Hall of Fun House Mirrors

I wonder if the military, and those who use it, aid and abet it, venerate it over civilian/diplomatic spheres, are prone to fall into self-reference, where the military is in and of itself virtuous and its mission, as defined by civilians, increasingly secondary. And a characteristic of institutional self-reference is further and further remove from those outside, an ever greater concentration on its own priorities rather than those of the society supporting it, with fell consequences almost inevitable.

You could argue similarly with cops, ever more isolated from their populations and protective of each other's prerogatives; religious fundies ever more dismissive of a common humanity with pagans; docs facing malpractice lawyers and bureaucratic nightmares; on and on. You might even argue that the whole, entire kit and caboodle of Western society is moving in such a direction, because it's inevitable if economics, especially 'free markets' where profit-making is exalted over all else, and financial markets ever more removed from actual assets in the real world, displaces any other way of thinking about our lives together. 'Rugged individualists' living a libertarian fantasy, or daydreaming of one, trapped in a hall of funh house mirrors, trapping, too, everyone...

An American Prisoner Released in Iran

My Eschaton buddy plantsman cites the Washington Post:

Iranian authorities have released one of three Americans held for more than a year in Iran, their lawyer confirmed on Tuesday...

Shourd's release was initially expected at a government organized ceremony on Saturday. But it was postponed after judicial authorities objected, saying her case had not been finalized yet.

On Sunday, a bail of $ 500,000 was set as a condition for her release. On Monday, Shroud's family in the United States said they could not pay that much and were trying to lower the amount. It is unclear if any money was paid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/14/AR2010091401484.html?hpid=topnews

As always, such actions have to be evaluated as signals, addressed to the domestic population and to the world. So, Ahmadinejad is clearly at odds with the theocracy, and he and the country's people not eager to entirely reject engagement with the west.

One could rely on Bush to do something stupid, ignorant and oblivious in response to such a thing, as in most other contexts. Let's see what Obama does. Maybe the Obama who gave the Cairo speech will show up.

Football Fans Give The Gladiators the Thumbs Down

The Times reports an ever better confirmed horror of our civilization:

A brain autopsy of a University of Pennsylvania football player who killed himself in April has revealed the same trauma-induced disease found in more than 20 deceased National Football League players, raising questions of how young football players may be at risk for the disease.

Owen Thomas hanged himself in his off-campus apartment after what friends and family have described as a sudden and uncharacteristic emotional collapse.

Owen Thomas, a popular 6-foot-2, 240-pound junior lineman for Penn with no previous history of depression, hanged himself in his off-campus apartment after what friends and family have described as a sudden and uncharacteristic emotional collapse. Doctors at Boston University subsequently received permission from the family to examine Thomas’s brain tissue and discovered early stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease linked to depression and impulse control primarily among N.F.L. players, two of whom also committed suicide in the last 10 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/sports/14football.html?hp

This wasn't a small, unskilled, vulnerable guy.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Football players are smarter, bigger, faster, stronger, ever more prone to injury, in a sport where winning is, famously, the only thing, the reigning values are paramilitary rather than what we're pleased to call sportsmanship. Stories like this one are now surfacing with regularity. And I don't think it's just denial that most fans don't give a shit. They watch football, in part, to see the tough hits, just as NASCAR fans wait eagerly for the spectacular crashes that are evidence for the passion of the sport. They despise athletes who don't play hurt.

If the NFL, and college, even high school teams, don't do something soon, it's only a matter of time before it occurs to somebody that they had knowledge of the risks, a duty to prevent them, a breach of that duty through negligence causing injury, economic loss, pain and suffering and loss of consortium, and that a suit in tort might succeed. The case will soon be better than it is in many suits for medical malpractice. And everyone will say that greedy lawyers are destroying the country. And the threat will, as has happened in the past, over and over again, produce change, desperately needed change, that wouldn't otherwise have happened.

Count on it.

