Fantasy & Reality

I spend most of my time on the internet reading stuff that interests me, makes me think, and encourages me. I have surrendered any attempt at dialogue with those with whom there is fundamental disagreement. The descent in to ad hominem attacks and pointless repetition is mind-numbing; that, and the simple fact that - not to toot my own horn - most of the people on the right who choose to engage me are dumber than stumps doesn't help either.

I had occasion this week to peruse a site I once checked on occasion. It became clear, once I moved down through the comments on one post, that the folks who managed this particular web site were now all part of the village board in Crazytown. One in particular just about bowled me over.

No self-respecting liberal would ever criticize Obama... but then again using "self-respecting" and "liberal" in the same sentence is, at the very least, oxymoronic.

Since I have nothing good to say about liberalism in America, I'll simply say they are beneath me, and only worth note in as much as an ant is worth note when it decides to chew on my toe... best to squish it, then burn out the entire nest.

Nancy Pelosi? She should be shot for treason.

Mr. Reid? Shot.

Every single one of those monstrous democrat excuses for representatives and senators who vote the evil machinations of Barack Obama into law....? Taken out back and shot for traitors.

Perhaps one day, liberalism will be treated as the disease it is, and its adherents as the mental defects they are.

Far as I'm concerned, anyone who can point at Barack Obama and honestly say that he is the right man for the Oval Office; that he's a good and Godly man who is living up to his oath of office, is an idiot... irrespective of their degree of education. They are idiots, and as such should never be allowed to vote or reproduce.

If Jesus were president... this nation would be a theocracy, And every liberal would be crying for his crucifixion... 'let His blood be upon us and our children!' they'd all scream. What a steaming pile of dung eating hypocrites all you liberals are.

Where are the days of Kore when you need them? When the earth opened up and swallowed entire families for the sins of a single man?

Those days are coming again. Not for the sins of single man, but for the sin of all mankind.

What was so wrong about what Pat Robertson said? Haiti has been steeped in evil for centuries... corruption, violence, voodoo... Why is Haiti so poor, destitute, and now ravaged by earthquake when right next door the Dominican Republic is unscathed? Corruption is the reason Haiti is in the shape it's in. Not America.

But having said all this, Obama is doing the right thing in regard to Haiti. But they are quite fortunate they are NOT the 51st state. He's destroying the current configuration of the United States with his corrupted, horrid, and ungodly, policies. He'd only serve the people of Haiti the same.

For the people of Haiti that'd be a step up. But they'd be just as much slaves to governmental corruption as we here are now.

The constitution means nothing to people like Barack Obama.

Think about it.

The thing is, the person who wrote this, at one time, was someone I thought was (for a conservative Christian and right-winger) pretty sane. This note from Neptune, however, indicates that the right, for the most part, is quite honestly loony. There is no response to something like this other than, "Thorazine can be your friend."

Yet, at its heart, the Republican Party, the Tea Bag Conservatives, Glenn Beck, and in particular the Republicans in the United States Senate really aren't all that far removed from this rally to multiple assassinations and the murder of millions for political beliefs. Rather than a difference of kind, there is only a difference of degree between this kind of thing, and the utter and blanket refusal of Republican members of the United States Senate to cooperate on any item on the legislative agenda. The result, as Matt Yglesias describes in this post, is that we do not "have a functioning political system." And why do we not have a functioning political system?

Because Republicans elected to office believe, in their hearts, as the writer of the above comment do, that Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and political liberalism in its current manifestation is fundamentally illegitimate. Their actions, especially those of Republican Senators, grind to a halt any and all efforts to stabilize the ship of state, and bring about some kind of national economic and political recovery.

That's the reality we face. A reality that suffers from the craziest notions to come along since the generalized conspiracy theory linking the Mob, the CIA, and the Communists to assassinate Pres. Kennedy. We are left, then, with a dysfunctional system that cannot move forward, or the country forward.

Whacky Stuff

A FB friend of mine posted a link to this.

[I]t is rather silly for people to focus simply on the red letters (a recent American invention). Of course, what is equally silly is this notion that everyone seems to know exactly what Marxism really is, and the fear that so many people have of it. Further, what surpasses silliness is the notion that ‘red-letter’ Christians with their focus on the social aspects of the Gospel cannot be Christians.

Of all the things for a conservative Christian to get upset about, a red-letter Bible?

Now the whole "liberals aren't Christians" thing isn't exactly new; I've heard it before. While I applaud the writer of the post for pointing out the variety of reasons why this is wrong, my guess is it will fall on deaf ears. These folks, assured in themselves of their own salvation, convicted of their own righteousness, have no need to listen to heathens, heretics, and false teachers.

This latest iteration, though - the preference for red-letter Bibles is a sign of false faith - is just about the silliest thing I have ever heard. I had always thought conservatives were the ones who loved their red-letter Bibles!

Anyway, whacky stuff from the Church of Crazy, to be sure.

Saturday Rock Show

I found out not too long ago that Kerry Livgren, the songwriter from Kansas', had a serious stroke. While he is in recovery - including relearning how to play music - that is very sad news indeed. In recent years, he reformed a pre-Kansas group he was in, called Proto-Kaw. Here they are in concert, performing "Scont". Leaning more in the direction of fusion - there is a section of this song that sounds quite a bit like the first incarnation of King Crimson - they are less edgy in concert than Kansas, yet still demonstrating two things I love about Livgren's songs - complexity and a need for a certain level of musical talent above the norm.

Question Begging

I am no longer one who complains about "journalists" as a kind of generic complaint. For one thing, what many perceive to be failures on the part of "journalists" are, really, ideological differences with pundits, a different breed of cat. Journalists, as professionals, usually are more-than-competent at their craft. The complaints leveled by some on the left on the internet too often are unrelated to issues surrounding how journalists do their jobs; indeed, one of the more egregious practitioners of the whole "our journalists are failing the country" theme, Glenn Greenwald, seems to believe - quite often writes without any sense that he has no idea what he is talking about.

All the same, there are moments, and even whole stories, that leave me wondering about some journalists. A story in this morning's Washington Post by Neil Irwin and Lorie Montgomery on the possibility that Ben Bernanke will not be appointed to a second term a chief of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee has a couple things wrong with it. First, the lede frames the entire story in a way that is puzzling, to say the least.

The populist brushfire that has burned through Democratic fortunes this week threatened Friday to claim Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, imperiling his nomination for a second term and sending an unsettled stock market tumbling for the third straight day.

What, exactly, is a "populist brushfire"? How did it "burned through Democratic fortunes"? This is meaningless drivel, really. Perhaps to the insiders in Washington, these words and phrases have some kind of resonance; since the Post is one of the ways folks up there keep tabs on the conventional wisdom, this is something for which we should account. Yet, I, for one, am puzzled by the construction.

Did the stock market "tumble" because Bernanke's appointment was under threat? Is there any way that question can be answered, beside consulting "experts" who insist it is, indeed, the case?

The other part of the article that leaves me troubled is the following:

Although Democrats and Republicans alike mostly praise Bernanke for aggressive steps to combat the recession, he is increasingly blamed for failing to rein in Wall Street excesses that led to the crisis and tarred by his role as engineer of the profoundly unpopular bailout for financial firms.(italics added)

This is one of those hidden passive-voice things that nags at me. It offers up some of the serious criticism leveled at Bernanke, yet does so without any reference to specifics. Furthermore, this charge, in particular, is one that can be checked with reference to actual events. Did Bernanke, in fact, have a role in the specific crisis, the collapse of the housing bubble? In fact, there is abundant evidence that Bernanke (and previous Fed Chair Alan Greenspan) encouraged the unrealistic investments in real estate, both private and commercial, and refused to interfere in the mushrooming of financial instruments increasingly reliant on unrealistic values and huge debt. There were many, many signs, even before the economy began to cool in the spring of 2008, that the housing market was a classic investment bubble. The housing bubble was a topic of discussion among economists and commentators on the economy and the financial sector for quite a while. The role of the Fed - easing the landing of that particular crash through incremental increases in interest rates, thus discouraging reckless lending and borrowing - was offered up routinely as a way to avoid what many feared would come. Yet, he (and they, the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee) refused to do so. When the collapse came, and the economy started to falter, then collapse, years-too-long near-zero interest rates left the Fed with no options as to how to tackle the recession.

Bernanke's role in recent economic events is clear. Yet, this article simply offers it up as an example of us versus them, Republicans versus Democrats back and forth on Capitol Hill. In framing it as part of an undefined "populist brushfire", this whole article leaves me scratching my head.

