Saturday, December 31, 2005
Liza has a blog
I's called Art History For The Unrefined and it can be found here. Again, that's Art History for the Unrefined.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Advocacy and Bad Art
As a comment to the previous post, I didn't see the Joe Dante Voting Zombies thing, and not just becuase I don't have cable.
It's because certain types of advocacy/activist art are consistently Bad Art. And I figured this would probably be the case with that. (Not to put down Joe Dante. Gremlins rule.)
But something bad happens when the aesthetics of cultural product take a major back seat to the advocacy of a certain ideology. This is the difference between Christian rock and JS Bach. Art can glorify God, absolutely, but only insofar as it still cares about being art.
In the case of Creed, we have two-bit Eddie Vedder impersonator at vocals, and a bunch of recycled grunge instrumentals beside, all over a bunch of fake spirituality. You can tell it's "Christian" because it sounds like bad advertising.
That's why Michael Moore Hates America, although I've never seen it, is almost certainly bad. Because the motivation, much more than for Moore, is to make a point. I don't too much like Michael Moore, but he is entertaining, and knows how to make an engaging film.
It certainly isn't the case that only the right engages in this kind of bankrupt art practice. The contemporary scene is littered with advocates without vision or perspective, people whose work gains nothing going from the page out into the world.
If I could change one thing about the tendencies of contemporary art practice, I would have more art in it, fewer picnics. Picnic art is only going to get paying customers out of that weird communal sense of guilt that sends art-worlders to shows that are "important" but ghastly.
And if picnic art wants to forego paying customers, it can go right ahead. But art without paying customers is like a sandwich shop without paying customers.
It's because certain types of advocacy/activist art are consistently Bad Art. And I figured this would probably be the case with that. (Not to put down Joe Dante. Gremlins rule.)
But something bad happens when the aesthetics of cultural product take a major back seat to the advocacy of a certain ideology. This is the difference between Christian rock and JS Bach. Art can glorify God, absolutely, but only insofar as it still cares about being art.
In the case of Creed, we have two-bit Eddie Vedder impersonator at vocals, and a bunch of recycled grunge instrumentals beside, all over a bunch of fake spirituality. You can tell it's "Christian" because it sounds like bad advertising.
That's why Michael Moore Hates America, although I've never seen it, is almost certainly bad. Because the motivation, much more than for Moore, is to make a point. I don't too much like Michael Moore, but he is entertaining, and knows how to make an engaging film.
It certainly isn't the case that only the right engages in this kind of bankrupt art practice. The contemporary scene is littered with advocates without vision or perspective, people whose work gains nothing going from the page out into the world.
If I could change one thing about the tendencies of contemporary art practice, I would have more art in it, fewer picnics. Picnic art is only going to get paying customers out of that weird communal sense of guilt that sends art-worlders to shows that are "important" but ghastly.
And if picnic art wants to forego paying customers, it can go right ahead. But art without paying customers is like a sandwich shop without paying customers.
What is it about artists
I was following some links about the Joe Dante voting zombies Showtime thing tonight and I found this link from some right-wing website I've never been to.
It's basically a diatribe against artists. We're parasites, as usual. Propagandists. Perpetually adolescent. Worst of all, liberal. The post itself ends with a call to support conservatiove filmmakers like the Orson Welles behind Michael Moore Hates America.
And so it continues through the comments. A bunch of libertarians and conservatives patting themselves on the back for having no imagination and for being logical.
Only a Daniel Myers came to it with any apparent familiarity with what it is to be an artist and an openness to see what's actually there. What he writes isn't perfect, but is much better than what I expect from such a blog.
More representative:
(There was a lot of talk about the Myers-Briggs on that blog as some sort of scientific, authoratative test- I kind of figured most people think of M-B as a step or two above astrology, but whatever)
In my world, as a graduate art student at a University, and before that as an art student at a private art college, the "withdrawal" is into long nights in the studio working through ideas, producing, discussing work and ideas, etc. Art students, they tell me, are more prone toward all-nighters than any except medical students.
I know a lot of artists are actually lazy, parasitic good-for-nothings who have no intellectual curiousity or any true creativity. These people do not tend to make a living of it. Those that do tend to be industrious, competitive, and fairly charismatic.
Why do these people tend, overwhelmingly, to be on the left side of the aisle? I think Mr. Myers' explanations are good. I would expand the part about an antipathy toward "regular people." It is certainly a two way street. Certain marginalized groups have a long history of association with the arts. I'm thinking particularly of gays and Jewish people. It is no secret that the proportion of these groups in the fine art world and the entertainment industry is higher than outside them.
Conservatives tend, far more than liberals, to demand conformity. Those outcast by conservative authority tend to reject conservatism. This is where the notion that artists and liberals don't think for themselves is just baffling. I guess, when you get down to it, I'm a liberal in large part because I spent my formative years constantly chastized for think for, and being, myself, by figures who were overwhelmingly conservative.
Artists, and people with similar temperments, tend to be vilified by most of society as weirdos and parasites. We don't tend to be paid very well. We're not particularly well represented or lobbied for politically. We tend to share circles with other marginal and marginalized groups. And we tend to be less religious than the majority of the population. What a shock, then, that we aren't, by and large, keen on Republicans.
It's basically a diatribe against artists. We're parasites, as usual. Propagandists. Perpetually adolescent. Worst of all, liberal. The post itself ends with a call to support conservatiove filmmakers like the Orson Welles behind Michael Moore Hates America.
And so it continues through the comments. A bunch of libertarians and conservatives patting themselves on the back for having no imagination and for being logical.
Only a Daniel Myers came to it with any apparent familiarity with what it is to be an artist and an openness to see what's actually there. What he writes isn't perfect, but is much better than what I expect from such a blog.
More representative:
"Contemplate the fact that "artists," as we usually interpret the word, are and have been for centuries social parasites. Their withdraw from the stressful humdrum into a make-believe world of "creative pursuits" is justified by self-serving rationale. Some very few produce enduring works. The overwhelming remainder produce dreck that, with some luck, reduces to recyclable refuse. "
(There was a lot of talk about the Myers-Briggs on that blog as some sort of scientific, authoratative test- I kind of figured most people think of M-B as a step or two above astrology, but whatever)
In my world, as a graduate art student at a University, and before that as an art student at a private art college, the "withdrawal" is into long nights in the studio working through ideas, producing, discussing work and ideas, etc. Art students, they tell me, are more prone toward all-nighters than any except medical students.
I know a lot of artists are actually lazy, parasitic good-for-nothings who have no intellectual curiousity or any true creativity. These people do not tend to make a living of it. Those that do tend to be industrious, competitive, and fairly charismatic.
Why do these people tend, overwhelmingly, to be on the left side of the aisle? I think Mr. Myers' explanations are good. I would expand the part about an antipathy toward "regular people." It is certainly a two way street. Certain marginalized groups have a long history of association with the arts. I'm thinking particularly of gays and Jewish people. It is no secret that the proportion of these groups in the fine art world and the entertainment industry is higher than outside them.
Conservatives tend, far more than liberals, to demand conformity. Those outcast by conservative authority tend to reject conservatism. This is where the notion that artists and liberals don't think for themselves is just baffling. I guess, when you get down to it, I'm a liberal in large part because I spent my formative years constantly chastized for think for, and being, myself, by figures who were overwhelmingly conservative.
Artists, and people with similar temperments, tend to be vilified by most of society as weirdos and parasites. We don't tend to be paid very well. We're not particularly well represented or lobbied for politically. We tend to share circles with other marginal and marginalized groups. And we tend to be less religious than the majority of the population. What a shock, then, that we aren't, by and large, keen on Republicans.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
What's next
I feel a change in the winds. If the Democrats don't screw up, they might actually have a majority in Congress this decade. Blame it on the hubris and carelessness of Gingrich's heirs.
Folks who spent years decrying the narcissism, immaturity, and amorality of liberals and Democrats have reduced the business of running this country to tactics, manipulation, and cheap theatrics. Not that there was some sort of golden age, but we live in a time of relentless anti-intellectualism and apathy, and this has certainly been aided by the Pavlovian conditioning of the words "family values," "compassionate conservative," "reformer with results," et cetera.
It's easy to rag on the timidity and cluelessness of the Democrats. But the job they have is terribly hard. They are playing by old rules. But more than that, they're dealing with institutions of power that Republicans have worked very hard to create. They still have some illusion that the point of politics stretches beyond keeping the party in power and securing a position as an industry lobbyist when it's all over.
I keep hearing from bloggers and columnists and thinktankers and the lot that the Republicans should be emulated in how they've come into and held power. This reflects a failure of imagination, the like of which leads to Democrats losing. Never fight the last war. Beyond that, the Republicans are a disaster. Nothing they do works, they can't get their favored non-tax-cut legislation passed, and their quickly becoming ballot box poison.
Democrats, please do this: embrace reform. Not just rhetorically, really embrace changing the queasy nature of politics. I want to hear hardcore demonization of industry lobbyists. Nobody likes lobbyists.
Don't let Republicans dictate the terms of class warfare. Do a couple Republican things- like identify conservatism with its many sins. Everybody likes lower taxes, but the idea of rich people who live of inheritance or other unearned wealth getting huge tax cuts while they get a pittance bothers people. Paris Hilton, people! Also, nobody likes deficits, wastefulness, bridges to nowhere in Alaska. Educate the public.
Do something about the environment. People still think that anyone who cares about the environment is a patchouli-smelling hippy. Change this. And change it soon. Gas has become dangerously expensive, we're losing topsoil, global warming, the list is endless. I also think it would be good strategy. Republicans don't see the environment as a Dem strength because it's kind of out of left field and it plays to a lot of notions of Democrats being pansies.
Do that Contract with America thing you're talking about. Don't talk about 1994. Nobody cares about it, and referencing makes it sound like you're playing politics instead of trying to change the country. If you're trying to convince somebody of something, you don't preface it by saying "I'm going to run a campaign to convince you of this." If you're going to crib from somebody's playbook, you don't warn everyone about it beforehand.
Foreign policy is tricky at the moment, because Americans have a childish macho pride. But Gephardt admitting he was wrong about the war is a good first step. Build a consensus within the party over a new path forward. The Democratic base is generally less hawkish than the electorate in general, but at least it's a position of some priniciple. The electorate at large is reactive and has few foreign policy core beliefs other than a belief in the superiority, strength, and decency of the US relative to the rest of the world. I think the profile of the Dem position should be humane and internationalist. This isn't possible unless there is a significant withdrawal in forces from Iraq.
In general, it's a good idea to be supporting Iraq vets for office. People like symbolism of that sort. There's a long history of veterans serving in the Capital.
I don't think I'm good for advice about immigration, which I see becoming a campaign issue in '06. Democrats always have it harder on these type of issues because it would be easy for a Republican to adopt an extreme (like, say, turn our Southern border into the 38th parallel) but politically safe position.
Most important, in general, is to articulate a wholistic vision for the country. mingle exciting policy (Mars, bitches, except more practical, and more real for voters) with work on Brand Democrat.
The important thing is not to freeze up, to remain defensive, to avoid issues in a way that pushes you in awkward positions, and to dictate the terms of the debate to the greatest possible degree.
Folks who spent years decrying the narcissism, immaturity, and amorality of liberals and Democrats have reduced the business of running this country to tactics, manipulation, and cheap theatrics. Not that there was some sort of golden age, but we live in a time of relentless anti-intellectualism and apathy, and this has certainly been aided by the Pavlovian conditioning of the words "family values," "compassionate conservative," "reformer with results," et cetera.
It's easy to rag on the timidity and cluelessness of the Democrats. But the job they have is terribly hard. They are playing by old rules. But more than that, they're dealing with institutions of power that Republicans have worked very hard to create. They still have some illusion that the point of politics stretches beyond keeping the party in power and securing a position as an industry lobbyist when it's all over.
I keep hearing from bloggers and columnists and thinktankers and the lot that the Republicans should be emulated in how they've come into and held power. This reflects a failure of imagination, the like of which leads to Democrats losing. Never fight the last war. Beyond that, the Republicans are a disaster. Nothing they do works, they can't get their favored non-tax-cut legislation passed, and their quickly becoming ballot box poison.
