A Freeway in Hell

From microcosms to the Cosmos

2008-03-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

Yet another of Amanda's thought-provoking posts that are basically against religion as we know it prompted me to this reply (ignoring most of the replies earlier, as I have had much less practical Net access than I used to).

Then MA Jeff said
"Mysteries are to be solved, not worshipped."

Which stimulated me to this:

MA Jeff,

Here's an example of a mystery that might be solvable in a rigorously Western scientific paradigm, and might instead be a Mystery in the sense of "a useful human understanding that does not go into words:"

Traditional Chinese medicine, for example acupuncture, is a set of procedures that make no sense whatsoever in the context of our current scientific understanding of what the human body is and what sorts of physical entities exist in it. The whole approach is based on a theory of "winds" in the human body and indeed a general cosmic metaphysic that makes no sense whatsoever in our general understanding of anatomy, biology, chemistry, or even basic physics. Even if we suppose that the ancient Chinese stumbled empirically on subtle electrical or chemical gradients that their metaphors of "wind" suggest useful interventions in, it would be very strange if, given this hint, we haven't observed and identified these phenomena in our labs.

So well and good, the mainstream response of our medical establishment has been that all this is just stuff and nonsense, pure superstition. But I have spoken to at least one MD in person who thinks that there is after all some real utility in these traditional practices, and I have the impression that for decades quite a few Western medical practioners agree.

We can off the bat imagine a few hypotheses that might explain why the Chinese built up this approach over millenia and arrived at results that impress us; one I've already alluded to, that they have found objective physical phenomena--if so, we would do well to investigate and understand them in our terms and could presumably employ them much more efficiently by integrating these phenomena, hitherto unknown to us, with the aspects of medicine we have made so much progress in. But as I say, that easy possibility doesn't appear to be borne out by evidence--either any physical phenonmena corresponding to the Chinese "wind flow" concepts are very subtle, or the Western medical establishment (not just that of the USA but all the practitioners of Western-style medicine, everywhere in the world) have been blocked from looking. Or, of course, there are no such physical entities whatsoever.

So, maybe it is some kind of sophisticated placebo effect. Well, that's the usual explanation given for any possible demonstrated effectivness of any alternative approach to medicine whatsoever, whether derived from some authentic tradition or recently made-up New Agey stuff (such as Mesmerism was back in its day, for instance). Power of suggestion, nothing to see here, move along.

But if mere psychological game-playing can have objective health benefits, isn't that a potentially valuable set of phenomena to investigate? If we can will our way to better health if only we believe in a lot of mummery, how much better could we do if we could understand the presumptive interaction of interior mental states with physiology that, in our paradigm, would account for it, and develop our own integrated mind/body approach to health based on general understanding of medical science including this power of self-suggestion?

I suspect that there are many barriers to the possibilityof realizing such a goal, which go deep into the limits of what we call rational thought, because we haven't, as we flatter ourselves, hammered out our modern paradigm by having recourse to a simply superior, more correct, approach to thinking. We've improved on our methods under constraint, under the condition that we develop ways of thinking and procedures that are justified under a dominator paradigm. We have to guarantee in advance that the social hierarchy will not be fundamentally challenged, and that mandates that we maintain an attitude of contempt for outsiders, and thus limits the possible range of general advance. For every step forward on this path we have to give something up.

It's part of my general agnosticism that I don't know whether in fact there is some deep, inherent conservation of ignorance going on, or whether, as I hope, we can sidestep many of these constraints by getting away from the dominator paradigm that demands we see things in terms of superior and inferior people.

Personally, I have never witnessed anything that challenges my basic belief in the Western scientific understanding of reality; all the challenges to it I know of from outside are matters of rumor as far as I am concerned. But as a science student back in the 1980s and since then, I was keenly aware of the internal challenges to a simplistic positivism--decisive blows struck against the smug 19th century paradigm of science as straightforward progress of superior knowledge, including particularly the very disturbing findings that led to quantum mechanics, and the deepest blow of all, Kurt Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, which struck right at the root of the very idea that a thorough, unshakable correspondece of theory with fact could be built up on a logical basis.

This is one major reason that any denunciation of people and their beliefs based on the idea that they are just stupid and ignorant of simple facts that we, the more enlightened, know better than they do, always rankles me. Human beings produce stupidity in abundance, but I always suspect that underlying any obstinate adherence to something that seems clearly wrongheaded to me is a social reason, a choice of allegience to a different system than mine. And I ought to know even if they don't acknowledge, that my allegiences, and I presume theirs, are in the end arbitrary and neither I nor they can prove, in some objective way, one is superior to the other.

The actual process of "proof" is nothing of the sort; it is the total outcome of the interaction of all people and things. The thing to do is be fair-minded and reasonable by one's own lights and struggle, in an ethical way, for outcomes in concrete cases, and let each person resolve their philosophical and metaphysical issues as they see fit outside those contexts.

For me, it has been important to make a leap of faith and suppose that in fact, there is an objective reality going on, that different beliefs are in fact more or less correct about specific matters, and that there is in principle a superior way of understanding everything relevant going on in particular cases--a way superior to anyone's understanding in any case. But also that no one is guaranteed in advance to bring that superior understanding to the case, in fact what we do positively know is that we are all immeasurably ignorant and in the end wrong about everything.

None of this is provable.

Suppose it turns out that there is always going to be a tradeoff, in the matter of things like Chinese traditional medicine versus approaches that make sense to Western medicine--that we never catch in our theoretical net what makes their approach work, and yet acknowledge that it does work, for reasons we can't explain? That would be an example of a Mystery, something that has an answer in the sense that if you drop one set of beliefs and adopt another way of thinking, you get some benefit, but there is no reconciling the two in words or mathematics.

My sense of how things work suggests that we will always be able to make progress by "solving mysteries," as you say, by refining our understanding of things to account for ever-widening sets of phenomena. But at the same time, there will always be things beyond the understanding of any particular system, or meta-system formed by reconciling older systems, and some of these things will always be matters of immediate consequence at least to some people at any given time.

And so I think it is foolish to simply adopt a superior attitude to people whose beliefs just don't make sense.

And it is a trap to assume we fully understand their errors, just because we have a pretty good explanation for them in our terms.

Earlier you said for instance that it was clearly nonsense to say that "God is the Universe seeking to understand itself," because you, MA Jeff, already know that the Universe is just a conglomeration of mindless stuff that clearly therefore is not capable of understanding itself, nor even seeking to.

But even on the basis of assuming as fact the presumption that right now, the Universe is indeed just a mindless set of random stuff, well, here we are, pieces of the whole universe, with ambitions to understand not only ourselves but everything around us we can discover. I have already said that as a matter of personal faith, I don't think we will ever achieve that goal, but I also think we will never give up on the pursuit as long as we exist. Why would it be unreasonable to suppose that even if we go extinct in the near future, as seems all too likely right now, that elsewhere in this universe, in the future or possibly already in the past, other people might not exist who have similar ambitions and avoid destroying themselves, thus launching and carrying on an indefinite project to bring more and more self-knowledge to this originally mindless and meaningless stuff? Indeed, why dismiss the possibility that in fact there is meaning and even self-knowledge that we have hitherto overlooked? As a matter of personal faith I disbelieve we will ever own that knowledge in totality, and perhaps the ultimate existence of it that I also believe in is just a vanishing point, a non-existent projection of efforts by various intelligent beings in this cosmos to understand as much as they can in the time they make for themselves.

Perhaps in fact all such attempted systems of knowledge will prove incompatible, mutally meaningless, perhaps even mutually indetectable. That is in fact what seems to be a reasonable prediction based on your hard-headed assertion that the Universe is currently meaningless and it is nonsense to talk about it knowing itself--if so, then our own attempts to find or "make" meaning are ultimately futile and useless.

I've admitted before on these threads--if my recoiling from that prospect, which I find very bleak and daunting, and embrace instead of the notion that there does exist some ultimate meaning that we can never own in full but is there anyway, that provides some ultimate common ground between all of us--if this makes me a coward and intellectually weak, so be it.

But that is how I do hear the tone of many of you, who seem so sensible and humane otherwise--that here is where the hard steel of the brutality of the dominator paradigm shows in your own spirits; that you too are clinging to a mode of thinking and reacting that demands conflict and the subjugation of others to your own superiority.

Whereas I believe that in the end, our very lives and all our hopes for the joy we all perceive is in some sense within our grasp, is in fact the great Mystery. We will never own it by any kind of formula--we must, for our own sakes, loosen our grip and make risky leaps based on no certainty whatsoever. Because everything that seems certain assures us that in the end we are all doomed.

I believe that the reason we live at all is thus the greatest Mystery.

Teh Veblen quote! "Self-contained globule of desire"

2007-10-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for this quote for years now.

The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent. He is an isolated definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-imposed in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down upon him, whereupon he follows the line of the resultant. When the force of the impact is spent, he comes to rest, a self-contained globule of desire as before. Spiritually, the hedonistic man is not a prime mover. He is not the seat of a process of living, except in the sense that he is subject to a series of permutations enforced upon him by circumstances external and alien to him.

Thorstein Veblen
"Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science"
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Volume 12, 1898.

"Do You Want to Play a Game..."

2007-08-08T18:53:00.000-07:00

Written on rest room wall, Left Blogtopia (YSCTW!)
"For a good time, call BlogWarBot."

For explanations and history, go here.

Transcript, DOJ archives (TOP SECRET):

BlogWarBot: My name is BlogWarBot. Who sent you here?
Guest: John Dziadecki's Airship site.
BlogWarBot: Let me guess. You're a Libertarian, right?
Guest: No, I'm a Menshevik. Registered Democratic, of course.
BlogWarBot: Do you expect a cookie just because you're a Menshevik. Registered Democratic, of course?
Guest: No, I expect to be beaten with a knout, sent to Siberia, then exiled to Manhattan.
BlogWarBot: That's the problem with people like you. You're never constructive about anything.
Guest: I'll probably be pressed into canal construction or the like during my stint in Siberia, then get into factionalistic journalism, perhaps become Minister of Fabrics briefly before being executed by the Bolsheviks.
BlogWarBot: So if I might get us back on track here, what in your opinion is the crucial issue facing us today?
Guest: The lack of populist power in our political system.
BlogWarBot: So what does all of this have to do with the current mass extinction?
Guest: Well, I'd say the casual links are pretty clear running both ways, wouldn't you?
BlogWarBot: You're projecting. And in denial. And ugly.
Guest: But I'm told by at least one woman that I do have a nice penis, so let's keep things in perspective, shall we?
BlogWarBot: Do you recognize the privilege involved in your calling yourself told by at least one woman that you do have a nice penis, so let's keep things in perspective, shall we?
Guest: Yeah, it's the privilege called freedom of speech, plus the privilege of having a nice penis and at least one girlfriend willing to say so. I do feel very fortunate.
BlogWarBot: And I suppose your pet issue is so much more important than ending the war.
Guest: Well no, but I can do a lot more about my "pet issue" than ending the war. I do speak out against the warpretty regularly.
BlogWarBot: That's the problem with people like you. You're never constructive about anything.
Guest: May I ask you what your idea of "constructive" is?
BlogWarBot: What, Malkin didn't cover this on Hot Air?
Guest: Ah, I'm beginning to get a picture then.
BlogWarBot: Why should feminists drop everything just because you're beginning to get a picture then?
Guest: Sometimes that is the very best moment to end a particular encounter. Ah, parting is such sweet sorrow. Bye!
BlogWarBot: About your family. Did your parents have any children that lived?

My BSG ramblings

2007-07-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

This is all in reference to Amanda's second Battlestar Galactica post at Pandagon.

I'm handicapped dealing with BSG as known to those who have seen all the eps, since I'm trying to catch up renting DVDs at Video Droid, and someone is ahead of me renting them and holding them a whole week. Right now I've finished through disk 1 of "Season 2.5"--second half of season 2--which means I just saw the Cain eps and the one where Roslin is dying and orders Sharon's baby destroyed (it's a "baby" because Sharon intends for it to be born--see how that works, anti-choicers?) And not to give out spoilers to those even more impeded than me, we know how that worked out...

So to deal with the theme on a very broad, non-BSG level,
"It ain't ignorance so much as what people know that just ain't so."--Will RodgersAnd I'll go the crackerbarrel sage of liberalism one step further--what is really toxic about fundamentalist intolerance is that people generally know, on some level, that what they believe that is false is in fact false. Ideology, as opposed to a framework of belief based on frank assessement of known experience, is about denying aspects of life for the sake of a system that would lose its compelling power if it tried to account for these facts that don't fit.

In real life, I think fundamentalisms never rise without an underlying social tension that people are afraid (often for very good pragmatic reasons, from an individual point of view) to articulate. I suspect these always boil down to, SOBs in power get to set limits on what can be said and who can be challenged for what bad behavior on what grounds, and people can either martyr themselves challenging these limits directly, knowing they will probably pay a huge price and accomplish little to their immediate purpose, or they can try to worm their way around via doublethink. Down the latter path lies most of human culture, in all its perverse glory.I think in a way this reflects our fundamental situation as more or less thinking beings in a universe we will never fully grasp. (Therein lies the key, IMHO, to how the Cylons, evolving from rationally designed machines for pragmatic purposes, have so quickly managed to put themselves on a loony fundamentalist path. Cylons are people too!)

I can't resist putting out some impressions I have of BSG despite knowing that many of them will be corrected or flatly contradicted by later eps others have the good fortune to have seen.I totally buy the show on its own terms, as being about real people in a recognizably real world. I can come up with dozens of nitpicks, as I can with any SF show good bad or indifferent. But these don't bother me at all while watching.

It does seem bizarre, when I am not immersed in it, that there can be a society so deeply similar to our conventional narrative of how our society is, that has such different historical background.I started watching just last month because so many folks here raved that it was the show for feminists to be watching. It is very gratifying to see a society portrayed in which bigotry about gender and race is so absent. That said, I don't see how it could be so similar to ours in so many ways if that were true, because I think if we look below the surface ideology of our society (and so many of us have been forced to look there whether we wanted to or not) the pieties of civics we were taught to believe in don't hold at all. The 12 Colonies appear to be in sober, matter-of-fact reality what the uncritical are supposed to believe our nation and world are supposed to be. It seems doubtful that such a society would come into real existence by any concrete historical process nor would it be stable if somehow it did converge that way for some brief moment.In fact the show's auteurs have shown a starker side of things, represented in various ways--by the popularity of Zarek's revolutionary views, by the reality of a prison ship in the first place, by the revelations of how severely Kara/Starbuck was abused as a child, and of course by the basic premise that humanity had released such a Frankenstein's Monster as the Cylons into their world in the first place. The basic existence of the Colonial military in the first place is to me a sign that the 12 Colonies could not have been such a peppy, happy place as it looked. And who exactly, besides a couple of warships and a prison ship, would have been in transit in the various civil ships gathered up as flotsam by Adama (and ruthlessly salvaged by Cain?) A lot of working stiffs to be sure--miners, freighter crews, flight attendents, pilots, ship mechanics. And there are always some poor folks traveling on even the most prestigious and expensive conveyances (not in first class of course) for purposes like relocating, big family events and emergencies, and even the occasional vacation. But I'd expect that the survivors in the Fleet are disproportionately of the better-off classes, as a sample of people on typical airline flights would indicate among us today.

Re the Colonial traditional paganism--I actually think that modern American/cosmopolitan capitalist society would not be what it is without the rise of monotheistic, absolutist religions (Christianity and Islam). I like the Colonial paganism to be sure. It has the virtues of pragmatism. Instead of claiming some absolute oneness with the Ultimate, people are acknowledging that reality is bigger than they are, has some more or less knowable features they can more or less rely on, and letting go claims to know all the answers at the back of the book. (This is something I like about neopaganism among us too.) It also gives wiggle room to rationalize all the ways that if Colonial society is not quite patriarchial (there really does seem to be a fundamental and unquestioned balance of gender there) nor otherwise polarized on bigoted lines, it nevertheless has those kinds of tensions.

The difference between a pagan/neopaganistic morality and world view, and that of the monotheistic absolutism we actually inherit here on Earth, is that the former involves an uncentered, distributed view of the nature of things that can, in principle, honor every particular thing that exists and also accept that struggle between them might be inevitable. Morality is about how you go about asserting yourself, whether you act rightly in dealing with what actually comes to you. Monotheism tends to emphasize a notion of absolute right and wrong, centered not in particular people and things but in God and some kind of Satan or demiurge or the like--the Universe as a puppet war between beings beyond us to which we ultimately must belong.Actual polytheism here on Earth of course has hardly been free of patriarchy and dominator ideology in general, of course. I think that the actual spiritual consensus of human beings before the rise of agriculture and the eventual emergence of dominator militaristic competitiveness, with its pretty much inevitable creation of patriarchy, was even more diffuse and undogmatic than the classical pagan systems we can study from the Greco-Roman, Nordic, or Hindu traditions. But then, we typically frame these latter from the point of view of later, more absolutist religions and philosophies, which have tried to square the fundamental logic of dominator absolutism, in which the ultimate value is submission to one ideal Will, with the subversive reality of diverse human experience.

So for me, it seems odd, if fortunate, that that whole process seems to have been arrested at the level of some kind of benign, enlightened, considerate pagan agnosticism in Colonial spiritual history, and odder squared that that kind of modus viviendi could be maintained in the face of a social reality involving ongoing militarism and injustice, without curdling and polarizing along the lines of warring factions we are so familiar with here on Earth.

I think by the way that in BSG, the Lords of Kobol were in fact real beings of some kind, who may or may not still exist or interfere behind the scenes in the modern setting. I always am resistant to the idea, so common in SF, that perhaps humanity did not evolve on Earth, for a lot of reasons I shouldn't elaborate here (though when the storytellers, like Ursula LeGuin in her Hainish stories, do their jobs well I don't fight it in the stories.) So until definitively established otherwise, I assume that these Colonial humans did in fact evolve originally here on Earth, and that the Lords of Kobol were some kind of powerful beings (Star-Trek like evolved "energy beings," or some kind of angels, or gods, or what have you) who decided for some reason, thousands of years ago, to remove a sample of us to Kobol, which they terraformed very nicely for them. And so the lost "colony" of Earth was actually an expedition trying to find their real homeworld millenia later, which is why the Colonial settlement is so far away and on the other side of Kobol.

Anyway, if the LoK were real beings, that might explain why Colonial paganism is so persistent. That they are clearly not the Creators of the Universe also is consistent and sensible.

I don't know what later eps reveal already about the original human/cylon conflict. I suspect it was as simple as this--human beings constructed actual artifical intelligences, capable of as much free thought and self-reflection as we are, which is to say they had "souls" and human (personal) rights as far as I'm concerned, but (as established from the beginning) the humans did not recognize or respect their rights, and so the Cylons were forced to rebel. Why the struggle could not be resolved in a more companionable manner is not clear to me, but it wasn't. I can imagine that with the surviving Cylons having objective reason to fear ultimate destruction from humanity, a strand of defensive fanaticism was favored (as it has been in every major successful political/social revolution in our history) and the Cylons being rationally designed machines, they were chillingly amenible to "reeducation" in the direct form of total reprogramming. I welcome the spoiler hints that suggest that there is dissension behind the facade that the conquering Cylons present along their battlefront--this seems entirely likely to me. But at any rate I think we can easily account for the monotheistic, fundamentallist fanaticism of the particular bunch of Cylons who attacked the Colonies, and why if there are others they are well hidden from humanity.

On "Conservative" Misperceptions of Their Own Nature

2007-06-24T06:11:00.000-07:00

At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte once again questions the wisdom of compromising reproductive rights in the misguided effort to "legitimize" progressives. Frequent reactionary commentator Dana expressed his puzzlement at why we regard choice as a basic right anyway, on "philosophical" grounds. My response was so massive I decided to put it here, as a courtesy to Pandagon.

Dana Jun 23rd, 2007 at 8:55 pm On more of a philosophical note, I have always found it a bit strange that liberals, in general, are pro-abortion, while conservatives are, in general, pro-life.

Well, then, has it occurred to you that perhaps this might be because you've badly understood the broad, fundamental bases of the "liberal" and "conservative" positions? If you have a theory that's a bad fit to reality, perhaps you should revise it or reject it in favor of one that works better. (Like, maybe, one that has an excellent track record of accurately predicting the nature of the real-world evolution of capitalism for instance.)

When I look at the positions of liberals, it seems to me that they can be broadly summarized as believing that society and government have more of a role in people’s lives, to promote the things they see as being of social value, which leads to the left being in favor of more government intervention to equalize wages, provide universal health care coverage, Affirmative Action and more government regulation of business.

That's the moderate version of the Republican/reactionary view of what "liberalism" is all about. "Moderate" in the sense that here you refrain from condemning out of hand "the things they see as being of social value" in themselves, as being obviously evil in themselves, which is what the rightist mantra generally assumes or asserts.

Just on those terms, without spelling out that these "things they see as being of social value" are supposed to be some kind of totalitarian dystopia--Communism, Islamofascism, the end of masculinity, whatever the boogeyman of the day is--these items you mention really don't seem that bad. I mean, would you really say that equalized wages, universal health care, an end to racial discrimination, or even "government regulation of business" are bad things in and of themselves? If so, why? If not, why wouldn't being for these things be to our credit?

Nope, the anti-liberal rant has to go on to explain why these apparently benign things are actually bad, either in themselves (which is a tough sell, unless one is dealing with for instance racists or other kinds of bigots who explicitly think that some people should be worse off than others) or because they are stealthy steps on a path to a hidden hell on Earth that we either seek to lure others on out of wicked disingenuity, or blindly and foolishly follow because we lack the wisdom and insight you have to forsee where this is headed.

