While I was waiting for my bus on Nicollet Mall, a cadre of naked bikers coasted past, singing The Star-Spangled Banner. Near me, an Old White Dude shook his head in disgust.
OWD: I like bicycles, but there’s no excuse for that. That’s why I live in the suburbs.
He notices me leaning against a pillar and reading City Pages.
OWD: Excuse me. Move that newspaper.
I do so, hesitantly. Now, note that I’m wearing a T-shirt with an image of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, with the caption “I’m from the government. I’m here to help.”
Now, I know I don’t look Chinese — my Hennepin County Jail wristband blandly identifies me as a “WHITE MALE”. And it’s not as though I disagree with the underlying sentiment. Although I wouldn’t necessarily use the word “deserves.” Or “crushed.” And I might want to add a couple of qualifiers to “China.” But “fucking” I’m totally on board with.
This exchange, edifying as it was, did get me to thinking. Even if China’s current government could be easily, peaceably dismantled, would that be desirable? It’s not even close to addressing the underlying problem of what China is, and has been for longer than any other country. The citizens of every nation are indoctrinated by their respective societies, but the Chinese people have been subjugated to a single monstrous intellect for two and a half thousand years. I’m not referring to Mao Zedong or Karl Marx, both of whom are fairly late comers to the party; I’m referring to Confucius, whose collectivist philosophy perhaps found its ultimate expression in Communist doctrine.
After all, isn’t this one of the underlying problems of the occupation of Iraq? We tear down a secular dictatorship, only to find a significant body of people who want to set up a theocracy. Contrary to what The Rascals would like to believe, ask me my opinion, my opinion will be — people everywhere don’t want to be free. Certainly one of the many issues I struggle with within my own faith is the concept of one man dying for another’s sins. Is it possible to pay for somebody else’s sins? Isn’t that something like what we’re trying to do? And from whence does the moral authority come to make a sacrifice like that meaningful?
My understanding is that the most rational and moral course available to us is one of non-interventionism. It’s certainly possible that that’s a mistaken belief, based on a poor education. And it’s certainly true that that understanding rejects me from the two major parties, both of whom seem to believe that overseas intervention and entangling alliances are necessary to our continued stability — a fact making this November’s election yet another no-win scenario for me.
But thinking about all of these ideological and geopolitical conflicts leaves me with one clear thought: that our own revolution, two-hundred and thirty-eight years ago, was nothing short of a miracle, in both a military and philosophical sense.
So thanks, Old White Dude. And a happy Treason Day to you, too.
Darcy Burner is running for Congress in Washington’s 8th District. She’s pretty cool. She ran in 2006 and incumbent Republican Dave Reichert just barely kept his seat (by an average of 5 voters per precinct.). She’s running again this year.
On Tuesday, she lost her home to a fire.
The laws of campaign finance say we can’t donate to her family directly. But we can donate to her campaign.
Barack Obama was correct in ridiculing Hillary Clinton and John McCain for their half-assed “gas-tax holiday” bullshit. This is an idea that carries alot of downside (forgoing revenue critical to our crumbling infrastructure) for a minor and temporary relief to consumers.
But, at least it did something.
Obama has now come out with his own half-assed solution…going after speculators who are driving up the price of oil. Now, while we should go after anyone who is using illegal tactics to drive up the price, a concentrated effort at going after these folks will have the impact of dropping the price of oil from $135/barrel all the way down to, like, $133.50. The underlying fundamental, which is that global demand for oil is increasing at an increasing rate, doesn’t change.
Mr. Obama is the most inspiring politician to come down the pike in a generation. If anyone can galvanize public support for a national R&D network focused on moving away from a carbon-based fuel system, it’s him. To waste that kind of charisma with “we gonna round up a posse and git us some speck-a-laters” is fucking lame.
“I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president.”
–George Bush, June 17th, 2008. Referring to the levee break in Gulfport, IL.