Democrats, please do this: embrace reform. Not just rhetorically, really embrace changing the queasy nature of politics. I want to hear hardcore demonization of industry lobbyists. Nobody likes lobbyists.
Don't let Republicans dictate the terms of class warfare. Do a couple Republican things- like identify conservatism with its many sins. Everybody likes lower taxes, but the idea of rich people who live of inheritance or other unearned wealth getting huge tax cuts while they get a pittance bothers people. Paris Hilton, people! Also, nobody likes deficits, wastefulness, bridges to nowhere in Alaska. Educate the public.
Do something about the environment. People still think that anyone who cares about the environment is a patchouli-smelling hippy. Change this. And change it soon. Gas has become dangerously expensive, we're losing topsoil, global warming, the list is endless. I also think it would be good strategy. Republicans don't see the environment as a Dem strength because it's kind of out of left field and it plays to a lot of notions of Democrats being pansies.
Do that Contract with America thing you're talking about. Don't talk about 1994. Nobody cares about it, and referencing makes it sound like you're playing politics instead of trying to change the country. If you're trying to convince somebody of something, you don't preface it by saying "I'm going to run a campaign to convince you of this." If you're going to crib from somebody's playbook, you don't warn everyone about it beforehand.
Foreign policy is tricky at the moment, because Americans have a childish macho pride. But Gephardt admitting he was wrong about the war is a good first step. Build a consensus within the party over a new path forward. The Democratic base is generally less hawkish than the electorate in general, but at least it's a position of some priniciple. The electorate at large is reactive and has few foreign policy core beliefs other than a belief in the superiority, strength, and decency of the US relative to the rest of the world. I think the profile of the Dem position should be humane and internationalist. This isn't possible unless there is a significant withdrawal in forces from Iraq.
In general, it's a good idea to be supporting Iraq vets for office. People like symbolism of that sort. There's a long history of veterans serving in the Capital.
I don't think I'm good for advice about immigration, which I see becoming a campaign issue in '06. Democrats always have it harder on these type of issues because it would be easy for a Republican to adopt an extreme (like, say, turn our Southern border into the 38th parallel) but politically safe position.
Most important, in general, is to articulate a wholistic vision for the country. mingle exciting policy (Mars, bitches, except more practical, and more real for voters) with work on Brand Democrat.
The important thing is not to freeze up, to remain defensive, to avoid issues in a way that pushes you in awkward positions, and to dictate the terms of the debate to the greatest possible degree.
"Criminalization of Politics"
Oooh, Frank Luntz must have been busy. The right, by which I mean the Republican Party and its representatives in the media (both in sense of Fox News and individual pundits like the sometimes almost bearable William Kristol) have seized a new rhetorical strategy to prevent the sinking of the SS. Conservatism. Every legal reaction to the manifest curruption of the modern right is now deemed "the criminalization of politics."
Lord knows if this were a society populated by decent people, that wouldn't float. Are there really people out there who think we hold politicians to to high an ethical standard? The same people promulgating this line spent the years 1993-2001 harping on Clinton's crookedness and immorality, spending millions of dollars to investigate minor infractions and right-wing fictions. Turnabout is fair play.
But it's not even turnabout. These people are real crooks. CIA agent-exposing, rat-fucking, money-laundering, extortionist, power-hungry criminals.
The fact is that the Republicans criminalized politics.(By Republicans, I mean the party, not Jeff, or the guy who lives across the street from me) Not in the way they mean it. They turned the sometimes icky business of kissing babies, raising money, selling yourself like cornflakes, and promising things you can't deliver, and turned it into a criminal enterprise. They have no concern for appearance of propriety (see Halliburton, Frist's insider trading, the selection of crony Harriet Miers) because they have the media bent to their will, and millions of Americans who would vote for Charles Manson if he ran on family values.
Lord knows if this were a society populated by decent people, that wouldn't float. Are there really people out there who think we hold politicians to to high an ethical standard? The same people promulgating this line spent the years 1993-2001 harping on Clinton's crookedness and immorality, spending millions of dollars to investigate minor infractions and right-wing fictions. Turnabout is fair play.
But it's not even turnabout. These people are real crooks. CIA agent-exposing, rat-fucking, money-laundering, extortionist, power-hungry criminals.
The fact is that the Republicans criminalized politics.(By Republicans, I mean the party, not Jeff, or the guy who lives across the street from me) Not in the way they mean it. They turned the sometimes icky business of kissing babies, raising money, selling yourself like cornflakes, and promising things you can't deliver, and turned it into a criminal enterprise. They have no concern for appearance of propriety (see Halliburton, Frist's insider trading, the selection of crony Harriet Miers) because they have the media bent to their will, and millions of Americans who would vote for Charles Manson if he ran on family values.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Derangement syndrome
From the newest Bobo column, available from Not New York Times Select:
Hey Brooksy, thinking Bush is rotten, loathsome, and evil doesn't mean you are consumed by hatred of him. He is rotten, loathsome, and basically evil. And I'm tired of this "clinical" bullshit. Bobo, diagnosing people who think Bush sucks (now basically a majority of Americans) as crazy is Krauthammer's job, not yours. You don't even have the dusty credentials for it.
And you really are misrepresenting Edwards. In fact, most of what you're doing is misrepresenting. Democrats should be tougher. After all, Republicans only win elections by appealing to fear, hate, and gullibility. Bush only beat McCain in the primaries by lying about his sanity and appealing to the racism of South Carolinians (it works, by the way). Bush only beat Kerry because gay-hating and opportunistic Republicans put Gay Marriage bans o the November menu in several states.
Democrats who vote against Roberts aren't doing it just to show they mean business, but because he's a stealth nominee they think will work to infringe our privacy rights and overturn Roe vs. Wade. And Brooks is either totally unclear about what partisanship means, or is merely disingenuous in the way he uses the term.
The Democratic party doesn't have policy problems, not the way Brooks means it. Never has. Despite the avalanche of bullshit ideological enforcement of this mythic "conservatism," most Americans prefer the actual policies of Democrats. What the Democrats are is always on the defensive and out of power, and this means they never really talk about policy. Nobody does. Columnists like Brooks spill buckets of ink writing about style. This very column, in which Brooks decries Democratic obsession with style over policy, doesn't talk about policy. When Brooks praises Edwards, it's for weaving a moving story, not for his policy prescriptions. This is just another "Democrats should be like this" column.
But yeah, we should be more like Edwards than Kerry in this instance. Democrats have an opportunity here, among the manifest failure and unpopularity of the Bush team and its allies, to talk policy. Not so it will be implemented. If the idiot Republicans want to build the world's largest trailer park to permanently house survivors of Katrina, it will happen. No, the Democrats need to forge their identity. Bush and co. are too busy trying to save their own asses to deliver attacks on liberal weakness, impugn our patriotism etc. with their characteristic effectiveness. Go, talk equality, fairness, giving up these stupid tax cuts for the rich, improving FEMA etc. Do it!
But don't listen for one moment while Brooks first mischaracterizes Edwards as non-partisan, and then warns us to be Clintonite centrists (as if a centrist could avoid being termed a fire-breathing liberal if he/she were running) or else. Brooks has one political aim above all, to keep his party, whose base regards anything resembling Brooks, ie. semi-intellectual, culturally urban, and Jewish, as well beneath contempt, (but this is typical for the Republican party, whose media symbols and representatives, like Armstrong Williams, Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter, Krauthammer again, Sullivan, even George Will who, despite being thoroughly WASP is a pencil necked geek, are all basically Chickens for Colonel Sanders in a party that is decreasingly accepting of anyone who isn't white, straight, evangelical Christian, if not male at least submissive to male authority, and dumb as a sack of rocks) in power. Would you trust someone like that to tell you the directions to the nearest gas station?
Kerry began his speech by making the point that Bush and his crew are rotten. He then went on to make the point that Bush and his crew are loathsome. In the third section of the speech, Kerry left the impression that Bush and his crew are evil.
Now we all know people so consumed by hatred for George Bush that they haven't had an unpredictable thought in five years, but in Kerry's speech one sees this anger in almost clinical form.
Hey Brooksy, thinking Bush is rotten, loathsome, and evil doesn't mean you are consumed by hatred of him. He is rotten, loathsome, and basically evil. And I'm tired of this "clinical" bullshit. Bobo, diagnosing people who think Bush sucks (now basically a majority of Americans) as crazy is Krauthammer's job, not yours. You don't even have the dusty credentials for it.
And you really are misrepresenting Edwards. In fact, most of what you're doing is misrepresenting. Democrats should be tougher. After all, Republicans only win elections by appealing to fear, hate, and gullibility. Bush only beat McCain in the primaries by lying about his sanity and appealing to the racism of South Carolinians (it works, by the way). Bush only beat Kerry because gay-hating and opportunistic Republicans put Gay Marriage bans o the November menu in several states.
Democrats who vote against Roberts aren't doing it just to show they mean business, but because he's a stealth nominee they think will work to infringe our privacy rights and overturn Roe vs. Wade. And Brooks is either totally unclear about what partisanship means, or is merely disingenuous in the way he uses the term.
The Democratic party doesn't have policy problems, not the way Brooks means it. Never has. Despite the avalanche of bullshit ideological enforcement of this mythic "conservatism," most Americans prefer the actual policies of Democrats. What the Democrats are is always on the defensive and out of power, and this means they never really talk about policy. Nobody does. Columnists like Brooks spill buckets of ink writing about style. This very column, in which Brooks decries Democratic obsession with style over policy, doesn't talk about policy. When Brooks praises Edwards, it's for weaving a moving story, not for his policy prescriptions. This is just another "Democrats should be like this" column.
But yeah, we should be more like Edwards than Kerry in this instance. Democrats have an opportunity here, among the manifest failure and unpopularity of the Bush team and its allies, to talk policy. Not so it will be implemented. If the idiot Republicans want to build the world's largest trailer park to permanently house survivors of Katrina, it will happen. No, the Democrats need to forge their identity. Bush and co. are too busy trying to save their own asses to deliver attacks on liberal weakness, impugn our patriotism etc. with their characteristic effectiveness. Go, talk equality, fairness, giving up these stupid tax cuts for the rich, improving FEMA etc. Do it!
But don't listen for one moment while Brooks first mischaracterizes Edwards as non-partisan, and then warns us to be Clintonite centrists (as if a centrist could avoid being termed a fire-breathing liberal if he/she were running) or else. Brooks has one political aim above all, to keep his party, whose base regards anything resembling Brooks, ie. semi-intellectual, culturally urban, and Jewish, as well beneath contempt, (but this is typical for the Republican party, whose media symbols and representatives, like Armstrong Williams, Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter, Krauthammer again, Sullivan, even George Will who, despite being thoroughly WASP is a pencil necked geek, are all basically Chickens for Colonel Sanders in a party that is decreasingly accepting of anyone who isn't white, straight, evangelical Christian, if not male at least submissive to male authority, and dumb as a sack of rocks) in power. Would you trust someone like that to tell you the directions to the nearest gas station?
Monday, September 12, 2005
A project
landing7
Originally uploaded by poopruiz.
A set of photos I've taken of planes landing at the Tampa airport.
Taken from approximately this location. It's a little public beach on Tampa Bay. When the airplanes pass over, it's incredibly loud. After they've passed, there's a peculiar effect where little eddies form hundreds of feet behind and produce a sound like papers being rustled by wind hundreds of feet up.
It might interest some that I saw a few roseate spoonbills, a skimmer, numerous brown pelicans, an osprey, and what looked like a shrike. it's a nice place. I suggest you visit
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Paid to fake it in a traveling band
Working undercover for the man.
From this article about an exhibition on East German punk, we find that punks there were enemies of the state, with all that entails for communist East Germany.
"By 1983 the secret police had sunk its talons into the movement and the scene was slowly but surely infiltrated with informants, forced under pressure from the State to choose between cooperation, a jail sentence, expulsion or military service."
via bloggy
From this article about an exhibition on East German punk, we find that punks there were enemies of the state, with all that entails for communist East Germany.