But now to open your eyes a bit to a reality-based world--how aware are you of the actual historical processes whereby these "liberal," or more properly progressive, goals were approached? Was it a matter of a cabal of society-minded liberals attaining power out of a blue sky, or did these concrete manifestations of a supposed collectivist agenda not actually emerge out of concrete historical crises, in which there came to be a broad consensus as much on practical as ideological grounds for adopting them?
Did not a sentiment for regulating businesses, for instance, emerge out of very specific incidents in which unregulated business discredited themselves by their obviously dysfunctional behavior? Didn't a broad array of businessmen themselves endorse their own regulation, as a means both of redeeming themselves socially as a class and also to enable them to function more effectively as businessmen?
Was not the drive for higher wages for working people in general a movement that had and still has wide popular resonance?
Have you examined the history of affirmative action enough to realize that it was actually a very conservative and limited response to the obvious injustices and general social risks posed by systematic racism in America, and that as a conservative, non-radical response to this challenge, its results have been limited, mixed, and pose minimal challenge to the basic social order?

Already there is clearly something very unsatisfactory about your theory of what "liberals" are all about. Onward.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are more generally in favor of the right of individuals to be free of government regulation, and for people to be more responsible for their own fortunes — for good or ill — in life. We generally oppose government intervention to equalize wages, provide universal health care coverage, Affirmative Action and more government regulation of business, being of a more libertarian bent.

Now here is where your notions obviously take complete leave of real history and for that matter everyday reality in modern America. Throughout our history, and generally all over the world and through all time, "conservatives" have never distinguished themselves by demonstrating any kind of consistent, general passion for any particular universal human rights, certainly not the specific theory of government and society--less and weaker government--that you claim for yourselves here. I think you have enough broad knowledge to realize that you are at best flattering yourselves by claiming that.

What best characterizes "conservatives," who certainly in the modern context of an ever-changing global and national society can't claim much credit for "conserving" many things, is a paramount concern for themselves--for whatever degree of power and privilege they and a limited set of allies have--and for social hierarchy in general. Far from being meaningfully libertarian, conservatives throughout history, certainly throughout American history, align themselves with the most powerful, and repress the less powerful without compunction. They are always on the lookout for some out group, be they foreign devils or pariahs within their own society, that they can scapegoat for all the routine evils of the society they uphold, and seek to maintain the social tensions that enable their own social hierarchy to functions at a state just short of general breakdown, so that there are large reserves of resentment and repressed violence they can unleash on designated enemies, foreign and domestic.

In fact, far from being rugged champions of individual freedom and responsibility, conservatives, in everyday and historical experience, are typically sycophantic suck-ups when they are not vainglorious, overprivileged, unrestrained misleaders of society into general disaster.

If you try to understand the behavior of Republicans, for instance, in or out of power, in terms of a passionate committment to human freedom, you will be puzzled all across the board, not just on the issue of abortion--or reproductive rights and sexuality in general, where, consistent with their stand on abortion if not your theory of conservatives as libertarians, they are generally reactionary too. But take any issue. Take fiscal conservatism. Take immigration policy. Take foreign policy. Take torture, the abolition of habeus corpus, surveillance--it is ridiculous to maintain that Republicans have stood for human liberty. But quite obvious that they have stood, consistently, sometimes even forthrightly, for social inequality and enhancing the wealth, power, and privilege of the already wealthy, powerful, and privileged, at any cost whatsoever to anyone they think they can get away with plowing under.

The idea of greater income redistribution is repugnant to us.

I'm right with you there. You are being forthright and clear on this matter. The name of the "conservative" game is to uphold wealth and power, period. The social hierarchy is the one thing, the only thing, that conservatives seek to conserve--and extend.

If the above was all you knew, you’d guess that it would be the liberals who are pro-life, seeing the right to life of the child as something society should protect, even though it involves sacrifice on the part of the pregnant woman; I’d have thought that it would be conservatives who would be more supportive of abortion, not liking government intervention in people’s lives.

Yet that’s completely backwards: liberals, who have views which are more societally-oriented, are absolute libertarians when it comes to abortion, while conservatives, who are far more individualistic in their outlooks on most things, are far more likely to be pro-life.

That would be an interesting subject for ~~our gracious hostess~~ Amanda to address (if she hasn’t in an older article that I’ve missed.)

I believe she and we have done so time and again. Since it's your paradox, not paradoxical in our terms at all, how do you explain it?

BTW, Dana--that whole "gracious hostess" thing is the kind of thing I mean about reactionaries being sycophantic suck-ups. Naturally I interpret this little tic of yours as being sarcastic and patronizing. But even if I believed you were doing it out of some bizarre compulsion of chivalry, it's inherently patronizing anyway. Amanda is indeed far more gracious than she needs to be, as she shows by actions and not just words. In general, progressives judge by actions and not words. I think Jesus had something or other to say on the subject too.

Anyway, our "societal orientation" emerges from real-world experience. We seek and find realistic explanations of the world we live in, and those guide our priorities. In the dominant, conservative-controlled, social rhetoric we have pounded into our heads at church, at home, in schools, and throughout the mainstream media, we are supposed to be fuzzy-headed, half-baked idealists and conservatives are supposed to be hard-boiled, tried and true realists (and at the same time the true guardians of morality and decency). But the dogmas ring false even to little children, who often see right through the Potemkin village facade of conservative ideology.

In fact human beings don't exist without some sort of cooperation or other. The question is, should the necessary machinery of society serve everyone and enable a maximum of real individual development, or should the majority go on being coerced into a "division of labor" that seeks to concentrate all the benefits and glory of individual development into one narrow segment of society.

In fact it is generally necessary to have some compromise on these matters. A society of absolute equality is not attainable or much desired by anyone. There will always be those who are more or less central to the social machinery, particularly in a society with an elaborate enough economic system of cooperation, in any form, to sustain the basic biological needs, let alone opportunities for general development, of 6 billion and rising people on this planet. It is rational for ordinary people to accept disparities in opportunity to the extent that the privileged use their position to improve opportunities in general for ordinary people. The thing is, concentrated power inherently has the potential for positive feedback. History is best understood in terms of the quest for a sustainable, liveable balance of social interests in that context.

Your premises are at best a sophomoric first attempt, obsequious to the already powerful, of trying to grasp the issues at hand. And persisting in holding that frame in the face of all the evidence of its inadequacy and mendacity casts doubt on either the intelligence or honesty of its proponents.

The matter at hand here is whether progressives ought, for any reason, to compromise on abortion in particular--or for that matter on reproductive rights in general, because generally the opponents of choice there are also against birth control and sexual freedom. *

If abortion were a wrong, evil thing in and of itself, then the question of compromise would be a side issue. For reasons we have gone over time and again at Pandagon and I have also mentioned here, I for one think it can't be, certainly not in the early stages, and that the very best way to manage the whole question of reproduction is to leave each case up to the decision of the woman who might actually be pregnant, and everyone else should support whatever decisions these women make. Insisting on this standard is inherently the right thing to do, and (this follows as quite reasonable, given that I have framed history as a struggle between the interests of ordinary people versus the privileged few) also tends to subvert the mechanisms of social repression and favor democracy. Democracy, I should point out, is not about putting the "best" people in power, but about asserting and effectively enabling the inherent power of all people, demanding that everyone's interests be considered in any decision that affects them.

By pretending to be overwhelmingly concerned with the interests of persons who do not actually exist yet as people, "conservatives" seek to absolve themselves of guilt for all the offenses they routinely commit against real people. "Thou shalt not abort the innocent babe in the womb; after it's born, open season" quite encapsulates the right wing's revised concept of the commandments.

I don't see much value in seeking compromise with such mentalities. Subverting them (that is, opening the eyes of the vast majority to the disadvantages for them of continuing their allegience to a system inherently prejudicial to their interests, and the positive potentials of helping, even at the cost of risk and likely sacrifice, develop alternatives with their interests in mind) seems far more appropriate.
----------------
*In reality, of course, "conservatives" often have recourse to abortions, and use BC, and have extramarital sex, and are even GBLT--but in my frame, their problem is not consistentcy between what they say versus what they do, but how likely they are to get "caught" breaking the taboos they think (for good reasons in their terms) must be sacred in principle, because they are fundamentally about enforcing a social hierarchy. They practically solve this problem by using their social privilege and power for the purpose that they think these exist, to exempt themselves from the ostensible rules, which exist for no real reason other than as tools and structure for repression in general, and are therefore used selectively.

The painful and complex Odyssey of the right to choose in America

2007-04-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

Once again, I'm struck by how astute it was of Amanda Marcotte to recommend Leslie Reagan's When Abortion Was a Crime to her readers at Pandagon. Judging by this article by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly, she could also benefit from reading it, though it does seem she is making progress toward the light indeed. But she has a ways to go.

One thing I picked up from Leslie Reagan's book was the complex nuances of the evolution of abortion practice and its opposition.

For those who have not had the chance to read it yet, I can summarize by saying that essentially there were about 4 phases between the movement to initially criminalize abortion in the mid-19th century and Roe v Wade:

1) Professional MDs (or rather, the precursors of the faction of medical practitioners that we recognize today as "real doctors," in part because of their political success in this period) led, indeed founded and mostly constituted, the movement to make abortion a crime, primarily as a way of attacking their rivals, the folk-medical practioners who included midwives, and establishing themselves as a closed, self-governing guild of arbiters of medicine. I think it is clear that the particular movement to ban abortions (except for "therapeutic" ones done by MDs like themselves) also had a specific element of desire to bring women under tighter control. But in the first period, once the legislative battles were won to criminalize abortion, such objectives were only partially accomplished, for women continued as they had always done to go to midwives, or increasingly, as their family income permitted and ethnic ties guided them, to MDs acting as family practitioners, to get "therapeutic" abortions. Because the doctors never disputed that certain abortions were necessary; the question was, who decided. Under the old rules, pre-criminalization, the law ignored the whole matter and women decided among themselves. This was not the same as recognizing women's individual right to choose; if the law did pay attention it frowned deeply on deliberate abortion, and it would often not be the pregnant woman but rather other women, such as her mother, who arbitrated. Women did not talk about it, to men or generally among themselves, because sexuality in general was under a veil of silence and shame. Under the new rules, this would only have been worse, since abortion itself was now a crime explicitly, and this emphasized Victorian denial of female sexuality in general. Now, if a woman chose the traditional folk medicine track she and her midwife were under the shadow of explicit law, and if she chose a family practioner MD she was subject to his judgement and scrutiny. On the other hand, MDs were generally private practioners who served families, and women (the same matriarchs who traditionally governed decisions about pregnancy and abortion) generally held the purse strings in these matters. The lady of the house was their client in other words, and smart doctors did not want to alienate them. (In this period the few women MDs tended to be more outspoken in their conservatism and opposition to practices like abortion, because they were already under very skeptical scrutiny and probably had internalized Victorian values in self-defense and as essential steppingstones to success.) So in practice, abortion went on much as before, except increasingly in the hands of MDs, particularly among white Protestant middle-and-upper class families. Most of Reagan's data from this period came from situations where something went wrong and a woman died or was seriously ill, or from the investigations of crusading journalists who regarded abortion as part of the general sexual "dangerousness" of big cities and the rising industrial society. The tendency of critics was to blame midwives, but doctors ran some risk of being held accountable. But there was no movement to arrest and imprison women who had or sought abortions; for them, the basic punishment was to expose them to public shame.

2) In the next period, roughly corresponding to the Progressive Era shading into the 1920s, things went on much as before except that now the drive to criminalize midwives and folk medicine in general went into higher gear. Police were more aggressive in trying to root out midwives and social progressives generally sought to bring them under medical supervision as a step toward eliminating them outright. Meanwhile more women went to MDs and sought "therapeutic" abortions, which MDs were still inclined to give for purely social reasons. However medicine was getting more specialized; just as the MDs had sought to marginalize midwives, so now the new specialists in gynecology and obstestrics sought to discredit GPs in matters relating to pregnancy, and patients were increasingly diverted to hospitals, where there was no longer the client/professional relationship that covered the joint discretion of families and private doctor in reaching decisions on abortion.

3) In the Great Depression especially, a sort of equilibrium existed whereby the medical profession argued quietly among themselves about what was and was not "therapeutic" abortion but in the general desperation of the times, a place was quietly made for abortion clinics which were illegal but had fairly high standards. Flanagan's mother and her peers would have come of age in a time when official doctrine stressed more and more that abortion was wrong, but in fact networks of women and their doctors still could quietly find a woman who needed one a fairly safe place for a reasonable price. But as medicine grew more specialized and centralized, the practices came under more and more scrutiny, while the doctors and nurses involved in abortion became more and more specialized in that practice, which exposed them to more effective prosecution. All along in these latter two periods especially, there was a rising threat that exposure as an abortionist would result in expulsion from the medical community; this went hand in hand with the threat of legal action but also worked largely by shame and ostracism, just as women were generally "punished" and terrorized.

4) But various political forces were on the rise that explicitly sought to eliminate, or at least more effectively criminalize abortion, notably various agencies of the Catholic Church and their political supporters--a strong and rising constituency in the mid-20th century. In the medical community, it was hard to speak for abortion, even "therapeutic," and increasingly respectable to speak very harshly against it. In any case the doctors worried about liability and losing their collective reputations on which their professional independence of external regulation rested, so the profession began tightening and clarifying standards of what did and did not qualify as properly medical justifications for abortions, and gave at least verbal support to the crusaders. In the late 1930s (about when Flanagan's mother had her shocking experience) and notably in the early '40s, police began raiding medical abortion clinics that had been operating discreetly for decades in major cities. At first they sought the identites of the female patients, whom they then apprehended, threatened with prosecution, and thus compelled to testitfy against the clinic workers themselves--thus also "punishing" them by again exposing them as sexual offenders to public shame and compelling them to speak about sexual details women normally were ashamed to talk about; they were not actually jailed. Soon the DAs began to focus on the mainstream doctors, nurses, and hospitals that referred women to these clinics, as ways of shutting them down.

Thus Flanagan's mother was living in a transitional time. Even in earlier days, of course, there were far too many women who did not in fact find the discreet networks that steered pregnant woment toward relatively safe abortions, and thus went to quacks or tried to do it themselves; this is a basic ugly fact of criminalization. (In fact, even where abortion is perfectly legal, we still have some women who are ashamed, or afraid, to risk exposure, or feel self-destructive shame, or just plain can't afford reputable care; perhaps we shall always have such tragedies, though one can hope otherwise in a society that finally gets away from shaming women for having sex.) But the bitter experience of Flanagan's mother's friend was not the universal reality for most women who sought abortions before WWII--though she may have chosen the way she did it because it was indeed headed that way.

Because the 4th period of criminal abortion, the period between WWII and Roe, is I think the most bitter and tragic of all. Indeed scientific medical practice had always held out the promise of technically safer and more effective abortions (though in the mid-19th century I think on the whole a good midwife might have been a safer bet) and by WWII the cumulative progress of antisepsis and medicines including the new antibiotics would indeed have made it far safer--if not for the much more effective enforcement of the law that went along with it. The crackdown on abortion was part of the general reactionaryism of the post-war and McCarthyite era; indeed Reagan stresses how effectively the era's conformism straightjacketed medical professionals of all kinds into following a reactionary script for fear of being singled out and expelled. This was the period in which women were forced to seek anonymous and dubious practitioners for extortionate prices in the dead of night, and suffered most severely from running these medical as well as social risks. The medical profession, soon underscored by law, required proposals for therapeutic abortions to undergo reviews by committees before being authorized; no longer could a GP or even Ob/gyn specialist make that decision on his professional say-so, as the original laws had provided. These committees in turn were having their decisions scrutinized by anti-abortion watchdogs of various kinds; the number of women who got abortions at hospitals was also being critically and skeptically watched, so that even liberally inclined hospitals (especially those that had a reputation for being laxer in these matters) had to tighten their standards to match the most reactionary, lest they stand out for legal attention.

It was these conditions that led women to organize to reclaim their right to choose, by clandestine action, by court challenge, and eventually to speaking out at last on why they had to regard this choice as essential and their basic right as women and human beings. It was this testimony that underlay both movments of legal reform (which were often disappointing, as they left the basic notion of abortion as a questionable option at best in place and retained mechanisms of scrutiny and judgement that intimidated women and denied even the bravest abortions except for strictly interpreted reasons) and the eventually successful path of court challenge on basic human rights grounds.

I hope that women like Flanagan learn, if they don't already know, this basic historical trajectory that shows how essential the right of choice as a basic, unchallengeable, unashamed human right is, and that they acknowledge how every other alternative has in fact been tried and exhausted.

To my perhaps overly spiritual way of thinking, I think that both medical facts and the trying ordeal American women have gone through in our history demonstrate that early-term feti simply cannot be human beings, as I do believe in an underlying justice in the Universe and I don't see how such a benign cosmic order could put these women into conflict with real human beings. Maybe I'm too soft-headed; I've spoken to women whom I respect who say they believe in choice and yet that "it's still a baby." I just can't process that, and medical fact seems to relieve me of the need to. In any case, the absolute value that a pregnant woman alone should decide if she is to become a mother or not is established in my mind. This is a big improvement I think on the status quo before the MDs decided to attempt to criminalize abortion, since the matter was kept in discreet limbo back then and the default position of law and society was that women were subordinate to others--perhaps to other women, but not seen as free and autonomous in the sense that men were. And vice versa, I think free women, who never bear children unless they have freely decided to do so, are more likely to birth and raise healthy, loved, valued children, and pass on the values and virtues that underly effective, real, human freedom. We are thus better off than we were, and perhaps the sufferings of past generations can be redeemed--if we hang on to what we have gained.

Because It Apparently Has To Be Said Again

2007-02-27T05:07:00.000-08:00

One side effect of the brouhaha about John Edward's brief employment of world-class feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte on his campaign staff and the subsequent right-wing Swiftboating of her and the candidate is that nowadays Pandagon has apparently quadrupled or quintupled its traffic, and among new commentors there are a lot of hostile right-wingers. In this new ecosystem, I have become more motivated to expound my Marxist views, particularly on the core subject of Marx's labor theory of value political economy. I don't know how far I'll get or how fast I can post, but clearly I need to write down my reasons for believing that Marx did in fact develop the rational approach to economics whereas mainstream "economics," called variously NeoClassical, Marginalist, or the "Austrian" or "Chicago" school, is a bunch of ideological hooey, of no scientific value and having no practical uses except for making apologies for the outrages of capitalism.

For now, just a long blockquote from the late Ernest Mandel, Trotskyite economist extrordinaire, from his Introduction to the Vintage Edition of Capital, Volume I, 1976.

[Capital] was never intended as a handbook to help governments to solve such problems as balance-of-payment deficits, nor yet as a learned, if somewhat trite, explanation of all the exciting happenings in the market place when Mr. Smith finds no buyer for his last 1000 tons of iron. It was intended as an explanation of what would happen to labour, machinery, technology, the size of enterprises, the social structure of the population, the discontinuity of economic growth, and the relations between workers and work, as the capitalist mode of production unfolded in all its terrifying potential. From that point of view the achievement is truly impressive. It is precisely because of Marx's capacity to discover the long-term laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production in its essence, irrespective of thousands of "impurities" and of secondary aspects, that his long-term predictions--the laws of accumulation of capital, stepped-up technological progress, accelerated increase in the productivity and intensity of labour, growing concentration and centralization of capital, transformation of the great majority of economically active people into sellers of labour-power, declining rate of profit, increased rate of surplus-value, periodically recurrent recessions, inevitable class struggle between Capital and Labour, increasing revolutionary attempts to overthrow capitalism--have been so strikingly confirmed by history.

This judgement has generally been challenged on two grounds. The easiest way out for critics of Marx is simply to deny that the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production which he discovered have been verified at all. This is generally done by reducing them to a couple of misstated and oversimplifed formulae (see below): "progressive immiseration of the working class" and "ever-worsening economic crisis." A more sophisticated objection was advanced by Karl Popper, who denied the very possibility, or rather the scientific nature, of such "laws," calling them "unconditional historical prophecies" to be clearly distinguished from "scientific predictions." "Ordinary predictions in science," says Popper, "are conditional. They assert that certain changes (say, of the temperature of water in a kettle) will be accompanied by other changes (say, the boiling of the water)." Popper denies the scientific nature of Capital by asserting that, unlike scientific theories, its hypotheses cannot be scientifically tested.

This is obviously based upon a misunderstanding of the very nature of the materialist dialectic, which, as Lenin pointed out, requires constant verification through praxis to increase its cognition content. In fact, it would be very easy to "prove" Marx's analysis to have been wrong, if experience had shown, for example, that the more capitalist industry develops the smaller and smaller the average factory becomes, the less it depends upon new technology, the more its capital is supplied by the workers themselves, the more workers become owners of their factories, the less the part of wages taken by consumer goods becomes (and the greater the becomes the part of wages used for buying the workers' own means of production). If, in addition, there had been decades without economic fluctuations and a full-scale disappearance of trade unions and employers' associations (all flowing from the disappearance of contradictions between Capital and Labour, inasmuch as workers increasingly become the controllers of their own means and conditions of production) then one could indeed say that Capital was so much rubbish and had dismally failed to predict what would happen in the real capitalist world a century after its publication. It is sufficient to compare the real history of the period since 1867 on the one hand with what Marx predicted it would be, and on the other with any such alternative "laws of motion," to understand how remarkable indeed was Marx's theoretical achievement and how strongly it stands up against the test of history.
Pages 23-25

Jammin' with Pam Spaulding on Matters of the Spirit

2007-02-16T10:08:00.000-08:00

As she does on matters of race and homobigotry, Pam Spaulding has once again bared her sweet heart to invite discussion on that "third rail" of socio-politics in the USA, religion/spirituality, organized and otherwise. Note it is cross-posted on her own blog here.

