Poetry Friday: Alexander Pope and The Great Chain of Being

Cross-posted to Wellreadchild.com.

The current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly examines the theme of Nature, and includes this excerpt from Pope’s Essay on Man:

VIII. See, through this air, this ocean, and this earth,
All matter quick, and bursting into birth.
Above, how high, progressive life may go!
Around, how wide! how deep extend below?
Vast chain of being! which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing. On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours:
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed:
From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
And, if each system in gradation roll
Alike essential to the amazing whole,
The least confusion but in one, not all
That system only, but the whole must fall.
Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly,
Planets and suns run lawless through the sky;
Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurled,
Being on being wrecked, and world on world;
Heaven’s whole foundations to their centre nod,
And nature tremble to the throne of God.
All this dread order break—for whom? for thee?
Vile worm!—Oh, madness! pride! impiety!

Pope’s theme here is the Great Chain of Being:

Its major premise was that every existing thing in the
universe had its “place” in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was
pictured as a chain vertically extended. (“Hierarchical” refers to an order
based on a series of higher and lower, strictly ranked gradations.) An object’s
“place” depended on the relative proportion of “spirit” and “matter” it
contained–the less “spirit” and the more “matter,” the lower down it
stood.

. . . .

A major example [of this theme] was the title character of Christopher
Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus. Simultaneously displaying the grand spirit of
human aspiration and the more questionable hunger for superhuman powers, Faustus seems in the play to be both exalted and punished. Marlowe’s drama, in fact, has often been seen as the embodiment of Renaissance ambiguity in this regard, suggesting both its fear of and its fascination with pushing beyond human limitations.

I thought it might be interesting to write a post-enlightenment Great Chain of Being poem with a modern twist on all the familiar themes. In fact, it might begin with an embrace of the scientific hubris about which Renaissance artists were ambivalent (whether it leads to a similar ambivalence about technology is an open question). Here’s a beginning — I’ll be working on this over the next few weeks.

Nader and Ferraro: Left-Wing Racism and Right-Wing Feminism

Here’s a legitimate criticism of the left: its identity politics can be a condescension to those it means to champion. Riddled with anti-racist and anti-sexist taboos on language, its politics doth protest too much. It’s quite a spectacle to watch a liberal white friend walk on eggshells around a black person because they’re afraid of saying something offensive. Human beings bring some expression of aggression to every real relationship (e.g., by teasing friends) — and so these stilted interracial friendships never get off the ground. The delicate, child-like victims must not be touched socially, because the line between good and bad touching can never be as crisp as the taboos demand.

None of this justifies the sense of many whites (on the right and left) that they are the poor wronged victims of affirmative action and the Politically Correct. They’re right to think that the relevant taboos are unfair, and they’re right to think that the woes of African Americans ought to be attributed less to their “racism” than to problems within some black communities. (That these problems are a legacy of slavery and segregation is not a measure of the collective guilt of every successive generation of whites). But beyond the restrictions on what views can be expressed in polite company, political correctness and affirmative action have little force outside of academia. You can hardly complain about what you’re not allowed to say around your progressive friends when you’re unlikely to have them anyway. And if you think that affirmative action is stinting your career (and preventing you from the riches that are your socially Darwinist capitalist birthright), then ….

The consequence of these taboos is the division among whites between those who have pseudo-relationships with blacks founded on guilt, and those who indulge a pathetic and juvenile racism behind closed doors — not primarily because they dislike black people, but because they overreact with what they think is a counter-cultural stand against the inauthenticity of political correctness. (I’m not denying here that there are such things as genuine interracial friendships on the one hand and hard-core racism on the other, I just don’t think that these are the norm).

So in an election year with a black presidential candidate, it shouldn’t be surprising to see the underlying racism of this dynamic spill over from all sides. And yet it is. I’m not one to cry racism, or even one to feel ashamed of my own fleeting racist sentiments — it’s the price of guilt-free whiteness. But I have to say that even I am fairly stunned by this year’s political climate — a virtual free-fire zone of thinly veiled racism. I’m not going run through the litany of right-wing Fox News-style offenses — we all know what they are. And as I argued a year ago., nor do I think that such sentiments are so widespread (or, where they do exist, so determinative of people’s behavior) that they will scuttle Obama’s presidential bid.

But in Ralph Nader and Geraldine Ferraro we have two very pernicious examples of what happens when one ressentiment-afflicted group has a close encounter with another. Without any cognitive dissonance, Ferraro can talk of Obama as an affirmative-action case at the same time that she cries sexism. With her she brings an entire coterie of deranged and frankly stupid political obsessives who make absolutely no secret of their left-wing brand of racism — their antipathy towards blacks (or “AAs,” as they like to call them) as their contenders for the mantle of ultimate victim-hood. Notice that this kind of resentment dovetails very neatly with that of conservative whites who feel burdened by political correctness and affirmative action — you will find the comments on these fringe left blogs indistinguishable from those of the right. That’s what’s so telling about the paranoid claim that Obama “played the race card” when he so carefully avoided it, or the strangely contradictory complaint that he didn’t make his race an overt part of his campaign as Hillary made sex a part of hers. But it’s especially telling when it comes to the accusation of sexism. Here we have the invocation of one left-wing taboo against another. Sexism is pitted against racism, with the righteous victim-hood of the former set against the chaffing, politically correct restrictions of the latter. You could sum up virtually all of the ranting of Clinton dead-enders with one sentence: “how dare you make me feel like a racist for calling you a sexist!”

Enter Nader. Never mind the easily refuted idea that Obama isn’t talking about issues important to African Americans (read some speeches). Nader has expectations of his black friends that go beyond the content of their character. They better not be trying to “talk white” in order to appeal to “white guilt”:

“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader said. “Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.”

The core idea here is similar to Ferraro’s: Obama is where he is because he is black. But rather than acknowledge his benefactors — and the affirmative action largess bequeathed to him — he has snubbed them. He equally offends Ferraroan Feminism and Naderian Progressivism by failing to be The Black Man — the good Democratic Party Black Man who “talks black” and concentrates solely on the interests of his group and cries racism at every turn and blows up at some point and has no chance of becoming a real force in the Democratic Party establishment. What’s worse, Obama succeeded by precisely by not being appropriately black. The claim that Obama “played the race card,” for instance, actually amounts to a complaint that he did nothing of the kind, at least openly: he did it behind everyone’s back, the conspiracy theory goes, sneakily; he didn’t play fair, he was a black-in-white’s clothing. Rev. Wright and several other ploys were meant to uncloak him, tease the real black man out of him for all to see, so that every could see that he was just another Jesse Jackson, just another angry black man with a right to his anger but not to the presidency. Meanwhile, Hillary was the Good Democratic Party Woman. Hillary talked woman and never failed to remind us that being a woman was a compelling reason to vote for her and that women’s issues would be one of her special concerns. She made the appropriate complaints about sexism. How dare that “inadequate black man” try to seem above it all! How dare he transcend the proper, left-wing role that has been defined for him!

This is what happens when some on the left consign African Americans to conceptual ghettos in order to become their benevolent keepers and defenders: as long as they don’t try to break out.

The McEwan Delusion: The Pseudo-Threat of Islamism

As a novelist, Ian McEwan is talented to the point of self-caricature: he writes nothing that hasn’t been dislocated on the rack of his talent. As the leader of today’s “look-at-me-I’m-a-writer!” lolly-pop guild, he would never dream of sentence to which had failed to attach several reflective addenda. Even then the verbal ordeal might be worth it — in fact deeply satisfying — if it weren’t a cover for philosophically misinformed and incoherent attempts at having a deep idea. All this lacy prose and what we get at the end is a forced juxtaposition of poetry, terror, and reductionist neuroscience. The reader is left to supply the profound connections, because it’s a task not even the author is up to — there aren’t any. This is what happens when you read too much Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel C. Dennet, but not any actual philosophy: A sophomoric crypto-celebration of scientism over religious fanaticism — of one superstition over another.

The political manifestation of all of this: McEwan’s brave hatred of “Islamism”:

‘And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well.

He went on: ‘When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation.

‘Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.’

On the face of it, “Islamism” seems like a worthy object of hatred — if we ignore the easy slide into “Islam” or “Muslims” and the fact that most readers simply won’t make the distinction. When you identify it with a lack of freedom, you have one of today’s moral tautologies and all the indignation raised by any challenges to it — it’s just like “I despise bad things!” How dare you call me a racist because I said “bad is bad.”

All of the moral simplicity of what I’ll call the “McEwan Delusion” falls away when you start to do a little thinking. Let’s start with McEwan’s definition of “Islamism”: it takes some very generic societal ailments and treats one manifestation of them as a particularly threatening. Here’s the list of qualities that McEwan takes to be definitive of Islamism: “wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality.” If we were presented merely with this list of qualities, we might understand it to mean “religious fundamentalism,” but we would never be able to arrive at “Islamism” per se. Of course, if we eliminated “religious belief, on a text,” we would just understand it to mean “illiberal societies; that is, “most societies, historically.”

So we have a species of a broader ideology that has been so widespread historically as to make any particular attribution misleadingly definitive. Illiberal societies are the norm, not the exception. So what is it about “Islamism” that singles it out for special attention?

The answer to this question, McEwan and his comrades will answer, is obvious: 9/11!

There are two premises at work in the special reservoir of emotion that McEwan and others reserve for Islamism: the first is that the fundamental cause of Islamic terrorism is actually Islamism — a certain kind of fundamentalist, politicized Islam. The second is that Islamic terrorism is a powerful and dangerous force in the modern world, and the preeminent national security concern of liberal Western societies. Both will seem like obvious truths to many Westerners. But both are false.

Let’s take the second premise first. Are terrorism and Islamism existential threats to liberal societies? Is it that kind of national security problem?

No. In fact, terrorism is amateur and small-scale war-making, often made by incompetents, rarely accomplished on Western soil, and largely ineffective unless abetted by the overreaction of affected governments. Even highly successful and large scale attacks like 9/11 cannot happen on a scale that poses a significant danger to the United States — as in the danger represented by Japan in World War II or the USSR during the cold war. And frankly, even a single nuke going off in an American city is a national security problem on a much smaller scale than such wars and stand-offs: it is dwarfed, for instance, by the devastation suffered by Germany and Japan in WWII or by Europe in general. No Islamic threat will ever come close to matching the wars that Europeans inflicted on themselves only recently. The USSR was a serious national security problem to the United States and Europe; accidental nuclear conflagration still is. But terrorism, in the scheme of things, is simply a minor threat. Yes, it is a threat: but how should that influence where it is we direct our emotions, and what we “despise”? And does it justify, as “despise” seems to imply, sending troops to make war on Islamist societies?

Far from being powerful, terrorism is powerlessness par excellence. And this brings us back to addressing the first premise: is Islamism really the primary cause of Islamic terrorism? As a violent ideology, it seems obviously so. But here I think we reach the foundation of the McEwan Delusion, which is ironically leftist in its origins: it is a form of relativism that treats ideologies as if they arise in a vacuum — as if they are unmoved movers of the world, explanations that themselves have no explanation; we are forbidden, for instance, from seeing feminine behavior as even partially “natural” or a matter of “human nature” — rather it is entirely “encultured,” and nothing explains enculturation beyond human whim (or, to take the neo-Marxist variation, economic interest).

But we ought to treat such ideology as a manifestation of something psychologically deeper than whim or economics. Nietzsche’s concept of ideology is relevant here. Is “Islamism” really the most relevant cause of terrorism or is it ressentiment — including revenge fantasy brought on specifically by powerlessness? Nietzsche is of course no fan of religion, but he is even less a fan of those who are blind to the more fundamental principle of which it is a manifestation, and so blind to their unwitting complicity with it, even in their reaction against these manifestations. This principle is a source of a wide variety of phenomena, including not just religion but … wait for it … scientism and atheism. Like religion, scientism and atheism are essentially nihilistic and ascetic, and meant to exert power-as-ideology as compensation for lack of physical might. On this view, religion celebrates weakness and martyrdom in exchange for the fantasy of eternal hell for one’s enemies; adherents of scientism and atheism pretend to have answers to un-answerable questions as a means to a sort of ultimate revenge-of-the-nerds over the ignorant masses: the obliteration of their folk-beliefs. They are on opposite sides of the surface battle — but in fact they are allies in the deeper war. (Incidentally, the fact that Islamism’s impatience for the next world, and a concept of martyrdom involves taking enemies with you, does not change the analysis — Christian ressentiment had a similarly paradoxical spill-over into more worldly power struggles).

