers vote against the war, it will be defunded, and this means failure every bit as much as if U.S. soldiers were outfought on the battlefield. A necessary part of any sound strategy is thus its ability to sustain the political majority needed to keep it funded, and it’s the president’s job to ensure that any strategy the country adopts can meet this requirement.

In our present political climate, it’s basically impossible to see any Congress, Red or Blue, ever ending a war by cutting off the funding.  The proof is Iraq.  A war that was begun under completely false pretenses, went disastrously wrong almost immediately (the insurgency was well underway in the summer of 2003), and had become crushingly unpopular by 2005, was, nevertheless, granted every dime and dollar the Pentagon requested.  Even after the 2006 election, when the political unpopularity of the war was validated massively at the ballot box, the movement to defund the war never got any traction.  Had 2008 gone the other way, is there any doubt that Congress would still be supinely voting for whatever the McCain Administration wanted in terms of funds to continue the adventure?  You couldn’t script a more unjustified, unpopular, or unwinnable war, and Congress never closed the purse.

When it comes to war making, Congress has effectively surrendered its powers (for a lot of reasons).  That is an extremely dangerous thing, and not only because the Constitution explicitly grants those powers exclusively to Congress.  In the here and now, it means that the military has no means of redress if it is asked to do the impossible.

In the original formulation, Congress decided whom to fight, and the President fought them.  If the President thinks it can’t be done, or requires more resources than Congress is willing to provide, then he has a lot of ways to push back against Congress.  Nowadays, the President decides both whom to fight and how to fight them, Congress meekly agrees, and the military gets caught in the squeeze when things go wrong.  The military needs civilians in positions of authority to treat war responsibly, and when Congress abdicates that job to the President, the military is stuck taking orders from a man who is asking it to do things it cannot do.  First it was Bush the Younger in Iraq and Afghanistan, now it’s Obama in Afghanistan.

From a civilian-military point of view, it is troubling to hear that the President has become frustrated that the brass keeps saying “but, but, but” when he tells them what he wants in Afghanistan.  They’re only supposed to say “yes” and “no”.  But he’s asking them to do things that cannot be done, at least not without massive and unsupportable increases in men and materiel.  Afghanistan might not be “winnable” even if we reinstituted the draft, raised everyone’s taxes, and sent in a million troops.  Does anyone seriously believe that if Obama had agreed to 40,000 more troops instead of 30,000 last year that things would be any different right now?  That’s a difference of less than 0.04 G.I.s per square mile, of one extra soldier per 3,000 Afghanis.

The commander in chief, under enormous political pressure from all sides, is telling the military to do something they likely know cannot be done.  But the military isn’t big on saying things can’t be done, in no small part because there’s always someone else willing to say that it can.  In theory, Congress would be able to pressure the President to either go all in or get out.  After all, the military is asking for more troops and funds while the public has already turned on the war.  Opinion polls have been running in the high fifties against the war for more than a year.  But Congress hides behind the President, too fractured and tepid to force a decision and content to let him take the blame for a war less and less Americans want.  Confronting the commander in chief, despite that being the very reason we have a Congress, would be seen as unseemly and unpatriotic.

The failure here is civilian, not military.  Our juvenile, gossip obsessed political discourse and the (mostly) cowardly politicians* caught in its flow are unable to admit that things might not go our way.  That it might be time to call the entire operation off.  Instead of facing up to that unpleasant but increasingly undeniable concept, we’re asking the military to keep at it for a few more years, to give the public and the media and the government a decent interval in which to calm down and look the other way.  Pushback from the military is unseemly and unsettling, but it would also be unnecessary if the Congress and the President were willing to act like adults and pull their heads out of the sand.

*Just as there are two parties, there are two kinds of cowardice.  Most of the Blues are terrified of being called pussies for wanting to end the war while there are still “bad guys” left alive (whatever that means).  All of the Reds (with the possible exception of Rand Paul) are terrified of admitting that wars are not free, and most of them would never let their kids anywhere near a recruiting station.

Big White Lie

“Do you remember a time when women couldn’t vote?  And certain folk weren’t allowed on golf courses?  Petridge Farm remembers.” – TV Commercial Narrator

It will come as a surprise to precisely no one that the revitalized base of the American right is a little fuzzy and selective in their history.  A movement led by the unintentional comedy duo of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, with a healthy dose of Rush Limbaugh (who may or may not have any long term memory left), is not going to place a lot of emphasis on intellectual honesty, open minded study, or, you know, facts.  But it’s one thing to make up quotes from guys who’ve been dead for two centuries (and in the process drop the common phrasing of “Founding Fathers” and replace it with the far creepier “Founders”).  It’s quite another deliberately ignore a third of the country.