OK, so now's as good a time as any for me to muse on my own faith journey.

Like Pam I was raised under some Catholic influence--unlike her, I was raised pretty much exclusively as a Catholic. For most of my life, whenever I even considered that I might recover, or perhaps more accurately discover for the first time, a true Christian faith, I assumed that of course then I'd become a Catholic again--because to be honest, I think I have to say a certain smug bigotry against Protestantism was successfuly conveyed to me, if not an actual living faith in my nominal religion.

Unlike a lot of Pandagonians, commenting on Chris Clarke's earlier entry, while I spent every year from 1st grade through 10th in a Catholic school, I had none of their seminal experiences with wonderful teachers, in or out of holy orders, who inspired me. But then neither did I have any truly horrendous experiences either. The bleak fact is that when I look at my childhood the only living inspirations and guides I had in matters of faith (or any other matter of spirit or intellect) were my own family. Otherwise, as I look back on it I pretty much lived in a world of books and other media.

I can trace the roots of my smug arrogance in part back to the fact that as a hearing-impaired child, one who was born with normal hearing but lost it gradually and behind the backs of everyone including myself, that I adapted by learning to talk rather than listen, and to read rather than hear. This is a fine thing for getting a leg up on the academic rat race of K-12 education and impressing one's elders with bookish accomplishments, but pretty poor for learning to relate to living people. But another would be my Dad's own rather austere and doctrinaire leanings in this same direction. My Dad actually went to a Catholic seminary instead of junior high school. Quite obviously he changed his mind, but from very early years I considered myself, emulating and following his pronouncements on faith and doctrine, fit to judge the orthodoxy and right-thinking of priests, nuns, and certainly my peers. Elsewhere I've written about my gradual revelation, as a young adult, that contrary to my impressions, I'd been educated to be a typical American racist. It was much easier to recognize, years before, how I'd been trained to be a sexist as well, because my Dad was quite explicit in his doctrines of the divisions between the sexes--so dogmatically so, and so in contradiction with my experience even as a child, that I questioned and rejected much of that nonsense.

Even as a child, I had my doubts about the reasonableness of what I understood I was supposed to believe, without question. Catholicism, and Christianity in general, has sound and reasonable answers for its critics, but one must accept the premises from which they are made. In my life experience, the message of Christianity seemed to divide up into, on one hand, a beautiful if dismayingly difficult challenge to confront the world with courageous and generous love, and on the other a corpus of dry and arbitrary doctrines fundamentally based on sheer authoritarian fiat. As an intellectually trained acolyte I knew that the latter was supposed to follow from the former, but I never really accepted that I saw it do so.

On the contrary, hewing strictly to the line that was clearly pronounced in Papal statements and dogmatic teaching seemed diametrically opposed to living the life exemplified by Christ and in the Acts. Believing as I was taught that the fate of my immortal soul depended mainly on the former, I spent my childhood as a sophist, seeking validation and approval for my proper understanding of dogma, while secretly chafing, and resenting the freedom and happiness of those who seemed to accept a more forgiving and gentle form of faith. In fact in the post-Vatican II 1970s, I was surrounded by folk masses and rather rockin' hymns and the threat of Charismatics and other bizarre shenanigans, not to mention my parents' rather dark pronouncements on the questionable orthodoxy of "liberal" clerics they found in every dioscese we moved to, even in places like Virginia or the Florida Panhandle.

So it was that within weeks of moving away from home, I dropped the facade of Catholic faith, stayed on campus on Sundays (skipping Mass being of course a mortal sin quite as much as if I'd murdered someone) and soon considered myself an atheist.

But that never sat comfortably with me either. Just as I was at heart a non-practicing Catholic, I've always suspected that somehow, we are indeed children of a Being that cares about us, and that somehow there will be judgement, reconciliation, and redemption. I've dabbled with various forms of neopaganism but have never quite crossed over to believing in any definite way that the powers of the natural elements are the same as this Great Spirit.

There came a day when I had a definite moment of revelation, when a reflection touched me deeply and I decided that at any rate, I am a person of faith. As it happened, this came from contemplating the record left on the Voyager space probes, that photographic and audio testament to human life on planet Earth, launched as an act of faith and a gift, for what it may be worth, to unknown peoples of other stars.

In the past year, I felt moved by various life events to seek out a congregation of more or less like-minded people to share some kind of affirmation of the spirt, vague as suited me but geared to some kind of positive action accountable to reason as well as the demands of the living spirit. For a time, I communed with a United Church of Christ congregation in Sebastopol, California. And a fine bunch of progressive, loving yet clear-minded Christians they are too. But the fact is, from my point of view the spirit of Christianity itself is clouded with the authoritarian, patriarchial dogmas associated with the rule of power over people. These good progressive Christians did not seem like agents of this to me, but I simply do not feel right trying to frame my perceptions from a specially Christian standpoint. I therefore sought out the Unitarian Univeralsalist congregation in Santa Rosa, and there I am happy to be for now, and for the foreseeable future.

For the moment I have run out of time, but blessings be upon everyone of good will.

Theoretical background stuff for Pam's guests and posterity

2007-02-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

The estimable Pam Spaulding, co-blogging at Pandagon, has once again asked us to seriously discuss race in the USA. Here is my theoretical abstract background to my response to her questions.

First of all, intellectually I frame the whole issue of race and racial categories and assignments and so on in the context of an oppressive system that is maintaining the myth of race for reasons of its own normal functions. Specifically, people in the USA have the impressions we have because of our social system and its history, and since there isn't any objective basis in inherent human abilities or characteristics for it, of course there is no other framework but this arbitrary history and present practice, and therefore of course it is full of absurdities especially around the edges.

The US racial system was founded in enslaving Africans, and this was done simply because African slaves who fled captivity could be readily identified and re-captured. This was true no matter how culturally comfortable or even identified a particular African or descendent of Africans became, and no matter whether there was any feeling of rejection any group of "white" people night have felt, nor even vice versa protective solidarity with a fellow exploited worker--other fugitive workers like indentured servants from Britain for instance, or the shipmates of an African sailor (of whom there were quite a few in the 18th and 19th century). It was objectively easy to catch escaped Africans, easy to separate them from possible allies, easy to enforce differential treatment. That's the crux of the matter, and that aspect continues relevant to this day.

To be sure the whole task of getting economic benefit out of the investment in slavery was made even easier by the cultivation and encouragement of bigoted attitudes among potential allies of recalcitrant black workers as well as other levels of society, so we have a tremendous cultural investment in bigotry. But we could analyze the whole thing without acknowledging this, though the analysis is much more straightforward if we do.

Many people might wonder why I think that the economic and sociopolitical basis of anti-African bigotry that seems so clear when we look at the era of legal slavery matters today, when slavery has been long abolished. We can and should consider the many ways that we have continued a number of quasi-slavery institutions and practices to this day, but for the moment leave that aside. Even if we didn't selectively and differentially convict people perceived to be African, or had no prejudices about hiring them on a case-by-case basis, or have any concerns about intermarriage, or whatnot, we still live under capitalism.

And capitalism by its nature produces a stratified range of options for people at different economic levels. Not only is there a wide range of income distrubution for wage workers, and a limited opportunity for people to enter the capitalist classes by amassing investment capital sufficient to live off the profits, which is the definition of a capitalist, there is also a tremendous range of working and associated living conditions. In particular, capitalism is characteristically volatile, unstable, and cyclic. Most of the jobs and related opportunities at the bottom of the ladder are particularly vulnerable to these inherent and necessary fluctuations.

But at the same time, capitalist societies, for good and deep reasons, tend to be associated with nominally liberal institutions. In particular, the notion that government, and society in general, derives from the consent and enlightened self-interest of the people, is very important (though not indispensible) in maintaining the moral pre-eminence of a capitalist society. Thus, we see a serious problem--individuals near the bottom of the ladder may well consent, or even be enthusiastic supporters of, a system they think offers them fair opportunities to enjoy greater wealth, and that at any rate offers them a lifestyle they are accustomed to. But when a boom goes bust, when a particular line of work that showed promise half a generation ago is supplanted by the evolution of the market, or indeed anything at all goes wrong, it is these people at the bottom, the last hired, who are first fired; it is they who bear the full brunt of the violent swings characteristic of the system, and these swings last years stretching into decades.
Therefore it is not necessary, but it is very handy, for a capitalist republic, to have a class of people whom the majority do not accept as full members and full equals of themselves. If a big portion of the worst work is offered mainly to them, and these people have impaired opportunities to seek more rewarding and secure positions, then it becomes much easier to cultivate stable sustained support for the cyclic system among the better-off majority. Of course the flip side of this purging of the risks and downsides onto a disfavored minority is that those people will presumably be even more disaffected than they would be as merely poor people, and might develop a group consciousness that all the more systematically works to change or overthrow the domininant system. But if this risk can be managed by a series of social double standards that permit the dominant portion of society to systematically attack and undercut such organization perhaps in ways that would never be accepted by the majority applied to themselves, then actually the threat of the revolt of the stigmatize underclass becomes a reinforcement of the system, as its plausibility justifies the harsh measures taken to a larger majority than might be prepared to stomach them without the clear and present danger.

The idiocy of private health "insurance"

2007-01-28T05:03:00.000-08:00

Dear Kaitlyn,

I just found your blog via a comment you made in Pandagon. And I read this.

I doubt very much you are an idiot. I'd say you are way ahead of the curve.

I'm very different than you in lots of ways, but we've got a lot in common too. I'm a military brat to start with, and a feminist, and I owe some of my own mental liberation to having read MAD back in the day.

Anyway, you are not the problem here. The problem is, private insurace sucks the big one. It is the essence of the evils of capitalism, distilled.

I didn't realize this until 1989, when I was already 24. I'd just moved in with Natasha (you can probably find plenty to go on about who Natasha was if you go way down to the earliest entries in this blog) and she wanted to write a play about AIDS. So, she said, let's you and I go get tested for HIV, to research that experience. So we did.

In those days, it took days or weeks for the blood sample to get processed; you had to make an appointment to come get the results back. They set it up so that no one could find out which way it went until you were in a meeting with a trained counselor--a bit nerve-wracking but good policy I think.

Since Natasha was researching the play she asked what they'd have done if either of us had tested positive. While we were discussing the options HIV-positive folks had back then one thing the counselor said was, if you've got health insurance, keep it no matter what, 'cause once you get dropped from whatever plan you had, you are screwed. No one will insure you at any bearable price. You become a human hot potato.

Now I suppose to some people this seems only reasonable, but it got me thinking about the very nature of private, for-profit, health insurance. The idea is, you pay money now, and they are betting you will never get sick and they can pocket the money, because if you do get sick it is gonna cost them way more than any one client typically can pony up over a lifetime to cover good care. So--either the fine print lets them off the hook, letting them get away with promising way more than they plan to give sick clients, or the chances of your getting sick are quite low.
Since there are dozens of rival plans competing with each other, every one has an incentive to try to persuade young, healthy fools to part with their money, and get rid of the older, sicker, more savvy folks who might want some value for what they've paid.

It might seem OK if people were in fact able to select and keep a plan when they are young and healthy, and guarantee either that that plan continues all their lives, so the company that was happy to take their money when they were young has to take care of them when old. But in real life, only very rich people have that option.

Look at me for instance. I was able to stretch CHAMPUS eligibility until I was 22, because my Dad was still on active duty and I had not actually graduated from college yet, but once I got too old for that, I had zero coverage. Could I afford to run out and sign up for some plan that would cost me hundreds of dollars a month to keep up? HAH! Once I moved in with Natasha as her full-time, live-in care provider (Natasha was disabled, if you haven't glanced at my blog yet) I worked over 60 hours a week--but at minimum wage, and with zero benefits. I was barely able to pay minimal payments on my student loans.

In 2003, I became theoretically able to sign up for union-supported health plans, but that brings me to the worst part of the story of private health "insurance in the USA. The only way that the vast majority of Americans can possibly afford to buy in is via their workplace--and as we have all learned these past 25 years or so, there ain't no guarantee anyone can keep a particular job in this country, no matter how hard they work or how loyal they are. And if your insurance is tied to your current job, it disappears the day you are downsized, laid off, or just plain fired. And all the money you paid into it vanishes into thin air as far as you are concerned. Lord help you if you have acquired "pre-existing conditions" since you last "shopped" for insurance by shopping for a job--they may have been covered at bearable rates under your old plan, but you can't keep that plan, even out of pocket if you have savings--it was a specific contract involving both you and your boss, who just got rid of you.

Or sometimes, the job just vanishes. A long time ago Molly Ivins observed that Unemployment applications in Texas didn't have any checkmark for "employer went belly-up;" her newspaper had folded, gone bankrupt, but the forms pretend that bosses are infallible and immortal--if you are out of work it has to be your fault!

But Natasha Littletree, my personal boss, actually did die, in early October 2004. I can verify--California, like Texas, has overlooked the possibility that some jobs just disappear completely. So if I had ever jumped through all the hoops necessary to sign on with Kaiser that the Sonoma County IHSS Public Authority and SEIU 250 had set up, all the money I might have paid in would have been gone.

In my current job, I have a similar theoretical right to sign on to Kaiser benefits at a price I'm told is fantastically low. Except, I don't have the money. (And one can only join up in certain time windows in the year, when the contracts are renegotiated and the phase of the moon is just so...)

And I still think that giving my money to a bunch of professional crooks is a bad investment. It may be better than getting stuck with a hospital bill, since I have no savings to pay a medical bill out of pocket, but I'm on the Republican health plan--don't get sick. And if I'm getting sick I don't want to know.

The only sensible plan is to do what every other civilized and half-civilized nation in the world does--have the ultimate insurance plan, the whole nation is the clients, everyone pays, and everyone gets served alike. No bureacracy of competing insurance bean-counters for doctors to apply to in the hope of getting paid; no contracts renegotiated every year that raise rates while adding loopholes for avoiding service. It is a simple fact that universal plans like Medicare, when not screwed up by politicians trying to privatize them, spend just cents on the dollar in administration, whereas private insurace takes a good sixth or more of their income to feed the company itself.

If I ever get into a place where I can pay my insurace premium, at this late stage in my life I'm beaten down enough to buy in, but only because I have no prospect of saving much before I'm quite old, and because I have some hope that at long last, our country might wise up and introduce universal health care once and for all. If I had been able to afford private health insurance all these years, but instead had saved the money, I daresay I might have saved up enough to cover big medical bills out of pocket.

But working class people can't do that by definition--why is another rant. The only sane thing is to hit the rich up for the bills. After all, they have no chance to get rich if there aren't healthy working people who are not in a rebellious mood, have they.

Undervaluing the work that is never done...

2007-01-15T05:34:00.000-08:00

Over at the Pandagon place, Amanda has once again attracted a fine crop of concern trolls. Gee, and all she did was point out that making marriage into a sacred norm is a bit of a crock.

Way up here "Robert" quoted Amanda saying:

particularly since the patriarchal model has men doing so very little of the actual work that in some families Dad is mostly regarded as decoration. Seriously, I know people who had more rearing from their aunts and grandmothers.

And then he said:

This is simply a reversal of the patriarchal notion that childrearing isn’t real work. You’re assigning the work of economic support for a family a very low value.

No, no, Robert you bozo, Amanda is clearly not "assigning" that work a low value. She's pointing out that our society does that misassement. It's not subjective, it's a clearly observable fact.

The people who actually do the labor you (correctly for once) point out should be so highly valued actually don't get credited with it. Wifehood is typically a euphemism for "house slave." Of course it doesn't have to be, of course fewer and fewer women are simply accepting that, of course quite a few men are gradually and grudgingly--as always, some willingly and eagerly--taking on their share and perhaps more (for a change) of that drudgery and effort.

Not all of motherwork is a pain, of course. But even the rewarding parts are still work in that it takes serious application, however willingly applied, and that doing it means you can't simultaneously be doing something else that is valued in our screwed-up socioeconomic system.

Quite aside from the specifics of childrearing, the types of work that women do, throughout history, throughout the world, have been systematically undervalued in the patriarchial societies that have been the near-universal norm these past several millenia. Today, in the capitalist world, it is quite possible to contract to have the types of ongoing maintenance of civilization women have "traditionally" been required to do to be done on a fee-for-service basis. When we do this, we typically hire people at the lowest wages, often illegally low (and by the way, arrange for specifically childcare duties to be handled the same way). We expect people working as employees in these sectors to work long hours with minimal or nonexistent benefits. And yet, despite the cut-rate and exploitive standards set, the price tag for getting the jobs done comes out pretty high. If we paid these workers (overwhelmingly women) at rates competitive with "men's work," the price would be even higher.

For 16 years I worked as the care provider for a disabled person. I can testify how minimally I was paid. For all but 2 of those years, it was at the minimum wage. And I learned fast the pragmatic basis of the maxim "Man works from sun to sun but women's work is never done." The most draining thing about it is that you are constantly on the battlefront against entropy itself--everything is coming unraveled as fast as you can ravel it. That's the nature of keeping life going.

And I learned how absolutely essential this inglorious, scorned work is. If the housewives and servants and janitors and cooks of the world could be organized to go on universal strike, I reckon that the entire world would grind to a grimy, sticky, malnourished, sick, miserable halt in about half a week, about when the frozen snacks in the freezers run out.

And yet this work is done, continuously, for the least consideration of any category of labor, often for "free," and has been for thousands of years.

I know you've got some "economic" answer for this, dear Robert. One major reason I have zero respect for mainstream so-called "economics" is that it is precisely an ideological machine for justifying the social order we've got, as the natural and inevitable order of things, nothing more and nothing less. That's its entire content and function.

I've studied a rational, scientific approach to economics, thank you very much, and it is quite straightforward in pointing out that real economic systems are generally based on exploitation enabled by implicit, sometimes demonstrated, systematic violence. Scientific political economy is also far better at accounting for the real structure and observed details of actually existing economies than marginalist twaddle has ever been--that's my main reason, that I think that as a model, political economy based on historical materialism and the labor theory of value is reasonably true, whereas mainstream "economics" is ideological bunk.

"Women's work," especially motherwork, is not underpaid because it is cheap. It's underpaid because women are exploited systematically as an ancient and crucial part of a global system based on general exploitation. In pointing out that in fact, in the real world, men in our patriarchial society very often get full credit for being great patriarchs while actually riding free on the unpaid labor of people drastically underprivileged and arbitrarily subordinated to these very "patriarchs," Amanda is taking note of situations we've all seen examples of ourselves, and they are by no means treated as bizarre extremes. The point of this thread, to reflect on why it is that our society maintains the mystique of "marriage" as a sacred norm, comes clear if we consider that marriage as it actually evolved in our society has always involved some degree of enslavement.

Thanks for blundering directly onto the very crux of the argument that punctures your whole sanctified balloon, Robert.

Cum Granum Salum

2006-12-31T05:53:00.000-08:00

Well I hope I got the Latin right.

And I checked off perfectly true claims to like all the old traditional carols too.

What Christmas Carol are you?

You are 'Christmas Time is Here, by Golly!', by Tom Lehrer. Hmm, you really don't like Christmas, do you? From the moment they start playing carols in the shops in October to the appearance of the first Easter Eggs in the shops on New Years Eve, the rampant hypocrisy of the Christmas spirit sets your teeth on edge. You know just how many family fights start over Christmas dinner, how many people are injured in the Boxing Day sales, and how few people actually find Christmas even remotely merry. You liked Scrooge far better before those ghosts got to him, and you are only doing this quiz because you are bored at work and anything is better than listening to everyone else discuss their Christmas shopping. Still, it is two days off work, which does count for something... Enjoy the break.
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I've been looking for years for this quote...

2006-12-23T09:55:00.000-08:00

...and a mere aside about one of Bill O'Reilly's many asinine remarks in a BadTux post finally motivated me to track it down.

The shrewd analysis of "Mr Dooley" of the nature of whiteness in America.
You just can't state it more clearly than that.

God rest you, Finley Peter Dunne.

And thanks, BadTux the Pragmatically Ethical Penguin!

"The Postwar Dream"

2006-12-23T08:47:00.000-08:00

Kactus has a vision

Which I share, though like her I'm kind of cynical about ever seeing it.

And before I got into actually reading Marx or any of that I owe it to Pink Floyd; they put in in words in "The Gunner's Dream":

A place to stay"Oi! A real one ...?"
Enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more no-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue
Kicking in your door.
You can relax
On both sides of the tracks
And maniacs
Don't blow holes
In bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no-one
Kills the children anymore.
And no one kills
The children
Anymore.

Is it our dream that is insane?

Well, some of us feel guilty enough

("And so this is Christmas...and what have you done?"

"Was it you, was it me, did I watch too much TV--is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?")

About not working hard enough toward it.

But I'm still here.

That's something. A joyous Yuletide, wassail to all, and don't forget to Keep the "X" in Xmas!

My Best Case Scenario for Iraq as it is Today

2006-12-09T05:38:00.000-08:00

The USA must get out now. We must prevent the Saudis from making good on their promise to intervene in the absence of the USA on behalf of the Sunni minority. I doubt the Saudi regime really wants to do this anyway, and I suppose it would result in a quick debacle and collapse should they be so foolish to attempt it.

And then await the quick and inevitable ascendency of Iranian hegemony over Iraq--either the outright incorporation of Iraq into the Iranian Islamic Republic, or the alignment of a Shia-dominated Iraq into a satellite relationship with Iran.