Yes, Mr. Prezzz has been to too many disasters. Pity he hasn’t done anything to diminish the impact of them. Having learned nothing, apparently, from Katrina…having opted to defer doing anything whatsoever about our crumbling infrastructure…the Prezzz has, in the time since Katrina not yet proposed a single increase in funding for levee improvements. Of course, he couldn’t do a thing about the rains that have led to the flooding throughout the Midwest. He could and should have done something about improving the infrastructure in place to mitigate the damage and even diminish the likelihood of these floods. The levees in Gulport, one of the 37 levee sites in the US considered at risk, broke today flooding millions of acres of cropland, destroying businesses, and ruining homes. In each of his previous budgets, the Prezzz has refused to allocate additional funds for critically needed improvements. Why? ‘Cause he can’t do that and continue his ridiculous tax cuts and corporate subsidies without blowing up his budget even further. Infrastructure ages and it takes more than maintenance money to fix it. If the next President chooses to address this issue (or the Dems in Congress…who I have little to no faith in given their track record of the last two years) he will have to raise revenue or hack the life out of spending elsewhere. And the Republicans will scream “tax and spend, tax and spend” like Rainman screaming about burning the baby.
I’ll take tax and spend any day over slash and spend. I’ll take a higher tax rate any day over more disasters that have more severe consequences than they need to have.
Yeah, Mr. Prezzz. You’ve been to way too many disasters as President. And you’ve done nothing but diminish our ability to address them.
Posted June 13 at 3:55 pm by Phillip · No comments
So we’ve started rehearsals for our next show, All Rights Reserved: A Libertarian Rage, which is a rewrite and a remount of a show we did a couple of years back — the show that initially got me into political writing. Like most of Maximum Verbosity’s shows, one of its primary themes is language, in this case how it operates within the realm of politics. One of the ways this is represented is through the use of profanity and racial slurs throughout the script.
When I initially wrote those scenes, I recall sitting down and thinking through the implications very carefully. I recognize the fact that there are some people — indeed, a significant portion of the population — who can find the mere existence of a word to be offensive, even painful. Surely, I thought, I must be able to connect to that mentality on some level — there must be at least one word, somewhere in the English lexicon, that fills me with rage.
But there isn’t. As a student of language, I’ve always had the sense that words, by themselves, mean nothing — they’re complete abstractions of the concept they represent: an arbitrary collection of syllables; ink on paper. Their meaning is defined entirely by intent and context. I’m reminded of a quote by Larry Elder:
Hate crime legislation forces us to place greater value on some victims because of race. By all means, we should prosecute bad conduct. But if I’m standing at an ATM machine and a Ku Klux Klansman hits me in the back of the head with a brick, the operative word is not “Klansman.” It is “brick.”
I’m also conscious of individual words as bearing the weight of history. Am I being excessively semantic to point out that the word “nigger” ultimately emerged from the Latin “niger” — a form of speech that hasn’t been widely used in nearly 1600 years? That it has derivants in every Romance language? That it was a neutral descriptive in our own country until about 150 years ago? That 150 years from now, it will no doubt carry a completely different connotation?
Oprah’s serene assertion that the word should be stricken from the dictionary (to full-house applause by an interracial audience) seems to me to be to be nothing less than an attempt to — if you’ll forgive the phrase — whitewash history. Language isn’t an absolute, but an evolving organism; and for someone fascinated with that process, witnessing the attempts of the black community to consciously reclaim the word has been compelling stuff.
These are all arguments I’ve been making for years. But picking up this project again, I find that my thinking has developed, and I think that my beef runs a little deeper than that.
I’m not prepared to say that I’m totally immune to being offended by something, but I think I certainly have a higher threshold than most. If someone says something I disagree with, I’m far more likely to laugh, shrug my shoulders, think “Wow, that dude is crazy,” and go on my way. If I were to be physically attacked for my minority status, my emotional response would be fear for my life — being “offended” on behalf of the race I was born into would, I imagine, be very far from my mind in that moment! A lot of my writing has been offensive to a lot of people, although that’s never been my intention. And here, I think, is why it bothers me so much:
Ultimately, it’s hard for me to read taking offense as anything other than attempt to seize control of the conversation. To be “offended” by something is to immediately put your opponent on the defensive. This is one of the reasons that polical correctness is subjected to much ridicule: that, for example, the appropriate term for an American of African descent has been, at various points, negro, nigger, colored person, person of color, black, African-American, Afro-American — and none of them are an appropriate descriptive of the range of ethnicities it applies to! To use the wrong one in the wrong environment is to demonstrate how out of touch you are, to force you to apologize, to put you on the defensive.