Much has been made this week about the literally lily white brochure that accompanied the Reds “Pledge of Allegiance: The Campaign Slogan”.  (I counted one (1) non-military minority, and she was a member of a big audience.)  It is, to put it mildly, pretty fucking racist.  But that too is unsurprising.  On everything from immigration to civil rights enforcement to niche issues like H1B visas and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Reds have systematically run out every non-white constituency they once had in order to please the less than accepting part of their base.

What’s far more troubling is the eliminationist fantasy it presents.  Without dismissing the rather large racial component, let’s look at what else this thing doesn’t feature: women and young people.  For all of Sister Sarah’s “mama grizzly” infomercials, a healthy majority of women vote Blue, and have for a long time.  A similar disposition affects the non-geriatric.  (Of the latter group, some have doubtlessly switched teams since their salad days.)  Nostalgia for an idealized 1950s, whether it existed or not, is pretty understandable.  After all, “rose tinted glasses” and “the good old days” are cliches for a reason.  The photos in that brochure, however, are neither sepia toned nor black and white.

America of the early 21st Century is a lot different than America of the mid 20th.  Women can wear pants, black people can vote, and queer couples can adopt children (even in Florida!).  A lot of people find those developments unpleasant, and as Americans they are welcome to argue against them, however they see fit.  But even as Americans they are not allowed to live in a world of make believe where those things did not happen.  The overwhelmingly old, white and male world of those pictures demonstrates that, for the Reds, the important distinction between disagreement and denial has been lost.

If you think the country was better off sixty years ago, say so.  Talk about values and communities; and if people mock you for that, mock them back.  That’s fair game all around.  But pretending the world is something you want it to be instead of something it is isn’t a philosophy or an ideology.  It’s a delusion, and it’s happening even in things where there used to be little disagreement, like basic math.

Ultimately, it amounts to a snake oil sale.  The Reds in charge, even the fanatically ideological Tea Party backed ones, are promising things they can’t deliver.  With enough bullshit and untraceable cash from the aristocracy, they can maintain their bony, melanin free grip on to the levers of power against the majority of Americans wishes.  They can defund Social Security; they can destroy the Department of Education; they can shred the non-2nd parts of the Bill of Rights (wait, scratch that last one, the Blues do that too).  But that’s all they can do.  They cannot make Mammy the only acceptable minority; they cannot stuff homosexuality back into the closet; they cannot re-chain women to the stove.

The people who want them to, and vote for them because of it, are always going to be disappointed.  They’ve been lied to and most of them will never face up to it, which means that their fury will never abate.  Their influence will decline only as old white people die and are replaced by young brown ones.  The only real question is how much damage their leaders, who deceive and patronize them with picture spreads of America as they’d like it to be, will do in the meantime.

Generational Frustration

“I used to be with it.  But then they changed what it was, now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.  It’ll happen to you.” – Abe Simpson

In the most recent issue of Harper’s, Susan Faludi wrote what I thought was a thoughtful article about the generational problems that perpetually plague mainstream feminism (sadly not available free on-line).  Very long story very shortly put, feminism is about rejecting existing strictures and part of that is telling your parents (and specifically your mother) to get with the fucking times already; moms object.  Writing at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte gave the first half of the article thumbs up, but was less enthusiastic about the conclusions which she thought leaned too heavily on the “moms object” part of the story:

I was floored that these are the conclusions Faludi came to, even after she honestly notes up front that she has repeatedly seen situations where older feminists literally shut young women out of the conversation and then complain that young women don’t care.  Stereotyping is a form of silencing—she’s doing it herself, even as she criticizes it (though far more gently than she does the younger women for being impertinent).  I realize that a story that claims there are major priority and aesthetic differences between the generations is sexier than a story that posits that this is just the same old power struggle between young and old, but it’s less honest.  Faludi admits that there was way more diversity in the second wave than is usually talked about, but then she drops that point and instead chases after a story that pitches hard-working activist elders against navel-gazing materialist youth.

The specifics of the critique can be read there, and I largely agree with her.  But there’s a bigger, albeit considerably more boring, story here as well.

These sort of internecine feminist fights get (relatively) heavy media coverage thanks to the whiff of titillation that comes with women talking about sex.  That is an inevitable side effect of the fact that as a culture we place most of the burdens of sex on female shoulders.  But it also obscures a larger pattern, which is that these types of inter-generational struggles are endemic and natural to liberal political movements.

Reading Faludi’s article reminded me of nothing so much as my own glancing and disheartening experiences with the anti-war/Howard Dean crowd in 2002-2003.  In person and in print, I encountered all the old saws about how the anti-war movement of the Naughts failed to live up to the grandeur of the one in the Sixties: today’s youth don’t care because . . . there’s no draft, they have too many gadgets, they’re spoiled, etcetera.  What all of those complaints share, in addition to the usual curmudgeonly Grampa Simpson “I walked ten miles to school uphill both ways” attitude, is this idea that the anti-war movement was so much more effective the first time around.

