Wax Banks

Obamaguts.

Some guy:

I appreciate the slim possibility of this happening, but would the activist left now please shut the fuck up about what a coward President Obama is. He may have just kissed off a few swing states--and in the kick-off to a presidential reelection campaign, it doesn't get any gutsier than that.

Some Sullivan:

impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.

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.

One key difference between God and King Lear...

...is that outside of the imaginative world of King Lear -- outside of the contract with Shakespeare and his performers which guides our experience of the play and the events it depicts -- no one actually thinks King Lear is a factual account of being in the world. It feels that way for a while, but as spectators at a drama we maintain a dual awareness that the events are both real-to-us and factually-incorrect, strictly speaking; the status of Jewish/Christian Scripture is such that readers/listeners accord it radically different ontological status.

That said, the Biblical God is a lot like a 'literary character,' and it's good to appreciate the ways believers relate to him both literarily and historically, all at once, complexly, with their full humanity intact. It's OK to think wrong things. It's good to feel deeply, even about nonsense.

But still: 'this kind of thing happens, it feels this way' is one good thing. 'This happened exactly this way so join our church' is straight bullshit.

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.)

A moment for Sasha Laxton.

'Gender-neutral' parenting -- i.e. a posture and policy of nonintervention in a child's experiments with social roles -- is a reasonable practice, or set of practices; at the minimum it can serve as a counterweight to the pathological limitations on sex roles found in (American) adult society. I have no great problem with gender roles as such; insofar as they're social/cultural conventions which amplify sex-linked traits and behaviours, I feel I should act neutrally toward them too. And defend against any intrusion on what I see as best practices, of course -- even if I surrender in the end.

I have a replica WWII GI's map case in olive canvas with a stiff cardboard back; it's the most convenient shoulder bag I've ever had. I refer to it as my purse, and get the occasional strange look for doing so. But it's a pretty butch bag all the same. I take this as a very very very small example of acknowledging the usual boundaries, tweaking them a bit, and going about my business such that my own convenience and comfort are kept high, even if productivity remains at a minimum. I also acknowledge that I get a giggle out of calling it a purse -- but I also explain, more often than is necessary, the super-masculine origins of the bag. Perhaps this is overcompensation in two opposing directions: an unstable equilibrium. Well, I'm not perfect. You?

Sasha Laxton is a five-year-old male. His parents claim to have kept his sex secret for five years. Now he's entered school, and they've publicly revealed that 'he's a boy.'

Here's a picture. Here's a TIME story about some backlash. Here's a quote from Sasha's mother:

“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge News. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become.”

I'm sure Laxton has done a lot of thinking about the nature of her/their experiment. I don't wish to engage in amateur psychology. And I do understand the progressive passion for replacement gender norms which are more just, or perhaps just differently unjust, than the ones we've got going today. So I want to point out two small things:

• This is not 'gender-free' or indeed 'gender-neutral' parenting. It is indeed explicitly interventionist in a ploddingly conventional way:

  Sasha dresses in clothes he likes -- be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

  Good idea, bad idea, doesn't matter: whatever her experiment was meant to accomplish in the beginning, she's cocked it up. Sasha knows what 'hyper-masculine' clothes are -- 'skull-print shirts and cargo pants.' Which of course 'affects what [he wears] and what [he] can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that [he becomes.' His parents -- by all press accounts his mom -- gave him a totally run-of-the-mill gender stereotype as a reference point and said YOU MAY NOT BE THAT. Good choice, bad choice, doesn't matter: now the kid thinks 'avoiding stereotypes' means not wearing traditional boys' clothing.

  The hypocrisy is important. The kid won't be five forever, and someday he'll learn about stereotypes and gender roles and the nature of sexual difference from someone other than his mom and dad. He'll still carry big lessons about the joy of not worrying whether you're doing what everyone else is -- but he'll also carry a lesson, bigger than it may seem at first, about choosing the right stereotypes to please the grownups who made him think he could choose freely...

• Look here:

  So is she hoping that dressing Sasha in pink will change anything? “Yes. If it just made one person think: ‘No, I won’t put that frilly dress on her because it’s a bit silly’ or: ‘Yeah, if he really likes that doll, then that’s OK,’ then that would be really brilliant.

  “All I want to do is make people think a bit.”

  And will she mind if Sasha grows up to be a butch rugby player or, indeed, a hairdresser?

  “I just want him to fulfil his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction,” says Beck.

  “As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters, does it? What’s more important than being happy, and making other people happy? It’s all that matters.” [my emphasis --wa]

  Whatever sentiments Beck is trying to express, these quotes make me...uneasy, to say the very least. I hope you see why: the emphasis on (other) people 'think[ing] a bit,' the weird equation of not pushing a child with 'fulfilling his potential,' the silly idea that frilly dresses are themselves inherently silly -- like cargo pants and skull shirts, presumably, only Sasha seems to be encouraged to wear the dresses and forbidden from wearing the other stuff. (I'll note too that the not-so-faintly condescending tone of the interview just pisses me off.)

The interview isn't about Sasha, it's about Beck Laxton -- just as the furor over Amy Chua's frankly abusive parenting style (like her contemptibly self-serving bestselling account of it) was all about Amy Chua. Fine, fine, that's the media for you.