This is perhaps more visible in the left — but the right is, if anything, worse — it’s just that their sacred cows are differently placed. Try to say anything critical of America’s recent military ventures, and, oh! The offense! The umbrage! And we have to twist ourselves into knots apologizing, affirming our patriotism, beating the nationalist drum. It’s a dirty trick, and one that’s killed dead just about any meaningful dialogue we could have about the war. Or race. Or language. Or any number of other issues.
None of this is new — after all, it was just a few centuries ago in Britain where it was a stated crime, punishable by death, to think treason against the king. In a representative republic, we’ve organized our “forbidden language” around a different set of concepts. Could we at least stop being offended long enough to figure out where we all stand beneath this steadily-growing morass of forbidden words and phrases?
So I’m out on the road right now. Have been for about two months. Things have been quiet. I haven’t subjected our readership here to my screeds about saving fish and the necessity of dam removal or the evils of the proposed Pebble Mine.
What I have figured out is who I can’t stand. Connecticut Republicans. These are officially, after having traversed this country, the most repellant people I have ever met. These fucking people have everything: money, civil infrastructure, culture, and an economy that caters directly to their fucking ‘needs.’ And yet, AND YET, they are fucking fascists.
So here’s the situation: I wander into a bar. The Detroit Red Wings are in game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals. All I want in the world is to drink a beer in peace and watch Nick Lidstrom hoist 35 lbs. of hockey history etched in silver (otherwise known as Lord Stanley’s Cup) over his head. What I get is a screaming match by everyone at the bar about how Barack Obama is at best a socialist, and at worst the anti-christ. And I was fine with that. I didn’t want to talk politics. I just wanted to watch The Wings win the oldest trophy in professional sports. It wasn’t until the bartender, trying to dismiss the Junior Senator from Illinois asked who was the last president to (in his words) ‘unify the country.’ Given that to him the ‘Kennedy’ is a bad word, I went straight for FDR. Franklin Delano himself. I hadn’t said a word in this conversation until this point, as it was cutting into my enjoyment of the third period. So it’s in part that these idiots were harshing my Stanley Cup mellow, and in part that they were trashing on one Barry Obama, that I had to speak up. I wish I hadn’t.
Did I mention that these people are fascists? I kid you not, he defended HITLER over FDR. Something about how he brought his nation together and FDR nearly became a tyrant.
This was the most egregious example, but the two women at the bar basically gave a pocketbook defense of Republicanism. Yes, yes, you don’t like Bush, and absolutely you don’t like how the war turned out (didn’t stop you from re-electing Bush 2004, but, I won’t say I told you so) and, of course, OF COURSE, you’re socially liberal.(I mean, The Gays are very nice) But you just can’t vote for a Democat because they’ll raise taxes.
When the Revolution happens I’m coming to Connecticut, taking your Beamer for a joyride, pissing in the backseat, and laughing my ass all the way back to the newly formed Great Lakes Nation. Where good people live.
Joe Lieberman never made so much sense to me until just now.
It’s looking like US Air is heading towards its 3rd bankruptcy in 7 years. You read that right. 3 in 7. One bankruptcy every 2 years and 4 months. Remember, the do-nothing Congress of 2004-6 did manage to pass a personal bankruptcy law that made it much, much harder for individuals to gain bankruptcy protection (a grossly under-reported factor in the current mortgage crisis). As a big ass company, it’s still so easy it’s as viable a strategy as issuing debt is. At some point, we have to seriously considering limiting the number of times a company can go to the bankruptcy well. At some point the advocates of the free market (as Republicans allegedly are despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) have to let the market work…which in the case of US Air means let that piece of crap business die the ugly death fit for it.
The current problem for US Air, and for nearly every other airline, is the price of oil. A year ago many industry analysts, when the price of oil was $60/barrel, said they didn’t think the industry as a whole was viable if the price of oil doubled. Said price is now at $130/barrel. Doubling complete. Hmmm…
Consolidation (mergers between Northwest and Delta and the one being explored between United and US Air) ain’t gonna provide the answer in anything but a short term sense. The reason for this is that the price of oil (as mentioned ad nauseum by me it is a factor of production in everything) is skyrocketing. The only answers are going to be new business models, new technologies, and most of all, higher prices. Get good with that concept. The price of oil, the single biggest factor of production for an airline, is rising far faster than fares. We are just now starting to see higher fares but they do not reflect the full increase in oil. Airlines will continue to piss off their employees by hammering them on pay but you can only get so much blood from that corpse before it runs dry. Fares are going up and they’re gonna keep going up. They have to.
