Common-Sense Capitalism, Not Emergency Socialism

While we're on the subject of collections of syllables that will get someone elected president...

Jacob Weisburg complained in Slate (and Newsweek) a week or so ago about the lack of a catchy slogan from the Obama campaign, and although I don't think it's a deal-killer at this point, I don't disagree that it would help. In this citizen's opinion, recent events have handed him a winner.

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The ability to organize economic issues around a simple, lucid theme was a talent of our two most successful recent presidents. Ronald Reagan offered an overarching narrative about how government had come to play too large a role in the economy. His most famous slogans -— "Get the government off our backs," "Morning again in America," "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" -— all got at his notion of unshackling enterprise from its bureaucratic fetters to restore growth.

[Aside: Yes, it got him elected, but how's that working out for ya the last couple of weeks? Are you better off than you were four weeks ago, Grover Norquist? Can we wait to see how these bailouts play out before we carve Ronnie's visage on Mount Rushmore?]

Bill Clinton had a different tale about how ordinary Americans -— people who work hard and play by the rules -— were falling behind. His catchphrases -— "Putting people first," "It's the economy, stupid," "Building a bridge to the 21st century" -— similarly supported the policy changes he thought would help the struggling middle class.

There's a brief window of opportunity here to point out that if government is always and inevitably going be the rescue squad for capitalism, then it owes it to all of us to regulate markets in the name of fairness and stability before the fact. How about this:

"All the American people wanted was common-sense capitalism, and what we got was emergency socialism."

The shorter, rolls-off-your-tongue version is the title of this post. It turns the old Cold War, Us vs. The Commie Pinko Bogeyman sloganeering on its ear, and for once, and while it's still fresh in everyone's mind, suggests we were right all along about drowning babies in bathtubs.

Other suggestions?

A Bridge Too Far Towards Nowhere

(CNN) -- Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that Sen. John McCain had gone "one step too far" in some of his recent ads attacking Sen. Barack Obama.

"In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove -- the man who held the previous record -- said McCain's ads have gone too far," said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, in a statement sent to reporters minutes after Rove's on-air comments.

If there's anything we've learned about conservatives, their eventual downfall is that they never know -- before the fact -- when to draw the line; whether it's if the country has gone far enough to the right, how much less regulation of financial institutions is too little, how many lies to tell about a political opponent, or how unqualified for office a running mate can be, there's not the perspective to know when they are about to overreach, so the good news is that, inevitably, they do.

It's just that waiting for the inevitable can be excruciatingly painful.

Earth To McCain: Get A F#%*g Map Already

While Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama put John McCain -- the presumptive foreign-policy expert of the two -- further back on his heels by essentially reaching an agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki on a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (see aimai's post, below), McCain was burnishing his foreign-policy resumé:

Asked on ABC about the uptick in violence by Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, he replied: "We have a lot of work to do and I'm afraid it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border."

Iraq borders several nations, but Pakistan is not among them...

Where Ignorance Is Bliss, 'Tis Folly To Be Wise

"d" at LGM has a post up about a new book on the science, if there is such a thing, of ignorance.

A reviewer makes this point about ignorance:

Ignorance is not simply a veil between the knower and the unknown. It is an active – indeed vigorous – force in the world. Ignorance is strength; ignorance is bliss. There is big money in knowing how to change the subject – by claiming the need for “more research” into whether tobacco contains carcinogens, for example, or whether the powerful jaws of dinosaurs once helped Adam and Eve to crack open coconuts.

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Having a memory so spotty that is a small miracle one can recall one’s own name is a wonderfully convenient thing, at least for Bush administration officials facing Congressional hearings. The Internet complicates the relationship between information and ignorance ceaselessly, and in ever newer ways. Poverty fosters ignorance. But affluence, it seems, does it no real harm.

This is, then, a field with much potential for growth. Most of the dozen papers in Agnotology are inquries into how particular bodies of ignorance have emerged and reproduced themselves over time. Nobody quotes the remark by Upton Sinclair that Al Gore made famous: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.” Still, that line certainly applies to how blindspots have taken shape in the discourse over climate change, public health, and the history of racial oppression. (In a speech, Ronald Reagan once attributed the greatness of the United States to the fact that “it has never known slavery.”)