What Matt Said

Pretty much, yeah.

Academia And Mediocrity

[K]nowledge is important, in the end, not because it flatters the pretensions of its producers, but because it helps us achieve our purposes.

I had every intention, at one time, of becoming an academic. The happiest I had been was in the academy; I love University libraries more than many places. Yet, my time spent in pursuit of that goal of academic life, the humanities' doctorate, left me disillusioned not just at the process, but at the life toward which I was working. While I am impressed by those who do finish the process, my own view from outside is that, a century after a slew of reforms of the academy - ushered in from Americans impressed with the standards set in German research universities - is that the sprouting of increasingly specialized academic journals and the pursuit of increasingly esoteric studies in a variety of disciplines (moreso in the humanities than the sciences, to be sure) has led not so much to an increase in our ability to understand and organize our collective experience so much as it has led to a kind of leveling down. The demand to "publish or perish" results, in the end, to an overall decrease in the level of academic life. On the one hand, will one more study, say, of the writings of J. D. Salinger or the philosophy of Spinoza really make our society better? Am I the only one who thinks that a careful study of a local poet or local historian or folklorist by a University Press is of decreasingly marginal utility, when considered on a collective basis?

Louis Menand, of Harvard University's literature department, has published The Marketplace of Ideas to address the elephant in the classroom - a kind of malaise that is effecting academic life (in particular the humanities). Reviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in Slate (from whence the epigram), Menand's work focuses attention on what has been wrought by the academic reforms of Harvard's storied President, Charles William Eliot. The model of academic freedom Eliot used, based in the academic reforms in the German Empire of the 19th century, were themselves modeled on an understanding of the pursuit of knowledge that was not only historically contingent, but structured on a particularly parochial understanding of "science" as the model for knowledge. That understanding is, largely, passe. Furthermore, while the model does work well in the sciences, they work less well the further one wanders from the laboratory. The mushrooming of academic journals might indicate that our collective pursuit of understanding (as opposed to knowledge) is working quite well; or, it might just be an object lesson, an example of the end of a model of academic professionalization that, for all it has benefited our society over the past century, has become one of decreasing utility.

From my own perspective, there is one telling observation Lewis-Kraus makes on Menand's book:

In the 2004 election, he notes, 95 percent of humanities and social-science professors voted for Kerry; zero percent voted for Bush. This is sure to be taken up by the few remaining culture warriors as proof of the disloyalty of the American professoriate. But Menand, in the context of a book about the trade-offs of professionalization, reads the situation differently. The fault is not with the politics themselves; academics are usually careful to keep policy out of the classroom. It is with the homogeneity. The system is simply replicating itself too smoothly.

As Lewis-Kraus makes clear, for all it insists that academic freedom as an umbrella exists to protect the pursuit of knowledge as an ideal, he makes clear that Menand makes the observation that the system really creates not scholars so much as professionals schooled in the wiles and ways of certain professional practices. Increasingly marginalized from the larger society, intent on pursuing esoterica that has an ever-decreasing marginal utility - again, understanding as a social phenomenon is, or at least should be, considered among the criteria we apply to the results of academic researches - we are now at the point, or perhaps far past it, where a reconsideration of the entire system might be necessary in order to reset our priorities.

When Congress Doesn't Pass Laws

I heard this story on the way home this morning and the first thought I had was, "This is the fault of Congress." The Bush Administration invented a term - "illegal enemy combatants" - and, without any clear definition of what, exactly, that means, the courts have been at sea as to how to proceed.

A year and a half ago, the Supreme Court opened federal courts to habeas corpus hearings for those held at Guantanamo Bay prison. Among the many issues, apart from the question of what, exactly, such a creature is, are questions of the admissibility of evidence obtained through "enhanced interrogation", which the federal courts routinely dismiss as the equivalent of torture.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Congress did not act to set up a framework for what the Bush Administration insisted all along would be a long, complicated, and non-traditional style of warfare. The Bush Administration, various offices of Legal Counsel all got together and cobbled together rules that the federal courts have, for the most part, found unconstitutional. Yet, absent any other legal framework, the habeas hearings have left a hodge-podge.

Too often we hear complaints about "government" as if it were some weird entity that bore no relation to the day-to-day functioning of our society. As Ari Shapiro's story makes abundantly clear, however, when Congress fails to fulfill its most basic Constitutional function - to pass laws - it creates legal headaches, to be sure. These legal headaches, however, hide very real human tragedies.

Yet another thing to get upset at the years of Congressional Republican rule, I guess.

Inhofe Outdoes His Own Stupidity

The deadliest terror attack in the US prior to 9/11 was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Today, one of the US Senators from that state said the following:

INHOFE: I’m, for one — I know it’s not politically correct to say it — I believe in racial and ethnic profiling. I think if you’re looking at people getting on an airplane and you have X amount of resources to get into it, you get at the targets, and not my wife. And I just think it’s something that should be looked into. The statement that’s made, it’s probably 90 percent true with some exceptions like the Murrah federal office building in my state, Oklahoma. Those people, they were not Muslims, they were not Middle Easterners. But when you hear that not all Middle Easterners or Muslims between the age of 20 and 35 are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims or Middle Easterners between the age of 20 and 35, that’s by and large true.

That he sees Timothy McVeigh as an exception to be set aside is even more horrible than the evident racism.

Things That Make Me Go WTF And Weep Simultaneously

Sigh.

Cowardly BS (UPDATE)

I want to play a little game here. It's called, "Let's be adults about things." Scott Brown won the special election in Massachusetts to replace the recently deceased Ted Kennedy. In part he won because the Democratic Party in Massachusetts miscalculated; Ms. Coakley also lost pretty much fair and square because she was, to put it bluntly, the worst possible choice for a candidate. Scott Brown, while certainly holding all sorts of odd, even awful, notions and political positions, is now the junior Senator from Massachusetts. I think he deserves a note of congratulations, if for no other reason than winning an election that, for all intents and purposes, he should have lost.

Now the Republicans have 41 seats in the US Senate. The Democrats have 57. There are two independents. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a socialist, and caucuses with the Democrats. Joe Lieberman is a douchebag and also caucuses with the Democrats, although I can't for the life of me understand why. That gives the Democrats, effectively, 59 seats. While there are, to be sure, more conservative Democrats - Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu - for the most part the Democratic caucus is far more liberal even than the majorities the Democrats held, say, in the late-1980's through 1994. The possibilities inherent in this quite liberal plurality should be exciting to contemplate.

Except, of course, too many people are not. Instead, they are actually accepting the Republican version of events - Mitch McConnell's truly stupid notion that an election in a relatively small state is a national referendum makes sense only in a mind bereft of sense - and are writing crap like this.

Folks, Scott Brown’s victory has sent a clear message that not one single American voter supports a progressive agenda. Let’s face it — it’s over. The Dems are not going to be able to salvage a single thing out of this.

As if they ever were.

We might as well quit trying.

--snip--

The Republicans own us. We may still technically have the presidency, large majorities in both houses of Congress and more governors, but really, the endgame in this particular political drama is all but written in stone.

And the message for any sane person is: Give up. Stop thinking it will ever get better. It will only get worse forever and ever and ever.

If the person who wrote this truly believes it, the website that featured this post should fold. Ditto pretty much every liberal who writes a blog, produces original news content, or advocates for candidates. Eschaton? Done. Crooks & Liars? Turn it off. TPM? Josh Marshall might as well start looking for a regular job. If D. Aristophanes publishes a single new post at Sadly, No!, he is both a liar and a hypocrite.

Am I the only liberal in America who couldn't care less that the Republicans won in Massachusetts? Am I the only one who thinks that it might be time to start providing testicles and spinal cords to Congressional Democrats, rather than sit in our corners and whine and moan because the Republicans have 41 fucking seats in the US Senate?

I didn't realize the caricature of Democrats as cowardly surrender monkeys was actually true, but this single post has proved me wrong.

At least some are, anyway.

UPDATE: I feel stupid. I got owned, apparently, because I was far too ready to accept Aristophanes' post as legit, rather than the satire it is. He let me know in comments.

Sorry, guys, I should have known better.

I'm leaving this up as an object lesson in my own stupidity.

Again, many apologies to Aristophanes and all those at Sadly,No! for being so dumb. Too may, at least in the mainstream media are acting as if the entire Democratic Party should fold so, in my defense, I read this as straight commentary rather than satire. My head is hung in shame. You guys can even write a post, like you did once before, about how stupid I am, and I won't complain.