It wasn’t.  All those young people asking LBJ how many kids he killed today didn’t get us out of that quagmire.  Richard Milhous Nixon ended the Vietnam War, and he didn’t get around to it until he’d been President for four years and won re-election by one of the biggest margins in history.  The anti-war movement wasn’t a waste of time, but it also wasn’t the smashing success it is sometimes remembered as.  Yes, I’m sure the music was good, the drugs fantastic, and the ball draining/pussy quivering orgasms earth shattering.  But the war didn’t end in 1968 or 1969, it ended in 1973 (mostly); and the militarization of American society and government rolled merrily along afterwards.

The same framework applies to pretty much all of the post-World War II liberal projects in America.  Enormous progress was made, but it always fell short of what its biggest supporters originally envisioned, and that was before hard right nuts took over the national discourse and the Republican Party.  Imagine traveling to an editorial meeting of Ms. in the early Seventies and telling them that forty years in the future, as far from then as 2050 is from now, Congress would be less than 20% female and that there would still be a roughly 25% wage gap.  Opinion wouldn’t be unanimous, it never is in activist circles, but my strong suspicion is that most of them would have dismissed you as some kind of reactionary pessimist.

The falling short of expectations occurred across the board, from civil rights to labor unions to the environment to nuclear disarmament.  It’s been forty-two years since Stonewall, and even though basic math and numerous scandals tell us that the real number is around thirty, there are only three openly gay members of Congress.  We have a black president, true, but it’s been forty-five years since the Voting Rights Act and we have only two black governors and one black senator, and at least two of the three are going to be out of office in a few months.  It’s been ninety years since women’s suffrage, and we’ve had only one serious female presidential candidate and two female vice-presidential nominees – both of whom were chosen by male candidates who were already desperately behind and who subsequently lost badly.  Huge, society changing improvements have been made, but none of them have quite lived up to the original expectations.

What you have is an ongoing generational problem between people who’ve been around the block and seen their best intentions at least partially frustrated and those who are too young to have had that experience yet.  One of the most telling anecdotes from Faludi’s article involves exactly that clash:

One rare effort by young feminists to establish a connection with the first wave ended disastrously. The New York Radical Women invited legendary suffragist Alice Paul to their 1969 Counter-Inaugural demonstration. Much to the dismay of the octogenarian woman who had founded the National Woman’s Party and endured imprisonment and force-feeding to win the ballot, the young activists asked her to join them onstage to “give back the vote” – by burning voter-registration cards.

What Faludi leaves out is that in 1969 Alice Paul was in her fifth decade of advocating for what eventually became the Equal Rights Amendment.  Burning voter registration cards is not the act of people who are preparing to struggle for the rest of their lives; it’s the act of people who think the Revolution is coming soon.  Paul would die eight years later while the ERA was in the midst of its ultimately unsuccessful struggle to win ratification in the state legislatures.

Marcotte herself noted this exact thing just last week:

The culture wars are going to drag out for a long ass time for a number of reasons.  One is that the social changes that we’re going through are too profound to be absorbed so rapidly.  Tracy Clark-Flory was mourning over this pronouncement by Gloria Steinem that women aren’t going to be seeing full equality for another century and a half, but I thought Gloria may be a tad optimistic.  We’re overthrowing literally thousands of years of a patriarchy.  It’s not going to happen very fast.  Even in the time that the Tea Crackers have so much nostalgia for, there were feminists making arguments that would still be considered radical by many today.

Twenty or thirty years from now, when the inevitable reforms to the recently passed healthcare reform law take place, the fight will be no less titanic than it was this time around.  There will still be well connected and massively financed opposition that makes too much money from the status quo to let things get reformed without a fight.  And some of the people who worked to get health care reform enacted this time will shake their heads at the silliness and superficiality of the youth of that time, many of whom are in diapers or not even born yet here in 2010.  The same will be true the next time we stumble into an idiotic war or contemplate some fresh environmental horror that will only benefit a tiny few.  The perpetually simmering battles over normalizing females, minorities, homosexuals and everyone else, from transgender people to the handicapped, are also unlikely to end anytime soon.

Bright eyed young high school and college students just coming to feminism today could spend their lives on activism and die in their beds in 2100 with their work still incomplete.  Feminism, like pretty much all of the liberalizing projects dating back to the Enlightenment, is a multi-generational task, and those are always going to be fraught with recriminations and baggage (on top of the usual tensions between the old and the young, which go back much further).  Disagreements, even nasty ones, over tactics, culture and priorities are inevitable.  The only really important thing is that progress continues to be made and, on that score, things are still looking pretty good, and there doesn’t seem to be much disagreement.