It doesn’t end with airlines. Prices are going to rise. China and India’s increasing demand for oil has radically changed the market for oil and it ain’t changing back any time soon. It may stabilize, the rate of increase may slow, but the price for crude will, for the forseeable future, keep going up.
As a result, stupid shit like the gas-tax holiday, opening up ANWR, opening up the coasts to drilling, are ineffective. The gas tax thing is, as Obama says, electioneering. It gets you in office. What are you going to do…suspend it as long as the price of oil is above some trigger level? It’s a bullshit policy. Opening up ANWR and the coasts to more drilling will do nothing meaningful to lower the price of oil. In a best case scenario it’d drop from $130 to $125 or so. It would, however, make the very wealthy oil companies very wealthier.
There is not going to be a single solution to this. We are entering the age of expensive oil and the age of increasing global oil demand. This is a considerable threat to us as a nation, given our oil dependence. Not foreign oil dependence…any oil dependence. The next President is going to have to lead this country kicking and screaming (and I mean all of us who love our cars and our gadgets and our lights and our heat and all the things we do and rely on that lead to the endless burning of fossil fuels) into a new future that is not powered by oil.
One important note (and this from a knee-jerk environmentalist): environmental organizations want to have you believe that switching from fossil fuels to low carbon energy will be painless economically. Don’t believe it. It will be expensive and it will be painful. Industries will die out. Jobs will be lost. The whole shooting match. However…the sooner we start through things like widespread publicly supported research of alternative fuels, new engine designs, etc., the less expensive and less painful it will be.
Posted May 23 at 11:50 pm by Matthew · No comments
If Barack Obama doesn’t become the Democratic nominee because he’s been assassinated, my guess is that we’ll have far greater problems then whether or not the nominee is then Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or something.
As I read the ongoing coverage of Obama’s “big win” on Tuesday and the epitaphs being written on behalf of the Clinton campaign, I can’t help but think that one of the many things that has plagued the Clinton effort is that it seems to suffer from a bad case of “inside the beltway” disease. It’s a disease that’s echoed in the analysis that so many pundits are now engaging in.
Let’s take Obama’s “big win” in North Carolina. That “big win” expanded his lead by 17 additional delegates. Really…that’s not alot. Ms. Clinton’s “big win” in Pennsylvania let her pick up 12 delegates more than Obama. Ohio gave her an 11 delegate advantage. Texas let her gain ground…by giving her 4 more delegates than Obama won. So, in the last three “big” wins for the Clinton campaign she inched a total of 27 delegates closer to catching Obama. These are not “big” shifts in the delegate mathematics. The press, because it’s more fun and dramatic and sells more papers, talks about primaries and caucuses as if they are winner-take-all battles. On the Democratic side they aren’t. It ain’t like the electoral college. Mr. Obama’s campaign showed an awareness of this, Ms. Clinton’s…until very late in the game…did not.
Hillary paid alot to high profile strategists who, I think, have not served her terribly well. It was as if they were running a campaign based on the electoral college. “We won Pennsylvania!” is a much more exciting battle cry than “we got marginally closer but not enough to matter!” If you look at the Clinton strategy, it was to focus resources heavily on winning big states with fat delegate counts. And, to an impressive degree, they succeeded. But they did so at the price of not just “losing” the small primaries and all the caucus states, the lost them by more than they had to. Until late March, the Clinton campaign essentially ignored those small states. They didn’t set up much in the way of campaign machines in them, they made token appearances, they stayed off of TV and (because of the few appearances and missing machines) out of the press compared to the Obama campaign. Right now, if you average out the difference between Obama’s and Clinton’s pledged delegate counts, it works out an advantage by Obama of just under 3 delegates per contest. If they had played to minimize the losses in smaller contests instead of only maximizing the wins in big ones…this would be a very different race.
