Friday, January 30, 2009

Steele carries the beakless soccer mom vote to victory

The GOP just elected Michael Steele (note: black dude) to the position of RNC chairman in a 6-way race that got much more publicity than one would normally expect for such intra-party politics due to the infamous choice by Chip Saltzman to rally support for his candidacy by sending out promotional CDs featuring song parodies, including one titled "Barack the Magic Negro".

Steele won on the 6th ballot over Katon Dawson of South Carolina who resigned from his country club last September and it was later revealed that the club's deed has a "whites-only" restriction and has no black members. Talk about your stark choices.

[Note: I am not saying that Dawson is definitively racist, but symbolism matters in politics and this looks horrible no matter what his actual personal ethics are.]

Wonkette covered the multiple roll-call votes with typical snarkiness. Although, being required to "live-blog" the voting for a new RNC chairman in order to earn a living would put almost anyone into a bad humor. To wit:

2:34 PM — Truly, these are the worst looking people in America. Even the “youngish” ones look old, they are pale and wrinkled, bad hair and schlubby suits, the few women have awful pinched little mouths, like anteaters, or beakless chickens.

Quote of the Day: "Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity..."

Store Clerk: I can get the part from Bristol. It'll take two weeks, here's your pomade.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Two weeks? That don't do me no good.

Store Clerk: Nearest Ford auto man is Bristol.

Ulysses Everett McGill: [examining pomade] Hold on, I don't want this pomade. I want Dapper Dan.

Store Clerk: I don't carry Dapper Dan, I carry Fop.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, I don't want Fop, g**damn it! I'm a Dapper Dan man!

Store Clerk: Watch your language, young feller, this is a public market. Now if you want Dapper Dan, I can order it for you. I'll have it in a couple of weeks.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Free-Association Synthesizing, but w/o the Purple Trench Coat

Here's the way my head is working today: Blog -> Synthesizing -> Synthesizer -> Synthesizer riff -> DMSR.

Alice says the thing she likes about my blog is the way I "pull things together." And, certainly for my longer posts, I tend to try to knit together a distillation of my thoughts by gathering pull-quotes from multiple sources on any given topic.

It is a matter of processing and synthesizing the opinions of others in order to figure out what I ultimately think.

The word synthesizing got me to think about the synthesizer as a musical instrument. This got me to thinking about my favorite synthesizer riff in any song I could remember.

And so, without further ado, I present Prince releasing the hounds of funk on DMSR.

All the white people clap your hands on the floor now...

Watch more imeem videos on AOL Video



(P.S. Prince-nerd shout out: Those of similiar ilk to myself will recall this one as featured during one of the party scenes at Tom Cruise's house in Risky Business.)

Quote of the Day: "And, it worked for my family..."

Christy Cummings: It's interesting, we have kind of a family dynamic going on here which pretty much mirrors what I grew up with, I'm the daddy figure, the taskmaster, the disciplinarian.

Sherri Ann Cabot: [nodding to Christy] Mr. Punishment over here.

Christy Cummings: Oh, but I also reward, and Sherri Ann is responsible for the unconditional love.

Sherri Ann Cabot: And the decorative ability.

Christy Cummings: She's the heart and the soul, which was what my mom did, that was her role, she was there for the unconditional love. And, it worked for my family, you know... until my mom committed suicide in '81.

To those who prefer their f-bombs served straight up

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Quote of the Day: "You're being very un-Dude."

The Dude: [answering phone] Dude.

Nihilist: [on the phone] Who is this?

The Dude: Dude. The bag man, man. Where do you want us to go?

Nihilist: Us?

The Dude: Sh*t! Uh. Yeah, uh. Me and, uh, the driver. I'm not handling the money, driving the car and talking on the phone all at the same time.

Nihilist: Shut the f*** up.

Walter Sobchak: Dude, are you f***ing this up?

Nihilist: Who the f*** is that?

The Dude: That is the driver.

[Nihilist hangs up]

The Dude: Sh*t! Walter, you f***... you f***ed it up! You f***ed it up! Her life was in our hands, man!

Walter Sobchak: Nothing is f***ed here, Dude. Come on, you're being very un-Dude. They'll call back.

My Hope for Obama

Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish is the first blog I ever started to read on any regular basis. I can no longer remember why, but I presume it is because I often buy The Atlantic Monthly when I travel. Something in the magazine must have motivated me to seek out the website, and as Andrew is the first blogger (from left-to-right in the navigation bar) on the site, The Daily Dish is where I landed.

I still haven't made it down to Barbara Wallraff on the right hand edge of the navigation. Maybe she should petition to re-order the bloggers alphabetically by first name (though Andrew would still beat her out for the alpha spot).

But, now that I have a blog of my own, I guess I can cite Sullivan as my blogging godfather in a way.