Our Really Stupid Discourse

Because the Democratic Party now has 59 seats rather than sixty in the United States Senate, their entire legislative agenda is doomed because this is a huge loss for President Obama.

I want to plucky my eyes out. Not because Brown won - Coakley was a lousy candidate, by all accounts - but because everyone thinks this is the end of everything for the Democrats. Including the Democrats.

A Cat's Life

The first time I saw Patch, she was a six-week old, scruffy cat sitting in a cardboard box. It was a hot Sunday afternoon in July, 1994. We had been in Jarratt, VA a little over a week and the Owen family offered us two kittens from a recent litter from their farm.

From the first, Patch's personality was the dominant of the two (the other cat, Hobbes - and you can guess where we got that name - died in October, 2004 after a long illness). Loud, insistent to the point of being demanding, a Diva among cats, she earned her name for the orange Patch over her right eye (she was a tortoise-shell calico, and the rest of her was gray).

She wasn't the best mouser in the world, to be sure.

She ate a tiny bit of mackerel with her meals every day of her life, including her last day.

When we had goose for Christmas a few years back, I gave her a small taste, which we always figured was the high point of her culinary life.

She lived in three parsonages in two states, never exactly happy at having to move, but always adjusting after a day or two.

Last night, after a typical day, she left us after fifteen years of companionship. Well right up to the (quite literal) last minute, she spent her last afternoon and evening demanding her dinner (as usual), lying on my wife as she was stretched out on the couch reading, and keeping the dog at bay with a combination of stares-down and the occasional smack on his muzzle. Then, she collapsed. Lisa and I sat and petted her, and my hand was on her when she breathed her last. We all gathered around her, crying and saying our last goodbyes. This afternoon, I buried her in our little garden in the side yard.

Fifteen years is a long life for a cat, and Patch's had that added element of robust health right up the very end. These last couple years, Lisa and I both commented that she just didn't seem to age, her personality not really changing all that much. She just lived, and despite an outward diffidence toward us and the other animals that shared her space, she loved, and was loved, deeply. It is less than 24 hours since her very sudden death, and both my wife and I find ourselves looking for her. At 5 pm, I wondered why she wasn't coming around to demand, quite vocally, her dinner, and then remembered why, and was sad all over again.

She was a singular individual, even among that most singular species, the domestic cat. More than a pet, she was a part of our family, with Lisa and me from just after our first wedding anniversary until now.

It is an end of an era for our family, and we are all sad. Yet we also celebrate the life of our beloved family member, and give thanks for all the years we shared home and life together.

Music For Your Monday

Exciting historical times offer up cultural artifacts that reflect on those times. I remember well reading the Rolling Stone "official" history of rock and roll (pretty standard fluff, but full of good stuff in the early chapters on American folk musics), for example, that the Second World War offered, among many other things such as death and destruction, a whole host of songs, popular and folk, on the event; the Korean War, on the other hand, only one B.B. King song, "Korea Blues".

The Civil Rights movement also had its poets laureate and songsters. While I wouldn't necessarily include Bob Dylan as an official "chronicler", he participated and supported the movement in his own way (including sitting around and holding hands, singing "Kum Ba Yah"). Yet, as he reflected more deeply, "The Times They Are A-Changing" came out, a far more reflective and threatening musical manifesto.



Sam Cooke's most powerful song, "A Change Is Gonna Come", was his offering to the world, stripped either of a desire to please the Lord or seek the gains of filthy lucre. As such, it managed to do both. My own sense is, had he lived, his voice would have rung out for many years to come.



It predates the Civil Rights movement; it was really part of the leftist, socialist/communist infiltrated, yet nonetheless necessary anti-lynching movement of the 1920's and 1930's (one of FDR's more cowardly moments; he knew a federal anti-lynching statute was necessary; he supported the idea; he also knew the resistance of southern Senators, especially if it passed, would doom the New Deal legislation he saw as far more important). This song was written for Billie Holiday, and she was afraid of it - its bleakness, its baldness, and the threat it seemed to pose. Yet, along with "God Bless The Child" and "Autumn in New York", it is my favorite musical performance of hers because she made it her own. For all the ravages his life of dissipation left on her face and body, it really didn't touch her voice, especially as she sings this song.

On James Baldwin

While he is justly famous for many things, Baldwin came to my attention when I read a collection of New Yorker pieces, collected under the title The Fire Next Time. The first piece in this slim collection is an open letter to his nephew on the occasion of the nephew's birthday, in which Baldwin tries to explain to the younger man why the boy's father, Baldwin's brother, is who he is. He wants the young man not to hate or despise him, but to understand him, and to use him as an object lesson in becoming more fully human, precisely because Baldwin's brother, living under the too-heavy yoke of white supremacy, has interiorized the lie of his own inferiority. Baldwin broke that particular yoke through the power of books and his own peculiar genius with words. He offers that as an option to the young man.

Baldwin suffered in a nation that hated him because he was black and gay. In the midst of this suffering, Baldwin loved America deeply, passionately enough to leave it for France, knowing in his deepest heart that no matter what he said, or wrote, or did, America would not love him. This kind of unrequited love, that cuts the heart out of one's innermost identity, no doubt left a huge hole in his heart.

As beautiful a writer as Baldwin was; as honest as he was unrepentant for the crime of being what the accident of birth had made him - a gay black man in a time and place that despised both; adamant in his refusal to hate that which hated him most, Baldwin's writings are a testament to the power of real love acting in the world to make it less hostile, less deprecatory, especially for those who are hated the most by the powers that be. In refusing to accept the judgment of the world that his life was of less worth than others, and in repeating his love for a time and place that did not want him, Baldwin's life is a marvelous example of a kind of existentialist heroism - he has made certain choices, accepted certain realities, and makes his own meaning as he moves forward. To read Baldwin at his best - which is usually whenever he puts pen to paper - is to encounter that rare-enough individual: the hero.

Of all the African-American writers who gave us a glimpse in to the heart of Darkness of America, I love Baldwin the most because of his fierce and open discussion of the power of love. Baldwin knew that real love, not the agape of secular liberals for that abstraction "humanity", but real love was, first and foremost, a threat to the lover. It creates real vulnerability. It offers the challenge to live up to the possibility of being oneself without artifice, without mask, and without pretension. While there is a deep romantic strain to much of Baldwin's words, it is tempered by an understanding that, in the end, love is the source of as much pain as pleasure, as much tragedy as triumph. Surrendering to love, for Baldwin is far preferable to other choices we face, even with the threat it poses, precisely because Baldwin understood, as he lays out in "Letter From A Region of my Mind", that all other choices lead only to death and destruction. Rather than live with the knowledge that his love for the land that made him would never be returned, he fled to France. He did so in order that he would not be destroyed by that American refusal to recognize him as one of its most beloved sons.

On this day when we remember the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I wanted to offer a rumination on a contemporary, a compatriot in the pursuit of justice in the name of love.

Those Who Never Knew The Past Are Condemned To Say Stupid Things About It

The title, an addition George Santayana may or may not have accepted, came to mind as I read this tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn upon the occasion of his death. A few months back, I wrote a post in which I highlighted an excellent, if chilling, article profiling a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, and his tale of his time during that particular nightmare. While I did so in order to bring the article to the attention of readers, I also did so to highlight a glaring, almost obscene, gap between much of the rhetoric of the American right regarding the Obama Administration. Specifically, I contrasted the very real horrors of life under tyranny with the still-on-going attempt to portray Obama as a budding tyrant.

The First of the Month piece includes a snippet from a Stalin-era show trial. On the stand is revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin, being questioned by prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky (who managed, through his long career, to demonstrate both viciousness and a willingness to do what is necessary to survive). Pay particular attention to the point Vyshinsky makes concerning "counter-revolutionary" acts:

“Is it true that every opposition to the Party is a struggle against the party?” “In general it is, factually it is.”

“And that means in the end, given the existence of oppositionist beliefs, any foul deeds whatever might be perpetrated against the Party…?”
“But, wait a minute, none were actually committed.”

“But they could have been?”
“Well theoretically speaking.”

“So you see, only a fine distinction separates us. We are required to concretize the eventuality: in the interest of discrediting for the future any idea of opposition, we are required to accept as having taken place what could only theoretically have taken place. After all, it could have, couldn’t it?”
“It could have.”

“And so it is necessary to accept as actual what was possible; that’s all. It’s a small philosophical transition. Are we in agreement?”(italics added)

That phrase, "a fine distinction", hides horrors. Insanity. It is the excuse for the butchering not just of our understanding of reality - a horrible enough thought - but of millions of human lives.