1337

“Do we take the drones for granted?” – Lana Kane
“No.  No.  No, Lana.  Do not make this about them.” – Sterling Archer

I was listening to BBC World Service the other night and they had on a guy, whose name I didn’t catch, from the union that represents Border Patrol agents.  The earnest and courteous BBC guy was asking him about the flare up of anti-immigrant (read: anti-brown people) hysteria here in America.  Despite his union affiliation, the Border Patrol guy clearly sounded like a man of the political right, and he said something that really caught my attention.

Paraphrasing, what he said was that it’s useless to build a fence, immigrants would get over or around any fence so long as there are jobs and opportunities waiting for them on the northern side.  What he really wants for Christmas is a law against hiring illegal immigrants.  If businesses had an easy way to determine someone’s immigration status, then they should be required to check it and be punished for either not doing so or hiring illegal immigrants anyway.  In the next breath, he said that such a thing was impossible since businesses derive too much benefit from the labor of illegal immigrants to ever let such a thing through the Congress they’ve so thoroughly bought and paid for.

In itself there’s nothing at all new there, Congress has been doing the bidding of business interests since the dawn of the Republic.  In other news, the sky is blue.  But there’s a more recent development as well.  For most of the twentieth century, Congress at least tried to conceal its near exclusive interest in the concerns of the wealthy, these days, not so much.  There used to be some attempts to mitigate the interests of the Haves with those of the Have Nots.  Today, on everything from tax policy and Social Security to our various ill conceived military adventures and the debt industry that pays for them, the Haves aren’t just getting most of the benefits, they’re actually offended by the tiny slice that escapes them.

While polls show that taxing the rich is about the only thing a large majority of Americans agree upon, that very thing is completely out of consideration.  Creating a couple of new tax brackets over the half a million dollar mark isn’t even on the table; instead, the forces of sanity and mathematical competence are fighting tooth and nail to let giveaways to the super rich expire.

Even the fact that those giveaways have already proved themselves financially disastrous and economically useless doesn’t seem to matter.  It’s one thing to massage future budget numbers or, failing that, to denigrate them as fictional.  It’s quite another to take a look at the economy and the federal budget of the last ten years and declare tax cuts for the wealthy worth preserving.  The only things that trickled down were table scraps, and the real income of everyone making less than about two hundred grand didn’t increase all decade.  Those aren’t projections; those are facts, but good luck hearing about them.

The talk shows, mastheads and Congressional offices that constitute the ruling class of this country are made up almost exclusively of the wealthy and the extremely wealthy.  Whether it’s donning a cowboy hat or talking about a hard scrabble upbringing, each one of them has a gimmick or three to prove their salt of the earth credentials.  But in America in 2010, a country of more than three hundred million people with many different cultures living in every environment imaginable, the only thing that makes one truly “of the people” is income.

Half of American households make do on fifty grand or less per year, but you wouldn’t know it.  Instead, we’re having a discussion about whether or not five times that number – a quarter of a million dollars every single year – is enough to deserve a helping hand.  That discussion is being hashed out almost exclusively by people who are comfortably nestled into that income elite.  But to really understand how far into the stratosphere of rank double dealing this goes, you have to remember that none of the debaters are yeoman farmers or small business owners.  Every single one of them works for people even more fantastically wealthy than they are.  Tax cuts for the rich are being debated by the rich at the behest of the super rich.

It’s not just tax cuts, either.  Consider the fact that there is not a single member of the Catfood Commission for whom Social Security benefits are anything more than a rounding error on their annual income.  None of them will be materially affected by any of their decisions, and they’re preaching belt tightening as god’s greatest virtue!  For the hypocrisy of that to be any more naked it would need to have its pubic hair shaved.

The famous line from Chinatown is, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”  It’s a great stand in for conceding victory in all things to the wealthy and the powerful, lest they take five minutes out of their day between brunch and tennis to irrevocably shatter your life with the stroke of a pen.  Want to eat, pray and love?  Keep your fuckin’ head down and learn to work a shovel.

But the much better line comes just a few minutes before, when Jack Nicholson, unable to comprehend the amoral greed of John Huston, plaintively asks, “Why are you doing it?  How much better can you eat?  What could you buy that you can’t already afford?”  That’s the situation in which we find ourselves.  The people in charge can’t eat any better, they can’t live any better than they already do; they’re screwing the rest for the sheer, thrusting pleasure of it.

The “elite” is a wonderful strawman to attack, which is why its thrown around with such abandon.  But the next time you hear someone use it, pause to consider their income bracket.  If someone making two hundred grand a year or more uses it to do anything but refer to themselves and their friends, be wary and consider them foolish until proven otherwise.  In the meantime, let’s try to remember that for all but a tiny handful of Americans even a low six figure income is a dream that will never come true, no matter how hard they work.  They’re the only ones who need a break.