The Freudian extension of the Nietzschean position is that we should treat these ideologies as what they really are: rationalizations. Islamists are not motivated by a “form of Islam,” they are motivated by a deeper political ressentiment which must be given voice in one cultural manifestation or another. What’s required here is some social form that provides a transcendental ground for the promise of vindication of powerlessness — that is powerful enough to counteract the insecurity inevitably created by the fact that the concept of political inferiority always resolves into the concept of psychological inferiority. Really there is no need for Islam here — practically any ideology will do, including its opposite: atheism provided plenty of fuel for the USSR and China, as it does now for some of those (such as McEwan’s comrade Christopher Hitchens) who would reform illiberal (but especially “Islamist”) societies at the point of a gun — who have supported a war that has essentially destroyed an entire country and killed hundreds of thousands of its people and displaced many more. You see? Any religion will do, including anti-religion.

Shall we compare which of these religions is more dangerous — the McEwan Delusion or the God Delusion? Shall we ask which is a greater threat to the world in terms of the numbers of the dead? She we calculate the “Islamist” carnage as a fraction of the enlightened carnage of we liberators of Muslim women from an oppressive “text”?

I’ll refrain — because it returns us to the more salient question of whether “Islamism” is really the grave threat to which we should be directing our hatred; whether we should really be courageously declaring that we “despise Islamism” — the “ism” a careful avoidance of the question of whether we mean Islam, a little suffix that we can use to inoculate ourselves against accusations of racism (more accurately, jingoism and stupidity), a little preparation for the whining and indignant protestations to follow such accusations.

Why not direct our attention instead toward national security per se? Why not say, “I despise the warmongers who killed hundreds of thousands of innocents and stir up a hornet’s nest of hatred toward the West”? Why not say, “I despise the war criminals who run the government of the United States, the creators of detention camps and torture policies who commit felony after felony while they ignore real national security — port security, loose nukes ….” Why not say, “I despise those who weaken us by wasting resources on unnecessary wars,” “I despise the incompetence that made 9/11 possible,” or simply “I despise lax security”? Are these more fundamental problems more worthy of our attention — or rather should we take one surface-manifestation of broken societies — societies the West helped break — to be our primary problem, our enemy, our scary-powerful Other?

The Constitution and Obama’s Dissaopinting Stand on FISA

I have never seen the “halo” that others have claimed for Obama (usually his opponents, at the many moments they claim it has just been removed). But since my posts to this blog have been relentlessly pro-Obama, here’s my chance to prove that I’m not simply a true believer.

While public financing is a non-issue, this is the kind of real capitulation that will create disappointment among many Obama supporters. It’s not the first time Obama has disappointed — his support of Lieberman and pandering to AIPAC are the most notable example.

On the one hand, I have no desire to see a candidate commit political suicide, and I am entirely comfortable with a candidate making rhetorical (AIPAC) compromises when I have reason to believe his behavior will be principled. But supporting the passage of a constitution-subverting law is another matter. The promise to oppose telecom amnesty is heartening, unless it is merely political theater, as it may be; but the the promise to use his new powers wisely is a lapse into Bush “trust me” territory. And as such it represents a misstatement (by someone who has taught constitutional law) of the point of the constitution and the separation of powers — “trust me” does not work when it comes to human beings. The role of the constitution is to take as much power as possible away from any one human being and bestow it as much as possible on an abstraction — on “law.” Part of the power of this abstraction is the intermediating game it creates: the players, the rules, their interpreters and executors, and the makers of corollary rules; and finally, the extreme difficulty in reflexively amending the core principles. The players and interpreters are fallible, but an abstraction has a stubborn life of its own.

Of course, the abstraction can be dismantled. It’s not the extreme corruption of one power-hungry individual or another that makes that possible, because such individuals are legion in politics, but a general political climate that appeases them — often the result of a humiliation felt at the national level (Versailles, 9/11). There is a more powerful, competing abstraction here, and that is nationalism. And it is designed to lend its power on its most vocal advocates — to those who create the fear that feeds it. Where the Constitution represents restraint, what the moment seems to require is unfettered action — men of deeds, not words. That’s why we’re told that terrorism is not a “law enforcement issue”: law is weakness. It is the fatherland that counts, and its strong father-like protectors.

There is a complication here, which is that the choice of an executive is largely characterological: the more decent and trustworthy they are, the better. And I have argued since before Obama was an electoral phenomenon that Obama gives off good psychological cues in this regard. And this is how voters make decisions, despite all the telling protestations about “issues.” Clinton supporters fought not for issues but for the character with whom they identified — as indicated by the fringe not to vote for Obama. (Talk of “experience,” incidentally, is the perfect rationalization here — since it means to milk personal identification for policy implications). And often issues are just a stand-in for the valuation of a certain type of character: my friends who think of the Democratic party as “tax-and-spend” cannot be moved by evidence that Obama’s undoing of a regressive payroll tax will help them and that McCain’s corporate tax breaks will not help them. What they care about is the general principle of the matter–the idea of self-reliance, the value of capitalism as the playground of the self-reliant, and so on. Actual taxes do not matter to them: what matters to them is being on the side of the people who value strength — mercantile and military.

The problem with making decisions based on character is that no-one is really trustworthy. Human beings are fallible (as Obama notes in his better moments). The integrity of the constitution and the general political climate that determines its fate is a much bigger national security issue than terrorism. Terrorists can destroy lives and physical infrastructure, but the loss of core institutions and principles would be politically fatal.

I am not making, by the way, the cynical argument that all politicians are the same, that elections are always a choice of evils, and that we can expect the same level of selling out and corruption from everyone. But it’s important that stand on principle and criticize even our candidate of choice when it is called for (not to mention email and call his campaign to register grievances).

Obama and Public Financing — A Response to Stuart Roy

My Crossfit friend Stuart writes the following piece, with which I must respectfully disagree.

With regards to Obama’s “Messianic Image” and the claim that his supporters have “drunk the Koolaid” (or rather “taken shots” of it, far more suitable to the demographic): this is a generic piece of political rhetoric that can be used, and has been used, to describe the supporters of any politician whatsoever. It’s a very convenient charge to make against a popular politician, but it’s unfairly broad generalization to apply to supporters in general — i.e., millions of people.

More than sixteen million people voted for Obama in the primaries. Some I know were ambivalent; some were enthusiastic. Some are more cynical about politicians and their motives, including Obama, and some are more hopeful about the integrity of Obama in particular. But if you think any of them care about whether Obama accepts public financing, I think you are extraordinarily naive. And as for McCain’s complaints, no American politician has gained an advantaged whining pathetically about the fact that his opponent has millions of eager supporters from whom he can raise lots and lots of money. The idea that Republicans complaining about this is especially rich: they generally out-raise the Democrats (and the RNC still has much more money than the DNC).

More importantly, Stuart fails to mention the following:

• Rejecting public financing is not the same as accepting special interest money; I’m
  sure Stuart knows that Obama does not accept special interest PAC or lobbyist contributions, and that when he became the nominee he convinced the DNC not to accept them either.
• There is hardly anything shameful about raising lots of money because you’re getting millions of contributions of $25 from grassroots supporters over the web; that’s a Democratization of campaign finance of which the Obama campaign is rightly proud.
• I’m sure that Stuart knows that public financing is a joke that has long been circumvented by outside groups who post campaign ads on “issues”; remember the swfitboating of Kerry? The money that financed that fell outside campaign finance laws. There is lots and lots of this money. That’s why campaign finance reform is still a big issue — and whether or not one accepts PAC and lobbyist contributions and makes use of these groups is a far bigger issue than whether lots of Americans are sending you $25 checks.

So I think Stuart’s piece is designed to appeal mainly to those who area already McCain supporters and perhaps those who think Obama is a Marxist, not the independents he mentions in the last paragraph. There’s a reason why Obama is polling far ahead of McCain with independents and in swing states. It’s not just “hard-core supporters” who won’t be moved by the partisan rhetoric in Stuart’s post. Again, if you think independent voters are troubled by Obama’s fundraising rather than simply impressed by it, and if you think they don’t know that Stuart would be singing a much different tune if McCain had lots of enthusiastic supporters sending him $25 checks, then I think you have badly misread the political climate. Partisan affiliation is one thing — but let’s not let that cloud our strategic predictions. The idea that the “hopes and dreams” of supporters will coming crashing down because of this decision, when many Obama supporters and contributers like me are proud of our participation in his grassroots fundraising machine, is simply absurd. We Obama supporters are not going to turn our cheeks while independent groups circumvent campaign finance laws to smear Obama as a Muslim, Marxist, and all the rest. Prepare for a fight — and please get over the idea that bemoaning the other guy’s strength is any more effective a political strategy than putting McCain in front of a green backdrop creepily reciting “that’s not change we can believe in.”

Stuart, I hope I have not offended. We’ll have to discuss this over Tequila shots Saturday. I’ll bring the Tequila and my Obama T-shirt.

(And speaking of no public financing, you can donate on my fundraising page here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/wesalwan)

Media Fairness and Hillary

Greg Sargent asks whether the media was unfair to Hillary, and goes on to list examples of an

extraordinary amount of frivolous, crude, unfair, misleading, outright dishonest, and transparently mendacious media coverage that without question had a major impact on this campaign. This should not have been tolerated by any liberals or Democrats, Obama supporters included.

Sargent admits at the end of this article that such a list could never tell us whether the media was unfair to Clinton “as a whole” or whether they were more unfair to her or Obama. And most of his examples come from pundits, who are there to express their (often frivolous) opinions, not to be fair to anyone.

So why call this article “Was the Media Unfair to Hillary?” Candidates have always been treated dishonestly, salaciously, and unfairly — that includes tabloid-esque coverage of the first presidental elections in U.S. history. That we ought to change the tone of our public discourse is unquestionable.

But Clinton has made the claim that she received extraordinary treatment from the media, and specifically that she was a victim of sexism — a claim that Sargent doesn’t address even though it’s the question du jour and seems initially to be the subject of this post.

Why this editorial lacuna? I think the primary point of Sargent’s post is to say that Obama supporters “tolerated” this unfairness and, by implication, sexism. Sargent cannot argue that Obama received less salacious coverage, because given Rev. Wright and Ayers and the rest, it’s a laughable task. But he wants to imply that Obama supporters were somehow involved in a nasty and defamatory campaign.

“Obama supporters” is just a rhetorical work-around, a stand in for Obama himself, since 16 or so million people are hardly unified in their reaction to Clinton coverage. And how would they go about demonstrating their lack of tolerance? For very active supporters, it would mean doing precisely the sorts of things they were doing on behalf of Obama — writing op-eds and blog posts and comments and letters to the editor, calling news organizations, and so on — on behalf of Clinton. That’s too grand an expectation — to be an activist on behalf of your opponent — during a hard-fought campaign.

As for Obama himself, he routinely stated, when asked about Clinton’s response to one smear or another, that he took her at her word. He never once personally brought up these controversies — from Bosinia to JFK — during a debate. Of course, we know that Clinton didn’t hesitate in this regard: Farrakhan, Ayers, “change you can xerox,” and the rest. So here we have a real standard of evidence: which candidate was willing to make public use of salacious media coverage in their own public statements?

We all know the answer to that question. And if you have a single piece of evidence to the contrary, please post it here.

Down with Harry Potter

Since I’ve pissed off several friends already by forwarding this critique of Harry Potter, it’s time to troll it up on the blog. I hereby admit that I feel nothing but revulsion for Harry Potter and everything he stands for. I wanted to articulate why one day, and then I came across A.S. Byatt’s fantastic review.

Some highlights:

Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.

****

Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, “only personal.” Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

****

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

That children like it I understand. That adults can’t see through its complete lack of imagination and craft I find depressing.

I realize that these sorts of critiques these days automatically make you a snob. You’re only allowed to say “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” While the idea that food might taste good yet be bad for the body is widely accepted. The idea that culture can be good or bad for you is not, because it evokes the uncomfortable and seemingly elitist concept of bad taste. The same people who work out and eat salads obsessively would never dream of making artistic distinctions that transcend the expression of their personal taste; and they would never dream of modifying their leisure habits.

In case none of this offends you, the same thing goes for “The Kite Runner.”

Fire away.

