Aeternum Vale

The Callous Mendacity of Ron Paul Supporters

2012-01-07T07:12:00.000-06:00

War fatigue, disenchantment, disappointment, consistency. These words no longer have a place as characteristics or reasons. Their application - as with so much rhetoric in American politics - has morphed from a rationale to hold political opinions to an excuse to reject political perspective. Ron Paul is many things, but amongst them, he's a force of revelation. Exposing - for all to see - the face that America conceals under a mask which mythologizes a false shared equality and a false shared opportunity. He has shown, again, the blood that lies beneath the thin layer of American soil that we forget to claim as our true ground. He has extracted the ghosts of Barry Goldwater, Storm Thurmond, George Wallace and the whole of the Confederacy. And his followers - comprised almost entirely of the permanently empowered white male majority - dare to insist that history - both America's and Ron Paul's - be set aside to "grapple" with the advancement of their pet issues.

Writers more patient and forgiving than I have engaged this farce on their terms. I reject that impulse. There are priorities that render isolated disagreements with a president's policies small. There are sins that are nearer, older, crueler and more encompassing than the Military Industrial Complex's institutional impulses. And there are considerations that expose the negligent superficiality innate in trying to paint acidic poison as an oasis that will cleanse this country's soul of dried blood. The forces that would dismiss this; the forces that would belittle its significance; the ones that would point to the fire in the distance while ignoring the rot on their person forget that much of that blood is not foreign. They forget that much of that blood was grafted onto this country not for love of evil, but through a systemic effort to reason - through laws, religion, culture and principle - that evil is a naturally mandated good. They forget that America's original sin had a rationale.

Before there was liberty, there was the states' right to deny it to you. Before there was freedom, there was the states' right to limit its scope. Before there was a United States, there was the states' right to own some of its citizens. Before the equality of all was acknowledged, there was the states' right to violently enforce a century-long apartheid to ensure that equality for some would never have to be recognized. Before property rights described the ownership of things, it described the ownership of people. To be deaf to the chorus of old, to be ignorant of the clarion calls that united secessionists, segregationists and slave owners is to relive the privileged, unreflected luxuries that perpetuate a malediction that America refuses to account for.

There are some who would have you look at positions that flow from these premises as things to be judged in isolation; divorced from the associations and impact granted by history. They would have you forget that it was words ("3/5ths", "nigger", "states' rights", "property rights", "individual liberty", "government intrusion") that clarified the premises which translated to actions (slavery, racism, secession, slave-ownership, segregation, Civil Rights opposition). They would have us drink in America's ritualized amnesia and deny not just Jim Crow itself, but the culturally compelled fragility that lingers as a consequence of pretending that Jim Crow could never happen again. An embrace of Ron Paul - even a passing one - is not an embrace of the positions where he "sounds" reasonable, but an embrace of a man who reaches those "reasonable" positions by associating with, drawing from and advancing ideas that are rooted in the darker recesses of American consciousness.

I submit that those who claim that Democrats/liberals should feel conflicted about Ron Paul; who pontificate from a perch of unreflected self-righteousness that he embodies virtues that all "principled" non-partisan liberals should engage with are guilty of the highest distortion wrought from the most unearned of privilege. These people - often white, often male - speak of principle, of liberty, of morality, but they speak of them as though every moral person must work within their calculus. They speak as though privileged thoughts represent the cusp of considered balance. And in so doing, they write screeds dressed as edicts; blithely demanding sacrifices - both political and material - from women and minorities while writing off that sacrifice's inherent disproportion. Ensconced in false authority, they ask of those not-them more than they ask of themselves, and then call their judgment justified and considered. I reject their frame, as I reject all frames drenched in the soft evils that grant this discussion life. Indeed, I reserve my right to take their arguments and their words for what they are: the cessation of moral authority.

To be American is to contend with more than just the considerations of the moment. To be American is to contend with - and consciously push against - a centuries long historical arc that's considered the destitution of one group a just toll for the elevation of another. So when I speak of Ron Paul; when I outline the various reasons why and how he's anathema; when I point out how his public existence is inimical to America just as surely as his philosophy is inimical to liberalism, I feel, justifiably, viscerally and morally - though I now know this is not true - that I should have to go no further than this:

However, contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was the massive violation of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.

...

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats begin forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color blind society. Instead, these quotas encourage racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.

...

Relations between the races have improved despite, not because of, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

I deem softcore and hardcore Ron Paul boosters mendacious; I acknowledge them as liars, not merely for their capacity to lie to others about what Ron Paul believes, but for their limitless ability to summon a combination of ignorance and privilege to lie to themselves. The most potent truth endemic to Ron Paul's political philosophy is that everything he proposes - everything - has not only been tried, but has been rightfully rejected by Americans once truth made the appeal of his ideals in the abstract an unqualified failure in function. His "solutions" don't speak to a vision of America that wasn't tried, but rather to a reality of America that didn't work. His attachment to ideas long after their horror has been made manifest doesn't make him brave or a visionary. It makes him wrong. Not in the way of someone misunderstands facts, but in the way of someone who internalizes conclusions that augured the oppression of whole demographics long after that result is proven.

To honestly engage Ron Paul, you can't argue and ask others to argue his ideas within the limited confines of his articulation, but rather through the consequences of his ideas when they were tried. We lived in a world where the federal government refrained from intervening when a white majority had used the powers constitutionally granted to the state to resign their fellow black citizens to an inferior, poorer, America where their status as political nothings left them permanently endangered. This is what the states, untethered from the federal government, reserved as its right to do:

Violence in Alabama was organized by Birmingham Police Sergeant Tom Cook (an avid Ku Klux Klan supporter) and police commissioner Bull Connor. The pair made plans to bring the Ride to an end in Alabama. They assured Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informer and member of Eastview Klavern (the most violent Klan group in Alabama), that the mob would have fifteen minutes to attack the Freedom Riders without any arrests being made. The final plan laid out an initial assault in Anniston with a final assault taking place in Birmingham.

On May 14, Mother's Day, in Anniston, Alabama a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen, some still in church attire, attacked the first of the two buses (the Greyhound). They tried to leave, but a person in a car kept blocking the bus as it tried to leave. The KKK members then slashed its tires. They forced the crippled bus to stop several miles outside of town, and it was firebombed shortly afterwards by the mob chasing it in cars. As the bus burned, the mob held the doors shut, intent on burning the riders to death. Sources disagree, but either an exploding fuel tank or an undercover state investigator brandishing a revolver caused the mob to retreat, allowing the riders to escape the bus. The riders were viciously beaten as they fled the burning bus, and only warning shots fired into the air by highway patrolmen prevented the riders from being lynched.