Reading Solzhenitsyn is a wonderful cure for those who get lost in the mire of our current political debates. The never-ending parade of nonsense, the portrayals of Obama as little different from Vyshinsky's mentor Stalin, or Hitler, or Pol Pot is a kind of rape of reality. We have record enough of the horrors of modern and contemporary tyrannies, the reality-distorting insistence that human life be subservient to the powerful's attempt to make it bend to their will, to take to task those who claim our current Administration is no different from these. Those who continue to claim that our freedoms are disappearing, our nation becoming unrecognizable, our culture bereft of spiritual or moral uplift all because of our current President not only display their ignorance; they do violence to the memory of those who managed to survive very real tyranny and tell their stories in order to keep others from having to live through the experience.

Some Things I Will Never Understand (UPDATE)

Following up on my post from yesterday, I have to wonder whether or not there are, as both the analytical philosophers and those who followed Wittgenstein suggested, some linguistic constructions that are, no matter how hard one tries, unintelligible.

HUME: Let’s assume that for the purpose of this question, which is in raw political terms is it better for the Democrats and worse for the Republicans if the bill passes or if it fails?

MCCONNELL: What’s important is it would be good for the country if it failed.(italics added)

To be honest, no way of seeking to parse, deconstruct, or otherwise interpret that sentence leads me to a conclusion other than it is just meaningless. A string of words that certainly looks and sounds like a sentence in English; yet, when one attempts to figure out what it means, I, for one, conclude that McConnell may have well said, "I am woman, hear me roar," and it would have made just as much sense.

At some point we need to remember that rhetoric like this is just noise, static clogging our airwaves.

Before anyone comments that McConnell is referring to deficits, or some a priori notion that government intervention in any sector of the economy is ipso facto bad for the country; or that, as a Republican, what he really means is it would be bad for the Republicans but he can't say that, let me just respond quickly. To the first, I doubt whether Mitch McConnell has any understanding deep enough to root his politics in something even that obviously false. In fact, it seems the Republicans believe only one thing; they are political Barthians, screeching, "Nein!" at any attempt by the Democrats to make the nation a little better, a little more compassionate, a little more sensible.

As for the second, while that may indeed be true, it would be far preferable for them to be honest enough to say it, rather than string a bunch of words together that sound noble but are really just sounds.

UPDATE: Another example. This kind of thing is so common that Duncan even has a tag-line for it. That it is meaningless isn't changed by repetition.

Saturday Rock Show

Another find on iTunes - Riverside, "Beyond The Eyelids".

Words Seeking Understanding

While it might be going out of fashion, there still exists a theory of Constitutional interpretation that insists we should only concern ourselves with a plain, dictionary-definition of words in order to understand what a particular clause or section means. This seems like common sense. Words mean what they mean. Yet, the text of the Constitution, at least in its preliminary construction, was written in the late-18th century and the words, while seeming familiar, might have meant something quite different to those who put them on paper than they do now. Time has a way of altering the meaning of even the most basic verbal construction.

Any attempt at understanding verbal communication runs up against the reality that language is not some thing. It does not exist apart from the people who speak or write it. The notion that there is, or can be, clarity in communication as long as we just consult Webster's or the OED is not just philosophically untenable; it is a violation of our everyday grasp that even at the best of times, and with those with whom we are most intimate, communication has a measure of opacity that cannot be escaped by running to a reference shelf.

If this is true in our everyday life, or in coming to some kind of legal consensus on a text or clause in a law or the Constitution, how much more can it be said of communication between people who do not speak the same language? Larry McMurtry offers up a speech given by the Cherokee Onitositah in 1777:

Let us examine the facts of your present irruption into our country. . . . What did you do? You marched into our territories with a superior force . . . your numbers far exceeded us, and we fled to the stronghold of our extensive woods. . . . Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. . . .

Indeed, much has been advanced on the want of what you term civilization among the Indians; and many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners, and your customs. But, we confess that we do not yet see the propriety, or practicability, of such a reformation, and should be better pleased with beholding the good effect of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them. . . .

McMurtry follows directly:

That sounds pretty Augustan to me; Dr. Johnson - who wouldn't have been on Corn Tassel's side - couldn't have put it better; the question it raises is why all Native American orators, whatever their language group, are translated to sound either like Dr. Johnson, the prophet Isaiah, or, at a stretch, the Sioux wise man Black Elk, himself rather fulsomely translated by the poet John G. Neihardt and hid daughters.

As a source of the constant - and ongoing - friction between the European who arrived in the Americas desiring to own the land and the native populations who sought to hold on to what was their land (and, of course, later their stories and customs and religion and languages and even their lives), this kind of problem might be solved by the recognition at the outset that even with the best intentions and attempts, people too often talk past one another in an effort to communicate.

As an object lesson in the difficulties inherent in communication, our national lack-of-clear discourse with Indian people should be a lesson to anyone intent on making an argument on the clarity of any communicative act. Whether it's reading the Constitution, debating a fine point of law, or reading the Bible, we should always remember that words only have meaning insofar as they exist as all too human tools. While they are suited well for the task of having one person, or several people, make sense of the world in a kind of general way, closer attention reveals there is, and always will be, a gap between those who are attempting to communicate. That gap can never be closed completely; when we factor in differences of the very real historical and social situation of any language (whether it is an Indian language like Cherokee, or a dead language like koine Greek), we have the added task of "doing the best we can" while always recognizing that best will be, despite our best efforts, incomplete.

We should remember, then, that when we are communicating, the challenge of misunderstanding also offers the opportunity for greater understanding as long as we acknowledge, beforehand, the limitation of any communicative act. Words have meaning, to be sure; having a meaning, however, is far different from understanding how those meanings fit together. That is the danger, and the possibility, that lies at the heart of much of the human predicament.

Z Team

Pointing and laughing is usually enough. Especially when right-wingers start reviving bad ideas that failed miserably in the past.

The Team B assessment . . . was simply a work of science fiction. Or, to be more specific, a work of political advocacy, with the authors deriving conclusions of Soviet capabilities from their own apocalyptic beliefs about the Soviet ideology, and then using those deeply flawed conclusions to justify more defense spending and more foreign policy adventurism. Which is precisely what they would like to do again in regard to the threat of Islamic extremism.

For those who may not understand the reference, when Gerald Ford became President, he ordered the CIA to make a kind of systematic survey of the Soviet's military and economic capabilities and how the United States stood in comparison. The report, while certainly flawed (as the linked post notes, the CIA did get quite a bit wrong), was essentially correct about the inherent limitations the Soviet political and economic structure placed on their ability to compete internationally with the United States. As discontent among the citizenry even then became an increasing concern for Soviet policy makers, the simple fact was their national economy, while dedicating a larger percentage toward military research, development, and operations, was so much smaller than the United States that even with this larger portion of national wealth dedicated to the military still kept them at a disadvantage.

For the emerging neo-conservatives, this seemed outlandish. George H. W. Bush created "Team B", which surveyed the same data as those who released the original report. The problem was they began with a set of assumptions based on the planet Neptune. Among these assumption were the Soviet economic model was working, while the American one was not; that the United States, just then emerging from Vietnam, was militarily weaker than the Soviet Union, and our national morale was sapped to the point where our leaders might just surrender to Soviet adventurism; finally, Team B assumed from the get-go that the Soviets did not approach international relations with some inherent rationality, but were so bent, not just on self-preservation and the extension of their national interest but world domination and conquest that there existed no rational restraint on their behavior, and there was no way to trust any negotiations with them.

It seems that, with the Soviet Union gone, this entire set of fantastic, America-hating craptastic nonsense is being transferred to Islamic militants. At the time the Team B report was released, it was pointed out that (a) the assumptions around its conclusions were "flawed" (politesse for the wet-dreams of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz); and, (b) the resulting conclusions were "off-base" (again, circling the eighth planet). This didn't stop the report from informing not just the Ford Administration, but the Reagan-Bush years as well. Since it's important to consider that - we had a foreign policy approach toward our major international rival based almost entirely on falsehoods and ideologically-based hokum - the revival of this idea should be a source of worry. Yet, it should also be a source of humor. Since the neo-cons clearly hate America - they always have, really - and live in a fantasy world, rather than attempt to refute them, we should just point out those particular set of facts, and then laugh.

