Wax Banks

Finished something.

Longest thing I ever wrote. One draft done. Is it bad? Doesn't matter. One draft done. Longest thing I ever wrote.

Lyrixxx.

As we walked up the stairs to the apartment I was spittin' rhymes.

Samples:

'When they played it in the club the whole place shat' (Flobots reference)

'Grab the cheek
Give it a squeeze
Bring the people to their feet
And the ladies to their knees' (self-aware misogyny is OK?)

'I'm a lyrical postdoc right now'

'I'm definitely gonna blog this'

And you don't stop,
W.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you're as lucky in your selection of friends and family as I am. Thank them, and if you're the sort to talk to abstract notions, give thanks for them too. And we'll see each other soon, I hope.

Love,
Wally

Best post-hiatus Phish?

[Non-fans: don't bother.]

I went to IT, Worcester '03, Albany December '03, and the first night at SPAC in June '04. (I also hit the two Great Woods shows in August '04, thanks to Goliath's Daddy, but they don't come into play here.)

IT probably counts as the best summer '03 Phish show; 6/19/04 is easily the overall best show of 2004; Worcester (2/26/03) is to my ears stronger overall than every other show of the Feb/March '03 tour. And that Albany show is probably the best of the Anniversary run (which is better than I remembered).

Damn, how lucky were the New England Phish fans back then? The band played 63 shows in 2003-04; I saw maybe three of their top ten shows in that time. (Prior to 2003 I was happier but less lucky.) And you have to understand, the best Phish show of 2003 is in the running for 'best concert by any rock band in 2003.' That year they were that good, that much a genuine rock'n'roll band (which was debatable back in the day, when they were a prog/jazz/comedy rock band). By June '04 they'd long since perfected the improvised-rock thing, and they were finally playing straight-up fist-pumping Rock day in, day out. 6/19/04 is the year's best example of that, I'd say: 'Scents,' 'Walls,' and 'Song' are pure rockers, 'Limb By Limb' turns into an arena anthem (my personal favourite version of that song), and the definitive version of 'Piper' contains a thunderous Tweeprise jam. But the show offers more than its share of other styles: a fine 'Reba,' a 150% nasty 'Wolfman's Brother,' and a tight 'Bowie,' plus Phish's versions of ska, dance-party funk, and the country-rock of 'Runaway Jim.' Just a perfect Phish show, worthy of comparison to Hampton '97 (yeah, I went there).

EMILY's List?

The same ridiculous specimens, those reactionaries, who offers this press release, who officially endorsed Hillary Clinton the day she announced her exploratory committee? They're to provide Obama's Director of Communications?

It's keep your 'enemies' closer, Barry. Not your 'entertainment.' And make no mistake: identity politics is more enemy than friend to Obama, no matter who's spitting it, no matter why.

(It threw me, for a minute, that Ellen Moran and Ellen Malcolm, respectively the Big Muckety-Muck and Executive Muckety Muck of EMILY's list - or is it the other way around? - are not the same person. Also, 'Emily' isn't a person, but rather a clever acronym.)

Hire editor; kill self.

Professional writers who write like this should be fired:

Tank Artillery [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

That's exactly what the National Review Institute is aiming to do: Highlighted and advancing the best of the ideas on the Right. At their conference last week, Mike Franc, Yuval Levin, and Heather Mac Donald were among the originial conservative thinkers on display. Mona Charen wrote about the conference here.

WFB would be ashamed, of course, for a variety of reasons. But why isn't everyone else?

Hall of Justice.

I don't know whether I linked to this before. If not: go, go.

Heh.

Via Sullivan, we have some idiot at National Review Online summarizing this...

Republicans are feuding in the wake of the November election. But they are not descending into civil war. That would be too tidy. What is unfolding instead is an overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme.

...like this:

There's no civil war on the Right. Ramesh Ponnuru, Time

I know, I'm trying to stop reading this stuff. But the level of self-parody here is delicious. NRO is a travesty of the once-vital National Review, and it occupies too central a space in conservative 'intellectual' circles to ignore. Alas, the politicians and the 'intellectuals' spend a lot of time jerking one another off down in D.C. True on the left and the right, but I can't stomach the 'liberal' version of this nonsense long enough even to laugh at it. Tyranny of small differences and so forth, I guess. Plus Rick Perlstein didn't, y'know, lead us laughing into a war that's killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and will cost maybe a trillion bucks.

Oh did I tell you we saw Bill Kristol at Zoe's the other day? No, I couldn't bring myself to make the obvious 'I loved you in City Slickers' joke. My wife was so disappointed.

Progressives in the Cabinet?

Ezra Klein says Obama is pursuing ideology-agnostic competence. Christopher Hayes says he's fucking the progressives who helped him into office. The Corner kidz joke that 'change you can believe in' looks a lot like the mid-90's. HOW CAN THEY ALL BE RIGHT?!

What the hell?

A nation of deeply distrustful temperamentally-conservative xenophobes just elected a half-African black man President by less than 10% in the popular vote, and you expect him to start throwing shit around before he's even taken office?

There's a war to prosecute and a massive global financial bailout to oversee, a half-Republican electorate to sell on universal health care, and an international investor class to massage into semiconsciousness before beating it to death with the Happy Communism Stick. The man knows what he's doing.

Please. Fools. Relax.

I think I'm about to kick off a no-blogs-until-2009 policy. There's writing to be done, and (y'know) actual 'living.' A few of these cats could undertake the same mission.

Reminder of a decent euphemism for balls.

'My business partners south of the equator.'

A little piece of a bigger thing.

He tried to imagine what it felt like to be a financial-sector worker during this time, a baron of industry and professional accumulator of capital, but got distracted wondering what it must be like to be a squirrel. It occurred to him that the financial crisis was only a 'crisis' of meaning and symbol - not yet a physical crisis for the vasty majority of humans, and never to be a crisis for the furry little creatures clawing their way up and down the trees outside his apartment. Nuts would still fall from trees; squirrels would eye them warily from low branches, would hold still chewing something (gum?) watching for any sign of predators, the occasional hawk - which creature humans would find amazing, no doubt, though no one but a kid thinks much of the squirrels themselves, though (or because) the treeborne mammals get to play Rosencranz and Guildenstern to the hawk, around just to amuse and then die horribly, one by one, alone. Where's the sympathy? If the global economy collapsed the squirrels would still live as they had: huddling for warmth in winter, hiding out in tiny squirrel homes, eating easy-to-prepare meals, not reading poetry - a lot like the American bipeds they were slowly as a species learning to ignore just as they were ignored. Indeed it was hard to know which was the more oblivious race of creature poetrywise.

So what were the bigwigs up to? For some reason he kept picturing a space-hotel in low earth orbit, full of financiers, chief executives, movie moguls, several superpowered mutants and aliens providing security. He knew as much about the inside of this craft (15,000-year-old vice president/clone-robot Dick Cheney's floating pleasure palace, The Seraglio, loaned to the financial cabal in the spirit of solidarity and crisis management, but not for free) as he did about the actual sites where world's-fate-deciding financial discussions took place. He'd been to the Capitol once, remembered nothing - wood paneled walls? It had meant no more to him than the building in Philadelphia that housed the Liberty Bell, site of an official school field trip. A room with no one in it is just...space.