Honest to God, that's the best outcome I could foresee at this point. It has the following possible virtues--

1) The Iranians have shown themselves to be rather savvy and restrained as Islamic fundamentalists go, and might very well restrain their Iraqi co-religionists from vindicative acts against the Sunni minority, once it is established that the Shia/Iranian coalition is going to call the shots in Iraq.

2) It would reduce rather than multiply the number of power players in the region.

3) Iranian ambition is checked by the fact that they are Shi'ites, and that with the incorporation of Iraq into their system, they would have taken about all the territory they could reasonably expect to hold, unless they prove to be Solomonic indeed in their wisdom and restraint in governing Sunnis, which I doubt. Enough to hold a minority in sullen alligence perhaps, but enough to persuade Sunni-majority nations to submit to their "heretical" hegemony? I don't think so. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, Shi'ites are a small minority, except in Syria where they are a fairly large one, and in Lebanon and perhaps Israeli-ruled territory--where they are one small faction among many. But there is little likelihood that a Shi'ite-based hegemony could grow much beyond an Iran-Iraq coalition.

4) It does correspond to the will of the majority in Iraq, and is the only one-state solution I see short of some kind of dictatorship, which would only breed ongoing violence. It also corresponds to the regional balance of power.

5) As for Balkanizing Iraq, that hardly seems like a brilliant solution to me. The Sunni territories would have essentially no economic basis save funds extorted from the oil-bearing Shia and Kurdish territories. A loose confederation of mutually hostile regions is a recipie for ongoing regional war, by proxy or by direct confrontation once the charade breaks down. The Shia territory would almost certainly affiliate directly to Iran unless forcibly restrained, and it would contain most of the current population of Iraq and a lot of the oil.

I don't know what is to become of the Kurds no matter what. On their own they could probably maintain a state, but unfortunately for them, both Turkey and Iran have large Kurdish minorities in their territories. Turkey has certainly said repeatedly they will not tolerate an independent Kurdistan or even Kurdish autonomy within an Iraqi confederation; right now only US patronage is restraining them from attempting invasion. If we go and the Turks try it I suppose they might be sorry, many tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths and yet another ongoing bloodbath later. I wouldn't be surprised if the Iranians, gaining unrestrained influence over Iraq, would gratuitiously let Kurdistan go, perhaps even throwing in their own chunk of Kurdish territory (if Iranian Kurds are Sunni as I suspect they are) just to throw a monkey wrench into the works, to either give the Turks a loose cannon on their borders to worry about or draw them into a Vietnam/Afghanistan situation of their own, and consolidate their own hold on a reconfigured Greater Shiastan Islamic Republic. But there is oil in Kurdistan. And it is a potential willing ally and base for future US adventures, so I suppose that would not be too smart. Perhaps they would concentrate on trying to win the Kurds over to accepting Iranian rule, on the same basis they've kept their own Kurds quiet hitherto.

And that's a monkey wrench in the neat scheme I've outlined for peace by consolidation of sectarian lines--the temptation to add the Turkish-ruled Kurds to the set. Along with the grievances of any Sunni Arabs the Iranians or their Iraqi co-religionists seek to dominate, it seems that no matter where one draws the lines, the Middle East is a powder keg.

And of course nothing I've outlined is good news for the USA as a great imperial power. Nor is it likely to be anything but ugly from a human rights point of view, though I do think it would be less awful than the realistic alternatives--Western-backed puppet dictators, perhaps even Saddam himself, versus Islamic dictatorships to the liking of the simultaneously corrupt and whacko-zealous Wahabi Saudis. Either of these would make (and have made) the ayatollahs look like Oliver Wendell Holmes in comparison. But only in comparison. Iraq is not likely to be worse off under the kind of Shi'ite regime that has developed in Iran than it was under Saddam's nominally secular but corrupt rule, and they have been worse off still under ours. But make no mistake, it will be ugly, just, I hope, somewhat less so. And were it not for the ambitions of Iranian extremists to make political hay of the situation in Israel and Palestine, I'd be confident it would be more peaceful for them. But Israel is another mess entirely, and despite bluster Iran is some distance away.

Face it, we have blown it in the Middle East. We have abused the rights and legitimate interests of its natives for generations, and we can hardly expect a pleasant outcome at this point. In Iraq in particular, our policy has consistently sown misery and death.

I have outlined before my reasons for opposing the invasion in 2003, boiling down to my correct prediction that the Bush crew could not possibly be expected to do anything but make things worse. And we had no principled grounds for invasion by any consideration. But let's take it as given that we were going to invade in 2003--could we have done better?

Perhaps, if we had followed the recommendations of the numerous security and military experts the Bush regime chose to silence or fire instead, we could, with far more troops, have secured the place immediately, and then, if and only if we had in good faith set out to rebuild the devastated country with American money freely given, and Iraqi labor hired without prejudice and organized in a collective effort of the US military--no contractors!--and all factions of the Iraqi people working together, we just might have capitalized on the universal hatred of Saddam and goodwill earned by good work to form the secular, democratic, tolerant, liberal Iraq Bush told us fairy tales about.

And perhaps not, even with the best will in the world. Because morality has a certain integrity to it, and no amount of good deeds could paper over the fact that we had no moral call to high-handedly invade there in the first place. The strongest claim we had to invade was that we had created Iraq's mess and we had to therefore clean it up. But any attempt to profit from that obligation negates all credit for such intentions. And the fact that the operation was at every stage corrupt and malicious shows that whatever illusions we may have willfully clung to, in the matter of deeds we had no good intentions.

So this nightmare was perfectly predictable and predicted by many, and the best we can do is get out now, and let the chips fall where they may.

And if God is merciful, it will be nothing worse than the foundation of Iranian hegemony in the region. It would be bad, but we can do far worse.

And the Bush Administration stands ready as always to show us how.

Thirteen years of childhood in Dixie but I'm still a Damyankee...

2006-11-28T01:41:00.000-08:00

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

But What Does it Take To Acknowledge Everyone Matters?

2006-10-31T05:03:00.000-08:00

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has gone deep toward the heart of the real conflict between "liberals" and "conservatives" in our country, echoing the wisdom of people like Rachel Maddow who when asked explain that "liberals care about the little guy." As Amanda says, the question is, "Who Counts?"

Wonderfully expressed, as far as it goes.

I still hold that one reason it was possible to twist the word "liberal" into a negative was that the Great Liberal Compromise of the mid-20th century hinged on making the very promise you point out we intend to keep--that all people everywhere count. I think most liberal political leaders and pundits actually meant it.

But the compromise came in when they considered the distance they had to go from American everyday reality to that goal. It seemed evident to most Americans that there really ought not to be any reason why in the great future of the American Century that stretched out before them that all serious problems might not be fixed by the first great democracy that had held first place as a world power. (No, Britain doesn't count, because the position of the British Empire was secured long before the franchise was extended to the majority of male subjects in Britain, let alone any women.) In other words--first of all it was all going to be contingent on an ever-advancing American Empire.

Second, it was going to be contingent on the hope that there were now (by say 1945) no severe structural issues within the USA that could not be negotiated away. That is--racism, homophobia, the second-class status of women, and the condition of the poorest Americans as they were by the end of WWII did not amount to a fatal disqualification of the USA as a democratic nation. You could hold that of course this that or the other oppresion was awful but it was on its way out, or you could hold that calling it an oppression overstated the case or that it wasn't a problem at all really to the enlightened mind. Anyone who believed otherwise could not rationally assume that we'd run our future or the world's any more wisely than any other pretentious world power had done before.

The crises of the '60s did indeed revolve around issues of "who counts?" Did foreign governments which happened to gainsay our dogmas count just because a lot of their people supported them? Did young men (then too young to vote, since the standard voting age used to be 21) count when they were needed in 'Nam, or did they only count _after_ they'd been initiated into manhood by military service as their fathers had legendarily been by WWII? Did people of color count just as much as white people? By the end of the '60s we had women pointing out all the systematic ways they were discounted, and even people of diverse sexual interests (who in 1945 were legally considered both criminal and insane and _certainly_ were not supposed to count) stepping forward and saying they actually did count too. And by then, the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement, which directly benefited mainly rural African-Americans still living in the South because they were mostly prohibitions of systematic denial of basic human and civil rights, had evolved into an explicit critique of the mainstream _economic_ setup that was the main factor in the de facto discrimination Northern, urban "minorities" faced. And programs and platforms that might address those issues immediately raised questions about how much these would take away from whites--whether in the form of taxes on the better-off, or of restrictions on "traditional" practices such as selectively hiring different ethnicities to different types of job. Or of stripping poorer white folks of an inflated ethnic pride of at least being of a superior race, which helped keep _them_ from rocking the economic boat even when they were down in the leaky bilge of it.

At this point, the question for liberalism was, could we make good on the promise? Could we offer people living overseas a way of life so much obviously better than what our rivals offered and they themselves could come up with that they'd freely join our project for a liberal world? Could we reform the obvious problems at home to demonstrate the perfection of the enlightened liberal order? And could any of this be done without completely tearing down and reconstructing on radically different lines the corporate capitalist order that clearly was the locus of American power? If not, would we gradually, in a constitutional, law-abiding way, reform the corporate order out of existance--or would the corporate order call bullshit on the promise and slap down all the pretensions of the various masses that they did indeed matter?

I am quite prepared to be proven completely wrong about my Marxist beliefs that in fact, the welfare of ordinary people and capitalism are in the end completely at odds. It might be nice to believe once again in the sort of optimistic, Tommorowland, shiny future I was raised to look forward to, one that would build on the power of "free enterprise" properly regulated by an enlightened and pragmatic democracy. But scientifically speaking I have to say it looks damned unlikely to me.

I don't think that we were chugging along fine in the 1960s and then we were mugged by a bunch of trogldytes in suits. It looks to me like all the people who uphold privilege, who will risk being oppressed themselves for the chance at spitting on others still lower than them, who accept as natural and inevitable that a few will prosper and the rest had better either serve them, get out of the way, or be mowed down, were in fact continuing a rival tradition just as much a part of the American vision as the Utopian dream of "liberty and justice for all" that has been intertwined with it since before 1776. If we could somehow reset our mindset to 1966 (without jettisoning all the progress made at least among progressive people on ethnicity, gender, ecology, and all that good hippie stuff) we'd just be stumbling back into the same mess within a decade, for the same reasons.

Liberalism was an attempt to lull the beast of privilege to sleep with soft words and lots of comfort food. If "liberalism" is to claim the label for the drive to achieve real human equality and universal mutual respect that we do indeed hold dear, at some point "liberalism" has to fight that beast, and see clearly what it is doing. In the 60s and 70s this did not happen, and so I can see why the term has a bad vibe to it today. Indeed, the hippies and Yippies and SDS and so on used the term about as perjoratively as El Rushbo does today, though with more justice since they were trying to take up the challenge rather than work for the Dark Side.

I don't mind people calling me a liberal, but I will call myself a "progressive," and often enough own up to actually being a Commie heathen space-case. I don't care about the label, I care about the faith that doing right by the little guy is the important thing.

Mercy Street, by Peter Gabriel

2006-09-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

I started this as a typical me run-on post on Kactus's Superbabymama, in response to this video of "Tajabone" from the movie Todo Sobre Mi Madre. Then I realized this is all about me, and it belongs here.

Kactus got me to think about songs that have jumped out and taken me by the throat. I don't know how to link to a video, or even the music, but I bet you probably know this one, Kactus:
"Mercy Street"
I only guess that because you like Laurie Anderson, whom the articles say he hung around with in this period, late '80s.

See, I don't know anything much about the politics of which artists are cool and which aren't among whom either. That was pretty much Natasha's department. I think she had all the back story of anyone, actor, songwriter, movie folk, ready to pop out and she kept it all straight.

All I know is this. A fellow Dabney House resident, a guy I looked up to, was playing this one day. Actually I didn't know where it was coming from, I just followed the sound like a fish on a line, and listened to it. I got the words pretty well in my memory but I wasn't sure--I don't know whether Gabriel just sung it so clearly I heard them all or whether the lyrics were written on the album--probably the latter.

Apparently I "know" as much as anyone about what the song "means."

Well, I just read Anne Sexton's poem "45 Mercy Street" for the first time ever just now.

I don't think it would be fair for me to say anything much about what the poem means, even just to me, just this second.

But here's what I found in the song:

Though I could figure out that Sexton was a suicidal poet readily enough at the time, and it has a plaintive, minor undertone, for me this song was like clean water, clear light, liberation. I hear all the darkness, all the despair (well, I get that it's there anyway) but actually what the song did for me was crystallize the positive vision of "materialism" in the Marxist sense.

See--

"looking down on empty streets, all she can see
are the dreams all made
solid
are the dreams all made real

all of the buildings, all of those
cars
were once just a dream
in somebody's head..."

That got me. I know I'm supposed to hear it all post-modernist, that the "dreams" of these other people are some kind of narrative trip that composes our world, this world that leaves us empty, despairing, miserable. But the first thing I felt was that it affirmed the worth of dreaming, of building, of striving. You can make your dreams solid and real. "Words support like bone." Because, I felt, words can be true words, honest words. Promises can be kept.

Anne doesn't find her worthwhile life in this world. Her life, her soul, is broken. The poem is about her fruitless search for 45 Mercy Street, the home she remembers, the place where she was loved and had meaning, and she doesn't find it. The last verses imply she "fails." She dies. The boat with her father is Charon's ferry to the underworld.

And yet--I felt that, I got that. But more important to me was the vision that whether we find it or not, the solid dreams are still there somehow. If we fail to get them, to build them and nurture them, in this life of ours, still truth and meaning go on somewhere out there. Maybe there is redemption and hope for us too. At any rate there is beauty, even if we have to rip our hearts out to see it.
It meant a lot to me.

Maybe I should revisit this.

Actually maybe I should blog it instead of clutter up Kactus's comments.
OK here goes. Select! Cut! Paste! Voila le blog-poste!

My First Checklist Meme

2006-09-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

As stolen from the adorable Kactus at Superbabymama.

The Checklist
(just bold everything you've accomplished in your life.)

1. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
2. Swum with wild dolphins
3. Climbed a mountain (well a big stone hill anyway--the Donnersberg at Dannenfels in Rheinland-Pfalz)
4. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
5. Been inside the Great Pyramid
6. Held a tarantula (maybe...)
7. Taken a candlelit bath with someone (not really--I gave Natasha such a bath once, when the power went out while she was having one, and cracked a mirror the candle was too close to.
8. Said "I love you" and meant it (absolutely!)
9. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea (well, the storm was at sea, and I was very foolishly driving on the US 98 next to it as waves washed over the bridges...)
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights (from the air)
15. Gone to a huge sports game (but I didn't like it much)
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby's diaper
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon (no, but I've helped one land)
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can--so my landlord said anyway, and he was not happy about it.
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states
41. Taken care of someone who was wasted
42. Had amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
44. Watched wild whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger's table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Posed nude in front of strangers
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted the Snake River - or was it the Colorado River?
82. Been on television news programs as an expert
83. Got flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Eaten fugu (pufferfish)
89. Had a one-night stand
90. Gone to Thailand
91. Bought a house
92. Been in a combat zone
93. Buried one/both of your parents
94. Been on a cruise ship
95. Spoken more than one language fluently
96. Performed in Rocky Horror Picture Show
97. Raised children
98. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn't stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn't have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Petted a stingray
110. Broken someone's heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a T.V. game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone's mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Petted a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad and The Odyssey
135. Selected one important author who you missed in school, and read something they wrote
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you're living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care--that was Natasha's worse nightmare, at least she was spared that.
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn't know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head
149. Caused a car accident
150. Saved someone's life--according to Natasha's doctor, yes. But only for 5 days.

The moral of the story--I wish I were as adventurous as Kactus.

Have you seen the fnords? Better yet, have you driven any lately?

2006-08-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte asked:

What made the scales fall from your eyes? When did you start to lose your trust in the mainstream media?

This is my attempted response. For some reason, it got trapped in "moderation," twice despite drastic editing. I have no idea why.

It came on kind of gradual for me. Even before I left my reactionary home, I started reading old Doonesburys in the community college library; that and a, um, liberal dose of science fiction sort of opened the way. Already by my first election, 1984, I was embarrassed to vote Republican and voted Democratic instead.

A critical moment in self-criticism came when I was arguing with women in Dabney House at Caltech about proposals to revise the language of the Caltech student government bylaws to eliminate sexist terms; eventually I said, “look, if you are really worried as women that the use of words like “he” and “him” are going to seriously be interpreted to bar you from office, why not just put one clause at the beginning of the bylaws that stipulates the pronouns are generic for both sexes and leave the rest alone?” It belatedly dawned on my that I had just proposed a version of the ERA.

But all this was just groundwork; even reading the Illuminatus! trilogy just seemed amusing until I finally saw the fnords myself.

I think it was summer 1985. At the time, the newspapers were full of anger at the Japanese for alleged sharp trading–chip dumping, that sort of thing. And, apparently just entirely by random coincidence, in the lifestyle section there was some article about how mean and nasty and intolerant of foriegners the Japanese allegedly were.
I saw the pattern, and I saw that I was not meant to see the pattern.

After that, it was painfully obvious to me that the media moved in fads and feeding frenzies; that one season we were supposed to be terrified of drugs, the next of day care centers, then it would be terrorism season for a while, then AIDS. And it seemed to go deeper than just that the media were incredibly shallow and stupid and given to fads; the fear du jour pointed to falling in lockstep behind a political agenda.

Addendum: naturally there was more to it than that, but this was the cleavage factor and moment. The more I think about it, the more important my interpretation of Robert Anton Wilson and Richard Shea's Illuminatus! seems. But while I did fool around with magick, Tarot, and stuff like that under its inspiration I pretty much always stuck to "secular Illuminism." That is, I understood it first and primarily and persistently as a materialist sort of proclamation, that fed into a basically Marxist way of looking for systematic patterns and how these operate to sustain a social system.

Thus by the mid-80's I was starting to listen to radical critiques, including heartfelt personal ones from people I knew regarding sex (and its demonization) and drugs (ditto). Weekly news magazines asking questions like "Are Drugs the Enemy?" on their covers pretty well hit one over the head with their tendentiousness. Then while the Iran/Contra scandal broke I was listening to Pacifica radio, which led to reading Noam Chomsky (his old stuff mostly, on Vietnam, but I got started with a radio interview in which he pointed out that the USS Stark had actually been attacked by an Iraqi missile in the Persian gulf, yet the USA escalated its hostility to Iraq's enemy, Iran). The stage was set for my eventual discovery that reading Marx directly was much more rewarding that letting his alleged ideas filter through more modern interpretations.

Long before theory caught up, though, I knew from repeated personal observations that our media systematically distorts information to project a world-view at odds with reality, but servicable to elite national interests.

I find that certain concepts in Illuminatus! that have nothing to do with any New Agy mysticism are very servicable to me still. There is the SNAFU Principle, “True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.” And the general critique of authoritarianism of course explains the "fnord" practice of hammering in buzzwords and stereotyped stimuli to elicit standard responses in lieu of critical thought and responsible action. In a world where real democracy and a meaningfully free society remain unrealized ideals at best, it would be Utopian indeed to expect the mainstream media to be a clear channel to truth.

Bureacratic Fraud and Abuse

2006-07-31T01:32:00.000-07:00

I met L Natasha Littletree in a community college class in Pasadena, California, in 1989, and within a couple weeks she had invited me to her home. She was severely disabled, with a neuromuscular disorder called Friedreich's Ataxia, and when someone she had hired to assist her did not show up I agreed to enroll as one of her In-Home Supportive Service workers. Within a few months I was her only IHSS care provider, and kept that job until she died in late 2004.

Within a few weeks of moving in with Natasha, I wanted to invent a board game, along the lines of "Monopoly" or "Life" or the like, called "Bureacracy." I was incredibly ignorant and naive about how to navigate social services. Generally speaking, people who qualify for any significant kind of public support need to get help from several different, more or less independent, agencies at once. (Natasha for instance dealt with LA County Social Services, the Pasadena Housing Authority, Social Security, the Department of Rehabilitation, and Medi-Cal). They all have rules, and no one but the recipient knows much about how they interact. When one agency makes a change, the relationship with all of them can be affected, often for the worse. It takes some footwork and savvy to avoid getting mashed in the gears.

While I was with her, Natasha was usually treated pretty fairly, although she had some truly horrendous stories from the course of the previous nineteen years, her entire adult life, of changing policies and systems that were not always what they were supposed to be on paper. She knew when to insist on her rights and when to back down, and when to pay a visit to her local politician. She was about as clearly entitled to support as anyone is considered to be in the USA, and even so for survival's sake she had to learn to be a player. And that's why I think I witnessed relatively few axes fall on her, and why we generally got along well with her social workers. But it took courage, and work, and the onus of bringing the right facts and legal mandates to the attention of various agencies often fell on her.

For instance, our introduction to active participation in negotiating with the California bureacracy at the highest levels came in early 2000, when she decided to join a Sonoma County commission that was going to oversee major reforms in IHSS. The county has a general policy of paying per diem compensation to committee members, and we could not figure out whether hers would be counted as "earned" (in which case she was supposed to keep half of it, the other half being taxed away in increased share of cost from her Social Security Disability) or "unearned," all of which she would lose via shares of cost. Apparently nowhere in the extensive codes of law and case experience did the state every record a case of an actual recipient of SSI, subject to the stringent and restrictive rules on income that come with a program designed to deliver no more than 60 percent of minimum wage income for people deemed unable to work in the regular job markets to live on, actually sitting in such a place of honor as a county committee. At any rate, not a county that paid per diem!