"By 1983 the secret police had sunk its talons into the movement and the scene was slowly but surely infiltrated with informants, forced under pressure from the State to choose between cooperation, a jail sentence, expulsion or military service."
via bloggy
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
The world is amazing and strange
Via boingboing comes these bizarre and wonderful images, portraits of Katie Holmes, Natalie Portman, Laeticia Casta, and Kate Winslet in chadoors beside images, I presume, of tourist attractions in Iran.
The images are very lovely, and terribly puzzling. They look like something I might conjure up in a dream.
The images are very lovely, and terribly puzzling. They look like something I might conjure up in a dream.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Staggering Incompetence
I had a feeling way back when that the president's adventures in Iraq were going to end up badly, but I couldn't have anticipated the range of foulups involved.
If you were trying to do everything wrong, how different from this would it look?
-From Kevin Drum, we know Saddam didn't have any nukes, but he did have nuclear scientists, and our carelessness regarding these scientists has allowed them to disappear. Some, apparently, into the hands of Syria. Great.
-From Billmon, we have paved the way for Iraq to becom an Islamic theocracy. That means, most likely, a step backwards for the rights of women. It almost certainly means an Iraq no American could call "free" with a straight face. And freedom, other than hollowly invoking Sepember 11th is the only justification Bush has left for the war in Iraq.(It was called Operation Iraqi Freedom, ya know)
-Also from Billmon, not only have we prepared Iraq for a future of violence, with rival militias wearing Iraqi military uniforms gunning eachother down in the street, and most likely a civil war, but we're going to be arming these militias extremely well. Billmon describes it as "Crips and Bloods armed with tanks." I may be mistaken, but what came to my mind was post Soviet invasion Afghanistan. Kalashnikovs and Stinger missiles.
If you were trying to do everything wrong, how different from this would it look?
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Doublethink
It seems to me that one of the biggest problems facing the adoption of useful policies, policies thast will actually serve America's interest, in Iraq is the widely spread (in certain elite circles, at least) case of doublethink.
Over at Political Animal, Kevin Drum identifies this doublethink to some degree, but his conclusions are what you'd expect.
A growing majority of Americans believe we should withdraw from Iraq. Democratic politicians, many of whom supported the war from the beginning, refuse to call for a withdrawal. They think we should stick it out, knowing full well that the supposed aims of the war over there are, at this point in time, impossible to achieve.
Perhaps they stick to it because they really believe in this folly. But I'm convinced they are merely terrified that expressing support for withdrawal will make them look weak.
The situation is so backwards it hurts my head. But Democrats really don't have the wide range of options they had three years ago, when they could have prevented the war from happening in the first place.
Let me start off by saying I never believed in this war. Not only was it completely obvious to anyone possessing judgment that invading Iraq was a bad idea, a waste of resources, and a guaranteed distraction from our struggle against Islamic terrorism, but Bush was absolutely the wrong commander in chief for this or any other war.
Bush is a completely political president. His concern for policy exists insofar as a selective adoption of backward conservative dogma is a concern for policy. He is stubborn not as those with strong beliefs is stubborn (I am unconvinced his beliefs extend beyond his belief in his infallibility and his desire to protect the investor class from the evils of taxes and regulation), but as children are stubborn. He is glib. He is not thoughtful. He lacks the kind of empathy and sense of responsibility that troubled fellow lousy Texas president Johnson's sleep over VietNam War casualties. This was clear from the outset. No such man deserves to be commander in chief.
Insofar as American soldiers are central to the occupation, that American prestige is tied into the war, and that grave consequences of the war will strike America hard, it is our war. But it is Bush's war just as significantly. It is hard to imagine this war without Bush or someone equally foolish.
If anyone should pay for this war it should be Bush. Why the warhawks of my party seem so concerned about providing Bush this cover, I don't understand.
Over at Political Animal, Kevin Drum identifies this doublethink to some degree, but his conclusions are what you'd expect.
A growing majority of Americans believe we should withdraw from Iraq. Democratic politicians, many of whom supported the war from the beginning, refuse to call for a withdrawal. They think we should stick it out, knowing full well that the supposed aims of the war over there are, at this point in time, impossible to achieve.
Perhaps they stick to it because they really believe in this folly. But I'm convinced they are merely terrified that expressing support for withdrawal will make them look weak.
The situation is so backwards it hurts my head. But Democrats really don't have the wide range of options they had three years ago, when they could have prevented the war from happening in the first place.
Let me start off by saying I never believed in this war. Not only was it completely obvious to anyone possessing judgment that invading Iraq was a bad idea, a waste of resources, and a guaranteed distraction from our struggle against Islamic terrorism, but Bush was absolutely the wrong commander in chief for this or any other war.
Bush is a completely political president. His concern for policy exists insofar as a selective adoption of backward conservative dogma is a concern for policy. He is stubborn not as those with strong beliefs is stubborn (I am unconvinced his beliefs extend beyond his belief in his infallibility and his desire to protect the investor class from the evils of taxes and regulation), but as children are stubborn. He is glib. He is not thoughtful. He lacks the kind of empathy and sense of responsibility that troubled fellow lousy Texas president Johnson's sleep over VietNam War casualties. This was clear from the outset. No such man deserves to be commander in chief.
Insofar as American soldiers are central to the occupation, that American prestige is tied into the war, and that grave consequences of the war will strike America hard, it is our war. But it is Bush's war just as significantly. It is hard to imagine this war without Bush or someone equally foolish.
If anyone should pay for this war it should be Bush. Why the warhawks of my party seem so concerned about providing Bush this cover, I don't understand.
Monday, August 15, 2005
jots
- You start to regret, ever so slightly, becoming an artist when, on a trip ferrying your paints and other materials to a new studio, you spill almost half a gallon of turquoise paint in the trunk of your car. This wouldn't happen if you were just about anything else.
- Sometimes I think there's nothing to recommend Florida except the weather. Of course, today, it was 90-some degrees until an electrical storm (which, in this part of Florida, seems to happen every day after lunch) dropped an inch or two of rain and cut out power all over town. Which was really exciting because the stoplights were out. This is bad enough, but Florida drivers don't exactly have a reputation for sanity and competence.
At an intersection in front of me two white trucks were stopped in the left lane. I eased myself into the right lane and tiptoed up to the line looking to see if anyone was crossing the opposite direction. The truck on my left, hauling a no-doubt soaked mattress, was so far up I couldn't see. he gestured to me- it looked like a "go" signal. But then he proceeded to attempt a right turn from the left lane. It was madness, but only to be expected.
- I think I have seen geckos crawling around my apartment complex. They are small and cute, as I expected, but also very quick, and move with an anxious gait. Their bodies cling flat to the wall. Cartoonish but also quite odd and unexpected.
-If I never find myself attempting to remove the stain of turquoise paint from carpet again, it will be too soon. I managed to ruin two towels and reduce my hands to hamburger, and the trunk still looks like a Martian crime scene.
- Sometimes I think there's nothing to recommend Florida except the weather. Of course, today, it was 90-some degrees until an electrical storm (which, in this part of Florida, seems to happen every day after lunch) dropped an inch or two of rain and cut out power all over town. Which was really exciting because the stoplights were out. This is bad enough, but Florida drivers don't exactly have a reputation for sanity and competence.
At an intersection in front of me two white trucks were stopped in the left lane. I eased myself into the right lane and tiptoed up to the line looking to see if anyone was crossing the opposite direction. The truck on my left, hauling a no-doubt soaked mattress, was so far up I couldn't see. he gestured to me- it looked like a "go" signal. But then he proceeded to attempt a right turn from the left lane. It was madness, but only to be expected.
- I think I have seen geckos crawling around my apartment complex. They are small and cute, as I expected, but also very quick, and move with an anxious gait. Their bodies cling flat to the wall. Cartoonish but also quite odd and unexpected.
-If I never find myself attempting to remove the stain of turquoise paint from carpet again, it will be too soon. I managed to ruin two towels and reduce my hands to hamburger, and the trunk still looks like a Martian crime scene.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Bobo and Constructive Arguments
I was watching a bit of the Chris Matthews show (ugh) and the panel was, of course, discussing Iraq. The consensus was that the war wasn't winnable and that the troops would be drawing down in the coming months. Then they started talking about the Democrats.
And David Brooks entered into one of the best examples of contradictory doublespeak I have ever seen. He praised Biden and Clinton (ya know, Hitlery) because of their "constructive arguments" regarding Iraq. What he meant was that Biden and Clinton are hawks, advocating an increase of troops in Iraq just as that is becoming increasingly unpopular and unlikely. Matthews sort of confronted him on it- how can Biden and Clinton be "constructive" when they are so far outside of reality? How exactly.
It was classic Washington insider nonsense. Everybody is turning on this war, but if, as a politician, you speak a word against it, the enforcers in Washington armchairs will brand you negative and faithless and weak.
This war was a direct result of phony tough talk, feeding more phony tough talk, until having reservations about the war meant you loved Saddam. Idiotic fake-toughness, especially among the Washington media mandarins, has consequences.
Also- who the hell is Julia Reed?
And David Brooks entered into one of the best examples of contradictory doublespeak I have ever seen. He praised Biden and Clinton (ya know, Hitlery) because of their "constructive arguments" regarding Iraq. What he meant was that Biden and Clinton are hawks, advocating an increase of troops in Iraq just as that is becoming increasingly unpopular and unlikely. Matthews sort of confronted him on it- how can Biden and Clinton be "constructive" when they are so far outside of reality? How exactly.
It was classic Washington insider nonsense. Everybody is turning on this war, but if, as a politician, you speak a word against it, the enforcers in Washington armchairs will brand you negative and faithless and weak.
This war was a direct result of phony tough talk, feeding more phony tough talk, until having reservations about the war meant you loved Saddam. Idiotic fake-toughness, especially among the Washington media mandarins, has consequences.
Also- who the hell is Julia Reed?
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Wimp Effect
Via Atrios, I discovered a Nation article that details the risk aversion and reflexive hawkishness of the Washington Democratic foreign policy establishment. It is both baffling and saddening.
One can't help but imagine that, at root, the reason behind this hawkishness is that both the left and right are trapped in worldviews informed by fundamental misconceptions of what constitutes strength, and how one comes to be regarded as strong. But while the Nation article is as close to a clear-eyed exploration of why Democrats like Biden and Hillary feel a need to back up Bush on the Iraq war, it seems to have internalized some of the habits of mind that are responsible for the Democrats' weakness.
Notice how the author, Ari Berman, describes Holbrooke's bizarre declaration that "anything less than an invasion of Iraq would undermine international law" as a tack to the right of Bush. It doesn't seem like much, but this little use of right represents assumptions about right and left that are a major part of why Democrats don't get elected president unless the economy is in the pooper and times are relatively peaceful. That little use of "right" represents the assumption, held instinctively by millions of Americans, that Democrats are a bunch of limpwristed sissies who run away from a punch.
There is nothing so dangerous for a presidential candidate to be seen as a wimp. It is a guarantee of failure.
Elected Democrats are becoming an endangered species because they take these received assumptions, that being strong means adopting a strong, or right-wing, or Republican position on foreign policy. It's clear that the American people don't want a pacifist as their Commander in Chief or head of State, but it's equally clear that holding positions that are both against one's conscience and mindlessly warlike is no kind of prescription for gaining the public's trust. Democrats need to stop assuming a Republican's views of strength.
Strength is not invading a country that isn't a threat to the US, getting embroiled in a guerilla war, spending billions of dollars, and inviting a civil war and/or the strengthening of a far more dangerous and powerful country next door. Moreover, strength is not agreeing with the parties that started this war at all costs because one is afraid of being called a chicken.
The position that the "Strategic Class", as Berman calls them, has staked out has not ensured that a single Democrat will be regarded with respect. It has ensured that the war begin just as planned, and that any attempt of establishment Democrats to reflect the will of the people, who are now largely in favor of a pull-out from Iraq and will continue to be so until it is done, will be seen as flip-flopping and pandering, those two being signs of weakness as well.
