Wax Banks

Derb.

Blah blah blah, John Derbyshire wrote an ugly, terrified column about how blacks are dumb animals -- but everyone who's ever read his stuff has known for a long time that he thought these things. (See Ta-Nehisi.) What's irritating about the current outpouring of boilerplate invective toward Derbyshire is that most of his critics-for-the-weekend have never given a damn about anything he's said in the past -- they're just joining in a fun group singalong. We found a racist, yay!

Derbyshire isn't an idiot (cf. my very clumsy response to a 2006 piece of his), and that's the only long-term point of interest in this case: how can an intelligent person with scientific training fall for the bullshit he's peddling in his recent post? And how can we make knowledge and acceptance (read: egolessness) more appealing than insane dogma of Derb's kind?

By being explicit about his race-hatred, Derbyshire does us all a service: now we can move on from talking about whether he thinks one or another thing, and learn more about why. I believe that a good answer to that question would open some windows, let some foul air out. Let some light in.

Schumer tries to say the right thing but can't, because he is a dick.

Chuck Schumer, ladies and germs:

“Democrats are focused like a laser on jobs, the economy, and the middle class,” Schumer said. “Republicans, realizing that that’s not their strong suit, are going off on these other things, women’s issues and women’s health and contraception. The women’s vote, latest polls show we’re up by 15 percent, because they want us to focus on the economy and the middle class, and we are doing it.”

You see the point he's trying to make, right? That the GOP are harping on culture-war issues (i.e. opening up lines of misogynist attack) out of desperation. Not exactly a controversial point, and useful to note.

But Schumer can't help being, as mentioned in the title of this post, a dick: 'these other things, women’s issues and women’s health and contraception.'

So-called 'women's issues' are human issues. 'Women's health' is public health. Cheap, widely-available contraception is an extremely vital part of any halfway-sane approach to public health. These aren't secondary matters, and the frustrating thing is that if male Dems like Schumer could get away with not even noticing the existence of women, we can be absolutely sure that they would. Schumer isn't castigating the GOP for declaring war on American women, he's complaining that they're harping on stuff that's not Big Important Veiny Throbbing American Politics Stuff. For focusing on the wrong stuff.

It's naked political calculation.

In other words: he's enough of a politician to know that Republicans are doing something wrong. But he's not enough of a man to say what it really is.

Fuck him.

Whitney Houston.

What a voice.

Rest in peace.

French parents are superior? But then what exactly do French parents produce?

My wonderful wife forwarded me this WSJ excerpt from Pamela Druckerman's forthcoming anti-Chua text, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. The broad argument: French parents are more comfortable setting boundaries for their children, so everything is better there.

Except, of course, it's not. From the article:

Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

There are a lot of things wrong with Druckerman's article: the bourgeois myopia, the cheesy stereotyping of American parents, the pathetic cod-Gladwellian namechecking (she brings on Walter Mischel, inventor of the 'marshmallow test,' to assert that he's never studied French children but his 'impression' is the same as hers(!!)), and especially Druckerman's dead stupid one-sentence dismissal of the deeply entrenched differences in governmental support of childrearing families between France and the U.S.

She even talks (elsewhere in the book) about how awesome it is that French women put on less weight when pregnant than American women do. Of all the tired-ass clichés...

But the deepest problem with the piece is in the paragraph I quoted -- or rather, the question it raises and doesn't even try to answer: if Druckerman doesn't want to raise French kids who turn someday into Frenchmen, why does she have such a hard-on for French parenting? Where does she think Frenchmen come from, exactly?

Turns out the answer is hidden at the end of the piece, and it's got precious little to do with her children:

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

What Druckerman wants, of course, is just this: to be seen differently; to sit around chatting her legs stretched out in front of her. To not be 'just' a mom. The real Pamela Druckerman is the woman having a chat at the playground, after all.

What she envies is that French parents -- the ones she sits around chatting with at playgrounds, anyhow -- feel no guilt about putting themselves first.

How do you say 'Fuck off, Seymour, mommy needs her merlot now' in French, I wonder?

Why don't geeks seem happy during/after arguments?

Here's part of a theory I'm working up. It is incomplete, provisional, and probably totally screwy somehow. THAT SAID:

'Geek culture' is built to facilitate social interaction between folks who have (certain) problems with emotional understanding and communication. Structured socializing (RPGs, cons, (video) game culture) is big here.

You'll note that geeks famously argue angrily 'til they're blue in the face about the pettiest pop-culture bullshit on earth -- which edition of D&D or Star Trek is the best, did Han shoot first, what exactly is Joyce's 'word known to all men,' is Tony Soprano dead, who's the metalest metal band of all, do Harry and Snape belong together forever, etc. One possible explanation for this annoying phenomenon is that geeks line up this way (w/r/t such irrelevant questions) so they can have the experience of being on a team without the trauma of being picked (last). In other words: affinity groups consisting solely of sharing an opinion.

That's part of why you hear so much affectless bickering in your local nerd store (or online forum): the point isn't to win, the point is to assert membership in a group when other forms of assertion are inaccessible.

NOW OK, BUT LOOK: 'neurotypical' folks do the same thing, right? NOT QUITE. The key difference is that people in/of the social mainstream are able to maintain memberships in social groups whose binding material is vulnerability, empathy, and/or public affection. (Let's leave the weird formalism of organized polyamory alone for the time being.)

People who for some reason have been impeded in their attempts to join groups who actually share and risk things -- by internal or external forces/circumstances -- will associate themselves compensatorily along 'ideological' lines.

Hence: Team Edward. (14-year-olds are socially-maladapted by definition, because our society can't handle puberty.) Hence: down-the-ticket voters. Hence: soccer hooligans.

If someone's in an affinity group whose main characteristic seems to be that the members are constantly at each other's throats (rather than that largely-irrelevant official business draws people together to agree broadly, and then to share experiences/feelings, e.g. the MLA or the NRA) then something is being compensated for, and some social fact is being avoided (or going unrecognized).

(I count myself among the uglies, here, and I have juuuuuust enough wit to hate it, but no more.)

You are probably better off without 'social networking.'

Frictionless pseudoconnection impairs real empathetic connection. Effort at socializing is not wasted; indeed it's essential.

Some folks can't connect with other humans without tools like Facebook. I feel bad for them but I imagine they don't care. Good luck to them.

The rest of us are better off picking up the phone.

'The terrorists' aren't winning -- they've won. Ages ago.

Your occasional reminder about the abject shittiness -- and the depressing underlying psychology -- of the U.S.'s unbelievably expensive security theater.

Brilliant: Ta-Nehisi Coates on 'Why do so few blacks study the Civil War?'

Read this.

They live!!

Thumbnail world:

• 1862 At the battle of Glorieta, New Mexico, which marks the end of the Confederate effort to conquer the southwest/western US, reports of ‘giant man-apes’ in the mountains spread among Confederate soldiers. The reports eerily echo ancient Taos Indian myths of giant mountain-dwelling cannibals. The rebels speak of the creatures with fear; popular reports (no doubt spiked with racial animus over the status of slavery in the Union) have them fighting for the North. Confederate mythology later puts the USA’s victory down to smallpox and travel-attrition among CSA troops.
• Late 1862 Sightings of ‘large brown bears walking about on hindlegs’ are reported in newspapers as far east as Tennessee.
• Christmas 1862 A small warband of Sasquatch, armed with shaped stones, approach a Union garrison in the Rocky Mountains. Hostilities are narrowly averted when a Union scout is able to make out snatches of English in the Sasquatch’s speech.
• 1863 A regiment of Sasquatch troops, helmeted in bone and wielded 70lb qaurterstaves, takes part in the successful Union siege of Vicksburg.
• 1865 Two Sasquatch are awarded posthumous Medals of Honour by President Johnson. The field of modern identity politics is born.
• 1870s Growing numbers of Sasquatch, integrating with remarkable (though still limited) success into rural life, are employed by local law-enforcement agencies in roles from labourer to (infamously) Federal marshal. Sixty Sasquatch enter employment with the Pinkertons Detective Agency.
• 1882 After a bloody and somewhat ambiguous incident involving a group of schoolchildren and a rabid dog, a Sasquatch is lynched in Huntsville, Alabama.
• 1884 Sasquatch Rebellion.

'Untitled 1' will do.

Thinking about (but not listening to) Vampire Weekend this morning, for some reason. The memory of the idea of their music playing in a club; or else the idea of the memory. Creepy: all those 30-year-old hipsters dancing to knockoff Afro-pop made by 18-year-old prep schoolers. Maybe the whole point of forming the band was So The Older Kids Will Like Us. But then when did a 30-year-old turn into a kid? Thinking back, I wonder (conversely) when I turned into an adult. My instinct is to say 'When we decided to have a baby,' or 'When we got married.' But shouldn't the answer be 'When I went off to college on my own' or thereabouts? I seemingly spent my 20's fucking and attending funerals; isn't that 'grownup stuff'?

Trying to synthesize years' worth of data regarding a particular observation: I rarely see well-off folks walking down the street yelling into phones or at other people on the street. What I take to be 'working-class types,' though, it happens all the time. Heavyset women in tracksuits with penciled-on eyebrows and heavily hairsprayed bangs telling their boyfriends DON'T CALL ME AGAIN I HATE YOU I'LL CALL YOU over cheapass cell phones.

Did I say 'types'? Do I say that? I do.

My baby is up and crawling about, throwing his rattle-blocks on the ground. His version of 'throwing' does not inspire Major League dreams. Not that I'd ever actually have those. He can be a doctor instead if he wants.

Key difference between Deadwood and McCabe and Mrs Miller; i.e. between real liberalism and (ironic-)conservatism.

In McCabe, the building and growth of the town serves as counterpoint to the main action, which is the private struggle of the title characters. The two stories parallel and illuminate one another, but the town - the church - is always a symbol in the background of the film. The story comes down to two characters, and the town is an element in that story.

On Deadwood, the characters start out trying to escape this or that, as McCabe does in the film, but their story is the story of the town itself, and vice versa; the social fabric is foregrounded at all times. Swearengen, the most complex character on the show, is also the central element of the town of Deadwood itself, the greater community body - yet he willfully subsumes himself in that body in the second and third seasons. Every character who thrives on Deadwood does so by entering into the fellowship that is the town. Writer David Milch makes no distinction between the stories of the characters and the story of Deadwood itself.

In this regard, Deadwood is the more radical political/moral text: where McCabe ironizes and subverts the tropes of the film western (disreputable outsider comes to frontier town to seek fortune, battles Big Money Back East), Deadwood rejects the film western's premises outright; this rejection is symbolically enacted with the murder of Wild Bill Hickock in the show's fourth episode. He isn't the West, he's the 'western,' the media fantasy of the lone gunslinger, and he dies alone as he must.

Or more neatly: Swearengen on Deadwood also faces mercenaries from Back East, like McCabe himself does; but on Deadwood they're just a subplot, a minor thread in a narrative building not to his own transcendence or apotheosis but to the town's legal incorporation. He submits to a greater will; the town enters into a greater, more robust (but much less comfortable) order; the buildings going up all around him aren't symbols. They're buildings.

This difference stems from the TV/film difference in no small part. But it's also a matter of political focus. Deadwood both valorizes entrepreneurs and demonizes Big Business, yet its social ethos is all about the collective, the self-organizing workers, the orderly transition to civilization. Not only does Milch dismiss the libertarian fantasy of the West and its affiliated political pseudophilosophy, he rejects the fundamental premise underlying it (the sublime value and meaning of the Individual).