But consider: if Beck Laxton had taken any other approach to gender norms, and been this self-righteous about it, and given such incoherent justification to the press, and picked such weirdly specific issues to take a stand about ('ruched sleeves and scalloped collar?' seriously?), but not in the name of 'gender stereotypes' -- how would you receive the article? Would her politics be more interesting and important than, say, her hypocrisy?

That said: why is the media covering the story? Whose side are the news media always on?

Lost some steam here, sorry.

'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.

The Emperor.

Most tarot decks don't seem to know what to do with this guy - maybe because his role is so straightforward. We'll see how we do.

Waite-Smith seats him on a granite throne on, apparently, Mars. Rams' heads adorn the throne. In his hand an ankh, though it's also tau and...well, I'll let Mr Waite handle the basics here:

He has a form of the Crux ansata for his sceptre and a globe in his left hand. He is a crowned monarch--commanding, stately, seated on a throne, the arms of which axe fronted by rams' heads. He is executive and realization, the power of this world, here clothed with the highest of its natural attributes. He is occasionally represented as seated on a cubic stone, which, however, confuses some of the issues. He is the virile power, to which the Empress responds, and in this sense is he who seeks to remove the Veil of Isis; yet she remains virgo intacta.

So he's great angry rugged penile authority, and the rock chair is no doubt giving him hemorrhoids. Red robes to complete the alchemical dyad with the Empress. Armoured under his official duds. A globe in hand. ('He's got the whole world,' you might say or sing, 'in his...')

He's also supposed to be a symbol of pure intellect, though how you'd get that from the Waite-Smith card I'm not sure. Snazzy hat though.

Crowley's Thoth deck makes one brilliant maneuver, crossing the Emperor's legs, which - in addition to making tau a central visual element, thereby freeing up the sceptre for another ram's-head insertion - links the Emperor to the Hanged Man (XII) and sets off a whole mess of interesting symbolic/narrative resonances. Start with the simple stuff: you live or die at the pleasure of worldly powers beyond control or accountability, beyond even comprehension (as the world gets bigger). But submission to authority can produce new understandings - every rube who's ever caught a cold or had a dog die wants to tell you hardship equals wisdom, and if you can ride with a smile, well...

One of our most famous pop culture Emperors, a certain Palpatine (a/k/a Sith Lord Darth Sidious), can serve a clarifying role here: his right-hand man (Darth Vader) and his nemesis, Vader's son Luke, are strong enough to band together and knock the old man off - but to do so would create a power vacuum which they would be forced to fill. Neat little political allegory, revolutionaries and regicides tending to want the throne for themselves, but the spiritual allegory is to do with the act of violence itself. Their journey (to redemption in Vader's case, to adulthood and wise stillness in Luke's) must involve both Palpatine's death and the rejection of any principle of violent revenge or cruelty.

Vader does kill the guy - allowing his son's Foolish journey to continue at the cost of his own life - but he does so out of late-blooming familial love. A principle of all-unity, which is (after all) what The Force, George Lucas's pop-tao, is meant to symbolize.

The Emperor literally rules the world(s) - but he's not the world. His power is abstract, like the intellect, like the state, and whatever its offices and equipment, it can not undergo transformation. (Palpatine's body remained ruined and sick despite his bruited 'power over life and death.')

That's the meaning of the state - as opposed to, say, a 'movement.' There's a political allegory for you.

* * *

The whole point of the Emperor, you might say, is that he embodies a fixed idea. Whether intellectual or governmental, he's a principle of Order. That's a dangerous thing: sure, with a long lever and a fixed point you might move the earth, but you're just as likely to break something. The lever itself, or something more valuable. The earth even.

Martial prowess (checked out the metal pants and boots!), focus, readiness. But not flexibility nor transformation. Of course the Golden Dawn folks would want to bring in Alchemical Wedding-type imagery, hence the red/white business and marriage of elemental opposites business.

Plus: the Hierophant might be the one who oversees the Priestess's work - maybe he sent her off to that island to do her, hmm, revelating - but the parcel of land has to be granted by the Emperor. His authority is 'lower' than the Pope's, but he can bring the hammer down pretty fast. Or indeed the tau-cross. Still, the Fool should have an easier time avoiding the Emperor's goons, on account of their uniforms (and clanging metal pants/boots). The Pope's harder to get around, because his fingers are invisible. The 'masculine principle' is easy to see: look for the uncomfortable dick-metaphor jutting up into the conceptual air.

The 'Occupy Wall St' movement is much in the news lately. Its purpose is 'demonstration' in the popular sense: showing the world how the thing - democracy - is done. The protestors haven't presented in writing a vision of what they want done to the U.S., which bothers the smart set, but the reason they haven't done so is that the demonstration is the vision. So many have given up any hope of being a meaningful or valued part of the American nation (except at tax time); the Occupation literally embodies hope, and anger, and an upwelling of authentic emotion. A rejection of fixity and despair, not in word but in new being.

Being otherwise.

The enemy at the moment is the State, not just the corrupt and increasingly insane U.S. government but its semi-official financial services arm on Wall Street. The State is all that the Occupation rejects and refutes: immobility, abstraction, obsessive accumulation, self-preserving elitism, a dehumanizing distance from the American body itself - the people, all people. The opposite of the State is of course the Movement: not just a dynamic organization but dynamism itself, change that brings change. The Occupation models a self-regulating flow of resources, human and material.