That night, the hospitalized Freedom Riders, most of whom had been refused care, were removed from the hospital at 2 AM, because the staff feared the mob outside the hospital.

We lived in a world where the hypothetical liberties of inanimate property transcended the lived liberties of actual people. This is what the defense of those liberties looked like:

The privilege entertained by reducing Ron Paul's ongoing opposition to the Civil Rights Act to an off-hand footnote is the privilege frequently indulged when white people feel validated in drawing a high-minded distinction between explicitly racist words and explicitly racist results. To argue for Ron Paul's political consideration is to cast yourself as an enemy of the engines of progress. To separate the man from the implications and applications of his concepts, is to look askance at the oppression of your brothers and sisters and say that not only doesn't it matter, but that you don't care. Ron Paul supporters don't merely lie, they cowardly scatter when challenged to engage in the entirety of what giving him a national podium means for people-not-them. His rise doesn't just offend: it hearkens back to a time when it took the generational sacrifices of a whole race to understand that locally centered oppression caused by groups of "individuals" is not inherently more "free" than government power exercised as a means to protect locally unrecognized freedoms. I recognize no power, no authority that can call itself moral or valid and subtly demand that Americans consider someone who'd return us to that evil.

It takes more than saying you want liberty to grant liberty. It takes more than saying you're for a less powerful government to ensure a less powerful government. In a world consistent with Ron Paul's ideals, we get neither. He is not - nor has he ever been - against authoritarianism. He is not - nor has ever been - for freedom. Ron Paul's overriding principle is inextricably woven into the very forces that would localize fascism and cast the legal allowances that construct modern civilization into oblivion: blanket opposition of all federal action. In his conception of government, local power - as decided by the states - remains untouched by federal intervention. When Ron Paul says "liberty" he never intends for liberty to include, encompass, ensure or incorporate civil rights. Innate to his argument is the allowance of any excess, any oppression, any malfeasance as long as it's dictated by the states. The areas where liberalism and Ron Paul's brand of isolationist tentherism coincide are fundamentally illusory in nature for this reason.

That this truth has eluded many liberals in recent weeks has been troubling. In their meekly qualified support/defenses for Ron Paul, they surrender the moral ground that's foundational liberalism. They surrender the understanding that all power, not just federal power can be used for ill. They betray the lived history of poverty that solidifies our commitment to public assistance of poor. They betray the lived history of corporate despotism that clarifies our support for unions. They betray the lived history of women as unequal chattel that energizes our need to keep their autonomy and their place as equals in America. They betray the lived history of predatory blackmail and thievery that justifies our desire for healthcare. They betray the lived history of corporate greed and indifference that outlines the necessity of food, drug, environmental and economic regulation. They betray the history of collective effort that undergirds the very sense economic justice that validates taxation of the wealthy. They betray the understanding of racism as a generational ill that requires generational correction. And they squander - with no promise of recompense - the human considerations that stand as pillars for liberalism's place in the political spectrum.

Supporting Ron Paul or "raising awareness" for the parts of his candidacy that you like isn't an abandonment of liberalism because he disagrees with you. It's an abandonment of liberalism because Ron Paul's philosophy itself is antagonistically hostile to almost every premise, every consideration and every issue that liberals claim to support. Think about what you believe. Think about why you believe it. Think about the facts that inform that belief. Remember the actual people - not the principle - but the people that inspire you to maintain it. Then see how Ron Paul fails to share either your regard or your rationale.

Liberals who oppose the drug war see it as a totalitarian, oppressive, racist-enforced perversion of paternalism and would end it on all levels. Ron Paul opposes it because he believes the federal government shouldn't have the authority to regulate anything. A person who's against drug prohibition wouldn't merely oppose it on the federal level. A person who thinks that the individual rights of people - regardless of their location - are inalienable and should never be broken would make that their rationale. He doesn't. Instead he simply passes the question to the states while ignoring that federal prisons only have 200,000 of our prison population. The states have around 2,000,000. Ron Paul's vision, exercised on his own terms has no corrective for this:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about drugs and go back again to your '90--'88 campaign and see where you stand today. "All drugs should be decriminalized. Drugs should be distributed by any adult to other adults. There should be no controls on production, supply or purchase for adults." Is that still your position?

REP. PAUL: Yeah. It's sort of like alcohol. Alcohol's a deadly drug, kills more people than anything else. And today the absurdity on this war on drugs, Tim, has just been horrible. We now, the federal government, takes over and rules--overrules state laws where state laws permit medicinal marijuana for people dying of cancer. The federal government goes in and arrests these people, put them in prison with mandatory, sometimes life sentences. This war on drugs is totally out of control. If you want to regulate cigarettes and alcohol and drugs, it should be at the state level. That's been my position, and that's where I stand on it. But the federal government has no, no prerogatives on this. They--when they wanted to outlaw alcohol, they had enough respect for the Constitution to amend the Constitution. Today we have all these laws and abuse, and they don't even care about the Constitution. I'm defending the Constitution on this issue. I think drugs are horrible. I teach my kids not to use them, my grandchildren, in my medical practice. Prescription drugs are a greater danger than, than hard drugs.

MR. RUSSERT: But you would decriminalize it?

REP. PAUL: I, I, I would, at the federal level. I don't have control over the states. And that's what the Constitution's there.

How is that liberal?

Liberals who oppose the Patriot Act see the steady erosion of our constitutional rights, starting with the Bush administration and continuing with the Obama administration as unconscionable. There's an understanding that not just the potential, but the actuality of abuse is a threat to our privacy and thus, to our civil rights. Ron Paul opposes the Patriot Act because it ruins the concept of private property just like the Civil Rights Bill:

CROWLEY:Let me ask you, you have addressed a lot of these complaints about pastwritings that were at least under your name, but that you said you had noknowledge of and didn't write. But there was one thing that caught my eye, whenI was looking through some of the briefing books.

Andit was something that was in the Congressional Record that you inserted intothe Congressional Record from June of 2004. And I wanted to talk to you aboutit. You said, contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Actof 1964, the act did not improve race relations or enhance freedom.

Instead,the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increasedracial tensions while diminishing individual liberty. So my question to you is,whose individual liberty did it diminish? And do you think the country wouldhave been better off in terms of race relations without the Civil Rights Act of1964?

PAUL:Well, we just could have -- we could have done it a better way because the JimCrow laws, obviously had to get rid of and we're all better off for that. Andthat is an important issue, so I strongly supported that.
Whatyou don't want to do is undermine the concept of liberty in that process. Andwhat they did in that bill was they destroyed the principle of private propertyand private choices.