We wound up meeting with state senator's staff, our Congressman's staff in St Helena, then off to an appointment with 5, count'em 5, high-level experts in the state's Health and Human Services Department in Sacramento, in the Capitol. (Governor Gray Davis poked his head into this meeting too.) The experts had no idea either, and had to send us home while they thought about it. Then they decided it was "unearned," on what grounds I never heard.

But the worst instance of bureacratic abuse I witnessed personally was when she was assigned a new In-Home Supportive Services caseworker in 1991 after the one she had when I met her had retired.

They routinely made home visits, in part for the convenience of disabled clients. Well, I'd agree it's more convenient when they keep the friggin' appointment, but she came about 3 hours late.Then she spent about an hour gossiping about her personal life. We were cool with that, I guess. But not in context with what came next.

She glanced at her watch, remarked how she had to run, and said "Now, I'm going to slash your assigned hours of service back 10 percent. You've got a right to appeal but you'll be wasting your time, because my supervisor instructed me to do this with all cases and whatever I say at the hearing she'll back up. Gotta run now."

In context, the stuff she had been saying, about how her son had been killed in mysterious circumstances in Tennesee, but "you know how they cover up for each other over there," seemed ominous.

This was late 1991, and the state deficits had been putting pressure on the whole government at all levels to slash costs. The next year the legislature did semihonestly what the counties had got their orders to do under the table, which was to slash back hours by 10 percent.

If we had stayed in LA County I suppose we'd have gone to a "fair hearing," as they call them. Natasha was alreay a veteran of them, though I never actually witnessed one myself. But we had plans in place to move to Humboldt County, so we decided not to make waves. Now I wish we had. I don't know if the LA cases had to take their arbitrary, illegal, baseless hour cuts on top of the next year's arbitrary, legal, baseless cuts or if LA had the grace to raise their hours back to something accurate before slashing the legally mandated percentage.

In my experience, and from what Natasha had told me about her far more harrowing ones, and from my historical studies on the matter, the social services system is a complex, ambiguous, and layered thing. It is a source of much-needed support, a base of operations for people who work quite hard to reduce human misery and aren't much appreciated for it. At the same time, this same system and these same people are a kind of social police, and are forced (or, sometimes you'd swear, enjoy) to implement policies that are quite brutal and stupid. Or rather, the only way to excuse the system of being foolish or misguided is to attribute outright cynical malice to policymakers instead; the age-old question "are they stupid or are they evil" remains as always a debatable enigma.

In its police-state aspect, it operates in layers. Sometimes--not every year by any means, but often enough to be a familiar terror in the lifetime of a disabled person dependent on social services--you hear of truly barbaric and draconian "reforms" proposed in the legislature or by the governor. These rarely come to pass in their raw form (though the minor reforms that can happen any year tend to be in their direction at least as often as in the direction of improvement.) But for certain "reforms" even to be discussed seriously is truly terrifying, and serves to remind the dependent of their abject condition.

The last years of Natasha's life, for instance, were shadowed not only by the possibility that the Bush Administration might do some very drastic things, but by Arnold Schwarzenegger's initial revelations of his plan to pay for budget cuts by reductions and "reforms" in many services that Natasha either depended on or was charged (as Chair of the Area 4 Board on Developmental Disabilities) with defending even if they weren't directly benefiting her. As things happened, the disability community of California, Natasha and I among them, descended on Sacramento after Arnold disclosed his schemes, and he was forced to at least appear to back off. But I firmly believe that the sheer terror she and I went through in the last weeks of 2003 contributed to her death 10 months later. And in general, by the way, the sorts of "savings" the governor initially hoped to realize would have so imperiled the lives of so many people, and closed the noose on the hopes of so many more for a better life, that such "reforms" probably would result in an actual die-off of the caseload--and that, and that alone, would lead to savings. Rationing by holocaust in other words. It was a specific fear Natasha expressed many times.

Sometimes less severe, but painful, changes are indeed mandated, as the legislature of California did in 1992. At the same time as the state openly and legally cut back service hours (the only way to cut IHSS costs short of murdering clients, since we IHSS workers were only paid minimum wage at the time) they had been cutting back the SSI levels on which the disabled recipients themselves were expected to live for several years, and those cuts, in the form of suspending cost of living increases, have never yet been restored. (The arbitrary hour cuts on the other hand were reversed a year or so later, as the state budget recovered.)

And sometimes, the bureacracy claims to be operating by one set of rules but actually follows others, or essentially none. This is what Natasha's new caseworker was doing in 1991. Had the county of Los Angeles openly adopted a policy of cutting the hours across the board, it probably would have been subject to legal challenge, but officially the county was still following the same guidelines as always; it was only a strange (and fiscally fortunate) coincidence that social workers were finding their disabled clients suddenly needed 10 percent less help.

A more persistent layer of dehumanization is "rationing by hassle." If they know that only a fraction of their "cases" know their rights, and a fraction of them will fight for them, they can cheat the rest, and drive some people who by the rules should be helped right out of the system.

But the real art of browbeating and belittling people who need some kind of help lies in the routines that have survived and been shaped by court challenges. These mental mazes seem fair and reasonable to people who don't have to navigate them to survive, generally without prior benefit of a high-level academic education that puts a premium on abstract systems.But in reality, your average welfare recipient, if the cultural barriers set up by class divisions the welfare system maintains could only be crossed, could tell your average high-level bureaucrat or politician a thing or two they don't know about the systems they are paid to be "expert" in.

People with disabilities may be some of our greatest potential statespersons. In general, diplomats are amateurs, but these are professionals whose survival is their best credential. In a modern world of interlocking systems and societies, anyone looking for sane and humane leadership should look there.

In the last years of her life, Natasha became more and more devoted to public service. She saw herself as an advocate, and the two of us often kept a rather grueling schedule. Sometimes I wonder if the sheer workload killed her perhaps a bit earlier than she might have died anyway. But generally I don't think it was the work or the challenge as such that wore her down, because she reveled in making contact with people, finding allies, being heard, and appreciated. I do believe the appearance of sheer blank walls of bureacratic indifference, especially with the Schwarzenegger Administration that seemed determined to dilute the voices of actual disabled people (and still more poor people in general) with "balance" from corporate interests where they pretended to listen at all, was a bigger burden on her. At any rate, she told me that if the Governor vetoed a certain bill she was passionate about, it would literally break her heart, and less than a week after he did so at the end of September, she was in the hospital and dead, of heart failure, by October 5.

It is possible, I suppose, as her doctors maintained, that the long gradual failure of her heart was not in any way sped up by the stresses and anxieties we went through. But in any case, on issue after issue, even as she took hope in signs of progress and in successes at resisting the most barbaric assaults on her way of living, even as she looked forward to serious and helpful reforms she hoped to see, bureacratic delay kept a dead hand on the actualities.

Given the short span of life alloted her, I think that was quite criminal enough.

I'm still here, sort of...

2006-06-10T00:15:00.000-07:00

The adorable kactus of SuperBabyMama muses "Ou sont les blouggeurs d'antan?"

Here is my reply:

What I do is, babble away on other people's comments. More than once I've been invited, or requested, or perhaps angrily hinted I should be writing this stuff on my blog.

But I have the feeling that one ought to blog on one's own blog about stuff that one's own life, or at least one's own meanderings around the Internet, inspires. And responses to other bloggers belong on their blogs.

Draw what conclusions you will about the quality and character of my own so-called life from my posting habits.

If any of my few fans ever check this out, my old e-mail is suspended and in all probability will never be revived. So use the comments here for a drop box, if you have a mind to.

Keep the "X" in "Xmas!"

2005-12-08T11:57:00.000-08:00

The commercialization of Christmas is a problem, but a very old problem. I'd say by the time the first Miracle on 34th Street movie was made the die was socially cast; if commercializing the holiday was going to ruin it, it started over half a century ago. Maybe it did.

Then again, I'm looking out the window at a dreary rainy day in Sonoma County and figuring, as I have ever since I moved to Humboldt County nearly 13 years ago, that the real "reason for the season" has nothing to do with anyone's religion. People who live in the temperate zone and north of there, in the Northern Hemisphere, generally get miserable weather around this time of year and so there is a deep social need for a holiday. If we didn't have a globally agreed upon party time now, we'd probably seek to hoard our food, money, fuel, whatever, until spring definitely had arrived. We'd spend half the year as miserable Scrooges. This way, we blow a lot of our savings, but we have the chance for a lot of socially shared good cheer, and no one will blame us for being sullenly hung over (for any number of reasons, many not chemical) next January. By then the solstice will have come and gone, and the days will be getting longer. The worst weather may still be to come but we only have to hold out till March or in some places May. Without Yuletide to brighten things up, we'd be much worse off.

Now of course a person who happens to believe in some particular model of how the Universe was organized can draw comfort and meaning from the symbolism of the season. They can assume all this came together with a Purpose in mind and it is no accident their organizing myths bless it. Historically speaking of course, the Christians co-opted a pre-existing holy season that was already a party time, and some denominations over the centuries have taken up arms against all the pagan fooling around that clearly doesn't have anything to do with the Scriptures. But if you believe in a kind and loving God or divine order of any kind, you ought to allow that it is no doubt providential that all this merry-making comes under the rubric of your traditions, even if it is clearly wrong from a Puritanical point of view.

The corporatization of the season is just another takeover in a long series of world-views that have adopted the season, then. If capitalism can have a human face, then we could have plenty of good, friendly fun with Xmas. Only if you suppose the cult of property is itself dangerously and inherently and irrevocably inhumane does it appear as an inherently terrible thing--and even then, we can always seek to co-opt the holidays back to a more humane, fun version and undermine capitalism that way.

I for one can't afford to run around buying gifts, but I can wish you all happy holidays, and remind us all to keep the "X" in "Xmas!"

A Reply to Floris on the Dim Dynasty

2005-10-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Floris,

Thanks for checking in on me!

> From: Florisv
> Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:47:49 -0700 (PDT)
> To: foxwell@sonic.net
> Subject: [A Freeway in Hell] 10/01/2005 12:47:48 PM
>
> intresting. One could almsot sya there would eb akind of bush dinassty.

Kevin Phillips, who once upon a time was involved in Nixon's 1972 re-election and is partially responsible for the racist "Southern Strategy" that has become the core of Republicanism today, has become, simply by standing fast to the same ideological place he was in in 1972 instead of moving right with the rest of his herd, what passes for a leftist populist progressive in this country. He has written several books, beginning with the 1986 The Politics of Rich and Poor, that give incisive insights into the strategy of the Right here. And one of these books is the recent American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (January 2004) which goes in depressing detail into this foul phenomenon. Not only are the Bushes a dynasty with pretensions of actual kinship with the British royal family; many Americans are in general succumbing to the urge to fawn on nobility and dynastic families. It goes hand in hand with the rise of a corporate aristocracy in practice.

> I wouldn't have voted for Bush.

Glad to hear it. I never did. And I don't believe a majority of Americans who voted in the 2004 election did either. It is an indisputable fact that they certainly didn't in 2000.

>The one thing that I did remark is that his
> younger Brotehr, the governor of Florida, looks far smarter then he.

He certainly seems to be. But W won the 1994 election to be governor of Texas and Jeb lost his bid the same year for Florida, so the dumb one got the nod. Besides, the dumb one was the one the American political system craved, as the perfect instrument of an intellectually vacuous and stupendously immoral set of policies; only an idiot could look at those plans and proclaim them as the "restoration of integrity into government."

And Jeb's brains don't make him any less of a disaster as a leader; they just prove that where stupidity in the Bush dynasty leaves off, evil takes over. Or perhaps W is not as fundamentally dumb as he has always looked; perhaps he is just poisoned by the evil.

I wonder if in the Netherlands you've heard Mater Babs's latest revelation of her character, where she remarked that all the victims from New Orleans were better off in refugee camps since as poor people they never had anything worth keeping anyway. If this family was not evil before George HW married her, it had a sufficient injection then. Nasty woman, and that is these guys' mother. (And the sort of creature mister "Kinder and Gentler America" George Herbert Walker Bush would marry. I sometimes wonder if he deserves her, or if she made him the man he is today and was in 1988).

>Lets hope
> tha tthe next president can undo some of the damage done by current
> govenrment. Many peopel in my country were suprised at how the governemtn
> handled katrian, and at reports of levess not being repaired an the like.

This should have come as no surprise to us, since we've seen how the Republicans handled Iraq. But yes, people were astounded that they'd do the same to Americans. So shocking was this, that veteran Fox news reporters who have been shilling for the Right for years and freely lying to carry out the will of Rupert Murdoch were challenging the media stars who tried to minimize the significance of the suffering these reporters were in the middle of. It just caught them under their ideological radars. Four years of what looks like miserable failure to anybody with a decent concept of humanity, and they were seeing it at last.

We honestly don't know whether the planned levee upgrades would have saved the city or not, but we do know this--for the past 2 years 80 percent of the projected budget for that project was diverted to pay for the war in Iraq, and for tax cuts, and pork for other politicians. Just 1/5 of the money that was supposed to be spent on the project remained. It seems likely to me that at least, the damage would have been less if the project had gone forward as planned.

>But
> something like katrina would hit us, a 300 km area would be destroyed. Still,
> there are so many things that could have been done after the previous
> hurricane in the 1960's, and weren't, I hope that hsi time around they do do
> them. Peoples live could have been saved.

We are all vulnerable, especially in a world which is definitely undergoing warming. There is talk right now of another hurricane in the Gulf that would be named with the letter S. The Gulf is definitely warmer and prone to create both more and stronger tropical storms. I have never spent any time in the Netherlands except for changing planes at Schipohl, and I remember looking with Natasha at the mark that showed sea level--about at my eye level, and Natasha in her wheelchair would have been about half a meter below it.

I really hope to visit the Netherlands someday. But I've been to Florida--if the seas rise, that state will be gone.

> why I found personnally so very
> strange and not just, was how people stayed on holdiay while, this was surely
> a disaster.I think I'm going to reread your post again. It igve a differnt
> view, opinion, then those often seen on the news.

I don't watch TV (unless you count DVDs of science fiction series--all the Star Trek stuff, Lexx, Red Dwarf...) anymore, but I do often listen to Air America radio; most of what I have learned about Katrina comes from web pages or Randi Rhodes on Air America. I wonder if you have any way to hear her in the Netherlands? She is the kind of American one can be proud of.

I have to wonder what they have been saying on Dutch TV.

The whole "let them eat cake" attitude of the Administration, as I have said, did come as a shock to a lot of Americans who are not normally considered at all progressive. Meanwhile, on the left, it has been pointed out that the calloused inaction of the Administration was supplemented by negative action--they actually acted to block private and foreign initiatives to help people out. And we have reason to suspect that the death or destitution and displacement of the mostly African-American New Orleans poor and the devastation of coastal people in general is seen as a windfall by rich people who hope to rebuild the region their way, for their profit. Already the Governor of Mississippi is trying to open the way for converting his state's coastline to a free zone for casinos.

Meanwhile, a lot of people were reminded of Bush's "My Pet Goat" moment on 9/11/01, when after getting the news of the second airplane to crash into the Trade Center, he sat for over 10 minutes, either oblivious or in shock, and continued reading a classroom of Florida school children pages from My Pet Goat. It is hard to figure out whether he is dim, sociopathic, just evil, or some combination of all of them--but this time, only a minority here think he was any kind of leader.

Position rant #1: on the war on Iraq

2005-10-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

This is largely in response to a quip by Pudentilla at Skippy; in keeping with my sporadically kept resolution to put long responses here on the blog instead of cluttering up my friends' comment sections, here is most of it, the more abstract and general part:

There is a hierarchy of abstraction around the question "should we under any circumstances have invaded and 'reformed' Iraq?" At the most abstract level of hypothetical cases, I can't honestly say I'd conclude, unequivocally and in all circumstances, "no." It depends on the details of course, and I'd never have been OK with the USA doing it alone and unsupervised, unless the Iraqi military had attacked the USA in a serious way (and there were no doubt about the accuracy of that claim.) Even then, we'd be obliged to follow some rules no matter what the Iraqi government had done.
But step away from the most abstract possibilities and contemplate the realities, and I say, "No way, not these guys, not ever." I can't forget that the Bushes, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and all that lot were so deeply involved in supporting Hussein for 12 years before they suddenly noticed he was a bloody-handed dictator. Not to mention the suspicious circumstances surrounding Hussein's decision to invade Kuwait--that he took care to consult with the US Ambassador, April Glaspie, before attacking and that her orders were clearly to give him a green light to do it. I have long believed that all the Gulf Wars were at least in part set up by morally vicious American politicos who cynically invested in bloody conflict for strategic reasons, and had we behaved decently none of these wars would have happened (and perhaps Saddam Hussein would never have ruled Iraq, or he'd overreach and get trounced early on in his career--remember, it was the USA that protected him the most from 1978 to 1991.) That crew would never have my blessing, but what did they care? Their best shot for invading Iraq and getting away with it was in 1991 and they passed it by. I would not have trusted Bill Clinton to do the job, mainly because he listened to these same neocons or their fellow travelers far too often and because his hands were tied and elbows joggled by the Congressional Republicans. And doing it in the criminal manner that aWol did it was just inexcusable, no matter what good these people, in some parallel universe where they suddenly grew hearts and brains, might have done once they got control.
And the hell of it is, they could have done some good. Not that I think they could have turned their own evil into good that way, but they might have earned the option of being forgiven by those they had wronged. If the initial force size of the invasion had been what every competent Army planner assumed would be necessary, then the chaos and looting of the post-invasion period would have been under control. If instead of slipping grossly inflated no-bid contracts into the pockets of their closest corporate cronies the Admin had detailed the American forces to direct the Iraqi people themselves into rebuilding their own country, the cost would be lower, the problems of unemployment in Iraq would be greatly lowered or eliminated, trust and camaraderie instead of hatred and viciousness would have been cultivated between Americans and Iraqis--and oh yes, the jobs would get done, the power would be on, the water flowing, the schools rebuilt.

But we have seen what the priorities and goals of aWol's crew are--either that, or they are so incompetent it staggers the mind, and clearly they don't learn better from mistakes if that is the case. But no, I think the time for generously assuming stupidity on their part is past--clearly they are doing what they intended. It benefits a few, tax cuts garner them a strategically loyal following who will justify any atrocity for their few thousand a year, and the pattern of behavior continues. They deny help of kinds that went without saying in previous administrations no matter how mean, dim, or misguided; they seek to charge for what they do offer, they channel it through crony contracts that don't even get the job done and cost the entire mint literally, and they try to establish that what they are doing is and should be normal for all time.

Because I think all of our interventions in Iraq have been badly intended and viciously executed, I think there is no question--we have to get out, now. Yesterday or three decades ago would have been better, but the best we can do is today. If we cut and run, we will surely leave a mess. But unless we undergo a drastic moral reform as a nation, and totally rework our priorities in government and private life, we have to expect that even a new American administration would continue to do even more harm. Whatever good past generations have done overseas in other places, the USA as we know it does on the whole only harm in Iraq, and we had better get out for our sakes as well as those of the Iraqis.

An Aristocracy of Demerit

2005-09-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

In reply to a Skippy post by Cookie Jill, "missing in partying action," which simply asks where those lovable Bush twins (with picture of one of them, I can't tell which) sticking her tongue out at we the people, have gotten to during the current crisis of Hurricane Katrina (shall we call it "Floodgate?") a reader named Charly asks:

"I still don't understand how AMERICA...home of the quote-un-quote "free" and "brave...has a RULING CLASS that everyone KNOWS ABOUT...and everyone is OKAY WITH THIS???? "

Ah, Charly, weren't you raised to believe that the USA has an "aristocracy of merit?"

Perhaps it is inevitable that all peoples everywhere who have a society more economically sophisticated than the gatherer-hunters we evolved as must have some kind of ruling class. I sort of hope not, but I am perfectly well prepared to live with the idea that some people will be privileged to have their hands on the ruling levers. Even the anarchist Utopia that Ursula LeGuin imagined in her science fiction novel The Dispossessed had evolved a sort of ruling clique on Anarres; one of her themes was that their idealism demanded renewed revolution, and that is something her scientist protagonist Shevek and his friends stumbled into doing in his generation. But he saw how worthwhile the effort was when he went to the capitalist Utopia of the nation of A-Io on their homeworld, Urras, which Anarres was the moon of.

My personal political philosophy is that people need to struggle for power in whatever system they live in; if they do, they will be heard in some way (perhaps beaten down brutally for the effort, but the alternative is to be even more brutally beaten down if they don't act up). If they don't fight for themselves no one will save them. But it could be that a society that has tremendous disparities in standards of living and political rights might be a decent one--if and only if the ruling class is held by the majority to deliver good rule that considers the interests of everyone. To get that, everyone has to have a de facto recognized right to speak up.

The apologists for the American class system argue that Americans do have that right. However, they generally also scheme to find ways to abolish or sidestep that right, and insofar as they have succeeded, our "aristocracy of merit" has evolved into a just plain aristocracy, with all the abuses and outrages we find in the history books and overseas where we can easily see them.

I think it is only logical that a society that respects the interests and needs of everyone will evolve into a more egalitarian society since I think "merit" is pretty evenly distributed. I might be wrong about that too. But the opposite idea, that social stratification leads to more excellence, seems amply and dismally disproved again and again.

I have a book by Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. One of his themes is that in general the USA has been slipping for some time into a genuine oligarchic aristocracy; today the ruling classes and the snobs and wanna-bes are not ashamed to tie their precious families to old Europe's ruling clans. The Bushes claim to be related to Queen Elizabeth II.