One of the things about reading someone for a long period of time is you get a real sense for the cadence of their written voice, the pattern of their thoughts, and even the texture of their personality as it leaks through on the screen. Sullivan can be overly-emotional at times (at least for my taste) and given to hyperbole. But, it may simply come with the form.

Given that he blogs so prodigiously, there is less time for real-time editing and considered reflection. Inflamed commentary is "walked back" in future posts if needbe, but what you get most of the time is the immediate gut reaction.

So, taking that grain of salt, I can't help but post this item from Sullivan today in its entirety. I can't say that I feel the claims he makes therein are uncontestable. It may be a matter of heart and hope coloring his eyes (and mine) at this very early stage.

What I can say is that this is what I wanted to see from Obama more than anything else he could do policy-wise as President. But, I believe it is more than simply wishful thinking and projection, as so many have claimed that Obama's campaign was built around -- people casting their own idealized notions of Obama the myth onto the tabula rasa of Obama the actual candidate.

What Sullivan describes is what I thought I saw revealed in Obama under the kleig light glare of the campaign spotlight. It was the measure of the man, not his platform.

And, if he can actually govern in accordance with the spirit that Sullivan identifies below, then I will be one very proud American:

One impression from Obama's interactions with the Republicans and Democrats in Congress: Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution than his immediate predecessor. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Bush had imbibed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his godfather (Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky, you'd get an explanation later, usually dolled up in propaganda. But the president had one accountability moment - the election of 2004 - and the rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power that should be used with total boldness and declarative clarity.

At times, Bush's indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. And so one of the oddest aspects of Bush's presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. The model was clear and dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush's authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong. The Decider had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, we had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, as opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It's fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

Let the people say Amen.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Quote of the Day: "From Moses to Sandy Koufax..."

Walter Sobchak: I'm saying, I see what you're getting at, Dude, he kept the money. My point is, here we are, it's shabbas, the sabbath, which I'm allowed to break only if it's a matter of life or death...

The Dude: Will you come off it, Walter? You're not even f***ing Jewish, man.

Walter Sobchak: What the f*** are you talkin' about?

The Dude: Man, you're f***ing Polish Catholic...

Walter Sobchak: What the f*** are you talking about? I converted when I married Cynthia! Come on, Dude!

The Dude: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...

Walter Sobchak: And you know this!

The Dude: Yeah, and five f***ing years ago you were divorced.

Walter Sobchak: So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?

The Dude: It's all a part of your sick Cynthia thing, man. Taking care of her f***ing dog. Going to her f***ing synagogue. You're living in the f***ing past.

Walter Sobchak: Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax... [shouting] You're g**damn right I'm living in the f***ing past!

The Loss of a Dog

Bill Simmons lost his dog recently:

The day after The Dooze left us, our little boy woke up and my wife carried him downstairs to feed him like she always does. I was still half asleep and could hear her footsteps. Then I heard this: "Day-zee. Day-zee."

That part didn't make me sad. The part that made me sad happened three mornings later ... when my wife was carrying him downstairs again and he didn't say anything.

Sadie is only 4 and in perfectly good health (knock on wood), but it was hard as hell to read this.

I love my dog :)

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Sullivan on Gay Marriage and Prop 8

To any that did not see it at the time, I can highly recommend Andrew Sullivan's response to Rod Dreher's post on this topic as one of the best defenses of gay marriage that I have come across:

Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.

To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently.

[snip]

But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way.

That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. [em: mine]

[snip]

Sorry, Rod, but you and I have to live in the disenchanted world our generation was born into. The dreams of total pre-modern coherence - whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century - are dreams undone by freedom. We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law.

The great thing about this post is that it gets beneath the surface legalisms at issue and exposes the heart of what is really under debate, which is the philosophical conflict between traditional conservatism and modernity itself. Gay marriage is simply the battle de jour upon which "deep statements about human nature" are being argued.

As Dreher himself writes even on the heels of the Prop 8 "victory" in California:

The concept of marriage has largely been severed from established norms in the popular understanding and is now seen as a contract formalizing the love a couple (for now) has for each other. Today, marriage has no intrinsic meaning that people are meant to serve; rather, it can be shaped to support people's desires.

This is the logical next phase in the development of modernity, whose 500-year project has been the gradual emancipation of the individual will. When gay marriage proponents argue that conservatives are on the wrong side of history, they're right. [em: mine]

Moreover, the prejudice – both in the bad, bigoted sense, and the good, Burkean sense – that protected traditional marriage is evaporating. Conservatives will lose this war because they have lost the young. And they have lost the young because they have lost the culture.

And, this is the "loss" that conservatives such as Dreher are really inveighing against. It is not about marriage per se, but rather about the long, slow loss of unquestioned cultural authority that is now being realized via modifications to our formal systems of legal authority (e.g. divorce, abortion, gay marriage).

Notice Dreher's obvious lament of the "gradual emancipation of the individual will." Taken as a standalone statement, one might be tempted to label a "gradual emancipation of the individual will" as freedom, which within the secular ethos of the American polity is always categorized as an unmitigated "good."