A Brief Summary of Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Begin day. Pre-day. Brain Surgeon awakes suddenly “some hours before dawn.” Opens window on London square from fancy big apartment. Condescending observation of square peons. Sees a distressed plane and its trail of fire cross the sky to an unknown fate in the west. Fears terrorism. Biologically reductive reveries about terrorism and religion. Nature, nurture, Darwin, genetics. Enter the family. His wife: he met her by curing her brain disease; fucks her. The father-in-law, the famous washed up alcoholic poet and blues lover; his daughter, the saucy soon-to-be-published poet; his son, the budding benign laid back blues prodigy. Begin post-breakfast day. Drive Mercedes; delayed and detoured by war protest; ruminations about the wisdom of the coming Iraq war. A car accident, near-mugging, and bruising punch to the sternum by what turns out to be a specimen of brain-disease-induced violent tendencies. Mr. Brain Disease. Attempts to palliate and control Brain Disease with diagnosis and hint of possible cure (worked on his wife) but just humiliates Brain Disease in front of his friends, who leave. Gets away and has an emotionally charged, competitive squash game with a typically aggressive American medical friend. Wins, American calls foul, they replay, he loses. To the fishmonger for dinner supplies. Stops by to see his brain-diseased mother in a nursing home. Is he being followed? Back to make dinner for the family reunion scheduled for that evening; the elder poet to forgive the younger her success and sexuality, and she his envy. TV: Fears of terrorism turn out to be unfounded–a benign plane. Mr. Brain Disease returns with Brain Surgeon’s wife, a friend, and a knife. Not benign. Daughter poet must strip and do a pre-rape reading of one of her poems–her mother’s life depends on it. Nudity reveals pregnancy. Grandfather poet suggests she pawn off Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach as her own. Mr. Brain Disease is touched (“You wrote that!”) and calls off the rape. Friend leaves–Brain Disease has failed him again. Father and pacifist blues son attack, crack open Brain Disease’s skull. Redemption of squash skills. Brain Surgeon goes to the hospital and patches his skull back up so Brain Disease can run his natural course. Back to bed with the wife. Biologically reductive reflections about Brain Disease’s genetically induced propensity for violence. Fucks his wife. Sense-of-vulnerability-induced reflections about life, getting old, familial diaspora, death, Iraq, terrorism. Another attack is as inevitable as the fate of Brain Disease, whom he decides not to press charges against. Camaraderie of mortals, pity for poetry-sensitive neurological victims, reductive sense of causal connection to and responsibility for family terror: ill-considered intersection with the genetically determined fate of Brain Disease; car accident, altercation, diagnosis, home invasion. Blowback? Trying to reason with demented thugs, whether products of religion or biology, will just get you in trouble? Reflect further on connection to unmentioned Islamofascists on your own time. End day.

When “Experience” is Conformity, and “Toughness” Insecurity

When I talk to friends who are worried about an Obama candidacy and possible administration, I hear the following:

1. Americans will not elect a black man
2. Obama is inexperienced and soft
3. The optimism of Obama and his supporters seems dangerously naive
4. Obama is simply a politician, like the rest, and no more like to put principle ahead of political expediency

I’ve written enough about (1). So In this post I’ll address (2-4).

Experience and Conformity

I frankly find (2) to be baffling. Perhaps that’s my own elitism and workplace cynicism, but consider the following. I’m sure plenty of your co-workers are experienced, in the sense of having been in the workforce for a long time, and yet either incompetent or competent but highly unsuited to positions involving authority or leadership. These people are notoriously difficult to weed out during the hiring process. The kinds of resumes that appeal to HR people (often not the brightest bulbs) are highly conventional and so inherently risky: it’s just as easy for less attractive candidates to jump through hoops, acquire certifications, and rack up years of “experience” as it is for mis-educated highschool students to ride a conveyor belt from one grade to another.

On the other hand, there are highly competent or even brilliant people who have jumped through the same hoops. Clearly some of these candidates stand out by virtue of their very shiny hoops — Harvard, prestigious firms, the expected career ladder, and so on. But even for these over-achievers there’s a second layer to the problem of evaluating “experience”: even they are not necessarily the most creative, independent minded, or ethical human beings. In fact, that they have gotten where they are is often the result of significant conformity: teacher’s pet, straight A’s, regurgitation of professor’s lecture onto blue book exams, all the right clubs and activities and political alliances, the right career choice, and so on.

In other words, experience often implies conformity.

This conformity has its place, because the teaching of artistic and technical pursuits depends initially on the passivity of their apprentices. Good teachers are authorities, and good students respect this authority. As a consequence of this respect they become vessels for the “knowledge” — today “information” — that their mentors pour into them. In the end, there is a body of knowledge to which the student must conform.

When generalized to the moral and political domains, this model of education fails. In fact, it is dangerous. That’s because these domains — and their study, Philosophy — depend critically on non-conformity rather than conformity; the challenging of received views rather their absorption; and a comfort with the lack of resolution of their primary questions, rather than their artificial dissolution into easy certainties. As a consequence, there is no such thing as “expertise” and “experience” in statesmanship: there are no technical facilities that you can develop to become a great leader. It is not like learning guitar, or becoming an accountant, or even like becoming a writer or artist. More critical are character, passion, independence of mind, and comfort with decision-making involving situations that are so unique as to be without real precedent: in other words, political and moral decisions cannot be learned like times tables, or as algorithms developed either from book-learning or “experience.” Experience is of course important in the broad sense — i.e., any experience that develops character and judgment. Years spent in office, or years spent in Washington, D.C. are not what’s relevant here.

In fact, one ought to be wary of strictly political experience when it comes to looking for a good leader. The more political a profession, the more likely an acolyte’s conformity is a preliminary to corruption or incompetence. Experience in politics means having been around long enough to have achieved enough mutually back-scratching relationships; it means making the winning of elections more important than standing on principle.

That is why Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War is so important to many of us. It was a vote of expedience, conformity par excellence. It is “experience.” You will see a certain amount of this conformity, at least in the public sphere, in any politician, including Obama. But there are clear differences between Clinton’s conformist opportunism and Obama’s independent judgment. And Obama gives one the hope that even where winning depends on toeing the line, he will be much more independent in his use of power when he acquires it.

Experience and Toughness

“Experience” is also meant to be a synonym for “toughness.” Obama is soft, the idea goes, because he hasn’t been tempered in the fires of political backbiting for long enough.

This argument is just a coded command for the conformity discussed above. Obama’s detractors are worried that he isn’t sufficiently cynical enough to keep his political enemies at bay by out-conforming his opponents. Clinton’s gas tax holiday and public beer-swilling are experience and toughness, again par excellence. So are talk of flag pins and the pledge of allegiance and patriotism in general: the point is to create doubts about Obama’s sufficient conformity to a grandiose American self-concept; about how un-reflectively committed he is to the American Tribe; about whether he will let the teeming hordes of The Other — muslims, Hamas, angry black men — storm Castle Americana. Obama is not tough enough, according to this argument, because he is not paranoid enough about the rest of the world; because he might not share the knee-jerk, xenophobic hysteria of his fellow countrymen; because he might hesitate to “obliterate” our enemies — their women and children with them; because he might be other himself — muslim, black christian militant, Kenyan, Indonesian, Hawaiian, elite ….; because as other, he might cast an uncomfortably critical eye on America itself — might be able to admit to himself some of the failings of its foreign policy, for instance.

Here the definition of toughness just is slack-spirited, weak conformity: toughness means sharing the patriotic delusions of your countrymen and rashly and even self-destructively striking out at the first sign of danger. Toughness is the cool, hostile posturing of the adolescent. Of course, we all know what “toughness” covers up in the United States just as much as the adolescent: profound insecurity, profound weakness. Demands for “toughness” and for “experience” are demands for conformity to this weakness: they are not about American national security but about American psychological security. They demand that a certain identity, a certain self-conception, remain unscathed, that a certain public mythology be perpetuated: it is the image of toughness that is to be preserved, even if it means gravely endangering the real United States (as for example, by going to war in Iraq instead of dealing with grave domestic security problems). What is meant to be “tough” is the shell preserving the posturing psychology itself — as transparently insecure, weak, and reactively belligerent as it is.

So insofar experience is meant to convey “toughness,” it really is just another conformist rejection of real strength: independent judgment, diplomacy, self-examination and even self-critique, and a willingness to change, negotiate, compromise. Real strength comes at an incredible psychic cost, which is why most of us don’t often achieve it: it explodes the myth of one’s invulnerability. At the national level, it threatens the idea of the United States as perfect and all-powerful. It threatens our imaginary, psychological security, which demagogues then transubstantiate into national security. Real strength is not in the rigidity of one’s delusions of grandeur, but in the steadfastness of one’s willingness to engage in self-examination — as a means to well-considered decisions.

And as we have seen, that self-examination can be hindered by experience, if experience just means developing one’s uncritical acceptance of the principles of national pride and collective narcissism.

So when you hear of anyone talk about “experience” in a political context, I encourage you to ask yourself whether what they really mean is “conformity.” And when you hear anyone talk about a leader’s “toughness,” I encourage you to think of this as just a way of describing the rigidity of the surface-level shell that hides a gooey center of insecurity.

Naivete and Politicians

Some people I’ve talked to are turned off by the enthusiasm of Obama supporters. “Yes we Can” and “Hope” amounts to naivete on two counts: first there’s Obama’s lack of experience and toughness, second there is the fact that he is not a messiah — not pure, not above political calculation.

I’ve dealt with the first reason for rejecting enthusiasm, and that analysis shows that it is not entirely consistent with the second. On the one hand concerns about experience and toughness are concerns about Obama’s non-conformity; while cynicism about his motives involves a suggestion that he is more conformist than he seems.

I think it’s enough to say here that most of Obama’s supporters do not see someone as a political pure savior. They see him as someone who’s unusually decent and honest for a politician. Any amount of decency and honesty in American public discourse is a reason for enthusiasm. But beyond that, Obama supporters are enthusiastic about the implications of his character for the presidency. We may be mistaken about his character and judgment, but it is still the right criterion. That’s because we’re looking for someone who displays real strength and independent mindedness, an independence is crucial to our national security at a time when the lemmings of conformist, “experienced” belligerence are leading us over a cliff.

The Viability of Obama, Part II — The Meaning of Toughness

A year ago I wrote a post called The Viability of Obama, in response to to friends who thought that the United States was not ready to elect a black president (and long before Obama was thought of as anything but a foil for Clinton). So yes, I’m here to congratulate myself. In part. For what I thought might form the counter-currents of Clinton’s weaknesses–anger and eliteness–were effectively turned on Obama.

Back then I thought that a) white guilt might balance out racism (although this is not the same as saying, a la Geraldine Ferraro, that Obama is only where he is because he is black); b) Americans were looking for the reassurance of a certain kind of personality — someone calm and sane; c) that Clinton was in a particularly tricky situation with regard to her own demeanor — because as a woman with a tendency towards a robotic public persona, she might seem fake and even unhinged if she tried force a warmer or more passionate identity, and overly harsh and opportunistic if she didn’t. And I thought that because of this dilemma she was in danger of being branded either as the “angry liberal” (a la Dean) or the distant “elite liberal” a la Kerry.

That’s before I knew that Clinton could combine harshness, tin-throated enthusiasm, and opportunism all in one motley package. So in that sense I was wrong: Clinton’s tough-but-occasionally-teary combo, as badly executed as it was and as see-through as I thought it should have been, helped her. While I saw her attacks and pandering as incredibly cynical, others saw this as “toughness” and “experience.” The same goes for what I see as Clinton’s delusional, entitled persistence. While I see this merely as a desperation for power, others give Clinton credit, once again, for “toughness.”

The Meaning of Toughness — Peace or Aggression?

Here, on the other hand, is what I wrote about Obama:

After their experience with Bush, Americans are looking for a candidate who exudes sanity. (Is “it’s the sanity, stupid” a possible slogan?). It’s not a high standard: please, just don’t be crazy. Obama possesses this un-crazy quality in much greater quantity than any other candidate in the Democratic or Republican field. It’s part of his sincere, calm, and charismatic demeanor. That he is an African American with these qualities makes him a more, not less, formidable candidate.

Obama’s weak spot was being cast as an angry black man — my point was that his calm, sincere, and sane personality (remarkably unpolitical in its way) immunized him to this. Of course I didn’t know how hard they’d try. That’s the significance of Wright, Farrakhan, Ayers, and Clinton’s talk of white voters: one goal has been to convince us that Obama really is that angry black man, still a relatively hopeless task except among there base given recent polling data and the results of Indiana. The other goal became part of Clinton’s meta-narrative: convince party leaders that a black man just can’t be elected in the United States, whatever the primary results.

The narrative of “toughness,” on the other hand, runs at cross-currents to these. On the one hand we have the claim that underneath the calm exterior is an angry black man or at least someone who will create that suspicion in white voters. On the other we have the claim that the calm exterior is a sign of weakness of the elite-liberal sort. Hence we have Clinton’s nauseating talk about 3am calls, obliterating Iran, the heat of the kitchen, her love of god and guns, how she never gives up, and so on.

We can note with sadness that there is an element of self-hatred here on the part of Clinton and her supporters — but I think that’s the inevitable result of identity politics. In this case it’s comprised of a gleeful rejection of qualities more usually associated with femininity — grace and compromise, for instance. In the harsher backwaters Obama is frequently referred to as a “pussy.” In other words, some of Clinton’s more enthusiastic supporters hate Obama precisely because of his opportunity to be … the first female president. Which is to say, Obama’s feminine qualities comprise his strength; while Clinton’s faux-masculine-toughness doth protest too much.