A major claim of such fatheaded apologists for our ruling system as George Gilder (author among other things of The Inevitability of Patriarchy, and lately notorious as an advocate of "Intelligent Design") is that the ruling classes are in fact demographically transformed as poor people with drive displace the feckless third and fourth generation trust fund babies. The Bush twins, and Dan Quayle, and aWol himself, seem to indicate otherwise and serious and scrupulous study of our ruling families exposes this myth for the lie it is.

It is often said that Americans tolerate the abuses of our system because they hope to become rich and get cut in on the spoils. I wonder if that is true to any significant extent; if it is, it is high time we wipe away that illusion. But I suspect that the large majority already realize the system doesn't work that way.

This is why our rulers are so afraid of democracy or even values (such as judgment on pragmatic performance) that might hold them accountable in any way. They are juggling illusions, people see through them, and they know it. Hence the growing interest in means of repression.

"I am Gandalf..."

2005-07-19T00:56:00.000-07:00

... and apparently, "Gandalf means me!"

This despite some honest answers to the test that I was not very proud of.

I expected to turn up as Stanley Tweedle or something like that. I have to admit I like it this way.

But there are far worse things than being Stanley Tweedle.

Why Conservative Social Darwinism will kill us all

2005-06-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

For reasons best known to himself, the admirable Skippy the Bush Kangaroo cultivates a friendship with "moderate conservative" blogger Chuck Simmins. I find myself clashing especially hard with these types held up as "reasonable," open-minding, civil spokesmen of the Right. Their reputation for balance and benignity is largely by contrast with the vicious, unreasoned screeds we typically find if we venture into any rightist venue. Was ever thus of course; the reactionaries of the 1900s or 1920s or 1950s were hardly ever known for their civility either. It does not take much to shine in comparison to these standards and so we find people of reasonable views gamely keeping the channels open to the more measured voices on the Right.

Well, that is the nature of freedom on the Internet, people can do as they please in their piece of Blogtopia. (YSCTP!) (This is why here I use capital letters; if I were posting on Skippy it would be "skippy" and the upper case would be banned. But I like the uppercase letters fulfilling their role; makes it easier to read I think.) Thank you Skippy and Joe Gandleman for this service. But I rather doubt we have much to learn from these types save to remind ourselves how grim the current cultural struggle is becoming.

Yesterday G. D. Frogsdong, a Skippy regular contributor, brought to Skippydom yet another outrageous story of our times, of a young man whom it appears Marine recruiters actually kidnapped in an attempt to enlist him.

Let me quote the relevant bit here:

[At the home of young Axel Cobb, with no one else present...] The sergeant was friendly but, at the same time, aggressively insistent. This time, when Axel said, "Not interested," the sarge turned surly, snapping, "You're making a big (bleeping) mistake!"
Next thing Axel knew, the same sergeant and another recruiter showed up at the LaConner Brewing Co., the restaurant where Axel works. And before Axel, an older cousin and other co-workers knew or understood what was happening, Axel was whisked away in a car.

[In context of the threat above, and similar threats made to other potential recruits elsewhere, this looks like a coerced trip to me. Hence, kidnapping.--Mark]

"They said we were going somewhere but I didn't know we were going all the way to Seattle," Axel said.

Just a few tests. And so many free opportunities, the recruiters told him.

He could pursue his love of chemistry. He could serve anywhere he chose and leave any time he wanted on an "apathy discharge" if he didn't like it. And he wouldn't have to go to Iraq if he didn't want to.

[These are clearly instances of lies.]

At about 3:30 in the morning, Alex was awakened in the motel and fed a little something. Twelve hours later, without further sleep or food, he had taken a battery of tests and signed a lot of papers he hadn't gotten a chance to read. "Just formalities," he was told. "Sign here. And here. Nothing to worry about."

Meanwhile, his mother and sister were frantically searching for him. Guessing he might be at the Seattle center, they had to resort both to lies of their own and invading the premises without permission to locate him and remove him from these deceptive, manipulative clutches.

But, even after being told her son would be brought right out, her daughter spied him being taken down a separate hall and into another room. So she dashed down the hall and grabbed him by the arm.
"They were telling me I needed to 'be a man' and stand up to my family," Axel said.

What he needed, it turned out, was a lawyer.

Five minutes and $250 after an attorney called the recruiters, Axel's signed papers and his cell phone were in the mail.

Such tactics as the recruiters were using (this incident being only the culmination of a long campaign of harassment against this family) lead clearly to the "press gang" familiar in Britain in Napoleonic times. Have we actually gotten to that point yet? Perhaps not, depending on further details of the story and whether what is there is accurate or not, but it certainly fits into the general trend we have seen in many stories of increasingly aggressive recruiters who leave voice mail threatening kids with Federal prosecution if they don't sign up at the office, and the increasingly sweeping powers granted recruiters under No Child Left Behind and other Federal acts--not to mention the rising level of desperation the military brass must feel as the Iraqi war drags on, the already exaggerated terms of called-up reservists finally draw to a close, and the aWol administration continues to look for trouble in yet more theatres without reaching any finales in the current run of blockbusters. Without a draft of some kind a crisis seems quite inevitable and imminent. Why then should we discount a story of just such a draft--not sanctioned by law, but entirely possible in Bush's America--when it comes up?

But this is what Chuck Simmons did. Here's his comment, first on the thread:

Let's face it, that kid isn't the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

If they have a complaint, they should report the recruiters. The Corps will take action.

Chuck Simmins

My own response was outraged. Here we have both Social Darwinism, with the implication that a dumb kid would be little loss to the Republic, and a truly obtuse confidence that the system would take care of any irregularity. Why it should, if we ignore all such warnings, and if we don't care about dumb kids anyway, is not clear. There is no mention in the article of anything that suggests the young man is developmentally disabled, or learning impaired, or otherwise not intelligent--in fact he was attending a community college at the time he was shanghaied to the Seattle induction center.

What he is is the son of a Vietnam vet who died when Axel was four. His mother assured the article's writer, Susan Paynter of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, that "because of his own experience in the service, Marcia says enlistment for his son is the last thing Axel's dad would have wanted." Instead the kid was raised to be affable; "'I've been trained to be pretty friendly. I guess you might even say I'm kind of passive,' Axel told [Paynter] last week, just after his mother and older sister had tracked him to a Seattle testing center and sprung him on a ruse." But stock in trade of the recruiters' spiel was that he needed to join the Marines to "make his father proud," to "be a man," to support his limited-income mother.

As for Chuck's confidence that the system would square the matter out--in the months leading up to being kidnapped to Seattle, the Marines had been indulging in a drawn-out harassment campaign of frequent phone calls (which Mrs Cobb was told rightly or wrongly could not be blocked, being from US Government origins) that led to the family making specific requests in writing that the attempts at contact cease. A request that was disregarded, clearly, and the recruiters clearly, according to the article, adjusted their tactics to circumvent family support for Axel rather than respecting the family's unanimously expressed wishes. There is no statement that young Mr. Cobb was mentally impaired in the article then, which Simmins takes as self-evident, but a clear statement based on experience that complaints through channels meant nothing to the recruiters--that is there in black and white.

To this, Simmins's answer is to join in with a chorus of other charming rightists who take Donald Rumsfeld's word as gospel truth but accuse the family and/or reporter of making up the story for reasons of political manipulation, insanity, or "too much estrogen."

Paynter has followed up both calls from liberal/radicals like myself for prosecution of the Marines for kidnapping Axel Cobb (legally it was not kidnapping, though I still think that there are clear undertones of coercion in the threateningly persistent way these guys disregarded frequently being told no and requests they back off, and of course that muttered threat) and also the numerous rants of mindless patriots like Chuck who presume any young man in his situation must be a victim of female "moonbats" bent on denying his destiny as a man, which only the Marines or some other service can give him.

The lines are hardening I guess. It is growing more difficult to negotiate sharing a planet with people like this.

Last week I saw a pair of men in camouflage Army uniform in a grocery store. I considered going up to them and welcoming them back home, even if it was just for a leave. But later I got a closer look and saw that these guys were part of the Recruiting Corps. All my sympathy froze right out of my blood. "Why the hell aren't you in Iraq," I wondered about these healthy, cocky young guys. Why the hell aren't our recruiters disabled veterans anyway? We have plenty of them.

But presumably it is necessary for recruiters to present a glamorous image of the military and not remind potential recruits too pointedly of the possible sacrifices they might face having to make. (Quite a contrast with Robert Heinlein's service-based society in Starship Troopers, where all the recruiters were disabled vets!) It would be otherwise if we had an ethic of national service-but such an ethic would have to rest on government and society keeping faith with those who have served, and there is little of that, and sadly this has been the tradition rather than the exception in this great Republic of ours--the Veteran's administration being a traditional outlet for patronage and graft going back to its foundation.

Meanwhile today our rulers face a choice of retaining the current crop of chumps in Iraq past their specified terms (while needing to replace attrition just to maintain a given level of force) or somehow getting increasingly skeptical youth to join up.

We no longer have good reason to be confident that press-gang tactics will be prevented by the checks and balances of a liberal society. Here Chuck for one sees a report that it is happening and dismisses it on purely ideological grounds. Meanwhile, the percentages of parents who say they would encourage their children to serve in the military have halved from just last year--down to 23% or so from 43% last year. That I think is not so much a perception that the war in Iraq is tough and dangerous (it is of course, Chuck just lost a neighbor to it) as that the system as a whole will not keep what promises it makes.

To fight it in the first place the government called up legions of people who had already served extensively and did not volunteer; this voided any confidence we might have in the good faith of the government. Knowing now that the premises of the war were wrong can only undermine confidence; knowing that these were not mistakes but a deliberate campaign of deception makes the state the enemy. While an assault is mounted on every form of social support, from welfare and food stamps (which the families of soldiers often need to survive) to education, that offers an alternative to military service for those who are not connected, the treatment of actual veterans and people disabled while serving gets worse.

To charming Chuck of course his independent-minded Americanism manifests as contempt for all those who condemn anything Americans do as long as someone else is doing anything bad:

The point that Rumsfeld made, and that I echo is that there were investigations, and that people have been punished. The pseudo outrage that many claim to feel is just that. There is no outrage for other acts of cruelty or persecution committed by Saddam's thugs, or Moslems, or anyone but American soldiers.

That's a lie of course and he knows it: back when Saddam Hussein was America's agent in the region it was only leftists who pointed out his many crimes, including using the poison gas Donald Rumsfeld himself delivered with a personal handshake. Perhaps if Chuck defines "outrage" as surprise, he might score some points; it was no surprise to me that US authorities, particularly ones whose peacetime work was in US prisons, would cross the line into torture, nor that we would hold masses of prisoners with no grounds for trial for years incommunicado. It was anticipating abuses like this I was against the war. Unlike Chuck I have no faith that more than a fraction of the abuses that went on and go on have been investigated, let alone acted on. I am not shocked--but there is nothing pseudo about my outrage at our behavior, which to our shame is our behavior for which we are responsible directly. When someone else injures me I have a grievance, but when I hurt someone else I am the criminal and that is far worse.

But Chuck reads that a handful of low-ranking soldiers get court-martialed and a dozen or so officers suffer "administrative penalties" and for him that is the end of the matter; of course the USA cannot be systematically torturing people to achieve its policies--and if we do, why by golly they must deserve it. Why else might we do it? That we might be attempting to terrorize a nation, and by implicit threat the world, into compliance with wishes we cannot get by persuasion, is unthinkable to him. Only bad guys do stuff like that--and if we do, then we only do it to bad guys, so there! Therefore any and all criticism of US policy is read by Chuck as indiscriminate hatred of the people in uniform--people he individually has no respect for until they are killed anyway, judging by his remarks about near-Marine Cobb.

As a person from a military family, I don't distrust the uniform as such; I know there are decent people doing their best in those uniforms as well as a number of psychopathic thugs--always have been, always will be. And I suspect the consensus among the soldiers is cynical and skeptical and I hope that this sane majority in uniform will draw the line and put an end to the escalation of this madness. (It is no coincidence I think that there are far more veterans who are Democratic than Republican politicians these days--I have no idea what Chuck makes of that.)

The people I disbelieve are the current crop of civilian commanders who choose what the military will say and do, and who are among other things hell-bent on purging dissent from the ranks and putting in Christocratic commissars.

And meanwhile, we the American people have a special interest in what our side does because we are supposed to control that. If other people are rotten scum who do outrageous things, it does not follow we must do as they do in order to prevail. If we choose to behave that way then it is our responsibility.

The fact that many of the specific supervillains Chuck wants us to believe should be blamed for all problems today were quite recently deemed allies by our rulers. The very same irresponsible clique that today demands conformity and obedience so we can allegedly smash these scum were the ones who chose to raise up the likes of Saddam Hussein against Iran and Osama Bin Laden against the Soviets. So, I am doubly skeptical that falling in line behind the banner of a crusade will lead to any good outcome. It only compromises us further to go down that road. If our mission was to liberate Iraq from Hussein, we have done that, and all the nice constructive rebuilding Chuck likes to document on his site has always been delayed and offset by the ongoing destruction we meanwhile inflict. I don't believe we are trying to build democracy nor a "republic" in Iraq, we are consolidating a military/corporate colony and as long as we stay will be overseeing a revolving door of puppet governments.

Chuck says it is all justified by the need for Western Civilization to commit cultural genocide in the Middle East, breaking up Islam as a belief system. I actually think we might drift down that road and eventually do it, and be able to, technically, at the cost of considerable losses and the destruction of much of the world's remaining oil supply and probable global climatic and ecological catastrophe. This would create the huge global coalition against us I think we could not defeat, any more than Hitler could hold off the combined forces of USSR, USA, and Great Britain aided by the outraged peoples he had conquered.

But I don't actually think the rulers plan to conclude this crusade any more than Bush Sr planned to actually remove Saddam Hussein from power. I never believed any of Bush's military adventures had a good purpose or were the best way to defuse the threats that confront us; rather they only make them worse, and the leadership does not care about that because they reckon they can ride it out, and exposing the rest of us to the worsening danger only will make us more obedient. The idea is to set up a new ideological division to justify their own rule; the struggle itself is their "solution" and therefore I believe they have largely created the so-called enemy to play this role. It is a dangerous, stupid, destructive, wicked way of running things but I have to admit it seems to be working.

And that is why I think recruiters these days think they can get away with kidnapping and 101st Keyboarders like Chuck Simmins the "reasonable conservative" will cheer it on with Social Darwinist remarks. If we let people like him determine our policies, then the world will ultimately roll back our assault on it, probably over our dead bodies.

Mission and purpose of Big Brass Blog

2005-05-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

Melissa McEwan, AKA Shakespeare's Sister has been pulling together the Big Brass Blog to unite our efforts to bring Bush and his minions (or masters, whatever, they all look like flying monkeys to me) to an accounting specifically for the war on Iraq. The "Downing Street Memos," if only they were more widely known to the US public, are a damning indictment, an indication that the alleged grounds for war were fabricated. But let Sister Shakes express it:

After Downing Street is a Coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups, which launched on May 26, 2005, a campaign to urge the U.S. Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The campaign focuses on evidence that recently emerged in a British memo containing minutes of a secret July 2002 meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security officials.

The name is a reference to the Downing Street Memo, a British memo recently made public in the London Times, which contained the minutes (pdf) of a secret July 2002 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security officials.

After Downing Street reports: In response to the release of the memo, John Bonifaz, a Boston attorney specializing in constitutional litigation, sent a memo to Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, urging him to introduce a Resolution of Inquiry directing the House Judiciary Committee to launch a formal investigation into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House to impeach President Bush. Bonifaz's memo, made available today at www.AfterDowningStreet.org, begins: "The recent release of the Downing Street Memo provides new and compelling evidence that the President of the United States has been actively engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people about the basis for going to war against Iraq. If true, such conduct constitutes a High Crime under Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution."

Congressman Conyers is now seeking 100,000 signatures to sign a letter on the Downing Street Inquiry. Information available at Raw Story and dKos .

Sign the letter here. Write to your Congresspeople here.

Another Salon article by Juan Cole, is that Tony Blair had to convince George Bush to go after al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and Bush would only do so in exchange for Britain's support of the Iraq invasion:

"Astonishingly, the Bush administration almost took the United States to war against Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. We know about this episode from the public account of Sir Christopher Meyer, then the U.K. ambassador in Washington. Meyer reported that in the two weeks after Sept. 11, the Bush national security team argued back and forth over whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan. It appears from his account that Bush was leaning toward the Iraq option.

"Meyer spoke again about the matter to Vanity Fair for its May 2004 report, 'The Path to War.' Soon after Sept. 11, Meyer went to a dinner at the White House, 'attended also by Colin Powell, [and] Condi Rice," where 'Bush made clear that he was determined to topple Saddam. "Rumors were already flying that Bush would use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq," Meyer remembers.' When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an 'Iraq first' policy in Washington.

"Meyer told Vanity Fair, 'Blair came with a very strong message -- don't get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban.' He must have been terrified that the Bush administration would abandon London to al-Qaida while pursuing the great white whale of Iraq. But he managed to help persuade Bush. Meyer reports, 'Bush said, "I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."' Meyer also said, in spring 2004, that it was clear 'that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions.' In short, Meyer strongly implies that Blair persuaded Bush to make war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan first by promising him British support for a later Iraq campaign."

...Finding out if this underreported outrage is true is an important part of the inquiry for which After Downing Street is fighting. That President Bush's entire presidency has relied on his ostensibly unique ability to "keep America safe," even though he had to be cajoled into going after the party truly responsible for 9/11, is not only an outrage, but a national disgrace.

Of course I agree. Back in 2002 I knew that Bush had always meant to make war on Iraq and didn't need inside information to disbelieve any and all of his claims; for that matter I doubted the basic wisdom of invading Afghanistan and certainly believed Bush was making a mess of that effort too. That Bush promised the invasion of Iraq would be a "Lightning War," which is of course English for "Blitzkreig," was merely the added outrage that prompted me to write my Senators (Boxer and Feinstein, I'm in California) to urge them to listen to nothing these proven liars/incompetents had to say. Sadly, Feinstein informed me she had classified information leading her to support the President's bid for war, which she did. Idiot. The Dems could not have stopped the war train perhaps, but at this point, and last November for that matter, they, and we, would be better off if they could say it was not their train wreck now. And they can't say no one warned them; plenty of people better informed than me could see this was all nonsense.

But it is nice to have evidence. Now it is important for people to know it exists.

Recessional: for our modern Memorial Days

2005-05-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

Recessional

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine -
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law ~
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word -
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Rudyard Kipling

Many of us find Kipling's self-righteous assumption that the British Empire was carrying out the will of God, and that the historical practices that gave them "Dominion over palm and pine" were decent and pious. But in fact the British Empire was not just a sustained act of piracy; it owed its strength while it had it in part to judiciousness and restraint. We Americans like to believe that we have acted with restraint and kindness in our own period of world hegemony; to the extent we actually have we could expect strength beyond mere strength of our arms. And to that extent, the men and women who like buried in our graveyards and under foreign soil died in a noble cause.

But when Kipling wrote this, for Queen Victoria's Silver Jubilee, few would foretell the dark fate overshadowing the Empire on which the Sun never set. British power and prosperity were riding high. The disease he diagnoses eating away at this apparent ruddy health and strength might be interpreted as the small-minded, Phariseeical creatures who run our country today would do, as a failure of piety and authority. But read the words; the sin is the sin of pride in material power, the power to coerce and threaten. What nation today places more "trust/in reeking tube and iron shard" than ours? Who has done more to totally forget all moral laws in the course of having "our" way?

It isn't the soldiers who are making these decisions, though horribly it is they who carry them out. Some are corrupted by this, others have always been corrupt; most are damaged, and all are placed in the front line of the danger of inevitable retribution.

It matters so much what they die for. Bring them home before more die for destruction only.

A letter to the editor of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat

2005-05-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

On May 18th the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat printed this editorial:

"New Nukes: Is it so crazy to consider reviving America's nuclear program?"

Well, yes, I think it is pretty crazy. Here is my letter, just under 200 words with all address elements in place:

Editor:

There is a key word missing from the nuclear debate: security. Unlike any other power source, fissionable metals and their waste products are suitable for making very deadly weapons of mass destruction. Radioactive materials are highly effective poisons. And if the rosy promises of the nuclear lobby are to be kept, we cannot rely on scanty supplies of uranium--we must build breeder reactors to turn low-grade fissionables like thorium into plutonium. Not only is plutonium even more poisonous than most radioactive materials, it is weapons-grade material. If we have a nuclear powered economy, we must consider not only the likelihood of accidents and the problem of waste disposal, we must also stop deliberate attempts to abuse it. A nuclear powered world will inevitably suffer nuclear weapons proliferation to both nations and wild terrorist groups, and inevitably some of these weapons will be used while others will pose a constant threat of blackmail. We would be insane to consider nuclear power as anything but a last desperate recourse, and if we use it we would need to run the industry behind fortifications.

Mark H. Foxwell
Windsor CA 95492

We'll see if they print it. It is probably just as well that I had no space to express my misgivings about any future nuclear power industry being run by private companies. We have little reason to think that all companies would keep up the highest standards of security and safety at all times. On the contrary during hard economic times, the less well off power companies might well scant on securty, alienate their workers, or even themselves conspire to commit nuclear fraud, selling materials for ready cash. I believe that if we do develop nuclear power, we should give the whole job to the Army--let them hire the researchers, engineers, and contractors, and run the plants with uniformed soldiers--fully trained to be professional plant operators, but also fully trained and with their main allegiance as soldiers. If we need nuclear power, it becomes a national priority, and at the same time the public must be protected from its risks. I would propose that the whole nuclear industry past the mining stage be moved behind the fortified walls of great isolated Army installations--processing, forming of power materials (and weapons), the plant itself, and all its wastes all to remain on one site so there is no danger of hijacking nuclear materials. A number of such fortress complexes might be hardened to survive even nuclear attack, and buttoned down so that no one but Army personnel on duty and closely watched authorized visitors enters, and nothing radiocative (except perhaps bombs made on site) ever leaves. Such plants would be inconvenient to the power grid, but we could use their power to synthesize fuels. The military ethos is I think far more suited to the task of running and guarding such a concentration of power and risk than is the security division of any private company, for career soldiers and officers are committed to a long-term perspective and are held accountable for what they do even decades after the fact.