Soif you do this, all civil liberties are protected by property rights, whereit's your TV stations -- that's a piece of property -- or whether it's thenewspaper, whether it's the church building, or whether it's the bedroom. Thisis something that people don't quite understand, that civil liberties aren'tdivorced from property. So if you try to improve relationships by forcing andtelling people what they can't do, and you ignore and undermine the principlesof liberty, then the government can come into our bedrooms. And that's exactlywhat has happened.

Lookat what's happened with the PATRIOT Act. They can come into our houses, ourbedrooms our businesses. And so the principle private property has been intheir mind. And it was started back then.

How is that liberal?

Liberals are rightfully suspicious - if not entirely against - many forms of armed conflict. They see a defense budget that's larger than the defense budget of our next 10 competitors increased during a period where our government is calling America "broke". They see our hammer's habit of conjuring nails and then calling them swords. They see the continuance of wars that have long since been detached from any meaningful purpose, and were furthered without public justification and without their consent. They see the violence of militarism on foreign citizens that have done nothing to us in countries that have done nothing to us and they deem that unacceptable. But in our distaste for blood and in liberal displeasure with a President who never promised to wash our hands of it, liberals not only made an anti-war candidate out of someone who isn't anti-war. We've ceded as a model, someone who would withdraw from all alliances, and back out of the UN as well as the ICC while ending foreign aid. Ron Paul's stance isn't pacifistic and it's only coincidentally non-interventionist. His foreign policy is little more that a national adoption of the paleoconservative refrain "None of my business":

News Anchor: Our viewers ask better questions than I do,so let me get right to some of them, talking about where you stand. DonPeterson in Hemet, California wants to know, “Where does Mr. Paul stand onIsrael. He seems to have dodged the question everything he’s been asked.”

Ron Paul: I disagree with him, because I don’t. We shouldbe friends with Israel, and I don’t think we do a very good job at it. But Idon’t think giving money to our friends is the right thing to do. I’m againstall foreign aid, and if we cut out all the foreign aid today we would cut out 7times more foreign aid from the enemies of Israel.

How is that liberal?

Ron Paul's rise is a travesty that cannot be excused. To be complicit in it is to be complicit in the rejection of modernity. I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the various disappointments that have fanned liberal outrage, but none of those disappointments can be counted as valid reasons to mistake a national omen for a national savior. If liberals have issues that need to be advanced, look to Wisconsin, look to Ohio, look to the Keystone Pipeline protestors as inspiration. See what the organized exercise of democracy and citizen engagement can do, see the virtue in sustaining it and the necessity of participating in it. Look to those who don't think government power is irreversibly bad, but to those who know that government can be significantly better. Accept that the advancement of Paul is inseparable from the defeat of liberalism as a civil rights, women rights, institutional equality, social services and economic justice philosophy. Accept that such an embrace from the context of liberalism isn't just deeply unacceptable, but inherently so. Accept that even as a non-liberal, Ron Paul represents a boundary that no American should ever cross. Ever. And that every vote, every argument, every duplicitous comparison between Ron Paul and Barack Obama is a step toward crossing it.

Not all of us have the benefit of living in a world where we can trust that the states would permit the rights that the federal government guarantees. Not all of us can question - in the abstract - what liberties we would see if sexual harassment and abortion were "left to the states". Not all of us are positioned to apathetically hypothesize about the effects of removing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act (which Paul also voted against) in a world where millions of minorities face an imminent threat of voter disenfranchisement. This isn't just brainstorming for a significant majority of the country. The threat is real. And Ron Paul has made no secret of his desire to create a world where only the already-empowered have power. It should be a point of mourning for Americans that the rights of its weakest citizens are so disregarded that this has to be frequently and forcefully pointed out.

Many bloggers from Digby, to BooMan, to Zandar, to Maha, to David Neiwert and to Scott Lemieux have been penetrating and insightful on this topic. And often without falling into the putrid requests for principled consideration demanded by Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedorsdorf, E.D Kain and others. I suggest that you read the first set to learn and confirm what you should know and that you read the second to know what - and who - you should dismiss.

Edit: I left out the singularly disqualifying fact that Ron Paul made millions from nakedly racist newsletters. I also omitted the fact that Ron Paul boasted about his authorship of them until it became convenient to deny them. I even avoided mentioning how the racists and the neoconfederates he associates with seem to be more attuned to things that lead to racism than people who claim to have an objection to it. While the newsletters confirm even the worst implications you can make about Ron Paul's conclusions about race, I find that establishment writers have done a good job making 2000 word posts telling us how good Ron Paul is and then "proving" they're not sympathetic or indifferent to racism by inserting a single sentence or paragraph about how the newsletters are really, really bad. I felt it important to emphasize that Ron Paul's noxious place in the public discourse is as much for his philosophy as it is for his words. I felt that focusing solely on those lets way too many people evade what it means to elevate someone like Ron Paul.

Oh, and I know I'm engaging in Soviet-Chinese style internment of political dissidents by calling Ron Paul a shameless crank in addition to a racist sociopath, but Ron Paul is both of those things. He thinks that we should return to the gold standard despite its economic volatility. Ron Paul's dear friend Llewellyn Rockwell was kind enough to publish one of his speeches, where Ron Paul warned that the UN was prepared to overrule constitutional law and establish a world government. Ron Paul has repeatedly claimed that in his first year of office, he will cut 1 trillion dollars from our budget - thus ensuring a minor...you know, economic collapse. And on his very website he not only effectively calls for a 0% across the board tax rate, but he promises to never, ever raise the debt ceiling, thus codifying the reality of a worldwide economic disaster. All to make sure Big Government doesn't exist. I wish Greenwald would be so kind as to supply his definition of crazy so I can see how Ron Paul misses his deserved inclusion.

Quote of the Day

2012-01-03T18:24:00.001-06:00

"For the record 'I'm against the drug war' has officially replaced 'I have a black friend.'" - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Journalism Is A Responsibility

2012-01-03T18:14:00.000-06:00

The American military has left Iraq, and, as is their job, journalists covered their departure. Offering gratitude to the troops for a job well done, solemnly analyzing the hurdles they face reintegrating into American society, measuring the political and geopolitical benefits of their return and passively mourning the tragedy of the engagement's elective nature. Unless you forced the memory yourself, you'd never know our brave military facilitated war crimes and is using fire to render evidence of its misdeeds to ash. Unless you take a moment to reach into the engagement's history, you'd never know that our indiscriminate bombing initiated a civil war that was policed by our military until the ethnic cleansing was complete.