Or more briefly: Altman offers a melancholy vision of the Little Guy trying to get by and dying at the hands of Big Business, but Milch gives us a continuum between the two, and locates his key moral conflict elsewhere (the illusion of separateness versus holy union in the community body).

Or even more briefly: McCabe is a movie about a pimp and a whore, set in a lifelike western town. Deadwood is a show about God a town.

I TAKE THAT

Neatly summarizing embodying everything wrong with today's 30somethings, ladies and gentlemen: Jason Kottke!

With 'digital culture' in general, come to think of it:

Take five minutes to read this and you'll be talking NYC pizza like an expert.

Obama's core political principle - the one that keeps getting him into trouble.

Obama obviously believes that the USA stands to gain more from joint GOP/Dem ownership of major policy shifts (like the highly conservative health care bill and the present misguided all-cuts budget plan(s)) than from unilateral progressive/Dem action. I believe he leans progressive in most of his political views, but he's made clear time and time again that in his mind, compromise - i.e. joint ownership, shared responsibility, shared accountability - trumps all other virtues of a policy plan/movement.

This is misguided only from a partisan viewpoint. Obama presumably wants to enact liberal proposals in general, but he seems more interested in presiding over a drawing-down of party-political forces. Not surprising from a guy who came of age politically during the disastrous post-Reagan economic-conservative experiment.

He doesn't betray progressives, folks. Sorry. He's given up on 'winning' ideologically. (Of course he wants to win reelection.) I think he's more interested in building a half-century of consensus than in what that consensus should actually consist of.

Shared destiny. Everyone whines about losing it. Obama actually seems to want to recommit to it. That makes him an enemy to partisans. Well - aren't there much worse things he might be?

Intransigence.

The key issue in the debt ceiling talks is, of course, that the lives of people everywhere will be made worse if the U.S.'s credit rating is worsened as part of a political/cultural squabble. But there's also very clear blame in one specific area: The Democrats really do have constitutencies that will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to take their benefits/political privileges away. Fair enough. But there is no equivalent in the Democratic Party to the startlingly large bloc of Republican congressmen who will oppose any plan that comes from Obama's office, regardless of its conservative bona fides. That's what actual intransigence is: not just stubbornness, but an absolute unwillingness to consider any plan on the merits if it comes from one's 'enemy.' That's what the Democrats are dealing with right now. That's what set off this political crisis, which may well precipitate (or just hasten) an economic crisis. I intensely dislike the Democratic Party - its spinelessness, its lack of principles, its reactionary identity politics. But the Tea Party has no equivalent among the Dems. They hold the process of actual governance in contempt, and actively work to sabotage it - and they've got a big bloc of congressmen terrified of their electoral power. 'Centrists' want that not to be true. But that's lazy false equivalence.

'Pitch me baby!': David Pogue's ego blocks our view of a much deeper, much scarier cultural problem.

David Pogue, a freelance gadget columnist best known for his work at the NYTimes, recently spoke (for pay) to an audience of PR professionals. The talk was entitled 'Pitch Me, Baby.' Last week the NYTimes ombudsman described Pogue exhorting the publicity men to suggest column material to him:

In the presentation, Pogue jumps out of the gate with a Power Point page inviting the audience to "Pitch me, Baby!"" The presentation goes on to offer do’s and don’ts and emphasizes his own close reliance on pitches that come his way from professional public relations people.

On a later slide, he displays eight recent New York Times columns and identifies five as having come from public relations people. Pogue explains that, as a reviewer of new gadgets, there is no comprehensive database he can rely on to learn about new stuff. Hence he relies on companies and their hired pitchmen to tell him about new products.

Pogue’s basic advice boils down to two imperatives: 1) "Save me time," and 2) "Don’t be a robot." This means that public relations people should tailor the pitch to its audience (avoid spamming, in particular) and avoid jargon and other extraneous matter.

This strikes me as a violation of journalistic ethics, not to mention good taste. The NYT agreed; Pogue has been forced to curb his appearances at such little get-togethers. But I don't care at all about that aspect of the article; my disgust at Pogue's behaviour isn't new, nor is it unique; nor is he different in that regard from, say, Judith Miller pawning off Cheney/Rove PR as reportage. We don't use the term 'corporate media' for nothing.

The deeper issue, which doesn't seem to be getting talked about this week, is this:

Pogue's job consists of advocating for the business interests of large corporations. That's it. Like so many other 'tech columnists,' he masquerades as an advocate for better living with/through technology, but it's easy to see that he's always been a paid shill, nothing more: he's only capable of talking about technology on a corporate PR timeline, within a logic of consumption rather than creation. He's an advertiser for The New (and Expensive).

If Pogue mattered, he'd be writing about amazing! new! corporate! technology! with an eye toward an actual alternative: i.e. instead of saying 'Should we buy the new iPhone or the new "iPhone-killer?"' a serious critic would ask, 'Should we buy new tech at all?'

A simple thought experiment: if you've bought a new computer in the last five years, why did you do so? If you're a grownup, chances are you didn't do it in order to play the latest video games. So ask yourself: what does your new computer enable you to do that your last computer didn't? If your last computer was less than four years old, the answer is probably nothing.

My first iPhone altered the way I traveled (thank you location-aware computing) and used email (thank you 3G data service). My new one lets me shoot video, take better pictures, and run the old apps faster. I can imagine needing to replace it when it breaks, but what in the world could I possibly want from a 'better' phone?

Pogue and his fellow tech writers would answer by listing the features of next-gen phones. But 'Why should I buy this phone?' isn't a question about a phone, it's a question about me; and Pogue and his ilk should know it. Their defense is always the same: Well, you don't have to buy what we recommend. And that's true, of course. But these idiots then turn around and write about 'tech' from the perspective of collectors, 'early adopters,' fetishists. And they orient the culture toward these perverse logics.

Pogue isn't a commentator on the 'gadget industry,' he's part of it. He's a servant of his corporate masters, who provide him with free shit in exchange for free publicity. But in his capacity as an NYTimes columnist, he's presented as something else: a servant of his readers.

The only thing he creates in this world is a misperception of the need to buy new things.

So no, David Pogue's recent bout of new-money tackiness isn't a 'journalism story.' It's not a 'tech industry story.' A paid advertiser got spanked by his bosses, who rely on paid advertising for their livelihoods. So what.

The actual story is that at this point, we can't imagine 'modern life' without people like David Pogue. We are fucked.

The word 'hack' has been stripped of nearly all its meaning.

As an MIT grad I'm disgusted by that - what was once a term of honour for the playful and innovative exercise of the engineer's craft is now a synonym for cosmetic change. Thank you, self-satisfied popcult 'geek' nimrods, for dumbing down absolutely everything you can get your hands on.

Two sentences and more on Mitch Horowitz's Occult America, which I finished reading today.

1) It'd be a lot more important - though a much harder sell - if it were a history of ideas rather than a gallery of Compelling Personalities (Joseph Smith, Manly Hall, Blavatsky, Cayce, Pelley, et al.).

2) The last hundred pages are far, far, far less compelling than the rest, as Horowitz subtly (and not-so-subtly) shapes the narrative to separate what seem to be his own occult beliefs from less pleasant/respectable currents in the genealogy of American mystical thought.

* * *

Horowitz's book is a decent introduction to a particular strain of American Irrationalism, which isn't a bad name for our unofficial national religion: we 300 million are proudly and deeply credulous, shockingly historically ignorant, and hooked on a centuries-old mythology of American self-determination (darkened by the identity-instability of a migrant nation cut off from all its geo-historical sources). Horowitz is an engaging guide to the links between mid-19th century American mythohistorical prophetic writing (e.g. Smith's Mormonism), Spiritualist psychiana, the civic-minded narcissism of New Thought, and 20th century self-help culture from Norman Vincent Peale to the 'self-actualization' subgospels of the 'New Age.' And for occult trivia from Lincoln to the Beatles, it's a fine, easy, breezy read - even when Horowitz gives in to the urge to show off his research cred, as in the uncomfortably defensive and shallow 'occult+fascism' chapter.

But the book falls short as a critical work, mainly for reason #1 above: it's a widely-read enthusiast's anecdotal tour rather than an analytical work, long on 101-level introductions and disappointingly short on serious historical context. Its brief epilogue (on New Age thought) leaves a sour taste as a result. Here's the last page:

For all of its inroads into mainstream life, New Age became a term (and sometimes an epithet) that for many serious people connoted nothing more than a softheaded jumble of spiritual-therapeutic remedies or bromides. But the New Age did, in fact, have a core set of beliefs and a definable point of view. Most people, thought schools, or movements identifeed as New Age from the 1970s through the earlytwenty-first century shared these traits:

1. Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas.
2. Belief in a mind-body connection in health.
3. Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages.
4. Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality.
5. Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine.

Most twenty-first-century Americans, whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements. To a very great degree, occult movements and personalities had introduced those ideas, in some of their most popular variants, into American life. Whether the occult changed America, or the other way around, certainly this much is clear: The encounter between America and occultism resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture. This new culture extolled religious egalitarianism and responded, perhaps more than any other movement in history, to the inner needs and search of the individual. At work and at church, on television and in bookstores, there was no avoiding it: Occult America had prevailed.

This slipshod question-begging gobbledygook retroactively imbues the whole book with an unpleasantly self-justificatory quality: in lieu of a historical argument about American integration of 'New Age' beliefs, Horowitz provides a brief laundry list of supposedly widespread beliefs - phrased so vaguely as to be meaningless - and uses this list to claim that even more vaguely defined 'occult' beliefs had 'prevailed' in the U.S.

Prevailed over what? Horowitz never does explain. The book's final movement is full of that kind of stuff: Horowitz's treatment of Carlos Castaneda involves (1) sensibly dismissing his factual claims as fabrication and (2) gushing over his books' value as 'allegories on [a] path' of 'religious or wisdom tradition. The resonances,' Horowitz breathily reports, 'could be remarkable.' At moments like this, the man's credulousness shows through, distorting his reportage, and it's hard to forget that the dude believes not only in ecumenical generosity but in the existence of leprechauns.

The whole book isn't this bad, thank god. Horowitz goes off the rails when discussing mid-20th century occult believers like Vice President Henry Wallace and 'mystic healer' Edgar Cayce, as part of his quiet book-length effort to demonstrate not just correlation but a straightforward causal relationship between occult beliefs and American progressivism/ecumenism (guess which is the cause). But the early material on Spiritualism and its discontents, and especially the link between early-20C self-help texts and loopy 'New Thought' pseudoscience/pseudophilosophy, is pure gold. The line from Peale's 'lemons into lemonade' cheeriness to our 'lemons into locally-grown organic lemonade' self-help culture is certainly important. And I bookmarked a whole mess of material about autodidacts, self-made huckster/loon/wisdom-adepts, and sui generis critico-poetic writers like Manly P. Hall (whose Secret Teachings of All Ages, which I picked up from the Cambridge Library on Horowitz's recommendation, really is every bit as comprehensively brilliant as it's made out to be). It's important to remember that every great creator, from Jesus to James Joyce, has had a bit of a larcenous touch - and Americans are unique only in the flavour of our celebrations of such generative poetic theft. We like being lied to - never moreso than by preachers.

[I wish Horowitz had spent time on the feedback loop between his favoured metaphysical claptrap and mainline American Protestantism - Billy Graham belongs in this book, without question. Imagine if our schoolchildren learned that kind of spiritual-historical context!]