If I were king for a day, I'd call for a pullout of 80% or so of our soldiers over the next year. And I'd have a conversation with the American people about the Iraq War. The American people need to know that the Iraq War was a mistake, that it was good for the terrorists and bad for us, and that the Bush administration is to blame. They need to know that the way to defeat terrorists is rarely to invade states and never to invade states who had nothing to do with those terrorists. The American people need to know, and we need to persuade them, that the assumptions the Bush administration has made about the War on Terrorism and the actions that have flowed from those assumptions, have hurt America.
I'm not sure who I read this from, but one of the blogosphere's more astute writers (or perhaps Rick Perlstein) had a comment about the DLC. The DLC (in addition to advising that major democratic weakness of fighting not to lose rather than fighting to win) look at the political future and assume every Republican strength and weakness and every Democratic strength and weakness are going to be the same into the future.
Part of the reason the Democratic establishment seems (and is) so reactive is because it has given up trying to persuade people. One of the strengths that the Republican party and its various organs, including talk radio, the think tanks, and cable news, has is that it has institutionalized persuasion. Persuasion is a tricky business, and it should probably not be left up to people like myself.
But here's something: way too many Americans believe in creationism. Way too many Americans think America was founded a Christian nation in the sense that George Washington was Pat Robertson to Jefferson's Jerry Falwell. Way too many Americans think that gays are ruining marriage. People aren't ignorant by accident- something happened to make them like that. Instead of shrugging and saying, sure, lotsa people believe in intelligent design and wouldn't it be arrogant not to pretend this ignorance was embarrassing, as the otherwise sharp Matthew Yglesias has been known to do, how about somebody try to inform the public.
Before anyone begins to assume my recommendation to a politican running for office is to run as a full-throated secularist, I think the task of disabusing Americans of backward notions is the duty of people in think tanks, on blogs, on the radio, and on television. Politicians need to be courageous, but you rarely hear a conservative politician say something that hasn't been anticipated by conservative talk show hosts or writers. This is why a figure like Jon Stewart is so important. Like Bill O'Reilly, he gets to stand up there and speak for himself rather than a party or a movement as such. He gets to attack the idiocy of opposing gay marriage. He's funny, goofy, smart and decent. He has his own show.
People like hearing common sense. What people have been hearing for years, on radio and television etc., is that common sense is Republican common sense. I.e. The poor are poor because they're lazy failures; social programs = communism/welfare queens; the best way to respond to jihadist terrorism is to attack any available Muslim or Arab; treating people who aren't like us with respect is political correctness; feminists are out to cut off your dick.
What we need is Democratic common sense, like: We need universal health insurance- not only will it be fairer, but cheaper; If two dudes marrying eachother hundreds of miles away is enough to ruin your marriage, your marriage is already screwed; War ought to be a last resort- it wasn't with Iraq, and what happened- the guy didn't have any WMDs; The Republican party is the party of the rich and selfish; Equal rights are never special rights (corollary: hate crime laws will prosecute black guys who beat up white guys, gays who beat up heteros, and atheists who beat up Christians); Torture is immoral, indefensible, anathema to every major religion, and it doesn't work; "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
These aren't superjumbos as such, but Democrats remain, in the popular imagination, whackos and/or weak. Staking out distinctively non-Republican positions removes the perception of weakness, and expressing one's beliefs in a common-sense, non-ideological, non-wonky way makes one appear sane. The more Democrats can get their views out there like this, the more Democrats there will be. People change. Thank goodness.
One can't help but imagine that, at root, the reason behind this hawkishness is that both the left and right are trapped in worldviews informed by fundamental misconceptions of what constitutes strength, and how one comes to be regarded as strong. But while the Nation article is as close to a clear-eyed exploration of why Democrats like Biden and Hillary feel a need to back up Bush on the Iraq war, it seems to have internalized some of the habits of mind that are responsible for the Democrats' weakness.
Notice how the author, Ari Berman, describes Holbrooke's bizarre declaration that "anything less than an invasion of Iraq would undermine international law" as a tack to the right of Bush. It doesn't seem like much, but this little use of right represents assumptions about right and left that are a major part of why Democrats don't get elected president unless the economy is in the pooper and times are relatively peaceful. That little use of "right" represents the assumption, held instinctively by millions of Americans, that Democrats are a bunch of limpwristed sissies who run away from a punch.
There is nothing so dangerous for a presidential candidate to be seen as a wimp. It is a guarantee of failure.
Elected Democrats are becoming an endangered species because they take these received assumptions, that being strong means adopting a strong, or right-wing, or Republican position on foreign policy. It's clear that the American people don't want a pacifist as their Commander in Chief or head of State, but it's equally clear that holding positions that are both against one's conscience and mindlessly warlike is no kind of prescription for gaining the public's trust. Democrats need to stop assuming a Republican's views of strength.
Strength is not invading a country that isn't a threat to the US, getting embroiled in a guerilla war, spending billions of dollars, and inviting a civil war and/or the strengthening of a far more dangerous and powerful country next door. Moreover, strength is not agreeing with the parties that started this war at all costs because one is afraid of being called a chicken.
The position that the "Strategic Class", as Berman calls them, has staked out has not ensured that a single Democrat will be regarded with respect. It has ensured that the war begin just as planned, and that any attempt of establishment Democrats to reflect the will of the people, who are now largely in favor of a pull-out from Iraq and will continue to be so until it is done, will be seen as flip-flopping and pandering, those two being signs of weakness as well.
If I were king for a day, I'd call for a pullout of 80% or so of our soldiers over the next year. And I'd have a conversation with the American people about the Iraq War. The American people need to know that the Iraq War was a mistake, that it was good for the terrorists and bad for us, and that the Bush administration is to blame. They need to know that the way to defeat terrorists is rarely to invade states and never to invade states who had nothing to do with those terrorists. The American people need to know, and we need to persuade them, that the assumptions the Bush administration has made about the War on Terrorism and the actions that have flowed from those assumptions, have hurt America.
I'm not sure who I read this from, but one of the blogosphere's more astute writers (or perhaps Rick Perlstein) had a comment about the DLC. The DLC (in addition to advising that major democratic weakness of fighting not to lose rather than fighting to win) look at the political future and assume every Republican strength and weakness and every Democratic strength and weakness are going to be the same into the future.
Part of the reason the Democratic establishment seems (and is) so reactive is because it has given up trying to persuade people. One of the strengths that the Republican party and its various organs, including talk radio, the think tanks, and cable news, has is that it has institutionalized persuasion. Persuasion is a tricky business, and it should probably not be left up to people like myself.
But here's something: way too many Americans believe in creationism. Way too many Americans think America was founded a Christian nation in the sense that George Washington was Pat Robertson to Jefferson's Jerry Falwell. Way too many Americans think that gays are ruining marriage. People aren't ignorant by accident- something happened to make them like that. Instead of shrugging and saying, sure, lotsa people believe in intelligent design and wouldn't it be arrogant not to pretend this ignorance was embarrassing, as the otherwise sharp Matthew Yglesias has been known to do, how about somebody try to inform the public.
Before anyone begins to assume my recommendation to a politican running for office is to run as a full-throated secularist, I think the task of disabusing Americans of backward notions is the duty of people in think tanks, on blogs, on the radio, and on television. Politicians need to be courageous, but you rarely hear a conservative politician say something that hasn't been anticipated by conservative talk show hosts or writers. This is why a figure like Jon Stewart is so important. Like Bill O'Reilly, he gets to stand up there and speak for himself rather than a party or a movement as such. He gets to attack the idiocy of opposing gay marriage. He's funny, goofy, smart and decent. He has his own show.
People like hearing common sense. What people have been hearing for years, on radio and television etc., is that common sense is Republican common sense. I.e. The poor are poor because they're lazy failures; social programs = communism/welfare queens; the best way to respond to jihadist terrorism is to attack any available Muslim or Arab; treating people who aren't like us with respect is political correctness; feminists are out to cut off your dick.
What we need is Democratic common sense, like: We need universal health insurance- not only will it be fairer, but cheaper; If two dudes marrying eachother hundreds of miles away is enough to ruin your marriage, your marriage is already screwed; War ought to be a last resort- it wasn't with Iraq, and what happened- the guy didn't have any WMDs; The Republican party is the party of the rich and selfish; Equal rights are never special rights (corollary: hate crime laws will prosecute black guys who beat up white guys, gays who beat up heteros, and atheists who beat up Christians); Torture is immoral, indefensible, anathema to every major religion, and it doesn't work; "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
These aren't superjumbos as such, but Democrats remain, in the popular imagination, whackos and/or weak. Staking out distinctively non-Republican positions removes the perception of weakness, and expressing one's beliefs in a common-sense, non-ideological, non-wonky way makes one appear sane. The more Democrats can get their views out there like this, the more Democrats there will be. People change. Thank goodness.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Serving my country
I guess I admire Paul Hackett, the Iraq War veteran from Ohio who almost unseated his rival in one of the redder districts of Ohio, for both his moxie in fighting in a war he didn't believe in and his moxie in contesting a basically unwinnable district.
I guess my problem is I overwhelmingly fear the prospect of failure and death. But this is the sort of fear that paralyzes but does nothing to prevent those consequences. In the end the paralysis makes you a failure, and times passage kills you.
But I wasn't about to sign up myself, despite a reasonably able body and a capable if not entirely sound mind. I don't trust people all that well, but in particular I didn't trust George W. Bush.
Reagan has been described as enigmatic, perhaps unknowable, despite his significant charisma and charm, and I think George is similar. George's father was not like this. As a child, I could sense his discomfort on television. I think being telegenic is meaningful on some level. Modern TV politics is basically Coke vs. Pepsi- not in the sense that the parties are similar. They aren't. The Republican Party is significantly more evil.
Things that happen on the other side of the television aren't real. I got that when I was a toddler. Even when they tell the truth, they aren't real. GHW Bush, it seems to me, didn't have the horse sense to be unreal for the cameras, to slip into the same oblivion as we find on a soap opera.
I think this is why Howard Dean made so much sense to me, and why Bill Clinton, on some fundamental level, didn't. When I was first introduced to Dean I was really shocked. I had never seen a politician talk like that. It was kind of coarse and real and amateur. Not like hearing a well-then common-sense fave outside-the-beltway politican type do that irritating simulacrum of realness, the rhetorical equivalent of a geriatric Wal-Mart greeter (Is there some reason why these folks are always 85 or in wheelchairs and seemingly deserving of a peaceful retirement?). Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was that very kind of genuine. Only the insincere can truly persuade you of their sincerity, and though I thought he was a damn good president after an unbroken string over the previous decades of incompetents, radicals, dickweeds or some combination of above, he was undeniably slick.
The presidency in the US remains pretty imperial despite the corrective which should have come, in a big way, as a result of Watergate. And, you know, I have some faith in the American people, but not so much I expect them to see George W Bush and see the petty, slimy, self-impressed wimp I see instead of some great protector. (Has there been a historical figure outside of a totalitarian state who was lionized so far outside of what is credible? Those sages over at Powerline, without a hint of irony, just ascribed
I guess my problem is I overwhelmingly fear the prospect of failure and death. But this is the sort of fear that paralyzes but does nothing to prevent those consequences. In the end the paralysis makes you a failure, and times passage kills you.
But I wasn't about to sign up myself, despite a reasonably able body and a capable if not entirely sound mind. I don't trust people all that well, but in particular I didn't trust George W. Bush.
Reagan has been described as enigmatic, perhaps unknowable, despite his significant charisma and charm, and I think George is similar. George's father was not like this. As a child, I could sense his discomfort on television. I think being telegenic is meaningful on some level. Modern TV politics is basically Coke vs. Pepsi- not in the sense that the parties are similar. They aren't. The Republican Party is significantly more evil.
Things that happen on the other side of the television aren't real. I got that when I was a toddler. Even when they tell the truth, they aren't real. GHW Bush, it seems to me, didn't have the horse sense to be unreal for the cameras, to slip into the same oblivion as we find on a soap opera.