The internet, with its speed of thought connections between previously unconnected things--such as voters and information--makes the sharp divide between voters and thought, history, and logic all the more striking. It has the potential to bring together people who believe one thing (erroneously) with people who believe another thing (correctly) but the conjunction of the two can be either fruitful or disasterous, explosive or rather more like a damp squib, as this link to a video onPandagon shows:

Amanda links us to a video interrogation and an attempted education of a small town, right wing woman who is spreading the rumor that Obama is, in fact, a baby killing "Arab." The woman, who at some point got herself on a national TV or radio show to spout her newfound "knowledge" of Obama's real background and thus his real intentions, is convinced that Barack Obama is an "arab" with "arab tendencies" who favors "killing live babies" because she learned about it from a "lobbyist" in "DC" who she misidentifies as the Christian Women for America. Not surprisingly she turns out to mean the front group "Concerned Women for America" founded by Tim LaHaye's wife, Beverley.

The video confrontation is very poorly done since the videographer has no idea how to talk to someone he disagrees with, and is not prepared to confront her with the kind of evidence she would find credible--testimony, pictures, counter-information from sources she would consider believable. For example he does not sit down with the woman and interview her in comfort or seclusion but remains standing the entire time looking down on her (he appears to be taller). He does not show up with anything like "evidence" that she can look at--pictures of Obama and Michelle at their children's baptism. Pictures of Obama in church. Pictures of Obama at their own wedding. He does not confront her with weak points in her own theology which presumes that blood history (Obama's father) is more important than conversion history in Christian belief. Simply raising the question of whether a person is "born" or "chooses" to become Christian would have been an important way in to destablizing her world view. White american ethnic tradition places a high value on blood and ethnic origin, even for religions of choice. This is what an anthropologist would call an ethno-theory or a cultural trope. But at a higher level of abstraction Christianity is and always has been a converting religion that places most of its emphasis on the notion that every individual, regardless of his race or religious background, can and should come to Jesus and that that coming to Jesus wipes out the past. So this woman's insistence that Obama is "really" an Arab at some fundamental level, below the level of his actual history as a practicing Christian, exists in a very fragile conceptual space for her. On the one hand she believes it because race and ethnicity hold a very important place in her own daily worldview--they are obviously ineradicable and they leave their traces on us as people. But in her concious religious tradition? They have no long term place. Obama's stated intention to be a Christian, and to live as a Christian, and to raise his children as a Christian can't be countered with "he was born an Arab" or "his father was an Arab" because there are no such things in Christ Jesus per Paul and all the great converting figures.

In fact Obama would have a great success with these people--if idiots like this videographer don't interfere--going on a barnstorming "before I accepted Jesus" tour in which he, like Bush before him, pointed towards his own state of "original sin" (Bush's drunken indifference to god, Obama's years in the wilderness of Islam) *even or especially if he has to make it up.* He can say Michelle converted him, all dressed in white. This is such a natural part of the fundamentalist christian worldview that they almost can't grasp any other orientation to religion other than sinner to saved. An anthropologist that I knew twenty years ago, when this stuff was just barely on the horizon for all of us, told me in a fury that his brother had become a born again Christian and was insisting that Jesus had saved him from a life of prostitutes and drug dealing. The fury part? He said that his brother didn't actually have all the sins he thought he'd been cleansed of--he'd never been a drug dealer and he'd never lived the life of loose sexuality that he had ended up confessing to. It was all a kind of popular delusion, as public confessions and repentances tend to be.

I'm getting rather far afield from my original intention, which was to discuss ignorance and knowledge in the context of politics and the internet, but we've actually known quite a bit of this stuff for a very long time. John Emerson put up this great quote from Theodore Lowi's 1976 essay in Poliscide

From Poliscide, Theodore Lowi et. al., Macmillan, 1976, p. 282.:

Ignorance turned out to be a major result of specialization. Decision makers give up their knowledge of the whole as they seek full and complete knowledge of their particular piece of the whole. But ignorance is not only a correlative of specialization. It is almost a condition for peaceful coexistence among specialists.

Ignorance tends to be meaningfully distributed throughout the hierarchies. There was more ignorance at the center than at the periphery.....This brings our particular concern into focus. Ignorance at the scale that we observed could not have occurred by chance alone. Ignorance at this scale involving scientists -- that is, men dedicated to knowledge above all else -- had to be deliberate.
John Emerson

Reminding us that ignorance is a function of specialization, and specialization is a feature of modern societies and of modern media formats which consistently cut the world up into bits that can be commented on, or understood, only by "experts" whose knowledge is guaranteed by their appearance with degrees or histories attached to their names (a fellow of the AEI, a woman from Concerned Women of America) and by their appearance on your TV as an expert.