Indeed, while it was widely accepted as truth that bad, unfortunate things happened, you'd never think from anyone's remarks that it was anyone's fault. It's not the soldier's fault for choosing to join a military that was engaged in an unjustified and violent invasion against a people that didn't threaten us. It's not the administration's fault for using flimsy, contested evidence to start and commit to the invasion. It's not the reporter's fault for uncritically circulating the case for the war while its institutions fired and demoted anyone who made a case against it. It was all just a formal political misunderstanding that just happened to cause the deaths of several hundred thousand people and the loss of trillions of dollars. As always, when faced with an event that can and should be a source of controversy, our media retreats into the comforting solace of pablum, understatement and false assent. And when accuracy stands to indict you, who can blame the media for retreating? They know exactly what I do.

They know that to understand Iraq isn't to grasp its common framing as a "war". To understand Iraq requires us to see it as a media propagated massacre, where the media - in collusion with the Bush administration - made power the visage of truth, misinformation the standard for information and abstraction the only descriptive reference point for hundreds of thousands of entirely avoidable deaths. And it worked. As liberally peddled propaganda so often does. When you see the blood-tainted troops return from their fabricated battlefield you should remember that the American military and American public opinion were tools in this ordeal, not actors. This was a conflict where the only victory possible was the ability to get away with it. They didn't do it by lying about their role as government enabling propagandists. They did it by playing their role, but never actually addressing what their role was. Consider this, if you will:

Nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1.

...

Official voices, including current and former government employees, whether civilian or military, dominated network newscasts, accounting for 63 percent of overall sources. Current and former U.S. officials alone provided more than half (52 percent) of all sources; adding officials from Britain, chief ally in the invasion of Iraq, brought the total to 57 percent.

Looking at U.S. sources, which made up 76 percent of total sources, more than two out of three (68 percent) were either current or former officials. The percentage of U.S. sources who were officials varied from network to network, ranging from 75 percent at CBS to 60 percent at NBC.

In the category of U.S. officials, military voices overwhelmed civilians by a two-to-one margin, providing 68 percent of U.S. official sources and nearly half (47 percent) of all U.S. sources. This predominance reflected the networks focus on information from journalists embedded with troops, or provided at military briefings, and the analysis of such by paid former military officials.

...

Of a total of 840 U.S. sources who are current or former government or military officials, only four were identified as holding anti-war opinions--Sen. Robert Byrd (D.-W.V.), Rep. Pete Stark (D.-Calif.) and two appearances by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio). Byrd was featured on PBS, with Stark and Kucinich appearing on Fox News.

...

Among British news sources, 95 percent were government or military officials; the remaining 5 percent, four individuals, were all journalists. More than a third of the British public was opposed to the war at the time of this study, according to a Guardian/ICM poll (4/1/03), but no British anti-war voices were carried by these six news shows.

Iraq provided the only exception to the rule that official sources dominate the news.

This is the function of journalism to journalists. For reporters, the power of politics doesn't flow from participants of democracy and the necessity of politics doesn't flow from their concerns or needs. For journalists, the power of politics flows from the powerful and relevance is exclusively decided by what the powerful say and do. To the extent that the consequences of policy are important is only to the extent that it can decide who becomes powerful. Which is to say, journalism frames ostracizing a necessary constituency for election as more significant than the government causing harm - particularly to effectively powerless parties. What's decided and what's important from a media standpoint relates solely to the words and actions of politicians. As a result, the consequences and effects of those actions become secondary - if they're considered at all.

The modern conception of journalism draws its authority from access. In order to be considered "valid" and "important" it requires the presence of those they consider valid and important. This not only creates an environment for establishment overrepresentation in media coverage, media interviews and media analysis, it creates an institutional incentive to avoid the necessary antagonism that honest and nuanced analysis/criticism of politicians and their actions require. Journalists will wail endlessly about "neutrality" and "fairness" and how the latter requires the former, but all those positions do is make journalists passive parties that amplify government claims - regardless of their veracity.

When I say that journalists failed to address their role, this is precisely what I mean. Culturally, western democracies consider news organizations a useful means of getting the necessary facts to be "informed". The perceived value of journalism rests on the assumption that this is what they're doing. But journalism to journalists is premised on repeating, not informing. Granting politicians a fertile ground to spread talking points through interviews, quotes, anonymous sourcing, etc is "reporting" to journalists. Telling you whether those claims are true or telling you whether policies have consequences is not. Journalism is merely a podium for politicians step on. And journalists - exhibiting their comfort with that - exist only to provide them with a mic.

This distortion of traditional and quality journalism has crafted an institutional role for journalists where they're not watchdogs of government or advocates for the interests of their country's citizens or even mechanisms for crafting an informed public. Their degradation is so ingrained that they don't even see it as necessary to be those things. It's lost on the institution that making wise decisions in a democracy requires knowledge of a country's going-ons. It's lost on the institution that people who have jobs and who have familial demands lack the time, education or resources to research the history, content and effects of policy disputes. It's lost on the institution that their exclusive access to politicians grants them an ability to challenge their claims and pursue the truths that lie in that grey area where the government's interests and the public's interests fail to intersect. It's not because all reporters don't care about those things - I'm sure some of them do. It's because they don't see it as their responsibility.

The founding assumption of The View From Nowhere is that it proves that a journalist is unbiased because they refuse to take a position on competing arguments. By adhering only to the information that doesn't step on "partisan" toes or by only repeating the information and arguments of the "different sides" they prove their trustworthiness and objectivity. It doesn't answer the central question of how you can demonstrate corruption, malfeasance or policy-damage without having a clear standard for what "corruption", "malfeasance" and "policy-damage" is. It avoids the question all together. By removing any rationale to critically view politicians and government actions, it superficially insulates journalists from the consequences of being perceived as wrong. It promotes political solipsism while painting anything that results from that stance as something that can't be blamed on them. So when misinformation becomes indistinguishable from information and the opinions of the electorate are affected accordingly, you're not supposed to think it's the fault of the people tasked with conveying that information:

An in-depth analysis of a series of polls conducted June through September found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions.

Such misperceptions are highly related to support for the war. Among those with none of the misperceptions listed above, only 23% support the war. Among those with one of these misperceptions, 53% support the war, rising to 78% for those who have two of the misperceptions, and to 86% for those with all 3 misperceptions. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, "While we cannot assert that these misperceptions created the support for going to war with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions."

...