Some Sympathy for the Screamers

“They took our jobs!” – South Park Traditional

Near the end of 1993’s Falling Down, Michael Douglas’s anti-hero American everyman comes to the sad realization that he is not the Good Guy he thought he was.  “I’m the bad guy?”, he plaintively asks, seconds before realizing it’s true.  (Skip to the 4:00 mark here.)  It’s a great scene in a movie that has a ton of them, and if you want to understand the angry right in 2010, it’s as good a place as any to start.

The first thing you have to do is ignore all the people who make a living from politics: all the politicians, lobbyists, radio guys, magazine/think tank people, television mannequins, and especially the independent activists suckling off wingnut welfare by slinging books, blog posts, and Tupperware parties that pass for political rallies.  For that sad group you can have a legitimate (and never ending) Evil vs. Stupid debate.  But that’s not who we’re talking about, we’re talking about the people Michael Douglas was standing in for.

Once you get past the professionals there is no Stupid vs. Evil debate, but there are millions of ordinary people, and for the most part they don’t have any power or influence.  They don’t go to rallies, they don’t attend fundraisers; their political participation is limited to voting and “keeping informed”, the kinds of low level interaction that generate no headlines but which have been raised to sacred rites by decades of American schooling and culture.

These people are the rule followers, a description which pop culture has denigrated to the point of being a sneer, but is nevertheless what we raise a lot of people to be, and not without some justification.  Plenty of Americans have built good lives by nothing more than nose down hard work, doing what they’re told and not asking a whole lot of questions.  They see that compact – work hard/follow the rules = do well – as fundamental and inviolable.  (It only reinforces matters that there’s a heavy overlap with religious people who believe in a similar deal regarding the punishment of sin and rewarding of virtue.)  When authority gets flouted without punishment, when the rules change, they see that as a violation, one that rewards people who don’t follow the rules; who aren’t them.

Before he realizes he’s the Bad Guy, Michael Douglas spends most of the movie thinking he’s the Good Guy, a man whose violent actions are justified by the fact that America broke its word to him.  He followed the rules, and yet he lost his job.  His varying confrontations over the course of the film show sympathy for ordinary people while raging against the system that failed us all.  The movie is very careful to portray him as a misguided champion of the little guy, not some right wing freak who hates minorities: he fights the neo-Nazi but bonds with the little black kid who helps him fire the bazooka.  He taunts the blue blood golfer into a fatal heart attack, but is horrified to learn that he’s scared the working class family that was just using the rich doctor’s pool.

His lines after “I’m the bad guy?” are more or less the Tea Party credo, sixteen years before there was such a thing:

How’d that happen?  I did everything they told me to.  Did you know I build missiles?  I helped to protect America?  You should be rewarded for that, instead they give it to the plastic surgeon.  You know, they lied to me!

“They lied to me!” is the realization that many of the ordinary people on the right will never make.  (“I did everything they told me to” is the one they make after they get laid off.)  That they have been deceived by the people in whom they put all their trust is too monstrous, too embarrassing, or just plain too frightening to contemplate.  Whether we’re talking about believing that “Muslims” are some kind of monolithic bloc that hates us, that homosexuals are little more than a cult that has to recruit children to propagate itself, or that evolution and global warming are little more than atheist conspiracies, that their betters (pastors, politicians, parents) are lying to them simply doesn’t register.

This is where the sympathy comes in.  Imagine you believe, as surely as there is air in your lungs, that homosexuals are conspiratorial deviants prone to pedophilia, and that sex between two people of the same gender is morally wrong.  The revelations about Ted Haggard, Larry Craig and George Rekers fit perfectly with your stereotypes and reinforce your beliefs.  And yet homosexuality – this evil upon the world – becomes more and more accepted every day.

Imagine that you’ve been told over and over again that Islam is a religion bent on the destruction of Christianity.  The plans to build the Not Mosque at Not Ground Zero confirm your belief that Muslims are coming to America to conquer it.  And yet you are being branded as intolerant for trying to defend America.

Imagine that the idea that the world was created in six days is instilled in you from birth.  Everyone from your parents to your baseball coach believes it.  And yet everyone who expresses those views is mocked outright.  No wonder these people feel under attack – they are.

That the assault they are under is gentle and mild compared to the one faced by many ethnic and religious minorities doesn’t matter.  They live in a world that is passing them by and every year becomes a little less like the one they were told existed.  Yes, a lot of these people are bigots and racists and misogynists, but they honestly and genuinely do not see themselves that way.  They see themselves as hard working, upstanding people and simply don’t understand that rule following of the variety they were taught can’t work for everyone.  That they are bombarded with an avalanche of fact-free propaganda about just how special they are certainly isn’t their fault.  The system they believe in is crooked and broken, but most of them aren’t, and so some sympathy is warranted.