I think this is why Howard Dean made so much sense to me, and why Bill Clinton, on some fundamental level, didn't. When I was first introduced to Dean I was really shocked. I had never seen a politician talk like that. It was kind of coarse and real and amateur. Not like hearing a well-then common-sense fave outside-the-beltway politican type do that irritating simulacrum of realness, the rhetorical equivalent of a geriatric Wal-Mart greeter (Is there some reason why these folks are always 85 or in wheelchairs and seemingly deserving of a peaceful retirement?). Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was that very kind of genuine. Only the insincere can truly persuade you of their sincerity, and though I thought he was a damn good president after an unbroken string over the previous decades of incompetents, radicals, dickweeds or some combination of above, he was undeniably slick.
The presidency in the US remains pretty imperial despite the corrective which should have come, in a big way, as a result of Watergate. And, you know, I have some faith in the American people, but not so much I expect them to see George W Bush and see the petty, slimy, self-impressed wimp I see instead of some great protector. (Has there been a historical figure outside of a totalitarian state who was lionized so far outside of what is credible? Those sages over at Powerline, without a hint of irony, just ascribed
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Novaksplosion
I have to say its nice that Bob Novak, one of my favorite cable news vampires, decided to freak/chicken out, say a bad word, march offscreen, and get himself suspended, all on live TV.
I won't miss him one bit. Anyway I don't have cable so whatever.
But I have to say the slowness with which the Plame saga is marching on is bothersome. The wheels of justice turn slowly.
I won't miss him one bit. Anyway I don't have cable so whatever.
But I have to say the slowness with which the Plame saga is marching on is bothersome. The wheels of justice turn slowly.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Or....
Another way of saying that is to say that, although we hear so much about the conservative intellectual tradition, conservatism isn't really an ideology, but a synonym for the Republican party. Brooks, as moderate as his soft voice and lack of obviously Limbaughian spleen may make him seem, is a party man. That's all one need know about him.
If he, like Rove, had a choice between party and country, it's hard to imagine he wouldn't make Rove's choice.
If he, like Rove, had a choice between party and country, it's hard to imagine he wouldn't make Rove's choice.
Caught flat-footed
I caught a moment of the Lehrer News hour on PBS and didn't like what I saw.
A little Mark Shields- David Brooks Crossfire type action about the Plamegate. It was shocking to me the persistence of old rotten disinformation in this debate, particularly from David Brooks, whose reputation has long been that of a reasonable and moderate conservative.
Among empty falsehoods- the old chestnut that Wilson insisted Cheney had sent him. Any careful reading of his NY Times op ed demonstrate this is not true. But most alarming was Brooks' unshaken belief that Iraq had in fact sought Nigerien yellowcake. The basis for this is apparently Sue Schmidt's erroneous assertion in an old column that the Senate investigation had confirmed an attempted purchase from 1998. It should shock Brooks, then, that it was not Saddam who had sought said uranium but rather the Ayatollah Khamenei, as a helpful correction on that Schmidt story tells us.
Karl Rove was wrong. If Cooper's email is typical of Rove's mad dash to mislead, Rove identified Valerie Plame Wilson as the person who had sent Wilson to Niger. We now know that isn't true. She didn't have the authority. Rove wasn't right on any merits. Wilson was right about Saddam's failure to seek, or have any relevant channel to seek, Nigerien uranium. The Iraqis didn't actually have any of these WMD precursors. Iraq didn't have any WMDs. Rove was trying to preempt a critic of a war fought on false premises. Karl Rove has had a long illustrious career of spreading lies and doubt upon people who have opposed his employers. Shields was right, then, to call Brooks' talking point (and there is no question that that is exactly what it was) that Rove was trying to altruistically steer Cooper among others away from Wilsons falsehoods one of the more absurd talking points imaginable.
Brooks of course said that this is just liberals assuming Rove is the devil himself. But when you've been spreading lies about people, setting up dirty tricks, and acting like a machiavellian dickhead for decades, you don't deserve this slack. It's almost sad to see Brooks, who, although he maintains this amiable simpleton persona, is clearly no idiot, carrying water for one of the most powerful and despicable men in a city of powerful, despicable men. Reasonableness, really, isn't writing pseudosociological sketches of far-off red state people in a way that both flatters its largely liberal, bourgeouis audience and convinces them they are insufficiently pious and salt-of the-earthy. Reasonableness, really, is every once in a while, not carrying water for your deeply corrupt party.
A little Mark Shields- David Brooks Crossfire type action about the Plamegate. It was shocking to me the persistence of old rotten disinformation in this debate, particularly from David Brooks, whose reputation has long been that of a reasonable and moderate conservative.
Among empty falsehoods- the old chestnut that Wilson insisted Cheney had sent him. Any careful reading of his NY Times op ed demonstrate this is not true. But most alarming was Brooks' unshaken belief that Iraq had in fact sought Nigerien yellowcake. The basis for this is apparently Sue Schmidt's erroneous assertion in an old column that the Senate investigation had confirmed an attempted purchase from 1998. It should shock Brooks, then, that it was not Saddam who had sought said uranium but rather the Ayatollah Khamenei, as a helpful correction on that Schmidt story tells us.
Karl Rove was wrong. If Cooper's email is typical of Rove's mad dash to mislead, Rove identified Valerie Plame Wilson as the person who had sent Wilson to Niger. We now know that isn't true. She didn't have the authority. Rove wasn't right on any merits. Wilson was right about Saddam's failure to seek, or have any relevant channel to seek, Nigerien uranium. The Iraqis didn't actually have any of these WMD precursors. Iraq didn't have any WMDs. Rove was trying to preempt a critic of a war fought on false premises. Karl Rove has had a long illustrious career of spreading lies and doubt upon people who have opposed his employers. Shields was right, then, to call Brooks' talking point (and there is no question that that is exactly what it was) that Rove was trying to altruistically steer Cooper among others away from Wilsons falsehoods one of the more absurd talking points imaginable.
Brooks of course said that this is just liberals assuming Rove is the devil himself. But when you've been spreading lies about people, setting up dirty tricks, and acting like a machiavellian dickhead for decades, you don't deserve this slack. It's almost sad to see Brooks, who, although he maintains this amiable simpleton persona, is clearly no idiot, carrying water for one of the most powerful and despicable men in a city of powerful, despicable men. Reasonableness, really, isn't writing pseudosociological sketches of far-off red state people in a way that both flatters its largely liberal, bourgeouis audience and convinces them they are insufficiently pious and salt-of the-earthy. Reasonableness, really, is every once in a while, not carrying water for your deeply corrupt party.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Vanity
"No matter what you think of me, you must accept that no small component of this performance is vanity- mine. I suppose some of the people in this room are my fans. Thank you. The presence of fans does little to mitigate the factors of vanity and caprice in this performance here.
"I abandoned my fans and took to seclusion. Worse, for me, at least, I abandoned my bandmates. I did so out of an exagerrated and mistaken notion of my own brilliance and musical prowess. I did so out of an antisocial desire not merely to be the loudest voice in the room, but the only one. To be honest, it was helpful for me.
"I indeed needed a bit of silence, to remember why I had forsaken a potentially lucrative and fulfilling career in medicine for a life of sleeping in vans and on strangers' couches, of smoke and beer stains, of poseurs and record companies, and of that food of the gods, rock & roll.
"As much as I cringe at the vanity of trying to bring all these back after forsaking them, I hold out hope that you will again welcome me into your hearts and ears. And, as they say every corner of this beautiful world, From Helsinki to Capetown, From Seattle to Taipei, Let's Rock!"
-Peter Rios of Owl
"I abandoned my fans and took to seclusion. Worse, for me, at least, I abandoned my bandmates. I did so out of an exagerrated and mistaken notion of my own brilliance and musical prowess. I did so out of an antisocial desire not merely to be the loudest voice in the room, but the only one. To be honest, it was helpful for me.
"I indeed needed a bit of silence, to remember why I had forsaken a potentially lucrative and fulfilling career in medicine for a life of sleeping in vans and on strangers' couches, of smoke and beer stains, of poseurs and record companies, and of that food of the gods, rock & roll.
"As much as I cringe at the vanity of trying to bring all these back after forsaking them, I hold out hope that you will again welcome me into your hearts and ears. And, as they say every corner of this beautiful world, From Helsinki to Capetown, From Seattle to Taipei, Let's Rock!"
-Peter Rios of Owl
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
More Horse
From Eugene Volokh we get a discussion of Horsemilkgate from a more right of center perspective. I agree with much of what Eugene says. I honestly find nothing wrong with Laura's lame jokes, particularly in light of the denunciations launched by some folks at NRO and by Michelle Malkin, who is quoted in Volokh's post.
I do disagree in that I find nothing wrong with a bit of nasty vulgarism. For example, if Whoopi Goldberg's mentioned remarks employing some sort of vulgar puns on the president's name were funny, then great. Since it's Whoopi, it probably wasn't funny. But still- who cares? Nobody was hurt. It wasn't a public event. The manufacture uproar in its wake was another instance of censorious blue-state conservatives making a mountain out of a molehill, which they certainly excel at.
So, back to Michelle Malkin. In addition to the fact that her outrage seems entirely manufactured, and she writes gushingly about some Heritage foundation jerk delivering an address calling for all the wingnuts in the audience to resist coursening the rhetoric of political discourse (I wonder if Ann Coulter, author of Treason, or Michael Savage, author of Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, were in attendence), she lets forth this gem:
Actually, Michelle should not only lighten up, but grow up as well.
But something about what she wrote made me think about that Michelle Maglalang. Her career owes a fair share of its success to her being perceived as attractive and exotic.
Quite a few right wing female pundits, including Ann Coulter and Malkin, owe some of their popularity to the fact that they are photogenic. I don't find them attractive, but much is certainly made of Coulter's long legs and blond hair. Pundits like Malkin can go out taking potshots at "Hollyweird" or insist that they are G-rated, but it seems odd to do that when half of what they're selling is sex.
There's something beautiful in the contradictions presented by figures like Coulter, Malkin, and, say, Dinesh D'Souza. One of the patterns of right-wing punditocracy of my lifetime is a tendency to play against type.
Coulter writes hateful things about feminism and women, Malkin justifies internment camps, D'Souza gives racism a non-white face. It fits into a category of argument the right uses elsewhere. In the place of even-the-female and even-the-ethnic appeals, we have, of course, even-the-liberal or even-the-Democrat appeals.
Figures like Zell Miller, large chunks of The New Republic magazine, and Ed Koch are frequently used to give cover to ugly and thoroughgoingly conservative arguments and policies.
I honestly don't think that this kind of behavior, whether it comes from Ann Coulter or Ed Koch, has its root in some sort of deep-seated self-loathing. But it strikes me as sad that people would debase themselves to an audience of angry Republican white Christian heterosexual men who would regard them as beneath contempt if they were working any job other than attacking Hillary Clinton for a living.
I do disagree in that I find nothing wrong with a bit of nasty vulgarism. For example, if Whoopi Goldberg's mentioned remarks employing some sort of vulgar puns on the president's name were funny, then great. Since it's Whoopi, it probably wasn't funny. But still- who cares? Nobody was hurt. It wasn't a public event. The manufacture uproar in its wake was another instance of censorious blue-state conservatives making a mountain out of a molehill, which they certainly excel at.
So, back to Michelle Malkin. In addition to the fact that her outrage seems entirely manufactured, and she writes gushingly about some Heritage foundation jerk delivering an address calling for all the wingnuts in the audience to resist coursening the rhetoric of political discourse (I wonder if Ann Coulter, author of Treason, or Michael Savage, author of Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, were in attendence), she lets forth this gem:
Lighten up, you say? No thanks. I'd rather be a G-rated conservative who can only make my kids giggle than a South Park/Desperate Housewives conservative whose goal is getting Richard Gere and Jane Fonda to snicker. Giving the Hollyweird Left the last laugh is not my idea of success. . . .
Actually, Michelle should not only lighten up, but grow up as well.