Naturally the Bush Administration has no such plans; their idea is to pour more pork into the mouths of their corporate overlords. A mess of private companies, with plants scattered over the map and nuclear materials changing hands continually is the perfect nuclear nightmare.

Sinners in the Hands of An Angry Blog

2005-05-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

Your Deadly Sins

Lust: 40%

Pride: 20%

Sloth: 20%

Wrath: 20%

Envy: 0%

Gluttony: 0%

Greed: 0%

Chance You'll Go to Hell: 14%

You'll die of a yet to be discovered STD.

How Sinful Are You?

I tried to be totally honest in my reactions to each questions but I might have overstressed my actual lust and understressed my gluttony. Still, I think this accords well with the "virtuous pagan" evaluation I got from the Dante's Inferno test.

Natasha blogging

2005-05-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

L Natasha Littletree's 53rd birthday would have been Wednesday before last, April 27. This past Friday she was honored at the Area 4 Board on Developmental Disability's Legislative Forum. I wrote a very short indication of who she was before an award was given in her name for lifetime achievement in advocacy for disabled people.

Here is that:

Hello, all of you. I’m Mark Foxwell, and I was Natasha’s partner and care provider from the month I met her 16 years ago until this October when she died at Memorial Hospital here in Santa Rosa. Many of you were able to come to Natasha’s funeral and were there for her or thinking of her in her last days; I am sure first of all she would want me to thank you for that. The last years of her life she was both anxious and yet thrilled and fulfilfilled by the chance to work with so many of you, and the hope of meeting you all. In the months just before I had to take her to the hospital she was determined to shephard in another Legislative Forum, and now here you all are again. So she would thank you all for that. I met Natasha in a community college class at Pasadena City College in 1989. There was this very cute young lady in a wheelchair behind me in class, who looked fascinated. She caused people to notice her. She more than the impression she made, and she was in control of it. Everything she ever came near got twisted a bit out of whack from everyday reality. She had the power of finding names for things, names that were apt and made the thing more real. Her strength had a foundation in love but tempered in adversity, as she had to struggle so often. But she was never bitter; she believed in working herself and those around her to near exhaustion but also in having fun. Being close to her was demanding, but also very rewarding. She lived a life many ordinary people would envy, hanging out with rock stars when she was young, but she dreamed of things ordinary people take for granted, like a job, marriage, and a home of her own. Living with her I quickly came to suspect she was just magic. All I can say for sure is this--Natasha Littletree lived a life that was worth living, and at least the 16 years I spent with her were years I lived a worthy life too. No matter what else I might ever do, I will always be proud of the time we spent together, and wish we had more time with her. The one thing she wanted the most was to be remembered--”I live in the hope of becoming a memory” was a phrase she repeated often. On her behalf I am grateful to you all for remembering her today.

In case you were wondering

2005-05-08T21:26:00.000-07:00

I am:
-7%
Republican.

"You're a damn Commie! Where's Tailgunner Joe when we need him?"

Are You A Republican?

Where have all the nuke plants gone?

2005-05-08T18:16:00.000-07:00

Back when I read a lot of science fiction in the 1970s, when I was in junior high and high school, I used to be a believer in many if not all of the planks of the modern Republican platform. I placed great store in advancing technology opening up doors and holding off otherwise certain disasters such as power crises. In particular nuclear power seemed on the whole the power source of the future. Why is it that today I no longer think so?

Well, there are several problematic aspects of nuclear power I was unaware of. Besides the danger of accidental breakdowns during operation, what are we to do with the waste products which will remain dangerous for centuries or millenia after we have made use of the metals? This is the problem of disposal and the only solution proposed so far is to find someplace full of suckers who won't realize their danger or political losers who don't seem to have the power to resist, and sneak it into their neighborhood when they aren't looking or can do nothing to stop you. Not even as right-wing a state as Nevada has people that sold on the rightness of the corporate line or that stupid; both the state's Senators (Democratic Minority leader Reid and Republican Ensign) are dead against the proposed disposal site. But if not Nevada, where? And if we outsource it to India--might we not regret it, for a leak even there might ultimately affect us here, and someone digging down and stealing some only slightly cooled wastes to deliberately fling at someone or put in their water would be more likely on the soil of poor exploited nations than in those regions where the power was once of some use.

Meanwhile, in order for known and likely radioactive ores to serve as power metals for "centuries" it is necessary to build breeder reactors which will create plutonium to be fissioned in power reactors. Plutonium is a much more dangerous material than uranium is.

At some point or other someone will speak up for fusion. We have not yet accomplished commercialy feasible sustained nuclear fusion. If we can, with an unknown amount of investment over an unknown period of time, develop that, we will indeed be freed of fears of depleting the power supply for perhaps millenia--presumably in that time we will develop still better alternatives that could even keep up with the exponential growth of power usage such a system might allow. But barring truly radical breakthroughs every practical method of harnessing the power of fusion involves capturing the energy it would release _mainly_ in the form of fast neutrons, in a blanket of fissionables that would be transmuted into plutonium in much the same way as in a fission breeder reactor. So actually such a system would involve precisely the same risks and costs as I outline below, except that if the plant is cheap enough then we will be doing it all on a bigger scale with even greater risks of something going horribly wrong.

And here we come to a crucial point--all this discussion of safety refers to a rational world where people have no malice. In reality there is a great deal of discontent and viciousness floating around the world, from disgruntled employees to religious fanatics who think they should kill the world's population because it is God's will. In between there are angry, desperate politicans, crazy soldiers, and dictators contemplating being removed from power. In this context--consider the actual history of nuclear power.

1) long before there was a power industry, there was a weapons industry.

2) Economically, nuclear power never did fly in this country. It took decades of gung-ho boosterism by the "Atomic Energy Commission" which used to be in charge of both regulating and promoting nuclear power to persuade private power conglomerates, even the largest ones with the biggest and most stable markets (best for nuke power, that requires a steady output) to buy in. When they did--they found the plants and the metals incredibly difficult and expensive to build and use. Rates have not gone down where nuke plants have been built, they have gone up. And this despite a package of incentives that included total freedom from liability in case of an accident. Other nations that have developed nuclear power aggressively such as France or the USSR, did so with massive government subsidy and guarantees--including comparable guarantees that the government will protect the plant operators from lawsuits or screaming lynch mobs if something goes wrong.

3) I believe this is because industry boosters delude themselves on the economics of fission power. It is actually difficult to locate, mine, and refine the basic ores. Then isotopes have to be separated (a very laborious process); radioactive materials worked with, and transported to power plants where they must be installed and then years later, removed, reprocessed--the waste disposed of in a way that will not come back to haunt us. All this takes an economic toll. In fact I believe even the meagre profits that have come to American nuclear plant operatons are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer.

4) There is a symbiosis between the nuclear weapons industry and the power industry. A nation determined to make the weapons will need to mine far more ore than they can use for weapons--for to make a nuclear explosive you need to concentrate isotopes not needed in such concentrations for power purposes. If they can use some of the rejected material for power generation this represents a recovery of some of the cost of the weapons program. Vice versa, a nation that runs a "peaceful" nuclear power program is in the position of being able to divert material into a weapons program fairly easily. Therefore I am alarmed by any nation that does either because it will entail the other. Even those nations like Japan, Germany, or Australia which participate in nuclear power but won't develop weapons are operating in a global economy that does include nuclear weapons programs; I believe that in a world without nuclear weapons nuclear power would not have even the appearance of profitability.

5) Meanwhile with mining and enhancement operations going on, breeder reactors producing plutonium, trucks rumbling across country hauling dangerous plutonium into dispersed plants and hauling equally dangerous wastes out--there will be plenty of opportunities for people to steal some radioactives--if not fissionables to make an actual nuclear explosive, then poisonous radioactives to make a fallout bomb with. We must also consider the danger of corrupt people in the process who sell materials for personal graft (as well as idealist fanatics who work their way into the system to get access to them) and the danger of corrupt officials who order materials diverted. Finally we need to consider the risks involved if terrorists with no inside access decide to just assault a nuclear plant, battering their way in to steal what they can and do what damage they may, including release of radioactive materials and melting down the plant deliberately, or just blowing it open.

All these risks might be necessary to face if nuclear power were the only way. However I don't believe this is true--many alternative sources of power exist, and if we had spent a fair share of development dollars on them during the Reagan and Bush Administrations (and Clinton did not do much for these investigations either) we probably would not be discussing "cheap" nuclear power as an option--it would be eclipsed by alternatives. But as I mentioned, we do have a nuclear weapons industry and bypassing our nuke power industry makes paying for the former more difficult, so corporate and governmental interests converge on pretending that nuclear is the only power source the future offers. Remember, these are people who upon finding a working solar power system installed in the White House, its development already paid for, saving heating costs already--ripped it out at whatever that cost, and cheerfully paid for more heating oil.

They are also the most irresponsible administration ever to occupy that house. Giving them a go-ahead for nuclear power is like handing a 16-year old who is swigging a bottle of vodka the keys to a Hummer. Yeah, he might survive the inevitable crash--that is part of the problem. The bigger part is, all the innocent bystanders who would not.

With a whole world of innocent bystanders around who never promised not to hold us liable, I don't think we should go nuclear unless we absolutely have to. And if we ever do, I would much prefer putting the Army in charge of designing, building, and operating the plants as well as mining the metals, and centralizing as many operations as possible in fortified compounds which the materials never leave. The charade of private enterprise would be too costly and risky to maintain with fission power; we tried that experiment already and it is not worth keeping up nor would we have the luxury for it in such a national emergency. No corporation should be trusted with the sort of blackmail potential fissionable materials place in their hands. Perhaps no army should be either but we've had that situation since 1945 and we know more or less how to deal with it and how reliable they are. Not quite as reliable as they should be unfortunately--it would be best to get out the fission business completely.

Let's be fair then!

2005-05-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

Half Sigma, who appears to take pride in claiming to fall between ideological stools while to my cursory overview, shilling mindlessly for the Right, comments on the post by Cookie Jill to Skippy I reproduced below, to the effect that "Not every figure is Bush's fault."

Here it is in full:

Most of these figures are important ones and worth talking about.

But not every figure is Bush's fault. How about a series of blog post where you write about each figure, and explain what a president other than Bush would have done differently?

For example, the stock market is down because it was in a bubble when he took office. Not Bush's fault.

Gas is up because supply is not increasing as fast as demand. Don't blame Bush because Mother Nature blessed the planet with only a finite amount of oil reserves.

Cost of a 4 year public college is up: this is controlled by states not the federal government. Too may people go to college anyway.

For quite some time I pointed out in my contrarian way that much evil we would like to attribute to Bush was not his doing. I think it should be obvious that our economy has deep cycles and neither Presidents nor Congresses are responsible (within the cycle) for its upturns and downturns. What they are responsible for is perpetuating the conditions that underlie the cycle--but in principle, we might generally agree the cycle is a necessary part of our economic existence. What I really hold them in contempt for is, that they avoid facing the issue of the existence of the cycle at all, that when the markets are doing well they take credit and when they tank they scuttle around blaming their enemies, but none of them--especially not the "pro-business" types, ever seem to notice the decade-long cycle we have all lived through a few swings of and that goes back far past living memory to the early 19th century.

But at this point in the cycle, by now, halfway through one, I would say GW Bush's policies have had their stamp on it. In 2001 it may have been unfair to blame the character of the downturn on him. Not so in 2005. If there are elements to all the economic variables that are cited that are nondiscretionary and happen "behind the backs" of all planners public and private, there are others that can and do respond to public policy.

Public policy, rammed through by a Congress that slavishly follows the most irresponsible and accountability-free, and mindlessly ideological, Administration ever, has been a relentless application of the idea that the rich must benefit and everyone else follows along in their train. If we have a boom and revenues to states pile up--we need tax cuts, going to the rich since the poor dears pay more. If we have a collapsed economy and states and the Feds suffer short revenues--we need tax cuts to "stimulate" the economy so more revenues might ("will," say the supply siders with their Laffer curves, but not only are they wrong, but they plan to cut tax rates on the rich yet again if this happens or if it doesn't) rise again. 99 percent of the population must rely on trickle-down from the 1 percent that is being consulted and slavishly flattered.

Proof is in the pudding. Does it work? 5 years into the cycle starting from the crash--we should not still be stagnant. But anyone with a brain watching economic history should realize that bribing the rich to "give" us a vibrant economy never works. Their rational interest is to take the free revenue they are getting or being suddenly told to keep, and sit on it or blow it on themselves, and let someone else take the risk of starting up a new boom. If that starts to happen there is plenty of time to cash in on it.

It is working people who create the wealth of the world, and it is they who suffer during downturns. If we were honest about the cycles, accepting them as real and normal and necessary, we would have policy designed to help working people through the phases when the economic machine is down and does not need them. But actually if we understand the cycle, we would learn that part of why we have periodic downturns is to "discipline" working people, to force them to accept lower wages and more dangerous working conditions by subjecting them to the threat of no job and no legitimate avenue of survival at all. Looked at that way, capitalism is a form of diffused class slavery. And this is why we don't have a coherent, useful school of economics at all in this great nation, or indeed in the whole capitalist world.

Let's take a look at those hooks you want to let Bush off of again:

"For example, the stock market is down because it was in a bubble when he took office. Not Bush's fault."

It is quite true that the global downturn began on schedule, as it has every decade, preceded by a feverish boom which is always part of the cycle (unless you have one so mired in the doldrums it never really booms at all, as can and has happened.) The downturn began under Clinton. Let us not forget that the boom also happened under Clinton, but perhaps you want to credit that exclusively to the Gingrich Republican controlled House? If you want to be fair and rational about this stuff, you had best acknowledge that politicians and businessmen alike are like children building sand castles by the shore while the big economic waves roll in from the global ocean.

There is a difference--economics unlike the ocean is made up of human behavior, and in principle political and social decisionmaking can modify that. The beginning of wisdom is to acknowledge what is. If Bush had done that coming into office, he would have recognized that the global economy was tanking and made proposals that took that into account.

When the world slides into depression, it ceases to be rational for individual investors to risk their money in stocks or productive investments in general. When an economy is healthy the source of the growth of wealth, which investors tap into, is the expanding work done by working people who are satisfying more and more general human needs and wishes. Because in general it is possible for healthy people to create more material wealth in a day than they need to consume that day, economies can grow, and so risking existing wealth by tying it up into time-bound productive processes is quite likely to pay off in selling the products for more value than was put into it by the investor--the difference is added by the work of the workforce. The investor however, under capitalism, owns the whole product, having hired workers not to provide a given amount of value but to be totally at his disposal during work hours--the workers own none of it but are owned only their wages that they have agreed to separately. All this is sustainable and ever-expanding--provided that all the actual stuff that is ultimately produced finds a market in a reasonable amount of time. The trouble is this--the system has no overall rational coordination and individual investors seek the most profitable investments, even though other investors are going after the same markets, while less hot markets languish for lack of investment.

This is the basis of my "Freeway in Hell" metaphor by the way--just as I wait impatiently for an opening into the lane next to me that is whizzing past me stuck into a jam, but the second I enter that lane at last it grinds to a halt, not by accident but because many other drivers seized the same opportunity I did when it finally came and so we filled and jammed the lane (while freeing up the one we left to move in its turn)--so it is that the capitalist economy does not smoothly fill in gaps of investment according to long-term need but, driven by hindsight and the desire to grab the best profits first, surges drunkenly from one crisis to another.

Knowing this is the nature of capitalism, it is futile to"push at string" by filling the coffers of the already rich with tax breaks. Rational capitalists will not invest in productive enterprises when the cycle is broken, for tying up liquid wealth into concrete production processes will become a loss and not a profit if the product of production cannot be expected to be sold! Therefore the Bush tax cuts which you may recall were his very first priority, right after putting in John Ashcroft for Attorney General, were a stupid and vicious piece of economic policy, for not only did they divert national wealth where it would do no good, they impaired the ability of the government to undertake investments of its own which could have done some good directly guaranteeing some paychecks, whose earners would buy things thus sustaining the level of consumption in general thus restoring confidence in consumer markets sooner. Bush of course did the very opposite, slashing all programs that divert money toward poorer people who tend to spend money more effectively while enhancing the welfare of the class most likely to just hoard it away or divert it overseas. So, it was not his crash, but he's the one who sent fire trucks to spray gasoline rather than water onto the fire.

"Gas is up because supply is not increasing as fast as demand. Don't blame Bush because Mother Nature blessed the planet with only a finite amount of oil reserves."

Ah yes. Speaking of gasoline etc. You don't suppose, do you, that it was foreordained that the world would reach peak oil during the Bush/Cheney administrations do you? Aside from finite supplies, there are rates of consumption to consider. Back in the 1970s we got a real scare, receiving a global demonstration in the vulnerabilities of a technical society dependent on a resource people elsewhere in the world are able to disrupt. Some people had the wisdom then to point out, even if the foreigners are all benign and harmless, even if we ourselves had all the oil in our possession--someday it is going to run low. What then? A rational person might think, well, let us look for alternatives to this stuff. The sooner we find other ways to meet our needs, the less dependent we are on oil, the less subject we are to foreign blackmail, the more options we have for the future. This long-term vision coordinated with the short-term panic to save money on suddenly skyrocketing oil costs through conservation measures. The result was a dramatic reduction in consumption which very largely happened not through bitter sacrifice but superior efficiency. This lowered the demand which tended, despite ongoing political shocks, to lower the price of oil.

Now I would say that when the price dropped, political wisdom would be to found a new tradition of setting a floor on consumer/industrial petroleum product prices by ramping up taxes as long as prices fell, and holding the line on them if market prices rose, so that oil would remain expensive to the ultimate user thus keeping the pressure on to conserve and to find alternatives. Meanwhile since the government would be taking a cut of the price difference, that money could be used to actively promote the development of ever more advanced alternatives. Remarkable progress was made (without the help of such a dedicated stream of revenue from the pump) in the late 1970s. What if it had continued?

Instead however, we got Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter had installed a solar heating system in the White House--Reagan had it ripped out. You explain to me the economic rationality of that move! There was none of course--the idea was to signal the oil people that the Reagan policy would be damn the solar cells, it's all "our oil" no matter whose soil it is under, and Americans were entitled to burn it up cheaply. The military buildup necessary to "safeguard our interests" in the Persian Gulf (not to mention keeping our thumbs on the people of places like Indonesia, Nigeria, and Venezuela via the dictators we imposed on them, so their regimes would keep the oil flowing) cost far more than the most ambitious technological "energy independence" projects, but the latter would yield a guaranteed and continual return in accumulating degrees, while the former has cost us not only a constant economic drain but global goodwill as well, and leaves us all vulnerable to this day that is arriving now, when we still need the oil-but we already burned it up.

Reagan was succeeded by Bush Sr who continued our policy of temporary glut through military conquest to be followed by deluge after them. For the Cheneys of the world are set up to be chief vampires, to reap what huge profits come to those who hold the key to the last oil reserves. Suffering will fall on the world as the price skyrockets again, but the corporate conglomerates who have created Bush Jr as their front will keep their revenues high at the cost of everyone else. What will they do when it is all gone?

At any rate we can and should blame Bush for the lack of any development of alternatives to oil dependency since his assumption of power, and recognize that his political side is largely responsible for the lack of progress on this front in the decades before as well. The fact that Bush's faith-based beliefs and policies, his contempt for facts and reality, has been reflected in a severe reduction of support for real science and useful engineering in favor of grandstanding and militaristic stunts and fundamentalist hogwash, makes this situation all the worse. And knowing that while the majority of Americans will suffer with rising pump prices that Bush's billionaire "base" will profit, it is impossible for me to credit him with any good intentions in this matter. This is, by 2005, presumptively Bush's policy and his fault.

"Cost of a 4 year public college is up: this is controlled by states not the federal government."

The feds tax the people of every state more than any state does; the states have to be very careful in meeting their responsibilities in that context. The formula used to be, Uncle Sam would take in lots of money via income tax, but kick back much of it via programs and grants to the states again. Today, the same political groups who want the Feds to butt out of allegedly "state" responsibilities also want the states to throttle back their taxes too. Whenever I see an argument that such and such is not a Federal responsibility, the real aim is always clearly to stop it from being done at all. That at any rate is the clear trend of the Bush education policy. A relentless dumbing down of every aspect of education in this nation has been the outcome. Primary schools have been diverted to preparing for tests that measure only the ability to mindlessly regurgitate meaningless "facts," and every form of Federal support for higher education has been chopped, while the very freedom of academics to speak or think freely is being threatened by campaigns for ideological conformity. Meanwhile other state responsibilities are seeing the Federal share of support being cut there too, forcing states to either seek new revenues or cut them all back. Since revenues are based on economic production and the Bush economy is still stagnant, the intent is clearly to force cutbacks both in education and social services. To suggest that Bush has no responsibility for these state actions is--Republican morality and conservative acceptance of responsibility for actions they have taken at the very finest level we have learned to expect of so-called "conservatives."