But as enthusiastic as I was/am about Horowitz's well-presented early material, I can't recommend Occult America's back half (from the Henry Wallace chapter onward) as much more than an extensively annotated bibliography. In fact the book's list of sources is a wonderful thing, and it'd be a worthwhile project for someone to organize his list of primary references into a proper bibliography. Or - hey, it's the 21st century, right? - an amazon.com wishlist.

In short, it's a decent book, or 60% of one. But for a first course in American mythoi/metaphysics, you might be better off rewatching O Brother, Where Art Thou? and paying close attention to the lyrics...

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Boring political fact-checking ahoy!

I don't have the constitution to argue about it.

The 'American dream.'

In answer to the Good Doc's comment:

* * *

If the question is, "Can't this country be better than it is?" I think the answer is yes; but when I compare this nation to what I have seen in Asia, the subcontinent, India, Africa, and throughout Europe, including what was "behind the iron Curtain" when I travelled those countries, then I think what we have had in the United States ... I think you and I are sitting in the most free nation on this Earth. [If we are not, why do all those immigrants from so many nations, and those who are illegal border jumpers keep wanting to come here?]

I don't think the malign inhumanity of our ruling class (and the corporate infrastructure that serves them, e.g. by our news media's near-exclusive support for monied interests) is incompatible with a benignly neglectful 'American goodness.' Indeed, I'd say the 'greatest country on earth' nonsense is just one angle on a kind of A>B>C>A cycle of preference: the U.S. is healthier than Britain, which is healthier than Denmark, which is healthier than the U.S. (Fill in whatever countries you like, there.) The point of the post is that some things are better here than elsewhere, after all, despite the manifest injustice of our arrayed social forces.

Among 'first world' countries we (uniquely, embarrassingly) have: an unbelievably high incarceration rate, a 'free' press that produces totally ignorant citizens, a lamentable public education system, an insane health care system/philosophy (holistic/preventive health is a dirty word in this poisonous country), and an addiction to 'sanitized' violence that manifests everywhere from the TV to our military sojourns in the Middle East.

Many Americans could not care less about these things, because they have 'other things to worry about.'

At the same time, there's a chaotic instability to month-to-month American life that many people find refreshing. In the right light it resembles opportunity. Day to day, things are complicated. On one hand, you're not likely to be locked up for having the wrong political opinions in this country; on the other hand, you have absolutely no say in the decision - on the part of the Congress, the Courts, and the Executive - to, say, erect a completely lunatic health care edifice, or commit to a decade of war in some distant sandstruck hell (or lush jungle). The U.S. government won't lock up 10,000 pro-democracy protesters like the Syrian bastards have lately done, but that's because the U.S. government simply ignores pro-democracy protesters entirely.

* * *

Have you seen The Wire? You simply must; it's better than all but, say, three or four dramas in the history of American television. One of its grand tacit arguments is that the 'American system' is essentially disconnected from American community - not just in a 'go federalism' anti-statist way, but even down to the mayoralty-hates-the-local-poor level. The opening scene of the show has a cop talking to a kid about his friend Snot Boogie, who's lying dead on the street, a casualty of the drug war. Snot Boogie used to come and steal the pot at the local craps game. Every damn time. The kids knew he'd do it, but they always let him sit in. The cop asks why the kids kept letting Snot Boogie run roughshod over them like this.

'Got to, man,' the kid says to the cop. 'This is America.'

The dead boy grows colder.

It's a nice allegory, I think, of the contradictions and ironies that crosshatch the 'American Dream.' The 'freedom' that the boys enjoy is all their own; the cop and the kid can chat amiably, if warily, on a stoop at night; various underground economies (drugs, gambling, street-level influence) operate unsupervised; the boy knows that Snot Boogie's fate will probably be his own, someday, and that the cop will be a part of that fate. The dead boy was permitted, welcomed, and his thievery was simply part of the fabric of their daily life; the kid has an idea about what 'America' is, what it represents, but as a poor black teenager in the inner city he knows - and the cop knows he knows - that he will never, ever, ever be welcomed into the corridors of power. The police are all over the scene, of course, working hard, doing their damnedest; they won't find the killer and they'll never stop fighting the murderous 'drug war' that did him in.

Everyone is welcome to play the game and everyone loses in the end. The ones who win, who take, don't have to play at all: they're the ones running the game. They're the 'sheltering hand.'

We're kept in the dark, and say thank you for the chance to rest in the shade.

I don't feel cynicism about this country. I feel anger.

The trouble with having a recreational interest in 'occult' or 'magical' thinking...

...is that the folks committed enough to produce the great body of Occult Literature today do not, for the most part, know when to stop, but they so often lack self-awareness about why they keep going. Reading Mitch Horowitz's Occult America - a breezy pop introduction to a particular strain of irrational/mystical thought in the American popular tradition - is a maddening experience for this very reason, among others.

Horowitz's book is a mishmash, and that's fine; it's an introductory text, after all. And to the extent that he has a thesis, it's a pleasantly obvious one ('occult belief is a vital part of the American identity'). But in talking about his work he's happy to go from 'Joseph Smith's apocalyptic/prophetic writing is part of an important American homebrew-religious tradition' to 'I think leprechauns are real and ouija boards connect us to another universe.' His catholic approach to the occult is good'n'proper, but his credulity is lamentable, and it bleeds into the book. (He's wrong about the sooper seekrit Masonic origins of the Great Seal, for one thing, and that's how he leads off the book!)

The book is free of the rapturous Weirdness of Charles Fort [indeed Fort's not even in the index!], because Horowitz doesn't (can't?) play the complex ironic-epistemological tonalities that were Fort's whole schtick. He's like a Disneyland tour guide slowly letting on, in unguarded asides, that he thinks Mickey is a real mouse.

[UPDATED the following w/r/t ARRR's strong point:]

The interesting thing about ghosts is that (1) they're not real but (2) we've built immensely powerful belief/practice structures around them and (3) those belief structures become autonomous from the original claimed belief and no longer require dogmatic belief in the existence of ghosts. The experience of 'seeing a ghost' is absolutely real, but that doesn't mean it's an encounter with The Spirits of the Dead or any such thing. And yet, and yet...

'And yet, and yet' is the essence of properly ironic Weirdness, and Horowitz's entertaining book is totally free of it. Siiiiigh.

9 Things the Rich Don't Want You to Know About Taxes.

Nothing to add to this nicely-presented summary of just One of Our Great Big Problems the Plutocrats Won't Let Us Solve.

Declare by Tim Powers.

Of the three Tim Powers novels I've now read, Declare is the best by a long shot: more fully inhabited and emotionally real than either Last Call or The Anubis Gates, with a less complex 'magic system' but set in a larger and more detailed world. Because of the centrality of two lead characters' Catholicism to the story - and presumably Powers's own imaginative sympathy with their concerns - Declare comes closer than those other two novels to feeling emotionally alive, helped along by its historical and conceptual proximity to our own time and place.

But it never quite does, because at day's end it's a Tim Powers magical-espionage novel and not, say, the Alan Furst espionage novel I perhaps foolishly, or at least jarringly in retrospect, read the day before starting Declare. Like the other two, it ends with a tidy victory for the clearly-defined Good Guys, a consoling marriage in the mode of the Elizabethan stage, and a strong, satisfying, transient feeling of I Suppose That's Done Then. Powers is rarely able to write transcendentally, it seems, and so must content himself with writing Well; his strengths lie in plotting and idea-association (imagine, for a moment, Tim Powers's Lost), but in Declare he loads his plot down with one spectacularly big idea - which appears to be, aah, Catholicism, with all that faith's symbolic complexity and vexed relationship to the material world - and it ends up weighing down what might have been a flawlessly executed spies-and-Weird-Stuff novel.

I recommend the book as another of Powers's master classes in plotting and dark urban-fantastic imagination, but with the usual reservations, which can't be discussed without spoilers. I recommend reading Adam Roberts's disappointed, annoyed review before proceeding, not least because the last section of this post jumps off from his remarks about conspiracy, lately a preoccupation of mine. The rest of the review is disjointed, sorry, but it does widen its scope about halfway through, and that material might be of interest to readers not otherwise concerned with Declare itself.

Shall we?

* * *

First, the anticlimax: Andrew Hale - the best of the three nearly interchangeable protagonists I've encountered in Powers's books by virtue of his private Catholic agon, which is clearly dear to Powers - kills the rebel angels on Ararat with mathematics, in the form of two shells full of buckshot. That's really it. The climactic 1963 Ararat ascent comes as a colossal letdown in the wake of the thrilling 1948 Ararat sequence, which - unlike the finale - effectively depicts the wild inhumanity of the djinn. ¡Cannibale! yells Elena from horseback, and it's the most human moment in any of the three Powers books I've read so far. Nothing like that in the 1963 sequence...just lots of pitons and axes and literally faceless commandoes climbing through an excruciatingly long narrative passage.

Which brings up a macro-concern with the book: though the Big Problem is the djinn (and specifically the captured djinn that is Russia's 'Guardian Angel'), the focus of the climax (and the long epilogue) is on Hale's relationship with his nemesis/twin Philby, and their notional relationship with Elena. So the great mind-melting conspiracy at the heart of the Cold War fades, throughout the book, into the background, while the supposedly romantic Andrew/Elena pairing and the damagingly symbolically-overloaded Andrew/Philby relationship come to the fore. Trouble is, Powers doesn't actually give Hale and Elena a relationship so much as symbolic proximity - she's the olive-skinned revolutionary romantic, he's the upright Englishman torn by love - and the longest interaction between Philby and Hale takes place over Yet Another Bloody High-Stakes Card Game...excuse me, two of those. The stakes of which represent another of Powers's moments of unself-conscious sexism, and which undercut the (ahem) cosmicism of the djinn plot to bad effect.

Elena is a big step up from the women in Last Call and (especially) The Anubis Gates - a sad total of three female characters between those two novels, as I recall - but ultimately she fades from ambivalent badass spy to weeping virginal madonna in Declare's most acutely disappointing narrative slip-up. Of course she diverts the helicopter rather than shoot Hale down. Of course she short-circuits the GRU brainwashing with a 'Hail Mary.' And of course she's deeply in love with a man she spent three months with, twenty years ago. Why not? The 'heroines' in Last Call and The Anubis Gates marry men they barely know at all; three months almost seems like a step up.

(Do women even bother reading these novels? Ever?)

* * *

The spycraft, meanwhile, might be well-drawn; I can't tell. It was detailed enough to carry me along, like the theatre-scrim London of Anubis, but after the much more detailed (yet less intricate) spywork of The Spies of Warsaw I was a little disappointed by the depictions of the Great Game here. Weary romanticism, yes, but bit more James Bond than I'd expected.

Then again, that's hardly the point of a Powers book. The sheer velocity of the story is astonishing: 600+ pocket book pages fly by in a wink. Powers's command of plot is a wonder to behold. So, as with the Coleridge/London/Cairo stuff in Anubis, I feel like a churl complaining about the tradecraft in Declare. If a 10% increase in detail cuts the velocity by 50%, it makes sense to leave it out.

* * *

Pity he couldn't have left out the 'gypsies,' though. Another distasteful holdover from Anubis. How can an author sharp enough to name his sorcerer 'Dr Romany' fall back on such contemptibly lazy 'gypsy' stereotypes? Why not have Hale take on a brigade of greasy wop soldiers for colour?