But something about what she wrote made me think about that Michelle Maglalang. Her career owes a fair share of its success to her being perceived as attractive and exotic.
Quite a few right wing female pundits, including Ann Coulter and Malkin, owe some of their popularity to the fact that they are photogenic. I don't find them attractive, but much is certainly made of Coulter's long legs and blond hair. Pundits like Malkin can go out taking potshots at "Hollyweird" or insist that they are G-rated, but it seems odd to do that when half of what they're selling is sex.
There's something beautiful in the contradictions presented by figures like Coulter, Malkin, and, say, Dinesh D'Souza. One of the patterns of right-wing punditocracy of my lifetime is a tendency to play against type.
Coulter writes hateful things about feminism and women, Malkin justifies internment camps, D'Souza gives racism a non-white face. It fits into a category of argument the right uses elsewhere. In the place of even-the-female and even-the-ethnic appeals, we have, of course, even-the-liberal or even-the-Democrat appeals.
Figures like Zell Miller, large chunks of The New Republic magazine, and Ed Koch are frequently used to give cover to ugly and thoroughgoingly conservative arguments and policies.
I honestly don't think that this kind of behavior, whether it comes from Ann Coulter or Ed Koch, has its root in some sort of deep-seated self-loathing. But it strikes me as sad that people would debase themselves to an audience of angry Republican white Christian heterosexual men who would regard them as beneath contempt if they were working any job other than attacking Hillary Clinton for a living.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Horses
Laura Bush tells a joke about the president masturbating a horse at one of those National Press shindigs.
What does the press do?
Well, I saw the execrable Brian Williams try to historicize Laura's raunchiness (she also talked about the Whitehouse gaggle of old broads, Condi, Karn Hughes, Lynne Cheney and herself going out to see Chippendales dancers, and the underlying theme of her routine was that the President was sexually boring) in the most insincere, unconvincing manner possible. Apparently Laura emasculating her husband on television is as significant as Betty Ford's campaign to remove the taboo in discussing and dealing with substance abuse.
The clip they showed on that show cut off the part about Bush "milking" a horse. Heh.
Bush is no longer a popular president. Laura Bush's horse dick jokes are neither so novel they deserve network anchors pretending they mean something, nor are they so funny they deserve this kind of pass. And there's the obvious double standard. If Hillary had joked about Bill jerking off a horse it would've been treated like she performed a satanic rite on stage involving aborted fetuses.
And of course we have the only editorial columnist for the New York Times dumber than David Brooks, John Tierney, explains the whole thing proves liberals are out of touch. (!) Listen, Laura Bush reading shitty jokes about horse schlongs doesn't make me think about her any differently, and it shouldn't. Laura Bush isn't a prim librarian-she's a politician's husband, one that lacks any sort of personality as far as I can tell (I may be wrong about this, she might just be bad on TV, and that's no crime). And Laura Bush talking about Chippendales doesn't mean shit about fictional red country.
Another note about Tierney: I'm tired of pampered conservative columnists who live in New York City talking about how regular folks feel sneered at by "elites." (A) What would Tierney know about it? And (B) What is with the martyr campaign? In the world of the conservative pundit, being a regular ol' red state schmoe makes one a figure of elite ridicule, a victim of Jon Stewart's terrible gaze of disapproval. In the real world, dumbshit conservatives run the country, "liberal" is a dirty word, and Laura Bush's horse dick jokes are some sort of epic accomplishment, like she came on stage and performed heart surgery.
What does the press do?
Well, I saw the execrable Brian Williams try to historicize Laura's raunchiness (she also talked about the Whitehouse gaggle of old broads, Condi, Karn Hughes, Lynne Cheney and herself going out to see Chippendales dancers, and the underlying theme of her routine was that the President was sexually boring) in the most insincere, unconvincing manner possible. Apparently Laura emasculating her husband on television is as significant as Betty Ford's campaign to remove the taboo in discussing and dealing with substance abuse.
The clip they showed on that show cut off the part about Bush "milking" a horse. Heh.
Bush is no longer a popular president. Laura Bush's horse dick jokes are neither so novel they deserve network anchors pretending they mean something, nor are they so funny they deserve this kind of pass. And there's the obvious double standard. If Hillary had joked about Bill jerking off a horse it would've been treated like she performed a satanic rite on stage involving aborted fetuses.
And of course we have the only editorial columnist for the New York Times dumber than David Brooks, John Tierney, explains the whole thing proves liberals are out of touch. (!) Listen, Laura Bush reading shitty jokes about horse schlongs doesn't make me think about her any differently, and it shouldn't. Laura Bush isn't a prim librarian-she's a politician's husband, one that lacks any sort of personality as far as I can tell (I may be wrong about this, she might just be bad on TV, and that's no crime). And Laura Bush talking about Chippendales doesn't mean shit about fictional red country.
Another note about Tierney: I'm tired of pampered conservative columnists who live in New York City talking about how regular folks feel sneered at by "elites." (A) What would Tierney know about it? And (B) What is with the martyr campaign? In the world of the conservative pundit, being a regular ol' red state schmoe makes one a figure of elite ridicule, a victim of Jon Stewart's terrible gaze of disapproval. In the real world, dumbshit conservatives run the country, "liberal" is a dirty word, and Laura Bush's horse dick jokes are some sort of epic accomplishment, like she came on stage and performed heart surgery.
Saturday, April 09, 2005
New Frames
Josh Marshall is absolutely right. Democrats do have to embrace their destiny as the party of grownups.
There was a lot of crowing when Bush came into office on 2000 that "the grownups" were finally in charge. But what has it come to? Blowing trillions of dollars in projected surpluses on tax cuts for the rich and industrial welfare. Saber-rattling jingoism and unnecessary war. Culture war politics. Veiled threats to the judiciary because it isn't in the pocket of the Christian Right. Sleaze from DeLay and company.
And all this time the economy has been running rough- there are just as many jobs today as there were 5 years ago when there were 10 million fewer Americans of working age. Gas prices are exploding. Life is tougher for average Americans today, and the Republican solution is to try to phase out Social Security and cut services for the most vulnerable Americans.
I have not, not do I truly intend to, read the Gospel of George Lakoff. It's clear that Democrats need to shed the ugly, Republican constructed aspects of their image, but one of the primary arguments in his latest book, that Democrats need to recast ourselves as gender-neutral nurturant parents, is absurd. Gender-neutral? Ya kidding?
How about this- Democrats cast as reponsible parents, Republicans as crappy, self-serving, incompetent parents.
Ezra Klein has written some good things along this line, but I think these need to be fleshed out.
Responsible parent doesn't have to mean boring parent. Responsible parents protect their children, they're invested in their children's happiness, they understand boundaries, they treat their kids like human beings.
They don't, for example, booze or gamble away their kids' college money. They don't arbitrarily mete out punishment. They don't live vicariously through their children.
Responsibility confers a certain kind of strength. You can't have faith that the father will protect you when he's left the house chasing after the wrong guy. The responsible parent doesn't do that.
A lot of the imagery built around Republican foreign policy is based in a half-assed pro-democracy idealism. Half-assed because it's symbolism to the degree that it actually relates to the world. We live in a pretty spectacle-hungry society, so that symbolism works on some level. This half-assed idealism has crept into most corners of Republican policy and politics, and I think this is dangerous for the Republicans.
I think, at the current moment, 5 major issues are hurting the Republicans, and I think this Responsible/Irresponsible binary can draw them together.
1. The Social Security debacle
2. Terry Schiavo etc.
3. High gas prices
4. Iraq
5. Tom Delay and attendant scandals.
We have, from the Republican side, respectively: buffoonish pseudoidealism; the feds reaching into our private lives; inaction in the face of a long term problem; adventurism that has resulted in a lot of death and not a lot of progress; and sleaze.
Democrats should demonstrate, likewise: a realism and an attachment to collective financial security; an understanding that the the government ought to respect families; a long-term, sober investment in improved efficiency, {possibly an investment in mass transit}, alternative energy sources, and thus a decreased dependence on foreign oil; and a committment to good, clean government.
It isn't sexy, but i'm not worried about that. One of the good things about a frame based on responsibility, rather than nurturing exactly, is that responsibility becomes a way to cast religious right culture politics as an attachment to divisive trivia. Mature adults can disagree on cultural hot-button issues, but threatening judges, grandstanding, and imposing the federal government in order to try to get your way isn't called for.
i think using maturity and responsibility as frames for the Democrats is probably a good way to ply educated people bothered by religious fanaticism and lower middle class people who are feeling increased financial burdens away from a Republican party increasingly under the reins of religious fanatics and a messianic agenda of decreased capital gains taxes and an eroded safety net.
There was a lot of crowing when Bush came into office on 2000 that "the grownups" were finally in charge. But what has it come to? Blowing trillions of dollars in projected surpluses on tax cuts for the rich and industrial welfare. Saber-rattling jingoism and unnecessary war. Culture war politics. Veiled threats to the judiciary because it isn't in the pocket of the Christian Right. Sleaze from DeLay and company.
And all this time the economy has been running rough- there are just as many jobs today as there were 5 years ago when there were 10 million fewer Americans of working age. Gas prices are exploding. Life is tougher for average Americans today, and the Republican solution is to try to phase out Social Security and cut services for the most vulnerable Americans.
I have not, not do I truly intend to, read the Gospel of George Lakoff. It's clear that Democrats need to shed the ugly, Republican constructed aspects of their image, but one of the primary arguments in his latest book, that Democrats need to recast ourselves as gender-neutral nurturant parents, is absurd. Gender-neutral? Ya kidding?
How about this- Democrats cast as reponsible parents, Republicans as crappy, self-serving, incompetent parents.
Ezra Klein has written some good things along this line, but I think these need to be fleshed out.
Responsible parent doesn't have to mean boring parent. Responsible parents protect their children, they're invested in their children's happiness, they understand boundaries, they treat their kids like human beings.
They don't, for example, booze or gamble away their kids' college money. They don't arbitrarily mete out punishment. They don't live vicariously through their children.
Responsibility confers a certain kind of strength. You can't have faith that the father will protect you when he's left the house chasing after the wrong guy. The responsible parent doesn't do that.
A lot of the imagery built around Republican foreign policy is based in a half-assed pro-democracy idealism. Half-assed because it's symbolism to the degree that it actually relates to the world. We live in a pretty spectacle-hungry society, so that symbolism works on some level. This half-assed idealism has crept into most corners of Republican policy and politics, and I think this is dangerous for the Republicans.
I think, at the current moment, 5 major issues are hurting the Republicans, and I think this Responsible/Irresponsible binary can draw them together.
1. The Social Security debacle
2. Terry Schiavo etc.
3. High gas prices
4. Iraq
5. Tom Delay and attendant scandals.
We have, from the Republican side, respectively: buffoonish pseudoidealism; the feds reaching into our private lives; inaction in the face of a long term problem; adventurism that has resulted in a lot of death and not a lot of progress; and sleaze.
Democrats should demonstrate, likewise: a realism and an attachment to collective financial security; an understanding that the the government ought to respect families; a long-term, sober investment in improved efficiency, {possibly an investment in mass transit}, alternative energy sources, and thus a decreased dependence on foreign oil; and a committment to good, clean government.
It isn't sexy, but i'm not worried about that. One of the good things about a frame based on responsibility, rather than nurturing exactly, is that responsibility becomes a way to cast religious right culture politics as an attachment to divisive trivia. Mature adults can disagree on cultural hot-button issues, but threatening judges, grandstanding, and imposing the federal government in order to try to get your way isn't called for.
i think using maturity and responsibility as frames for the Democrats is probably a good way to ply educated people bothered by religious fanaticism and lower middle class people who are feeling increased financial burdens away from a Republican party increasingly under the reins of religious fanatics and a messianic agenda of decreased capital gains taxes and an eroded safety net.
Friday, April 01, 2005
Music
I'm not a musician, but I'm playing at being one.