But, within a philosophical framework of Original Sin and the inherent fallen nature of man, emancipation of the individual will, by definition, leads to evil. There can be no good outcomes for mankind or society without the constraints of religious doctrine to check our baser impulses. The apple beckons and we are futile to resist.

Or, as Wilkinson more succinctly noted in a discussion of Atheists vs. Pedophiles and which group was more despised by the American public:

Wilkinson (facetiously):

I mean it's kind of obvious. If God is dead, then everything is permitted. And if everything is permitted, the first thing you want to do is abuse children.




Oddly, I think somehow that this moment provides an opening for religious conservatives to advocate more effectively for the positions they hold dear, since (in a modern context) they will be forced to justify and argue for the utility (moral or otherwise) of the positions they espouse. There is no unified cultural North Star doing all the heavy lifting of justification for them.

And, my sense is that those elements of religious faith that serve humanity (the Golden Rule, et al) will survive unscathed from the confrontation with modernity, while those that are merely relics of a different social order will simply fall over time, since the weight of cultural inertia alone is no longer enough to sustain them.

Friday, January 23, 2009

A 5 foot 2 inch black man who can slay with a guitar

I still remember seeing this performance live on TV from over 20 years ago. I told Alice, before even finding the video on the Interwebs, what he was wearing and about the moment when he kicks the microphone over (you could see Cyndi Lauper stand and pump her fist in the audience, but is not easily visible here due to the poor video quality).

Needless to say, the accuracy of my recall indicates that I:

a) am not yet currently showing signs of senility, and;
b) was a massive, fanatical Prince fan as a high school student.

But, with performances like this, who could blame me... (keep scrolling, couldn't figure out why this extra white space appears)









Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Goodbye Bush

Julian Sanchez reflects on Bush's helicopter exit and the surprising lack of incoming rocket fire from the gathered crowd:


That George Bush got to leave the White House in a helicopter, rather than dragged from the rear bumper of a Buick, is a testament to the almost mindboggling restraint of the American people. It’s an act of mercy bordering on injustice that the man is facing execration rather than execution.

“Derangement” at this point consists in the failure to appreciate how easy he’s getting off.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Disguise yourself to fool our avian overlords

I wrote previously about an interesting experiment with a NYU researcher who taught crows (through Skinnerian behavioral modeling) to drop coins into a vending machine for peanuts.

Find below a video of him describing the intelligence of crows in greater detail.

Paraphrased from below:

At the University of Washington they were doing some experiments a few years ago where they were catching some crows on campus. Some students went out and netted some crows, brought them in, weighed them and measured them and let them back out again.

And, they were entertained to discover that, for the rest of the week, whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them, and run around them and generally work to make their life miserable.

They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week after that... and the next month... and after summer break... until they finally graduated and left campus and when they came back sometime later, they found that the crows still remembered them.

So, the moral of the story being don't piss off crows. Now, students at UW who are studying crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask.

Really amazing description of their adaptive behavior at the 5:00 mark.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

And take your GWOT with you

One of my favorite books from high school is Orwell's 1984. Mostly for the lesson in how language can be used as a framing mechanism for controlling what can be effectively communicated, or even conceived of to start with.

Language is the the key to abstract thought, and abstract thought is the key to reason.

So, as I wave goodbye to the Bush years, I am extremely hopeful that Obama will quickly retire the ridiculous term "Global War on Terror." I always always always hated this formulation. Mostly, because since it was so purposefully inaccurate -- it has been said it made as much sense as declaring a War on Hand Grenades; since it is a tactic, not an enemy -- that it seemed to imply bad faith a priori on the part of those proffering it. And, in retrospect, I think it is clear this assumption of bad faith was true.

By contrast, here is a statement by UK foreign minister, David Miliband, in the wake of the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai.

I agree with every word of it:


Terrorism was not invented or started on 9/11. But since then, the notion of a "war on terror" has defined the terrain. The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats we face, the need for solidarity amongst allies, and the need to respond with real urgency - and where necessary with force.

But for a couple of years now the British Government has used neither the idea nor the phrase "war on terror". The reason is that ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good. But we need to move on to meet the challenges we face.

The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available to us. We must. The question is how we best do so.

The notion of a war on terror gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and the organization of Al Qaeda. In fact, as India has long known, the forces of violent extremism remain diverse. Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.

The global threat from violent extremism has become more real because technology enables terrorists to connect more easily with each other, whether to plot and plan or to ape each other's tactics and techniques. But it is also more potent because Al Qaeda and its ilk seek to aggregate different local, regional and religious problems into a single complaint: the alleged oppression of Muslims around the world.

Yet the motivations and identities of terrorist groups - from Hizbollah to the Taleban, Tamil Tigers and Lashkar e Toiba - are disparate not singular. The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common, and the more we magnify the sense of threat. The trap to avoid is inadvertently sustaining Al Qaida's propaganda - their claim that disparate grievances add up to a unified complaint. We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is.


