Thieves, All of Them

Dennis Lim discusses heist movies in the Times today in relation to a film festival centering on them:

IN “The Asphalt Jungle,” a 1950 noir by John Huston that is credited with creating the template for the heist film, a duplicitous lawyer observes that “crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.” The idea of crime as a line of work — hardly an honest one, but a job all the same, requiring an investment of skill and labor — is central to this most process-oriented of cinematic genres...

Even more than “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Blue Collar” is a crime movie about human endeavor, recasting heist-film antiheroes as working-class heroes. Its unmistakable political point is that they’re every bit as doomed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/movies/01heist.html?src=dayp

The point he doesn't make is that not only are thieves recast as workers, and, at that, workers capable of precision and craft, but doomed to fail, but that there's a comment here on the society and the economy in general: not all thieves fail, much economic activity is more akin to theft than is admitted, and that the rich are rich in large measure because they are more successful thieves than the blue collar guys in these films. Yet another outsourcing of blue-collar work, one could even say. And the heist movies in which the thieves succeed often center on suave, elegant protagonists whose hands don't bear the calluses of actual work. Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some by selling you credit default swaps with a nominal value of $100 million...

Ayn Rand's Men (sic) of the Mind, and libertarians' enabled entrepreneurs freed of restraint and parasitic theft, don't always exhibit that nobility of spirit and self-restraint which exclude a degeneration of their Utopias into a vicious and unprincipled contest between strength and weakness. You don't see many libertarians emigrating to African countries with ineffective central governments, where the shackles of law don't at all hinder entrepreneurial activity, and the right to bear arms is taken for granted. Nor do you see small-government righties praising those countries' economic and social performance as worthy of emulation, despite the absence there of the heavy hand of government constraining human progress. And they can't imagine themselves weak or careless enough to themselves become the victims of a heist.

They Contribute, You Decide

Get your fair and balanced news today:

The News Corporation, whose holdings include The Wall Street Journal and the Fox News Channel, has donated $1 million to the United States Chamber of Commerce, the business advocacy group that is among the heaviest anti-Democratic advertisers in this year’s elections...

The Chamber has vowed to spend around $75 million on this year’s elections, and the effort has overwhelmingly focused on defeating Democrats, though the Chamber has made exceptions in some races.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/

How anyone could object to the social utility of the Citizens United decision escapes me. An international media conglomerate owned by a naturalized American of Australian descent obviously has the same interests as an individual citizen of the country. It would be wrong to limit that corporation's right to political speech. Why, anyone could see how it's been laboring under the restraints imposed by jackbooted socialist thugs on its ability to get its message across. Thank goodness for the Supreme Court majority, and its courage in overturning close to a century of previously uncontested legal precedent, even though it had nothing to do with either the initial arguments or the issue before the bar. Judicial restraint and results oriented jurisprudence are the refuge of the little people. The Men of the Mind know better...

Yet another heart breaking story involving a bullied gay kid's suicide, cited by Thers at Eschaton:

http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2010/09/11589/

Sobering reading that.

Spent a good part of school until maybe 14-15 or so y.o. getting bullied. Big, fat, clumsy, unathletic, no social graces. The stuff I cared about wasn't worth anything to anyone else other than as a subject for further ridicule. Good grades made it worse. I wasn't gay, but maybe 90% of the stories resonate entirely with my experience. And, yes, I was told it was part of growing up, that I should toughen up and be a man. Got no support at all, none whatever. A growth spurt and a clever choice of parents made me six feet tall and less nerdy looking, and I went to a magnet school; that took care of it. Sort of. And, like most, if not all, who go through this crap, I remember a lot of it to this day with startling immediacy. I can only imagine how much worse it would have been had I been gay, and not just called a faggot because when i was a kid, that's one of the things you got called. With parents, a peer group, a church congregation, a community that would reject in horror rather than support in recognition.

An odd turn of the wheel had me meet one of the last psychiatrists in New York City who treated homosexuality as a disease, and thought he could talking cure it in the old Freudian paradigm. Psychiatry has its problems, but has moved on.