Mars Needs Women, and Earth Needs Adults

Roger Cohen on what passes for the mideast peace process, and the blase cynicism with which even mostly secular Tel Aviv greets it:

(George) Mitchell, after 18 months of toil, believes Netanyahu will go the extra mile. I was shown minutes of a meeting this year with Palestinian officials in which Mitchell said: “Benjamin Netanyahu will be thinking about his legacy. My experience in Northern Ireland makes me strong in my belief. Ian Paisley blocked an agreement for decades. He hated Catholics and called the pope the Antichrist in Parliament. At the age of 82 he started thinking about his legacy, made a turn and was a key figure in reaching an agreement in Northern Ireland.”

To which Saeb Erekat, a leading Palestinian negotiator shot back, “Let’s hope that Netanyahu reaches that conclusion before he reaches 82!”

It’s hard to resist Erekat’s cynicism. Peace is tough when politics are dead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/opinion/14iht-edcohen.html?hp

'Politics' has become a dirty word, synonymous with system gaming, power and patronage, purblind obstructionism. That itself is a sad indictment of our times. Myriad problems present themselves, in America, Israel and the world, and will not be solved absent the conduct of politics in its best sense, by adults working together. Middle school bully contests won't do it.

Obama has tried--for too long, I think--to be an adult approaching his opposition as adults, rather than as petulant middle-school bullies. He's a bit, if only a bit, better abroad: offering engagement to Muslim non-terrorists, something other than bombs to Iran, meaningful negotiations to Medvedev, settlement limit-setting to Israel. He needs, at home, to do something similar, out loud, frequently and often: differentiate between moderate Republicans, all three of them, and the crazies, in service of recruiting the former and putting the latter at more of a political disadvantage than they currently enjoy. Nobody else can do it. Perhaps he can't, either. But if the issue isn't that he can't, but that he won't, for shame.

And what he's been doing hasn't been working. What does he have to lose?

Big Trouble

David Brooks, who, as my indulgent readers know, isn't a favorite, notes that he admires Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks (American Enterprise Institute), but then goes on to state that their dogmatic, hysterical insistence that every government intervention in the economy is another step on Hayek's road to serfdom is ahistorical, incompatible with good policy and an intellectual and political catastrophe:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1284459868-L5lag4TxhaEgZ6fDFF9/2A

There's lots to disagree with in his column, of course. But if the right's too much even for Brooks, there's something happening here. Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid.

They aren't just mistaken in policy. They're nuts. Crazy. Removed from reality. Insane. Unreachable with fact, logic in service of fact rather than opposed to it, and experience. And they think they're absolutely, utterly right, and everyone else isn't just mistaken, but forcing dictatorship on our country via malevolence, useful idiocy or both.

In the end, they won't succeed even in their stated purpose. The only question is how many they will hurt, how much damage they'll do, how long before they're found out. So far, the answers are most of the country and many throughout the world, a poisoning of discourse and too goddamned long.

We're in big, big trouble. But, then, you knew that...

Love Shall be the Whole of the Law

My friend Hecate, poetry lover, practicing witch and world class energy regulation lawyer, posted this on Eschaton this morning:

Charge of the Goddess:

Whenever you have need of anything, once a month, and better it be when the moon is full, you shall assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit of Me Who is Queen of all the Wise.
You shall be free from slavery, and as a sign that you be free you shall be naked in your rites.
Sing, feast, dance, make music and love, all in My Presence, for Mine is the ecstasy of the spirit and Mine also is joy on earth.
For My law is love is unto all beings. Mine is the secret that opens the door of youth, and Mine is the cup of wine of life that is the cauldron of Cerridwen, that is the holy grail of immortality.
I give the knowledge of the spirit eternal, and beyond death I give peace and freedom and reunion with those that have gone before.
Nor do I demand aught of sacrifice, for behold, I am the Mother of all things and My love is poured out upon the earth.