The muckety-mucks gathered on the Seraglio are no doubt frantic, or their faces are darkened by worry - or the atmosphere is businesslike, no one wanting to show fear, though the awkward silences at the lunch table speak volumes about their grim purpose, the shared acknowledgment of vulnerability. The way that men can be weak around one another, so weak, even frail. That high above the earth you can see everything, which is to say, you see how small We Are: small enough to make capital letters an ebmarrassing affectation. The squirrels were here long before us. (Right? Or something like a squirrel - but would the squirrels be offended by this equivalence between resemblance and understanding, like William Jennings Bryant objecting to hearing about his distant cousin the chimpanzee?) And they'll probably be here long after, still with the nuts and the getting eaten by hawks, though by then no doubt the hawks will have been exposed to mutagens and media programming of all sorts, will have acquired cybernetic parts, a taste for human flesh - now hard to come by for the same reason the birds have metal claws and telescopic eyes! How the fuck is a squirrel supposed to get by in that kind of environment, with the odds stacked decisively against her, the god-given (or at least -begun) balance of predator and prey upset by mechanical power creep, as if the natural world obeyed the commercial logic of roleplaying game expansion books and cinematic sequels, each new installment Just A Little Crazier in order to sell, slowly rendering the original text moot, the cannibalism that is Progress, nightmare vision of Growth Without Bound...

Gay graph jam.

Good?

Ezra Klein:

After watching Gephardt and Edwards' 2004 runs, did anyone expect that their former staffers could execute something like Obama's campaign? Seemed unlikely. But the idea was that they had incredible technical competence that just needed to be matched by moment, candidate, and money. And that turned out to be correct.

The transition argument seems to be something similar: The longtime Democratic operatives and wonks are really quite good.

Alternative argument: The longtime Democratic operatives and wonks are fucking prostitutes, who'll work with a man of integrity (Obama, it seems) as happily as they'll work for anyone else (e.g. that brilliant grotesque Bill Clinton). The worst thing about the likely adoption of policies I favour by the United States is that the credit for those policies, for the positive change they'll likely/hopefully bring, will go to a party that at nearly every opportunity in my adult lifetime has helped the Other Plutocrats fuck the American people in whatever uncomfortable position has been featured in the magazines that month.

Here's to Obama and smart picks - but let's not go over the moon praising the people we were happy to vilify when they were ineffectually waving their hands at the Imperial President this last nearly-a-goddamn-decade, OK?

Pro-life views hurt the Republicans as much as bad foreign policy.

This, from the intelligent but really-really-imperfect Daniel Larison, is simply false:

Doesn’t it seem obvious that foreign and economic policies, in which the GOP is widely viewed as having failed, have much more to do with the woes of the party than pro-life views? These would be the policies that the administration put into action, as opposed to its pro-life rhetoric, which has more or less changed nothing.

The answer's no.

It's possible that Larison doesn't actually live in the world and interact with people, but not likely. So how does he manage to misunderstand this simple point? 'Pro-life' fundamentalism, like institutional and individual 'homophobia' (i.e. 'hatred of faggotry and distrust/hatred of those who practice it'), colours all discussions of domestic cultural policy, just as ridiculous anti-tax/'small-government' rhetoric (read: calls to cut social services for the poor, nonwhites, et al.) colours economic policy. The policies we get from Washington might not be 'conservative' in any pure sense, but they reflect the disproportionate influence of those politically active right-wingers who hold these views. The window of acceptable conversation is narrow, and that narrowness is one important measure of the influence of various political organizations.

Which leads us back to Kathleen Parker. Larison's criticism of Parker amounts to, 'It's the war that fucked the Republicans up, and our policies don't actually reflect evangelical beliefs.' Half of which is half-true (the war is a rallying point but this wasn't ultimately an election about the war, nor about George Bush, as polls overwhelmingly show), and half of which is totally irrelevant. Christianists (to borrow an increasingly-popular term) might not determine the final outcomes of social debates, but they dictate their terms to a remarkable degree. The idea that 'life' begins at conception, that a 3-day-old fetus has the same rights as a 3-day-old neonate, is absolute insane bullshit. Yet we have to take into account the feelings - purely religious beliefs, in other words - of the people who hold onto such notions, when setting domestic cultural policy. That's a direct result (and not the only one) of the disproportionate power Christianists have over domestic policy debates.

Proposition 8 was a blow to the civil rights of all Americans. At a moment when the state could be altering the legal definition of marriage to remove religious considerations, we remain shackled to a conception of marriage that no longer has procreation as its main goal, no matter what lies the pro-Prop 8 types spread around. That's a function of the influence of largely right-wing (culturally/socially conservative) religious organizations - though not of 'religious beliefs' or even 'Christian beliefs,' obviously, as those are up for very public debate and e.g. Barack Obama's 'heterodox' Christianity has the same claim as the laughable James Dobson's on the public's attention. Again: Larison wants us to believe that Christianists have no power because they always vote Republican. He's choosing to misunderstand this point (he's far from stupid). The Republican Party doesn't ever deliver the cultural counterrevolution the Christianists want - but it's doing its best to arrest any social progressivism that rears its head. Which is in part - to whatever degree - a function of Christianist (politicized Christian) loyalty to the GOP.

Which is why they won't have a place in the Republican Party forever. Political parties are compromises; soon the Christianists may well realize they needn't compromise with the likes of Cheney, Gingrich, and Rove any longer.

'Wellllll...that'll be an interesting day.'

[Doc - I'll get to your comment tomorrow, probably.]

Kathleen Parker.

Over at the Corner they're stewing about Kathleen Parker's WaPo column, which boils down to: 'Religious conservatives are destroying the Republican Party.'

Of course there are few facts in the column to back up this assertion; Parker's not a terribly interesting pundit, and her heterodoxy on Obama this go-round doesn't suddenly make her interesting any more than it makes her Adlai Stevenson. She mentions some demographic numbers but mostly complains about how Bible-thumpers are mongoloids:

the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party [...] Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. [...] [The GOP] has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners. [...] the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. [...] [The 2008 GOP convention] felt like an annual Depends sales meeting.

All of which is run-of-the-mill condescending big-media-market bitch-slapping and not impressive at all. But her concern isn't that evangelicals are stupid jerks ruining the fun for everyone (though she clearly feels this); it's that Republicans can't run the country without their permission. In other words: the Republicans have sound ideas, a strong identity, and are being hijacked by fundamentalists - can we assume she means 'just like the Democrats and their Dean/Kos wing'?

Well, if you take away the evangelical-fueled domestic policy interests of today's Republicans, what's left?

Nationalism.

Corporatism.

Imperialism.

And a strain of libertarianism, tinged with standard 'populist' anti-intellectual resentment, that is less philosophical (i.e. principled friendly-anarchism, interest in rule by the nongovernmental collective, willingness to provide for local welfare as cost, etc.) than aesthetic (guns as symbol of masculine strength, the countryside as fantasy-staging ground, SUV's as symbols of freedom, etc.).

It's one thing to go down a list of proposed policies and haggle details, but let's stay abstract for a second: 'libertarian nationalism' is an oxymoron; 'nationalist corporatist imperialism' went by another name during the 20th century; corporatism and nationalism are increasingly at odds (nationalists' impulse toward protectionism comes to be anti-business even in a country of 300 million, 3,000 miles across - you'd think there'd be room...). 'Free' markets assembled at the barrel of a gun are a threat to everyone - and come back to haunt the pistol-packing marketeer. The national-defense types basically call for an American Empire - the least libertarian thing imaginable, and incidentally a bad deal for most of the world's businesses.