* * *

Lovecraft looms behind this story: the ironic Crucifixion at Dunwich, the damned Antarctica expedition, rendezvous in underground passages, long-lost alt-religious tomes, bargains with sanity-stealing powers from beyond, and of course the ultimate revelation - and temporary suppression - of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. But Powers's Catholicism angles these elements toward the Manichean setup of the 'Mythos' revisionists like August Derleth, rather than the bitter 'cosmicism' of HPL himself. Hale blends bits of Henry Armitage with some of Le Carré's spies - with a little bit of Luke Skywalker (or is it Anakin? or is that Philby's role?) thrown in, destiny/powerwise. Hale takes Raymond Chandler's modern knight schtick to a thuddingly literal conclusion - naturally reciting bits of the Pater Noster at appropriate moments, in case we've missed the point.

OK, I've got to disagree with Adam Roberts on some stuff here:

Amongst the several things this book is saying are (for instance) that Communism is a fanatical quasi-religious cult for which its followers are actively eager to die; and that events recounted in the Bible (specifically Genesis) are literally true. To which I say: hmmm.

The implication here is that there's something fishily Right about the book's setup and, arguably, its payload.

I initially mistook his first claim; he's right, that is indeed how Powers portrays the Soviet spies. BUT. It's not Communism as such that they're willing to die for; the ones who head back to Moscow to be 'shown the truth' are those who've had contact with the Divine, and of course Russia's 'guardian angel' has presided over that nation since the 1880s, not the 1920's.

To the extent that Communism and Catholicism are opposed forces in Declare, it's not because they're ideologies, but rather incompatible mysteries. Attitudes toward the unknowable. After all, Stalin tries to purge the USSR of the acolytes of the djinn; what's on Ararat is out of his imaginative reach. Communism exerts a hold over its adherents in the book, sure, but no more than 'England' (abstractly and variously defined) does over Hale, Theodora, and their crowd. And the SOE boys do swear to kill their brothers if the Crown demands it.

So I suppose I disagree with Adam on the political content or allegorical nature of the various mysticisms (national, supernatural, etc.) at war in the story. Several reviewers have referred to the djinn as 'weapons,' but I didn't get that sense from the book at all - Powers isn't writing 'A Colder War' here (which in any case rightly treats those who'd weaponize Cthulhu as fools). Roberts isn't making that claim either. But by linking the content of the fantastic premise (holy texts are literally true, crosses and ankhs have superpowers, the USSR is empowered by a literal deal with a devil) to other, more transparently political conspiracist talk (9/11 as an inside job, etc.), I think Adam is politicizing what Powers might take for an ideologically neutral setup - the 'power of faith,' or 'willingness to open up to the divine,' or something like that, in a specifically Catholic flavour.

Yet the endpoint of all this imaginative wrestling with things-as-they-are is the beastly angelic choir on Ararat, and those who are initiated into their mysteries - Philby, Hale, Elena - get that way at the expense of their own humanity. ¡Cannibale! and all that, complicit in the massacre of the men on Ararat. The Bible might be literally true, in part, but Powers maps that setup (straight out of every historical fantasy story ever told, ever) onto a compelling bit of Weirdness, the ability of certain humans to tap into a hidden symbolic order through ritual action, even unwittingly, which is just too creepy to do anyone any good. In other words, Powers happily (guiltily? defensively?) rubs his Yahweh all over our Lovecraft, but he definitely doesn't do away with HPL's darkness.

Which makes the political dimension of the book less straightforward again. The English spies don't want to eliminate the djinn; like any other imperialists, they're happy to leave local (angelic) warlords set up all over the place, so long as (1) they only bug brown/yellow folks and (2) they don't help the Soviets. And the Soviets prop up Communism with an explicitly theistic magical bargain. (How post-ideological of them!) And the agencies that deal directly with the djinn are for the most part unwelcome in, or unacknowledged by, their own countries - the Prime Minister serves the SOE, not the other way around, and the GRU have to hide from the KGB...

The 'conspiracy' here, in other words, isn't about accumulating worldly power or propping up the human Elect. Mostly it's about maintaining the boundary between the Merely Physical and the Divine - no wonder the Berlin Wall is the site of one of the book's two best sequences. Powers does well with symbolically-overloaded action setpieces, and that's as overloaded as it gets. The 'shot that topples the Soviet empire' is fired on Mount Ararat in 1963, but by that point it hardly seems to be about the USSR at all - after all, we know who 'wins' that Cold War. The whole thing seems to be about working around the existence of the angels. The political stuff is a smokescreen for the Real Story, but in a very different way from, say, the government-toppling Illuminati myth (which encodes fears of Jews/Catholics/Masons/Others in an explicitly cultural-political narrative).

I think Powers both likes the shapeliness of this magical border-drawing and -crossing and -maintaining, and can't help injecting his story with his own experience of sensuous Catholicism. (The mention of a pipe organ chord at a crucial moment of angelic encounter was, for me, one of the richest moments in the book; as a once-upon-a-time Catholic 19-year-old who wept over his sexual 'sins' in a cathedral in New York City, I know/knew exactly what that painful clarity feels like. But then I'm an atheist who prays and might be afraid of ghosts, so...) But I don't think the symbolic layer here is meant to reduce to, or even primarily relate to, a real-world political order.

Powers's depiction of actual Communism is way, way, way too thin for that. He doesn't even bother making Moscow sinister; it's just exhausted, a citywide afterparty. Because, y'know, God's not there, or something, but they've got their ghul.

* * *

I loved Declare. Sort of. It annoyed me - particularly the shabby way Powers sets up Catholicism as a kind of substitute for religious Communism, which is structurally necessary in the book's symbolic register (and its notional 'characterological' register) but is really inadequate and silly as actual psychology - but I very literally couldn't put the book down for two days. I mean I carried it everywhere and opened it up at every spare moment. It took less than three days to read...with childcare taking up much of my time and attention.

As a piece of pulp fiction it's as good as can be.

And I guess that's my one-line 'review,' because why bother with the other stuff? It shouldn't win the Clarke award, absolutely not (isn't that for new books?), but I understand why people like it; if you don't want it to be anything but what all of Powers's novels seem to be, a machine for the delivery of flawlessly timed and plotted Cool Magical Ideas, it will hit you right in your pleasure center.

But that leaves the real point of Adam's review, which - once you sail by the bit where he makes it clear that he really, really didn't like the novel and it really, really shouldn't have been nominated for the Clarke award - is about conspiracy.

* * *

Before we get there, though, let's take one sentence to be deeply uncomfortable with Powers's few sore-thumb references to homosexuality - always, here, in the context of mind-violation and rape. Got it? Are we all annoyed and disappointed? OK, moving on then.

* * *

Declare is a novel of conspiracy, yes, but it isn't about conspiracy in the way, say, Foucault's Pendulum and Illuminatus! and The Crying of Lot 49 are. Those novels all depict and critique (the idea of) networks of secret organizations; Powers just has a fun time wheeling one out. (Indeed the second half of the book isn't a conspiracy story at all, it's a 'knight climbs mountain to defeat nemesis and save princess' story that happens to have spies in it.) That said, all Powers's 'secret history' novels seem to add up to a kind of consideration of the idea, or in any case an anatomy of his own relation to Secret Stuff, which can (to a certain extent) stand in for other conspiracists' ideas.

It seems to me that Powers is interested in his conspiracies only to the extent that they embody the idea of Something Else, Something Hidden, Something Darker and Greater Than Us. Yes, with all the capital letters. Whereas, say, Glenn Beck - to the extent that he is, apparently, a cynical carnival barker in addition to, obviously, a mentally-ill paranoiac - wants to do something with his conspiratorial talk, which is (don't let's let on that we know) take back the United States for its former social-hegemons, i.e. people who look and dress and talk and vote just like Glenn Beck. Powers has no more of that ambition than Lovecraft did; Yog-Sothothery is a shaggy-dog joke (they're not really real!) with a didactic edge (and humans are specks of space dust!), which is a tempting interpretation of e.g. the Tea Party's crowd-madness...but let's not fool ourselves with 'comfort.' They really mean it; Powers doesn't.

But then Powers also doesn't get into his own 'magical thinking' the way Pynchon/RAW/Shea/Eco do. He does channel the startling electric current that secret thinking can provide, but his subject in Declare is the encounter with the symbol-set itself; we know that the USSR crumbles and that Philby dies in 1988, so like Lovecraft, Powers is just trying to show us that moment of contact, a sense of how small is the world we see, compared to What Truly Is. (Not for nothing does Powers keep coming back to 'give him the truth' as ironic-Lovecraftian agentspeak for kill!) To me, the best tales/ideas of conspiracy promise endless multiplication of meaning and possibility; Powers just wants to send us up the mountain to shoot an angel or two, having shared in the chilly recognition that we aren't in control of it all. Of anything, really.

Good conspiracy-stuff is always about an unimaginable They, who remain distant, ineffable. Secular absent God, in a way. (Bob Dobbs, for instance. Though of course the SubGenius books are stupid and childish Conspiracy-stuff.) Powers sticks angels on earth and gives us math-bullets that can magically kill them, buying wonder on the cheap, a little.

That's maybe the most annoying thing about the book - its lack of ecstasy. Not just the difference between throwing up our hands (HPL) and putting up our dukes (Howard, Powers, etc.), but the way the plot-mechanical stuff and intrusive Catholicism of Declare keep undercutting the pleasure of the idea-tangle itself. It all gets solved at the end, with guns and prayers no less! Grr.

* * *

So what I'm coming around to saying, basically, is that novels of conspiracy are all about What if? Possibility, the not-yet-known, the slow revelation of secret forms among comforting formlessness. And for much of its length Declare is just that: 'adventurous expectancy,' in Lovecraft's term. For all that time it's a hell of a good adventure novel. Then Powers wraps it all up with a bow and attaches a card marked 'Yours in Christ,' and it's hard not to feel cheated - especially given the lingering sense of wonder attached to the djinn, the impossible strangeness of the angel that presides over the laying of the cornerstone in Berlin, the alien majesty of the 1948 Ararat revelation...it's not a failure, it's a disappointing choice. OK.

But political conspiracies are not actually about that. In the end, most real-world conspiratorial cabals are pretty simple - they have to be. The Illuminati-as-popularly-imagined, the X-Files group, the Satanic secret alt-Trilateral Commission, simply can't support their own weight in the real world's thin air.

Glenn Beck's conspiracies are complicated precisely because they're fake, but the conspiracies themselves are just justifications - no one watching his Worry Hour cares about their content or shape, only the reassurance that Our (White) (Right-Thinking) America Is Under Attack.

What separates his rants from, say, Gravity's Rainbow is that Pynchon wants to bring us to (1) apprehension of the depth at which things in the world are connected, not just politically, and (2) a kind of psychedelic rapture-of-release, a break with unitary mythologies. If it's All True, Man, then we're a lot less likely to be sucked into religious fervor for any interest group's One Truth; the connectedness is the trans-political point. (Remember the proximity of Pynchon's psychedelic-conspiratorial thinking and, say, Eastern mysticism; think of John Crowley too. Have you read Crowley's Hesse essay? Oh, you oughta. You gotta.)

In Declare, Powers has to split the difference between his Church's One True Program and his invocation of Lovecraft's crazy-making cosmic indifference; he leans churchwise in the end, but not right away.

Well, he's not Pynchon.