David Frum? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Frank Gaffney? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Tom Wolfe? HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Word-Herding

Back in the late-1990's, through the end of 2004, I subscribed to The New York Review Of Books. I loved it, and I miss it. I dropped my subscription because our move to Poplar Grove put us in an area where the cost of living was substantially higher than any previous place we had lived; even having two incomes (for a time, though, I was a stay-at-home Dad, so we had only one) meant dropping all sorts of luxuries. So, I stopped getting The Nation, The New Yorker (which published a whole series of short stories by Stephen King, Feodor), and NYRB. I miss The New Yorker and NYRB for different reasons, but the latter because it served as a catalog of books I just had to have (which is why my wife encouraged me to drop it, I think).

During the course of my subscription-time, there was a series of review essays on books on the American West by author and critic Larry McMurtry. In those essays, collected in a slim volume, Sacagawea's Nickname, I discovered something I had only dimly glimpsed in all my previous reading. Reading McMurtry was a joy because it was obvious that he loves words; more than ideas, more than their collection in sentences and paragraphs and multiple volumes, McMurtry had the unique (to my experience) virtue of loving words. He loves them so much that his review essays are among the most pleasurable, joy-filled reading experiences of my life. They were object-lessons in that classic understanding of beauty as something that is more than the sum of its parts.

I picked up that volume this morning to read myself to sleep after work, and found myself, once again, happily ensconced in some of the most masterful prose I have ever encountered. In an introduction he wrote to the volume, he recalls his failure to be what all Texas-ranch-children wanted to be, a cowboy, and his sad realization that his life would be spent among words. Yet, he then points out that being such is a bit like herding cattle. His deep love for words makes his writing something sublime because, loving them, he takes care to arrange them as sentences, paragraphs, and essays as carefully as possible. Yet, doing so with a seeming ease that belies what must be an agonizing process of writing, rewriting, editing, then rewriting again. Loving words, compared to loving the English sentence, which was the preference of another great prose stylist, Winston Churhcill, makes of the larger building blocks of writing something magical.

I offer this little report on my reading as a way, in part, of talking about how I am continuing to learn about the art and craft of writing. Even as I spend a good chunk of my waking hours (when not at the work that pays the bills) trying to figure out how to put stuff down in writing, I am also always wanting to learn how to do that better. There might be something discouraging about reading someone as wonderful at the task as McMurtry, but I am actually encouraged by reading him. Because I read McMurtry as sharing my own sense that it is at the level of words - not sentences, not paragraphs - that begins the task or building something that is a pleasure to read, I am now quite happily reading, and learning again, how that might be possible.

Word-herding is as apt, and workable, a description of writing as I can imagine. Not ideas, certainly. Just words. Getting them to go where we want them in such a way that it seems to be their own plan. How wonderful.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

I was going to write something, and discovered, to my surprise, I had already written it. So, click the link, and have at it.

I hate repeating myself, so there you go.

Sad News

Teddy Pendergrass, part of that wonderful Philadelphia Sound of the early-70's, has passed away. Confined to a wheelchair for the past two decades after a car accident, his music has not had the cachet it once did - musical tastes have moved on, as they always will - he still has a place in music history for his deeply emotional performances. Rest in peace, Teddy, and prayers and thoughts go out to your family.

Aborted Hope

As I'm getting to know First of the Month, I am reading articles at random - based on the title of all things - and I came across this piece from the October, 2009 issue.

Art said that he had often sought to understand the persistent presence and power of the number 40 in the Hebrew texts. What had begun to be evident to him, he reported, was the fact that while we usually speak in our culture of nine months as the normal time of a woman’s pregnancy before giving birth, the more precise and traditional period is actually given as 40 weeks. As soon as I heard Art’s words it became clearer to me what I had been feeling, sensing so deeply. And I began to try to articulate it for myself and others: Something is trying to be born in America. Again, I’m not quite certain what it is, but the new emerging reality seems firmly related to the visionary calls of King and the earlier urgent hope of Langston Hughes (”O, let America be America again/The land that never has been yet/and yet must be /The land where every [one] is free.”) Suffusing all of it I hear as well the beautiful wisdom and strong challenge of June Jordan: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

So as this year went on, as I sat one August night in Denver among the tens of thousands of on-site witnesses to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, it seemed obvious to me that my young brother was related to all of this, but more as an opening, an opportunity, a new space. He seems to offer the place where all the “we” people can stop our waiting and carry on our work to create the pathway, the birthing channel toward “The land that never has been yet, and yet must be.” Indeed, as I wrestled with Biblical symbols, the birthing imagery and the calls of Langston, Martin and June (herself the marvelous offspring of Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ann Braden, and Amzie Moore), I could not escape another revelatory metaphor. Not only is something trying to be born in America, but some of us are called to be the midwives in this magnificent, desperately needed and so painfully creative process.

The author, Vincent Harding, then goes on a long rumination on midwifery, and the way he sees the analogy working as a possibility for a confluence of democratic activism and the Presidency of Barack Obama. While the election of our first African-American President is certainly a moment of national celebration, and there were many people who believed that Obama would usher in something new, something promising, a la the Langston Hughes quote, I must confess that I was never one of those who believed that lurking beneath the carefully cultivated public image and record as a relatively moderate state and United States Senator lurked the heart of a real liberal. My own hope lay in a consideration more of the confluence of events at the time of his election - the near-collapse not just of our national economy, but the world economy - and those who would make up his cabinet. That and the appearance of a number of far more liberal Democrats in both houses of Congress might just push his Administration to adopt a far more liberal agenda than he might otherwise be inclined to support. Like FDR, Obama seems always to have accepted all sorts of conventional, received wisdom; unlike FDR, Obama never saw the looming economic crisis as an opportunity to be seized. He did not move with either speed or ruthlessness as Roosevelt did, the latter calling Congress in to special session to deal with the collapse of the banking industry. Instead, he dealt with the "stimulus" legislation much as he has dealt with much else - with a coolness, and even detachment, that has led many to become disenchanted with him before his first year in office is up.

More to the point of the piece in question, I have to say that if the analogy of midwifery is correct, then the hope that many invested in the election of Obama, and many others, in 2008 has really come to very little. While I have defended him, his Administration, and the approach to the Presidency, in the past, I have become frustrated with his apparent belief that time will be on his side. Perhaps; as events continue to unfold, as Congressional Democrats continue to be led by holdovers from the era of Republican domination, as more and more liberals become disenchanted with both the style and substance of his Administration, I can easily foresee a breakdown in what could have been a realignment toward Democratic governance for, perhaps, as long as a generation.

While part of me wants Obama to be right, another part of me is frustrated at his seeming dismissal of a huge group of dedicated volunteers willing to work to further a progressive agenda even as he surrounded himself with men and women far too willing to toe the line on all sorts of issues. His tag line from his campaign - "Yes, we can," - seems to have morphed into, "Yes we can, but we won't". Too sad.

Intellectual BS

Dissent has an interesting, if somewhat odd , array of participants in a special issue "Intellectuals and Their America". E. J. Dionne is not the first name to fall from my lips when asked, "Who is an engaged public intellectual today?" Nor is Katha Pollitt, a poet and columnist for The Nation, and author of an embarrassing, confessional/memoir on her anti-feminist approach to the end of relationship with a man. Katrina VandenHeuvel is the editor of The Nation, and, again, not someone who leaps out at me and screams, "I'm an intellectual!"

So, I have a problem with the choices the periodical made in respondents. The questions asked also seem, to me, to be - how can I put this? - not exactly timely and even a bit tiresome because, for the life of me, I can't imagine caring what any other respondents think about American popular culture, the internet and its role in public discourse, or the other questions to which they are asked to respond. Yet, I would recommend a reading for no other reason than to offer a good example of the irrelevance (sad to say) of intellectuals in American public life. There are good, thoughtful, even funny intellectuals deeply engaged in both education and larger public concerns. That none of these, nor many others I could consider, were consulted is a display not only of myopia (or perhaps ignorance), but of the marginal place the life of the mind plays in our society.

Having said that, among the more annoying things intellectuals tend to do is to dismiss with a hauteur worthy of ancien regime aristocrats our mass, popular culture. They are either diversions from the pursuit of the revolutionary goal, or (worse) the bread and circuses concocted by a conspiracy of elites to keep the public disengaged, entertained by a nearly-pornographic desire to vicariously experience all sorts of titillation. The public becomes a mass of drooling zombies, perched at the edge of their seats waiting for the next "reality program" or what-have-you. While I will admit that I am disgusted that my brain actually contains the names "Jon and Kate Gosselin" and understands the referents, that hardly means that my IQ has shrunk.