Another key perception--one that US intelligence agencies regard as unfounded--is that Iraq was directly involved in September 11. Before the war approximately one in five believed this and 13% even said they believed that they had seen conclusive evidence of it. Polled June through September, the percentage saying that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 continued to be in the 20-25% range, while another 33-36% said they believed that Iraq gave al-Qaeda substantial support. [Note: An August Washington Post poll found that 69% thought it was at least "somewhat likely" that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11--a different question than the PIPA/KN question that asked respondents to come to a conclusion.]

In the run-up to the war misperceptions were also highly related to support for going to war. In February, among those who believed that Iraq was directly involved in September 11, 58% said they would agree with the President's decision to go to war without UN approval. Among those who believed that Iraq had given al Qaeda substantial support, but was not involved in September 11, approval dropped to 37%. Among those who believed that a few al Qaeda individuals had contact with Iraqi officials 32% were supportive, while among those who believed that there was no connection at all just 25% felt that way. Polled during the war, among those who incorrectly believed that world public opinion favored going to the war, 81% agreed with the President's decision to do so, while among those who knew that the world public opinion was opposed only 28% agreed.

While it would seem that misperceptions are derived from a failure to pay attention to the news, in fact, overall, those who pay greater attention to the news are no less likely to have misperceptions.

Of course, we know now that the Bush administration was quite canny in its understanding of journalism. The establishment of the White House Iraq Group existed to play on the susceptibility of journalists to starkly painted, Factual and Important sounding drama from fancily titled "official sources". They understood in a way that journalists could not that the modern conception of journalism makes no distinction between a lie or the truth. There are only ever positions from one side and positions from another. And when one position is stated often enough in the right places, a world where journalists fail to challenge the claims of politicians is a world where the claims of politicians don't become significantly challenged.

When Judith Miller (who ended up at Fox News) used her platform at the NYT to lie about Saddam's capacity and intents and successfully sell a false rationale for war to the American public, journalists didn't see it as their role to question her sources or to demonstrate skepticism about how thin that sourcing was. They saw it as a Big Story, and brought Bush officials on media outlets like Meet the Press (which Cheney used to "control the message") to answer fawning questions without the slightest hint of suspicion. When we went to war and when Americans were persuaded to support a war under pretenses that were subsequently discovered to be false, they didn't see it as evidence of a system-wide disaster. It wasn't seen as a demonstration that modern journalistic philosophies are dangerous. It wasn't even viewed a rationale to reject the principle architects of a horrendous policy. It was just politics.

The lives of hundreds of thousands, the survival of cities/countries, the sovereignty and self-determination of whole peoples and the expenditure of our tax dollars were not issues for the media so much as they were details. Stated without context and squandered without repercussion. Most of the journalists who pushed the Iraq war and gave ample pretext for the commission of a war crime not only still have their jobs, but were given promotions. Of the White House Iraq Group (and other Bush Administration officials), Ari Fleischer (CNN), Michael Gerson (Washington Post), Tony Snow (CNN), Mary Matalin (CNN), Sara Taylor (MSNBC), Karl Rove (Fox News) and others all went on to have nice little stints at mainstream media outlets as correspondents.

It's not enough to say that the media "got it wrong". It's not enough to call them irresponsible or misleading. It's no longer adequate to paint them as shameless, craven or ignorant. These terms only serve to avoid the necessary levels of introspection that transforms observations into conclusions. It makes them sound like children that unwittingly stumbled onto something forgivable instead of influential adults who consciously embraced an evil that they refuse to account for by using a professional system they refuse to reject. In understanding the failures of journalism, you mustn't let the presumption of decency obscure the pervasiveness of systemic fault.

Shorn from any sense of responsibility and shielded from any significant amount of accountability, journalism internalizes its role as a weapon for the powerful rather than an instrument that heeds the interests of those the powerful are tasked to protect. Removed from the considerations that make journalism worthy, journalism becomes anathema to both democracy and to the qualities that can make a democracy work. The Iraq War is illustrative, not merely because of the mistake's enormity, but because it exposed - for all to see - the essential failing of journalism-as-practiced. To journalists, journalism is a posture. It exists as a set of preestablished norms, unspoken traditions and tonal orientations that prize "neutrality", "dispassion" and "fairness" in order to look the way a reporter is "supposed" to look. The essential failing isn't that they got it wrong, but rather that nothing about its professional ethos, nothing about its ethical trends and nothing about its institutional incentives made it their job to get it right.

For journalists, the Iraq War - and politics generally - are not events that involve people. They're not actions that carry consequences. And those consequences have no true moral dimension. For journalists, politics is a thing. The fact that it involves humans, their livelihood and the question of whether they'll have life generally is substantively tangential. Their perspectives and their careers are dedicated to politics and to international events as paltry trivialities where power and the exercise thereof exists in vacuums where its usage has no effect. Supporting the Iraq War to these people wasn't supporting the indiscriminate bombing of people who've done nothing to us. It wasn't condemning the innocent to fire, ethnic cleansing and neoliberal serfdom. It wasn't lying the country into a conflict that cost us the trillions that could be use to strengthen the well-being of our own citizens. It was a position. The fact that it did and could affect people was less than immaterial to journalists. It was an abstraction.

If you wonder about media-wide detachment. If you wonder about the empty pedantry that leads "journalists" to declare truths to be lies. If you wonder about the forces that cause "journalists" to pivot every noxious political remark into a horse race assessment. If you wonder about what motivates "journalists" to characterize disputes that relate to something as fundamental as government functionality to the false cry of "both sides do it!". If you wonder what can lead "journalists" to casually entertain reducing all spending to combat the nonexistent specter of debt while we're facing mass unemployment. If you wonder how "journalists" can remain largely silent on the unprecedented state-level attack on the physical autonomy of women. If you wonder why it took a throng of protestors to show "journalists" that income inequality exists. If you wonder how wars can be waged, and civil rights can be shamelessly eroded without so much as an establishment outcry. If you wonder at all, look no further than who modern journalism serves: no one.

The moment journalists defined their purpose as something unrelated to the interests of their readers is the moment journalism lost any rationale to have a voice. Whereas activists and voters have interests to protect and consequences to consider, journalism subsists on the fallacy that such considerations are beneath it. Objectivity demands an Above The Fray detachment that looks at the truth and the lie as equivalent and that views the repugnant and the acceptable through a lens that purges them of any responsibility to outline the difference. Journalism's sin is inherent to its decision to abandon the tangibly human effects of the political. By denying that the very politics they cavalierly comment on is about us and what happens to us, they've denied the need to be accountable for or reflect on how their reporting guides the discourse and how a missed qualification, or a removed bit of context, or a pulled criticism can mean the embrace or the false depiction of a policy that harms and kills thousands, hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions.