So yet again, I find myself reminded that gay rights are human rights. When a gay person comes out, he does it not only for himself but for me. Human rights are like that. When bullying becomes unacceptable, it'll help not just gays, but everybody who'd otherwise spend years in silence, and more years wondering why. When preachers of a universal God extend welcome to all, a recognition of a common humanity, as if that's a more meaningful sort of prayer than all the posturing and proscription, it'll help all, and, too, render their beliefs a little more legitimate in the eyes of the rest of us.

And maybe, just maybe, the awesome, horrific mystery of suicide won't rear its ugly head, yet again, in a situation where it loses all too much of its mystery and none of its horror.

Wombat's Short Guide to Right Wing Social Policy Rhetoric

The louder they protest, the more they hide.
Denial.

The more they tell you what to do, the less likely they are to do it themselves.
Displacement.

The more they accuse you of doing something, the more likely they are to be doing it themselves.
Projection.

Poopyheads...

Killing the Israeli Right With Peace

Robert Wright in the Times today suggests that a one-state solution, Palestinian and Jewish in an increasingly secular Israel, might evolve into a more just society with peaceful, persistent Palestinian protests from within against injustices:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/a-one-to-two-state-solution/?hp

A one-state solution, with evolution of Palestinian rights and secularism, was also advocated by Edward Said and Tony Judt.

Israel is already ostracized internationally. Doesn't seem to phase them, or extend to rejection of Palestinian outrages either. A further ostracism if they resist peaceful, non-violent Palestinian demonstrations, with a positive Israeli response, seems a faint hope to me. There are too many amongst the Palestinians, and in the larger Arab world, who benefit from violence, and the intractability of the problem. There are too many Israelis who benefit from a dehumanization of Arabs and a willful ignorance of their positions and their positions' origins. It's hard to see either group, too, allowing ongoing, persistent peaceful protests without resorting to violence.

Israel, with by far the largest economy and most competent military in the region, with the world's strongest military and intelligence power behind it, has the greater freedom of action, and, therefore, the greater, but by no means the only, responsibility for ending the conflict. Israelis shouting 'Ma'alot! Munich! Holocaust!' and Palestinians shouting 'Sabra/Shatila! Stern Irgun! Zionist imperialism! Apartheid! at Israelis are not going to solve the problem, and will continue, for another generation or two, to kill each others' children. I find that unacceptable.

The Noble Sacrifices of Others

Tom Friedman calls them Tea Kettlers today: all hot air and no substantive or rational policy ideas. He differentiates them from the 'real' Tea Party, which is basically the Good Guys who have Tom's ear: he says they are looking for 'real leadership' and will respond to calls for sacrifice in order to restore American greatness:

The important Tea Party movement, which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats, understands this at a gut level and is looking for a leader with three characteristics. First, a patriot: a leader who is more interested in fighting for his country than his party. Second, a leader who persuades Americans that he or she actually has a plan not just to cut taxes or pump stimulus, but to do something much larger — to make America successful, thriving and respected again. And third, someone with the ability to lead in the face of uncertainty and not simply whine about how tough things are — a leader who believes his job is not to read the polls but to change the polls.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/opinion/29friedman.html?hp

He's not entirely awful, but says, amongst other things, that a leader would inspire folk to sacrifice for the common good. The vast majority, though, especially of the rich and empowered, think it's sufficient and necessary that others, and not themselves, do all the sacrificing, especially those perks and entitlements they don't really deserve anyway. I hear less talk about universal sacrifice than I do about the Schwarzchild solution to the general theory of relativity. Universal sacrifice, involving 'entitlements' of the rich as well as the middle class and the poor, is the genuine political third rail. The systematic destruction of the social contract, overtly beginning with Reagan's legitimization of greed and racism, and more generally since the social changes of the 1960s, in which blacks, women, gays and others asserted their right to participate in the political and economic life of the country as equals, have made it so. Unless the underlying problem is addressed, until the need is as great as it was during World War II and the Depression, and until we have an FD Roosevelt available, it ain't gonna happen. In some places, that's how great the need is already. And Friedman, who goes part of the way, misses this entirely. He's not interested in social contract, either its destruction or its creation. He's interested in leadership. Now, we could use some of that. But yearning for positive leadership without mentioning the forces that'd cut any leader of any stature down is ingenuous. (And I'm not apologizing for Obama here.)