If you show the Emperor you can live without him, you have power to ask him to try to live with you - and what an ally he could be.

To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder.

-- 'The Curse of Greyface and the Introduction of Negativism, Principia Discordia

Alchemical marriage of incompatible orders remaking each the self and each the other: you don't need a hammer (godly or otherwise) to bring down a mountain, just a slow steady rain and time. Nice thing about raindrops is they don't give a damn one way or the other about falling, nor about wetness, nor the oceans where they breed nor the clouds where they gather (which they become, which in falling they unmake). The rain will always wear away the mountain.

Remember, remember...

Mitt Romney, alas.

Josh Marshall writes this week, briefly and cattily, about the inevitability of Mitt Romney as 2012 GOP presidential candidate. Romney is, on one hand, a moderate technocrat whose marquee role was as governor of the great state of Massachusetts; on the other hand he's simultaneously a fake-populist opportunist (read: shameless liar) and a a money-grubbing corporate whore. Which is to say he's everything Americans love, all at once, plus a Mormon for heaven's sake. Wow, fun. Still, running a Wall St slickster against Obama during a nationwide recession can't possibly be exciting for Republicans. It doesn't excite me either, despite my hopes for Obama to decimate Romney, because Romney will bring absolutely nothing to the debate - i.e. he's not really an alternative to anything, on any score. He's a grotesque image-handled TV character and I'm sad that it's come to this.

At least Palin is actually a hick, you know? At least Perry is a monster!

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.

Fox News watching. Ugh.

Watching Fox News - Chris Wallace's Sunday roundtable with Brit Hume, Bill Kristol, Juan something, and someone I don't know - and the weirdest thing about it is the absolute disjunction between, on one hand, actual analysis (Boehner and Obama both need to satisfy several constituencies with disparate aims, most Americans want the debt ceiling raised now, the GOP caucus is sharply divided over tax cuts in particular, etc.), and on the other hand pure partisan talking-points nonsense ('the Democrats haven't put forth a plan,' etc.). Everyone who's appeared on Fox News this weekend has mouthed lines about how Obama has put nothing at all forward - the only person to use the word 'intransigent' actually applied it to SEIU, AFL-CIO, and AARP! It's like being in a screwed up alternate universe where no one actually knows anything about the underlying economic questions. Or, no...it's like a televised segment in our universe, in which that actually happens to be true. Damn. The only breath of fresh air today was Tim Geithner's hard-nosed performance on Wallace's show, in which he maintained exactly the right tone of professionalism - spiked with richly-deserved contempt for Wallace's ignorant parroting of talking points. Stark contrast with the babble from the other talking heads. Though you have to respect the nepotism-hire Bill Kristol, in a way, for his absolute cynicism: he really did have the audacity to describe the negotiations as 'laying the groundwork for electing [a Republican] president in 2012...' What a pathetic wretch that man is.

Trying to get my head around the current U.S. political crisis; or, the nice thing about the Garden of Eden isn't supposed to be that you're all alone and don't have to care about anyone.

[Consider this a freewrite despite the capital letters and whatnot. I've been watching/hearing a lot of Fox News and have some anger that needs venting. There really is something sick about the current crisis in Washington - because it reveals that there's something sick about this country.]

The current debt limit crisis is the most surreal event in American politics in some time. Maybe since the Clinton impeachment. The basic issue - the unquestioned need for Congress to raise the debt limit so that the U.S. can meet its national financial obligations - has been made secondary to a high-stakes fight over the true natures of American conservatism and (to a lesser extent) liberalism. The long-predicted showdown between John Boehner and his 'Tea Party' caucus is happening at arguably the worst possible time; the Obama White House has shed its original economic advisory team and is apparently taking cues from campaign guru David Plouffe and his political team (shades of Karl Rove and his 'Mayberry Machiavellis'...); and the Democrats in Congress have shown, with few exceptions, just how much contempt they have for liberal principles. It's a very dark moment for America.

The basic outline of the situation is this: Boehner and his fellow old-fashioned corporate Republicans are facing insurrection from a 'conservative' caucus variously motivated by anti-Obama hatred, Randian pseudo-economic principles, and conventional political ambition. What might, in another year or under another President, have been a couple weeks of standard-grade posturing from the opposition party followed by pro forma raising of the debt limit has been seized upon by the Tea Party folks (exemplified by House Majority Leader Cantor) as a chance for a showdown over the budget deficit itself.

Boehner can't simply throw his anti-tax zealot constituency under the bus, much as he'd obviously like to - holding the debt limit hostage is probably the most anti-business move the Republicans have made in a long time - but Boehner also can't let Obama look good. He is, after all, a GOP machine man.

Meanwhile Obama, for his part, has decided to play up the situation for the benefit of the 'independent voter,' whoever that is. Instead of divorcing the debt limit and deficit issues, locating the deficit fight in the yearly budget process, the Democratic leadership has decided to allow the Republicans to renege on the promise to fund their own federal budget. What's more, Obama has decided to make the purely political (i.e. economically insensible) move of pushing for massive spending cuts instead of job creation.

Incredibly, he's not even standing firm on the matter of letting the Bush tax cuts expire - a quick route to several trillion dollars in revenue.