Magic, it seems to me, is one of Powers's real subjects: magic as (somewhat Lovecraftian) cosmic math, or cognitive self-modification, or historical escape (or deep historical connection)...and this is where the (let's call it) occult tradition's magical thinking can split decisively from the paranoids' conspiracy-schtick. By understanding magic as metaphorical - even when giving it concrete form in a fictional context - Powers and his fellows skip past the narrowness of the rube's magical thinking (I'll believe whatever takes the edge off this week) and move toward a kind of aesthetic appreciation of historical ways of being. The actual loonies, along with the cynical players who finance or imitate them, insist on historical ignorance, after all - a cascade of facts devoid of actual connection, resistant to any mapping to the mere lives of humans. So you get Atlantis and Reptoids and the Elders of Zion, instead of (respectively) the literary/didactic function of Atlantis, or the conceptually-difficult notions of evolution/fitness/chance that form humanity's mundane origin story, or the relentless persecution of Jews that requires Elders-of-Zion mythmaking...but if you dig guys like Charles Fort (not a conspiracist as such, far as I know, so much as a more general occultist) then you recognize the difference between the conspiracist-aesthete's rigorous, demanding suspension of disbelief and the paranoiac's monomaniacal insistence on One Story, However Complicated.

* * *

And it appears I've just argued that Alan Moore is not in fact as crazy as Dave Sim, despite my previous insistence to the contrary. Huh.

* * *

It seems to me that the difference between benign and malignant conspiracy-stuff is in the placement of the didactic emphasis: the former will happily rave about how Everything You Know Is Wrong, but the latter - the dangerous stuff, the cynical stuff - adds the rider that We Can Show You What's Really Going On, Trust Us. The difference between intellectual independence and ideological dependence, in other words.

Which is, curiously enough, one of the buried, problematic throughlines of Powers's book, one that seems to culminate in the two heroes happily deciding on Trust Us as a perfectly satisfactory endpoint. 'Grace, not magic,' Elena says, as she and Hale seemingly become invisible to the police in Red Square. It's the most jarring moment in a book that contains several of those.

Or as Gob Bluth would say, 'IT'S AN ILLUSION, MICHAEL. A TRICK IS SOMETHING A WHORE DOES FOR MONEY.' In the end, Powers seems to take pleasure in tricking us. Like Adam, I resent that. But I maintain that most of Declare is concerned not with the trick - with 'winning' over the audience - but with the illusion: the feeling of complicity and wonder and (in)credulity and anticipation and above all ecstatic purpose that is, after all, not only the point but the substance of magic itself.

Maddening.

The Obama/Reid/Boehner budget talks have not been progressing well. The holdup?

Behind the scenes, aides on Capitol Hill said a deal is within reach but the two sides remained divided on abortion policy riders and the overall spending cuts. The White House and Senate Democrats are resisting attempts to up the spending cuts to $40 billion from the previously agreed to $33 bilion. Republicans have long-wanted to find ways to slash money to Planned Parenthood and are using the contentious issue as a wedge to extract more spending cuts.

Republicans are insisting on a policy rider that would take all federal funds slated for Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations and give it to state health departments to use as they see fit. That way, states controlled by Republican legislatures would choose not to give that money to Planned Parenthood while state capitals controlled by Democrats would keep things status quo.

You read that right: Boehner's caucus insists that this is the right time to fight another battle in the war on women's autonomy and sexual health. Between the lines, you gotta wonder, is Boehner empowered to do anything on his own here? The man's a mainstream corporatist and opportunist, not a culture warrior; these don't seem like his personal governing priorities. Of course when looked at as an opening act for the 2012 elections (cf. Taibbi) this grotesquerie makes more sense.

Josh Marshall points out something dispiriting about the imbalance between the sides' priorities here:

Politicians, at the end of the day, follow their voters. And the new WSJ/NBC poll tells the tale: a majority of Republicans prefer a government shutdown to a budget compromise.

The majority of Democrats and Independents prefer compromise over a shutdown.

That's the dynamic. I buy that John Boehner doesn't want a shutdown because if nothing else I think he thinks it will be damaging for his caucus and his party. But Republicans around the country want a shutdown before they want any compromise. And it's pretty clear that applies to most of his caucus -- which shouldn't surprise us since those are their voters. So one side wants to compromise and the other doesn't. And the side that's ready to compromise doesn't want to be dictated to. So there's an impasse.

All of which points up a deep-seated problem with the Democratic Party. Glenn Greenwald, in an indispensable recent column:

One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).

In light of that fact, ask yourself this: if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? That's what a rational, calculating, self-interested, unprincipled Democratic politician should do: accommodate those factions which need accommodating (because their support is in question), while ignoring or scorning the ones whose support is not in question, either because they will never vote for them (the hard-core right) or will dutifully canvass, raise money, and vote for them no matter what (the Democratic base). Anyone who pledges unconditional, absolute fealty to a politician -- especially 18 months before an election -- is guaranteeing their own irrelevance.

There's no reason for Obama and company to do the right thing here - stand firm, force Boehner to shut down the federal gov't, and insist on a realistic budget that doesn't torpedo vital federal programs - because no powerful constituent group actually wants that. Whereas there's a powerful GOP subgroup that's exactly this selfish, mendacious, and (most dangerously) ignorant:

Minutes after the crowd that was assembled at an Americans for Prosperity-backed Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday broke out into chants of "shut it down," Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the Tea Party doesn't want the government to shut down and that Democrats would unfairly blame the movement if it did.

"They want to blame it on you," Bachmann said. But there was a large part of the crowd willing to step up and take the blame.

There was John Oltesuig -- the guy decked out in colonial gear holding a sign that read "SHUT 'ER DOWN" -- who despite his sign said in an interview that he would "prefer not to shut it down."

What've we got here? Millions of scared Americans who want 'socialist Obamacare' overturned but want hands off their Medicare...who carry Shut 'er Down signs but have no idea what that would entail and aren't actually sure they want to shut 'er down at all. The Tea Party is primal scream therapy for traditionalist whites scarred by the twilight of their era of unquestioned dominance. Boehner has to show up for the meetings, let out a little scream of his own, then go back to scratching Big Business's back (using tools like the Ryan budget). There's no working for the common good in this situation. None.

* * *

Or in short, from the Washington Post:

They are the strongest voices against a budget compromise: the conservative Republicans who have said they won’t accept a deal with Democrats on spending cuts, even if that means a government shutdown.

On Wednesday, some of them began to signal, without quite saying it, that they had put themselves in a bind.

If a shutdown comes, some conservatives said, it could seriously damage their political momentum. But, after winning an election on a no-compromise pledge, they saw nothing else they could do.

“I don’t want a shutdown,” said Rep. Tim Griffin (Ark.), one of 87 Republican freshmen, saying he thought Democratic leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) were trying to make it happen.

So why not accept the kind of compromise Democrats have talked about? That would avert a shutdown and let Republicans move on to other, more ambitious efforts to slash the budget.

Griffin said he couldn’t.

As long as the Republicans have to please both corporate plutocrats and the Tea Party in order to stay in power, we'll keep seeing this insane behaviour: on one hand the Bachmann schtick, on the other Ryan's massive tax breaks for the wealthy not even paid for by abolishing Medicare/Medicaid, and old-fashioned GOP types like Boehner (who infamously handed out donor money on the floor of the House) mugging for the camera and pretending It's All the Democrats' Fault.

Taibbi on Ryan's 'budget proposal.'

Heeeeeeeere we go:

...Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers [like Ryan, Cantor, Rand Paul, et al.] are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.

This is a political game that gets played out in the media over and over again, and everyone in Washington knows how it works... [my boldface --wa.]

'Lying bastards who don't even bother pretending anymore,' episode 3,554,891!

Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Ryan, 'rising star' on the Right.

Arab spring?

Question:

Do the folks driving the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt really give a damn about U.S. policy on torture? Do the Libyans? I mean this as a serious question. I don't mean 'How would they respond in a survey?' because, honestly, like almost everyone else in America I don't think about Tunisia at all unless I'm playing a game of Diplomacy or watching an Indiana Jones movie, yet I'd happily opine about their democratic prospects for a telephone survey given the chance.

C'mon now: does the fact that the U.S. kept Abu Ghraib open matter as much in the streets of Cairo as the fact that Saddam Hussein and his lunatic children are no longer running the country? Is U.S. brutality a footnote to Hussein's overthrow...or the other way around?

Horrifying as this possibility may be today, please consider: thirty years from now mightn't everyone but the antiwar Left look back on the Abu Ghraib torture photos (remember them?) as an all-but-irrelevant implementation detail in a massive changeover of power in the Arab world?

I'm not asking glibly or with hidden pleasure. I'm just trying to figure out whether Andrew Sullivan has any idea what he's talking about in response to Christopher Hitchens. Precedent tells me: '50/50 chance at best.'

Amy Chua addendum.

Another astonishing passage from the book:

Florence [Chua's mother-in-law] and I got along great for years—she introduced me to the world of modern art, and I used to love accompanying her to museum and gallery events—but we started having conflicts after Sophia was born. In fact, it was through butting heads with Florence that I first became aware of some of the deep differences between Chinese and (at least one variant of) Western parenting. Above all, Florence had taste. She was a connoisseur of art, food, and wine. She liked luxurious fabrics and dark chocolate. Whenever we returned from travels, she always asked the girls about the colors and smells they’d encountered. Another thing Florence had definite taste about was childhood. She believed that childhood should be full of spontaneity, freedom, discovery, and experience.

At Crystal Lake, Florence felt that her granddaughters should be able to swim, walk, and explore wherever they pleased. By contrast, I told them that if they stepped off our front porch, kidnappers would get them. I also told them that the deep parts of the lake had ferocious biting fish. I may have gone overboard, but sometimes being carefree means being careless. Once when Florence was babysitting for us at the lake, I came home to find two-year-old Sophia running around outside by herself with a pair of garden shears as large was she was. I snatched them furiously away. “She was going to cut some wildflowers,” Florence said wistfully.

The truth is I’m not good at enjoying life. It’s not one of my strengths. I keep a lot of to-do lists and hate massages and Caribbean vacations. Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future. Florence always wanted just one full day to spend with each girl—she begged me for that. But I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments. [my emphasis --wa.]

* * *

The book is not ultimately about Amy Chua's 'parenting style.' It's definitely not a parenting manual. It's about her very serious emotional trauma, the nature of which she does not (intentionally) explore at all, and her resultant behavioral/emotional deformities (paranoia, lying, egotism, lack of impulse control, emotional abusiveness, etc.). That's why reading her book is so uncomfortable. She is not an idiot; apparently she's quite intelligent. Her inability to distinguish between analytical intelligence and actual social health is not the mark of a bad mother; it's the mark of a serious handicap.

Is Arrested Development actually funny? If so, what's funny about it?

[Spoilers follow.]

From the Wikipedia entry for 'Afternoon Delight' (2x06):

Buster sees a plush seal in the skill crane, wearing a shirt that says "Good Luck". Buster then points to the seal and says, "That could be good for Army," implying that a seal with clothing will help him get out of the army, something that later happens in "Hand to God". The Narrator later says that Buster had "gotten hooked playing the skill crane," placing particular emphasis on the word "hooked", all the while the camera is zoomed in on Buster's hand that is operating the claw. The hand he's using is his left hand, which is the one he loses and for which he gets a prosthetic hook.

'Out on a Limb' (2x11):

Buster is on his way to the Army when he decides to finally go swimming in the ocean, where a loose seal bites off his hand, after he misinterprets a warning from a coastguard about a "loose seal" with a response about his not caring about Lucille.