Navel Gaze Nation

“Coming up next, which work better, springy clothes pins, or the other kind?” – Kent Brockman

Writing over at TomDispatch, Juan Cole lays out the horrific extent of the recent submerging of Pakistan and asks why this enormous disaster has been shrugged off by the world in general and the United States in particular.  Professorial as ever, Cole produces several potential answers, but ultimately assigns the lion’s share of blame to the fact that this story, which is easily deserving of constant coverage, is basically absent from American television.  His conclusion is worth quoting in full:

Another explanation may also bear some weight here, though you won’t normally hear much about it.  Was the decision of the corporate media not to cover the Pakistan disaster intensively a major factor in the public apathy that followed, especially since so many Americans get their news from television?

The lack of coverage needs to be explained, since corporate media usually love apolitical, weather-induced disasters.  But covering a flood in a distant Asian country is, for television, expensive and logistically challenging, which in these tough economic times may have influenced programming decisions.  Obviously, there is as well a tendency in capitalist news to cover what will attract advertising dollars.  Add to this the fact that, unlike the Iraq “withdrawal” story or the “mosque at Ground Zero” controversy, the disaster in Pakistan was not a political football between the GOP and the Democratic Party.  What if, in fact, Americans missed this calamity mostly because a bad news story set in a little-known South Asian country filled with Muslim peasants is not exactly “Desperate Housewives” and couldn’t hope to sell tampons, deodorant, or Cialis, or because it did not play into domestic partisan politics?

The great Pakistani deluge did not exist, it seems, because it was not on television, would not have delivered audiences to products, and was not all about us.  As we saw on September 11, 2001, and again in March 2003, however, the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.

The only thing Cole whiffs on there is the mention of “Desperate Housewives”.  That silly little program doesn’t have much to do with anything.  But his larger point is absolutely correct, there is no “political football” here, no way for professionally angry pundits to yammer back and forth and cut one another off.  That verbal bloodsport is the lifeblood of television “news” here in the twenty first century.  It keeps eyeballs on screens and makes all the difference in the pitifully tiny ratings wars between the cable news channels that set the media agenda.  Therein lays the real problem.

Network news takes its cues from cable news, and cable news chases a pitifully small audience of political fans every bit as myopic and insatiable as the less respected fans of sports and celebrity gossip.  Based on cable news ratings, we can pretty safely say that the politics fans number at most 2% of the US population.  They’re the tiny, tiny minority that slavishly follows “who won the morning” and all the other catty horseshit that gives attention junkies like Rick Sanchez and Wolf Blitzer erections of self importance.

I’m all for laying a big flaming bag of dog shit at the collective big media door of Time Warner, Disney, GE, Viacom, News Corp, and the rest of the media oligarchy.  But they are not the fundamental problem.  They’re myopic and don’t do a lick of serving the public good, but all they’re doing is chasing a few more cents per share.

The real problem is that we’ve fatally confused news with gossip.  The cable news networks are that in name only, in reality they’re political/business gossip channels, as vapid and obsessed with fashion, style and hurt feelings as any of the TMZ outlets.  They’ve become that because that’s what the politics fans want, and they’re the ones who have the TV on in the background all day, who sit down for some red meat in the evenings.  Who’s up, who’s down, who’s outraged now?  You could place any one of the political gab show, morning or evening, weekday or weekend, on ESPN or E! and all you’d have to do is change the proper nouns.  Public service can’t compete with an audience that expects, demands and pays for the vapid.

We Who Are About to Concuss, Salute You

“Aw great, you made me miss Joe Theismann!” – Homer Simpson

There are few things in 2010 America more transparently silly than the unctuousness of the press.  There’s the political press, bleating about polarization and incivility as they feverishly fan both with all the wind generated by their perpetual enthusiasm for self administered clit rubs and dick pulls.  There’s the celebrity press, breathlessly speculating themselves into a world of make believe where they can condemn the sins of the boys and girls at the cool kids’ table.  There’s also the sporting press, righteously hyperventilating about the deceptions of people for whom they routinely act as stenographers, decrying the frailties and shortcomings of people far tougher and more accomplished than themselves.