Parker isn't unjustified in pointing out the growing rift between evangelical voters and the rest of the tenuous Republican coalition (please, please read Thomas Frank on this); 'culture war' is a pretty easy sell but it's hard to maintain (e.g. as scientific advances make anti-abortion arguments, which are really anti-sex arguments, increasingly irrelevant) and requires pulling resources from other efforts (e.g. check out Big Bobby Jindal putting out a health care reform package!). The current Republican strategy seems to be to yoke the modern-day Democrats to something called 'socialism' that in no way resembles Actual Existing Socialism; but as long as the evangelicals want to legislate bedroom morality, roll back scientific understanding in schools, and keep investing ungodly amounts in defense, that argument isn't gonna fly.

Just look at McCain: a genuine Republican reformer, once upon a time. And what happened this time out? He tried to run for, and in the manner of, his 'base' - meaning god/guns/gays Christian right-wingers. A young black Senator with four years of experience in national politics beat the living hell out of him. He embodies Kathleen Parker's argument. And yet...what if he'd won? Leave aside the anti-Roe stuff, the gay-marriage stuff; what else did he have in his platform this time out? 'Small-government' boilerplate that would expand our largest budget items (de-fense! de-fense!), 'low-taxes' faux-libertarianism that would have deepened the gap between rich and poor (which may well be a goal of American libertarians, who knows)...there wasn't much of a there there, with or without the sad concessions to the Moral Majority types.

Here's how Parker ends her column:

The young will get older, of course. Most eventually will marry, and some will become their parents. But nonwhites won't get whiter. And the nonreligious won't get religion through external conversion. It doesn't work that way.

Given those facts, the future of the GOP looks dim and dimmer if it stays the present course. Either the Republican Party needs a new base -- or the nation may need a new party.

There's no 'either/or' about it. Here's my guess: just as we have an evangelical counterculture, just as we have an increasingly fervent radical-Christian media sphere, as the Republican coalition wakes up from the nightmare of Bush and sees what it has enabled, we'll have a 'conservative' (i.e. Christian theocratic) third-party candidate in the next fifteen years, and it'll be a big problem for everyone - especially the GOP.

See? Idiot.

I don't understand.

Yes, there is rot on both sides. But social conservatives are not rotten and it's rotten to suggest they (we, in my case) are.

And, dear God, it's not God who is the problem.

'Yes, everyone has to share the blame, including us. But we don't! See, I got you there! Also I'm high as a kite right now.'

I know, old joke. But how else do you explain her?

I think someone's gone off-message!

Doesn't this idiot know the President-Elect is one of them?

In the video, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, castigated Obama's foreign policy stances on Afghanistan and Israel and ridiculed the president-elect's worldview. Al-Zawahiri compared Obama unfavorably to the late Malcolm X, an African-American militant who adopted Islam.

On the other hand, does this mean it's OK for these idiots to like Obama now?

Invaluable dating advice.

Spend your free time making things you can be proud of.

Watch what people do, and really try to understand why.

Your mind and body are connected; take care of them both.

Be honest about everything you can; be understanding about the rest.

Gifts do not embody affection; they commemorate it. Find other ways to show affection.

You're not entitled to sex; you're not entitled to anything. Give generously.

There's no such thing as destiny, nor The One True Love. But love is real and you should honour it.

Talk about something other than yourself. Ask about everything. Don't fear answers.

Stand up for yourself, but don't be possessive; ideas are cheap. Principles aren't.

When you die, that's it. Revel in the time.

No one knows anything. Be understanding and forthright and work with your lover.

You're not as good at sex as you think you are; keep studying. Practice often.

Don't be afraid to be alone.

Don't be afraid to be together.

When you lift weights you tear your muscles; they grow back bigger and stronger. No other way to do it. Which is to say: breakups are good for you. Pay close attention.

Listen to your friends.

If it feels wrong it probably is. If it feels right, keep your eyes peeled.

Learn your weaknesses and address them directly.

When you're in love you can't see straight. Breathe. Take people's advice. Trust your instincts - but verify.

Love is a renewable resource.

Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Rosenbaum.

Joss Whedon's law firm: Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca, Fischer, Gilbert-Lurie, Stiffelman, Cook, Johnson, Lande & Wolf.

All I know is, if I were (ahem) blessed with the name Stiffelman, I'd definitely seek employment in a field where I can destroy people's finances and reputations while earning a salary. Then I'd go back and visit my high school...

Lieberman-in-exile.

If the Democrats took away Lieberman's beloved DHS committee chairmanship, why wouldn't he just leave the party entirely and start to caucus with the Republicans?

Well that's my guess as to why the Dems are letting him keep his spot in the party. He proved himself a rat during the 2008 campaign, but the Dems want as big a majority as possible. He's not gonna sit on the back bench, not at his age. For whatever reason they think they need him on their side. (Here's a reason: they've got a real shot at 60 Senate seats.)

Of course all these people are bastards: thoughtless warmongers, special-interest prostitutes, and power-hungry narcissists. ALL OF THEM!! I make no distinctions between people who make more money than me.

[Update: All this said, the goddamn Senate Democrats are a pitiful bunch: J-Lieb kept his DHS chairmanship. Could a more serious Democratic candidate than Ned LaMont run against this schmuck Lieberman in 2012? Please?]

'Billy Breathes' chords.

I couldn't find correct transcription/chords of Phish's 'Billy Breathes' - most amateur guitarists aren't trained musicians so no surprise there - so here's my own. I didn't listen for inversions so you'll have to invent your own bassline, you lazy swine.

Billy Breathes (approximately)
Trey Anastasio

verse

D Am F G Bb C Bb F

D Am F G Bb C Eb Bb



chorus

F C Bb etc.

F Eb Bb

F C Bb Am Gm

C Bb

'horn' solo

passing into solo: Eb Bb 

F Cm Ab Bb C# Eb F# C#

Ab Cm Ab Bb C# Eb

another chorus (begin on F)

Eb F

quiet part (same as verse up to turnaround)

D Am (F) G Bb C

Eb Bb

then guitar solo (first half of guitar solo same as 'horn' solo, with new turn)

F Cm Ab Bb C# Eb F# C#

Ab Cm Ab Bb C# Eb F# Ab

Bb Fm C# Eb F# Ab B

C# Fm C# Eb F# Ab B C#

climactic hold: Eb Eb7 Eb6 Eb/Bb

final cadence: C# Ab F

Writing down the chords has given me new appreciation for the song - it's got a lot of stepwise and minor-third climbs answered by tumbles down the circle of fourths, and the solo is split into two sections, each of two lines, with the lines a minor third apart and the sections separated by a fourth (look at that!). Very systematic chordal development with a winding, eminently singable melody in a heartbreaking, layered arrangement. I've listened to Billy Breathes (the 1996 album) several times this week, and while I have a soft spot for the individual songs on 1992's Rift, it's clear to me that Billy is Phish's best album by a large margin. Picture of Nectar is all over the map, trying maybe too hard to be all to all (and 'Tweezer' doesn't belong on an album); Undermind is fun but the songs are less satisfying; the shaggy prog-pop/rock collections Junta and Lawn Boy are too inconsistent to be great (though again, individual songs are); Farmhouse overbalances its pretty acoustic tunes 'Driver' and 'Sleep' with the lamentable 'Sand,' 'Jibboo,' and 'First Tube' (TAB songs that generally added little to Phish's concert repertoire and just thin out the album); Hoist is uneven and its filler is dumb; Round Room is a silly-but-fun mess. Rift is important to me for all manner of fanciful reasons: it was my first Phish album (not the first I'd heard) and a redheaded saxophonist named Jessica left her phone number stuck to the CD case after All-County Jazz Band one year. (I failed her.) Plus it's a neat album structurally speaking, its concept neatly echoed in each individual song.