As part and parcel of this theme we watched the shift of Clinton and her supporters to the right: of course, this is what “new democrats” are all about. It’s why, for instance, Clinton voted for the Iraq war; and why Bush, despite his weakness, remains unchallenged by the Democratic legislature; and why the party put up Kerry in 2004. The message of toughness really is: be afraid. Be afraid that the Republicans will out-tough you.

With Obama Democrats seem to be near the realization that tough-talk just is weakness: it’s weakness when Bush does it, it’s weakness when Bush acts on it, and it’s especially weakness when Democrats cower before it by appropriating it. Countries are not made safe by preemptive wars (Germany, anyone?). They are not made safe by bluster. (Similarly, campaigns aren’t always won by going for blitzkrieg early wins, pandering, and generally acting like a macho ass).

Countries are made safe (and sometimes campaigns are won) by deliberate, cool decision making in the face of crisis. That means an openness to discussion, an element of selflessness, and the ability to run a household, to mention a few cliches of femininity that I think apply more to Obama than Clinton. But ultimately it’s a matter of the inherent toughness of inner peace — the kind that opponents have uncomprehendingly tried to brand alternately as cerebral and “elite” or a cover for an angry black man.

In a previous post I noted that Obama’s legislative accomplishments, abilities as an organizer, and the strengths of his campaign went hand in hand, and that his opponents ignored this at his peril. I think that organizational ability is closely connected to Obama’s calm. A recent Newsweek article (“Sit Back, Relax, Get Ready to Rumble”) documents this fact superbly:

Obama was explicit from the beginning: there was to be “no drama,” he told his aides. “I don’t want elbowing or finger-pointing. We’re going to rise or fall together.” Obama wanted steady, calm, focused leadership; he wanted to keep out the grandstanders and make sure the quiet dissenters spoke up. A good formula for running a campaign—or a presidency.

It worked against Hillary Clinton, whose own campaign has been rent by squabbling aides and turf battles.

The ability to do battle is the kind of thing that’s supposed to make you tough. Apparently not:

Team Obama has been a model of tight, highly efficient organization, certainly in contrast to most presidential campaigns. The few tensions that have emerged have been between those who want to stick to the high ground and those who want to fight a little dirtier. (Such debates could intensify in a hard-hitting general campaign.) The campaign has at times been a little slow to fight back.

But Team Obama has been consistently able to outstrategize the opposition, and it does have a plan for the coming mud war.

This might sound like an anecdotal fairy tale if it weren’t for the way in which Obama, a freshman Senator, has methodically seized power in the Democratic party from its entrenched bosses, including the Clintons:

From top to bottom, they have destroyed their opponents within the party, stolen out from under them their base, and persuaded a whole set of individuals from blog readers to people in the pews to ignore intermediaries and believe in Barack as a pure vessel of change. It’s actually very similar to Clinton from 1994-2000, where power and money in the Democratic Party is being centralized around a key iconic figure. He’s consolidating power within the party.

Read on to be reminded of Obama’s deadly combination of organizational and fund-raising genius with his charisma and iconic power. One might wonder why there isn’t more worry about his power than hand-wringing about his chances in a general election, especially in light of GOP weakness.

Witness the recent spectacle in which Obama was greeted as a rock star on Capitol Hill by his supporters, some Republicans, and … Hillary supporters: “The mob scene around him was Beatles-esque.”

So I rolled out this slogan and I’d like to roll it out again, as a tribute to the power of the pacifist personality: “it’s the sanity, stupid.”

We Hard Working, White, Statistical Falsehoods (Obama’s Demographic Problem: The Elderly, not Whites)

Clinton: I, but not Barack Obama, have the support of

working, hard-working Americans, White Americans

Some … call you swing voters, I call you Americans

(Where “hard-working” means uneducated enough to have voted for Bush twice).

The common interpretation among pundits is that it is an unwise but innocent statement of fact. But it is neither factual nor innocent.

First, there is the transition from hard-working to Americans to whites, with the implication that being white and American and hard-working are all the same thing. It is a testament to the collective tolerance for Clinton’s delusions that she is not barraged with charges of racism, but rather given heat for just another indelicate gaffe.

Second, there is the idea that Obama automatically wins the black vote because he is black. In fact, Clinton once had a significant lead among African Americans–in January of 2007, by 40 points. She and Bill Clinton had to work very hard to shed that advantage.

Finally, if Obama has a demographic problem is with older white women, not white voters per se.

Obama and White Voters

Gallup Polls show that Obama’s support among whites is precisely the same as Kerry’s was at the same period in 2004. In fact, Obama’s support among white voters has been remarkably consistent.

The point is that the white vote skews against Obama is likely an artifact of other factors, most egregiously, the fact that Indiana is 78% white. This means that barring some unusual circumstance (like winning 92% of the Black vote), any winner of of Indiana would have won the white vote. Given Clinton’s current disadvantage with black voters, winning Indiana for Clinton implies winning the white vote. Hence no matter what the motivations of voters — no matter what her reason for winning — Clinton would have won the white vote. Why not attribute her win to voter policy preferences? If Edwards had lost to Clinton in Indiana, he also likely would have lost the white vote. Would that have been because of a Clinton advantage with race, or because of her name recognition? Or experience? Or her health care plan? Or her appeal to women and the elderly?

Obama and Older Women

In fact, because the Indiana electorate is far more evenly divided by sex and age groups, it is far more relevant to speculate about these demographics as causally relevant to Clinton’s success. They are still speculations, but no where near as vacuous as speculations about racial advantages in a 78% white state.

56% of Indiana primary voters were female, and 58% were over the age of 44. 52% of women voted for Clinton, 52% of voters 45-59, 65% of voters 60 years and older, and a whopping 70% of voters 65 and older. These demographics are far more significant than race, and a racial advantage is an inevitable artifact of these advantages in a predominantly white state.

So the defense that the statistic about white voters is technically correct doesn’t fly. The statistic is irrelevant. It is not conclusively indicative of a cause, it is not an explanation. Hence its use as an explanation is simply the assertion of a falsehood.

That pundits are incapable of making these analysis is far more distressing than Clinton’s race-baiting.

Poetry Friday Challenge: The Aubade

Today’s WellReadChild post:

We’ve done the aubade, and Wilbur, so I thought I’d combine them and turn it into a challenge.

In Richard Wilbur’s “Late Aubade,” the morning departure of a lover has already been staved off. It’s just a matter of how long he can sustain the post-coital languor. Love has a lot in common with being lazy — the bed is equally important to both.

I thought I’d try to write my own aubade — since Wilbur’s started late, I thought I’d start mine early, just before waking up. There’s no convincing a lover to stay here when in a sense she’s already left — with the darkness, with the dream, with the end of a romantic story; especially if, unlike Wilbur’s mistress, her loyalties lie with the sun!

So my attempt follows; if you accept the challenge, please post your own in the comments here (or a link to it on your blog)!

Early Aubade

by Wes

Now I feel the intrusion of the sun,
And your backwards glance against the glare

I was dreaming about the movies,
The projector beaming at the wall

We hold hands before the fire,
The drums beat for the entranced wood

We do our lines for the moon and crickets,
And kiss in closeup against the sky

We dance on the lawn,
And laughing, get some steps wrong

The celluloid burns a little and peels your face
Which I try to press back down

But time staggers on the wheel
In undone loops, darkness settles in

Now there’s just your warmth, and I realize
We cannot see what we are

Fleeing through the night-rain without looking back,
Under a rising umbrella

To my car, where the pistons hum
And keep the world going, around us

The day you went back there,
I chased you through the void

The flames chanting at my back,
I found you in a bright-empty room

Standing at attention before the sun,
Turning from a wall of undressed window

To say get up, sleepyhead,
The day has just begun

If we took a holiday …

It’s interesting that the shameful pandering that is the gas tax holiday is being acknowledged as such by the establishment press; I can’t remember such a broad consensus in the punditocracy about charges like that. Is that because Obama resistance to that pandering is such a rarity? If  there weren’t that contrast I’m not sure the establishment press would approach the story in that way; they might take it as a face value policy decision, as they do many other sorts of pandering. Notice that in most areas such anti-pandering would be heresy, insofar as pandering usually has something to do with national pride (“how dare you say American foreign policy had something to do with 9/11!”). On the other hand, the Republicans routinely get away with the most gratuitous pander of all, and a shell game to boot, tax cuts. If Obama can do to tax cuts in general what he’s doing the gas tax holiday, when may finally be seeing a Democrat who has the courage and know-how to successfully fight instead of tucking tail and parroting the Republicans in political fear (on the Iraq war, economic policy, etc.).

Poetry Friday: Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

http://wellreadchild.blogspot.com/2008/04/poetry-friday-love-calls-us-to-things.html

Richard Wilbur published his first poem when he was 8 years old. He went on to translate Moliere and Racine, write lyrics musicals, win the Pulitzer Prize, and become the U.S. Poet Laureate. If you’ve never been inspired by laundry, now’s your chance.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

Poetry Friday: Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” – “I work all day, and get half drunk at night”

http://wellreadchild.blogspot.com/2008/04/poetry-friday-philip-larkins-aubade-i.html

In the Middle Ages minstrels sometimes sang Aubades, or songs about lovers parting at dawn. This theme was revived by metaphysical poets like John Donne. In “The Sun Rising,” he rails against the sun for its interruption of lovers.

In “Aubade,” Philip Larkin replaces one lover with death, and speaks of night not as romantic cover but as an encounter with “what is really always there,” mortality. The parting lover becomes the parting of this consciousness of mortality in exchange for the glare of distractions from it — socializing, work, religion, drink. “I work all day, and get half drunk at night.”

Aubade

Philip Larkin

<!– Philip Larkin poem –>I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
— The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

We are All Descendants of Muhammed, Charlemagne, etc.

And like Barack Obama, we are all cousins of Dick Cheney.

A little research that once ended my genealogical ambitions to find someone famous in my family:

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:5CiheUn4INcJ:www.theatlantic.com/doc/200205/olson+%22the+royal+we%22+olson&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang’s model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.

This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang’s analysis to the world as a whole. For example, almost everyone in the New World must be descended from English royalty—even people of predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of intermarriage in the Americas. Similarly, everyone of European ancestry must descend from Muhammad. The line of descent for which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist.

http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/GenealComp1.html

The staggering number of ancestors each of us has (for example, perhaps 200 million of them in 1300 AD) also means that your ancestry is probably more diverse than you think. Somewhere among those 200 million people who were your ancestors in 1300, there are probably some folks who came from places you wouldn’t think likely, or who were members of ethnic groups that would surprise you. You’ll never know who all those 200 million people were, but they can be abundant fuel for your imagination.

http://www.stat.yale.edu/%7Ejtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureCommonAncestors-Article.pdf (PDF)

If a common ancestor of all living humans is defined as an individual who is a genealogical ancestor of all present-day people, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past (ref). However, the random mating model ignores essential aspects of population substructure, such as the tendency of individuals to choose mates from the same social group, and the relative isolation of geographically separated groups.Here we show that recent common ancestors also emerge from two models incorporating substantial population substructure. One model, designed for simplicity and theoretical insight, yields explicit mathematical results through a probabilistic analysis. A more elaborate second model, designed to capture historical population dynamics in a more realistic way, is analysed computationally through Monte Carlo simulations. These analyses suggest that the genealogies of all living humans overlap in remarkable ways in the recent past. In particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just a few thousand years ago in these models. Moreover, among all individuals living more than just a few thousand years earlier than the MRCA, each presentday human has exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors.

http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html
http://www.elvidge.com/Genealogy/essay1.htm
http://members.aol.com/acadac/gnlgy/cousin.html

Poetry Friday: Crossing the Hellespont

A poem by me, available here.

Silvanellia Plath

I didn’t quite get my Villanelle Expirans right. Here’s another go.

Rev. Wright’s Letter To NYT About Obama

March 11, 2007

Jodi Kantor
The New York Times
9 West 43rd Street
New York,
New York 10036-3959

Dear Jodi:

Thank you for engaging in one of the biggest misrepresentations of the truth I have ever seen in sixty-five years. You sat and shared with me for two hours. You told me you were doing a “Spiritual Biography” of Senator Barack Obama. For two hours, I shared with you how I thought he was the most principled individual in public service that I have ever met.

For two hours, I talked with you about how idealistic he was. For two hours I shared with you what a genuine human being he was. I told you how incredible he was as a man who was an African American in public service, and as a man who refused to announce his candidacy for President until Carol Moseley Braun indicated one way or the other whether or not she was going to run.