In that last vein comes multi-platform, relentless moralizer, and celebrity sports journalist Michael Wilbon to lament . . . something in his pre-season NFL column.  This little hairball is one of those rare masterpieces of stupid that combines so many cliches and reflexive sportswriter tics that it approaches “so bad it’s good” territory.  He manages not only to castigate the NFL, sports fans in general, and even the sport of football itself, but also to lament the decline of baseball, boxing and, wait for it, horse racing(!).  Once he’s done berating ordinary people for their ignorance of sport and love of useless spectacle, he proceeds directly, without even the tiniest nod to irony, to make his almost certainly incorrect pre-season predictions about who’s going to win this year.  The cherry on top comes literally at the top when he does his best Grampa Simpson impression in his first paragraph:

The kids – meaning anybody under 40 – laugh when you tell them baseball used to be America’s sporting passion. They stare at you in disbelief when you try to explain that the heavyweight champion was often the most adored athlete in the world, or that tens of millions listened to big horse races on the radio and that Sunday, not all that long ago, was a day off from sports.

That Sunday “not that long ago” was a day off from sports doesn’t quite jog with his declaration five paragraphs later that football eclipsed baseball in 1965.  And nevermind that baseball has pretty much always been played on Sundays.  Truly, it is a masterpiece of cliches and stupid.

Perhaps the most disingenuous of all his moralizing statements is this one though:

We’ll even ignore serious news relating to concussions if such revelations, even for a second, threaten our enjoyment of football.

Truly, we are all terrible people for wanting to watch football.  Unlike, say, Michael Wilbon who only watches for professional reasons as pure as the driven snow, the rest of us are uncivilized barbarians cheering for injuries.  Except, of course, that the sporting public seems to have a pretty healthy attitude about injuries; with the occasional exception, players limping off a field or court are usually given a nice round of applause regardless of rooting interests.  We might celebrate from the comfort of our sofas if an opposing player goes down, but no one’s seriously wishing permanent suffering on anyone, nor have concussions been ignored by the public.

In contrast to Wilbon’s pointless sanctimony, the players themselves seem to have a decent grip on what it means, and the tradeoffs involved, to play football professionally.  Ryan Grant, of the Packers of Green Bay, perfectly understands the economics of concussions versus paychecks:

Grant pointed out that players who are worried about making the team in training camp don’t necessarily want to exercise caution when it comes to concussions. No one makes the roster by sitting in the training room, so if you’re fighting for a roster spot, you’d probably be wise to lie to the doctors and say you feel fine, just so you can get back on the field and prove yourself.

“I think with the business of the game it might make some guys a little more leery of saying certain things or doing certain things, which is unfortunate,” Grant said.

Nobody’s saying “Hooray for concussions!”, instead the adults who do real work for a living recognize something as bad, but worth putting up with.  That rational calculus, however unpleasant it is to a man with several cushy jobs like Michael Wilbon, is the kind of choice people make everyday.  Commuting has numerous negative health consequences, but people commute anyway because that’s the way life works out sometimes.  People get stress disorders, both physical and psychological, and all kinds of injuries doing their jobs, but if that’s where the money is, then that’s what you’ve got to do.

It’s certainly not only Grant.  Here’s the starting center for the Chargers, Nick Hardwick:

Have you ever had concussions?

“Yes,” Hardwick says.

How many?

“What was the question?” Hardwick replies, grinning. “I’ve had a few.

“I’ve had one with that,” he adds, pointing to his newest model, which is resting on the floor in front of his locker. “But it’s probably nothing that’s going to change that. There are certain things that you just can’t stop. That’s part of the risk you assume, and we’re willing to take it. That’s part of the deal.”

Certainly not every NFL player is so enlightened, but it’s not like it’s a secret that playing football is hazardous to your health.  Most of the guys who play do so because even on a rookie minimum salary they can make more in one year than they might be able to in five in the regular job market.  It’s not a pleasant truth, but it’s not exactly a scandalous secret either.  For a guy like Wilbon to scorn fans, the overwhelming majority of who make far less at far tougher jobs than him, is outright callous.

Whether we find it genteel or not, violent sports, often involving people inflicting damage on one another for the entertainment of others, haven’t gone out of style since at least Roman times, and are unlikely to do so anytime soon.  Boxing is still big business; large parts of the world are obsessed with things like hockey and rugby, and mixed marital arts gets more popular every year.  None of that shows any sign of stopping, nor should it.  Honestly addressing the risks of said endeavors is important, particularly for the people involved.  But turning it into something to be tsk-tsked about doesn’t help that in the least, all it does is allow self serving choads to feel good about themselves.  That’s all well and good for them, but there’s no reason the rest of us need to feel bad so they can feel righteous.  They’re going to feel that way about themselves anyway, so the best thing to do is ignore them and get ready for kickoff.