And Obama can't easily do the failsafe thing, i.e. invoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and simply raise the debt limit by fiat, because the same GOP that happily ceded ever-greater power to the imperial executive under George W. Bush is now preparing to run (presumably the dim technocrat Romney) in 2012 against the bogeyman of a power-mad socialist administration! Not that Obama hasn't been adding to the power of the executive himself, if not on the Cheney/Yoo scale...

Meanwhile former-Speaker Pelosi has offered a revenue-free plan (tied to ending the war in Afghanistan), Senate Minority Leader McConnell has put forth a plan that would allow several purely symbolic votes (living down to his earlier assertion that the GOP's #1 priority was to make Obama a one-term president rather than, say, to help right the U.S. economy), and unserious politicians like House Majority Leader Cantor have done their best to sabotage any kind of bipartisan negotiation.

(Cantor walked out of White House negotiations the instant he was asked to put up specific plans for cutting essential services and located revenue sources. While Boehner's cowardice is utterly conventional and expected, and it's even possible to feel sympathy for him in his fight against the Tea Party, Cantor's grandstanding has been absolutely contemptible, his ignorance shocking, and his arrogance not just dangerous but possibly treasonous. Boehner is just a selfish lying old hack, but at least he's tried at moments to resemble an adult; Cantor is a fucking cancer.)

The upshot of all this: a civil war in the Republican Party (Tea Party anarchists against old-line corporate hands) has turned a run-of-the-mill reminder of our baseline economic ill health into a possible global financial catastrophe, and Obama and the Democrats continue to negotiate with the Republicans as if the pretense of good faith hadn't been shredded ages ago.

* * *

What's most galling about the present situation is that the primary motivation behind the Republicans' unprecedented debt-limit intransigence is - wait for it - the Tea Party's apocalyptic xenophobia. Remember that the average Tea Partier is an old white person happily drawing on federal subsidies and services while bemoaning the moral weakness and federal-teat-suckling of liberals. For the Tea Party, these really are the End Times. There's a Kenyan in office, socialists in Congress, we're losing wars right and left (mainly left), the money has run out (THE GODDAMN MONEY HAS RUN OUT!!), and -

- most importantly -

- our economic situation in general can't be blamed on Obama or even the Democrats, at least not primarily, except to the extent that they were complicit with the criminal (and criminally irresponsible) administration that left office in 2008. Bush, Cheney, and their cronies shared a commitment not to fund their presidency, happily throwing out revenues and conjuring up a gigantic new subsidy (hi Medicare) for - wait for it - those same elderly medical patients now calling for Obama to be strung up. (Not an idle choice of image, that.)

The 'stimulus package' is a lot harder to complain about than the 'bailout,' which - after all - President Bush did sign. Our economy's been running on fumes for a long time now, and for all his frightening ignorance and denial, Bush may well have known it. That'd shed new light on his purely political approach to economic policy. And it also sets a large bloc of American voters squarely against both major parties, because their most cherished myth is being shattered by their leaders.

This is the end of American exceptionalism. Racism might have catalyzed the Tea Party's rage, pseudopopulist economic rhetoric might be its mode of expression, but the heart of the terror is the collapse of old-fashioned hegemony and privilege.

Consider the sheer complexity of the financial crisis, the murky nature of our various Middle Eastern wars, the ongoing crisis of anthropogenic clime change, epochal demographic shifts in the U.S., a sea change in public perception of African-Americans' role in the body politic, the dawning realization that our late-capitalist reliance on the financial sector closely resembles the crimes that put Bernie Madoff in the clink, the slowly rising post-9/11/01 awareness that not only isn't this a Christian world but we're not even a Christian country, the inescapable fact that the 'Drug War' (a war on a marginalized underclass) must now end, and the nauseating decline of America's material productivity and industrial robustness (how ya been, GM?). It's been a terrible decade for this country - Osama Bin Laden might well have patted himself on the back for this, but he just showed us where the hands had come to rest on the clock.

The debt limit fight shouldn't be happening at all. Nor should we be fighting now about austerity - the economic consensus is that job-creation and fiscal stimulus are needed, not 'belt-tightening' and pig-ignorant analogies to household budgets. The time for budget-balancing will have come when our unemployment is no longer approaching historic levels, when we're not deep in the lengthiest recession in modern American history. But these straightforward economic matters are lost on our angriest pseudopopulists.

Why should this surprise anyone? What we're seeing is denial, pure and simple: the four-sided fight between Boehner, the revanchist right wing, Obama, and the folks holding $14,000,000,000,000 of U.S. government debt was sparked off, and now approaches its catastrophic end, because the age of American hegemony is over, as is the age of whatever ideal type the Tea Party composites into.

In that regard, we really do need to look to Osama Bin Laden at this moment - to see that his primary contribution to American culture was to inject the terrifying knowledge that we can not hide from the world, that we're bound up in a shared global destiny (even with the globe itself) and can no longer think of our American identity as primary or transcendent or everlasting or God-given or immutable.

* * *

It's tempting to see the debt limit crisis as nothing more than a standoff over spending cuts and the appropriate level of taxation. That's certainly what it looks like, at a superficial level, and 'tax/spend liberals versus anti-tax conservatives' is a comforting, banal, helpfully meaningless frame for political action. The news media reinforce this misperception. My father-in-law watches Fox News, and while we've been staying at the in-laws' house this week I've heard lots of Republicans squawking about the world-historical necessity of making 'tough decisions' about lowering spending. (I haven't heard a single specific policy suggestion all week, but never mind.)