'Hand to God' (2x12):

The next day, Buster returns from the hospital, fitted with a metal hook prosthetic, to find the family gathered in Lucille's penthouse under a banner which reads "Welcome Home, Buster!" (the "You're killing me, Buster" banner strategically covered up). Buster says, "Let's give me a big hand!" and everyone forces awkward laughter. Gob arrives at the party ignorant of Buster's accident, and is scared by Buster's hook. When Buster says his hand was bitten off by a seal wearing a yellow bow-tie, Tobias attributes that statement to the "playful mutterings of the shock victim" because a seal would never attack a human. "Unless, of course, it had acquired a taste for mammal blood." Flashback to Gob performing a magic show with a seal wearing a yellow bow-tie, when a cat jumps into the chest where the seal is hidden. Cut to another flashback in which Gob releases the seal into the ocean saying, "You're not going to be hand-fed anymore.

Of course, how in the world would you catch the foreshadowing on TV? You gotta ask: why are they dropping cryptic references to the 'loose seal' accident five episodes in advance?

Well. Because they can.

None of this loose seal/Lucille/claw/limb/hand stuff is actually funny the way, say, Tobias's analyst/therapist business card is. But it's a big part of the attraction of Arrested Development. The casting of Scott Baio as Henry Winkler's replacement (on a show produced by Ron Howard) has the same sort of intellectual appeal: there's a nerdy audacity to the writers building these levels of metatextual and self-referential humour into the show, and catching references is one of TV fans' main pastimes in this data-driven (rather than knowledge-driven) consumption age.

What made Arrested Development a great show, rather than an 'interesting' one, is that for all its allusiveness and dense self-reference (some might say self-regard?), it was a strong example of a classically-structured sitcom as well. The characters were set up as sitcom types, and the elders' performances - in the roles of George, Oscar, Lucille, Lucille II, Stan Sitwell, Barry Zuckerkorn, etc. - were in a familiar sitcom style, however beautifully performed. (Jeffrey Tambor, in particular, brought a startling humanity and pathos to his work as George/Oscar, quickly outgrowing the broad material he was given in the early series.)

The point here is only that Arrested Development, like Seinfeld and The Simpsons, was a well-executed example of a familiar comedy type as well as a formal advance for the sitcom. Seinfeld's circular plotting and moral chilliness, The Simpsons's visual density and deep self-referentiality, and Arrested Development's pomo involution and formal ingenuity would all be forgotten were it not for their familiar comic modes - Lampoon-style WASP magazine-minicomedy in the cartoon's case, Borscht Belt stage theatrics for the thoroughly Jewish live-action shows. Arrested Development is the end of a developmental line that includes both the two earlier sitcoms and (crucially) The X-Files (which was both a self-referential funhouse and a bit of a genre catalogue) - but also a healthy dose of The Golden Girls.

In other words, your grandparents couldn't have loved Arrested Development the way you do, ya hip 21st-century white kid - too much rides on form and style - but the jokes themselves are old, old, old.

Amy Chua.

Two passages from her book-length apology for herself, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. First:

“I don’t want to give a toast,” was Lulu’s response.

I pulled out the big guns. I threatened everything I could think of. I bribed her. I tried to inspire her. I tried to shame her. I offered to help her write it. I jacked up the stakes and gave her an ultimatum, knowing it was a pivotal battle.

When the party came, Sophia delivered a minimasterpiece. At sixteen, standing 5’ 8” in her heels, she had become a stunning girl with a sly wit. In her toast, she captured her father perfectly, gently poking fun but ultimately lionizing him. Afterward, my friend Alexis came up to me. “Sophia is just unbelievable.”

I nodded. “She gave a great toast.”

“Absolutely . . . but that’s not what I meant,” said Alexis. “I don’t know if people really get Sophia. She’s totally her own person. Yet she always manages to do your family proud. And that Lulu is just adorable.”

I hadn’t found Lulu adorable at all. During Sophia’s toast, Lulu stood next to her sister, smiling affably. But she had written nothing, and she refused to say a single word.

I had lost. It was the first time. Through all the turbulence and warfare in our household, I’d never lost before, at least not on something important.

This act of defiance and disrespect infuriated me. My anger simmered for a while, then I unleashed my full wrath. “You’ve dishonored this family—and yourself,” I said to Lulu. “You’re going to have to live with your mistake for the rest of your life.”

Lulu snapped back, “You’re a show-off. It’s all about you. You already have one daughter who does everything you want. Why do you need me?”

And:

There’s another huge difference between dog raising and Chinese parenting. Dog raising is easy. It requires patience, love, and possibly an initial investment of training time. By contrast, Chinese parenting is one of the most difficult things I can think of. You have to be hated sometimes by someone you love and who hopefully loves you, and there’s just no letting up, no point at which it suddenly becomes easy. Just the opposite, Chinese parenting—at least if you’re trying to do it in America, where all odds are against you—is a never-ending uphill battle, requiring a 24-7 time commitment, resilience, and guile.You have to be able to swallow pride and change tactics at any moment. And you have to be creative.

Last year, for instance, I had some students over for an end-of-the-semester party, one of my favorite things to do. “You’re so nice to your students,” Sophia and Lulu are always saying. “They have no idea what you’re really like. They all think you’re nurturing and supportive.” The girls are actually right about that. I treat my law students (especially the ones with strict Asian parents) the exact opposite of the way I treat my kids.

* * *

These passages are not even close to the most unintentionally nauseous material in the book. 'Unintentionally' is the key word here. The book is perversely enjoyable, but probably not for the reasons Chua would like: the narrator is a raving narcissist, an unabashed hypocrite (she obsesses about her children's insufficient 'Chineseness,' criticizes Western men who 'fetishize exoticism' in music and in women - yet never for an instant considers forcing any musical instrument on her youngest daughter except...the violin), a woefully failed cultural analyst, an elbow-in-the-ribs 'ironic' racist, and - crucially - able to point out the absolute unnaturalness of her supposed Chinese conception of the child as 'an extension of the parent' without possessing any understanding of what that means to the child. It's meant to be family comedy, but the book keeps veering into twisted non-apology apology; in the Coda, Chua has her children congratulating her on what a great mother she's been. (Yes: the same Lulu who correctly calls out Chua's narcissism in the first excerpt then turns around to stroke her ego at book's end. This is called an 'editorial stance,' readers.)

The prose is funny in places, but it's not 'comic' writing; that is to say, you're never laughing with the book, but rather in spite of (literally 'spitefully at') Chua herself, who no doubt wants to appear to be in on the joke but seems to lack some basic critical faculty that would allow such a thing. She depicts her own acts of cruelty and overweening egotism with an eerie affectlessness that she apparently tries to pass off as 'irony.' Chua is hugely, contemptibly wrong about children's interests and dedication (have you ever seen a kid play a video game, or work on a model train, or work up an elaborate fantasy story? they're the hardest workers in the world if they're not subjected to abuse), but her book is canted such that you'd never know what lives her children have other than the one she's living for them. The book is framed disingenuously as her own 'coming to realization' story, and she speaks sincerely of her own 'pain' at 'allowing' her children to be human beings rather than her own ego-functions, yet her chapter-long 'realization' is unreadably cute nonsense, and her 'pain' differs from every other parent's only in Chua's delusion of specialness (and aloneness, sadly).

I feel sorry for her, but not in the way the book's third part clearly intends - that is, I don't feel pity for an ostensibly-intelligent person who can't allow her children to emancipate themselves (and lacks the ability to understand the basic nature of jazz or gamelan). And I don't feel bad for someone who's ordered her entire self-conception around banally racist images like the titular Tiger Mother. (She's not kidding when she babbles about 'Chinese' and 'Western' parenting styles; her descriptions of both have the 'truth' of racist jokes, but are inadequate as analysis. Surprise!) I feel sorry for someone who takes the emotional abuse she suffered as a child and passes it on to her own children.

And I feel sorry for Chua's husband Jed, who appears in the book only when required, i.e. (1) as a semi-important part of Chua's all-important backstory; (2) to commute from North Carolina to New Haven so that Chua can have an academic job while 'parenting full-time'; (3) to point out that Chua's being a self-obsessed asshole, which she invariably ignores; (4) to ratify her choices by allowing himself to be steamrolled; (5) and this:

[A]part from intervening occasionally to defuse blowups, Jed always took my side in front of the girls. From the beginning, we’d had a united-front strategy, and despite his misgivings, Jed didn’t go back on it. Instead, he tried his best to bring balance to the family, making us go on family biking trips, teaching the girls how to play poker and pool, reading them science fiction, Shakespeare, and Dickens.

In other words: Jed allowed the girls to experience pleasure outside of a pleasing-authority context, and this - Battle Hymn of the Jewish Father - merits exactly one sentence of Chua's attention. She only has one kind word for his contribution to the children - and in that case she specifically praises...his DNA.

Long story short: Chua is exactly like every other status-obsessed rich asshole in this country, and she's obsessed with her own racial identity because it gives her a way to understand her own emotional dysfunction, which otherwise she apparently can't understand. Her 'ironic' treatment of her life story is a function not of presentation style but of simple incomprehension; the book gestures at self-consciousness like it's supposed to (this is America, after all), but ultimately she can't allow it to do anything but serve what I can't help thinking is its secret purpose: to justify Amy Chua's hypocritical cruelty toward her daughters. The myopia of the book is its most important feature for the long term: it stands as a testament to the contemptible smallness of the East Coast elite's imagination and ambition.

Congrats, Amy Chua: you did all you were capable of.

Did you know it's the 40th anniversary of Starbucks this year?

Yeah me neither.

Ideas existing in tension, cont'd (or: Quid punches pro in the quo across the flickering expanse of the Internet).

I feel a compulsion to know things about folks - ideally everything (in the sense of 'it is only an ideal') but practically just 'more than expected' - yet I recognize this urge as potentially destructive, grounded in selfishness (to 'possess' knowledge, the impossibility of such notwithstanding). So I tend to, in the parlance of these fucked times, 'overshare' as a kind of compensation/penance. Plus I value honesty and like seeing surprise register in people's faces. Even those of strangers. The whole private psychodrama ends up working OK: I listen, I talk, folks listen, they talk, information gets to flow comparatively freely, the wheels of eventual apocalypse keep turning and we've done our part. But I have no illusions about Essential Generosity or anything like that. I'm decent, I strive for decency, but and ('but' is a way of dodging responsibility) decency offers, in this case, kickbacks.

All of which is the long way 'round the barn to just say: I am willing to demand your honesty, and demand that you demand mine back, but I can also be kind of a weirdo about it because I'm massively awkward and self-parenthesizing and performatively self-abnegating, and I wish I could just make it all better. For everyone. I desperately wish I could be an avatar of possibility and love but I'm pretty invested in my present role as Icon of Wordily Pleasant Nonsense. Still, inaccessible or compromised love is love, even as it is compromise and refusal. Is this a shortfall? Depends on whether each wants the other to be something one is not (yet), wuntcha say?

Something I've never actually heard a Confederate sympathizer say.

'Well, we would've freed the slaves eventually.'

Meanwhile, on the other side of the mirror...

...George W. Bush continues to say unexpectedly reasonable things about immigration. Give the man credit: he's been a lot more Mexican-immigrant-friendly than many of his nativist/isolationist/protectionist political fellow travelers.

Of course, as one of the TPM commenters puts it:

Who could have foreseen that actively promoting fear and ignorance and pumping tons of cash into the campaigns of hateful, ignorant Congressional candidates to maintain your grip on power could lead to hateful, ignorant people making policy for years after your [sic] gone?

Well there is that.

'...this image of a tea party army standing strong against a socialist tide is just made up.'