I told you what a dreamer he was. I told you how idealistic he was. We talked about how refreshing it would be for someone who knew about Islam to be in the Oval Office. Your own question to me was, Didn’t I think it would be incredible to have somebody in the Oval Office who not only knew about Muslims, but had living and breathing Muslims in his own family? I told you how important it would be to have a man who not only knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis prior to 9/11/01 in the Oval Office, but also how important it would be to have a man who knew what Sufism was; a man who understood that there were different branches of Judaism; a man who knew the difference between Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews and Reformed Jews; and a man who was a devout Christian, but who did not prejudge others because they believed something other than what he believed.

I talked about how rare it was to meet a man whose Christianity was not just “in word only.” I talked about Barack being a person who lived his faith and did not argue his faith. I talked about Barack as a person who did not draw doctrinal lines in the sand nor consign other people to hell if they did not believe what he believed.

Out of a two-hour conversation with you about Barack’s spiritual journey and my protesting to you that I had not shaped him nor formed him, that I had not mentored him or made him the man he was, even though I would love to take that credit, you did not print any of that. When I told you, using one of your own Jewish stories from the Hebrew Bible as to how God asked Moses, “What is that in your hand?,” that Barack was like that when I met him. Barack had it “in his hand.” Barack had in his grasp a uniqueness in terms of his spiritual development that one is hard put to find in the 21st century, and you did not print that.

As I was just starting to say a moment ago, Jodi, out of two hours of conversation I spent approximately five to seven minutes on Barack’s taking advice from one of his trusted campaign people and deeming it unwise to make me the media spotlight on the day of his announcing his candidacy for the Presidency and what do you print? You and your editor proceeded to present to the general public a snippet, a printed “sound byte” and a titillating and tantalizing article about his disinviting me to the Invocation on the day of his announcing his candidacy.

I have never been exposed to that kind of duplicitous behavior before, and I want to write you publicly to let you know that I do not approve of it and will not be party to any further smearing of the name, the reputation, the integrity or the character of perhaps this nation’s first (and maybe even only) honest candidate offering himself for public service as the person to occupy the Oval Office.

Your editor is a sensationalist. For you to even mention that makes me doubt your credibility, and I am looking forward to see how you are going to butcher what else I had to say concerning Senator Obama’s “Spiritual Biography.” Our Conference Minister, the Reverend Jane Fisler Hoffman, a white woman who belongs to a Black church that Hannity of “Hannity and Colmes” is trying to trash, set the record straight for you in terms of who I am and in terms of who we are as the church to which Barack has belonged for over twenty years.

The president of our denomination, the Reverend John Thomas, has offered to try to help you clarify in your confused head what Trinity Church is even though you spent the entire weekend with us setting me up to interview me for what turned out to be a smear of the Senator; and yet The New York Times continues to roll on making the truth what it wants to be the truth. I do not remember reading in your article that Barack had apologized for listening to that bad information and bad advice. Did I miss it? Or did your editor cut it out? Either way, you do not have to worry about hearing anything else from me for you to edit or “spin” because you are more interested in journalism than in truth.

Forgive me for having a momentary lapse. I forgot that The New York Times was leading the bandwagon in trumpeting why it is we should have gone into an illegal war. The New York Times became George Bush and the Republican Party’s national “blog.” The New York Times played a role in the outing of Valerie Plame. I do not know why I thought The New York Times had actually repented and was going to exhibit a different kind of behavior.

Maybe it was my faith in the Jewish Holy Day of Roshashana. Maybe it was my being caught up in the euphoria of the Season of Lent; but whatever it is or was, I was sadly mistaken. There is no repentance on the part of The New York Times. There is no integrity when it comes to The Times. You should do well with that paper, Jodi. You looked me straight in my face and told me a lie!

Sincerely and respectfully yours,

Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., Senior Pastor
Trinity United Church of Christ

Poetry Friday: The Villanelle

Here’s an interesting exercise: write a 19 line poem with just two rhyming sounds, and in which about a third of the lines are refrains. The first stanza haunts every other — its first and third lines alternating as conclusions to the stanzas that follow, until they come together to end the poem as a couplet. Do that and you will have created something called a “villanelle.”

See the rest of my post on The Well Read Child.

An Open Dear Jane Letter to Hillary Clinton

Please Sign the Petition

Dear Hillary,

I remember when I first saw you across the bar. You seduced me those experienced eyes and that raucous, sarcastic laugh. One thing led to another — too many cosmopolitans, a long conversation about solutions for America, then the uneven walk, arm-in-arm, back to my place. I vetted your credentials all night long. Good times.

I don’t know how it got so nasty. I tried to make it as clear as possible: I’ve chose someone else. There’s no chance — none — that we’ll be starting something up again.

But now I seem to see you everywhere. You say you have the experience. That I’m being seduced by mere words. You call me at 3am to tell me to “get real.” When that doesn’t work you cry, you beg, you tell me how hard it’s been, how it’s all unfair. In a flash you’re wiping away the tears and ridiculing me for being so deluded by hope. You say it’s all a lie.

And lately you’re telling all our friends how it’s not over yet, how it’s still possible for me to change my mind. You say it’s a “Myth” that I can’t come back to you. You say I’m going to get cold feet.

I don’t how to make it more clear that that’s not going to happen.

So please stop. This is hurting both of us: you’re tearing our family apart.

In Memoriam,

Most Democrats

P.S.: Next step: restraining order.

Clinton 2.0

Clinton and the Death Throes of Identity Politics

“I’m human,” Clinton tells us, and it’s “news to some people.” We’re not told why this is so, but apparently its common knowledge that more is expected of her. What exactly the double standard here is we are not told. But if we connect all of the dots in her campaign’s narrative of victim-hood, we’re meant to interpret it in the following way: She is a woman, and Obama is black; but she is where she is because of experience, and he is where he is “because he is black”; while Obama’s blackness is working for him, her womanhood is working against her. And that’s unfair.

Because one bit of identity politics has been pitted against another, it is especially petty and nasty, as competing victim-hoods always are. That’s why we see such a willingness to embrace right-wing talking points in the enforcement of that privileged victim-hood: Clinton surrogates have jumped on Rev. Wright’s supposed anti-Americanism in a way that they — and most progressives — never would otherwise. This is not to say that the legacy of post-9/11 Democratic cowardice hasn’t helped incubate such mindless nationalism in all quarters.

But who would have guessed that some weird political chemistry would bind pro-Hillary gender consciousness and right-wing nationalism into a single molecule?

Here’s the glue: in Rev. Wright, we have a nexus of the volatile issues of race and patriotism. He is, so to speak, the catalyst that allows a progression from a manufactured opposition of race and gender (as competing presidential identities) to an implied correlation between race and patriotism. Woman or Black Man; if Black Man, then Black Anti-Americanism; therefore, Woman.

Let’s look at how this catalyst works in more detail.

The Clinton campaign seems to believe not only that her current predicament is unfair, but this unfairness is compounded by the contrast between Obama’s supposed post-racial, unifying campaign style, and her unabashed appeal to women and the “historic” opportunity to have a female president. The strategic consequence of this sentiment is the seizing on any opportunity to show that Obama’s campaign is not post-racial at all: that he is not only relying on white guilt and black identification, but also “playing the race card” when he sees fit. Of course, you can go further, and with Rev. Wright Clinton supporters found an opporunity to do just this: not only is Obama not post-racial willing to manipulate race to his advantage, but he secretly embodies the worst excesses of the black community — paranoia, anger, anti-white racism, and a corresponding anti-Americanism. These excesses then become the substance of her current predicament — her glass ceiling: the only way to turn voters back to her special status as a woman is to undo white guilt by connecting Obama to a particular kind of blackness that most Americans can be counted on to fear. That these associations are more common on the right is excused by the fact it is merely a tool to making Americans see a stark contrast between her legitimate identity-claim and Obama’s bogus claim to transcend identity politics.

There is a lesson to be learned from the failure of these tactics: to live by identity politics is to die by it. It can be used indiscriminately by the left, the right, or any political actor in order to vie for power. At bottom it relies on an emphasis on divisions (by race, gender, or other qualities) that can be used for good or ill.

And so this little chemistry experiment can also blow up in your face.

Clinton’s campaign was not helped by her emphasis on her sex or her victim-hood. So the nasty spectacle of her campaign’s prolonged death throws may be just another sign of the times — of this election season’s transcendence of identity politics.

Here’s How you Lay Someone Off

Classy. Hat-tip ACopperWire.

McCain and the Political Mainstream: Substance is “Rhetoric,” Policies are just “Speeches”

Obama gives an extremely detailed (as well as elqouent) economic policy speech (see below) that should put McCain to shame. That doesn’t prevent the McCain campaign from engaging in the following chutzpah:

“No amount of rhetoric can hide Senator Obama’s clear record of embracing the liberal tax and spend, big government policies that hit hardworking American families at a time when they’re most vulnerable, and are certain to move America backward.”

This is one of those Orwellian reversals we’ve gotten used to with Bush (the “Clean Air” act): detailed policy prescriptions are just “rhetoric,” because accusations of “rhetoric” are the stale and failed campaign strategy McCain inherited from Clinton. Meanwhile, the response itself includes no substantive rebuttals, and (like McCain’s policy speech) is entirely rhetorical: “liberal tax and spend, big government.” What’s so offensive about such political word-games (which are de rigeur for typical Democrats and Republicans) is not just the particular positions they cloak (in this case, tax-cuts for the rich) but their intellectual dishonesty. Here’s a new principle for post-Obama politicians: thou shalt give an intellectual honest characterization of your opponent’s position, even in disagreement.

How pathetic that when a politician comes along whose hallmark is honesty, speaking to people as adults, attempting to focus on issues rather than personal attacks and identity politics, all of this should be summed up by the political mainstream as “rhetoric”; while the typical modus operandi, vague labels like “ready on day one” or “liberal tax and spend” are treated as the staples of experience.

Obama:

But there are several core principles for reform that I will pursue as President.

First, if you can borrow from the government, you should be subject to government oversight and supervision. Secretary Paulson admitted this in his remarks yesterday. The Federal Reserve should have basic supervisory authority over any institution to which it may make credit available as a lender of last resort. When the Fed steps in, it is providing lenders an insurance policy underwritten by the American taxpayer. In return, taxpayers have every right to expect that these institutions are not taking excessive risks. The nature of regulation should depend on the degree and extent of the Fed’s exposure. But at the very least, these new regulations should include liquidity and capital requirements.

Second, there needs to be general reform of the requirements to which all regulated financial institutions are subjected. Capital requirements should be strengthened, particularly for complex financial instruments like some of the mortgage securities that led to our current crisis. We must develop and rigorously manage liquidity risk. We must investigate rating agencies and potential conflicts of interest with the people they are rating. And transparency requirements must demand full disclosure by financial institutions to shareholders and counterparties.

As we reform our regulatory system at home, we must work with international arrangements like the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the International Accounting Standards Board, and the Financial Stability Forum to address the same problems abroad. The goal must be ensuring that financial institutions around the world are subject to similar rules of the road – both to make the system stable, and to keep our financial institutions competitive.

Third, we need to streamline a framework of overlapping and competing regulatory agencies. Reshuffling bureaucracies should not be an end in itself. But the large, complex institutions that dominate the financial landscape do not fit into categories created decades ago. Different institutions compete in multiple markets – our regulatory system should not pretend otherwise. A streamlined system will provide better oversight, and be less costly for regulated institutions.

Fourth, we need to regulate institutions for what they do, not what they are. Over the last few years, commercial banks and thrift institutions were subject to guidelines on subprime mortgages that did not apply to mortgage brokers and companies. It makes no sense for the Fed to tighten mortgage guidelines for banks when two-thirds of subprime mortgages don’t originate from banks. This regulatory framework has failed to protect homeowners, and it is now clear that it made no sense for our financial system. When it comes to protecting the American people, it should make no difference what kind of institution they are dealing with.

Fifth, we must remain vigilant and crack down on trading activity that crosses the line to market manipulation. Reports have circulated in recent days that some traders may have intentionally spread rumors that Bear Stearns was in financial distress while making market bets against the company. The SEC should investigate and punish this kind of market manipulation, and report its conclusions to Congress.

Sixth, we need a process that identifies systemic risks to the financial system. Too often, we deal with threats to the financial system that weren’t anticipated by regulators. That’s why we should create a financial market oversight commission, which would meet regularly and provide advice to the President, Congress, and regulators on the state of our financial markets and the risks that face them. These expert views could help anticipate risks before they erupt into a crisis.

These six principles should guide the legal reforms needed to establish a 21st century regulatory system. But the change we need goes beyond laws and regulation – we need a shift in the cultures of our financial institutions and our regulatory agencies.

Pain Trickled Up (Obama’s Cooper Union Speech)

How many people can create a refrain like “pain trickled up” (a nice crystallization of its substance) as part of a detailed economic policy speech? In his Cooper Union speech today Obama made a call for regulation and transparency and acknowledged of the role of widespread fraud (and its facilitation by Republican policies) in the current financial crisis.