But we need to lift the debt ceiling today to pay for a budget passed by Republican leadership - and nobody was concerned about the borrowing limit those few months ago. Nobody! That's why Boehner looks so run down on TV: he didn't realize he'd be dealing with intra-party civil war at this point. (If D.C. scuttlebutt is to be believed, Boehner's compulsive drunkenness probably isn't helping. Sidebar: anyone who complains about Michelle Bachmann's migraine meds and doesn't mention the various drug addicts in Congress is a liar and an asshole, pure and simple.)

It's not the budget. It's not even the idea of the budget. It's the idea of America that's at stake - specifically the idea of 'our America.' Only 'America' has been abstracted away from the actual nation-state the word has historically referred to. Something else is going on; we mistake what these folks do if we see it as merely political.

The zealots of the church of 'no taxes' are now at war with the idea of a functioning democracy. They believe that ideological purity - which masks 'purity' of another kind - is more important than the U.S. meeting its financial obligations. They rely on the state's services but hate their own reliance, their inadequacy; they fetishize rugged individualism and the iconography of the frontier, of revolution - and they are willing to sabotage the operations of the state to turn their cinematic fantasies into live action.

There's a word for people who want to smash the state. But what do we call citizens who want to smash the state and insist that the state is favoured by God?

What happens if they're willing to do far more damage than we're able to fix?

Rolling Stone's brilliant, authoritative look at Fox News's daily 'news' schtick.

For everyone but the delusional and the cynical, the debate over whether Fox News provides 'news' (never mind 'unbiased' news) ended years ago. Here's why. Brilliant presentation here.

It rarely stops.

I should warn you: these are not easy to watch.

Watch them.

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.

Next time you think free speech is critically endangered in the U.S. ...

...consider the 'opinion manipulation' situation in China. The idea of 'national character' is deeply problematic (not least in a a country with hundreds of millions of citizens) but China makes it awfully attractive.

In March 2005, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide purge by the Ministry of Education of college bulletin-board systems. As Nanjing University, one of the country’s leading academic institutions, readied itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure of its popular “Little Lily” BBS, school officials recruited a team of zealous students to work part time as “Web commentators.” The team, which trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively argued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university work-study funds. In the months that followed, party leaders across Jiangsu Province began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Rumors traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors received 50 mao, or roughly seven cents, for each positive post they made. The term Fifty Cent Party, or wumaodang, was born.

The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro-government stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2007, as President Hu urged party leaders to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to increase the strength of positive propaganda.” Mr. Hu stressed that the Party needed to “use” the Internet as well as control it.

One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed firms, to splash news of Mr. Hu’s Internet speech on their sites for a week. Soon after that speech, the General Offices of the cpc and the State Council issued a document calling for the selection of “comrades of good ideological and political character, high capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web commentators … who can employ methods and language Web users can accept to actively guide online public opinion.” [...]

China’s Culture Ministry now regularly holds training sessions for Web commentators, who are required to pass an exam before being issued with job certification. A Chinese investigative report for an influential commercial magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by this writer, describes in some detail a September 2007 training session held at the Central Academy of Administration in Beijing, at which talks covered such topics as “Guidance of Public Opinion Problems on the Internet” and “Crisis Management for Web Communications.”

This is something different from the standard U.S. practice of influential bloggers being fed propaganda and outright lies by the two major political parties, or the influence-peddling and access-trading practices of major (corporate) media; the standard quid pro quo in the U.S. news media at least functions market-democratically, with organizations like the New York Times able to maintain some ideological independence with the backing of their advertisers and readers (and other funding sources). But that system plays up inter-party differences even while trumpeting essential governmental/national unity; the system absolutely does not embrace a myth of (essentially divine) government/Party hypercompetence and benevolence as this Chinese gov't-media network evidently does. Most adults in the U.S. get that politicians are self-interested manipulators; the political press is built around that knowledge.

The U.S. government can browbeat, cajole, and threaten our independent press, but it can't shut it down, nor can it 'forced private Web sites...to splash news of [a political] speech on their sites for a week.' Americans maintain a powerfully, dangerously anarchic sense of press freedom; it's baked into the 'national character,' if you will. Not consistently, to be sure, and our press is hamstrung by any number of factors, but the ideal remains.

When folks say that the U.S. remains a shining beacon of freedom or whatever the hell this country is supposed to be, people like me tend to find them silly - but it's good to be reminded why this myth exists, what facts it's grounded in.

Amen.

Y'know what?

I'm happy right now and would rather enjoy it than question its palliative nature. Is the 'meaning' of Bin Laden's death a fantasy? Yes, yes, yes, and today his life is one of the tens of thousands lost in this decade of madness. Whatever weakness it reveals in me, I'm glad to see the bastard go.

He fought a religious war. He can have it. Is this just? It just...is.

And I'm glad a man's dead. Perhaps he would have wanted it that way. War reduces us.

The interesting Harry Potter Lexicon case.