This kind of snobbish bullshit is on display in the response of Leon Wieseltier, even as he claims to defend intellectual interest in mass culture as a form of noblesse oblige:

The championship of mass culture by intellectuals must be vigorously challenged when it is done as an attack upon the legitimacy of the categories and the distinctions—for a leveling end, as yet another gospel of relaxation; or to establish irony as the highest value of culture; or as the cultural program of a political ideology. I must confess that I regard intellectuals who are immune to the power of Winterreise or The Flaying of Marsyas or Modern Love or The Four Temperaments as incomplete intellectuals, insofar as they cannot grasp such refinements of structure and meaning and make of them refinements of their own souls. I think that the life of the mind should be soulful; but that is my own inclination. Otherwise, as I say, protect the differences, find truth and beauty where you can, and slum on.(italics added)

In the course of his response above the quoted section, he considers the following question as a serious one, to which my only response is, "You need to pay attention a bit more, I think."

Whether or not Monk is like Debussy, he sure as hell is not like Kanye West.

Such paucity of understanding, by someone who considers himself an intellectual (or, serving as he does as the literary editor of The New Republic, is considered one whether he is or not) is reason enough to consider these all-too-brief takes on intellectuals and American culture more as object-lessons in all sorts of stupid than anything else.

Prayers And More

Poor Haiti. According to TPM, the State Department "has also set up links on its Web site to facilitate donations to disaster relief agencies." Give, please, for Haiti is so desperate. The United Methodist Church, through the United Methodist Commission on Relief (UMCOR), also has a site dedicated to giving. UMCOR is already there, and their relief efforts will remain long after the headlines and stories have passed down the too-short memory hole of our news media.

A Mess Of Pottage

In the Biblical account of the patriarchs, Esau trades his birthright to his (younger) twin, Jacob because he, Esau, feels he is quite literally starving. Thus, the phrase, "trading your birthright for a mass of pottage." In this remarkable profile of intellectual historian Tony Judt, one nugget that jumped out was Judt's position (with which I agree whole-heartedly) that it isn't even a mass, but a mess, of pottage that is on offer.

Judt called attention to America's and Europe's worship of efficiency, wealth, free markets, and privatization. We live, he said, in a world shaped by a generation of Austrian thinkers—the business theorist Peter Drucker, the economists Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Joseph Schumpeter, and the philosopher Karl Popper—who witnessed liberalism's collapse in the face of fascism and concluded that the best way to defend liberalism was to keep government out of economic life. "If the state was held at a safe distance," Judt said, "then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay." Public responsibilities have been drastically shifted to the private sector. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come."(italics added)

Even as the results of deliberately following the lead of some of the men mentioned by Judt (and other, lesser, lights, such as Milton Friedman) lay around us - the physical, political, and socio-economic ruins of western society demolished in a perverse insistence that public good can only come from the accumulated "wisdom" of private vice - we should heed the emphasis on legacy to which Judt refers.

There is irony in this. Judt's masterwork - at least from his own perspective - is a 900 page recounting of modern European history entitled Postwar: A History Of Europe Since 1945. In his own words, Europe has become the exemplar of many social and civic virtues "by forgetting its past. 'The first postwar Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory—upon forgetting as a way of life.'" The irony here is that Judt sees our own social and political predicament as resulting from forgetfulness. Yet, it is a kind of manipulative forgetfulness, as he points out.

"Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions. In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the good questions back on the table."

We need to be attentive to those questions as we stand and stare at the social wreckage around us. Our best friend, at the moment, is a much longer memory. I do hope that Judt, despite his desperate physical condition, continues to serve as a mnemonic for us.

Apropos Of Nothing More Than A General Statement

I have to admit that my admiration for essayist and CD-purger Scott McLemee only grows with each day. His newest column in Inside Higher Ed has led me to a marvelous, eclectic, unnerving on-line journal called First Of The Month which is actually an annual. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in issues cultural and political, with an editorial policy that seems to me to encourage no ideological stringency.

In his column, Scott quotes a passage from a letter from the father of the editor of First of the Month, which sums up, in a wonderful shorthand, my own approach to pretty much everything intellectual, theological, philosophical, interpersonal, and every other "-al" you could name.

The younger DeMott quotes a letter written in his father’s final years -- a piece of advice given to a friend. It offers a challenge to what we might call "the will to sophistication," and its hard clarity is bracing:

"Study humiliation. You have nothing ahead of you but that. You survive not by trusting old friends. Or by hoping for love from a child. You survive by realizing you have nothing whatever the world wants, and that therefore the one course open to you is to start over. Recognize your knowledge and experience are valueless. Realize the only possible role for you on earth is that of a student and a learner. Never think that your opinions – unless founded on hard work in a field that is totally new to you – are of interest to anyone. Treat nobody, friend, co-worker, child, whomever, as someone who knows less than you about any subject whatever. You are an Inferior for life. Whatever is left of it....This is the best that life can offer. And it’s better than it sounds.”

Scott adds by way of commentary:

This amounts, finally, to a formulation of a democratic ethos for intellectual life. It bends the stick, hard, against the familiar warp. So, in its own way, does First, and I hope the website and the series of anthologies will continue and prosper as new readers and writers join its public.

One member has been added to its public.

Dump Reid (UPDATE)

I had heard something about Harry Reid over the weekend. Now, having read what, exactly, all the hubbub is about, I can only say - at the very least get this guy out of leadership. While the right-wing scree, "He's worse than Trent Lott!" is bogus, having someone in a position of senior leadership who has racial views that echo Talmadge and Russell of a generation ago is simply unconscionable. Whether or not he leaves the Senate is up to the voters of Nevada; he needs no longer to hold any position of authority in the United States Senate.

UPDATE: In all honesty, I couldn't care less what Eleanor Holmes Norton says. There are differences between both the rhetoric and record of Trent Lott and Harry Reid, but that is beside the point. This is more the case of a straw breaking a camel's back. We need better leadership in the Senate, and Reid's troglogytic comments push me far past the point where I can believe he will be or can be useful.

A Book To Find

Once again, many thanks to Scott McLemee for directing me to a book review in the Guardian newspaper. From Theo Hobson's review:

The book is largely concerned to rebut Dawkins and Hitchens; there are many polemical thrusts against a narrow bourgeois version of rationality, and a faith in Progress that thinks it is just enlightened neutrality. This is all good stuff, but what I find really interesting is Eagleton's thoughts on revolution and Christianity.

He is of course sympathetic to Jesus's message of the kingdom of God, in which the poor will finally have justice. But he resists the normal Marxist response: that instead of fetishising the dead Jesus, we must do what Jesus failed to do. Instead he argues that the myth of Christ's death and resurrection is no escapist illusion: Jesus's "death and descent into hell is a voyage into madness, terror, absurdity, and self-dispossession, since only a revolution that cuts that deep can answer to our dismal condition." This is the sort of revolution that a normal Marxist would angrily dismiss as illusory, for "our dismal condition" can be politically mended. For Eagleton, the idea of the Fall cannot be brushed aside. This is confirmed later on, when he notes that Dawkins and Hitchens "have no use for such embarrassingly old-fashioned ideas as depravity and redemption. Even after Auschwitz there is nothing in their view to be redeemed from."

Typical doctrinaire Marxism, however, usually doesn't have Marx's respect for bourgeois culture, and Marx's understanding of Christianity as an ideological framework. Later Marxists, most especially Ernst Bloch, shared Marx's respect for the accomplishments of bourgeois society even as they understood capitalism's devastating impact on the working class. Bloch set aside early 20th century Marxism's dismissal of "religion", and expanded a Marxist appreciation for the potential revolutionary power of Christianity.

An attack on Dawkins and Hitchens, whether from a Christian or Marxist perspective (or some combination thereof), is all to the good, especially as Eagleton cuts through much of the typical apologetic frew-frew and gets to one of the hearts of their very limited vision (at least, Hobson makes it sound that way). In any event, an expanded appreciation for the deepest content of the Christian faith, whether or not Eagleton himself "comes out" (as Hobson ironically put it) as a Christian, would be a nice read, indeed.

Music For Your Monday

I have joined the downloading generation! A decade after the heyday of free downloads via Napster, and with my daughters' being gifted iPods for Christmas, I have started what I am sure will be a very long process of setting up a huge iTunes playlist on my computer. So far, I have 35 songs on my own playlist; my goal is to purchase music that is an adjunct to my already far-too-large CD collection. With it becoming increasingly difficult to find music in the real world, I guess that my late-entry in to this particular form of musical commerce is all to the good. Without further ado, some samples from my playlist.