In the more than two centuries since then, we have struggled to balance the same forces that confronted Hamilton and Jefferson – self-interest and community; markets and democracy; the concentration of wealth and power, and the necessity of transparency and opportunity for each and every citizen.

A subtle tribute hear to Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech on slavery, which also appealed to the views of the founding fathers.

The difference between McCain’s policy free speech and Obama’s is simply embarrassing.

On Truth and Lie in the Extra-American Sense (Obama’s Race Speech)

On CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Candy Crowley leads off on Obama’s speech today with the caveat “whether or not you agree with what Barack Obama said,” and then launches into the staple of political discussion on American TV: whether or not the speech “worked.” And this is the theme of every show on television: Obama had a strategy, he “had to do this” to address concerns about Reverend Wright; the coping strategy either was brilliant or it was not; it will go over with working class Pennsylvania whites or not (as if the Obama campaign is dumb enough to think it can budge polls, in a state with solid Clinton demographics, with a speech about race; or desperate and cynical enough to pander in a race where he holds a delegate lead that will not budge substantially either way, no matter what the results in the remaining states). There is little about the substance of the speech: whether Obama is right about race, whether or not Americans can move beyond it. There is little about Obama’s obvious sincerity. There is little about the greatness of the moment — a greatness rarely exhibited in American politics — in which a politician is courageous enough to give the frankest speech on race yet given by a modern presidential candidate, despite the fact that it is highly risky to his campaign. And there is none of the sense that commentariat might share his passion: the question is whether Joe Schmoe, especially white Joe Schmoe, has been manipulated by a crafty and self-serving politician.

I’ve been told I expect too much of TV pundits, but these pundits are the sum of public discourse for many Americans. “Whether or not you agree” is the opening bell of every political discussion on the airwaves, as it waves off questions of substance. These questions are bracketed to avoid a peculiarly American instinct in public discourse. And it is the instinct to do the following: to lie, and to lie about everything in public life — to lie about everything that if said truthfully might offend the various sensitivities of the manifold consumer-citizenship being purchased by advertising dollars. To be fair, this lying has roots in a kind of salesman’s optimism with a long history in the United States–old enough to be noted by Tocqueville. Americans are bullshit artists of the highest order; it’s not that other societies aren’t subject to such conformities, it’s just in the United States there are so many taboos as to make authentic public discourse virtually impossible. (Naturally, communications technologies such as television have only amplified these tendencies).

Try and describe the problems of the black community — their roots in slavery and segregation notwithstanding — and you are a racist. Point out that American foreign policy is murderous and cynical in the extreme — something so well-documented as to require leafing through a rudimentary American history book — and you “hate America.” Point out the connection between these policies and 9/11 and you are saying “America deserved 9/11.” Criticize the Iraq war and point out war’s inevitable atrocities as they occur, and you have not lived up to the “support our troops” mantra. Point out that blacks have reasons for their resentment and anger, and you have engaged in reverse racism.

This is to say that despite the unhelpful tone of Rev. Wright’s remarks, what is really offensive to American ears is that someone would say anything that doesn’t flatter every narcissistic fault-line in their brittle identities, whether that identification is racial, sexual, or national. Every statement of substance in American public discourse is simply scandalous: and so such statements are avoided. The fact that nauseating, pandering bullshit artists dominate public office scarcely registers with most Americans, who say they want something different but punish truth at every turn. Truth is the enemy of the people.

To their credit, now that someone like Barack Obama has come along many Americans identify with his sincerity more than their own identity politics. On the other hand, many pundits are tin-eared to it: the riveting, sincere, and highly unusual bluntness of Obama’s speech “works,” but otherwise it is not so impressive. That someone who is uniquely not a bullshit artist has come along hardly registers. Registering it might mean noticing, for instance, that Obama has merely reaffirmed many of Wright’s observations with a different tone: more conciliatory than divisive, mournful than angry, nuanced and forgiving than generalizing and condemnatory. It is simply honesty–offensive to American ears, somehow palatable in a man of decency, and at this point in American history it really is our only hope: that Americans develop the habit of being willing to scream at each other from pulpits before they degrade themselves by skulking in the pews, paying self-conscious homage to every American false idol.

Google Searches that Lead to this Blog

Currently in the Google top ten results for:

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Favorite: malt liquor fried chicken

The Only Maternal Presence in the Campaign

The only maternal presence in the campaign: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14obama.html?em&ex=1205726400&en=7c86d1bf8cf11784&ei=5087%0A

And what it produced:

Stanley Fish: Dis-disinterested after all

After 341 comments on Stanley Fish’s last column, he felt he had to intervene with the following:

Just two points in response to readers’ questions. I do read all the comments. And I do not use words like “objective” or “impartial” or “neutral” or “disinterested” to describe what I try to do in these columns. All I’m saying is that analyzing arguments is a different project than taking positions on ethical, moral or political issues. Neither is objective; both involve opinions; the opinions are, however, about different things, in one case about the best thing to do or think; in the other, about whether the case made for thinking or doing something hangs together. It would be quite possible for me, or anyone else, to fault the arguments made in behalf of a policy or agenda and still support it. I am insisting on the distinction, but no claim to objectivity is involved

That’s right, it’s the idea that he might be making a claim to “objectivity” that really gets to him. My response:

First, whether an argument “hangs together” has nothing to do with “objectivity” — it’s entirely a matter of logical coherence. The content of propositions isn’t relevant to the discussion.

Which leads me to a second point: since the content is irrelevant, why talk about political issues at all, unless your goal is to stir up the passions of readers? Why not choose subject matter that is entirely benign, and won’t distract readers from the critical thinking lesson at hand?

Finally, when you feel like you have to disclaim “objectivity” about arguments about arguments, I suspect that you don’t have a very advanced understanding of the difference between logical and factual truth. Certainly you could claim to have truth as to whether something hangs together without claiming objectivity. The former is a matter of a set of logical axioms, or in its older form the “law of contradiction,” and the latter is a matter of some relationship to the world (of empirical objects).

If I’m wrong about your understanding of that distinction, then I can imagine a response to this point that denies it, and perhaps invokes Quine or Rorty. These are sophisticated (and I think failed) attempts at relativism under another name (and it’s unfortunate that the chosen name is “pragmatism”), but I think readers would be interested in knowing that that’s really what your project is about — that you’re really recusing yourself not just from “objective” discussion but from any commitment whatsoever: not because you’re a skeptic who thinks that truth is elusive, but because you reject the concept of truth entirely (unless it is redefined as something benign, such as coherence).

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be refreshing just to come out and take a stand on something — just for the hell of it? You might feel reborn, like a Hobbit who has spent his youth in a hole, only to be called to far away adventures, the ruggedness of the outdoors — dragons, wars, the feel of cold steel in the palm …. Anyway, call that column “Credo”; it might turn into a New York Times headline, “Stanley Fish Takes a Stand!”

Otherwise, you’re just left writing a column where you try to flatter yourself as someone who is willing to let his mind travel into the forbidden realms of the politically incorrect, because the rules of “hangs together” don’t forbid it; who is more than a typical unreflective academic liberal; who challenges his politically passionate readers to challenge themselves, to take this journey with him ….

Really thin stuff.

Toughness Revisited (A Calm Attempt to Alleviate NYCweboy’s Frustration)

I suppose I should have made it clear that I was impressed by the sober and conciliatory tone of NYCweboy’s comment on this post, despite the fact that I disagree. (And as for my own vanity — being disagreed with is far more flattering than being ignored!) A bare assertion that other people are wrong is less impressive. And I’m unsure how my response was a rejection of civility and dialog — which doesn’t imply getting beyond disagreement. That disagreement includes real disappointment by people like me in the way Clinton has run her campaign and its implications for her character. It’s clear that view of Clinton’s character may simply be unfounded, and as I mentioned, “caused by mere partisanship, the fact that I’ve taken a side and will tend to minimize the sins of my candidate and exaggerate those of the other.” On the other hand, they may well be founded. The point here is that a commitment to civility is not a commitment to giving up strong negative views about Clinton’s character.

In my case for example, certainly those negative views are motivated certain powerful emotions about all the characters who have influenced my own character — a “transference”, to use a psychoanalytic term. A political reaction to Clinton is more than a reaction to her public persona — it’s a reaction to Clinton as a symbol, and it’s a low level emotional foundation upon which reasons are built. But that doesn’t mean that the foundation isn’t good and the reasons are bad. Clinton-haters might be right that Clinton is dishonest, for instance, and they might well be wrong. I just haven’t seen any reasons that have changed the direction of my passions, and I’d like to give one example, to get back to “toughen up,” where the analytical shovel reaches bedrock and goes no further:

High toned notions of “respectable” campaigning aside, political arguments are not ice cream socials: things are bound to get rough, a little ugly, more than a little mean. My own suggestion: toughen up. If you’re prepared to get into it with people you disagree with, great; but if you plan to complain that such-and-so is unfair or mean or beyond the pale, don’t expect much sympathy. Neither side is innocent here, and things will get worse before they get better ….

This seems like a call to inure ourselves to the extremely low level of public discourse in the United States. Are we meant to accept dishonest games of gotcha — Rezko and Whitewater to take two examples — as just a necessary part of rough and tough politics? Tolerance of those games doesn’t really seem consistent with “calm” debate. NYCweboy might object that he’s thinking of lesser examples of roughness– for instance, the claim that Obama praised “Republican ideas” when he talked about Reagan. I think he’d probably agree that this claim is false, with the caveat that it’s part and parcel of rough politics, and we should tolerate it as such.

I have a few problems with tolerating that kind of public discourse. First, it’s actually a distraction from the substance of the calm (and I’m supposing more rational) debate that NYCweboy desires. And far from getting us to the “details” that are supposed to be Clinton’s strong suit, attacks like these are necessarily vague because they require trimming off all the context. Even claims that may have a reasonable grounding — like “only I’m ready on day one” — are rhetorical inanities unless we here about exactly what that readiness entails. The problem is that actually focusing on the details (what bills did you work on? what are your views on the intricacies of policy x?) is that they quickly derail a candidate from repeatedly hammering home the vague slogan that’s supposed to get them elected — “I’m the candidate of details!” Toughness, like a bludgeon, does not allow for surgical strikes.

But I think it’s a reasonable political aspiration to ask of politicians that they put away a desire for the rough and tumble methods of winning to engage in a genuine debate. That debate simply isn’t possible if candidates can’t engage in an intellectually honest characterization of their opponent’s positions. And I think that making that demand, rather than inuring ourselves to the tough political reality, is a more plausible path to “calm.” We might disagree about which candidate better meets that demand, but I don’t think we should abandon it.

I have to say that the “toughen up” idea seems to me to have its source in a quintessentially American misology. The priority here is winning rather than reasoning. I’m going to cite an argument I’ve made elsewhere on this blog that I think is especially relevant:

We know that there are broad consequences to such values [misology] when coupled with power. We see one consequence in American policy, and its, intermittent isolationism and machophilia. We see another in the tone of American public discourse, which is rhetorically inept and hard-selling. Misology and love of war have reached a peak with the Bush administration’s disdain for diplomacy and compromise, its use of torture and rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and many other illegal and anti-constitutional measures.

Nominalism begets nihilism. It is because we are concerned with the “real world” to the exclusion of inner life that we can leave our principles and humanity behind. We ought to remember that an attack on “words” has serious implications if we take “word” in its larger sense (as in Ancient Greek logos): the persuasion of an electorate, diplomacy with an enemy, public discourse, legal proceedings, due process, constitutional provisions, and so on.

The use of words in these examples is supposed to provide some structure to an otherwise violent and chaotic world. They’re meant to be a middle ground between idea and action, defenselessness and violence, contemplative detachment and brutish immediacy. That rhetoric can be used for ill does not imply that it is always “empty.” As potentiality, as a middle ground between thought and deed, rhetoric is a receptacle for retaining and storing power instead of discharging it upon every impulse. As we have seen, the alternative to persuasion, in the world of political action, is force.

That is fine with those who embrace Machiavellian realpolitik—of late, our neoconservatives. The world is a tough, scary place, we are told, and only force will do. Words are for the weak. There is a relevant similarity between the Clinton campaign’s implication that Obama isn’t tough and cynical enough—whether for the campaign or the presidency—and the idea that Constitutional principles are too fragile for the real world, the world full of threats and enemies. Early in the campaign there were suggestions that Obama’s nuanced responses could easily be exploited in a national campaign—that the lifting of the level of intelligence in politics was positively dangerous. The same might be said of diplomacy.