Yglesias has it. The 2010 numbers, please:

So, so, so boring.

When medical procedures are illegal, only outlaws will perform those medical procedures.

Just a friendly reminder that when third-trimester abortions are all but illegal, and safe, timely abortions in general are prohibitively difficult to procure - especially for the poor, or those who live in scientifically/religiously backwards regions of the country - monstrous things happen. The Gosnell case is a horror, of course, but it would never have occurred if our laws regarding abortion (and for that matter infanticide) weren't themselves horrific.

We owe it to our fellow human beings to legalize abortion in all three trimesters NOW.

[Just so we're clear: people who think things like this -

For many young liberal women, abortion is THE answer to being inconvenienced. They don’t even think about it as killing a baby. I am glad to hear about [H.R.3] since I don’t want to aid and abet in anyone’s abortion.

- are part of the horror as well. If you are capable of seeing an unwanted pregnancy as 'inconvenience,' you have completely lost touch with reality. But 'FirstSkirt,' the Malkin poster who made that comment, is one of literally millions.]

[Second update: Am I required to mouth the words 'Of course abortion itself is a terrible thing' in order to be considered respectable? I can't bring myself to bother. Because abortion is, to my mind, no more 'terrible' than any other medical procedure, except (usually) to the pregnant woman undergoing it. (You don't abort a fetus, you abort a pregnancy.) Is it sadder than most procedures? I imagine it would be, unquestionably so. Is it ending a life? Let's not brutalize the word 'life' that way, talking about 'a life' as if the average person had a clear understanding of what 'a single life' could possibly mean in anything but a parochial, person=life/dog=life sense. An abortion is the destruction of an organism, like cutting down a tree, but I believe that abortion and murder have nothing to do with one another. The existence and lunatic embrace of capital punishment and war suggest that the prohibition on 'murder' has less to do with life than with fairness and advantage. Neither of which are relevant to discussion of abortion.

And yes: the birth and life of my nearly five-month-old son have strengthened my belief in the absolute moral obligation to legalize and protect the availability of abortion.]

Reality check: 'Tea Party' origins.

I forgot about Ron Paul, and about Santelli's televised racist insanity. Heeeeeeeere we go:

The original Tea Party was launched by a real opponent of the political establishment — Rand Paul's father, Ron, whose grass-roots rallies for his 2008 presidential run were called by that name. The elder Paul will object to this characterization, but what he represents is something of a sacred role in American culture: the principled crackpot. He's a libertarian, but he means it. Sure, he takes typical, if exaggerated, Republican stances against taxes and regulation, but he also opposes federal drug laws ("The War on Drugs is totally out of control" and "All drugs should be decriminalized"), Bush's interventionist wars in the Middle East ("We cannot spread our greatness and our goodness through the barrel of a gun") and the Patriot Act; he even called for legalized prostitution and online gambling.

Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008, and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book, The Revolution. The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W. Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.

The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party 2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG — massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis; the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford — and now the government was going to bail them out.

"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"

Matt Taibbi is an insufferable, pompous asshole; he's also one of the most important journalists in America right now, a treasure. Even if his take on the Tea Party was only partly correct at first - his recent article on Boehner plays up the 'last defense against the Tea Party' angle just a couple of years after his long 'the Tea Party will sell out immediately' piece - he's growing rapidly into something extraordinary. I suggest following both links. Enjoy.

Ending the drug war.

John McWhorter paints a picture of African-American culture after (drug) Prohibition. (Via.) I'm not with him on legalizing all drugs, I think, but it's an (ahem) intoxicating idea. Though I wish it were possible to get into a discussion of drug policy without gratuitous slaps at psychedelic culture(s) (McWhorter takes a shot at Timothy Leary's 'ideology' in the first paragraph). The enormous upside of careful (carefree) use of psychedelics, hallucinogens, and various'n'sundry consciousness-altering drugs is not a joke, nor is it a utopian 60's fantasy; nor should we dismiss the powerful lessons gleaned from psychedelic experience, even when they reveal our own postures and habits as fraudulent or selfish.

In any case, a little pick-me-up for ya this Monday afternoon in early Oh-Dubba-One.

(p.s. Why the 'Science' category? Because this is a matter of body/brain chemistry, which is to say a matter of personal liberty, first; and a political matter second.)

Day begins: WikiLeaks, Assange, Aeon Flux, 'affective' this-and-that, naive cognitivism, consistently thuggish inconsistency, a brief mention of the New York Yankees (those bums).

Starting the day. 10:30 already. Well you don't get to tell your brain what to do. Funny notion, actually: the idea of 'you' floating around somewhere, monitoring the activity of your brain, the way 'America' observes 'its' citizens. Or 'the Yankees organization' looks at its employees. We imbue distributed networks with unitary identities in order to provide affective hooks for ourselves. It's so easy to get wrapped up in a meaning, an identity. The emptiness of 'meaning' is itself the reason for our preoccupation. There's just so much nothing to go around. We can all get into it and have the same good time.

It's wrong to say we're wired to build civilizations - that's like saying 'evolution tends to produce human beings.' Rather, we're wired to move and think in certain low-level ways, to process and store and eventually forget data or data-relations by certain methods; given the crosshatched high-level network effects known as 'human society,' within which we're bound to think, our own merely human (i.e. banally/miraculously biological) predispositions tend to interact creatively or destructively with our 'civilization.' At this point the human world is robust and complicated enough that uncivilized people can interact creatively with it; civilization needs uncivilized people. They function like inactivated viruses, strengthening the Weave without recognizing (accepting) their place in it.

Maybe co-optation is the paradigmatic civilized act.

Julian Assange can be both a rapist and a public servant. Responsible journalism would admit both possibilities - would not mix up the charges he faces in Sweden with the morality or legality of WikiLeaks's actions. It seems to me that responsible journalism is transparently principled observation and reportage. The responsible thing is to state the facts and let the chips fall: WikiLeaks's actions are ethical; their costs are difficult to determine; their legality is difficult to determine; in any case it will be difficult or impossible to bring WikiLeaks to trial; Assange and WikiLeaks have taken steps to ensure the safety of the government employees mentioned in the recent 'Cablegate' leak; nations and corporations are applying wholly inconsistent standards to WikiLeaks and the journalistic outlets it works with (e.g. treating WikiLeaks as a gov't 'leaker' rather than a journalistic organization, not pursuing the NYTimes for its role in publicizing the leaked material, etc.); the concerted actions by Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, et al. indicate that government pressure is being applied to private organizations without clear legal justification or transparency; this pressure should also be responsibly reported.

The Obama administration is acting thuggishly and inconsistently, and politicians like the contemptible Joe Lieberman are embarrassing their constituents (i.e. us). I'm ashamed of the U.S.'s role in the pursuit of Assange and WikiLeaks.

It seems to me the WikiLeaks case highlights a worrisome brittleness in the international political order. A robust community of nations would be able to incorporate - to co-opt - an organization like WikiLeaks in the role of watchdog (not necessarily of diplomatic cables, of course). It's clear that Assange and his colleagues have done something intolerable; perhaps that's as simple as being a small, independent organization with no clear national sympathies. No unitary identity. WikiLeaks isn't a company with a boardroom, it's a pirate Internet. Our governments can't recognize or understand the ethics or motivations of such an organization, because to do so would admit the possibility that an order beyond the neoliberal 'consensual hallucination' is possible - and might even work. But we don't know how to process such an organization. We only know how to destroy it.

Only we don't, do we.

Not really.

If you've never seen Aeon Flux, the pretentious and intermittently brilliant early-90's MTV cartoon consisting of a series of two-minute shorts and ten inscrutable half-hour episodes, this is the time. Julian Assange is reencountering its central questions, after all: How many links do you have to cut before the Conspiracy (State, Company, Family, Graph, Cabal, etc.) recognizes you as fully human? Why is it so hard for us to understand that civilization and barbarism are tautologically defined, indeed constitute one another? Why do citizens consent, without even a moment's reflection or resistance, to all-pervasive surveillance and government intrusion, but object strenuously to any attempt to surveil governments themselves?

The answer to this last question has something to do with identification, of course, and - hey look, a consistent theme - affective hooks. Minds built to process faces and naively correlate symbols respond incoherently, chaotically, to encounters with truly distributed/decentered/faceless networks. So the state is Dad - the President, the Cleric, the Soldier - and WikiLeaks is just Julian Assange, the dissipated 'alien-looking'(!) foreigner who's a bad bad man, probably a rapist, and so let's shut the bastards down, go! go! go!!

[This began as my informal get-myself-working freewrite for the day, but I only got two sentences deep before I started capitalizing words and picturing you, Reader(s), rather than hiding in the whistle of warm air between my ears. Funny thing: I adored Aeon Flux when I watched it in 1995, and loathed it when I grabbed the DVDs earlier this year. I've convinced myself to try again, somehow. That's one definition of madness, yep, but there are others.]

Yes, this is something to be worried about.

Cantor is a liar and a buffoon, of course, but people who care about the stability of the nation (and its legislators' ability to govern) should be worried about the millions of people who've been suckered into this kind of stupidity:

Incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is part of a class of Republicans who say they want to change the country fundamentally -- and to that end, Cantor isn't dismissing a plan by legislators in his home state of Virgina to blow up the Constitutional system and replace it with one that would give state governments veto power over federal laws.

For several weeks now, conservative legal circles have been buzzing with Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell's plan to amend the Constitution so that a 2/3 vote of the states could overturn any federal law passed by the Congress and signed by the President. Howell first floated the idea in a September Wall Street Journal op-ed he co-wrote with Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett.

We'll laugh and laugh and laugh and then wake up one day to find there are twenty million people wanting to secede because a TV host told them to.

Mad Men Seasons 1-3, $30 total, today only. Go buy these DVDs immediately. Here's why.

The first three seasons of the best show on American television are on sale for $10 apiece on DVD and Blu-Ray. You should not hesitate to buy them.

Mad Men belongs in the same dramatic tier as The Wire, Deadwood, and The Sopranos - the three Big HBO Shows, which aired simultaneously in the first part of our terrible decade. Mad Men is run by Sopranos alum Matthew Weiner; indeed the spec pilot to the series apparently helped win him the Sopranos job. Unusually, Weiner oversees a writing staff consisting almost entirely of women (including former Buffy showrunner Marti Noxon).

The XX-heavy writing room is a huge part of Mad Men's success; indeed, one of the two major distinguishing characteristics of the show (beyond its pornographically slick design/aesthetic and obsessive period detail) is its complex treatment of the inner and outer lives of women. The show's main character is semi-principled adman Don Draper - a once-in-a-lifetime role for the versatile Jon Hamm - but Draper rarely gets the last word; we know that his generation's fate is to be left behind by the youth revolt of the mid- and late-60's, embodied on the show by Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss, turning into a star before our eyes) and Pete Campbell (Vince! Kartheiser! of! Angel!). Mad Men expertly balances a decade-long generational narrative about the traumatic journey from Eisenhower to Nixon with a closely-observed character study of Olson, Draper, and Campbell - each transforming into something unexpected, none of them following a straight characterological line. There are very few arguments masquerading as characters on Mad Men.

That's its other key distinguishing feature, its great triumph: the world of Mad Men's fourth season only faintly resembles its initial (Season One) conditions. Unlike The Sopranos, a study in selfish resistance to change, and The Wire, which focused on institutional inflexibility and incompetence, Mad Men gives us characters, organizations, and moral codes that change little by little, week by week. The story of Don and Betty Draper differs from the operatic (though no less believable) saga of Tony and Carmela Soprano in that Don and Betty actually transform in the ways Tony and Carmela only dream of. (SPOILER: Just as The Sopranos included TV's most detailed and complex marriage, Weiner's show centers on the most nuanced, sustained examination of marital collapse and divorce in the history of the medium.)