Ms. Clinton’s campaign never seemed to grasp that a loss wasn’t a total loss and a win wasn’t a total win. Take her “big” win in Pennsylvania. Three months ago the thought that Barack Obama could capture 45% of the popular vote there was laughable. He still campaigned hard and spent a ton of money. He tried to minimize the loss. The net? Hillary gaining on him by a total of 12 delegates given the number of contests left at that time and his lead was trivial. Yeah, yeah, yeah…I know…the pundits will tell you that it signaled this or that or whatever and Obama was on the ropes and blahblahblah. But it seems to me that the Obama camp (wisely) ignored those histrionics and kept doing the arithmetic and came to the correct conclusion that they were still winning and didn’t need to panic. Given how far behind she was in the pledged delegate count, Hillary’s net gain of 12 delegates in Pennsylvania, in April, towards the end of the primary season was the equivalent of a football team being down by 17 points with 3 minutes left and scoring a field goal…yeah…they needed it…but it really didn’t change alot.
I’ve been listening to talking heads from the Clinton camp say silly things like…”if this were winner-take-all like it is for the Republicans Hillary would be winning”. Well…yeah. She would be. But it isn’t winner take all. It was never winner take all. It’s never been winner take all. So that lament is, to me, a huge indictment of the campaign. It is saying, obliquely, “we didn’t pay attention to the rules”. Which is cool, I guess. But at that point your only hope is that your opponent drinks the same Kool-aid as you. And in this case, he didn’t.
Here’s an interesting li’l tidbit from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (for reasons I don’t understand when I tried to put the link in I kept blowing up this post).
H.J. Heinz Co. plans to close a plant in Dallas next month, affecting nearly 200 employees. The Pittsburgh-based food company says work now done at the plant will be transferred to Heinz facilities in Mason, Ohio, Jacksonville, Fla., and Chatsworth, Calif.
The reason I bring this up is that here in Minnesota (and happening in states all over this great land) the righties in the state legislature have an annual drama-fest over “lower the corporate tax rate! lower the corporate tax rate! Businesses leaving! Can’t compete! blahblahblah”. In the case of Heinz, I don’t know why they decided to consolidate operations and shut down one of their four plants. I do know that corporate tax rates weren’t the reason. In fact, if you read about consolidations taking place and the reasons for choosing one state over another, etc…the one thing that rarely comes up, and when it does it’s way down the list, is the corporate tax rate. In this instance I know, unequivocally, that it wasn’t the corporate tax rate. How, you ask? ‘Cause California is a high tax state, Ohio is medium-high, and Florida is generally low. And Texas? The state they left? The “we’re a damn tax-haven state so come bring your biness (Texan for business) here” state. It hasn’t got a fucking corporate tax rate (okay, okay…it has a thing that’s called a Franchise tax but it’s full of loopholes and even when applied it’s roughly 3x lower than Florida’s low ass rate).
So, righties in the legislature, shut the hell up. Stop selling the theory that the corporate tax rate leads to decreased business investment. Bring me data…not anecdotal examples…but solid data.
I issue this challenge with great confidence. ‘Cause their ain’t no data to support it. Sure, you could set the rate so high that businesses would bail. Absolutely. But the tax rates that currently exist in this state, high as they are, show zero…ZERO…correlation to corporations exiting the state or cutting back on operations within it.
The TV just told me that Hil’ry is gonna “take on OPEC”. She’s gonna “break them up” apparently by filing an action with the WTO. Yup…the working mom ($120MM income in the last few years) is gonna save the working class ’cause she knows what it’s like to struggle (rich daddy paid her room, board, and tuition but nothing more when she was in college so if she wanted “a cup of coffee” she had to go work) and she knows who the bad guys iz (those damn A-rabs - just like George Bush sez).
She ain’t stupid. She knows that filing an action with the WTO is going to accomplish nothing. She knows the OPEC nations will simply ignore it. She knows she can’t get the gas-tax holiday passed and she knows it would be a policy that would do absolutely nothing to help anyone. She knows she’s promising things she can’t deliver and, more important, that she doesn’t want to deliver. She also knows there’s an opportunity to use that false populism to keep the race tight so that after the primaries she can win over a bunch of superdelegates.
And the most alarming thing judging from recent polls is this shit it working. In the same way that a rich guy (Prezzz Bush) recast himself as a good ol’ boy a few years back and got the shit-kicker vote to carry him home to the White House.
Jesus…are we really this stupid?
Here on the eve of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, the haggling of the candidates over Hillary’s genius “gas-tax holiday” strategy…genius in the “I’ll do anything to win” sense, spectacularly stupid as policy. You can bet your life that oil companies, knowing that consumers will pay the current price, will just raise the damn price up to the current levels as soon as the tax is rolled back. Duh.