I am reminded of the long literary and philosophical tradition that ruminates on the question of the experience versus innocence. At its best, it defies the conventional wisdom that cynicism and paranoia is superior to openness. Plato’s Socrates advances the idea that being the victim of injustice—and harm—is better than being the perpetrator, because of the internal deformity of character surrounding the latter role. The events of the last seven years show that we can say the same for a nation: if terrorism has a method, it is certainly not the direct destruction of lives infrastructure, but rather the induction of institutional self-destruction from within. Cynicism and toughness may not be so durable after all. Realpolitik can be self-immolating. This may sound like a dangerous form of pacifism (today “anti-war” is practically an epithet). But one need not be opposed to defense—psychological and national—to take a realistic measure of its costs, in order to use it wisely—and in the case of war, very rarely.

The Roman orator Quintillian noted that where rhetoric is in decline, a society has opened up a perilous gap between word and deed, emotion and thought, the academic and the practical. The lame and passive jargon of our academics, bureaucrats, and politicians is testimony to this division. These are the “irrelevancies” that Twain rails against—irrelevant because to stray from the point is to conceal the fact that even when they aim at the truth, words are motivated by feelings. So is the electorate. The non-pejorative sense of rhetoric is important because it is not just about inducing admiration and hope, but about preserving the dialectical component of speeches—the sense in which persuasion is a public dialog with an audience, and not just a monologue of reasons. That dialog is important not just to fostering national cooperation, but to a genuine and peaceable engagement with the “real” world. That is how people are moved, and that is how things get done.

Obama and Clinton — Real Differences in Tone and Honesty?

  NYC weboy writes (in reponse to this):

There’s an awful lot going on here, and a lot of conclusions about what I might mean, at least by implication, in saying “toughen up” (I can’t speak for Wolcott, nor would I try). Just to be clear, I think you can find people on both sides to complain that the treatment their candidate gets is “intellectually dishonest” and done by “petty liars”. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another. I think we’ve had some low shots all around, some less than stellar commentary, and some things, on both sides, that probably were regrettable. I don’t see a need to give chapter and/or verse.

What I do mean, and what I did say, is that if we want politics to be more than that, and better, then what we need to do is do it. Be more civil. Argue the issues. Take the high road. My problem with Barack Obama has to do with a lack of specifics from him on the issues, not some litany of ugly charges that some people think are floating out there about him. I think he’d make a fine candidate for President (and have said as much, repeatedly). I simply support the other person in the primaries. And I think we can have a primary process, even one that gets rough, and still come together at the end. That’s because I’m a Democrat, and the most important thing, it seems to me, is electing one. Because, despite what you suggest, all of those issues you mention matter to me. And I know the person who will make them worst, most, is John McCain. Let’s not lose sight of that. And let’s all work to elect a Democrat. Whoever he or she may be.

I disagree on a) the comparative level of the honesty and tone of the Clinton campaigns respectively b) the question of whether or not Obama is offering specifics. (a) could be caused by mere partisanship, the fact that I’ve taken a side and will tend to minimize the sins of my candidate and exaggerate those of the other. On the other hand, I was a long time Clinton supporter, and leaned towards Clinton at the beginning of the primaries. And I think there’s plenty of evidence to show that there is a clear difference. With regard to (b), I’ve tried to do some analysis of speeches and debates and I think that it shows this is clearly a myth (for one instance see the end of this). Clinton consistently veers towards vagueness and petty cheap shots (which by their nature are not only vague and misleading, but lead the conversation away from specifics); and Obama is consistently more detailed. If I had the time I’d try to do a more comprehensive analysis. Both candidates have large staffs and policy wonks who have created detailed policy papers; so I think the “details” charge is often without substance (as is another standard political riff, the “flip-flopper” charge).

Ferraro, Part II

One more word about Geraldine Ferraro: her bluntness and tenacity are admirable. And that Obama’s campaign benefits from a guilty white constituency because he is African American is probably right (as I have argued before). And certainly she is not racist, and really she’s not a representative of the Clinton campaign.

Yet Ferraro is just wrong.

First, while it is true that Obama’s campaign is made viable by white guilt, insofar as it balances white racism, it certainly isn’t helped overall or occasioned by it. And there is no parallel here to her being picked as a vice-presidential nominee, as she claims: no one has picked Obama. There is no affirmative action here.

Second, her comment seems to be a variation on the idea that Obama has been given a free ride by the press and that Clinton is a victim of reverse discrimination–another myth we can reject.

Finally, and this is really the error: the Obama campaign did not call Ferraro a racist, as she has claimed. She was accused of introducing race into the campaign in a way that heightens racial tensions. Whether intentional or not (and I think it was unintentional), she has put the finishing touches on a Clinton strategic trope, which is to race-bait by a) bringing up race and then b) falsely accuse Obama of introducing charges of racism. The introduction of the idea of reverse discrimination is in this case an unforgivable theme only comprehensible to an older generation that is out of touch–not with some politically correct stricture, but with the fundamental reality of the Obama campaign’s meticulous avoidance of the subject of race. If there is racism here it is racism by grandfather clause, the paranoid expectation that the racial sensitivities of yesteryear must be at the bottom of any political objection by a black candidate.

The Right Approach

The right approach:

“Part of what I think Geraldine Ferraro is doing, and I respect the fact that she was a trailblazer, is to participate in the kind of slice and dice politics that’s about race and about gender and about this and that, and that’s what Americans are tired of because they recognize that when we divide ourselves in that way we can’t solve problems,” Obama said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Don’t hit back with more identity politics: just condescend to it as the weakness it is.

The Banality of Mamet

Mamet’s “Why I am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal‘”: A long, boring, unedited piece, and what do we get at the end?

at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler

(A great way to brand the Rwandan or any other genocide, e.g.: “Hutus: the same folks we Tutsis met at the well”)

But the title of this piece should really be, “that’s funny, as I age and acquire wealth and become more cranky, I become more conservative.”

I’d rather read Stanley Fish on Starbucks.

A Conspiracy of Old Women: Geraldine Ferraro and Identity Envy

We know that old women are Clinton’s demographic.

The question is whether we want them ruling the country.

I think that’s the deeper subtext of the recent stupidity of Geraldine Ferraro: it’s not so much racism and as competing identity politics: victim-status-envy. Old women who are so close to vindication they can taste it, flush with scorned entitlement as they feel their chances slipping away. It’s no accident that Clinton’s campaign has also exploited tensions between blacks and Latinos.

The real meaning of Ferraro’s comment: why isn’t Clinton going to win because she’s a woman? The significance of age here is their direct acquaintance with the past and the compromised place of both women and blacks, the coming of age in a period of transition for both groups. One revolution gets pitted against the other, as if envious siblings were competing for the attention of neglectful parents. Perhaps that envy has undergone an atavistic decomposition into the prevalent racism of those times.

Obama is where he is because he’s tapping into a desire for decency. Clinton is where she is because in the entitlement of her and her followers, they are simply unaware of their own haggery: fair is foul, and foul is fair.

Poor Graymalkins!

What I’m really trying to say is that Geraldine Ferraro would not be in the trouble she’s in if she weren’t an old woman.

Humanizing Spitzer

Cramer breaks up.

As always, we’re shocked–shocked!–that someone’s sexual impulses run deeper than their public persona.

The Third Variable Problem, the Red Phone, and the Sham Science of Polling

We get more speculation on the effectiveness of the red phone ad.

Did it work, the way pundits assume it worked in Texas and Ohio?
There’s no way to know. Ever. There are too many other variables. That’s a classic problem of causal explanation — and at the very least “analysis,” even political analysis, should try to rule out other possible causes.

It can’t, because even a poll that’s positive for Obama about who would make a better commander in chief doesn’t rule out the effectiveness of the ad. It could have been a significant factor in Obama’s meager support among whites, for instance. And race or candidate likability could have been the predominant factors, and the red phone ad entirely irrelevant in all states. Pre-established voter loyalty or their choice of candidate based on other factors will skew any answers about readiness to be commander in chief or even specific questions about the ad itself. Even if the red phone had been asked about explicitly, are respondents really good evaluators of whether they were affected by this or other factors? Nope. Again, they would be likely to claim the ad was effective or even “changed their mind” simply because they already leaned toward Hillary or had preconceived doubts about Obama as commander in chief anyway. It’s a foregone conclusion that he will win that poll in any state that he wins, and lose it in any state that he loses. If there is a disparity between the margin of victory and the commander in chief percentage, can we assign a cause to that? No.
There’s no way to control other variables barring running and not running the ad in separate Texas’s, Ohios, and Mississippi’s in alternate universes respectively. (Even then we can’t be completely sure, because it’s possible that other factors derived from elements of pure chance (chaos theory) have screwed up the control). Whatever the case, there’s no way to establish causality via statistical methods.

Not only does polling about the ad produce meaningless results, but it assumes that voters are dumb sheep, marketing victims, easily manipulated. That may be true, but if it is we ought to spend our energy on elevating public discourse rather than cynically reinforcing its stupidity.

The sham science of polling should be put out of its misery. It won’t only because charlatans make money off it, because it gives politicians something a little better than astrology with which to soothe their anxieties, and because it gives pundits something to make meaningless pronouncements about.

Monitor Thyselves

If you’re one of those people who waits for tragic self-destruction and then cozies up to it in self-righteous revulsion, then ….

Obama Trades Nomination for Malt Liquor and Fried Chicken

I have the sense that Clinton thinks she can take the nomination from Obama the way Manhattan was taken from the Indians. He is a black man after all.

Spitzer Violates the White Slave Traffic Act

The only part of this that interests me, from Scott Horton:

The prosecution is opened under the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. You read that correctly. The statute itself is highly disreputable, and most of the high-profile cases brought under it were politically motivated and grossly abusive. Here are a few:

• Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson was the first man prosecuted under the act — for having an affair with Lucille Cameron, whom he later married. The prosecution was manifestly an effort “to get” Johnson, who at the time was the most famous African-American. (All of this is developed well in Ken Burns’s film “Unforgiveable Blackness”).
• University of Chicago sociologist William I. Thomas was prosecuted for having an affair with an officer’s wife in France. Thomas was targeted because of his Bohemian social and his radical political views.
• In 1944 Charles Chaplin was prosecuted for having an affair with actress Joan Barry. The prosecution again provided cover for a politically motivated effort to drive Chaplin out of the country.
• Canadian author Elizabeth Smart was arrested and charged in 1940 while crossing the border with the British poet George Barker.

Stanley Fish, The Unmoved Blogger

Sigh, yawn. I’m Stanley Fish, the academic, and having an opinion would require about 75 footnotes.

What I’m here to do is help you regular folk — those unsophisticated enough not to have qualified your feelings with a hundred indecisions — to reason properly. I don’t have arguments about the world — that would be gauche, and naively suppose there is a world. I have arguments about arguments.

So my opinions transcend ideology. Godlike, I opine that I opine and nothing else. I’m not interested in actual issues, just the way they “play out in our present cultural moment.” And you, dear ignorant readers, are part of that play. You are subjects in a demi-God’s anthropological experiment, and when you think you disagree with me I am quietly recording your symptoms on my chart.

And now you have my dispassionate diagnosis — not about your disgusting untouchable beliefs, my dear filthy peasants, but how your stench casts its shadows on my pure white cerebrum.

Another way to put this argument, as I did in a comment to Fish’s article:

It’s true that when readers believe that you have intentionally taken a stand on some substantive political issue, they have missed the point. And these readers are easy to refute.

But there are other readers (like me) who find your column to be based on a conceit that reeks of academic condescension. If you really want to teach people about arguments (rather than pontificate on the substance of those arguments), why write about hot-button political issues? If the content is just a placeholder, why not choose subject matter that is relatively benign?

One possibility is that you’re trying to test your audience–that you’re inviting them to rise above their passions to your heights of “analytical judgment.” A more likely possibility is that you enjoy stirring things up and then sitting back to
watch your readers sputter with rage. The pretense of dispassion makes this all the more effective. And when the accusations fly, you get to throw up your hands and lawyer your case–“what did I say?” There’s a name for all of this: passive aggression.

That all of this is just a thin conceit is illustrated by how quickly it falls apart under pressure. The Obama/Surge argument is not, for instance, an “argument about arguments.” It may not be an evaluation of the Surge’s success, but it certainly is a misguided assessment of the implications that public sentiment about perceived success has for the general election. That’s a political argument, and it’s based on a lack of comprehension of the political climate. There’s lots of data to show that voters overwhelming resent the war and are disaffected with the Republican party, whatever they think about the Surge.

So not only is your view on Obama not an argument about arguments, it’s an example of the inane horce-race punditry that dominates public discourse. Worse, it’s just bad inane punditry.

That inanity is the result of your view that political argument cannot be suitably “analytical”–that they necessarily devolve into “pious fuzziness.” That’s precisely the kind of cynical view that motivates TV pundits like Chris Mathews, who must also maintain the conceit of being above the fray by talking about strategy. It’s not the issues they’re concerned with, but the techniques that power uses to preserve itself. And so by implication it esteems the possession of power over policy, in the same way you elevate the coherence of arguments over discourse about what is right (at least for the purposes of your column). What readers sense and respond to is the tired nihilism behind all of this.