This strikes me as a mature, thoughtful, direct and steadfast statement about the principles that should underlie our ongoing confrontation with radical Islamic terrorists.

Of course, it stands in stark contrast to the black/white, Us/Them jihad against jihad that the Bush White House has subjected us to for the past 7+ years.

Christian Brose, in Foreign Affairs, highlights Bush's unyielding and mind-numbing consistency on this point right on through his farewell address to the country.


Here is Bush last night:

The battles waged by our troops are part of a broader struggle between two dramatically different systems. Under one, a small band of fanatics demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology, condemns women to subservience, and marks unbelievers for murder. The other system is based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace.

I have little to quibble with in the descriptions; it's the comparison that bothers me. And the reference is clear. Here is President Harry Truman speaking to Congress on March 12, 1947:

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

There was a time after 9/11 when America needed a president who saw the people who had just attacked us as a world-conquering, ideological counterweight to American liberalism. And Bush answered that call.

Now, more than seven years on, we need to insist -- without compromising one bit of our post-9/11 seriousness, vigilance, or willingness to defend ourselves -- that by raising al-Qaeda and company to our level, we are only degrading ourselves while painting them as the very thing they aspire to be.

Our enemy in this confrontation is a deviant bunch of bitter-enders, whose only ideas about organizing society have been rejected everywhere -- everywhere -- they've been forced on people. The sooner we start treating them as such the better.

Bush could never accept that, let alone do it.

It is said that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. In this case, there was more than a hobgoblin at work. It was the frickin' Godzilla of small minds on the loose.


Friday, January 16, 2009

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

On the doorstep of the end of the Bush years, I just came across this great peice by Jay Rosen from back in 2006 that reaches to the philosophical core from which the fatal course of the Bush Presidency was set.

Rosen credits the reporting of Ron Suskind, particularly his Without A Doubt article from the New York Times Magazine, as revealing the intellectual scoop for how to interpret the Bush White House.

From Rosen:


A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism.”

Which is a perfect example of what Bill Keller and others at the New York Times call an intellectual scoop. (“When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way…”) Over the last three years, and ever since the adventure in Iraq began, Americans have seen spectacular failures of intelligence, spectacular collapses in the press, spectacular breakdowns in the reality-checks built into government, including the evaporation of oversight in Congress, and the by-passing of the National Security Council, which was created to prevent exactly these events.

[snip]

The alternative to facts on the ground is to act, regardless of the facts on the ground. When you act you make new facts. You clear new ground. And when you roll over or roll back the people who have a duty to report the situation as it is—people in the press, the military, the bureaucracy, your own cabinet, or right down the hall—then right there you have demonstrated your might.


It was Suskind's reporting that led to the coinage of the now famous phrase the "reality-based community." As noted, this seeming disdain for the facts wasn't so much an unintended result of anti-intellectualism run amock as it was a calculated method for clearing the ground for actions the White House wanted to take.

Facts or dissent could create roadblocks to desired actions. So, facts had to be subverted, channeled or ignored.

To paint Bush as simply a bumbling, redneck bumpkin who slid into the White House on Daddy's coattails is to undercut the level of intentionality at work here. It is a way of shifted or mitigating the blame. Or, to frame Bush, as some of his remaining supporters do (can there still be any?), as a good man led astray by bad advice.

This simply doesn't wash for me. His trajectory is more complex and directed than the simple narrative of "good man, bad advice" will allow.

It was more than dim-witted ignorance that was propelling him. It was arrogance that served to cover, for all his vaunted Texas swagger and machismo, a real weakness at the core of the man. A man whose doubt has to be covered with needless and unearned certitude.

A strong man can afford to be humble. A weak man cannot, as there is no pillar from which to hang his humility.

From Bob Woodward, via a post by Dreher:


During a December 2003 interview with Bush, I read to him a quote from his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, about the experience of receiving letters from family members of slain soldiers who had written that they hated him. "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that, they don't suffer any doubt," Blair had said.

"Yeah," Bush replied. "I haven't suffered doubt."

"Is that right?" I asked. "Not at all?"

"No," he said.

Now try to square this attitude with the following description, by Rosen, of the White House debrief of the first leader of the post-war Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Jay Garner:


When Jay Garner returns to the White House from running the American effort in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice and Rumsfeld are there to greet him. Not only does he know to give a falsely upbeat assessment in his written report and stick to cheerful banter during the meeting, but he finds that no one asks him a single question about the situation on the ground in Iraq. [em: mine]

Here you have the best possible reporter, but there is no report. The scene (as described by George Packer) is highly ritualized. A message is being sent about who gets to define what’s happening on the ground, and it isn’t the people on the ground.