"Too may people go to college anyway."
Yes, Mr or Ms Sigma, I suppose too may people do go to college. Of course if they don't go to college and learn to spell good and use write grammar, I guess that is a good reason for them to have to accept jobs that pay far too little to stay ahead of debt and cover life's necessities? It is a fact that today not having a BA at least is as bad as not having a high school diploma was a generation before. I certainly can agree that people ought to go to college if and only if they have a passion to learn what is there. If we were moving our society toward one that did not shut doors in people's faces merely because they do not have diplomas with their names on them but recognized people for what they do, I would expect that fewer, far fewer, people would go there. As it is--your proposal is to slam another door in their faces and thus ration the diplomas--on what basis? Old fashioned ability to pay, to reserve the better jobs for those with richer parents? Or some kind of judgment of "merit" by tests or graders who in real life, have ties to the social power structure and will in fact ease the way in for kids with privilege and filter those without so the latter will be chosen for their serviceability to the former? That was characteristic of the "good old days" too. Actually the great expansion of college today traces back to the GI Bill of Rights, which would have turned into a boondoggle had it not been the case that the American economy, taking over the role of the ruling economy of the capitalist world after WWII, had a vastly expanded need of workers with advanced skills. That people need higher degrees to qualify for jobs is at least in part a reflection of the reality that modern jobs do ask people to take their place in a more sophisticated global workforce. The other thing that higher education might accomplish is opening doors to ordinary people being better informed democratic citizens. But if you don't care about that because the ruling class has it all well in hand anyway I don't suppose you'd value that. Away with the rabble then!

By those standards your President is a great success. In terms of outcomes for the ordinary people of this nation whose welfare he is supposed to be concerned with, he is a miserable failure--with all due accounting for circumstances, the worst President ever.

First a post swiped from our friends at Skippy International!

2005-05-08T09:56:00.000-07:00

This was put up by Cookie Jill and is worth quoting in full: (Capitalization somewhat restored by me; this is after all a blog that comments on Capitalism!)

Begin Quote:<<

Report cards are in...a few 1600 Crew Children were left behind in Economics 101

The Center for American Progress issued a report card for President Bush.

The numbers below are for 2000-2004.

The financial markets
s&p 500 -15%
nasdaq -36%
dow jones -5.3%

Consumer income and expenses and standard of living
price of a gallon of gas +46%
real value of the minimum wage -7%
median household income -4%
average cost of 4-year public college +24%
poverty rate +11%
americans filing for bankruptcy +33%
annual increase in prescription drug prices (from 4.1% t0 6.8%) +68%
number of Americans without health insurance +18%

Federal finances
Federal debt +39%
monthly trade deficit +75%
annual trade deficit +53%

The dollar
dollar versus euro -30%
dollar versus yen -11%

Consumer debt
home mortgage borrowing +100%
total outstanding consumer debt +28%
household debt as a percentage of assets: +20%
household debt as a percentage of gdp +21%

Big tips of the kangaroo tail to Bonddad's Daily Kos Diary and the delightful named Yes, I Do Take It Personally.

I heartily agree with Bonddad's suggestion of "Posting these figures at work, use them in emails, shave them into your head, whatever. Get the word out."

EndQuote>>

My response to the first comment is above in the next post

Time to break out the ice skates?

2005-04-10T00:18:00.000-07:00

I had the notion of explaining the Freeway in Hell metaphor sometime soon, but instead I got to reading LeftI, and Eli links to a recent speech by Texan Republican Congressman Ron Paul, who was the Libertarian Presidential candidate in 1988.

Here I have been marveling at how, without any of my beliefs changing, I am becoming such a conservative, in the sense that I value preserving at least the way we did things in America, for the past few generations, rather than any more of these half-baked innovations our alleged Congress and President want to ram through right now, and therefore I want to preserve independent courts, Social Security, etc etc.

I don't listen to Libertarians usually because I am afraid they will take my first agreement as an excuse to slash social services. But here is Rep. Paul saying so many true and sober things. My shock is complete. Apparently we are at the point where Texan Republicans are too liberal for the alleged "mainstream."

I hope I wake up from this dream before I turn completely into Edmund Burke.

My sources of passion: a reply to Shakespeare's Sister

2005-03-31T13:25:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare's Sister asked "What has stirred in you that fervor for politics that’s brought you to my virtual doorstep?"

Here is my answer:

Hi, first of all what brought me here was skippy.

I was raised in a Catholic military officer's family, mostly at a rotation of Air Force bases in the South. However I always identifed as a middle of the road generic American--always out of step, I considered myself a "yankee" in the South. And of course in California one year I took a lot of abuse as "Florida" because I had finally gotten comfortable in Panama City, Florida. I was always an outsider wherever I went.

The roots of my politics are being raised as a true believer in a moderate vision of the American way, combined with a tendency to be an outsider (perhaps because I am nearly deaf) and to have a bleeding heart for other outsiders and losers.

Nowadays I can only describe my parents as reactionaries (very decent individuals, I owe them plenty including this passion, but they support incredibly vicious causes in almost the worst ways possible.) I think when I was little they were much more in a mainstream that was much more liberal--on the conservative side but they got polarized in the 1970s and for a time I went with them, my own way. But we all still watched CBS News with Walter Cronkite, and I grew up assuming people read the newspaper every day and thought about issues it brought up. How could you get the jokes on Saturday Night Live if you did not after all? When I was little my parents used to watch Smothers Brothers and while comedy got reined in after that, comedy remained the most subversive intellectual influence around. Right wingers are not and never have been funny, because they are too busy hiding from the truth to see the absurdity of things. But when I was young I think even conservative Americans had less insecuirty and more ability to do that than they do now, and so the fatal seed of independent thought was planted to be nurtured by such waters as Mad Magazine! But in the 1970s I still believed that the basically liberal society we had worked well, offered the best hopes of progress, and would be improved with less government interference--from my white suburban military brat position I thought I was a Libertarian and that Reagan was our champion, though it did cross my mind that I had grown up in the very bosom of the government and admired lots of things, from NASA to public libraries, that were governmental. I hoped it would all get sorted out when capitalism was stripped down and revved up--the USSR would collapse under its own weight; the economy would boom and shift away from weapons; freedom would spread and traditional tyrannies wither and private ventures into space would pave the road to the abundant future.

This true belief was outraged when I discovered gradually in the 1980s how much deception there is in the myths Americans live by, and of course that was a time when the ruthlessness of the real rulers of our system against anyone who did not have "clout" became apparent. All of this fed my indignation at the lot of powerless people and admiration of those who take power by standing up bravely to those who consider themselves the "better" people.

It has never gotten better in that respect either; the only progress I have seen is polarization between people who are more and more outraged and indignant, and those who are more and more calloused. Or both; we are all developing some kind of battle armor.

Basically I still believe the deep values reached for by the American Revolution were and are still worthy goals (thus I base my US politics on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address), but their true evolution has been in the direction of other great revolutionary movements. I believe the evidence shows we must all evolve into some kind of populist communitarians, or we are all going to kill each other, by murder, poisoning, or ecological catastrophe in some combination. Socialism or Barbarism, baby! And we have lots of Barbarism and getting more of it all the time.

And that I and I think most people really don't want to be bothered with politics, but we have no choice since those who are outside of systems of power get abused by those inside, and only a balance of power brings about justice and equity, to some rough degree.

Fearless Fosdick on the case!

2005-03-26T01:07:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to notice a pattern in dealing with Republicans. Yes, even here in Sonoma County one can strike up a conversation and even make friends with Republicans, and then there are the ones I am related to, like my parents. So I am asking them the reasons for their priorities, like getting Bill Clinton but giving a pass to all the tremendous (and illegal, unConstitutional, hypocritical, and policy-related) blunders (or are they more sinister than that?) of their President and his crowd,or saving Terri Schiavo (but not the thousands or perhaps millions of other severely disabled Americans their tax cut/benefit cut/give corporations carte blanche policies put into the same position of having their food cut off, etc, as in Texas's "Futile Care Law" enacted by G. W. Bush as Texas Governor.) How about then WMDs in Iraq (or actually, as it turns out, not...) Well, what do they have to say?

What I am hearing lately reminds me of something that shocked me about our criminal law system. The vast majority of felons entering our prisons never actually have a trial, properly speaking. The police arrest poor people, typically, who know they don't have the resources to fight the system--especially because they are typically also members of some out-group, which juries would tend to be prejudiced against--which might not mean they could not get a fair trial, but they had better be able to match the prosecution's lawyers. A public defender will not cut it, generally speaking. So they plea-bargain, the judge pounds the gavel, and that is the trial. In effect, this makes the police department the practical court. American police do generally have the attitude that they know who the crooks are, and if they arrest someone on flimsy evidence--probably their collar is guilty of other crimes they can't actually pin on him, so it is not just OK, it is practically mandatory, to try to make every little charge stick, and get as much punishment as you can out of whatever you can get a conviction on. These people are not citizens, they are "the enemy."

So much for Perry Mason. When Edwin Meese said that an "innocent suspect" was a contradiction in terms, that someone would not be a suspect unless he were guilty, he flew in the face of all the noble talk about rule of law, presumption of innocence, the necessity of trials, etc we were all trained to recognize is great about America, but he accurately reported the true attitude of American enforcers. They think they know, and in our legal system they often get to bury their mistakes--once a "suspect" has been tarred with the label of "felon" it becomes far more difficult for them to prove innocence as they are forced to do.

So, how about all those other Terri Schiavos? As a longtime parter of a disabled person I am uneasy with my fellow lefty bloggers who jump in with "she is effectively gone and has been for over a decade." Well, maybe and maybe not. Lots of very functional disabled people have aspersions cast on the worthwhileness of their lives, particulary when acknowlegding it might cost money. It is supposed to be the business of the courts and other elements of the system back there in Florida to decide these things, and I am in no position to go visit Terri Schavio and see for myself--is there an imparied but alert mind there, or not? None of my business is how it should be, but both sides are making it my business. Am I the only one reminded of _Citizen Ruth?_

Why single out Terri Schavio? Why not take her husband's word for things? Well, something I don't see on left-wing blogs is all the allegations rightists like to make against his character (and they imply the judges all are in on some deal too). I have no intention of perpetuating what I judge is probably slander, of felonous proportions, but I asked the reasonable question--oh, if that is the case, why not prosecute him on those grounds. And then there is a lot of shifty muttering about statutes of limitation, cold trails, etc. But some of the things they allege would have no statues of limitation. If they are true, then Mr. Schavio appears in a different light and so would anything he said about Terri's wishes. But if not true, he has a long list of people he can sue at this point, I would think. So in the Republican mindset, they can't bring Terri's abuser to justice--but they can _spite_ him by keeping her alive! And maybe she will get better and _talk!_ That is what they say.

Why by the way, I ask, did we spend 8 years with Republicans gumming up all the works of the Federal government in their attempts to get Bill Clinton? Well, Clinton was a sexual predator. Can't let one of those stay in office, can we? Predator? I asked--name me one non-consensual relationship! And he did, a name I don't remember but Lord knows they were coming of the woodwork. Again I ask--oh, if he raped or harassed someone, why didn't Starr make that the thrust of his prosecution? Why didn't Congress impeach him for that high crime/misdemenor, instead of about lying to them about a question they had no business asking? Again, not much of an answer. But they Got him lying! Such an unprecedented dishonor of the White House, a stain wiped away by the new President...

So it goes, they locked up Martha Stewart on similar charges it seems--perjury when the investigation itself had no merit. I am wondering what the hell Kevin Shelley, California's Secretary of State, allegedly did to cause him to be driven out of office, and how does it weigh versus tremendous conflicts of interest like Katherine Harris's simultaneous oversight of Florida's 2000 election and state campaign for Bush. Iraq--no WMDs, but Saddam was a bad man. And there are murky hints at yet unrevealed secret justifications, but no clue why would could not use true charges to drum up war fever instead of false ones. Because the only time you have to use false pretenses is, when your case has no merit at all, and no truthful charge can have the weight needed to bring around judges or publics.

Everywhere, the Fearless Fosdick is on the case, out to make a collar, and if the evidence of the heinous crime he is sent out to avenge is slim, nonexistent, or downright against the charges--no matter, there is some techicality or other the perp must be in violation of, or at least it can be rumored to be so. Or it that falls short, by golly rules are made to be broken! When dealing with some people and some cases anyway.

So-Calling it Mainstream; the early years

2005-03-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

MistahCharley wrote:

I just want to urge you to start using the term "corporate media" for what has been too long misleadingly called the "main stream media" - "corporate" is denotatively as well as connotatively more accurate.

I usually do say "corporate media", or "reactionary."

Note what I did say this time though--not SCLM, not MSM. I said SCMSM! The So-Called Mainstream Media--that is the essence of the discussion. Who does the calling besides themselves? My point is that they have always promoted a "national party line" and been rewarded with a special status for it. This has not arisen by accident and is no recent phenomenon. They have always been corporate, true, but they have always been "so-called mainstream" in a largely successful attempt to drown out and discredit alternative messages with the clear signal that whoever listens to what is not on their menu of acceptable memes will be ignored, dismissed, or shunned and punished as an "irresponsible" thinker.

Our modern perception that the MSM are corporate whores is not exactly breaking news!

I was not thinking very carefully or planning or anything. But I have done this rant in dozens of comments in the past. If I did it right I'd weave in the cartoons in The Masses magazine (actually in a memorial compendium)--"Poisoned at the Source," by Art Young, showing a suited, sneaky figure poisoning a reservoir ("The Press") with a vial of "Lies." He is labeled--AP. The cartoon is from July 1913, and AP sued The Masses over it.

TM was a sort of semibohemian, semiprogressive, semiradical, semipopulist organ that featured a lot of cutting edge journalism and wicked cartoons (including of semi-nude women, which prompted a semi-obscene portrait of the semihuman Comstock, maven of censors in his day who of course tried to shut them down.) Much of their best work (featured in the collection anyway) was concerned with World War I--its precursors, its example, the US being drawn into it--actively as TM's contributors saw it by the US elites. (Another great cartoon-haven't found a link to it yet-a bloated, confused, worried, greasy figure gesturing at the black clouds and vague but horrible smoking ruins of Europe over the sea--this man is a "Preparedness Advocate" and his tortured plea is "If we don't do as they did it could happen to us!" The cartoon's caption? "Logic") One thing about TM was that I could recognize images that the cultural censorship we live under had let through the net--yet other cartoons had eventually gotten a gig as illustrations in such references as the World Book Encyclopedia. And the editor, Eastman, went rightward and founded Reader's Digest in later years.

But in its day, The Masses was sort of like Mother Jones magazine. And the war between the radical and establishment press was in full swing. Woodrow Wilson is in many ways the President who did the most to lay the foundations of modern, 20th century America--FDR largely just had to cultivate Wilson's legacy and bring it front and center. (Wilson also did much to confirm and to worsen the system of racial oppression as it worked in modern America, practically mandating Jim Crow, and his racism was fused with his imperialism to set the pattern in global policy as well.) Regulation got its start earlier than Wilson, with Theodore Roosevelt, but it was the Wilson years where such entities as the Federal Reserve Boards and the amendment to allow income taxes were passed. In general their impact was kept limited by conservative resistance. But of course Wilson got World War I to give him war powers in this early modern context--Lincoln had equally sweeping powers and mandate, but Lincoln was dealing with an internal convulsion that demanded radical, sweeping methods, while Wilson was entering into what was for us an optional war. He used his war powers to reshape the very idea of what was "normal" in America, creating Creel's committee of advertisers to not only direct propaganda but also to create a culture of informers. Of course he created the FBI to round up and jail or deport troublesome leftists who allegedly sabotaged the war effort--as many did merely by continuing to be against the war on the same terms they had always opposed it. That's how we got rid of the Socialists as a rising mass party for instance.

And as the cartoon illustrated, the mainstream "respectable" press played its part in the general repression, hewing to what Abby Hoffman would later call a "national party line." Such are the origins of the ideals of liberal journalism--a social contract whereby the press plays a defined role and follows rules, and is rewarded with its place at the big table. Throughout that era there were parallel presses, that followed different lines and did not get that mantle or those perks. I suppose there were far rightist rags, though actually the mainstream was so accommodating of so many reactionary views, to which it could point as evidence of its freedom, that it would be pretty hard to be thrown out of the ranks of respectable journalism in the day for being too racist or nationalistic or otherwise bigoted. But definitely there were left-wing organs, ranging from Communist Party mouthpieces to some of the greatest journalism we have ever seen-that were socially speaking lepers to the AP set. They were the best evidence we did have a free press, but their views were not considered to have the reliability that the word of the mainstream press did.

So what I am pointing out here is, the claim to be "mainstream" is not just a market response phenomenon, it is not just that 7 out of 10 readers freely choose to prefer this or that flavor of news. Powerful social mechanisms exist that claim the right to define "mainstream" in terms not of what people like or dislike to read, but in terms of the range of content these papers and other media have. If they toe the line they are mainstream. They are "so-called" because someone arrogates the right to do the calling. They are mainstream because the national party line defines that idea, not some faith in moderation or loyalty to truth. It was always that way here, at least since Woodrow Wilson and World War I.

Digby on the need for a Left Wing press

2005-03-19T23:46:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I don't read Digby every day--because I have to tear myself off the Net sometime I guess?

In response to laments from some who claim to be lefties, who worry that insofar as we are establishing our own trusted media channels and abandoning the so-called mainstream, we are falling into the same wicked, postmodern error as our dear friends on the Right have been wallowing in for decades now--Digby had this to say.

And I had this supportive reply for him:

In the days when a bunch of folks left outside of the process that formed the Constitution intruded their democratic heads back into the process and said, "Put this Bill of Rights in there right now or we ain't gonna let you do this!" the free press they had in mind had none of the pretense to objectivity and balance that we children of the 20th Century came to think was our God-given right. Back then, the Federalists had their papers, the Democrat-Republicans had theirs, and each side's portrayed a world where they were decent and wise folk and the others were the spawn of Hell. That kind of freedom of the press is what they had in mind--the freedom to say any damned thing and let the reader judge what they wanted to believe it really meant, and whose lies they wanted to read.

Mind you, I think that the rise of a press with standards of objectivity and balance was a fine and noble vision, and one whose passing I do regret. But professionalism is not an adequate basis for standing up to powerful, entrenched interests. What America needs and has not had for generations is a genuine, hard-core Left with a firm basis and claims to real power; a bunch of people who are not ashamed to say that capitalism is the problem and real power over property to the people is the solution. Part of the rise of professional journalism was the process of shutting down the left--the real, organized left in all its fraticidal but significant diversity--Wobblies, Socialists, anarchists--the lot. The generation of middle-class readers who favored the respectable news feeds of the AP and UPI and revered the NYT, also favored J Edgar Hoover's police state tactics. For quite some time, we could delude ourselves that the mainstream press was providing "All the News That's Fit to Print"and that was not "Fit" was just too indecent--and irrelevant to the big picture--to worry about. Objectivity about important matters was supposed to arise via vigorous competition for market share and fear of the "scoop" by the rival paper. But in reality there were always huge gaps and distortions in American mainstream coverage and no amount of reportage in lefty rags brought some of those stories into the mainstream, no matter how true they were.

But, I think it was fear of the possibility of a revival of a genuine Left that kept a generation or two of mainstream journalists middling honest. There were stories you just didn't print and knew no other mainstream paper would print either; but in the field legitimately open to public view, by golly real journalists dug out the story! That way, we in the middle classes could believe our press served us well enough, no reason to doubt and go off and read weird stuff. And we could believe we had the information needed to make informed political decisions and not that we were being herded. George Orwell had a few words to say about it. And now we are living in times where everyone who lived before the Wilson Administration is dead, and the people who remember the Depression are leaving us, and there is no fear of a Left that no one has ever seen here among our propertied rulers, and they think they can just bloody well rule without all this pantomiming.

The rise of a genuine Left press, if that is at hand, and insofar as we have one here on the Internet, is the only hope I see for a revival of the old middle-of the road mainstream journalistic ethics we were all raised to believe a free press was all about. Actually it is not, freedom is supposed to mean freedom, not adherence to a quest for truth. But a believable quest for the truth would be nice to see again, and as long as we have it I will exercise my right to believe what seems sensible to me--which means I read the lefty stuff because a radical socialist analysis is how I understand things. And I do hope that if we can keep our freedom and dislodge the propertied from their dead-hand monopoly on power so they have a healthy respect for the need to gratify and benefit the public if they want to keep us Leftists at bay--then out of this process may emerge again a revived mainstream, fact-oriented, balanced press, hopefully one with _no_ blinders reliably on its vision. That would be a new thing actually. But if it doesn't happen--it wasn't the Left that killed it, and it is not our obligation to do the balancing for those who did.

This is both funny and wise

2005-03-05T02:08:00.000-08:00

The sound of the shoes of the centipede dropping; or, isn't Leviticus fun?

Who was Natasha you ask?

2005-03-04T22:52:00.000-08:00

Natasha was my dear lady. She was the person I lived with until she couldn't live any more, and the website we did together was some of our best work. And she did a lot of good work.

Here, here's the old site, it should be good at least till September 2005 and I will do what I can to keep it up after that.

Alternate answer to my random profile question

2005-03-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

"You can punch a hole through an apple with a straw. How does this make your milkshake feel"

First answer was that it feels flashes of hope amid its terror and despair. Then I wondered...

...does the milkshake enjoy and look forward to its destiny of thrilling my palate and pooling in my gullet? In that case, it might be miffed and anxious I will neglect it. Not to worry, brave milkshake! If I order an item of food or drink, or make it, I am gonna eat it soon enough.

Stupid Blogger demanded a 150 word answer. I am not about short answers most of the time.