These points are only reinforced by all the adoring admirers who wish that everyone had the same gratitude for your lofty dispensations, and even wish to protect you from the sea of passions that threatens to overturn your serene, transcendent bark!

Toughen Up?

James Wolcott and NYCweboy tell the Hillary haters to “toughen up”–politics is a rough game. The corollary here is that Clinton and Obama aren’t really different; they “both” played rough. It’s all the same.

Nonsense. Calling for decency and intellectual honesty in politics is not a matter of lack of toughness. If you don’t make that stand, then you get what you ask for–inane public discourse, a nasty political climate, and the kinds of panderers who can’t vote against war if there is the slightest breeze in the opposite direction.

It matters whether politicians are petty liars in the way they run their campaigns; it matters whether they are fear-mongers; it matters whether they can characterize their opponent’s position in an intellectually honest way; it matters whether they’re shrill, angry, sarcastic, and frankly hysterical.

If you can’t tell the difference between Clinton and Obama here, then you’re simply a bad judge of character.

The toughen up position is just the political version of “get over it.” We are supposed to remember that we sophisticated liberals are at bottom nihilists, and have no beliefs more profound than the valorization of society’s oppressed victims and the denigration of power in all its forms. Power is bad per se, so why should we expect that it can be fought for fairly? We are utilitarians; so why should we care whether politicians are essentially power-hungry and dishonest in the way they run their campaigns, as long as we get what we want?

That’s just politics. That’s just being tough. Don’t be a pussy, get on board. And if warrantless surveillance is a fact, get over it. That’s just legislation. And war? Get over it. That’s just foreign policy. And crimes by the Bush administration? Get over it. They’re all criminals. That’s just the way the world works. Shitty politicians, bad policies, infringement on civil liberties, un-checked and criminal abuse of power, and lots of dead people.

From the supporters of Clinton and politics as usual we here the same tired arguments of appeasement that got us war and waterboarding, and a Democratic congress that has done nothing to check Bush’s abuses of power.

Toughen up we are told. That’s life.

Obama and the Art of Political Self-Defense

Dick Morris has a new bit about the need for Obama to attack Hillary via surrogates. I don’t entirely agree, although I made a similar call in this post.

Here’s the difference: if the Obama campaign were to bring up Norman Hsu (or Whitewater for that matter), it should only do so to compare Rezko-attacks on him with Republican Hsu-attacks on her. Obama’s message shouldn’t be that he buys into these attacks, but that she should know better about Rezko from experience. This need not sound whiny: just say that one is as flimsy as the other: “Don’t Hsu me, don’t Whitewater me.” This isn’t a correlate of Clinton’s “don’t Ken Starr me” tactic because it a) rejects Republican attacks on one’s opponent as a means to rejecting hers against you and b) focuses on the opponent’s history of vulnerability to Republicans, not one’s own. That vulnerability has large implications in the general election.

The Obama campaign accomplishes a few things here: it allows Obama to continue to maintain his integrity, which is more important than winning elections and what fuels his movement anway; avoids alienating the many Democrats who were disgusted by the anti-Clinton pogrom; highlights Clinton’s vulnerability in the general election and even post-election if she were to win; doesn’t broach the inconsistency of having to argue that Rezko style attacks don’t have merit while Hsu or Whitewater attacks do; and yet … it still reminds everyone of the ethical lapses of the Clintons.

Defending your opponent’s character can be the best way to create doubt about it.

The Deaning of Obama (Almost)

What’s happening to Obama in the press, incidentally, is remarkably similar to what happened to Howard Dean (with the exception that Obama is less vulnerable to negative coverage). Dean, like Obama, initially received positive press–not directly, but as a by-product of being acknowledged as a phenomenon. After this coverage peaked, there was a serious attempt to paint Dean as a kind of angry clown–most notably by Jodi Wilgoren of the New York Times. There were probably a few factors at work in this coverage, including the fact that the Democratic establishment opposed Dean and reporters are naturally in bed with their establishment contacts–even if unconsciously.

And then there’s the natural tendency to de-mythologize what seems to be too good to be true, and to take down whatever challenges the status quo and its underlying cynicism (its “realism”). Dean and Obama are at first merely phenomena. They garner the respect of the press because the press respects big stories, and that’s what populists who come from nowhere are. At first. When that story gets old, we are left merely with a flawed human protagonist. He must be punished not just for being unable to sustain the sacred Story, but for challenging the cynical narrative that the Story must tell. The respect for the initial drama of the phenomena must not be mistaken for the elevation of its protagonist, the transcendence of the narrative itself. That would undermine a self-conception that the average reporter and pundit must protect: the identity of the muckraking truth-teller, the leveler, the one who reveals that nothing really stands up to “investigative journalism.” If the main character escapes the story, the storyteller is undermined.

This protection of this neutral-because-adversarial identity is ironically a way of preserving the adversary, and so preserving the status quo. While exploding myths may seem to reporters like an inevitable challenge to the establishment, it is merely a way of reinforcing it if everything dissolves, under the same indiscriminate scrutiny, into a homologous muck. That muck consists of “nothing really changes” and “everyone is motivated by power rather than good intentions.” If nothing really changes and power is primary, then all that is left for the pundits–the sifters of dirt–to do is stand in awe of power and dissect the strategies of its self-preservation. This is what press “neutrality” comes to mean: a failure to distinguish between good arguments and bad arguments, because everything must be given equal time as “spin”; and a failure to distinguish between sincerity and manipulation, because every character is just “spin” as well.

So the press must turn on Obama because not to do so undermines the entire premise of their approach to the world and especially politics; to the irrational and pseudo-analytical dime-novel drama that they seem to believe makes their chatter interesting (or “sells papers”).

I’m not claiming that there is a conscious anti-Obama conspiracy per se, just that there are a few natural impulses in the press, which are just extensions of human nature when left unchecked by a little thoughtfulness. Here are the commandments:

• Be the mechanism of entrenched power, the status quo, conventional wisdom, and cynical “realism”
• Create imaginary drama that titillates and flatters audiences by reaffirming this cynicism
• Take down the one you have sanctified (Obama is first a phenomenon and then the object of sacrifice, a la Frazier’s Golden Bough–the ritual sacrifice of the king or god, or anything that is anxiety-producing because its power is unconventional)

Hillary Clinton, incidentally, initially received bad press only insofar as her bizarre outbursts received airtime; that they didn’t work and seemed ridiculous to all made things “unfair”).

How they’re Preparing us for NObama (is it time for a third-party threat?)

The tenor of current political discussion suggests that the masters our preparing us for the possibility of undoing Obama’s win:

1. The superdelegate freeze (why not decide this now and spare us the pain?); claims by Gov Rendell and others that party officials need not respect the pledged delegate count; superdelegate claims in a New York Times article to the same effect; despite the fact that Clinton will need 65 percent of superdelegates to overturn the popular vote; the bizarre talk of “buyer’s remorse” and “electability,” as if elections can be undone and despite the fact that all the data shows that Obama is a far better candidate in the general election
2. The “dream ticket” line–where Obama gets to be VP as prize for winning the superdelegate count, state count, and popular vote
3. Talk of seating Michigan and Florida as-is because re-dos are too expensive or may lead to lawsuits, despite the fact that Obama was not on the ballot in one state and the candidates didn’t campaign in the others
4. The overwhelmingly negative Obama press coverage in the last two weeks: the hysterically positive coverage of Clinton’s marginal Texas and Ohio wins according to the lame “change of momentum” narrative; the attempt to Dean and Whitewater (Rezko) Obama, pretending an issue in which there is not even a theory of wrongdoing, much less a question, is a scandal; the bogus NAFTA story; hit-jobs in the New York Times parroting the Clinton experience argument; the gleeful (and delusional) anticipation of Obama lowering himself to Clinton’s level; the scant acknowledgment of Obama’s caucus and delegate victory in Texas; the downplaying of Obama’s 11 wins, the significance of Mississippi, and then the Wyoming victory (Clinton “almost split” the delegates in Wyoming is a line worth pushing, in contrast the silence on Obama’s delegate victory in Texas); the press’ parroting of the Clinton line on the election as a whole–“it’s essentially a tie,” “superdelegates will decide the nominee either way”

It’s time to float this threat: if they take it away from Obama, he makes a third-party run in the national election.

Bill! It’s for you!

As much as I loathe Dick Morris, this is a really succinct dose of reality and it ends with a great suggestion:

The next time Hillary uses the recycled red phone ad, counter with one of your own. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, have a woman’s voice, with a flat Midwestern accent, answer it and say, “Hold on” into the receiver. Then she should shout, “Bill! It’s for you!”

Hillary Must Reads

I rest my case (for now):

• http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9271?in=00:34:15
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/breaking-the-final-rule_b_90420.html
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-david/on-the-red-phone_b_90338.html
• http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=ba30ff16-a5af-4035-a883-cf15ffee406c

Poetry Friday: The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

My weekly guest post on The Well Read Child:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, I wear a tourist’s shirt with “Nantucket” printed on the front. A nurse who had already done several embarrassing things to me saw the shirt and asked me if I had been there, and I told her I hadn’t, there once was a girl had given it to me. I like the shirt because “Nantucket” seems simply exclamatory, and universal enough that you don’t have to have been there. That’s not just because of many honorary limericks, but because the island once ruled the sea, and deprived it of the world’s largest animals. As Melville put it, “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”

More

Obama Campaign Strategy Suggestions (it’s time to take off the gloves)

The Obama campaign has avoided negativity and gratuitous attacks. That’s a matter of integrity, and it’s nice that someone has finally proved that it works.

On the other hand, it’s time to put Hillary out of her misery. It’s important that these attacks be fair, not be made directly by Obama himself, and that they stem from the nature of her own campaign–i.e., that they point out the implications of her own nastiness.

Some things I’d like to see:

1. Hang McCain around Clinton’s neck the way Bush will be hung around McCain’s. If she thinks that after her, McCain is the next best commander-in-chief, then she ought to bear the burden of that view. Run ads showing her and McCain together. Point out similarities in their voting records and views–especially on Iraq, Iran, and NAFTA. Call her McCain Light. Show her with Liebermann as well, just for texture.
2. Because Clinton is a whiny victim, ask voters whether they really want someone with a victim-mentality as commander in chief–someone who is thin-skinned and so brittle that she can’t fight a fair campaign; highlight her instability, her bizarre range of moods–from condescending scold to tearful victim, from bitter complainer to euphoric winner, from pandering flatterer to angry fear-monger, from solemn admonisher to sarcastic fool. All that takes is editing together a few clips in a way that shows her to be the bi-polar (multi-polar!) candidate that she is
3. If Clinton counts being next to Bill Clinton at 3am when he picks up the phone as commander-in-chief experience, ask voters to compare this absurd notion to a husband having experience in law because he’s around when his lawyer wife picks up phone calls in front of him or discusses his day with him. Ask voters if we want someone who dramatically overestimates her own experience and seems unaware of her own shortcomings. Dissect her “35 years”–again, a series of images and clips are all that’s required. Her she is in law school; as a corporate lawyer; on the board of wal-mart; contrast this to Obama’s career in public service–again, visually.
4. Clinton as an experienced manager: simply highlight the way she’s run her campaign–the short-sighted strategies that damage the party; the financial mismanagement; the internal discord
5. Claim that Clinton cares more about herself and her power than about the party [this a very borderline strategy that if it can be done at all would have to be done well–important for Obama not to appear to be complaining or implying that he’s already won and that future primaries aren’t important]
6. Create an ad that alternates between Clinton’s attacks and her complaints about Obama’s attacks and media coverage. One attack clip, one complaint clip. No voice-over. Just a quick line as summation at the end, something like “whether she’s on the attack or thinks she’s a victim, is Hillary Clinton in touch with reality?” It’s important that these attacks merely highlight all the inconsistencies and contradictions internal to her own logic

Update: (1) is already being rolled out:

“For seven years she aligned herself with Sen. McCain in putting all our eggs in General Musharaf’s basked,” Craig said. “And she aligned herself with Sen. McCain when they both criticized Barack Obama for taking action against al Qaeda leadership, which has taken safe havens in Pakistan. She aligned herself with Sen. McCain in supporting the Kyl-Lieberman resolution”

They need to keep this up in earnest–in public statements and in ads. There needs to be a concerted take-down of her character and emotional stability. My suggestions aren’t very nice, but a knock-out punch is required to keep her from damaging the party and Obama any further.

Update II: Larry David’s hilarious version of (2) here:

How is it that she became the one who’s perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn’t panic when he’s losing or get too giddy when he’s winning, who’s as comfortable in his own skin as she’s uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she’d actually kill herself if she lost.