The Warmth of the Winter Sky

The night sky starts to get gorgeous in the fall: clearer, dryer air, less heat coming up, Orion starting to come. Winter sky is the best. You freeze, absolutely freeze, and see fifty gazillion stars, the Milky Way, all seven of the sisters.

Did a senior thesis in astrophysics in college. Went in winter to the school's telescope, in the middle of a state park, observing. No heat. Tracked U Geminorum stars, which have the amiable habit of blowing themselves up periodically. Had a professor with a quirky, wildly expansive manner and knowledge base. Sample conversation, as we're driving up there, after maybe five minutes' companionable silence:

'WOMBAT!'
'Yes...'
'Wombat, in which of Beethoven's symphonies are the tympani tuned in octaves rather than fifths?'
'Er, uh,...'
'THE EIGHTH, Wombat, the eighth! Recall the third movement; that's where it's most obvious! And do you think it coincidence that OCTAVES appear in the EIGHTH?'
'Er, uh,...'
'I think not, Wombat. I THINK NOT!'

Good times...

You're Only As Good As Your Dreams

Bob Herbert calls out Carl Paladino, running for NY governor, on what he thinks are good clean fun e-mails he forwards. He then drops this paragraph:

As for the poor, Mr. Caputo (Paladino's press secretary--PW) said that Mr. Paladino has at times not fully explained his expansive plans for welfare recipients, failing public school students, and men and women who receive unemployment benefits. He said a Governor Paladino would ask parents of struggling students to send them to state-sponsored boarding schools, which would also house children taken from their parents “because of social service or child welfare reasons.”

He said all recipients of long-term unemployment insurance or welfare services (except for the disabled and mothers with small children) would be required to work (or be re-trained) in government programs in order to get their benefits. This would include, he said, those who are already very well educated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/opinion/28herbert.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1285669050-wDDuvho3a8w1fPXHUbRVHw

Well. Seems to me that an expansion of boarding schools and workhouses for children from 'dysfunctional families' would require a bit of expansion of the state, and the spending of, er, money. Not to mention an, er, expansion of intrusive state power over families and communities. And those government retraining programs and employer-as-last-resort jobs would, too, cost money and involve the state in, er, job creation that would cost, er, money.

Entirely consistent with tea-party conservatism, isn't it?

Now, you're only as good as your dreams, and Paladino has shown how good he is beyond a shadow of a doubt. But he's also crazy. Nuts. Reality-challenged. At utter odds with himself. And nobody in the Republican Party is saying so. He's recommending policies so entirely contradictory that he couldn't conceivably implement them, even were they the right thing to do.

But, again, we're not talking policy here. We're talking Self and Other, one virtuous and productive, the other parasitic, evil and dehumanized. And that's easy to implement. And needs to be called by its name, and fought.

California Dreaming

Found David Brooks this morning in the Times trying to be even handed in assigning blame to California's fall from grace, after applauding the progressives who once led the state:

Between 1911 and the ’60s, California had a series of governors — like Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown — who were pro-market and pro-business, but also progressive reformers.
They rode a great wave of prosperity, and people flocked to the Golden State, but they used the fruits of that prosperity in a disciplined way to lay the groundwork for even more growth. They built an outstanding school and university system. They started a series of gigantic public works projects that today are seen as engineering miracles. These included monumental water projects, harbors and ports, the sprawling highway system and even mental health facilities.
They disdained partisanship. They continually reorganized government to make it more businesslike and cost effective. “Thus,” the historian Kevin Starr has written, “California progressivism contained within itself both liberal and conservative impulses, as judged by the standards of today.”
...In fits and starts, California’s progressive model has been abandoned. The state’s current economic decline and political stagnation is a result of that abandonment. Now California government has all the dysfunctions that mark national government, but at a more advanced stage.
Both parties helped kill off California’s pro-market progressivism. Some assaults came from the left. First, there was the growing power of the public sector employee unions. These unions began lobbying for richer salaries and pensions. That, of course, is their job. But in the 1970s, governors started caving in. Money that could have gone into development went into prison guard benefits. Infrastructure spending, for example, has dropped from 20 percent of the state budget to 3 percent.
...Another assault on California progressivism came from the right. Conservatives refused to acknowledge the public sector’s role in creating the state’s prosperity. With Proposition 13 and other measures that cut taxes, they cut off revenue and pushed through structural reforms, making it hard for future administrations to raise funds. Many on the right became unwilling to think creatively about using government to promote prosperity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/opinion/28brooks.html?hp

He writes, too, implying that California exhibits a decline also seen in the rest of the country.

I'd add a few things. The environmental movement has been 'anti-growth' in the context of the Santa Barbara oil spill, water troubles and a few other concrete issues. The prison guards' union grew in part as the prisons themselves grew, in response to the 'war on drugs', mandatory sentencing and other horrors. Then there's Medicaid and all those brown people.

But Brooks is here, as he has tentatively suggested elsewhere, accepting a bipartisanship of the sort Obama (whom Brooks has supported, too) has been dreaming of, one in which government action is accepted by Republicans and fiscal restraint by Democrats, but the work gets done. He's anchoring prosperity in that of the middle class, and noticing it's threatened or gone, and that government inaction is in part to blame.

Now, the states have to balance budgets; the national government doesn't, and, in lean times, shouldn't. He still talks about federal fiscal restraint as key to recovery. Like that. But he's looking for common ground with others at a time when left and right--I'd say center and left on the one hand, crazies on the other--face each other across a blasted heath. I disagree with him often. I'm not in the it's-everybody's-fault camp. I'd like Obama to move towards a political position he'd find less satisfactory. And when he talks of philosophy and sociology, I find myself bemused. But were he representative of the right in this country, I could live with that. And I don't see anybody of prominence in the Republican Party even close to being able to embrace Brooks' column today, once which not only concedes the possibility of effective government, but cites an example, applauds it, finds it necessary, and ascribes catastrophe to its absence.

Gloom and Light

Short term pessimist, long term optimist, me. Keeps me going. I don't think the universe has exhausted its capacity to surprise and delight, and we are part of that. The unexpected isn't always catastrophic. It's more likely to be if we expect it to be. We have little input into an appallingly contingent world, but we do have some. There's even a quantitative demonstration of the fact: Edward Lorenz's work showing weather so exquisitely dependent on initial conditions that a butterfly's flight can affect it is but one example. His work is usually cited as evidence of human futility before an unknowable universe. I'd suggest quite the opposite: small actions can have large, unexpected, distant consequences.

Go ahead, give the guy a nail; maybe he won't need a horse shoe...

I Know It When I See It

Ron Suskind quoted an unnamed source during the Bush administration, famously, as claiming the right to construct their own reality arising out of their power. The Tea Partiers seem to all but themselves increasingly at odds with reality, and the Republican Party increasingly unwilling to challenge them on even their most ludicrous beliefs. Such as Krugman, shaking their heads, say outright that their numbers don't add up, their assumptions at odds with data. Doesn't matter. The 'Pledge To America' is equally at odds with any sort of fiscal reality.

I've wondered in this context about the philosophical distance at which some on the left have positioned themselves from the notion of the correspondence theory of truth, the existence of an objective reality, the alleged hegemony of scientific over humanistic takes on life and the alleged demarcation between the two. the right increasingly demonstrates a potted caricature of postmodernism, raising the possibility that there's a fundamental problem with it. Or, perhaps, a less fundamental one, whose desperately needed clarification would exclude righty abuse of the notion.