First, Steven Wilson, leader of Porcupine Tree, from a solo album Insurgentes, this is "Salvaging":



An oldy but definitely a goody, Mahogany Rush's "Dragonfly":



IQ's "Closer" - the sound quality on this is really poor, but the song is pretty enough to make up for it (mostly):

Sex And The American Male Novelist

I don't like Katie Roiphe. Let's start with that up front. Even less do I like the way she frames her discussion of the way contemporary male novelists write about sex. To be honest, I'm not even sure what her point is.

Let's back up. Feodor (not his real name, but you all know who I mean) sent me a message on Facebook on the article linked above. He wanted my take on it, so I took a gander, and I have to say that, as someone who teaches literature, she offers to her readers no sense that contemporary authors, writing in a different time, a different social and cultural setting - postfeminist? hardly - might have a different agenda, including presenting male sexuality as more ambivalent.

She has sense enough to frame an earlier generation of male novelists in the context of their times. The three men she references the most - John Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer - were, indeed writing at a time when the literary floodgates were only beginning to open, thanks in part to the 1960 court decision that D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was not obscene. These men also were writing for and from a generation of men living in the midst of changing mores, changing cultural values. The kind of uber-virility they describe - the notion of sex as an adventure of personal discovery, or its opposite, just a way to pass the time - certainly captures what was, even then, a dying ethos. I am unimpressed with her claim that the sex in Roth's later novels is a failure of writing and nerve; perhaps it is a confession that the older "set" or "frame" just doesn't work anymore. Foster Wallace's confession that he just doesn't "get" Updike's approach to male sexuality should be a clue that the whole frame of reference has shifted.

I find nothing wrong with contemporary male novelists showing a bit more ambivalence toward sexual subject matter. Of course, one problem with the idea that this is, indeed, happening is the survey of contemporary novelists is not only incomplete, but precisely for this reason it fails to take all sorts of expressions of male sexuality in to account. T. C. Boyle, for example, isn't shy about writing about sex in a fun, if somewhat idiosyncratic, style. He is conspicuously absent from her survey of contemporary authors, probably for that reasons.

Even if she is correct that contemporary American male authors are more ambivalent in their descriptions of male sexuality, there are several questions one needs to ask. First, would a more direct, old-fashioned, "virile" approach serve the literary needs of the story, the character, the overall effect the author wants to present? In Mailer, Updike, and Roth, we have men writing at a certain time, presenting characters whose many obsessions, including sexual obsessions, they tackle with a kind of vengeance. They drink in all life has to offer, or at least try to, dealing with the emotional consequences either much later or not at all, depending on both author and story.

I think a scene from my favorite Roth novella, "Goodbye, Columbus" makes my point. In it, the lead character, a middle-class recent college graduate Neil Klugman, falls for a wealthy Radcliffe student. In the course of their romance, they struggle to find a way to connect, including sexually. At the end, their most satisfying coupling, at least for Neil, comes on a ratty, dirty couch that is hidden away in the attic of Brenda's house. Now, this could mean that, for Neil (and perhaps, by extension, Roth) thinks the only sex that is good is sex that is something hidden away, dirty. Or, it might be possible that this is a narrative point Roth is making - about class, about the unbridgeable gulf that even sexual intimacy cannot close - rather than something about sex itself. That was my take when I read it.

In any event, the presentation of sex by contemporary American male novelists might just be the result of changing times. The kind of sexual adventurism celebrated by the older novelists in question was a part of that time. Yet, the fruits of that adventurism have proved to be far less liberating than used to be imagined. A new generation of men might just consider a more thoughtful approach to sexuality something worth exploring. All the same, this flight from (descriptive) sex in some contemporary novelists might also be seen as a flight from real intimacy as the kind of detached, occasionally humorous, definitely ribald descriptions of hyper-sexuality in older male novelists.

A recent commenter claimed that sex is nothing more than lust. I couldn't disagree more, and find such a truncated, limited view of the possibilities of human sexuality to be silly. While the kind of madonna/whore syndrome Roiphe assigns to Mailer certainly creates its own set of issues, one can detect the same neurosis in her description of characters who would prefer not to be sexually intimate. A healthy sexuality includes a willingness to open oneself to all sorts of emotional connections with one's partner; sexual adventurism, including adultery, troism, even masturbation, if it is worth anything at all, creates emotional dangers as much as it does physical pleasure. Characters unwilling to take that risk are fleeing from real human intimacy as much as Zuckerman sitting and watching in a detached way as a young woman masturbates with a vegetable.

In any event, I find it ridiculous to compare authors from a different time - and American forty years ago, even twenty, was a far different place than it has since become - and comparing any art form from one period to another, even on the kind of flimsy criteria Roiphe sets up in this essay, is a fools game. The article in question reveals far more about the author's mind-set than it does anything about sex and American novelists.

I Hope INTERPOL Finds Me And Whisks Me Away To The South Of France

I usually don't pay attention to the darker, murkier, and stupider side of the right-wing internet. I let various others do that for me, and laugh at the results. Discovering this tidbit, however, is far too priceless to pass up. Unlike Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds' attempted exegesis of a photo of Pres. Obama, the stuff on the Executive Order granting diplomatic immunity to INTERPOL agents in the US should become the stuff of legend, as far as I'm concerned. The following paragraph points up how stupid and clueless Breitbart really is:

This story has begun to make the rounds at some other blogs and web sites. Some scream about the on-set of the New World Order, some merely question the timing, motives and logic behind such a move while we are still fighting foreign wars and under threat of attack from Al Qaeda and other international terrorist bodies. I certainly don’t walk down the New World Order/One World Government path, I don’t look good in tin-foil hats… but, I do wonder why this move was made so quietly and why the White House Press Corps has not made any hay about it.

Yes, indeed, it is odd that the United States would grant certain privileges to the International Criminal Police Agency at a time we are engaged in fighting both a war and police action against an international criminal conspiracy against the United States. Definitely one of the things that makes you go, "Hmm . . ."

The comment thread at Tbogg's post on this is a gold mine.

Does Human Life Have Value?

Every time I hear a right-winger talk about the sanctity of human life, I want to barf. Truth is, they don't care one bit about real human life, except perhaps their own, or that of those who look just like them. If one needs any more evidence - besides their fondness for the death penalty, their love for extra-legal murder, their fondness for Bush's wars without purpose or end - I will just cite this (h/t Think Progress):

A Bipartisan Proposal [Cliff May]

Step (1): Return all Gitmo detainees to Yemen.

Step (2): Use Predator missiles to strike the baggage-claim area 20 minutes after they arrive.

Just an idea.

I know someone somewhere will claim this was "just a joke". A willingness to joke about mass-murder is evidence of serious mental illness, or at the very least a kind of moral vacuousness.

Please don't try to make a case for this, because I just bought this laptop and I don't want to get sick all over it trying to read an "argument" supporting sociopathology like this.

Getting The Word Out

There are many errors and problems with the Washington Post Outlook piece on the necessity of scientists to be better public communicators of their findings, theories, and their impact on public discourse and policy. Not the least of these problems can be found, easily enough, in a lead sentence of a paragraph buried about midway through the article.

With the media distracted by the food fight, scientists weren't leading the public discussion, and other important findings that ought to have received attention in Katrina's wake -- for instance, that we had better tend to our overdeveloped coastlines, which are dangerously exposed to future storms -- were drowned out.(italics added)

That highlighted clause at the opening conditions not only the rest of the paragraph - which concerns itself with the way the public reacted to discussions of the role of climate change and natural disasters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - but the entire article. The entire piece, written by a fellow in science journalism at MIT, simply ignores the role the media has played in continuing to pretend there isn't a working theory of global warming that works as a good model for all sorts of scientific research.

"Climategate" was a manufactured controversy, the purloined emails evidence of nothing more than scientists' back-and-forth on the impact of research on public discussions of global warming. That's all. Since the deniers - whether scientists, politicians, or ordinary folk - are either in the direct pay of petroleum corporations, indirect pay (think Oklahoma's two Senators), or folk confused about the way the science works thanks in large part to a journalistic predilection for insisting on more than one side to any issue, we are left with the conundrum that a well-established scientific theory is claimed to be erroneous by those who have a vested interest in refusing to accept it, and a public too busy making sure they don't lose their jobs, their homes, and their sense of well-being to take the time to consider the reality. Of course, a scientifically-literate science journalism might help matters; there are such, and NPR's Talk of the Nation: Science Fridays is a good template for that, but that audience is relatively small, and the contributors exceptions rather than the rule.

Another problem, related to evolution, is exposed readily enough, a bit toward the end of the article.