Honestly, it is hard to read such stupid s*** like this and not want to strangle the dumb m*****f***** with my own bare hands. He had a f***ing responsibility here that was much bigger than any self-aggrandizing dreams of himself!! A responsibility to the lives of 150K+ soldiers (not to mention the millions of Iraqis), and the cavalier attitude that he managed to revel in while simultaneously abdicating this responsibility through willfully blind recklessness and outright incompetence is truly enraging.

Rather than suffusing himself to the responsibility of his Presidential authority, that authority was bent in the service of his own ego.

For instance, Bush has a well-known habit for giving nicknames to everyone around him. On the one hand such behavior could be be seen as an ice-breaker, a way of tearing down the formal stiffness that might naturally be present when one finds oneself addressing the President of the United States.

On the other hand, it is an interpersonal power play. Bush can nickname, jibe, even soft-handedly demean the other person with full knowledge that the same will never be returned in kind, given the authority of his position. And, thereby Bush can relish in the capacity to lord his authority over others around him, even in such an insignificant manner.

This is the mark of a weak man and tyrant by nature.

And while Bush is often criticized due to his various malapropisms and mangled syntax, it was this quote that always riled me the most:


I'm the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

There is an imperial sensibility at work here. I am in command and what I say goes.

In such circumstances, loyalty is the highest value in one's subordinates. Since disunity is a threat to a weak king. It threatens to pull back the curtain, to reveal the man who is really there. And, that is something that Bush couldn't abide.

So as this sorry chapter in our political history draws down, I find that this commenter to James Fallows blog captures the sentiment of these times for me properly:


I too thought the final Bush press conference was a remarkable performance; if an actor were to memorize and replicate it, it would seem like something out of Eugene O'Neill, staged in a barroom, and we might feel pity.

The inept man without words realizes that he cannot say what he must say: an admission of failures across the board, a realization that his pipe dreams were deadly, an understanding that his nation and the world now hold him in low esteem and wish him gone.

And not to be able to say these things is to remain their captive forever. But there is no expiation for Mr. Bush, and that is the objective tragedy. How can he live without awareness?

He also must see how much Barack Obama is his opposite, how much he is admired and welcomed to the office, so unlike the stolen Bush arrival in 2000. It's a remarkable achievement for Mr. Bush: every moment of his presidency is touched with a shame that cannot be bathed away. I think he will disappear; I cannot see any post-presidential role he could fulfill without the full recollection of that shame.


And, this is a shame that is fully deserved. And, so it is not with a twinge of sadness or pity that I read the following revelation from the devastating retrospective assessment of Bush by the Economist which characterizes his presidency as one of "partisanship, politicization and incompetence."


He leaves the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.

America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”. [em: mine]

Well, he's getting a full f***ing dose of reality now, isn't he? Too bad for the rest of us it was eight years too late.

I, for one, won't be sending the SOB any flowers.


Thursday, January 15, 2009

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

A Six-Foot Black Woman Who Says What She Means

For those not familiar with Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogger and writer for the Atlantic Monthly, I can recommend you to his blog.

And, additionally, to his recent profile of the soon-to-be First Lady, Michelle Obama, from the magazine itself:

In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott.

But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road--being ourselves. Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as a disbelief in the ability of our white peers to understand us. But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity--not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience--then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.

Pop culture has laid the groundwork for that recognition. Barack Obama's coalition--the young, the black, the urban, the hip--was originally assembled by hip-hop. Jay-Z and Nas may be problematic ambassadors, but their ilk are why those who thought Barack and Michelle were giving each other a "terrorist fist jab" were laughed off the stage. We are as physically segregated as ever, yet the changes in media have drawn black idiom into the broader American narrative.

[snip]

When I saw Obama in Chicago and took her for white, it was not because of her cadences, mannerisms, or dress, but because of the radical proposition she put forth--a black community fully vested, no DuBoisian veil, in the country at large. A buddy of mine once remarked that Michelle "makes Barack black." But that understates things. She doesn't simply make Barack black--she makes him American.

[snip]

These heralds offer a deeper understanding of African American life, a greater appreciation of the bourgeois ordinariness of our experience. “People have never met a Michelle Obama,” the soon-to-be first lady said toward the end of our interview. “But what they’ll come to learn is that there are thousands and thousands of Michelle and Barack Obamas across America. You just don’t live next door to them, or there isn’t a TV show about them.”

There is now.

There was some discussion during the primaries that Barack should find the opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment in order to distance himself from "blackness" or racial identity-based politics. There was also a certain mythology that merely the act of electing a black President would somehow magically heal certain lingering racial wounds in our society (allowing blacks to shed racial grievance, eliminate lingering white guilt).

One frequent suggestion was that Obama should campaign on a pledge to shift from race to class-based affirmative action policies. The thinking being (a la Nixon goes to China) that it will take a black Democrat to drive such changes through, since he will not be open to cheap charges of racism, given his personal identity.