Weiner's ability to let the nature of his story change with its setting (Season One begins in March 1960; Season Four ends in October 1965) is testament to his writerly seriousness - but it also speaks to his writing staff's concern with the lurching progress (regress? collapse?) of the American social contract in those times. Mad Men deals only elliptically with the Civil Rights struggle, but the women's movement is front and center at all times - even in the lives of women who resist or are not yet transformed by the social struggles of The Sixties. That variety of depiction is almost unheard of on TV. For all The Sopranos' almost prurient interest in the archaic social structure of the Mob, there weren't many female characters with real freedom of movement (Charmaine Bucco, Angie Bompansiero, and Rosalie Aprile spring to mind, not without caveats) to provide contrast, so the proceedings had a certain airlessness at times. There were no winners on that show, only illustrations.

Mad Men, meanwhile, follows women as fantastically varied as 'dowdy' ingenue copywriter Peggy, icy Betty, young Sally Draper(!), empress Joan with her hidden talents, Dr Miller with her lack of child-empathy, the tentatively professional Rachel Menken, Peggy's boho lesbian friend Joyce, the saintly beatnik Anna Draper, and Anna's college-age niece Stephanie: some of them are gonna be just fine in the show's future, and Weiner and his writers expertly avoid didacticism and moralizing. They just keep on living. Mad Men doesn't exist to make a point - or rather, it makes so many (sometimes mutually contradictory) points, on such a wide range of social topics, that it feels more like mere life than its father-series.

In that regard, Mad Men most closely resembles not The Sopranos but Deadwood, the most interesting, eccentric, and (ultimately, for business/logistical reasons) unsatisfying of the great HBO shows. David Milch's transcendent 19th-century soap opera made institutional and social points by depicting characters in their full humanity; it was never didactic (except arguably in its Season Three theatre plot), and always made room for individuals' complex relations to their social roles. 'There's no such thing as an unmixed motive,' Milch is fond of saying. The Wire was all about unintended consequences, but its mode of characterization was classical rather than Shakespearean; The Sopranos started with two of TV's greatest characters but abstracted many of its characters for the sake of night-black comedy. Mad Men, on the other hand, makes room for characters like Pete Campbell, whose transformation from clownish villain to weird tragicomic antihero (and halfway-decent husband!) is one of the show's small narrative miracles. Unlike most of the Soprano family and anyone in the Baltimore of The Wire, Pete Campbell would fit nicely in Deadwood. I mean that as a high compliment.

I haven't even mentioned the show's wit, its sexiness, its one-liners, its detailed and unsentimental treatment of creative/artistic work, its handling of children, its vivid direction and photography, or (c'mon) the great John Slattery as Roger Sterling, as good a comic role as a middle-aged man will ever find in this shabby ruin of a television industry. Well, pretend I mentioned those things.

OK look, enough of this. Just go buy the DVDs for god's sake. This is the best value you're gonna get for the best show on TV. (And when Season Four comes out, get that too - it was the best year of the show so far.)

No backscatter machine, no patdown.

Matt Kernan wins (at cost):

In order to enter the USA, I was never touched, I was never “Backscatted,” and I was never metal detected. In the end, it took 2.5 hours, but I proved that it is possible. I’m looking forward to my next flight on Wednesday.

Of course.

"Empathy can't be taught, but it can be caught." --Mary Gordon

Disgusting.

The difference between the GOP and Dem approaches to the Bush income tax cuts is...wait for it...waaaaait for it...no I guarantee it'll be a real surprise...

...aah, just kidding. It's a giant GOP giveaway to the super rich! Surprise!!

Check out that (superb) WaPo infographic. The Republicans' fiscal irresponsibility is total - indeed, programmatic. Fiscal irresponsibility is part of their appeal. This is important to understand: scams like the Bush tax cuts are vote-buying, pure and simple. They have no policy purpose, not even 'starving the beast'; the GOP has no interest in cutting the size of government, only in slashing welfare programs of every kind. That is vote-buying, pure and simple. Whose votes? Well, you figure it out.

Polls show that a huge number of Americans think their income taxes have gone up under Obama; they have in fact gone down. 1 - 2 - 3 - boom! the GOP takes the House of Representatives. Choosing ignorance is cowardly but understandable; spreading it is evil.

Another moment for The Sopranos and sitcom form.

Seinfeld is the story (or rather a still life) of two sociopaths, a depressive, and an innocent; because it is a 'situation comedy,' the characters never change except temporarily, for comic effect. The purpose of the characters is to make a key point about late-20C American culture - specifically its decadence and terminal triviality. Some of the show's depth of meaning comes from its cultural specificity, its focus on a particular tribe of rich Jewish Manhattanites.

The Sopranos uneasily blended the generic demands of the mob drama with the basic form of sitcoms like Seinfeld. The shows shared DNA: The Sopranos made Big Cultural Arguments through narrow focus on one (comically exaggerated) ethnic group, too, and its main topic was the creeping pointlessness, triviality, and resulting bestial inhumanity of turn-of-the-century American culture. I don't want to overstate the links, but understanding one can illuminate the other.

Tony Soprano - who is a sociopath, a depressive, and an innocent - certainly grows over the course of the series, but one of the show's main (thematic) concerns is Tony's discomfort at being caught between oppressive, obsessively-referenced but only dimly-remembered traditions (omerta, distant Italy, blue-collar cred) and the workin' American's need to push relentlessly forward toward...something.

Drama is change, comedy is variation (stasis). The American Dream of change resonates destructively with the ritual repetition and variation that held together the culture(s) of Tony's ancestors, familial and professional. 'Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?' is one of the show's central questions; the sobering answer, 'the Soprano family happened,' was one of David Chase's oft-repeated refrains. Indeed, in service of his generational argument, Chase was often happy to let that symbolic drama supersede the personal dramas of his characters. (Hence the simplicity of characters like Paulie and Silvio when compared to analogues like, say, the simpering Farnum on Deadwood.)

The Sopranos was more like a sitcom than any of its peers among American TV drama. Its approach to its Clintonesque protagonists, Tony and Carmela - maybe the most complex pair ever depicted on TV - relied more on iterative elaboration than revolutionary change; its supporting characters were largely types, there to illuminate (or shadow) Tony's concerns; its exploration of generational transition and transformation gained much of its power from its choking claustrophobia rather than its historical sweep or daring (compare Mad Men, with its candid insight into divorce and other major midlife transformations - or even Buffy, with its yearly narrative apocalypses and constant characterological churn).

It was every bit as good as they say - a major work of art. But we should be clear about what kind of art it was. The characters who escape the sitcom of 'The Sopranos' (e.g. Melfi) find their way into the long second act of the inadequate drama that is life. One of the most amazing things about The Sopranos, to me, is that it managed to tell an episodic story (Ralph Kramden/Archie Bunker, Mob boss!) in serial form...allow its characters to recognize this weird genre trap...and in doing so illuminate the weird state of the American middle class at the turn of a weird century. Formal shenanigans of that sort rarely add up to anything. Kudos to David Chase for being, quite unexpectedly, an avant-garde comedy writer.

Private regrets.

I am ashamed to have devoted energy, in my wayward youth, to a school of music that counts the Disco Biscuits as members, never mind giants of the scene. (I speak of 'jam bands,' of course.) I understand the Biscuits' appeal to bourgeois stoners who grew up in the hip-hop era - y'know, the kids who ruined Phish's lot scene in the late 90's - but the music of the Biscuits is a null. The basic idea, integrating techno/electronic instrumentation, style, and arrangements into the Dead/Phish-inspired improv-rock form, is perfectly valid. All the more disappointing, then, that the Disco Biscuits combine mid-level instrumental chops with atrocious singing/lyrics and thin-at-best songwriting, and that their seemingly endless 20-minute improvisations are just as monotonous as the euro-dancefloor rubbish they were supposed to be (a breaking wave of helpless children hoped without knowing that this dimwitted comedy routine would be) invigorating.

Nine mile skid.

Heh. The 9/21/72 release was one of the first Dick's Picks I sought out, and it's one of those things that would've drastically changed my life had I heard it during, say, freshman year of college. Yesterday I was driving around with the GD Movie soundtrack playing, that incredible He's Gone > Jaaaaaam > Other One from 10/17/74, flashing back to something one of my closest Phishin' buddies told me recently: if he'd been around to hear 1973-74 Dead, to know that somewhere in America a bunch of guys were playing music like that every night, he'd have dropped everything that moment and gone on tour. It was just too pure, too real not to.

Now, I've always been kind of a stick in the mud, in terms of tour culture. In an essay I've been working on I go on for a while about "middle class white kids with time to kill – the folks who think 'hippie' is a synonym for 'irresponsible,'" and I mean it. Phish tour culture actively pisses me off, and the Phish fan community leaves me colder by the day.

But for the very first time in my life I found myself wishing I could go back to that age, to that unrecoverable time, and just wander the country. I got it, for a minute. The only way to see (to hear) a nation-idea so big is to keep moving, either through time or through space. For a moment I wanted to run around a little, and it was 'He's Gone' that got me there. The very idea: songs that reach backward through time toward blues spirits and mountaintop musics...it's just destroying me, lately.

Of course I quickly disabuse myself of nostalgia every time I turn on any post-Hornsby Dead. Time isn't a friend or a lesson, it's just time. Same as space. My wife is working at her laptop now, sending emails to colleagues. We're in house slippers and there's a 'Baby Shower' banner over the serving counter. This is far, far better than OK.

Further news on craven irresponsible fucking bastards.

Still bastards.

We get the mendacious shitmongering cuntiquated Congress we deserve.

When you feel like scaring and depressing yourself all at once...

...you want Wikipedia's 'Level of support for evolution' page. Start with this dispiriting graphic, if you like, then try to imagine a U.S.A. in which people actually received basic education about science, and were not forbidden by abusive church fathers from experiencing the joy of honest recognition of their place in the universe. Just you try it.

Mark Lilla on 'Tea Party Jacobins.'

Quite a read:

A familiar American ritual is now being performed in homes across the country. Meetings are being called. Coffee is brewed, brownies baked, hands raised, votes tallied, envelopes licked, fliers mailed. We Americans are inducted into this ritual’s mysteries at an early age, and by the time we reach high school we may not read well but we certainly know how to organize an election campaign and build a homecoming float.

But what happens after the class president is sworn in and the homecoming queen is crowned? The committees dissolve and normal private life resumes. And that, I suspect, is what will happen to the Tea Party organizations: after tasting a few symbolic victories they will likely dissolve. This is not only because, being ideologically allergic to hierarchy of any kind, they still have no identifiable leadership. It is because they have no constructive political agenda, though the right wing of the Republican Party would dearly love to attach its own to them. But the movement only exists to express defiance against a phantom threat behind a real economic and political crisis, and to remind those in power that they are there for one thing only: to protect our divine right to do whatever we damn well please. This message will be delivered, and then the messengers will go home. Every man a Cincinnatus.

I find the tone of the article a little weird in places, and there are a few moments of fake evenhandedness that poorly serve the article overall, but its core argument (the 'Tea Party' is just the militant wing of parallel 'libertarian' revolutions in private/economic autonomy) is compelling and (to me) novel.