Individuals don't "know" much, outside of their own sensory perceptions, that they haven't heard or acquired at second hand from other sources of more or less dubious authority in their own social circle--or, with the growth of newspapers, books, radio, tv, and the internet their own imaginary social circle. When you go out to talk to someone who "knows" something that you think you know "just isn't true" you have to come armed with the same kind of information they are using to get to their erroneous conclusion, and you have to have a lot of patience. Just confronting someone and telling them they are wrong--or worse, that their trusted source is wrong is simply not convincing.

aimai

A Train Wreck For Your Viewing Pleasure

Yes, I'm talking about the Massachusetts Republican Party, a continual source of amusement for many of us here in The Commonwealth. The latest embarrassment is that the nationally-anointed challenger to John Kerry, Jim Ogonowski, failed to obtain enough legal signatures -- and only 10,000 are required -- to appear on his own party's primary ballot. By thirty (30) signatures.

Although there's another Republican who will be on the ballot (after submitting 17,000 signatures), his name has not even been mentioned by national (especially Senate) Republicans who had high hopes for Ogonowski after he mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to Niki Tsongas for the U.S. House seat vacated by Marty Meehan last year.


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Republican voters have recently been in short supply here in the Bay State. This is widely misinterpreted and spun by propagandists as an indication that MA is extremely liberal. The truth is that citizens from a wide variety of positions identify as Democrats here, from socially conservative (anti-choice, anti-gay-marriage) to liberal/progressive. It's possible for the entire left-right dialog to take place within the party.

The traditional New England Republican, on the other hand, was fiscally conservative and socially liberal (more accurately, "small-l" libertarian), and wouldn't fit into any 21st-century pigeonhole. Unable to gain any traction around the wedge issues that define the national GOP, the current state Republican party has been reduced to little more than an empty label, the party leadership unable make a cogent case for its nonexistent platform.

When Mitt Romney ran for governor, he vowed to grow the number of Republican state senators and representatives; that election (which he won with big support from independents and Reagan Democrats) resulted in an embarrassing net loss of GOP State House seats. The bleeding that started before that election was only exacerbated during the gay marriage discussion, as some of the foot-draggers were dismissed at the polls in subsequent elections -- Democrats and Republicans alike.

When it became apparent that the prize for Mitt had been a platform from which to campaign for president -- and spending two to three weeks of the month out of the state in the process -- the one thing Republicans could try to pin their hopes on (literally) went South. His lieutenant governor, Kerry Healy, mounted a poorly-run and extremely negative campaign for governor, against the competent, progressive, and likable Deval Patrick, and lost in a rout.

So the Republican Party in Massachusetts continues to shoot itself in the foot with its incompetence, lack of leadership, and indifference to the responsibilities of public office. Especially with the national GOP on the verge of spectacular meltdown, there's really no end in sight. I couldn't be more delighted.

A Kinder, Gentler America

Exists in our imagination, not in reality. In reality, we treat people who need help as a disgusting drain on the system. No matter what the circumstances or how innocent they may be. And if they aren't from this country, we won't and don't give them the care and consideration that an American would expect to receive in a foreign country under the same circumstances. And we call ourselves civilized. More... There is going to come a time, most likely in the near future, when we will need the type of help that China or Burma currently need and the world will turn its back on us. And we will complain mightily, totally forgetting all of the cruel, insensitive and depraved actions we have taken against those who we have determined are less than human. White American humans that is.

And then there are the Israelis. The usual bullets against stones, with the normal result. I know my position isn't popular, Ireland has been one of the safest places in the world recently and who would have predicted that back in the 70s?

While I empathize with Damien Cave, imagine being an Iraqi veteran and trying to readjust to society in an America that doesn't care. Without the job, the money, or the contacts.

No, they didn't. The trauma and drama is something that will affect ALL those kids for many years to come. While there is something definitely wrong with the way the elders practice their lifestyle, the kids did not deserve to have their lives totally destroyed. 400 kids, forcibly separated from the only love they had ever known. You bet it was wrong. But then, this is the state that also contains Waco. And Crawford.