Anyway, it got me to thinking about inflation. Kevin Phillips has an interesting piece in Harper’s this month. I like Harper’s because I often read things that remind me of things I learned back in econ school that blew my socks off. Here’s the reminder I got from the Phillips piece…
All the inflation numbers you read in the paper are total, utter horseshit.
First, you will always read that the CPI, excluding food and energy, is blahblahblah. Food and energy are taken out because they are volatile. Meaning, they cause the inflation rate to jump and fall. Because…um…they represent huge expenditures for each and every household. Think about that for a moment. Taking out food and energy from inflation is the logical equivalent of taking inflation out of inflation. As an example, between March 2007 and March 2008 the “core” inflation rate (inflation minus food and energy) was 2.4%. Don’t seem so bad. But the inflation rate on food was 4.5% and on energy a whopping 17%, making for an inflation rate with food and energy of 4% and rising.
But wait, there’s more…
Due to numbers cooking by Ronnie Raygun (with ongoing assistance from Bush the first and Bill Clinton) our inflation numbers have been cooked even farther. If you want to see how much, check out Shadowstats.com. The long and short of it is that the inflation rate, if we still measured it the way we did in 1992 (which means reporting core inflation without food or energy) isn’t 4%…it’s about 7.3%. What does that mean? It means that social security payments are far too low. It means that real GDP is grossly over-calculate. It means that your buying power ain’t shit and hasn’t been for awhile.
So…if you were wondering why the inflation numbers don’t match up with your personal experience…it’s because on a bipartisan basis we’ve been cooking the books for years.
Posted April 29 at 2:33 pm by Natascha · No comments
I am getting more worried about this man by the day. And not just because he apparently calls his wife names and has that slightly disturbing anger problem.
On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.
In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.
Holy buckets.
I just hope he doesn’t kick the wrong country out accidentally:
Posted April 28 at 5:23 pm by Phillip · No comments
Posted another one of my longer essays (too long to post here, I think), this one about the left-wing religious movement. Those interested can check it out over at Libertarian Rage.
Posted April 18 at 12:01 pm by Matthew · One comment
The Huffington Post has an article about how some—well, two—Iwo Jima vets are all upset that the raising-the-flag picture has been used by Time for a cover on global warming:
“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Mates said. “Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor.”
…
“The second world war we knew was there,” Mates said. “There’s a big discussion. Some say there is global warming, some say there isn’t. And to stick a tree in place of a flag on the Iwo Jima picture is just sacrilegious.”
I find it terribly curious—disturbing, really—that this man describes something he perceives as a slight against him as “a mortal sin,” “sacrilegious” and that the person who did it is “going to hell.”
I think it’s clear: We should be not just appreciative of these men and women—the Greatest Generation, the military, whatever—but we should worship them as the living gods they are.
It should no longer be shocking that the Greatest Generation—Those Great Souls Who Through the Largeness of Themselves Saved Us and Made Europe Safe for Speaking English—spawned the self-important, barely tolerable Baby Boomers. The Clintonian and Bushian apples don’t fall very far from the Nixonian tree.
Posted April 16 at 9:19 pm by Matthew · No comments
Okay, so Natascha and I were having sushi instead of watching the—apparently, very, very stupid and insulting—ABCNews debate.
I’ve decided that I’m no longer going to live my life as if Hillary Clinton could win the Democratic nomination. That is, I am going to relax for a while, until my deep-seated fear of the American elite’s provincialism becomes unavoidable during the DNC and I have to confront it, here, again. And, yes, it should be painfully obvious in the last week that the coastal cosmopolitans are the most fucking provincial sons of bitches in this entire country… Which doesn’t really surprise me, of course, because I’ve spent enough time with people who have advanced degrees and, really, all it does is make them really good at saying “A=A” except that “A” is defined as some sort of postmodernist identity cocoon from which no pupae can survive. (That’s a joke about racial constructs, just in case you were wondering. ¡Arriba!)
That is, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes people can actually think coherently regardless of the restraints placed on them by genitalia, melanin, region, income and gun ownership status. I know this is probably shocking to many academics and journalists. But, alas, it is true, and just because you read James Brooks’s books ironically doesn’t mean they’re not damaging your behavior.
ANNNNYWAY, apart from giving Barack Obama $20 whenever I can, I’ve decided I’m going to completely check out of the entire political process and have Japanese food with my friends from time to time.