In 2007, Harry Potter author Jo Rowling and her publishers (along with Warner Brothers, her thieving reptilian film-pimps) sued Steve Vander Ark and RDR Books in order to stop publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon - a print version of the website of the same name, which Rowling herself had used as a reference while writing the final volumes in the series. The judge ruled in Rowling's favour, and Vander Ark RDR eventually came out with a heavily-modified version of the Lexicon.

Rowling - whom I admire - offered several arguments against the Lexicon's publication, most of them (frankly) bullshit. She planned her own authoritative Encyclopedia, you see, and worried that the Lexicon would cut into its profits (which she naturally planned to give away). This claim strikes me as irrelevant; I'm surprised it was taken seriously anywhere but in the (ahem) court of popular (uninformed) opinion.

Anyhow: victory for the Rich Bad Guys, tough day for the Little Fan, right?

Not quite.

I admit to surprise and relief: the ruling is actually a careful defense of the 'fair use' copyright provision, an reassertion of the right of works like the print Lexicon to make use of copyrighted materials for reference/analysis purposes, and a further definition of the line between repurposing and regurgitation. (Much is made in the judge's decision of the thinness and inconsistency of the Lexicon's citations, which were deemed insufficiently 'scholarly.') Interesting stuff - not least in the peripheral detail that Warner Brothers apparently violated Vander Ark's copyright by stealing material from the Lexicon timeline!

The decision implies that it's inappropriate for a reference work to relate the entire plot of its source; this strikes me as a poor, or in any case vague, standard. That said, for nervous fans/creators these are the crucial passages of the decision:

The purpose of the Lexicon’s use of the Harry Potter series is transformative. Presumably, Rowling created the Harry Potter series for the expressive purpose of telling an entertaining and thought provoking story centered on the character Harry Potter and set in a magical world. The Lexicon, on the other hand, uses material from the series for the practical purpose of making information about the intricate world of Harry Potter readily accessible to readers in a reference guide. To fulfill this function, the Lexicon identifies more than 2,400 elements from the Harry Potter world, extracts and synthesizes fictional facts related to each element from all seven novels, and presents that information in a format that allows readers to access it quickly as they make their way through the series. Because it serves these reference purposes, rather than the entertainment or aesthetic purposes of the original works, the Lexicon’s use is transformative and does not supplant the objects of the Harry Potter works.

...

[D]espite Plaintiffs’ criticisms, the Lexicon occasionally does offer “new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings,” Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 141 (internal quotation marks omitted), as to the themes and characters in the Harry Potter works. The Lexicon’s discussion of certain characters, while perhaps not rigorous analysis, contain some reflections on the character, observations of his or her nature, and examples of how that nature is exhibited in the story.

...

To fulfill its purpose as a reference guide to the Harry Potter works, it is reasonably necessary for the Lexicon to make considerable use of the original works.

...

[A] reference guide to the Harry Potter works is not a derivative work; competing with Rowling’s planned encyclopedia is therefore permissible. Notwithstanding Rowling’s public statements of her intention to publish her own encyclopedia, the market for reference guides to the Harry Potter works is not exclusively hers to exploit or license, no matter the commercial success attributable to the popularity of the original works.

(Cheekily, the judge uses Rowling's own praise for the site as evidence of its transformative/reference value.)

* * *

Let's change direction a bit.

The surprise here is that the finding in favour of the billionaire and her corporate pals seems like a blow for justice. (Among the infringed-upon works are Rowling's two short HP reference guides - which even the defendant agreed he'd substantially reproduced.) But between the lines of the decision is the uncomfortable fact that Rowling herself agreed to the usefulness and appropriateness of the Lexicon while it was 'just a website,' but once money - paper - was involved, the dogs were released. It's not the money angle that makes the affair uncomfortable (c'mon, what world do you think you're living in?), but rather the ad hoc sublegal order that sites like the online Lexicon exist in. Old-world media companies treat online networks like a dangerous frontier, happily accepting the necessity of digital fan networks - even infringement - for financial exploitation, but insisting on an increasingly uncomfortable distinction between those networks and the 'real world' of information-in-print-form.

This distinction is one of the ways media corporations perpetuate and profit from the persistent 'digital divide,' and reminds us of the best reason to transform our copyright laws: the accelerating digitalization of the modern world's information diet strips human beings of their vital physical connections (with one another and with their own histories), we need to be able to bring information freely in and out of the digital realm - to rephysicalize it, and ourselves.

In other words, I'm worried about legacy-media IP law not because it's usually inapplicable to digital media, but because the flow of physically-embodied information - the free movement of physical bodies, whether organic or textual or otherwise - is vital to the continued existence of our species. Which is to say I don't much care whether printed words are easier to read than onscreen words; I care about the experience of handing you a book and being part of your physical experience of it.

This won't silence the mentally ill and paranoid, of course, but that should be about it for the hucksters.

Obama called the feckless White House press pool together and slipped a shiv into the lot of 'em. Beautiful.

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.

Poor you.

Two things about the Obama/Boehner/Reid budget deal:

1) If there had been no media coverage of the political horserace aspects of the deal, no one in American would care one way or the other about the difference between what Boehner demanded ($40B in spending cuts) and what the idiot Democrats gave ($39B).

2) Obama's 'be the grownup in the room' schtick is disgusting. He really does seem to think that partisanship is a bigger problem than capitalism-as-inadequate-social-policy. That's childish, and though he'll win reelection in 2012, his Democratic colleagues will suffer. And progressivism will suffer.