I'm trying to record music for my fake band, Owl. It's about as hard a I thought it would be, even though the songs are covers and are being selected for their relative ease of performance. I've always been musically inclined, even if I haven't really performed music since I was in middle school, and it's been a long time desire of mine to make something of it.
I had a grad school critique yesterday and I presented a clip I had recorded yesterday in front of my professors and fellow grad students. A professor told me the music was terrible, that it sounded like experimental art music, and was therefore bad. And this excited me.
Not because he's right or because he's wrong, but because music is far more resistant to evaluative ambiguity. You like a song or you don't. It's not like visual art, where criticism tend to involve complicated discussions that skirt the simple but important thumbs up- thumbs down evaluation.
Art is also less distinctly connected to its audience. Most people don't look at art the way they listen to music. Most people don't look at art.
And the fact that I'm a novice at music adds to all of the above. It didn't hurt my pride to hear the music was bad the way it would if that judgment had been applied to my art. It has spurred me to reevaluate my music process, and I think it will help me grow.
I'm trying to record music for my fake band, Owl. It's about as hard a I thought it would be, even though the songs are covers and are being selected for their relative ease of performance. I've always been musically inclined, even if I haven't really performed music since I was in middle school, and it's been a long time desire of mine to make something of it.
I had a grad school critique yesterday and I presented a clip I had recorded yesterday in front of my professors and fellow grad students. A professor told me the music was terrible, that it sounded like experimental art music, and was therefore bad. And this excited me.
Not because he's right or because he's wrong, but because music is far more resistant to evaluative ambiguity. You like a song or you don't. It's not like visual art, where criticism tend to involve complicated discussions that skirt the simple but important thumbs up- thumbs down evaluation.
Art is also less distinctly connected to its audience. Most people don't look at art the way they listen to music. Most people don't look at art.
And the fact that I'm a novice at music adds to all of the above. It didn't hurt my pride to hear the music was bad the way it would if that judgment had been applied to my art. It has spurred me to reevaluate my music process, and I think it will help me grow.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Very Nice Line
Atrios lives up to his reputation:
As true as it is funny. That is, as I was suggesting earlier, liberals and Democrats have a foolish tendency to see their weaknesses and try to overcome them in ways that only highlight their weakness. Like kowtowing to Bush on foreign policy, expecting to get a cookie from Bush or voters or somebody hor having been such good little boys and girls.
Whatever Bill Clinton's weaknesses, and they were indeed legion, he was better than I think any other contemporary Democratic politician at repositioning without signaling to everyone paying attention that he was repositioning.
It's nice, on the other hand, to see Bush appear to be engaging in the same sort of foolish behavior-at Dkos we find that Bushites apparently leaked Bush's supposed reservation about actually signing the Terri Schiavo bill, this coming alongside a general WH distancing from the whole affair. Does the W stand for "wimp", George?
The way to be perceived as strong isn't to let George W. Bush tell you where to point your dick.
As true as it is funny. That is, as I was suggesting earlier, liberals and Democrats have a foolish tendency to see their weaknesses and try to overcome them in ways that only highlight their weakness. Like kowtowing to Bush on foreign policy, expecting to get a cookie from Bush or voters or somebody hor having been such good little boys and girls.
Whatever Bill Clinton's weaknesses, and they were indeed legion, he was better than I think any other contemporary Democratic politician at repositioning without signaling to everyone paying attention that he was repositioning.
It's nice, on the other hand, to see Bush appear to be engaging in the same sort of foolish behavior-at Dkos we find that Bushites apparently leaked Bush's supposed reservation about actually signing the Terri Schiavo bill, this coming alongside a general WH distancing from the whole affair. Does the W stand for "wimp", George?
Moral Conservative
What on earth could that ever mean? And, then, what would it be to be "morally liberal?" I mean, I know the answer. Morally conservative = upright and moral. Morally liberal = libertine and permissive. But morality is a lot more complicated than going to church every Sunday and hating gays. It's an actual part of life, a part of one's mind.
One of the larger blind spots our culture has is that we collectively make an uninterrupted straight line between being moral, being religious, and voting Republican.
Why on earth should we do that? Religious people are just as likely to beat their wives, steal, lie as anyone else, ditto Republicans. And Republicans- these people in Congress are far more corrupt than the supposedly corrupt Democrats they took over from in '94- all in eleven years! If Tom Delay escapes jail it will be because of abusing his power to escape culpability.
What moral conservative means, mostly, is self-righteous conservative blowhard. Don't use it, then.
One of the larger blind spots our culture has is that we collectively make an uninterrupted straight line between being moral, being religious, and voting Republican.
Why on earth should we do that? Religious people are just as likely to beat their wives, steal, lie as anyone else, ditto Republicans. And Republicans- these people in Congress are far more corrupt than the supposedly corrupt Democrats they took over from in '94- all in eleven years! If Tom Delay escapes jail it will be because of abusing his power to escape culpability.
What moral conservative means, mostly, is self-righteous conservative blowhard. Don't use it, then.
Being who you are
Excuse my ignorance, but what is a progressive? I mean, other than a liberal who refuses to be called the L word.
What are you like if you're not liberal but are progressive? Are you a radical then, or an anarcho-syndicalist, or a socialist or something? I don't think so, but I'm not sure.
My perception is that a progressive is someone who believes calling himself or herself a progressive means that the anti-liberals won't get to call him/her a communist, traitor, or god-hater. Or maybe just that moderates won't be offended by their icky liberalism.
Either way, I'm convinced that calling yourself a progressive accomplishes not very much, and that it marks you as self-hating, obsequious, and weak.
I dunno.
Anyways, I'm a liberal. Fairly moderate, but a liberal nonetheless.
What are you like if you're not liberal but are progressive? Are you a radical then, or an anarcho-syndicalist, or a socialist or something? I don't think so, but I'm not sure.
My perception is that a progressive is someone who believes calling himself or herself a progressive means that the anti-liberals won't get to call him/her a communist, traitor, or god-hater. Or maybe just that moderates won't be offended by their icky liberalism.
Either way, I'm convinced that calling yourself a progressive accomplishes not very much, and that it marks you as self-hating, obsequious, and weak.
I dunno.
Anyways, I'm a liberal. Fairly moderate, but a liberal nonetheless.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Terry Crusade
I read someone describe the ongoing drama of Terry Schiavo as a thing of DeLilloesque absurdity, and I think that's about right.
Like every human tragedy/spectacle of the week, it is a perfect showcase for virtuosic foolishness of American culture, in particular its vulturelike press. There is something darkly funny about the pandering, cynicism, and abstraction of human drama on the part of the Randall Terry-and-Tom DeLay contingent here (in the adoption of near total abstraction by some of the world's more literalminded people, etc.), but mostly it's just sad.
I agree with the Christianists that Schiavo is a human being, and that's exactly why it's so sick that she's being treated primarily as a political device to manipulate prolifers. I think the humane thing would be to let this essentially braindead woman, whose cerebral cortex has been replaced with spinal fluid, to die a peaceful and natural death, instead of lingering on for eternity, an occasional football for the Christian Right.
Of all the horrible things about this ongoing spectacle, beyond tortured attempts by prolifers to characterize Schiavo as disabled, worse than televised protests featuring signs characterizing Terry's husband as "Little Hitler," is the repulsively insincere, cynical, and ghoulish involvement of the Republican congress. Beyond being very constitutionally dubious, and embodying the very opposite of the hostility-to-federal-power conservatives are supposed to stand for, it just smacks of opportunism and a pathetic pandering to prolife absolutists.
I can't help thinking, watching these red-faced politicians intone seriously about the moral outrage of letting this woman die, raising their voices in holy righteousness, that it's all an act. These people don't care about Terry Schiavo- they don't care about any of this. It's the satisfaction of play-acting outrage and moral superiority that gives this spectacle its juice. The woman at the center disappears, just a placeholder for their pious rage.
As I said, Sad.
Like every human tragedy/spectacle of the week, it is a perfect showcase for virtuosic foolishness of American culture, in particular its vulturelike press. There is something darkly funny about the pandering, cynicism, and abstraction of human drama on the part of the Randall Terry-and-Tom DeLay contingent here (in the adoption of near total abstraction by some of the world's more literalminded people, etc.), but mostly it's just sad.
I agree with the Christianists that Schiavo is a human being, and that's exactly why it's so sick that she's being treated primarily as a political device to manipulate prolifers. I think the humane thing would be to let this essentially braindead woman, whose cerebral cortex has been replaced with spinal fluid, to die a peaceful and natural death, instead of lingering on for eternity, an occasional football for the Christian Right.
Of all the horrible things about this ongoing spectacle, beyond tortured attempts by prolifers to characterize Schiavo as disabled, worse than televised protests featuring signs characterizing Terry's husband as "Little Hitler," is the repulsively insincere, cynical, and ghoulish involvement of the Republican congress. Beyond being very constitutionally dubious, and embodying the very opposite of the hostility-to-federal-power conservatives are supposed to stand for, it just smacks of opportunism and a pathetic pandering to prolife absolutists.
I can't help thinking, watching these red-faced politicians intone seriously about the moral outrage of letting this woman die, raising their voices in holy righteousness, that it's all an act. These people don't care about Terry Schiavo- they don't care about any of this. It's the satisfaction of play-acting outrage and moral superiority that gives this spectacle its juice. The woman at the center disappears, just a placeholder for their pious rage.
As I said, Sad.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Work Ethic etc.
I really like Mark Kleiman. It's because of folks like him that I'm glad to be a member of the reality-based community; he exemplifies a kind of intellectually-flavored seriousness and humanism.
So I thought it would make sense to link and briefly discuss this post of his concerning the American work ethic.
Simply put, we work too damn hard in this country for- for what?!?
This is a discussion that more people should have. There's the distinct sense in this, among the wealthiest countries on the planet, is working itself to death without really stopping to enjoy the fruits of that labor. If you ask me, one of the primary problems is that people also don't stop to think, and that the pace of modern life in part explains the cultural backwardness of large parts of this country. When people are working stressful, enervating jobs, they don't want to expend that sort of energy on their leisure, hence the unfortunately common practice of decompressing before the crap deluge of television, and the embarrassingly high American tolerance for said crap.
Kleiman also makes a point that I must repost here:
Our economic system (and this isn't and shouldn't be seen as an endorsement of any other system) has a rather incredible tendency to instill economic anxiety to the exclusion to other drives. Any idiot knows that looking at education as primarily a road to wealth is an awful and stupid, and yet that's how we tend to look at it.
I daresay that an economy in which there was a greater measure of economic security, and one where there was a greater perception of security, would allow a culture that wasn't so goddamn cheap.
So I thought it would make sense to link and briefly discuss this post of his concerning the American work ethic.
Simply put, we work too damn hard in this country for- for what?!?
This is a discussion that more people should have. There's the distinct sense in this, among the wealthiest countries on the planet, is working itself to death without really stopping to enjoy the fruits of that labor. If you ask me, one of the primary problems is that people also don't stop to think, and that the pace of modern life in part explains the cultural backwardness of large parts of this country. When people are working stressful, enervating jobs, they don't want to expend that sort of energy on their leisure, hence the unfortunately common practice of decompressing before the crap deluge of television, and the embarrassingly high American tolerance for said crap.
Kleiman also makes a point that I must repost here:
Yes, many people can't fill the leisure they now have with anything they actually enjoy. That's what keeps the networks and cable companies in business. Perhaps that would be less true if we didn't think about our educational system primarily in terms of preparing people for the workforce.
Our economic system (and this isn't and shouldn't be seen as an endorsement of any other system) has a rather incredible tendency to instill economic anxiety to the exclusion to other drives. Any idiot knows that looking at education as primarily a road to wealth is an awful and stupid, and yet that's how we tend to look at it.
I daresay that an economy in which there was a greater measure of economic security, and one where there was a greater perception of security, would allow a culture that wasn't so goddamn cheap.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Television
Overheard on television: "A new way to track your kids, tonight, after 'Wife Swap'."
I think that's just about everything that's wrong with America right there.
I think that's just about everything that's wrong with America right there.