For my money, I doubt that Obama will do any such thing, and moreover, I would hope that he would not. Any symbolic benefit to be obtained from him being our first black President is only going to be realized by his being an effective American President first and foremost, outside of simplistic racial classification. And, this is not because he must explicitly reject or negate any black identity, but rather that he simply needs to implicitly live it, as Coates notes, such that the "particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country."

Any move he might make as President that reeks specifically as a self-conscious performance of his blackness, of using his racial identity (even if for presumed positive ends) as a political tool, will by definition retard any such objectives. At this stage, basic competence within the White House would be a massive step forward for the country in completely non-racial terms.

Or, as Chris Rock noted on Larry King Live:
KING: You must be … proud that at this stage in our history a black man is running for president on a major ticket.

ROCK: I’m proud Barack Obama [is] running for president... If it was Flavor Flav, would I be proud? No. I don’t support Barack Obama because he’s black.

KING: I said just as a proud feeling. That’s normal.

ROCK: There’s a proud feeling because of the character of the man.

I sincerely hope Rock is right, because with everything that is going to be on Obama's plate, we are going to need it.

On a side note, any of you who have seen me spend time with my own niece, Mahlia, will know that I have a soft spot for elementary-school and middle-school aged kids (like Miss Mahlia herself). I am not as naturally drawn to babies and teenagers, but I like kids a lot.

So, I am all in favor of the coming Cuteness Stimulus, as Yglesias has termed it:

Obama transition team acts to counter national cuteness deficit by posting photos of Sasha and Malia getting ready for their first day at school

Monday, January 5, 2009

Our World is Upside Down

It strikes me that the principle difficulty facing traditional norms and values today is not liberal secular ideology (the right-wing radio boogeyman), but simply the rate of change in our world. When I was a child, I watched Captain Kirk say "Beam me up, Scotty" into his transponder. That was science fiction.

Today, I have an iPhone. Granted it doesn't do the full blown teleportation yet, but according to WikiPedia:


In August 2008, physicist Michio Kaku predicted in Discovery Channel Magazine that a teleportation device similar to those in Star Trek will be invented within 100 years.


So, the difficulty in passing on traditions to the next generation is that, other than certain basic ethical propositions (don't kill, steal, lie, etc.), the world today's children are going to have to navigate is going to be significantly different from that of their parents and light years different than that of their grandparents.

See Dreher for an anecdotal example:


The day I got my first paycheck in my first post-college job, I walked into my old campus saloon - the gang hardly recognized me in a suit - leaned on the bar and ordered a Heineken. Not a pitcher of whatever watery suds were on sale to the penurious undergraduates, whose wretched lot I shared only a few weeks earlier. Nope, I asked for an imported brand. And you know, for once I didn't have to worry about it.

That was 20 years ago. I don't know when I drank my last actual Heineken, but in a way, I've been a Heineken man ever since. That is, though I've never known wealth in my working life, I've also never had to do without, not in any serious way. There has always been money for Heineken. Live that way long enough, and you begin to think that the easy availability of Heineken is the natural order of things.

My father, he drinks whatever's on sale and doesn't care. That's his way. He was a child of the Great Depression. When I was a senior in high school, I tasted my first Heineken in, no kidding, Holland (cheap flights, a strong dollar - ah, 1984). When Daddy was a senior in high school, he installed the first indoor plumbing in his family's house.

Same planet, different worlds. [em: mine]


Economic dynamism loosens the relevancy of the past. The world changes, sometimes radically. In such circumstances, the wisdom and rituals of ones forefathers can seem less like the insight of the ages and more like old fuddy-duddyism that is simply out of touch with the times.

And, in such a chaotic environment, it is harder to implicitly teach the next generation simply "how to be," much less how to be successful or moral or wise. Not only are there not commonly agreed upon standards for what constitutes such behavior, but the very nature of society itself, and the demands it makes upon individuals, is constantly shifting.

And, gaping into such uncertainty can be daunting, decentering, and even disabling. A commenter on Dreher's blog captures the sense of cultural dislocation well:


(Caveat: I am Indian, so no scolding me about using the term "Indian"...that's what we call ourselves among ourselves).

Long ago, when Indian boys were very small, 5 or 6 maybe, their Dads made them a little set of bow and arrows. They used these to practice hunting. When they got a squirrel, or a rabbit, or even a little bird, they would take it solemnly to Mom. Their first kill was celebrated, no matter how small it was, and they were praised as hunters for anything they brought in to feed the family.

They were called "that MAN" when they did things like this, to build them up. And most importantly, ANYthing they brought in, the scrawniest little bird, a big deal was made about it, and right in front of everyone, the little morsel went right into the family cooking pot, alongside the deer or buffalo or anything else. It started that early, the work, the praise as men feeding the family. Yes, we men need that building up, from the earliest experiences. You would be surprised what proud words can do, or what the reverse can do to.