--I wonder about love as a law. Makes sense, in the context gods, goddesses and the like are heard all too often by us poor limited souls, I guess: we can't hear everything a larger entity worth a serious person's consideration would say. But law, down here, anyway, is oft compulsion imposed from without, perhaps, sadly, more commonly than an agreed to part of a just society. The rest of the lovely piece suggests something more than what we flawed, limited folk mean by law, redeeming the concept, and, I think, offers us a chance to be part of something larger than we are. I've heard 1 Corinthians 13 discussed that way, too, as well as restricted to dogmatism, limiting love, which, if it's worth anything at all, should never be restricted to even humanity as a whole, much less any given subset of humanity, certainly not to oneself.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But such indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

What if the stars were to burn
With a love for me that I could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Then let the more loving one be me.

WH Auden

Willie Sutton Isn't Enough

Krugman, responding to the David Brooks column I bloviate about below, noted a few days ago that people went into financing and consulting rather than manufacturing because, like Willie Sutton, they saw that's where the money is. Docs go into dermatology and plastics rather than primary care and, even, general surgery, because that's where they can earn big bucks with short hours and far less administrative headache, and pay back their average $150,000 educational debt faster. Companies like GE and GM make as much or more money from finance and consumer loans as from manufacturing. Meanwhile, the right ceaselessly pounds the drum of individual responsibility (always for others, though, never for themselves) and the efficacy and moral privilege of 'free market' solutions to our woes. Dangerous, stupid, greedy, self-serving crap, that, and anyone who isn't greatly privileged sees it in a minute.

I'm going to buy Obama a little dog, named Fala. Maybe that'll help.

http://www.hpol.org/fdr/fala/

If you never read FD Roosevelt's 'Fala' speech, click on the link to see how a master did it. Obama could do that. He damned well should.

The Mirror of our Schools

Tom Friedman (not a favorite) quotes Robert Samuelson (mostly loathsome) today re education reform and why it isn't working all that well:

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12friedman.html?hp

Now, one can quarrel with Friedman's assertion that we're spending a great deal of money on education. But my buddies DWD and Uncle Blodge, and most decent teachers of my acquaintance, tell me that student behavior and interest in other than a small group of academically driven kids has declined measurably and dramatically in their professional lifetimes, that parents' roles have moved from exhorting their kids to criticizing teachers and their unions, that long-term poverty, unemployment, racism, incarceration, right wing abandonment of common humanity and demands for personal responsibility excluding their own, the obscenely ineffective war on drugs, the predominance of athletics and celebrity, and a ubiquitous trash-talking lowest-common-denominator marketing-driven pop culture have more than a little to do with schools' ineffectiveness.

There's an obvious middle ground between the Asian stereotype--waking up to play a Rachmaninoff piano sonata and solve three partial differential equations before breakfast--and what too many kids, parents and citizens in this country think education is. That's where we should be. The former stereotype has little to offer us and is, in any case, close to unattainable here. The latter would require major shifts in the culture. They won't arise out of short-term profit-seeking devoid of any thought that society might need to be more than economic. And this isn't even good for business in the end. If Friedman and his clients see this as a problem, maybe they might talk it up in terms other than ain't- it-awful. Maybe the word would get around that schools mirror a society, and if we don't like the reflection we see in the mirror, it isn't the mirror's fault.

Remember

Remember 9/11/2001. Also, remember the aftermath. And note, as seems always to be the case when the powerful are attacked by the less powerful, that the response to the attack far exceeded in horror the attack itself, was deeply counterproductive to American interests, abroad, even narrowly construed, and destructive to democracy, discourse and the rule of law domestically.

And consider, were a similar attack to occur today, that it'd be more than likely that it'd elicit a response possibly even more obscene than that following 9/11/2002. It breaks my heart to say it, but i think it's true.