Do you like oral sex? How about some velvet handcuffs, feathers and a major tickle session before getting down to those three minutes that are supposed to satisfy? Do you like the lights on? Do you prefer to physically be with someone of your own sex? Do you like to do it in the shower? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you might be a deviant. At least according to the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that is currently being worked on. By appointees of the current Bush administration. The definition of normal sex (according to the American Psychiatric Association, that bastion of people who determine what is normal and what isn't) is being worked on once again. I think they discovered that some people don't even do it under the covers. Oh, the horror.

Okay, enough funning around, back to the world we live in now. Only in America can one lose one's home for a $68 dental bill. My potted tomatoes (if the wind doesn't blow them away today) are worth more than that bill. In what world do you take someone's place of residence in lieu of smaller items? There are people who have larger outstanding phone or cable bills and they are still living in their homes, but with satellite and cell phones instead. Can indentured servitude for parking tickets be far behind?

3Bsand Debsweb

For Lack of What is Found There

It is difficult
To get the news from Poems
but men have died miserably everyday
for lack
of what is found there

Took the girls to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem yesterday. Two exhibits utterly transformed me. I spend so much time worrying about politics, duty, the fate of the world, that even though at this point in my life I'm the child of two artists, I have been unable to immerse myself in the here and now of art and experience to the full the true joy of being human. The first exhibit was a hands on exploration of origami and its world. The second was "Body Politic, Maori Tatoos today".

In my more despairingly calvinist moments the thought of people devoting their lives to origami would strike me as another sign of the wasteful excess of modern consumer culture--for g-d's sake don't people who buy those little origami kits know that someone is starving somewhere? But face to face with the astonishing creations, and watching a short film on some of the artists, I became enraptured with our human ability to fashion beauty and to explore space and nature even in the face of the chaos and fear of our everyday lives. The artists ranged from a guy who had two degrees from cal tech and had worked for NASA and abandoned everything to "fold paper" to a wonderful woman who had "dedicated her life to the children" and to "peace" and used origami as a way of bringing Palestinian and Israeli children together. The exhibit contained pieces, such as a kraken swallowing a three masted schooner, folded and then molded by dampening the paper, from a single six foot sheet of paper. The artist's folding design, a highly mathematical blueprint of the creases and folds, lay next to it. Another was a full sized pangolin folded from another single sheet of paper, perfect in every scale. Still another was a single piece of folded silk, carefully folded into a tessalated moorish design. Backlit the warp and woof constitute the pattern.

One of the artists spoke about how, to his eye, everything is folds--from the mountains and hills around us, to the creases of our own skin. A baby, to his mind, unfolds. Everything can be seen as a surface, or set of surfaces.

Which takes me to the next exhibit. Maori body tatoos were banned by the white colonial authorities from (?) 1840-1962 (?) and preserved by only a few old women who, presumably, no one bothered to arrest. After 1962 criminal gangs began to use them but eventually through a process of self rediscovery and indigneous pride the elders of the community and the leaders of the various clans and families recaptured control and have begun the process of turning facial and body tatoos (moko) back into a serious form of self discipline and ethnic pride. It was an intimate and powerful exhibit since the participants were asked not just to allow their photographs to be taken but also to put up a statement about what their moko meant to them. They agreed on condition that the exhibit would serve as a kind of public prayer for the return of the various severed and mummified Maori heads which were taken from New Zealand and collected in museums around the world.

Putting on moko is a highly complex act--one part rebellion, one part self assertion in a hostile world, one part zen like discipline. Many of the subjects talked about assuming moko as (to their mind) an out of control young man in a gang but later learning to use it as a form of bodily and spiritual self discipline. Many spoke of how, by externalizing their Maori heritage onto their skin, they found themselves no longer able to move invisibly or humbly through their interactions with other Maori or non Maori. They said that their moko had given them an inner discipline because it drew attention to them and to their behavior. Sometimes young people took moko, with their elders' approval. And in some cases very old people were taking moko, in order to support the choices made by those younger than them. there is a whole Rasta community of Maori whose statements were simply pieces of the old or new testament.

Both these forms of art created new communities for the people participating in them. Both are art forms of the skin, or surface. Both were, for their participants, almost a form of meditation or communication. To go from one exhibit to the other was to grasp, for a second, how important art is to human existence. Its not something that we can or should forgo in pursuit of "higher" or even more "necessary" political goals. Its something we can't do without, even if we do it on the edge of a precipice.

aimai