Now of course, little girls too were given miniatures of the tools they would use as women, would work alongside mom and grandma, learning to bead, to tan hides, making food, caring for the babies...this again from the age of 5 or 6. And they were also praised, and a big deal was made about the moccasins they made, and called "this WOMAN" even as a little girl when she did grownup work.

I contrast this with what I see when I see 18 year olds in this culture, doing horrible things, and people trying to keep them out of jail saying they didn't know any better, or they were so young. Doing terrible terrible things to each other. Unbelievable some of it. And all excused by parents, who want to be friends rather than parents.

If parents built up kids from the earliest age, 2 or 3, saying how proud they were when the kid did something good, was kind, picked up toys, made a big deal, that would be something. Not ignore them when everything is going ok, or act inconsistent. And when kids do bad, shame them, be disappointed, call them a "baby." Give them a rattle or a bottle. But then praise them again when they do good and call them a MAN or a WOMAN. That was how it was in the old traditional days among our Indian people. Back in the old days, sometimes kids even had to fight to protect their families, go to war, life and death.

I am really sad when I see the homeless kids. No one told them to be a MAN or a WOMAN was to help the family, be courteous to strangers, have self-respect. They think being a man or woman only means to have sex, to talk vulgar, drink, be violent, nasty, do drugs. That's not being a man or a woman. That is just being crazy (although now to many "crazy" means something good) and ugly. Teens want to be thought of as adults, it is a major thing. So how has it come to mean "adult" means sex and vulgarity, while taking care of yourself and others is "lame." Our world is upside down.


When the world is upside down, the old frameworks, standards, traditions no longer graft easily onto it. It becomes harder to always know where to turn, which direction to point ourselves, which way to guide our children. Many get lost.

And, according to Grant McCracken, it isn't likely to get any easier.


The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least freeform. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was exhuberantly transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.

The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs. The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them.


Sunday, January 4, 2009

The LizardMan Cometh

I wrote recently about Grant McCracken's new book: Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (see my overview of the thesis if need be).

In our postmodern world, individuals are taking more and more radical steps in personal transformation (not just through participation in sub-cultures, the rejection of social conventions, or the creation of new or modified public personas), even down to almost inconceivable changes of physical appearance, such as The LizardMan, Erik Sprague.

From McCracken:

Sprague has had more than 450 hours of tattooing to give his skin the appearance of scales. He had plastic surgery to install Teflon bumps in his forehead and to bifurcate his tongue. He has had his teeth filed to make them look like fangs.

On the heels of the successful mapping of the human genome, our collective future portends potential transformative capabilities beyond that which even the Erik Spragues of the world are presently tempted to dream. The nature of the some of the points of conflict is summarized below:

Another issue is whether scientists should seek to alter genetic structures to "improve" the human race. One of those who discovered the DNA structure, James Watson, is decidedly in favor of such action, the London Times reported April 24.

Watson, currently president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, said that spurious objections from left-wing and religious groups were slowing the pace of the medical advances that rely on genetics. "I think you should be able to do all you can to improve human life," he said.

Addressing a gala dinner at London Guildhall, Watson commented: "I don't see genetics as offending the gods, as I don't think there are any gods out there." The Times also noted that Watson recently opposed a ban on human reproductive cloning. [em: mine]

Others are pointing out the dangers of tampering with human genetic structures. In an April 14 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibbon, author of "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," welcomed the celebrations of the anniversary of the DNA discovery.

But he warned that "the latest plans of Watson and his followers are monstrous." Such schemes "look forward to a world of catalog children, who might spend their entire lives wondering which of their impulses are real and which the product of embryonic intervention. They replace the fate and the free will that always have been at the center of human meaning with a kind of genetic predestination that will leave our children as semi-robots."

He added: "A species smart enough to discover the double helix should be wise enough to leave it more or less alone."

Dr. Leon Kass is also wary of the trend toward genetic consumerism. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, addressed the issue in an essay in his recent book, "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics."

Genetic technology, he observed, "comes into existence as part of the large humanitarian project to cure disease, prolong life and alleviate suffering. As such, it occupies the moral high ground of compassionate healing."

But this same technology, he noted, "also represents something radically new and disquieting." We should reject the attempts by some scientists to cast the debate about genetic technology as "a battle of beneficial and knowledgeable cleverness against ignorant and superstitious anxiety." [em: mine]

Genetic manipulation, Kass explained, is decisively different from other medical technologies. First, changes to human genetic structures will be transmissible into succeeding generations. Second, genetic engineering may be able to create or improve human capacities and therefore new norms of fitness and health.

Moreover, genetic technology and the practices it will engender are not morally and humanly neutral, Kass warned. Scientists will end up judging other beings' worthiness to live or die based on genetic information. And the temptation to produce designer babies will bring about the commodification of nascent human life. [em: mine]

We have only begun to scratch the surface of the moral conundrums that are embedded therein. And, one doesn't have to be a religious conservative to wonder about our capacity to wield such power with wisdom and care.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

- Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 - 1892)

Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Bum Rush

Courtesy of the Freakonomics blog, comes this revelation by Edward Conlon whose memoir Blue Blood recounts his experience as a Harvard-educated writer who joins the NYPD.