The Wombat Codicil on War Powers

Facebookk won't let me post this: too long. So here's the Wombat Codicil, to be added to the Constitution, on war powers:

1. War is, under this law, presumed to be, of itself, the result of incompetence of the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense.
2. The officers mentioned in S.1 are impeached and removed from office 60 days after American troops are placed in harm's way, or the sovereign territory of another nation is attacked by American military operations.
3. A joint session of Congress, by a 2/3 majority vote, can, within the 60 day period of S.2, retain any or all of the officers of S.1 in office.
4. The joint session of S.3 will be attended by every Congressman and Senator then holding office. Those not attending will, as a matter of law, be impeached and removed from offices.
5. Every operation of the joint session of S.3 will be televised and available on the Internet without restriction, and votes recorded and available for public inspection.
6. The President, and the joint session of S.3, will each prepare a report detailing the causes of the action, the action's purposes, and the criteria by which the action will be concluded.
7. The reports of S.6 will be submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, which will respectfully be asked for its formal opinion on them.
How's that?

Brooks Waxes Sociological, Or, Perhaps, Wanes

I summarize Brooks' column today so that you need not subject yourself to reading it. His points:

1. It's a shame that all those smart people went into finance and consulting, instead of making things. That the money was so much better doing what they did, and all the incentives were to do that, and why, seem to have not made it into his column.
2. Harvard students mostly go into finance and consulting, rather than manufacturing. That Harvard Business School, amongst others, teaches downsizing, outsourcing, rightsizing, cheese-finding, financing everything on debt, holding minimal cash reserves, maintaining an insecure, poorly paid, non-unionized labor force and like that seem not to have made it into his column.
3. There's trouble in River City: social breakdown, crime, broken families, failing schools. That light manufacturing jobs have vanished like dry ice in Death Valley, unemployment approaches 20-40% in poor communities, that incarceration or parole cover astounding percentages of males in the communities, that school budgets get reduced and teachers entirely discredited as the sole reasons why students from such places fail, seem not to have made it into his column.
4. Economic historians point to non-economic causes for American social decline. That there are, er, social historians, political thinkers and others (I'll shill for Tony Judt's 'Ill Fares the Land' again) who have for years contested the near-exclusive predominance of economic thinking over all other ways to examine our lives, and that policies based largely on economics, and, at that, short-term exaltation of greed over any other consideration, have reigned for years, been imposed from the right, and seem, er, less than successful even economically, seem not to have made it into his column.
5. The British lost the bulldog determination that was the stuff of empire, and thereby declined. That they, too, sacrificed horribly in two world wars and a depression, and then lost said empire as the colonies insisted on liberating themselves while British resources weren't up to preserving the empire, seem not to have made it into his column.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10brooks.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fopinion%2Findex.jsonp

A careful reader would, at this point, see the subtle signs of a trend emerging...

Nobody Flies Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Gail Collins comments today that 5% of the country is crazy, and has always been. Been addressed before; Hofstadter's 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics', written in the wake of another Scoundrel Time, comes to mind:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/opinion/09collins.html?adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1284037328-ztPnRVwbcs7V15+VKI//zw

The problem is not so much the crazies, who are always with us. The problem is that not nearly enough people actually call these crazy people crazy. Such as Paul Wellstone and Dennis Kucinich are marginalized and dismissed, but Beck and the Tea Partiers are taken seriously. And even those who do reject the crazies oft make excuses for them, try to explain them, in precisely the manner they loudly denounce in projecting onto lefties similar behavior, when lefties try to understand and explain (but never justify) evil as originating from human beings. Timothy McVeigh might have killed a hundred or so people, but government is too big and intrusive. Killing ATF agents is wrong, but they're jackbooted thugs who want to take away our guns. Shooting a doc as he eats breakfast with his family is wrong, but abortion is murder. Flying a plane into an IRS building is wrong, but taxation is tyranny. Burning the Quran is wrong, but Islam is evil and moderate Islam a dangerous illusion. Like that. Utterly, completely indefensible and inexcusable, that. And fact is,a Republican running for office denouncing such people in no uncertain terms wouldn't have a chance in hell. And nobody calls them on it.

I Have A Dream

Maybe Norquist was right, and bipartisanship really is date rape. Perhaps, better, with respect to the Democrats, it's like a first-year woman in college lookng for someone to read Emily Dickinson with at a jock frat kegger on the night after the Big Game...