The Tea Partiers and, well, sane people, are obviously at odds. Their world views are irreconcilable, and not merely, seems to me, because of intrinsic assumptions equally valid though different, their validity a matter of social construction and nothing else, neither side privileged, but rather because one side is entirely crazy and the other is trying to deal with the real world. I don't see how that can be argued. The Tea Partiers, of course, would disagree with me, and assert precisely the same thing about, well, sane people, and are immune to factual and logical disputation of their positions. I'd like to refute them with more than a Potter Stewart hand-waving 'I know it when I see it'. I'd like to assert, with absolute confidence, that there's a way to objectively distinguish between socially constructed world views based on external correspondence, or lack of it, with reality. Then again, I'd like to do so with respect to science and other human enterprises--an exercise most scientists take as obvious or unnecessary, but which has resisted most rigorous philosophical attempts to do so.

Or, perhaps, I can just say they're all bigoted, intolerant, ignorant and dogmatic, and that lefties aren't. Obviously...

The Pledge On America

The Times editorializes this morning on the Republican pledge to America, in much the same way Krugman has been, reviewing its disingenuous numbers and uselessness as policy.

The Republicans’ central claim is that they will be able to reduce the budget deficit, while cutting taxes deeply and making marginal cuts in spending. That pledge is impossible to keep...
The Republicans’ pledge also fails to mention that President Obama has already called for extending the tax cuts for 98 percent of taxpayers (couples making up to $250,000 and individuals making up to $200,000).
So what the pledge is really advocating is a permanent extension of tax cuts for the top 2 percent. In all, the pledge’s tax proposal would add $3.7 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years, nearly $700 billion more than the administration’s proposal.
The drive for permanent high-end tax cuts is profligate; there is no other word for it...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/opinion/26sun1.html?hp

If you haven't read the Republican Party platform documents, you should: they're quite remarkable in their economic, social and political obeisance to the far right:

http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/07/texas-gop-platform-endorses-anti-sodomy-laws-other-controversial-positions/

The complete Republican sell-out to the Tea Partiers has no parallel, now or at any time in American history, in Democratic concessions to the left.

The Tea Partiers are angry because the world and their dreams differ. They're angry because those who are not like them consider themselves fully as human as they do. They're angry because they assert what they consider objective, unassailable truths, and are disagreed with by others when they do. And their consistency in these matters of affect gives rise to a wild inconsistency, and an impossibility, of actual effective, just governance, making it inevitable that any actual attempt to govern will result in either total failure, which, to them, is always Somebody Else's Fault or a betrayal of principle.

And, while they doth protest much, perhaps too much, I think they'd be a lot less angry about all this if a centrist Democrat who was maybe 60 years old, graying at the temples and, er, less melanotically prominent were occupying the White House, if Barney Frank had a wife and two kids, if Nancy Pelosi were afflicted with a Y chromosome. And if the country as a whole weren't moving the way it is socially, as well as politically and economically. I don't think you can overemphasize the fact that the thrust in their political argument has much less to do with politics, especially rational, applicable politics, than anybody pretends, and that they will never be satisfied were that realm alone addressed even to their utter appeasement. They couldn't care less if the numbers don't add up. They care that Self is in danger from Other. An argument about the former addresses the latter not in the least. Which means that collaboration with them in governance is not only unwise policy, but a priori entirely impossible, doomed before the attempt is even made.