Conlon has been getting information from a homeless heroin addict named Charlie, regularly paying Charlie small sums of his own money in exchange for tips.

Charlie has a homeless friend named Tommy. One day on the street, Conlon runs into Tommy, who tells him a location where crack sales occur.

Conlon writes:

I handed Tommy some money, he held up his hands and said, “C’mon, Eddie, you don’t have to, it’s okay.” I said, “It’s all right, you guys work, you take risks for us, you should get paid.” He took the money, but he shook his head.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel a little funny, since you guys pay out of your own pockets. Do you know how much we make out here, panhandling, during rush hour?’

“No, how much?”

“About a dollar a minute.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t take my money back, but I saw his point. Charlie and Tommy made more money than us. I should have realized that earlier, as the math was not complicated — we took home less than a hundred dollars a day, while their habits were at least that.

I tried not to dwell on the fact that, economically, a New York City police officer was a notch down from a bum.

It is amazing when you think about it. Our society is so damn rich that even the bums are living large.

Friday, January 2, 2009

That is what Our Father said it was

UPDATE: I made slight modifications to the text to make my final point more clear.

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Just finished reading Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture by Grant McCracken.

Difficult read in places, but paints a picture of the development of the concept of self-hood and how an individual can/cannot change within a culture through different "transformations" (e.g. rites of passage, for example) which demarcate modifications in the nature of the self.

I will probably have multiple entries on the book (since there is much richness to draw on), but I'll try to summarize the thesis broadly below. He describes our culture as transitioning from:
  1. Traditional - Face-to-face societies where ritual and myth are the means of transformation. Only prescribed types of transformations are allowed. Individuals may not choose or invent their transformational routines.
  2. Status - Hierarchical societies where individual station is defined by birth (e.g. class or caste systems). Individuals could endeavor to change their status by cultivating exteriors (clothing, speech, deportment) and interiors (thought, emotion, outlook) to create a convincing performance of the social self.
  3. Modern - Beat poets (previewing the 60s social upheaval) declared war on status transformation and adopted an oppositional cultural stance against the pretensions of bourgeois society. Authenticity and the individual self were valued above (and were in conflict with) mainstream social norms. Even within the mainstream, modern faith in technology and progress depicted an evolutionary self, one with the capacity for self-directed change, that was always forward looking and unmoored from its past.
  4. Postmodern - The self is porous, fluid and open to near complete self-determination. The individual claims the right of self-authorship and the right to change the cultural categories that define him/her. Moreover, the individual consists of many "selves" with an emphasis on exploration of multiplicity over singular authenticity.

In short, the portrait moves from a sense of selfhood that is defined and limited by the outer societal norms, to one where the self is free to become nearly anything that one can imagine.

Now, the thesis is NOT that we shifted through all 4 phases, one displacing the one prior, but that they are additive. We still have "traditional" forms (e.g. weddings, etc.) but the power of society to define and control those meanings is limited and even contested (e.g. Prop 8).

I found this quote regarding traditional societies to be an echo of many present day culture war issues:

The ruling ideas of a traditional society are truly sovereign. They discourage criticism, originality and the "disposition to change." They discourage the very concept of reform. As J.S. La Fontaine puts it, these societies "base their concept of society on the idea of tradition, established once and for all. Society is the projection over time of the original founders, heroes or ancestors."

[snip]

What does not serve the "traditional forms" of a society is not allowed to matter. For many of these societies it isn't wisdom unless it is received.

When questioned as to why a particular ceremonial activity is carried out in a particular way, Navajo singers will most often say, "because the kiyin dine - the Holy People - did it that way in the first place." The ultima ratio of non-literates tends to be "that is what our fathers said it was." [em: mine]


The quote above reminded me of this recent Dreher post on the schism within the Anglican church.

Damon is troubled, and understandably so, by the fact that American churches are breaking apart based on positions congregations and individuals within them hold on culture-war issues. I don't see how any serious believer, whichever side he takes, can be cheered by schism. But I am inclined to think of schism as the second-worst option, if the only other is to accommodate one's church to a serious heresy.

As Damon notes, the stance a believer takes on issues like abortion, homosexuality, order and authority in the family, and a related constellation of concerns, typically places one within one camp or the other. It's no accident that there's a thread connecting stances on both sides; i.e., there's a reason why Christians who oppose abortion rights are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage rights, and vice versa. It all comes down, in the end, to Authority. [em: original]

If you believe that Scripture, or Scripture and the institutional Church, is the Authority for deciding questions of meaning and morality, then you are far more likely to fall on the traditionalist side of these questions. If you believe that individual conscience is the Authority, then you are likely to be a progressive.

To Dreher, a social conservative, the ultima ratio on any such question comes down to: that is what Our Father said it was.