Now, with respect to the politically possible, indulge me in a fantasy:

(before a Democratic leadership meeting, with Obama, Reid and Pelosi in attendance)
(introduction by a Democrat like Grayson or Franken)
Ladies and gentlemen, the progressive element of the party has searched high and low for someone who could help us think outside the box, find our cheese and work as a team to fulfill our potential. We're proud to have Prof. Wombat, of Wombat Consulting, a subsidiary of Consolidated Marsupial, with us today. Give him a nice round of applause: Prof. Wombat!
(tepid applause as Power Point gears up; an ingratiating bad joke or two, thanks for being here, let's all work together, like that, and then:)

The current situation:

1. Republicans and the right relentlessly, stridently and without any shame at all constantly pound the country with crazy, arrant nonsense and lies.
2. Democrats, in response, say, in a lower voice, 'Ain't it awful?' mostly to each other.
3. The media repeat the Republican crap as if it's true, and can't be challenged on fact.
4. The media focus most of their energy, though, not on actual fact, but on the manly Republicans from Mars, showing excitement, energy and manliness, recruiting the Real America to their cause, and the weak, metrosexual, hand-wringing, mojo-challenged, well, non-manly Democrats from Venus.
5. The politically possible is defined as whatever the Republicans condescend to concede the legitimacy of, and nothing more.

It need not be so, for the following reasons:

1. The Republicans, er, lost the last election, definitively, because George Bush and Dick Cheney left a steaming pile of offal ofunprecedented size and odor on the White House table as they left.
2. The Republicans made a disaster, throughout the Busherregnum and on leaving, of every economic, domestic, foreign and social policy they touched. Every one.
3. Poll after poll shows that when individual Democratic policy points are separated out from Republican talking points, there is at least parity, and often a majority, in support, even in the current unfavorable environment.
4. Republican policy recommendations mirror the disastrous Bush policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

So, there is not only something that can be done, but something that should be done, with a greater chance of success than is generally acknowledged even by you guys:

1. Support yourselves, and attack your opposition, with equal or greater energy to that the Republicans show in attacking you.
2. Talk up the unprecedented Republican use of filibuster in opposition, the multiple forced compromises, as limiting Democratic effectiveness in a baldly partisan, historically unprecedented act of nihilism, and that Democrats would be more, rather than less, effective were they to do what they were elected to do. Recast the disappointments not as failures arising from flawed Democratic policies, but from Republican intransigence.
3. Challenge every last lie. Every one. Without exception. Call them lies.
4. Challenge every last paranoid raving--birthers, Cloward-Piven conspirators, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Illuminati and the Masons, all of them, as craziness having no relationship to reality.
5. Challoenge the notion that class warfare is only directed against the rich.
6. Recall the prosperity we've seen under more burdensome tax schedules than Obama wants to implement, much less those demanded by republicans.
7. Speak constantly and clearly about the good government does, and that demanded of government by the people, in terms which clearly delineate Republican malfeasance from an actually achievable alternative.
8. Embrace the concerns of the middle class nand small business by demonstrating Republican bias towards the rich and the huge corporations.
9. Be prepared, every time, to call media figures on their biases and challenge them with facts, logic, humor and derision when derision is called for.

Such a strategy will enlarge the previously recognized bounds of the politically possible, improve Democrats' political position,and may, even, help solve the world's problems. Any questions?

(nervous hand-wringing, followed by: 'But what if they call us poopyheads?')

Laugh at 'em. Say that Hitler and Tojo called Roosevelt a poopyhead. Say the Southern racists called Johnson a poopyhead. Say that opponents of Medicare called the program the first step towards destruction of the American way of life, and that its supporters were all poopyheads. Say that Republicans think old folk on Medicare and Social Security and Medicare are parasites, that those who advocate talking diplomacy as well as war are appeasers, that those advocating helping the unemployed with extending their insurance benefits hate America, and that, if Republicans call us poopyheads, well, we've been called worse. Laugh at 'em again. And say, if they want to help, fine; if all they do is rave, call names and lie, well, we can deal with that.