Because, let’s face it, when you’re being insulted by George Stephanopolous on a regular basis—as, I feel, the vast majority of the non-punditocratic American population has been recently, not least of all this evening—sometimes you just have to just change the channel.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force is better than the Sunday talk shows, anyway. And certainly a lot less surreal.
Posted April 8 at 1:38 pm by Phillip · One comment
So a while ago I read the novel “Empire” by Orson Scott Card. I’m a fan of his fiction, less so of his political writing — frankly, I think he’s off his rocker most of the time, and obnoxiously dismissive of anyone who disagrees with him, although he will occasionally startle me with a well-reasoned and fairly-argued point about a controversial issue. So I was looking forward to this one, not least because its premise — a civil war breaking out in the contemporary United States — is an interesting one to me.
It’s appallingly bad.
Leaving its politics aside, its literary qualities are pure camp, played with an absolutely unironic intensity. Its heroes are all unflinching, steely-eyed, square-jawed military men; its villains cringing, conniving academics plotting the overthrow of the free world. The prose is riddled with intrusive editorials from his blog. It’s almost impossible to believe that this emerged from the same mind that created the tales of Alvin Maker — stories about a group of men and women trying to stop a civil war that are thoughtful, layered, and inventive. Seriously. This reads like one of Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen novels, only it’s not a parody.
I suspect that all of these issues are symptomatic of an underlying conceptual problem. The basic argument of the book is as follows: that all of the moderates need to get together and stop arguing, or the extremist wackos will break us apart. On its face, this seems like a reasonable position, and echoes one that I’ve been hearing in political discourse for a while. The problem is that it’s bullshit. Read his work closely, and his definitions become a bit less opaque. Do you support homosexual marriage? Then you’re a wacko! Do you oppose the occupation of Iraq? Then you’re a wacko! And pretty soon, it becomes clear that the real argument of the book reads thus: that all of the moderates (people who think what I do) need to get together and stop arguing, or the extremist wackos (everyone who disagrees with me) will break us apart.
It’s a rhetorical trick — six of one, half a dozen of the other. For that matter, I have a hard time seeing the virtue of moderation as a guiding moral principle, period. Sure, you can look around you and draw up an average of the opinions of everyone within your political boundaries — and I guess that would make you a moderate, if such a thing is to be desired — but in nearly every other place and time in human history, you’ll be a raving extremist. You believe in representative government? Guess what? In the context of most other civilizations throughout time, you’re a wacko. I know that it’s an extreme example. but if you were a moderate in Nazi Germany, I wouldn’t want to know you. What’s to be gained by seeking a middle position between two morally untenable ones? The founding fathers weren’t seeking a reasonable middle position, and they were quite openly contemptuous of those who did. This guy sure as hell wasn’t a moderate about anything.
After I spoke at my Republican caucus, I was followed by a man who stood up and asserted that “an election is not the time to assume a moral position.” Buh? Then when is the appropriate time? When there’s nothing at stake? When there’s nothing to be either gained or lost by espousing a principle?
I’m annoyed with myself, because I’ve been so hesitant to support Ron Paul. For a number of reasons. He seems too good to be true, for one thing, and I’ve been burned by politicians before — the last time I was this enthusiastic about a politician was Bill Clinton in 1996. (Which, I suppose, demonstrates how far my politics have swung in the past decade.) For another, I’m embarrassed to be playing to type, to be so utterly predictable. A fellow playwright asked me who I was supporting a couple of weeks back, then cut me off before I could respond: “Oh, you’re a libertarian. You’re just going to be supporting Ron Paul.”
So yeah, I’m annoyed with myself. Not because I haven’t been shoving my opinions down people’s throats (like, I’m afraid, so many other Ron Paul supporters have been doing), but because I’ve been squatting over my enthusiasm for him, stammering and changing the subject even when people ask me point blank who I like in the race — when I’m faced with the most exciting political candidate I’ve seen in my lifetime. In a way, that’s why I’m pleased to see the success of Obama’s candidacy, despite my profound dislike for his policies — that someone has the opportunity to support a candidate that they can believe in. Lord knows the Republicans don’t. When presented with the options, they chose the path of political expediency.
And if that’s the voice of moderation, then I’ll none of it. If there’s a basic argument to what I’m trying to say, it reads thus: that all of the extremists need to keep arguing…
…before the self-styled moderates find a way to pull us together.