"Many Christians, including fundamentalists, can accept evolution as long as it is not attached to the view that life has no purpose," Karl Giberson, a Christian physicist and the author of "Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution," told me recently. "Human life has value, and any scientific theory that even appears to deny this central religious affirmation will alienate people of faith and create opportunity for those who would rally believers against evolution."

Does human life have value? How is this relevant to the issue of evolution? This entire paragraph is chock full of either debatable points or red herrings that have nothing at all to do with how evolution is, or should be, taught. Those who deny the reality of evolution through natural selection (in its modified, synthesized, form) will not be satisfied with any attempt to address these concerns outside a very limited, sectarian-Christian insistence that the entire theory is wrong. Even conceding that "human life has value" will not rescue evolution from criticisms from those who, for reasons known only to them, think it a pernicious threat to religion, ethics, and social well-being. On this issue, not one step backward. Give the ignorant and demagogues nothing.

In all, while it might be necessary for the run-of-the-mill biologist, climate scientist, or whomever, to give the public good, solid information that is also accessible, it seems to me this entire piece ignores one important piece of the media puzzle - scientifically literate journalists who eschew simplistic ideas of public controversy in order to get information to the public. While it might be true that, for example, legislation that is intended to address global warming will be met with all sorts of opposition, journalists should present the data to the public, including the role of industry-sponsored counter-factuals and propaganda presented as such rather than present the latter as good-faith, legitimate science. We do need scientists who are a bit more media-savvy, to be sure. We also need journalists who are science-savvy as well, and understand how science works, how scientists come to the conclusions they do, and offer that information to the public intelligently.

Saturday Rock Show

Ah . . .

Oh My (No) God

As someone who has been dealing with these issues for the past two decades, hearing the same, first-year undergraduate arguments about God's existence, about the nefarious social influence of religion, and about the possibility of a secular ethic is really quite tiresome. Yet, at "On Faith", Sally Quinn gives space to Herb Silverman, who founded and is President of something called the Secular Coalition of America. Wow, how counter-cultural.

As to the first, that is God's existence, my response anymore is, "Who cares?" God's existence is no more dependent upon some kind of argument deemed "rational" or "logical" than is the existence of gravity, evolution, or second law of thermodynamics. Whether or not an individual, or a whole planet for that matter, believes in God or not no more renders God non-existent than a refusal to accept the evidence for evolution somehow renders the theory invalid. Most first-year undergraduates who take some kind of survey class in western thought run up against the same arguments Silverman offers here. While they might be exhilarating to an 18-year-old who is hearing them for the first time, their novelty wore off a long time ago.

As to the question of "belief" and its social dimension, I cannot imagine an issue for which I care less than perhaps the previous one. All social phenomena have both good and bad aspects, religion among the rest. Since Silverman has no idea what he's talking about when he speaks of belief, as it operates for Christian believers at any rate; since Silverman seems to think that Christianity is the sum total of religious expression in the United States (odd, considering his surname), his argument is nonsensical from the get-go, because other religions define belief, and the content thereof in completely different ways, and live it out in ways that are alien to the Christian mind-set.

Finally, is it surprising to anyone, after nearly 200 years of doing so, that there are ethical codes that are quite successful that have nothing at all to do with God? It shouldn't be, at least to anyone who has been paying attention. Yet, to judge from the readers comments, as well as Silverman's, one finds the idea somehow fresh and new to some people. Again, it might be a good idea for them to return to undergraduate school and take a survey class in Enlightenment, Romantic, and modernist/post-modernist thought.

Like conservatives who spew out gobbledygook, the best way to treat nonsense like this is not to respond to it, but just point and laugh. When adults are carrying on a conversation, and a child interrupts, we usually stare for a moment then carry on as usual. Best way to treat garbage like this as well.

Kinda Sorta Agreeing With Joe Klein

OK, so not completely. Yet, there is something about his basic critique of some parts of the left-wing on the internet (I hate the non-word "blogosphere") that rings true.

To be fair to my ideological soul-mates, I will offer up part of his critique that I find to be ten pounds of offal in a two-pound bag.

In the snarkier precincts of the left-wing blogosphere, mainstream journalists like me are often called villagers. The reference, so far as I can tell, has to do with isolation: we live in this little village on the Potomac — actually, I don't, but no matter — constantly intermingling over hors d'oeuvres, deciding who is "serious" (a term of derision in the blogosphere) and who is not, regurgitating spin spoon-fed by our sources or conjuring a witless conventional wisdom that has nothing to do with reality as it is lived outside the village.

While not a huge fan of the invocation of "the Village", of the epithet "serious" used ironically, to denote not just a lack of seriousness, but a lack of any insight or moral depth (most of the time, at least when atrios uses it, the reference is to someone like John Bolton, who is as dumb as a canned ham), as Klein describes its use, the short-hand critique of the elitism of some parts of the press corps is spot on. It is insular. It is parochial to the point of self-parody at times. It ignores substantive debate, ideological diversity, and even the pretense of openness to a kind of People magazine etiquette of who's in, who's out, who's up, who's down, and policy is for nerds and Al Gore (who seems to be their natural leader). Klein is the archetype of this kind of thing; ignorant of any serious understanding of policy, even to the point of revealing that a criticism he authored of a bill was done without even having read the bill even as he accused an interlocutor of ignorance, Klein is a bit of a joke (thus the shortened version of his online nom de guerre, "Joke Line").

Yet, there is something correct about the next paragraph (the author shudders):

But there is a great irony here: villagery is a trope more applicable to those making the accusation than to those being snarked upon. The left-wing blogosphere, at its worst, is a claustrophobic hamlet of the well educated, less interested in meaningful debate than the "village" it mocks. (At its best, it is a source of clever and well-informed anti-Establishment commentary.) Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum. Hilariously, as we stagger from one awful decade into the next, there has been a coagulation of these extremes — a united front against the turgid ceremonies of legislative democracy, like compromise, and disdain for the politician most responsible for nudging our snarled checks and balances toward action, Barack Obama. The issue that has brought them together is opposition to the Senate's health care–reform bill, which makes some sense on the right, but none at all on the left.

This is a criticism I have been leveling for a while now - the left, in the end, wants to set aside democracy in order to be no different than the Republican majority as its hubristic height, steam-rolling opponents, shutting down debate and discussion, refusing to listen or consider alternatives. This last is particularly galling, as there is no appreciation for the reality that opponents might be moved to think and act in different ways not out of evil intent or spite or ignorance, but rather because they are different. One of the things I used to like about liberals was an appreciation for difference, an acceptance of others as inhabiting a different space, yet with rights and privileges we all share. Instead, the left can be as small-minded, bigoted, ignorant, and insistent on its prerogatives as the right. The pretense to being "reality-based" disappears like water in a volcano when one confronts, day after day, some of the truly ignorant, small-minded, thoughtless nonsense on the left.

I hate to begin 2010 with a criticism of the left; yet, it seems to me that this continues to be our biggest weakness. We have no idea the power we yield, should we choose to use it positively. Instead, we gripe and mutter and complain and desire nothing more or less than the rest of the world recognize, instantly, how wise and insightful and even comprehensive is our intelligence, our politics, and even our humor. I guess I always considered humility to be a liberal virtue, yet one sees almost none of that on the left. Rather, it is an almost constant chorus of how much the entire system is in hock to the real power-brokers, the Party rejected in two straight national elections - the Republicans. One tires of such repeated bullshit after a while, to be honest.

And it is just that - bullshit. The biggest thing the Democratic Party has going for it right now is the support of the American people; while it is true that the American people are frustrated, even occasionally angry, we are in the midst of a severe recession/depression (depending on where you live). A bit of ennui is to be expected. The American people, for all they occasionally go off the rails (two terms for George W. Bush was a bit much), have not only smartened up, they have wisened up. For all that there are legitimate criticisms to be leveled at the Obama Administration (and I have made some), one can hardly argue that we are no better off now than we were, say four years ago, politically speaking.

We have the opportunity to make serious, sweeping changes. What we need is patience, wisdom, and a certain canny ruthlessness to bring it about. Rather than bitch that the game is fixed, demanding therefore a change in the rules (which isn't going to happen) - beat 'em at their own game. Man up, grow a pair, play the game the way it's played and by doing so, show the opposition they really don't run the show. Instead it's more of the same, tired nonsense about corporate control and corporate money and the idiocy of the traditional media. Last time I checked, all that corporate money and influence didn't stop a whole bunch of liberals from being elected to Congress and even the White House. All the same, if you don't like corporate access, then deny them access not through changed laws, but through better access for yourself and those like you.

One hopes that 2010 will bring about some serious changes in the American political landscape, not the least of them being a bit more of an adult attitude among those on the left.