Labor Day in a Management Year

“Come gather round children it’s high time ye learned, ’bout a hero named Homer and a devil named Burns.” – Lisa Simpson

First, let us dispense with the bullshit.  Labor Day has about as much connection left to the labor movement as Memorial Day does to the wars we fight, or the Fourth of July to the crimes of George III, which is to say very little.  Oh sure, there’ll be a parade or two; the keepers of Americana, from the Rotary Club to the President, might make speeches or something; people who do care will grouse that the rest of us have forgotten what it all means with a capital M.  But, like the Fourth of July and Memorial Day, Labor Day is long divorced from its original meaning, now it’s one of the summer fun holidays when a country that takes almost no time off work takes a day off work.

Of course, the fact that we have any days off at all is largely the result of the labor movement.  But keeping that in mind won’t make the burgers taste any better, giving your heart to gratitude won’t make the end of summer any less bittersweet (however much the start of the football season mitigates things).  Labor Day is just one of those precious days off, and you don’t need to have walked a picket line to enjoy it anymore than you have to die at war or sign the Declaration of Independence to enjoy the other summer holidays.  Labor Day is for everybody, and that’s a precious thing these days.

Unlike holiday sourpuss party poopers, the massive rise in inequality in America in the last decade is not bullshit.  Nor is the return of corporate profits and nominal economic growth while the unemployment rate remains sky high bullshit.  They are very real, and indicative of an America that has almost totally mistaken earnings for morality, and money for merit.  The economy isn’t producing enough jobs to keep up with population, much less reduce the unemployment rate, and yet we castigate the unemployed for being lazy?  As a joke, that’s sick and twisted and has much else to recommend it, as policy it’s just this side of sociopathic.  There simply aren’t enough jobs, it’s fifth-grade math.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, we’re poised to hold an election in which the Reds are openly running on tax cuts for the super rich, slashing spending – which means, as any Californian can tell you, cutting jobs – and shutting down the government over health care.  That last one is particularly telling, because once you strip away all the talking points and all the giveaways to insurance companies, the health care bill the Blues managed to shove over the finish line six months ago is the single biggest break the workers of America have gotten since the 1960s.  It’s fucked up and stupid in a lot of ways, but it’s a real step towards shifting the economic playing field to being merely tilted towards the rich instead of being nearly vertical in their favor.  It was a genuine victory for labor over wealth, and attacking it is now one of wealth’s highest priorities.

Not that there’s any shortage of fashionable targets for the wealthy.  An estate tax that does little more than keep money out of the hands of manor born dilettantes is vilified.  Marginal tax rates that would be considered laughably low by almost any 20th Century American standard are denounced as oppressive.  And it’s not just the Reds; the Blues are doing their part too, playing footsie with those who say that the completely healthy Social Security system needs to be disemboweled for its own good.

But all that is in the future, and despite the economy and their gutter level reputation, the good guys have done a lot lately.  So kick back, have a beer, and enjoy your holiday.  Summer’s over; and winter is coming.  We’ll get through it, we always do, but this winter might be a long one.

Shelf Pleasure

“Lisa, we can’t afford all these books.” – Bart Simpson
“Bart, we’re just gonna borrow them.” – Lisa Simpson
“Oh, heh heh, gotcha.” – Bart Simpson

A little over a month ago, I was standing in my local public library looking at books.  Like many trips between the shelves, I was on a mission for a specific book.  Having found it, and already being keen on the subject, I looked at what else was at hand.  In the process of looking, I fell upon a book I’ve since finished and found to be wonderful.

Though it was published in 1969 by a prolific author, Amazon has no listing for this book.  As far as the internet is concerned, it barely exists, and had I not chanced upon it on a library shelf, I’d likely have gone my entire life blissfully ignorant of its existence.  That would not have been a tragedy; I am certain to die never having heard of many books I’d have loved had I been given the chance.  But I did get to read it, and that unknowable list of the enjoyably unknown was reduced by one.

Doubtlessly, there is some site on-line that would’ve pointed me in the right direction.  But it seems unwise to bank on serendipity being easily replaceable by modern technology.  I was interested in a subject; I saw another book that caught my eye (my reading of which makes a profit for no one); and I very much liked the reading of it.

I’ve written before about my belief that the death of the paper book has been greatly exaggerated, and this is another example of why.  Whether bookstore shelves will last, I cannot say.  But it seems unlikely that bookshelves in libraries and private homes are about to vanish forever.

The storage cost is low, and since no additional equipment is required to use them, they’ll never become obsolete like outdated formats of video or audio.  Kids might still want to peruse the shelves of books that their parents read years before they were born, pulpy paperbacks will still line the walls of rental cottages, and an asshole in a library will feel a little luddite thrill that he pulled one over on the internet by doing nothing more than looking at titles on spines.  E-books are great, and when they become the default that will make serious reading that much easier and more accessible, but that instant gratification of pulling a book off a shelf, flipping through it, and then making the critical decision to replace it or take it with you will remain attractive.

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