Still, no Phish studio album can touch Billy for delicacy, consistency, and overall flow. The second half of the album seems to blend into a single suite, an effect the band never quite achieved on Rift despite its efforts with the volume fader. I remember buying Billy at the mall near the college where I took Metaphysics (and other) classes in high school - sitting in the parking lot blasting 'Free' on my headphones, realizing the band was becoming something new, sure I was doing the same.

Well take the music, make your own (and whatever else you'd like).

Sing softly,
W.

Low-information dating.

[From elsewhere.]

A single low-information voter can rest assured that his vote boils down to inherited preference and mere caprice (peer pressure, whim, etc.); ten million voters obeying their whims make nuance and strategy impossible. They change the game to (Russian) roulette.

Now, a million low-information daters will eventually fall together in more-or-less appropriate pairings and sort out as they have for millennia; each iteration of the system-state, each timestep, sees them console one another with genuine empathy of the 'Oh, I've made those same mistakes' variety, disingenuous sympathy in the 'Next time will be different, I'm sure of it' mould. But to wander into a relationship on your own, not knowing what you're in for, yet treat the situation with the seriousness that love deserves (indeed insists upon), and to do so without necessarily knowing that everyone else will fall flat in the same way and that you'll be able to join the party later...it can be absolutely crushing. Every first 'I love you' is a huge risk for the lover, an everyday gesture of association at the societal level. The complex dynamic system of American love doesn't need to accommodate the low-information lover; he's the ideal participant. Love is supremely undemocratic, even antidemocratic in that way.

Thing in progress.

Well it gets going and I go with it, or try. Working on something, this is in it:

As a form of outreach - think globally, act locally and globally, as the Trilateral Commission would say - Obama had offered the newly-reelected Republican Senator from Georgia Saxby Chambliss the position of Ambassador to the nation of Georgia, which had triggered an immediate surprising-but-not-that-surprising domino effect: the Russians, well aware that there was a new sherriff with the unbelievably testicular name of 'Saxby' in town, offered an immediate apology to the Georgian people (both Georgian peoples!), which Chambliss accepted on everyone's behalf. African leaders of every colour and machete-wielding gangland affiliation put down their weapons and overly starchy military uniforms to journey to the U.N. for a summit, at which event Obama's magical elf children Sasha and Malia were allowed to pelt the leaders with grapes and play immensely complicated mutable-rule-system card games with their children, which fostered an environment of comfort, comradeship, and confession, in which President-for-(apparently-though-unconstitutionally)-life Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe talked movingly about his hardworking and kind mom, and how his two older brothers had died and his father had left young Robert in charge of his younger brother Donato, a charge Robert had taken seriously, but how could you make up for the lack of a father? And though he'd grown both mature and more importantly old before his time, how could little Rob be expected to develop a healthy relationship to the world that way, to power, to his own desires? Who could possibly fault him his selfishness or his perverse need to touch so many lives, to replicate the shape of his own broken family, his own truncated past, in the homes and lives of his countrymen - to make his own story the root of his nation's story, at gunpoint if need be, if they couldn't grow quickly enough, couldn't hear the rising music of time whistling and roaring past...

Michelle Obama, America's new First Lady and a mother in her own right, had looked over at her husband, whose mahogany cheeks were stained with honest tears. For one man to lose a father to the mystery of Africa, for that father to leave his son to be raised alone by a woman who would become by her very proximity and intimacy with her son a kind of stranger, less a person than the curve of the landscape itself: Barack Obama knew that pain all too well, and his gift and curse were the too-bright mirror image of his Democratic forerunner Bill Clinton's grotesque capacity for instant sympathy. Obama's core was an inborn empathy supplemented by unflagging curiosity he had learned to unfetter and indulge, the length of his vision and the breadth of his heart measuring the shape of a man's name, his name, or perhaps his father's...And so the old murderer and the young teacher embraced in the middle of the Assembly floor, world leaders applauding wildly in a ring, calling out hallelujahs in tongues familiar and foreign, guttural and sibilant, the voice of every instrument in some god's orchestra. They embraced, and across the world petitioners, aspirants, acolytes, begettors, usurers, connoisseurs, pretenders, and beaming grandparents mirrored the outpouring of televised affection. The world seemed to laugh with one voice, if only for a day.

That evening Obama had Mugabe arrested on a variety of charges from corruption and vote-rigging to genocide; the Assembly cheered his judiciousness no less enthusiastically than they'd cheered his understanding.

How well this fits the rest of the story, I confess I don't know. But writing it fits writing the rest. Fire now, aim later.

Digital diabetes.

Wednesday Phish. Why not?

Cultural stigma be damned! Here's some Phish.

The 7/29/97 Gumbo is a favorite of fans and the band alike - one of a handful of tracks given to Phil Lesh to prepare him for the April '99 'Phil and Friends' show in San Francisco featuring Page and Trey. With mid-period (post-1994) Phish soundboards hard to come by and post-hiatus SBD recordings available only for pay, it's a treat to hear a clean recording of the band's nasty summer '97 group improv. For many fans the fall '97 tour is the height of the group's career; others cite summer '98, December '95, even August '93 as their greatest single stretch (only fools choose the latter). Contrarians point to the harder-edged 2003 shows, or the 7-hour millennial set at Big Cypress. But to my mind 1997 was the most consistently engaging, challenging year in the band's performance history, peaking in Fall but offering a variety of pleasures throughout summer: the delicacy and polyrhythmic rediscovery of the spring and early-summer Europe club dates (as heard on the dark, naughty Slip Stitch and Pass, which chronicles the Hamburg show at which the band's sound changed for good), the spacious funk and ambient/textural hints of the open-air U.S. shows, the freewheeling joy of the Great Went with its DJ set and 'art jam.' If all you've heard is muddy audience recordings from their 95-99 peak, there's greatness in store for you.

Start here if you'd like: Phish, 'Gumbo,' 7/29/97. [mp3]

Funky 16 Corners.

It's the fourth anniversary of the naaaastiest podcast on the web. Maybe you've heard of 'Rubber Souled'? Go now, go.

[All links save the last are to mp3 DJ mixes guaranteed to spice up your music collection, your dinner, and your goddamn sex life. Hat tip to Walter for reminding me about the Corners - along with a stern reminder, in turn, that Obama's electoral victory doesn't mean he gets to go around stealing all our fine white women! Happy belated birthday, W.]

Prestige architecture.

MIT's architecture is a mixed bag.

Filip Dujardin creates images of 'impossible structures' by piecing together photographs of existing buildings. Here's one:

Here's MIT's Simmons Hall:

Huh.