Triumph of the Force

Thers on Eschaton today posts some hilarious and beautifully executed old-graphic propaganda posters for the empire and rebel alliance forces in the 'Star Wars' universe. The symmetry between Empire and Rebel Alliance posters is striking:

http://www.pbh2.com/2010/04/incredible-star-wars-propoganda-posters.html

I grew up reading every science fiction story I could get my hands on, from the 1950s on up. Very few movies purporting to be science fiction reflected the books' sensibilities: 'Metropolis', the Flash Gordon and 'King of the Rocket Men' serials, 'Forbidden Planet' and not much else come to mind. 'Star Wars' (now ep. 4) wonderfully recreated and embodied many classic SF tropes. I could have pulled maybe five books from my collection which had tramp freighters escaping into hyperdrive. Like Lucas' best film, 'American Graffiti', 'Star Wars' owed much to reference to widely understood external context. The more the films became self-referential, the worse they got; the material simply wasn't up to Lucas pretensions.

The more I think about Lucas' world, the more troubling it is. Both sides depend on an elite, in power because of mastery of the Force, vaguely on a border between supernatural and metachlorion/biological, amounting to inborn ability and an assertion of will over both humans ('These aren't the droids you're looking for'; 'I find your lack of faith disturbing') and the inanimate universe arising out of training and suspension of disbelief. There's no constraint at all on Jedi Knight any more than on Dark Siders, other than internal ones, and a trip to evil an appallingly short and seductive one. The lives of the Forceless and the non-royals have no relevance whatever to the films, and their lack of input into the pre-empire regime, empire, revolution and post-empire event never remarked upon. Clones, machines and troops not much more than machines predominate.

Vincent Canby in the Times, at the time the original film (now ep.4, which, I might add, I saw perhaps 12 times in theatres) was released, noted that the medal ceremony at the end of ep. 4 was a direct quote from Leni Riefenstahl's notorious 'Triumph of the Will' about the Berlin Olympics. There isn't much in Lucas' universe that's incompatible with fascism, or, being charitable, even Ayn Randish virtuous selfishness. True, even more obviously, of such classic science fiction as the space operas of EE Smith, which are revered in the SF community as having created the genre. Anyone who really cares about science fiction, and a pop culture increasingly taken with it, should read Norman Spinrad's vastly underappreciated, underread and troubling 'Iron Dream', which purports to be a pulp science fiction novel, entirely compatible with genre conventions, written in an alternative universe by a failed painter, emigrating to the USA after World War I, named Adolf Hitler. The ease with which Nazi ideology fits in is extraordinary. Harry Harrison's 'Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers' is a biting parody of Smith and his ilk, and worth a look too.

'Star Trek's Federation galaxy does far better, though still underreporting on Federation civilian life to the advantage of the quasimilitary Star Fleet command and undervaluing diplomats compared with ship's captains, though the Fleet has many roles other than military. And much, much better acted and written: q'plah!

Starving The Beast

Paul Krugman in the Times this morning thinks the Republicans are making the country ungovernable, and their policy prescriptions at frank odds with reality:

...the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

The “pledge,” then, is nonsense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/opinion/24krugman.html?hp

Hard to argue. They've been talking about starving the beast and drowning it in a bathtub for decades. They've been talking of government help as something to be feared, of government regulation as tyranny. Anybody who's been listening has been saying, also for decades, that you don't give a hammer to someone who doesn't even believe in tools. Anybody who's been watching has seen example after example of problems arising from Republican failure to govern.

And it'd be a damned shame were historians in 100 years to attribute the long-sought destruction of American government to the ease with which a black man in the White House could be delegitimized, and the insufficient response to their hatred and bigotry from those who knew better.

Logic in the Asylum

Michiko Kakutani reviews Woodward's 'Obama's War' in the Times this morning. Obama, as described, sounds better than i've heard him described in a while, on left or right, facing difficulties throughout, being realistic about them while being buffeted by the demands of various people and constituencies within and without the military:

Mr. Woodward describes Mr. Obama as engaged in a methodical decision process that is nearly the polar opposite of the gut calls and out-of-channels policy making of the Bush administration, which Mr. Woodward mapped in four earlier books. Mr. Obama is seen repeatedly questioning his aides and the military about the actual United States mission in Afghanistan and underlying assumptions about the war...