Lost in the volume of bad reporting, false equivalences, lazy fact-checking, shallow policy-understanding and dry, empty policy/political articulation is the sense that journalism is a responsibility. Not to the political process, not to the institution, not to professional norms, not to advertisers, not to the inclinations of your peers, but to us. By casting our grievances into the realm of the blandly political, by pretending that politics are just a series of arguments that should be pursued just to show how courageous you are for considering them, by pretending that no one in politics can ever truly be right, journalists detach themselves from those who inevitably suffer from their ill-considered negligence. They contribute to the very things that lower our standard of living and then say that their inability to act, or their willingness to give a podium to those who do "is not our fault" and "not our job".

Yes, it is.

Edit: Here's Paul Krugman - a real journalist, with actual credentials and the ability to grasp policy - explaining why he takes a fearlessly honest approach to the implications, substance and consequences of his opponents' and politicians arguments:

Cowen apparently wants me to make the best case for the opposing side in policy debates. Since when has that been the rule? I’m trying to move policy in what I believe to be the right direction — and I will make the best honest case I can for moving in that direction.

Look, economic policy matters. It matters for real people who suffer real consequences when we get it wrong. If I believe that the doctrine of expansionary austerity is all wrong, or that the Ryan plan for Medicare would have disastrous effects, or whatever, then my duty, as I see it, is to make my case as best I honestly can — not put on a decorous show of civilized discussion that pretends that there aren’t hired guns posing as analysts, and spares the feelings of people who are not in danger of losing their jobs or their health care.

This is not a game.

Exactly.

Stained Glass Windows Can't Be Mirrors

2011-08-04T18:15:00.015-05:00

The ongoing tragedy of "black history" as it's conventionally told is that it makes the past defining without acknowledging the past as fluid. A yesterday that's inseparable from the legacy of slavery, emancipation, reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement is transformed into something lesser than a yesterday that consists of those events. Whole generations of black history, black achievement, black struggle, cultural evolution and even broader cultural progress stand in thrall to a past that serves to paint the present as nonexistent. When the past is zenith; when the past is rhetorically placed into a seat of unquestioned reverence; when its heroes are written as saints and its events are portrayed as the highlight of our time, where is the place for those that come after?

The frequently ignored underside of making that past defining is that it makes those who were and are unattached to that past "other". It makes the face that did exist more important than the face that does exist. It ostracizes the very people who are tasked with perfecting a progress that's over a century in the making, and it does so without even understanding the modern shape of their obstacles. Racial segregation has evolved into generational segregation, and its character is emotional and intellectual instead of physical.

The surviving luminaries of the civil rights movement have become a force that cherishes their memory, their achievements, their cultural contributions, their ideals and have used the power of a narrative they helped construct to form an enclave of black culture that's in stasis. Generational condescension is human and culturally universal; but never since the so-called "Greatest Generation" has it been backed by so appealing and consequential of a narrative. In most cases, a generation that demonstrates distaste or isolation from succeeding generations can be safely ignored once power inevitably passes to their children and the cultural landscape is formed through the imagination and experiences of fresher eyes. But these people have been anointed by history.

They marched from Selma to Montgomery. They have family members who were lynched by the KKK. They ate with Martin Luther King Jr. They took part in the bus boycotts. They remember when restaurants and bathrooms had "White's only" signs. They saw the I Have A Dream Speech live. They supported the Freedom Riders. They belonged to radicals fighting for racial equality. They were beaten by police, sprayed by hydrants, mauled by dogs and lawlessly confined to prisons. They went to the churches that were bombed. They organized around the NAACP at its most popular and relevant. They resisted, campaigned and struggled against a racist regime that was intent on making a permanent skin-decided caste. To contest them is to disrespect the enormity of what they sacrificed and to diminish the extent of what they accomplished for themselves and for those that came after. Or so many would like you to assume.

Ta-Nehisi Coates comes close - closer than many I've seen - to identifying (or attempting to identify) the rather innocuous problem he has with pondering those who've been sainted by merely belonging to the civil rights movement. I suggest reading his take in full:

A couple of reactions. First, one reason why, as a child, I wasn't much interested in the Civil Rights movement is because it was always presented as a kind of holier than thou moral play. Black history, at least in the schools, existed mainly as clunky "You Can Do It" inspirational rhetoric. I often joke that I know I'm in a hood school because there's a lot of inspirational sloganeering around "success," "achievement," and "winning." At my old middle school they actually organized us into "teams" named after heroes of black history--the Woodson team, the King team, the Garvey team, the Booker T team etc. I was on the Marshall Team. On the rafters of my hall there was a slogan that went something like, "It is by choice not chance, that we choose to enhance, the Marshall Team. We can achieve. We will achieve..." and so on.

The point was to make black history utilitarian, and applicable to our education. The strategy was not wrong, but with it came this sense that we walked in the path of infallible Gods. No one talked about, say, Garvey dismissing the NAACP as the "National Association for the Advancement of Certain People." Or Fannie Lou Hamer talking cracking some Uncle Toms head.

I don't even know that that sort of thing is appropriate for middle school kids, but my point is that the narrative of black super-morality never connected with me. The people just never really seemed human, so much as they seemed like rather divinely passive reactions to white racism. The Montgomery boycott is the perfect example. The way it was told to us, sheer magic and Christian spirit made the boycott work. Castigation and intimidation surely would have doomed it. Except any deep study of activist and activism always reveals moments like this, moments that cut against the narrative of victory through pure moral force.

Ta-Nehisi Coates presents a valuable perspective, and one that warrants more exploration and discussion than this subject ever has and likely ever will receive, but I have a separate contention. The 60's were the first time in American history where there was something resembling an institutional movement that conferred political and cultural power to black people. Through civil rights organizations and black churches particularly, a semi-unofficial apparatus was formed that shaped - and continues to shape - black perception. Through those efforts, a force of mobilization was created that continues to inspire the black population, black intellectual thought and that has some limited influence over what falls within the bounds of permissibility in black culture. Attempting to analyze the enormity of what that means and how that power expresses itself is a near impossible task as long as those involved are seen as "apart" from American culture. Instead, let's ask ourselves a different - but no less important - question: who benefits the most from that?

I find it difficult to mentally escape the sheer convenience of the narratives surrounding the civil rights movement. The mythology, the indomitable innocence and greatness of the people involved, the hushed reverence accorded to its participants, the unquestioned "good" of their tactics, the subtle "look at what we did for you" bribery undergirding its descriptions. Fallible, human and - at times - calculatingly cold figures like Martin Luther King and the NAACP leadership have been transformed into suns. And those who were closest to the light when the movement's power began to wane are now viewed as successors to an unparalleled era of greatness. They've marked their place as angels under a new series of Gods and the mere mortals that have followed don't dare to challenge them.