Well, here's another of Dujardin's images:

Here's MIT's Stata Center:

That's why you pay the big bucks for your MIT diploma, folks.

Excitement!

While we're on the subject of Internet cranks, here's the dazzling Webster Tarpley, 9/11 truther among other things, from his book Barack Obama: The Unauthorized Biography:

We state emphatically here at the outset: Obama is a creature and puppet of finance capital and of the Wall Street bankers and investment bankers, as represented by the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger Group, Council on Foreign Relations, Skull and Bones Society, Ford Foundation, and Chicago School of Friedmanite economics. The family business which Obama inherited from his mother (a Ford Foundation anthropologist and counterinsurgency operative who also worked for the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development) was to work for foundations. And this is what Obama has done in his life, working at various times for or with the Gamaliel Foundation, the Woods Fund, the Joyce Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, and other foundations and entities which notoriously look to the Ford Foundation for guidance and leadership. Obama is best described as a foundation-bred counterinsurgent, that is to say an operative in the service of the US financier ruling class whose task it is to wreck and abort any positive outcomes that might be forthcoming from the political ferment which is shaking the globe, and above all from the deep political upsurge which is clearly at hand in this country.

Obama claims to be a uniter, but the simplest empirical survey will show that he is the most explosive divider seen in this country in decades, since he has succeeded in splitting both the Democratic Party and the US population in general according to the classic fault lines of white against black, black against Hispanic, black against Asian, black against Jewish, men against women, old against young, rich against poor. Having seen Obama accomplish all of this in less than a year and a half on the campaign trail, we can confidently predict that an Obama presidency would in all probability put the United States well on its way to civil war. Giving Obama and his financier controllers the White House would represent an act of national suicide for this country, with the most catastrophic implications for the world as a whole. This analysis is corroborated by the fact that Obama, alone among all the protagonists of the 2008 presidential contest, possesses either a postmodern fascist mass movement, or a very plausible facsimile thereof. These are the lemming legions who are not supporting a program of measures that the government might take, but who are hysterically loyal to and obsessed with Obama as a fantasy figure and charismatic savior – in other words, as an emerging fascist leader. As those who lived through Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933 remind us in the writings they have left behind, there is simply no comparison between a normal, corrupt, bourgeois parliamentary regime and a fascist seizure of power.

[...]

The first instinct of most right-wingers is to look at Obama’s middle name of Hussein, and perhaps at his Moslem father and step-father and at his time in school in Indonesia, and announce that Obama is a Moslem. But this will hardly do. Obama’s father and step- father were united not by the Koran, but rather by their shared devotion to Johnny Walker, which increased as they got older. And if Obama himself were a secularized Moslem, so what? Voters have a right to know Obama’s religious history in full detail, but there is no religious test for office. But Obama is something very sinister indeed. Obama himself is either an atheist, or much more likely a Satanist of the apostate Jeremiah Wright-James Cone-black liberation theology school, a Christian heresy which places racist hatred instead of charity at the center of its edifice of faith. Wright is ultimately the high priest of a death cult. Obama is, more precisely, an existentialist fascist made of equal parts 1969 Weatherman race war theory and Frantz Fanon’s cult of violent Third World rebellion. This is what low-income blue collar voters in West Virginia have understood far better than all the effete snobs who profess postmodernism at Harvard. [my emphasis --wa.]

The section is entitled 'The Mendacity of Dope,' but I haven't been able to stop crying long enough to get to the part about drugs yet. It promises to be fascinating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I did a Spotlight search on my machine for 'Trilateral.' The first hit was, you guessed it nerd boy, a page in a GURPS Illuminati. Second hit was Dictionary.app. Third hit, Tarpley's book. No fourth hit. (If there had been five I would never have posted this, of course.)

Will someone please send Arthur Silber a goddamn laptop...

...so he can go back to whining about how Barack Obama is the devil?

Coin of the realm.

I'm proud of this Harry Potter- and MIT-inspired phrase:

'Defense Against the Liberal Arts.'

And Google turns up no other hits for it. I'm a late-blooming genius I guess.

The necessary stupidity of open-source culture.

The basic problem with open-source software as a model for cultural production is this:

The Apache HTTP server is not like a novel. It's not like an encyclopedia. It's absolutely different from those things in every way: it does a specific thing (an interlocking set of specific things) the accuracy and speed of which can be measured and compared to those of other HTTP servers. Apache is a famously successful open-source project, and is indeed a handy illustration of the value of collaboratively-written software: each modification brings it closer to a well-understood, precisely-articulated goal/ideal.

Encyclopedias don't work that way. The tasks for which we write software, and the text of the software itself, don't need to be interpreted. A human doesn't need to figure out what kind of response to give to a particular HTTP request; there's a spec, and the programmers follow it. This isn't to say design doesn't take place, of course. Rather that there's a set of very simple fitness functions to apply to such software, with clear feedback available (you know when a request is badly handled, and can generally deduce how/why) to aid revisors/programmers.

Writing creative/interpretive prose doesn't work that way. And Wikipedia, for instance, is clearly a creative work, poorly done on average.

I desperately want Wikipedia and its analogues to become a source of expert summary and analysis. But they never will. They can't. With very, very, very few exceptions (relative to its enormous size), Wikipedia is a laughable waste of time. It reflects a lot of hard work. Nonexperts have to work hard in complex discussions to keep from embarrassing themselves; encyclopedias should aim for something grander.

The specific nature of the Wikipedia project - an open-source creative project the success of which can, for a variety of reasons, only be evaluated by those who didn't work on it - is what keeps it from being terribly valuable. Not the intelligence of its participants, nor the lack thereof.

Aaaaaaaand it's goodbye Derb!

I'm ashamed to have made excuses for this fool:

Pat Buchanan (Whom God Preserve!) gave his own autobiography the title Right from the Beginning. If Barack Obama had been a tad more honest when writing his, he could just as well have titled it Left from the Beginning. He was honest enough though, lavishing praise on coarse, fascistic radicals like the odious Jeremiah Wright. (You can let Rev’m Wright out of the basement now, guys.)

[...]

I see that some of my NRO colleagues are scratching around for shards of optimism — of Hope! — in the general wreckage. Good luck to them. I see nothing for conservatives to hope for in an Obama administration. We just have to stick it out. This shallow, ignorant, self-obsessed man, who held an actual job for just one year of his charmed life (low-grade editing for an obscure newsletter — he felt, he tells us in Dreams, "like a spy behind enemy lines," the enemy of course being capitalism), this red-diaper baby and his wife, will be our First Couple for the next four years and some weeks. It’ll be interesting. Interesting.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with 'conservatism,' of course. Derbyshire, like Victor Davis Hanson, talks a good game about conservative ideology, but this is a matter of style. To wit: Barack Obama, it turns out, is somewhat black. Carrying on about Marxism is generally code for other things (as Marx - rarely read, poorly understood, and available to us now mainly in the form of cultural interpretations and low propaganda - isn't really a reference point for mainstream liberals, of which e.g. Obama is one). Leave aside the inanity of claiming politics isn't 'an actual job'; Derbyshire writes purely out of resentment. Given the surprising cultural conservatism of the man he's calling a 'cultural Marxist' (what now?), it seems to me the object of his resentment isn't what he's claiming. Summary judgment: Liar. Fool.