Whose debt?

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.'

Brown for the win, again! This guy keeps surprising me.

Scott Brown:

"I support family planning and health services for women," Brown said in a statement. "Given our severe budget problems, I don't believe any area of the budget is completely immune from cuts. However, the proposal to eliminate all funding for family planning goes too far. As we continue with our budget negotiations, I hope we can find a compromise that is reasonable and appropriate."

The Planned Parenthood cuts are political hackery of the lowest sort; nothing new from the completely spineless Boehner. Good to see our new Senator pointing out the obvious. Next step, Scottykins?

Simple exercise.

Here's a simple exercise you can try at home.

Look at your Twitter feed, or your friends' Facebook updates, or a local newspaper, or indeed any shortish list of people.

For each one in turn, try and imagine what he or she wants to accomplish today; or what he or she was feeling when writing that Twitter/Facebook update; or what he or she sees out the window upon waking or going to work/school. Easy, right? Just try to imagine his or her feelings. Try to feel them for a moment.

OK? Now try the same thing with, say, the national news. Or the blog or newspaper column of someone you vehemently disagree with or dislike. Or an ex-lover, or -spouse, or -boss.

No sweat, right? I'm sure you had no problem with any of those things. Lemme guess: even when arguing with someone over blog comments or email or Twitter, you still do exactly that, the very thing.

There is no such thing as a 'supporting character.'

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

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

Two bombs dressed up to look like they are words.

1.

And for most, the biggest problem is the drive: you don't [masturbate to Internet porn] because you're horny, you do it because you're bored. With porn that available, you never get to really horny anyway in the same way Americans never get to really hungry.

[...]

Junk food is stripped of the essentials of real food, leaving just the vulgar, the simple, the obvious of taste: sugar, salt, fat, repeat. It is the pornographization of food. The mistake people make is that they think it is delicious, but it's really just easy, comforting, reliable, satisfying. And that's where we are now: online porn is the pornographization of porn.

2.

Honest up, wildpeople, when you heard a TV reporter named Lara Logan got sexually assaulted by a gang of hooligans, how much did you want to see what she looked like? Lara sounds hot. And how certain were you that to find out, all you'd have to do was click the link?

[...]

I will point out that the entire pubic discourse on these reporters does not ever mention the content of the original story -- what was Logan about to report? ... Oh, that's not important. Then why did we have her out there in the first place?

I find the man's weblog uncomfortable, maddening; I agree with part of what he says in nearly every one of his articles, but I can't usually predict or even say clearly after the fact which parts those are; for those reasons I highly recommend The Last Psychiatrist.

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.

Delusional? Evidently. An ignoramus? Evidently!

Sarah Palin, you are still my idol!

Remember, President Reagan lived that mantra trust but verify. We want to be able to trust those who are screaming for democracy there in Egypt, that it is a true sincere desire for freedoms. And the challenge that we have though, is how do we verify what it is that we are being told, what it is that the American public is being fed via media, via the protestors, via the government there in Egypt in order for us to really have some sound information to make wise decisions on what our position is. Trust but verify, and try to understand is what I would hope our leaders are engaged in right now. Who's going to fill the void? Mubarak, he's gone, one way or the other. He is not going to be the leader of Egypt. That's a given. So now the information needs to be gathered and understood as to who it will be that fills now the void in the government. Is it going to be the Muslim Brotherhood? We should not stand for that, or with that or by that. Any radical Islamists, no that is not who we should be supporting and standing by. So we need to find out who was behind all of the turmoil and the revolt and the protests so that good decisions can be made in terms of who we will stand by and support.

--Sarah Palin, 2/6/11

I keep thinking the media narrative about her 'shrewdness' can't possibly be entirely false, having lasted this long despite her seeming brainlessness. And I keep being wrong! She really does seem to lack any perspective on her own importance and abilities. That's not entirely her fault - she noise machine certainly encourages her to keep babbling and posing for the camera, and it seems she's not cosmopolitan/savvy enough to realize the ways she's being jerked around - but her preening narcissism and small-mindedness are not only embarrassing but dangerous to this country. At least Limbaugh has a gutter pickpocket's sharp eye and willingness to work; Palin is halfway between Rush's race-baiting cynicism and Beck's sci-fi lunacy, and people love her schtick. Not enough to win the White House, studies and polls show, but enough to do real harm to any number of delicate nationwide cultural negotiations.

I love the 'Mubarak, he's gone...[t]hat's a given' bit. Oh, man!! That is world-class dilettantism right there. Go on now ex-Governor Palin, you tell 'em. You fool.

'...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.

Two things about Ta-Nehisi Coates.

[Started this a little more than a year ago. Added two sentences today and here it is. I've nothing to add today.]

1) He is a spectacular writer and an admirably honest man.

1.5) Even better: he's gonna be even better someday.

2) This -

My Moms once busted my lip after I tried to literally look down on her. I was 13 and had recently grown taller than her, and thus thought I could intimidate her. Heh. I was left singing that old Ice Cube riff, "With a right-left, right-left your toothless\And then you say godddamn they ruthless." My Moms came up in the projects and used to walk miles to school, and miles to church. She spent her summers in the country down on the Eastern Shore. She was raised by Negroes who did not play, and she took the lesson.