An administration review of the Afghanistan war is scheduled for this December. “I’m not signing on to a failure,” President Obama is quoted saying near the end of this book. “If what I proposed is not working, I’m not going to be like these other presidents and stick to it based upon my ego or my politics — my political security.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/books/23book.html?ref=books

He also, predictably, consulted Colin Powell, who, equally predictably, advocated centrist positions that conserved authority and political capital as much as asserted them.

I'm yet again, as I am so often with Obama, torn between demanding that he move leftward in discourse and action, and wondering if he's doing the best he can in the realm of the politically possible while dealing with the steaming pile of shit Bush and Cheney left him, and the borderline types in the Pentagon. Every day brings new evidence of Republican capitulation to the insane far right, and their embrace of total obstruction as sole political tactic. I remain convinced that he should fight more, and more in public, trying to move the goalposts defining legitimate discourse leftward. Nobody else can do it. And his more cerebral, less confrontational default manner demonstrably doesn't work politically against an opposition that demands frank condemnation rather than vain attempts at accommodation. But, too, I wonder if he, or anyone, can succeed in implementing a more progressive agenda in a country increasingly embracing not just conservatism but madness.

Double Negatives Are Not Always A Positive

Stanley Fish, who seems often to provoke my bloviation, does so again today by praising NIMBY opposition to windmills, while simultaneously opposing 'fracking' in extracting natural gas:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/windfall-in-new-york/?hp#preview

He offers no evidence that he recognises that fossil fuel use poses any problems whatever. Nor does he suggest any alternatives. Nor does he consider that the 'fracking' he opposes (rightly, in my view) is in service of fossil fuel use which wind energy, which he, too, opposes,in his backyard and others', might lessen the need for. He'd be more credible had he done so.

If we continue to use power by the terawatt, we'll be required to make choices which will have consequences good and bad. Such choices are the very essence of politics, for better or worse. If they can't, or won't, be made, and paralysis results,that, too, will have consequences, serious ones, which it would be well for Prof. Fish to address.

Traitors To Their Class

Paul Krugman today talks about how angry, how under unjust assault, how victimized the rich feel, during hard economic times affecting them and their prerogatives hardly at all:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/opinion/20krugman.html?_r=1&hp

I've noted that Angry Rich business for some time. I've met some of 'em. They complain. Taxes. Parasitic brown people sucking on the public teat. Sneaking into the country, dropping their babies in ERs so they can claim citizenship. Welfare queens. Fat smokers with cell phones on food stamps. And the rich, too, have cash flow problems. They can't save as much as they thought they could. Maybe a six figure hit in their 401ks. early retirement less of an option. Life is altogether more difficult than it should be.

And these people have 5000 sq ft homes in tony suburbs. Kitchens the size of airplane hangars. The Cape house. The 6-series BMW and Lexus SUV. Three kids in private schools, lest their opportunities be compromised by an underperforming public Tony Suburb HS under the thumb of a teachers' union. Maybe one or two in college, and, at that, certainly not a state school. Landscapers, classy restaurant meals, golf, hairdressers, spas, shoes, suits, Botox, boats, planes. And they feel entitled to all that, because they work their butts off, and, since they only talk and listen to their peers, don't have much of a feel for their economic lessers, working their butts off too, but with far less security and return on their labor. And, if they have cash flow problems, they never reconsider whether or not they really need All That Stuff. They feel as great a sense of entitlement to it, all of it, as that which they project onto dirt-poor single parents, greedy geezers and those having so little regard for themselves and society that they get sick and need medical care.

So they're angry. They talk about 'class warfare', comically restricting the notion to that waged by the poor against the rich, at a time when the upper tenth of 1% take home 14% of the income in this country. And, since they talk mostly to each other, and listen to nobody else, they get increasingly removed from reality. An unstable situation, this, neither sustainable as is nor as it is playing out. The ways such situations have evolved historically have not all been pretty, and don't offer reassuring precedents. It's ugly and getting uglier, crazy and getting crazier.