While the particulars of that narrative are important to grasp, the only way to truly understand it is to understand its utilitarian value. A history has been crafted that's portrayed the Perfect as victors against the Evil to the benefit of All. When your personal grounding is rooted in something surrounded by a hallowed glow, what decent person would or could question you when no one questions that interpretation of history? What decent person would say to them "You, who have suffered much are my equal and are just as capable as anyone of being wrong"? Many of these people are honorable and they've been through much - no one does or should deny that, ever - but the function of this narrative does little to instill pride in black culture or history, it does nothing to solidify the potential black cultural progression, nor does it create a relatable means of outlining black capacity for conventional achievement. In fact, it's portrayed in a light that makes their achievements seem impossible for anyone who decides to follow them. It largely postures that imitating "greatness" is the only means of attaining it. Think about that.

This is a history that makes those involved - and only those involved - completely untouchable on any rhetorical or practical level. And it does so by painting themselves as part of a bizarrely "impeccable" historical picture that makes it automatically immoral to challenge their intellectual positions and institutional authority. Are we really supposed to believe that largely self-proclaimed "black leaders" had no part in or derive no benefit from shaping how a movement they were apart of is viewed? It would be disastrously naive to think so. And it would be short-sighted to ignore the consequences of having four decades - or, to put it differently, two entire generations - of black thought, black perspective and black expression narrowly confined to and dominated by a single generational demographic and their well-groomed intellectual successors.

A sect of people has selfishly molded an important segment of American history into a generational repository for 60's nostalgia and romanticism. They've wedded black history and black culture to a time and a context that no longer exists and in so doing, they've left no place for what black culture has become. They've decided to freeze the evolution of black thought in amber by saying that this is the only period blacks can and should take lessons on how to proceed from. The meaningless marches, the dry recitation of "Old Negro Spirituals", the empty speeches about long forgotten accomplishments that bear no relation to today's problems, the sad, sad worship of long-dead figures - all of it is an artifact of a cultural segment that's desperately attempting to continue the quasi-historical canon that's integral to their esteem. And all of it is intended to distract you from the problem with the "Look what we did!" framing: the "we" automatically excludes anyone and everyone that had no part in it.

The corny "you can do it", "you can succeed!", "you are winners!" bromides are simply revealing of a deeper generational dismissiveness. Inherent to these assumptions is the belief that those involved are "failing" now. That they have nothing that can be pointed to as an identifiable success, a worthy thought or an experience that warrants sharing and analyzing. Almost collectively, the latest generations of black culture have become viewed as problems to fix instead of genuine perspectives and experiences to incorporate. Their fundamental, culturally-guided differences as products of the civil rights movement has made them pariahs amongst those who claim to be "doing what they can".

Such myopic condescension can be attributed to many things, but the disconnected hands-off approach is simply the final expression of a culture that views at their youth as empty containers for their own dated views instead of new additions to an intellectual culture that's growing and evolving with America as a whole. They've asked its youngest to look at the eldest as the Perfect Example without understanding how impossible it is to see themselves in the face of mythic figures fighting against demons that have no modern parallel. The overstated morphing of gang members, rappers and sports players into "heroes" isn't a symbol of cultural depravity in black youth; it's a forcefully disconnected segment of black culture gravitating toward figures that actually seem like people as they recognize them. "Black leaders" have become so obsessed with deification that they've failed to question whether it has meaning to people who weren't involved or aren't close to those involved in the civil rights movement. They've even failed to question whether the struggles of the period have any relation to the systemic disadvantages that could be pointed to today.

Cultural stagnancy isn't just the result of "forgetting where you come from". It's just as often a byproduct of not knowing what you are and where you want to go. For ages, this conversation has been guided by people whose only vision for black people and black culture rests on addressing and invoking the spirit of issues that have long since been fought against and solved. In keeping with this shortcoming, there's been a cultural unwillingness to address and identify what modernity means for such a successful cultural movement, and unfortunately, this has come with an unwillingness to see what the civil rights movement didn't and couldn't address that participants of this generation could.

By thoughtlessly cleaving to an antiquated basis for institutional relevance, those most capable have foregone the primary requirement for an institution and a movement's longevity: modern applicability. That's something you can't offer by simply looking at a group of young people and dictating what's right and wrong for them. Experience does not bequeath omniscience. It's often a precursor to wisdom, yes, but it's also informed by a time that rarely resembles the time of your children or grandchildren. If you want to speak to the trials of the present, you require people who belong to the present. "Back in my day...", "pull your pants up!" and "go get a job!" speeches do little more than speak to the conceit of people who are arrogant enough to believe that "proper" is solely defined by their preferences. Lost in this patronizing display is the understanding that leadership isn't just motivational, it's transitional.

A generation you're not utilizing is a generation you've perceptually rendered nonexistent. The more successive generations are ignored and kept from the levers of influence, the more whole demographic periods become alien to the people who require them to comprehend the present. What would those oft-discussed civil rights figures say if they knew their supposedly divine shadow was being used as a boundary to limit the broadness of black political, cultural, institutional and generational expression? If they're indifferent, they were never worth praising to begin with. If they'd disagree, then why countenance this rather pernicious usage of their legacy?

The continuing sin of deification lies not only in its ability to transform the human into the unapproachably alien. It's that it is, in its own way, reductive. In the short sighted desire to make quick idols out of the first prominent black leaders, there was a failure to view them in both perspective and context. Their generation has presented those leaders to their children as glimmering towers instead of foundations that they were just as capable of adding to. The true tragedy isn't encapsulated by the loss of something black people had taken away, but by the loss of something its own cultural elements ensured that black people didn't really have the chance to receive.

Understanding The Democratic Party's Function

2011-08-04T03:04:00.012-05:00

Since I've fulfilled my "did he just write that?" requirements for the month, let me directly outline what I didn't write and why I didn't write it. I didn't say that both parties are the same. I didn't say that dismantling the current system means failing to participate in and influence it. I didn't say that Obama's weaknesses as a president and as a product of a deformed system means that he shouldn't be voted for in 2012. I didn't say we should start primarying Obama with The Perfect Liberal Messiah. I didn't say that the Democrats' institutional conformity and aversion to open liberalism makes them Too-Conservative or unfit for governance. Mostly because what's not patently wrong with these remarks is contented with being incredibly stupid.