Bad for everyone.

When white racists refuse to do overtly hateful or fearmongering things for fear of being called out as racists, the essential problem is not with the pressure that society has put on them to appear upright - the problem is with the pressure that society has put on them to hate darkies.

Read:

The campaign's internal polls showed that those lower-income swing voters in industrial states had not forgotten about Wright. In the view of some of his advisers, McCain had a chance to really hurt Obama by dredging up those videotapes of his longtime pastor crying "Goddam America!" But McCain did not want to. He did not want to do anything that smacked of racism. Some of his aides had quietly wished that the 527s, the independent- expenditure groups, would do the campaign's dirty work by running ads about Wright. Yet others worried that the 527s would indeed run lurid ads about Wright—and that McCain would get the blame. In any case, the big conservative moneymen who might fund such a smear campaign were lying low, and not just because their portfolios were suffering in the stock-market dive. They didn't want to be called racist, either.

Fight the emerging reactionary press narrative now. (I promise to go back to writing adolescent short fiction in a few days!)

Vindictive, juvenile assholes.

Ezra Klein: 'THE END OF NADER: The man who did more, arguably, than any other to condemn us to the Bush era comes out swinging against the Obama era, wondering if Obama will be "Uncle Sam or Uncle Tom?" [...] I'd just add that Nader's political opinions have long since ceased being relevant to his role in American politics.'

Andrew Golis: 'At a certain level, this strikes me as a nice punctuation to end the era of Bush. The man who helped start it finishes it by racially smearing the man who has now ended it. On another level, it's just so fucking sad.'

Matthew Yglesias (sarcastically): 'I, for one, am completely indifferent to the fact that George W. Bush rather than Al Gore has been president for the past eight years — they’re just tweedledee and tweedledum.'

Some fool at TPM: 'I thought I'd lost every ounce of respect for Ralph Nader. The 2000 nonsense cost him most of his capital with me, and in 2004, he lost even more for running so plainly not for the people he claims to represent, but for his own glorification.

But now, it's all gone.'

Sigh.

Please go read this instead. The complaints in the liberal blogosphere about Ralph Nader have basically nothing to do with race - it's an expression of guilt from pious white fools, sure, but mostly it's resentment from people with short historical memories who're working hard to keep their finally-the-Democrats-are-in-charge-of-everything buzz going for a few more days before they're reminded that politicians are, in fact, fucking politicians.

Hey, wasn't that the point Ralph Nader was making?

DEAR EZRA KLEIN: Ralph Nader did not even arguably do more than anyone else to 'condemn us to the Bush era.' Saying so makes you sound a DAMN FOOL. (Better candidates: George Bush. Karl Rove. Whatever imbecile ran Al Gore's campaign. Everyone who had anything to do with John Kerry shitboxing himself and the entire Democratic Party in 2004. Bill fucking Clinton and Monica fucking Lewinsky. Everyone who voted for George Bush in good faith having been lulled into a false sense of security by the stock market's spectacular success. Osama Bin Laden, for God's sake.

Grow up you schmuck.

Attic and elsewhere.

All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. This
Is the process whereby the pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense

Of joy.

--Robert Penn Warren, 'I am Dreaming of a White Christmas...'

McCain couldn't look at Obama during the debates. Why?

The conventional wisdom holds that McCain's inability (unwillingness) to look at Obama was a sign of great disdain, contempt, disgust.

But listen again to McCain's gorgeous concession speech. Watch the video, particularly his disgust at the crowd when they booed Obama.

Then read this extraordinary article.

What if McCain couldn't look at Barack Obama out of...shame? What if the contempt he was feeling was aimed not at Obama but at the party who'd taken his soul?

I believe it. Maybe just because I want to. Maybe not.

In progress.

I've got a going concern, it's got some of this in it:

On Election Day he biked to his polling place early in the morning, excited to be taking part in politics and government and so forth. He really did think of it in those terms, even talked that way to the heavyset transsexual checkout girl (boy? He wasn't up on the nomenclature) at the yuppie grocery store down the street: it was the limit of his imagination when it came to civics. Hadn't always been that way though. As a boy he'd dreamt of being president; like so many of the best minds of his generation he'd given up that ambition within maybe twelve hours of losing his virginity. He had grown preoccupied with other things, it seemed. When he met his first real rich kid in college he'd started buttressing his run-of-the-mill teenage vocabulary with phrases like 'and so forth' instead of the depressing teen-sitcom construction 'and stuff.' It seemed important at the time, or at least afforded an opportunity to extend in a new direction, to acquire a new texture. Casting his vote he felt much the same way; he assumed everyone was feeling it. He looked around at the line - longer than when he'd voted for the first time, but shorter than he'd hoped, where was everyone? Shouldn't five hundred people be here with me? Am I unusual in some way? Worse: have I been wrong? - looked around and felt a rush of pride and fellow-feeling, tempered with a twinge of regret. America! Sure, why not! He wished he could cry.

One of the poll workers was a woman about his age. He immediately liked those boots on her, cocked his head to the side, considered for a moment. But I normally hate that kind of boot, he thought. As an adult he didn't need to pluraize 'boot' anymore. She had a pretty face, a little more severe than he normally dug. She didn't actually have bushy eyebrows but she somehow looked like the sort of girl who should have. You have to know where you stand to rock the bushy eyebrows; even Bulgarians and Czechs, who come by that shit naturally, need to keep things under control to avoid looking like wild beasts. See? With opinions like that you don't need a girlfriend. You're never alone if you've opinions enough for two. She smiled at everyone, but didn't smile when she looked down at her papers to check names and addresses. The smile was part of the job. For some reason this turned him on, way way on. That wasn't even a phrase, 'way way on.' What?

When he got to the front of the line he pretended to be getting a phone call and let an elderly man go in front of him, so as to end up in her line. Unfortunately she was taking a long time with the registrant in front of him, and the fellow next to her - his nametag said 'Bill' - called our lad forth again. Difficult choice. On one hand, the severe girl with the boots (knee-high unlined light brown form-fitting, yikes). On the other, the embarrassment of faking another phone call in front of a whole group of -

'Yes? Hold on - sorry sir, I have to take this, just a second. No go ahead ma'am, you can go in front of me.' The most you can know is: your limits.

Holy fuck. I write like me. Finally. Um, sort of.

The original dream.

[10]
Clerks now go home, night watchmen wake up, and the heart
Of the taxi-driver, just coming on shift,
Leaps with hope.

All is not in vain.

Old men come out from the hard-core movies.

They wish they had waited till later.

They stand on the pavement and stare up at the sky.

Their drawers are drying stiff  at the crotch, and

The sky dies wide. The sky

Is far above the first hysteria of neon.

Soon they will want to go and get something to eat.

Meanwhile, down the big sluice of Broadway,

The steel logs jerk and plunge

Until caught in the rip, snarl, and eddy here before my face.

A mounted policeman sits a bay gelding. The rump

Of the animal gleams expensively. The policeman

Is some sort of dago. His jowls are swart.

His eyes are bright with seeing.

He is as beautiful as a law of chemistry.

-- Robert Penn Warren, 'I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision'

Trufax.

Some data on 2008 vs. 2004.

What is the heart of American conservatism?