Monday, February 21, 2005
Start the Reactor, Quaid
Scientists discover a sea of water ice near Mars' equator. No word from Kuato as to exactly what this means.
Monday, February 14, 2005
Back from the Grave
Back from the Grave
Sorry I've been gone so long. Busy keeping myself busy. This is a subject in an of itself- why is it so easy to keep oneself busy doing nothing, or at least, nothing much?
Anyways, I have this wonderful class on Early 20th century European painting. Very useful, very exciting. Not only is it informative to the subject, but the class becomes an excellent pretext for thinking hard about readings, of focusing on art in a dedicated manner, of getting the ole intellectual juices flowing, and of keeping one's instrument sharp.
But yeah- very useful. I've been convinced, through readings on Picasso, to dust off an old art project/alter ego. The alter ego is a fella called Poop Ruiz, some remote relation to Picasso. He's got all sorts of artistic delusions. The work is meant to be an ill-fitting, stunted early modernism filtered through post-postmodern eyes. It's meant to talk about artistic failure, play, the contemporary institutional structures of art, and more.
The reason I've decided to dust him off is that I've discovered that Picasso is more compelling and interesting than I had thought, that he was a figure who batted away conventions often enough with no idea what monsters might come out of it, perhaps merely because he could. Picasso's cubist constructions and collages do not comfortably fit with the modernist ideas and intentions that have been ascribed to them.
In general, we have a way of sainting our revolutionaries, of enshrining them. All revolutionaries and all revolutions are messy and so are revolutionaries. But that's a good thing! It's a disservice to saint just about everyone.{I daresay saints aren't really the saints we create for ourselves, to simplify the world and make things clean and easy} But it's doubly a disservice to saint people like Picasso, people who screwed around, and screwed up the old version of art. After Picasso, you simply can't make the same paintings. Or, if you do, it means something else. That's what the avant garde means!
That's why we should be simultaneously appreciative of our revolutionaries and exasperated. The new world can be a scary place to live. And some people don't realize what it means to live in the new world, so they try to pull back the clock- to build a world that no longer exists. And these people don't realize that they can't build a past with todays tools, you get a sick, bizarre shambles!
And Poop Ruiz is about this phenomenon, only, of course, with a twist. Today, Picasso's is an old revolution. But Picasso's revolution, on a number of levels, failed. Avant gardes are supposed to become old hat, but Cubism is simultaneously consigned to a deep past and still threateningly "modern."
Is ours not at least a modern, if not a postmodern, or post-postmodern age? Well sort of. But ask a conservative... or don't.
Sorry I've been gone so long. Busy keeping myself busy. This is a subject in an of itself- why is it so easy to keep oneself busy doing nothing, or at least, nothing much?
Anyways, I have this wonderful class on Early 20th century European painting. Very useful, very exciting. Not only is it informative to the subject, but the class becomes an excellent pretext for thinking hard about readings, of focusing on art in a dedicated manner, of getting the ole intellectual juices flowing, and of keeping one's instrument sharp.
But yeah- very useful. I've been convinced, through readings on Picasso, to dust off an old art project/alter ego. The alter ego is a fella called Poop Ruiz, some remote relation to Picasso. He's got all sorts of artistic delusions. The work is meant to be an ill-fitting, stunted early modernism filtered through post-postmodern eyes. It's meant to talk about artistic failure, play, the contemporary institutional structures of art, and more.
The reason I've decided to dust him off is that I've discovered that Picasso is more compelling and interesting than I had thought, that he was a figure who batted away conventions often enough with no idea what monsters might come out of it, perhaps merely because he could. Picasso's cubist constructions and collages do not comfortably fit with the modernist ideas and intentions that have been ascribed to them.
In general, we have a way of sainting our revolutionaries, of enshrining them. All revolutionaries and all revolutions are messy and so are revolutionaries. But that's a good thing! It's a disservice to saint just about everyone.{I daresay saints aren't really the saints we create for ourselves, to simplify the world and make things clean and easy} But it's doubly a disservice to saint people like Picasso, people who screwed around, and screwed up the old version of art. After Picasso, you simply can't make the same paintings. Or, if you do, it means something else. That's what the avant garde means!
That's why we should be simultaneously appreciative of our revolutionaries and exasperated. The new world can be a scary place to live. And some people don't realize what it means to live in the new world, so they try to pull back the clock- to build a world that no longer exists. And these people don't realize that they can't build a past with todays tools, you get a sick, bizarre shambles!
And Poop Ruiz is about this phenomenon, only, of course, with a twist. Today, Picasso's is an old revolution. But Picasso's revolution, on a number of levels, failed. Avant gardes are supposed to become old hat, but Cubism is simultaneously consigned to a deep past and still threateningly "modern."
Is ours not at least a modern, if not a postmodern, or post-postmodern age? Well sort of. But ask a conservative... or don't.
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Distinctiveness, Identity, and Criticism
Category: Criticism
There is a great deal of blog triumphalism, especially on the right side, that is utterly self-contradictory and and utterly concerned with the amplification of memes, etc. For all the (in general, but not in this specific circumstance) derision cast at the MainStream Media, the mainstream media is still the effective game in town.
I think of why blogs are important to me, and I think of Billmon at Whiskey Bar. I think of how sad it is that he's no longer blogging, and I remember the reasons he gave for leaving.
What made Billmon so important was his pronounced perspective and his distinct and eloquent voice. There is no one like him. And that's the promise of blogging.
Not to get rid of the George Wills and Howard Finemans of the world, or to even replace them, but to act as a bulwark, however small, of distinctiveness and individual human identity where notions of the world are otherwise received and homogenous.
Readers of Whiskey Bar, especially when comments were alive and well, felt like part of a community of individual human minds. It was stimulating and exciting and entirely unlike the world of opinion one finds on those execrable cable news roundtable shows.
I know I'm wired differently from other people, and probably have more time than most to dedicate to such things, but my feeling upon discovering that there was this world of smart people, good writers, and interesting thinkers was very positive.
American culture is both, more often than not, homogenous and also, more often than not, tailored toward underestimating the taste and capacities of its audience. The rightwingers will often say that it's evil liberals who are to blame for the bar being set so low. I cannot say it's the rightwingers' fault, in certainty, although the very fact that George Bush, a true dullard, the very fruit of the soft bigotry of our low expectations, is my president says something. The fact is that we have a culture that encourages in every way possible magical thinking, that, despite its self-conception, is not meritocratic an any substantial way.
I am convinced that blogs are part of the solution. There are minds that would otherwise go rusty from disuse, opinions that would go unchallenged, souls that would become ever decreasingly insensitive in its absence.
There is a great deal of blog triumphalism, especially on the right side, that is utterly self-contradictory and and utterly concerned with the amplification of memes, etc. For all the (in general, but not in this specific circumstance) derision cast at the MainStream Media, the mainstream media is still the effective game in town.
I think of why blogs are important to me, and I think of Billmon at Whiskey Bar. I think of how sad it is that he's no longer blogging, and I remember the reasons he gave for leaving.
What made Billmon so important was his pronounced perspective and his distinct and eloquent voice. There is no one like him. And that's the promise of blogging.
Not to get rid of the George Wills and Howard Finemans of the world, or to even replace them, but to act as a bulwark, however small, of distinctiveness and individual human identity where notions of the world are otherwise received and homogenous.
Readers of Whiskey Bar, especially when comments were alive and well, felt like part of a community of individual human minds. It was stimulating and exciting and entirely unlike the world of opinion one finds on those execrable cable news roundtable shows.
I know I'm wired differently from other people, and probably have more time than most to dedicate to such things, but my feeling upon discovering that there was this world of smart people, good writers, and interesting thinkers was very positive.
American culture is both, more often than not, homogenous and also, more often than not, tailored toward underestimating the taste and capacities of its audience. The rightwingers will often say that it's evil liberals who are to blame for the bar being set so low. I cannot say it's the rightwingers' fault, in certainty, although the very fact that George Bush, a true dullard, the very fruit of the soft bigotry of our low expectations, is my president says something. The fact is that we have a culture that encourages in every way possible magical thinking, that, despite its self-conception, is not meritocratic an any substantial way.
I am convinced that blogs are part of the solution. There are minds that would otherwise go rusty from disuse, opinions that would go unchallenged, souls that would become ever decreasingly insensitive in its absence.
RIP Artie Shaw
Category: Observations
I did not know the man's music, although I imagine my father has some stories.
I remark on this man's passing because it appears he had a significant and colorful life, and because there is something lovely and terrible in what this E Online obituary says about the man.
There must be something terrible in discovering, at the age of 44, that you have outlived your artistic peak, that you have begun walking in your own footsteps. And yet ending one's career on such a note is an ideal of sorts and one that many hold. Musicians in the rock genre are regularly chastized for continuing to record and perform well after they have hit the peak of their careers. It is even said, in some cases, to discredit their earlier work.
Part of this is the fickle and immature tendency of fans and critics alike to see artists as merely the facilitators of otherwise autonomous artworks, rather than, in any substantial sense, their creators. All art that's worth a damn is the product of commitment and energy and risk. This is what artists (although most who say so are defensive twits) respond to when they identify critics as parasites or carrion-eaters. Truly great criticism is perhaps an art in itself. I respect all good writing, and the job of separating wheat from chaff is important culturally and socially.
Again, there is something simultaneously quite brave and quite sad about Shaw's decision. My perspective as a young and inexperienced and naive artist is that Shaw made a deal with the long shadow of his own mortality a good fifty years before he came to die.
I understand that this is something that athletes experience perhaps much more intensely, and generally much sooner. I think of Olympic gymnasts or figure skaters who reach their peak before they are my age.
To recognize one's fragility and mortality is a terrible thing. People spend decades attempting to shield themselves from these truths, through distraction, intoxicants, plastic surgery and the other weapons of self-delusion. There is something about Artie Shaw's decision that bespeaks an integrity I can't help but respect.
Also: Contrary to the author of the obit, one does not read vociferously; I imagine voraciously was the word desired.
I did not know the man's music, although I imagine my father has some stories.
I remark on this man's passing because it appears he had a significant and colorful life, and because there is something lovely and terrible in what this E Online obituary says about the man.
But in 1954 he stopped playing the clarinet, claiming he could not achieve the level of artistry he desired.
As he explained to Reuters in a 1985 interview, "I am compulsive. I sought perfection. I was constantly miserable. I was seeking a constantly receding horizon. So I quit."
"It was like cutting off an arm that had gangrene. I had to cut it off to live. I'd be dead if I didn't stop. The better I got, the higher I aimed. People loved what I did, but I had grown past it. I got to the point where I was walking in my own footsteps."
There must be something terrible in discovering, at the age of 44, that you have outlived your artistic peak, that you have begun walking in your own footsteps. And yet ending one's career on such a note is an ideal of sorts and one that many hold. Musicians in the rock genre are regularly chastized for continuing to record and perform well after they have hit the peak of their careers. It is even said, in some cases, to discredit their earlier work.
Part of this is the fickle and immature tendency of fans and critics alike to see artists as merely the facilitators of otherwise autonomous artworks, rather than, in any substantial sense, their creators. All art that's worth a damn is the product of commitment and energy and risk. This is what artists (although most who say so are defensive twits) respond to when they identify critics as parasites or carrion-eaters. Truly great criticism is perhaps an art in itself. I respect all good writing, and the job of separating wheat from chaff is important culturally and socially.
Again, there is something simultaneously quite brave and quite sad about Shaw's decision. My perspective as a young and inexperienced and naive artist is that Shaw made a deal with the long shadow of his own mortality a good fifty years before he came to die.
I understand that this is something that athletes experience perhaps much more intensely, and generally much sooner. I think of Olympic gymnasts or figure skaters who reach their peak before they are my age.
To recognize one's fragility and mortality is a terrible thing. People spend decades attempting to shield themselves from these truths, through distraction, intoxicants, plastic surgery and the other weapons of self-delusion. There is something about Artie Shaw's decision that bespeaks an integrity I can't help but respect.
Also: Contrary to the author of the obit, one does not read vociferously; I imagine voraciously was the word desired.
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