Obama, I think, is trying to save the system mostly as is, rather than challenge it. We on the left see him as centrist, perhaps slightly center-left, his actions not nearly sufficient in substance or in energy of presentation. The right, we think implausibly, even comically, sees him as interventionist without precedent, wildly to the left, a socialist, an out of touch elitist, a despoiler of the American way of life, a Constitution-shredder, entirely illegitimate: a crypto-Kenyan, Muslim, vacation-abusing, Panther-coddling, dictator-appeasing uppity nigger, not One Of Us. We've seen this sort of thing before, with that traitor to his class, FD Roosevelt, who might well have saved capitalism from itself during history's worst economic calamity, by running a government that the people thought cared about them, was working and fighting for them. If Obama can't similarly legitimize government, and times get worse and people feel increasingly abandoned, seems to me we're headed for big trouble. And not just prolonged economic stagnation.

Health Policy 101

The raison d'etre of insurance, from the policy holder's viewpoint, is the spread of unacceptable risk across a pool better able to manage it. The raison d'etre of a private insurer is to maximize profits and market share.

So, it's in the policy holder's interest to broaden the risk pool as much as possible. I'd suggest, in the context of health insurance, that the whole country would be about right. Meanwhile, it's in the companies' interest to deny or delay benefits, community rate, restrict the risk pool to those not, er, all that risky, and to plow as much money into profit, administration and salary as possible, and as little into return to policy holders as possible.

Those interests would seem, er, not entirely coincident...

The Torturer's Horse's Innocent Behind

Dwight Garner in the Times this morning reviews Kwame Anthony Appiah's book, 'The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen', and quotes him:

“Whatever happened when these immoral practices ceased, it wasn’t, so it seemed to me, that people were bowled over by new moral arguments. Dueling was always murderous and irrational; foot binding was always painfully crippling; slavery was always an assault on the humanity of the slave.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/books/15book.html?adxnnl=1&ref=books&adxnnlx=1284632420-ERZZwMEck/wJrkGL5U1Q+g

Appiah, Garner says, argues for change not out of new data, or internal reconsideration, but out of a personal, and national, search for what John Adams calls 'the esteem and admiration of others', mindful of what Jefferson called 'the decent opinions of mankind.' I recall here Jacobo Timerman's 'Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number', his searing indictment of torture, in particular that practiced in Argentina under military rule. Timerman demanded not only that we look at the victim of the torturer, and the views outsiders have of torture, but of the effect torture has on the torturer, on the society that sanctions torture. Perhaps, when we lose our way, we can recover it by seeing ourselves more clearly in the mirror of others' eyes. Appiah argues that internal considerations are insufficient. Timerman argues that the practice of evil itself perpetuates evil by changing the actor internally.

It's all too common these days to hear those angrily opposing the 'Ground Zero mosque', or Islamic terrorism, citing the Saudi ban on Christian churches in that land, or the excesses of Sharia law dogmatically and cruelly applied, as somehow justifying intolerance on our part. They oft hold such a stance not only reasonable but the only possible realistic response to the reality of Islam, denying even the possibility of moderate Islam, demanding that we respond to a lower bar by lowering ourselves to it rather than challenging it, offering an alternative, showing both ourselves and the world that an alternative can work. Islam, in Appiah's model (I haven't read the book, so I'm probably simplistic here), and Islamic countries, will more and more characterize themselves as peaceful, moderate and reject ever more firmly violence done in the name of their religion, given the decent opinions of the mankind of which they, too, are a part. When we lower ourselves to the level that we perceive to be characteristic of the worst of Islam--for all too many, even of all of Islam--Appiah would say that we are hindering precisely the change we most wish for, both in terms of human rights and our naked self-interest. And, too, Timerman would say that when we torture, when we embrace intolerance, we above all change ourselves.

Serenity

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom never, ever to blindly accept the unalterable as others have defined it, and to fight like hell for the right, and the serenity that comes from doing the right thing, rather than passively accepting false bounds to my acts.

Amen.

May I have an 'Amen' from the crowd?

Thank you, and give generously as the collection plate comes by...