Depends on whom you ask, of course. Ross Douthat's answer:

Social conservatives, a group in which I count myself, might profitably meditate on how to disentangle our primary political goal - the protection of the unborn - from secondary issues like, say, abstinence-only education and the debate over evolution and intelligent design, which dovetail too easily with caricatures of religious fundamentalism (as Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin both discovered in the media coverage of their campaigns). Meanwhile, those Republicans who wish that the GOP spend more time talking about, say, capital-gains tax rates and less time talking about abortion should recognize that in this election, the McCain ticket did exactly that, sidestepping the social issues and instead emphasizing a business-friendly tax agenda and (late in the game) Joe the Plumber's case against progressive taxation. This strategy did not exactly reap impressive returns.

Since I feel that 'the protection of the unborn' is an insane choice of a central political tenet - literally insane, a perversion of Christian morality so extreme as to render the name of 'Christian' almost meaningless - I'm put off a bit by this claim that abortion is social conservatives' main concern. But if you grant that there are people who feel this is the basic question facing American conservatives, and grant (for the sake of argument) that they're reasonable adults who like living in the real world and just happen to care a whole lot about cutting off access to reproductive health care, then you can move on to Finding #2, which is: Douthat is dead right, and the further he gets from his own social-con biases, the more right he is. The whole article is worth a look. He's not as much of a flouncing attention-starved jackass as Reihan Salam, his Grand New Party coauthor; quite the opposite, he's a wet noodle taped to a cold fish wrapped in a ball of uncooked dough. (Dick Cheney's favourite dessert treat, I've no doubt.) Douthat's one of the ones to watch, though.

[For Adrian, BTW, lemme reiterate: of course it's possible to be 'pro-life' (anti-reproductive-freedom) and be able to function in the real world. But to make outlawing abortion the central tenet of your political philosophy is madness. I don't know how I've managed to live in this particular bubble for so long, but I've always believed that anti-abortion beliefs are part of a comprehensive American-Christian morality that's (to me) fucked but at least consistent, an actual moral code. I'm finally coming to realize that it's just not that way, that this single to-me-somewhat-midsized belief actually takes over people's entire political programs. I can't understand it. I sure as hell can't sympathize with it. Those conservatives for whom this isn't true are a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Hard to believe my problem is I'm too charitable!]

Also, this sounds familiar:

Ronald Reagan attracted me to his side in 1980 with five words: "family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom." It was Barack Obama who spoke in those timeless terms in this election, and he received his just reward Tuesday evening. What's more, he spoke about them by using well-considered, new ideas—for example, universal health insurance, as well as a national commitment (and not just an anemic executive order) for faith-based and often neighborhood social-service delivery.

The bit about Romney looking and acting 'like a president' is a little startling, but no matter. Good read.

Michael Crichton.

There are books I come back to every few months, even today: DFW's first essay collection, Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett, David Milch's two TV-tie-in books (weird but true). When I was in grade school, my comfort books were Lord of the Rings, sure, but mainly Jurassic Park. I must have read it cover-to-cover more than a half-dozen times, and have read favourite passages many many more times than that. I first heard about the book in seventh grade - I think it was still in hardcover then, and it was talked about in a little science magazine that our Life Science teacher, Mr Hall, handed out in class. The book was perfect for me: brainy action, breathless suspense, dopey prose, cardboard characters, a socially-awkward scientist as the hero, and an insane climax involving, of all things, a babychild navigating VRML menus. (Plus a harrowing anticlimax, purely intellectual, cut from the film: the characters sneak into a velociraptor nest and find out the dinos want to...migrate! What a thrill.)

I loved everything about it. Plus, Crichton was artist-in-residence at MIT in the mid-90's; that made me want to go there all the more. I was weirdly proud to follow in his footsteps in that regard. Dorky? OK.

In high school I read a bunch of Crichton's other novels, and always had a soft spot for Sphere - indeed wrote stories based on it. (Fanfic? Say it ain't so.) In college that was it for him and me; I never picked up his work again after the disappointing Park sequel The Lost World (I was embarrassed for him when that book came out - even if its jacket copy is perfect). Somewhere along the line Crichton began to slide into something awful: I was too young to understand how racist Rising Sun is, how grotesque Disclosure's ball-breaking female lead is, but what I know about his last novels leads me to believe that they're embarrassing reactionary tales about the horrors of new tech and leftist antiscience. He followed a line.

Still, certain aesthetic categories I now understand in terms of the stories of my childhood, and Critchton's work looms large among my early favourite books. Crichton died today, aged 66 years. I'm sad to hear of his passing.

Cultural politics: very, very complicated.

Ralph Nader, folks:

Shep what's-his-name sounds like a fool here, but this is an interesting moment. And Nader is clearly making an important point about selling out to hegemonic interests (in this case corporate). Unfortunately he's doing so using language that means 'a nigger who acts white to curry favour.' Some days I just don't understand things.

Negatif.

I decided this morning not to spend time on positive coverage of the election; I'm elated that Obama won and I think that good times are coming, but I'm worried about the guaranteed conservative reaction. Here's Rick Perlstein in - yes - late 2005:

Here is something I started to ponder only after completing Before the Storm. How did my subjects from the youth conservative movement of the 1960s, the ones that later came to inherit the world, present themselves to the researcher who came calling for stories about how their triumph began? On the one hand, beaming, telling me stories of principle. On the other, sometimes in the same breath, winkingly defining political deviancy down, telling Hustonian tales of antinomial subterfuge. Peeling off opposition bumper stickers with razor blades, jamming Rockefeller phone banks, working to subvert the 1961 National Student Association convention by setting up a dummy "Middle of the Road Caucus." I related these in the spirit they were offered: as evidence of good, healthy political exuberance, in an ennervated political age. I didn't even give a second thought to the delight F. Clifton White took in relating, in his two memoirs, his self-tutelage in the techniques of Stalinists--Stalinists!--to take over the Young Republicans National Federation.

Well, I'm writing now, however, not in an age of Clintonian triangulation, but in an age where the notion of conservative Republicans seeing as their first duty divesting themselves of the power they have been given seems perfectly absurd. Perhaps that is why it has becomes my thesis that the Republicans are less the party of Goldwater, and more the party of Watergate--and this not despite the operational ascendecy of the conservative movement in its councils but in some sense because of it.

[...]

This part of my talk, I imagine, is long after the point a constitutive operation of conservative intellectual work has clicked on in your minds: the part where you argue that malefactor A or B or C, or transgression X or Y or Z, is not "really" conservative. In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.

It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula--well, maybe he's a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He's certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it's William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.

So I'm reading The Corner, Pajamas Media, Michelle Malkin's site, and so forth. The rightward shift in the Republican Party doesn't stop with Obama's victory, it accelerates. Here's a guess: four years from now there will be serious talk of a pragmatic conservative third party, while the Republicans nominate someone a good deal more like George Bush than like John McCain. And Obama will whip the GOP's guy - even if it's Sarah Palin. Why shouldn't it go that way? Conservative countercultures aren't strong enough to dethrone the 'culture of life' types, and why would that change before 2012?

Well it excites me to think about anyhow.

Mere numbers.