Yes? Anyone else?

We thank you for your generous reception, and hope we've helped.
Now go get 'em.

(audience files out, eats watercress sandwiches for lunch and returns to work)

When You Have To Go There, They Have To Take You In

The Times notes the ridiculous extent to which ERs are overused for routine medicine:

In a snapshot of systemic waste, researchers have calculated that more than half of the 354 million doctor visits made each year for acute medical care, like for fevers, stomachaches and coughs, are not with a patient’s primary physician, and that more than a quarter take place in hospital emergency rooms.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/policy/07health.html?hp

In a system full of waste, this is ridiculously low-hanging fruit. Anyone with any experience in ERs knows that a great deal of their work could, and should, be done elsewhere. ER docs don't know patients, don't have their records, don't work in continuity of care before or after the visit. More tests get ordered; less complete care given. Nothing gets prevented. The meter runs much, much faster than anyone not in the system realizes; the average visit costs around $1000-1500. And it isn't as if anyone actually likes waiting an hour or two in an ER to see a doc for a head cold, or because a gazillion others are before you in line with their head colds.

But the ER is, by law, sort of like Robert Frost's home: when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Always open. In some places, if you have Medicaid you can get an ambulance ride there for free, even if grotesquely unnecessary and expensive, rather than pay for a cab.

The obvious alternative is access to a primary care physician, in whose practice you're already enrolled, and whose job it is to be the first to respond to acute needs as part of general care, rather than in isolation from it. Won't happen if every last incentive deters docs from entering primary care or staying in it.

Labor Day

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun:
For what on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.

Solidarity forever.

Not Enough Is Not Enough

President Obama has proposed a $50 billion infrastructure program.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/41807.html

$50 billion isn't very much, on the scale of stimulus that folk such as Paul Krugman think necessary to stimulate the economy, and is minuscule with respect to the need for repair and maintenance of our current decaying infrastructure, much less creation of new infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the need in the trillions of dollars.

What we have here, seems to me, is yet another compromise of what's actually needed in the name of the politically possible, against an opposition party that would claim Obama to be the product of an unnatural union between a seq urchin and a platypus if it could. No doubt, were the proposal to be, say, as big as that which bailed out the banks, or funded/funds the wars, it wouldn't have a chance. Today.

The counterargument from the left is that the presidency remains, and should be, a bully pulpit, that the president should fight for more, should not accept the current limitations on his ability to do the right thing, and should cast the opposition, if successful in blocking him, as responsible for the consequences. Further, if said $50 billion is, in fact, not enough, either to stimulate the economy or address infrastructure needs--if, as the soundbite would go, it's another failure--then it'd be easy for the Republicans to call it not a failure of insufficiency, but of yet another government overreach, squandering of tax revenue, increasing the deficit at the expense of the grandchildren and so on, and the media would lap it up.

So, is the $50 billion better than nothing? Is better than nothing enough?

Debt Vigilantes Are Depressing

Found this on Krugman's blog: great ammo vs the Forces of Darkness:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/paradoxes-of-deleveraging-and-releveraging/

He goes to the Depression and on to the Fabulous Fifties, and graphs the national debt, which turns up dramatically. But then, on the same scale, he graphs the debt/GDP ratio, and finds it falling. He draws the conclusion that a higher national debt, in fact, grows the GDP rather than shrinks it, contrary to the currently reigning dogma.

If Only Rugged Individualists Would Keep to Themselves

If you asked me what single thing I'd want every damned person in the world to learn about, it'd be the economic notion of the negative externality: that economic decisions have consequences to people other than those who make the decisions, and those consequences aren't necessarily thought of, or, even if recognised, given the slightest import in the decision.