This is hard for a lot of people to hear, but in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my community this is what part of what parenting meant. If you weren't feeling the edge of the sword on your ass, then you were responding to the possibility of it. One thing I learned, while touring for my book, was that a lot of people consider this to be child abuse. It really was news to me and ultimately unthinkable. Almost everyone I'd ever known had come up the same way. My book editor would joke, while reading, the manuscript about his grandmother coming up from the South and making him go search for a switch. In Harlem.

Which isn't to say I, or people who came up like me, are without a critique. I smacked my son's hand until he was four. And then spanked him until he was seven. Most of this was about him sucking his teeth at his mother, or some such. We're done with that now, and at least in my presence, he doesn't exhibit that kind of disrespect. When he's staying with my people in Baltimore he doesn't earn any immunity, and he's subject to the same threat of the sword as his cousins. I get the argument against corporal punishment. But there's something elemental in me, that recoils at modern parenting. I was on the train the other day and watched a kid repeatedly say to his father, "Daddy, you're a jerk." Wow. I confess that my immediate thought was, "that kid need his ass whipped."

- is fucked. Not the fact of hitting kids, which is complicated, but the affectionate internalization of this circular logic of violence. Or, no: not violence but bad, stupid pedagogy. Hitting kids is the bluntest teaching method imaginable, and for that reason it's useful in some situations ('Don't touch that very dangerous thing!') and absolutely wrong in some situations ('Don't try to make me feel small in order to get what you want; it will not work'). Spanking and hand-slapping are largely symbolic violent acts - I remember most spanking as a warning rather than a punishment - and I understand why they're useful. Shorthand! (Literally.) But motherfuckers do not put the switch to a child because they're interested in communication - and so they hurt the child's chances of growing into an adult who is interested in (and skilled at) communication. Sometimes it turns out OK (cf. Ta-Nehisi Coates?).

Mostly it doesn't.

What Coates calls 'elemental' is 'habitual.' That's something worth pursuing later, maybe?

Bill Keller's embarrassing 'I was a spy' story.

Keller's essay on the NYTimes collaboration with WikiLeaks - which, with Assange's recent troubles, falls to the level of 'celebrity profile' for those keeping track - contains stuff like this:

An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always “the source.” The latest data drop was “the package.” When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project. I never imagined that any of this would defeat a curious snoop from the National Security Agency or Pakistani intelligence. And I was never entirely sure whether that prospect made me more nervous than the cyberwiles of WikiLeaks itself. At a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts. [my emphasis --wa.]

Yes, you read that right. Bill Keller can't decide whether he's more nervous about (1) ongoing, borderless government surveillance by nuclear powers and torture states or (2) a European antiwar dissident snooping in his email. If you've ever wondered how the NYTimes (like almost every other American news organ) ended up cheerleading for Bush's wars, well, there's a hint right there.

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.

Cottage cheese again, Mr Assange?

I just realized where I'd recently seen the pathetic news-media-wide denigration and dismissal of Julian Assange: in the sudden backlash against David Simon during Season Five of The Wire, which 'notoriously' attacked the Baltimore Sun and similar newspapers for catastrophically failing refusing to cover the persecution of B'more's minority communities in the guise of the federal drug war.

Simon sensibly said, at the time, that we'd surely have heard the same carping from cops and teachers had they had access to 'ink by the barrelful,' but that he took the criticism in stride; after all, old-media journalism is the world he knows best. The Wire was the critics' darling until it savaged the critics, at which point it 'strained credulity' and 'descended into comedy' and the like.

Just thought of this while reading the nauseatingly condescending Vanity Fair piece on Assange and the Guardian:

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks disdain the notion that anything should come between the public and the vast universe of ostensible information you can evaluate for yourself, if only someone will let you. The ideal role of a journalistic outlet, in Assange’s view, is to be a passive conduit for reality, or at least for slivers of reality, with as little intervention as possible—no editing, no contextualizing, no explanations, no thinking, no weighing of one person’s claims against another’s, no regard for consequences. [...] The conflict is as old as civilization itself—between those who cherish what institutions provide and those who distrust everything that institutions stand for.

Only an idiot could read Assange's essays and think he 'distrust[s] everything that institutions stand for'; I bet you a hundred bucks Sarah Ellison hasn't read his essays. Hooray for old media.

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.)

Bernie Sanders shows the chuckleheads in the Senate how a man behaves.

The Senate's leftiest old man has been speaking, uninterrupted, for six hours.

Ladies and gentlemen, gutless colleagues to the Right and Left: this is how grownups filibuster.

I salute you, Senator Sanders!!

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.]

Johann Hari on Assange.

Hari's not infallible, but he's brilliant and serious - and this is a very, very good article about the importance and social value of WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange: moments of brilliance amid the autistically dry posturing.

This is an astonishing bit of off-the-cuff philosophizing, from Assange's recent (email?) interview in the Guardian:

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.

I'm still mixed about the overall effectiveness of the 'Cablegate' leaks, and Assange himself is an unsettling individual, but there's no doubt that WikiLeaks is generally a force for good in this world.

Sidebar re: 'astrobiology.'

Presumably the hype around the NASA press conference had to do with federal funding rather than any actual import for 'alien life.' Not that life could possibly get more alien than being a PR person at NASA, mind you.

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.

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.

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.