I hate to be a spoilsport, too, but 52% of the popular vote isn't a 'decisive majority.' A 52-46 victory is a nonnegligible margin - hey, that looks a bit like a...six-point spread, doesn't it? - but if 52% of voters wanted you to be president, and not everyone is an idiot, then you need to keep reaching out to the other side to stay afloat. 52-46 isn't a decisive repudiation of the other guy. It's a win, but there are lots of ways to win. The margin and the majority aren't the same thing. 70-30 is a goddamn decisive majority and a huge victory. This ain't that.

On the other hand, this guy won the greatest electoral landslide in U.S. history - but less than 60% of the popular vote.

So maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

Or maybe no one does. Doesn't that seem more plausible?

Errers.

Time for a hearty laugh at the expense of apparatchiks. Reader(s), the 'Top Thirty Errors That Doomed McCain':

1. Not pursuing the Reverend Wright connection, as an issue of judgment and then credibility. Even Jerry Nadler knew it was a sign that Barack Obama lacked political courage, i.e., character.

[...]

9. Appallingly deficient “oppo” research and timing. Why didn’t the “bankrupt the coal industry” tape come out before the final weekend?

[...]

13. The roll-out of Sarah Palin.

14. The internal trashing of Sarah Palin.

15. The failure to put Sarah Palin on every radio and TV outlet they could find in the final two weeks of the campaign.

[...]

28. Too much hostility toward conservatives offering smart strategy and policy ideas.

29. Not enough explanation and focus on Tony Rezko.

(etc.)

Shorter Jennifer Rubin: 'John McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough.'

That's the right-wing narrative going forward, of course. Rush Limbaugh's audience will explode over the next four years. Watch and listen. The implosion of the Republican Party isn't over yet.

Not funny crazy but walk-away-backwards crazy.

Scott Johnson, everyone. Take it away, crazy guy:

In the course of the Democratic caucuses and primaries Obama emerged as a messianc [sic] figure come to redeem the time. He is a quasi-religious figure for non-believers, playing to the same market that made films such as "Ghost" and "The Sixth Sense" such enormous successes.

[...]

Obama's race was an asset to his candidacy at every step of the way. Americans want to prove their racial good will.

I can enjoy a dose of crazy sometimes. Today's not the day for it.

The first point there starts from a reasonable implied observation: Americans want deliverance from racism, historical and contemporary, and as the ascendancy of George W. Bush demonstrated, Americans are happy to settle for 100% symbolic politics without policy substance. Where Johnson runs aground is the stupid implied false equivalence: the election of Barack Obama really is an earth-shattering moment in the history of civil rights for black Americans, but the culmination of a historical progression is not the same as the forcing of a political issue for the purpose of expiation. Or, less messily: Obama's candidacy was always about political transformation, but most of that quality comes from outside the campaign. Indeed Obama's rhetoric has always eschewed cult-of-personality talk; he's emphasized his biography only as much as McCain showcased his own, but the differences in their biographies didn't need overemphasis. Many Americans figured things out for themselves.

Johnson's second point is half-stupid (Obama's race was hardly an 'asset' when Rev. Wright was the only national news story for several days) and half-devious (the people most invested in having our racist past washed away are...racists). Its silliness is self-evident: Barack Obama helped himself and made an asset of his background and mixed race; that has nothing to do with racial difference and hatred in general, in America. If Johnson's first point is true - Obama's ascendancy is symbolic expiation - then his second must be false, else no expiation would be necessary.

And when he says 'Americans want to prove...' he means: 'Real Americans (whites) want to show niggers they don't hate them anymore.' It's no more complicated than that, alas. You can change the wording if you want - 'niggers' is a deliberately offensive choice on my part - but the sentiment is the same.

The 'messianic' quality of Obama's candidacy is and has always been a Republican talking point first, and a sociological observation a distant second.

One forward, two back.

California Prop 8 seems to have passed. But justice will prevail in time.

Ezra Klein, sigh.

Bored now:

Spencer Ackerman asks, "Remember in 2003 and 2004, when there was all this talk about how the Democrats were in danger of no longer being a national party?" I do remember that. I also remember how Democrats had to get religion if they ever wanted to be competitive again. I also remember how they had to appeal to the white heartland by nominating candidates more culturally recognizable to rural voters. Instead, they went in the opposite direction, running a candidate who was recognizable to the majority coalition Democrats hoped to have in 10 years. It seems to have worked out pretty well. It's almost as if pundits don't really know what they're talking about.

No, Ezra. Don't be fucking stupid. The Democrats nominated a young, very Christian Midwestern senator with centrist capitalist/cultural views and a plan to cut taxes for most Americans during a major economic downturn, affiliated with a flame-spitting Christian church and willing to forcefully repudiate the Democrats' laughable identity-politics brand. He's exactly as cultural-elite as the majority of Senators, Republican and Democrat, but - in spite of his tech-heavy campaign machinery and academic credentials - Obama is more or less the ideal Safe Black Male to pitch to moderate Republicans. And the fact that he brought so many new voters into the race is a function, primarily, of

1) his age,

2) his race, and

3) George Bush and Dick Cheney's disastrous presidency, the most media-saturated presidency in history at a time when 'progressive' media outlets are just being born in the USA.

The man will ride into the White House on the back of a tax cut proposal. Think about that for a minute.

Obama is not the radical liberal the politically wishy-washy national media makes him out to be. And much as young left-leaning pundits like Klein and Ackerman would like to believe he vindicates both their politics and their attitudes about Republicans and Democrats, Obama's appeal remains as it's always been: he can reach out to Republicans and build a liberal coalition using conservative language.

My hope is that Obama is able to show disaffected post-Palin Republicans (the ones who don't see the GOP primarily as a white Christian cultural army) how much common ground there is between his views and theirs. His command of the Christian cultural language so important to American politicians is what's gotten him in through the door.

Self-satisfied liberals ignore that fact at their peril.

A 'center-right country'?

Consider the following statements:

Barack Obama is a socialist.

Barack Obama won the popular vote with a convincing margin and the electoral college with a very comfortable one.

Barack Obama's election reflects the will of the majority of voters - particularly new entrants to the political process.

Conservatism - small-government conservatism as sold to the guns/god/gays crowd, and libertarian-themed conservatism as espoused by wealthier Republicans - is now an opposition belief in the USA, a political counterforce threatened by the rise of pluralism, multiculturalism, liberal class warfare, atheism, etc.

YET America is a 'center-right country.'

* * *

In order to believe all these things simultaneously you must also hold on to a bridging belief, namely that conservative voices are marginalized and silenced in America unlike other voices - indeed, to a degree unimaginable to favoured minorities like 'poor blacks.' The implied solution to this problem is obvious: get louder. Now that we've seen the beginning of a committed liberal-centrist media infrastructure (ThinkProgress et al., to a limited degree MSNBC, etc.), the conservative pundit-corps will, after a short period of soul-searching, get even rowdier and even more baldly partisan in order to drum up more noise from its 'base' (what a sadly abused word). This is the limit of the imagination of movement conservatism as embodied by e.g. today's National Review. This is the difference between the Goldwater Republicans and the Bush Republicans: the earlier group set out to change the party by changing its ideology. Now: '¿Qué? You can't understand what I'm saying? Lemme scream it in your ear.' The deep-seated will of the American people has gone unexpressed: that's the narrative.

You can see the next logical stage. Sarah Palin for President.

THE GREAT WORK BEGINS!!

More life!

Now comes the tough part.

No problem.