One of the things about the right that drives me crazy is their refusal to even consider that economic decision making which doesn't account for negative externalities--often even denying their very existence, and, at that, often mendaciously--can produce every bit as much loss of freedom, economic cost, limitation of human potential and progress as any act of even a far less than ideal government. And that, in consequence, action to hold decision makers accountable for the consequences of their actions, provide incentives to prevent them and disincentives for creating them, moving them onto a balance sheet that the Magic of the Marketplace will transform into an instrument for social good thereby--or define some of them as crimes against individuals and society--is not only an appropriate function of government, but a necessary one. Some might even argue it the central one.

Those on the right, too, oft see a lack of personal responsibility as the source of all social ills. When they don't hear, or refuse to listen to, the cries of those external to decisions for mindfulness of consequences, they reject the very personal responsibility for themselves that they so stridently demand of others. And, in doing so, they embrace the notion that society's problems are someone else's fault and, therefore, require no sacrifice or even contribution from the virtuous. Convenient, self-serving, counterproductive, morally bankrupt. And wildly dissonant with their stated beliefs.

Davos Man at Munich

One of the things that galls me every time it comes up--and it does come up, often--is the right's frequent recourse to the metaphor of Chamberlain at Munich. They invariably use it to imply that nothing other than unyielding opposition and recourse to force will work when we deal with opponents on the world stage, as if the USA is as militarily weak, and with as little intelligence capacity, today as the UK was in 1938, and as if all our adversaries are Hitlers. The left should challenge their exclusive use of Munich as a metaphor. It could be used not solely to damn negotiation as appeasement and justify the use of force, but also as a cautionary tale about the consequences of delay in dealing with a problem before the fact of emergency, rather than after the emergency forces action. Delay costs lives and treasure, makes mitigation more problematical even of eventual achievement, much less in good time. The midwest's industrial catastrophe, for instance, could be cast as an economic Munich: a problem was recognized; solutions were delayed or withheld; negative consequences greater, harder to mitigate, eventually more costly, even, than timely action would have been. Another example is the delay in acting to move away from fossil fuels with urgency, or even with deliberate speed: potentially, an environmental Munich.

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Intelligent people oft have this weird notion that facts, logic and thoughtful, carefully researched and reasoned analysis will carry the day over intolerance, ideology, selfishness, ignorance and blind prejudice. And they sometimes go far as to assume that to be the default position, because most people are reasonable, their sources of information complete enough and grounded in reality enough, so as to render the superiority of the former over the latter obvious.

So, we've had multiple examples of Obama in a group of Republicans discussing issues with which he was far more acquainted, far more equipped with fact and logic. We had Al Gore and John Kerry debating George W Bush. We had Sarah Palin on the platform with Joe Biden, at least, though hard to call her performance a debate since she didn't respond to questions. In every case, few, if any, minds were changed by obviously superior grasp of fact and logic. In every case, criticism based on performance values trumped even the slightest analysis of actual content.

In which context, we have the notion of bipartisanship, which Norquist famously labeled 'date rape'. A nice thought. 'Come, let us reason together' is a more pleasing approach than, 'Shut up asshole'. And if you have a better grasp of reality, a more logical approach to it, then, you might think, once you explain it to those who disagree with you, they'll come along.

Except that for Obama's opposition, the American media, and too many of its citizens, none of this applies. None of their stands have much to do with fact, logic, reality or much else other than the realities of their own power, perceived threats to it, and increasingly self-referential, ever more reality-challenged discourse excluding external reality in favor of intolerance, prejudice and ignorance. Glenn Beck isn't just a conservative. He's crazy. His conspiracy theories and dark fantasies are easily disproven, offer nothing with respect to actual policy making in response to the country's problems. And he's at the center of current right wing opposition to Obama and the Democrats,ever more strident and rigid despite countless conciliatory gestures and compromises.

Nothing new about anti-intellectualism or paranoia in American politics, of course. Hofstadter famously addressed them both during another of America's Scoundrel times. All the more reason for the historically informed, intelligent Obama to recognise the limits of a rational response to these people, and a need to appeal to those whose worlds don't revolve around fact, logic and a building of consensus around them.