The recurring ideological failure of the Democratic party's more liberal and dejected elements is their spoiled incapacity to internalize two truths at once. It's not a Betrayal of Your Ideals to simultaneously think that the system is innately incapable of producing positive results and that Democrats are our only hope of short-term functionality while planning long term alterations. In fact, it's the only logical conclusion you can come to. There's a reason why government shutdowns and economically catastrophic defaults aren't threatened when Democrats have comfortable majorities: it's because Democrats are a mostly-responsible and competent party that suffers because it belongs to a system and a series of incentives that are resistant to systemic improvement at a time when we're suffering from systemic disadvantage. Its weakness is a precise function of its desire to work within the established framework and its good faith - but baseless - belief that the system can be an engine for good. Their defining flaw as a party is that they're wrong. That doesn't make the party itself bad or useless. It makes them mistaken.

They're an enemy of institutional alteration, but very little of what they've done suggests that they're an enemy of the people. The same can't in any way be said for the Republican party. And, indeed, it's the modern Republican party's unique position in American society - and in history - that makes systemic evolution and Democratic support (at least in the short term) necessary. The Republican party is a body of acid kept behind an eroding dam, and the Democratic party is the patch on one of the dam's cracks that assures the dam's structural stability. If the Democratic party goes, the dam goes and we burn alive. It's that simple.

To put it in less alarmist, but no less dire terms; America is ungovernable as long as the Republican party has anything that resembles power. Time and again, Republicans have shown a creepily pervasive apathy to the suffering their most strongly supported policies and tactics will elicit, and that craven indifference is consistently bolstered by a fanatic insulation from anything resembling fact.

A proper government relies on functionality first and foremost with a desire for progression and evolution where it's possible. A Republican government relies on the dismantling of functionality, particularly if the characteristics that maintain government are actively resistant to their policy objectives. For a normal government, the institutions that guide governmental stability are things to be respected, maintained and strengthened. For a normal government, the elements that make government - and, indeed, your country - work are not open to compromise. For Republicans, they're something to recklessly and destructively threaten if it means that you can get what you want more quickly. They've indicated as much themselves:

“What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order.”

Creating a circumstance where congress is forced to vote on whether or not to suddenly crash the American and global economy wasn't just an extraordinarily repugnant measure undertaken for destructively partisan ends. Not for Republicans. Neither was forming a basis for "compromise" that changed a vote on whether to crash the American economy to a vote on how fast you want to crash the economy. No. "This is just the first step". Under crippling economic conditions, the Republicans decided to threaten to make those conditions immeasurably worse in order to attain a result that weakens our ability to strengthen our standard of living and mitigate the suffering of real people. And "this is just the first step". I take them at their word. And so should you.

As long as the Republican party exists, questions of progress will always, always devolve into defensive fights for basic survival. And as long as we care about the worst-case consequences and they don't, these will continue to be fights where "victory" is defined as whatever does the least amount of long term damage. This isn't just disastrous for political morale, it's unsustainable on any long term scale. Eventually two of two things are going to happen: the Democratic party will be rendered incapable of fighting because "compromise" has brought them to something that almost precisely resembles the Republican's maximalist position. And it would mean we're in a governmental environment where there's no taxes, no efforts to address systemic inequality (cultural or economic), no regulation of food, drugs and water, a dismantling and attempted privitization of life-saving social services, the legal codification of old, white men telling women what can and can't be inside of their bodies, the complete disenfranchisement of the politically weak/poor from our political system and the codification of corporate control as more of an uncontestable absolute than an unfortunate but still-correctable trend.

Our notions of justice, egalitarianism, income distribution and civil liberties are logically sound, but it's dishonest to avoid internalizing their status as long term abstractions that can only be entertained because we're in positions of relative wealth and high living standards. While very many of us are poor, very few of us are starving. Our basic provisions are, by and large, somewhat available to us and our living expectations are a function of quality standards that were established long before we were born. The unstated consequence of Republican policy is the total redistribution of wealth away from us, the complete removal of those standards, and the completion of our inability to regain them once lost. Which means that "justice, egalitarianism, income distribution and civil liberties" become secondary to wanting to stop you and your family from dying within the next several days because of an inability to procure food. Arguing for systemic evolution is wholly contingent on our attention being focused on what we want in the long term instead of being governed by uncertainty about our ability to get what we need in the short term. The simple fact is that Republicans compromise that and Democrats don't.

You can disagree with every single item in the Democratic platform. You can - with total clarity - see their capture by corrosive special interests. You can see how their attachment to the system limits their ability to act as effective tools for progress. You can see how the incentives of government opens them to internalizing the necessity of America's Sacred Cows like military spending, "government belt tightening" and the security/secrecy state. You can find them excessively meek and rhetorically incapable of fighting against Republican offenses. It couldn't matter less. As long as the choice between the Republican party and the Democratic party is the choice between starving and not starving, the choice will always, always be easy. If self-interest is incapable of making you understand that, then interest in the well-being of your fellow citizens should suffice.

The simple truth is that there are no Nancy Pelosi's in the Republican party. A fact which would be less meaningful if you didn't understand that there can't be any Nancy Pelosi's in the Republican party. No one's asking you to give up your beliefs, compromise your principles, sell out to evil or whatever other hyperbolic trope that's in vogue at the more popular "OBAMA BETRAYED US" blogs. What is being asked of you is that you keep in mind that progress is only possible and prudent in the presence of governmental functionality, and only one party is capable of offering that.

The debt ceiling debate wasn't just illustrative of the Republican's complete disregard for our living conditions. It was illustrative of the fragility of our institutions. Solid institutions promise stability and have contingencies to assure that stability when it's threatened. Poor institutions have weaknesses that allow nihilists to subvert the will of the government - and democracy itself - to enact a "compromise" that wouldn't be achieved without threatening the system itself. The debt ceiling debate went out of its way to not only prove that Republicans refuse to govern well, but that our very system gives them the tools to threaten chaos and catastrophe.

The choice between Democrats and Republicans is not a choice between who you unquestioningly support and who you don't. It's a choice between the party that can ensure your stability and survival and the party that can't. Very few things are simple, but this is. An embrace of radicalism doesn't require an embrace of stupidity. The more we fail to appreciate the usefulness of the Democratic party, the more we make it that much more difficult to grow beyond needing it.

While there might be some satisfaction in playing the "let's get rid of Obama" and the "I can't support x Democrat in y election" game, there's no utility to it. As of now, there are no ulterior options, and if there were, there's almost no possibility that they'll be successful or relevant beyond the emptiness of protest voting. Right now, the choice isn't between government "working well" and government just "working". The choice is between government working or government not working at all - and I can't overstate how selfish it is to pretend that making the latter easier benefits anything but the ego of political purists. We don't live in I Get What I Wantland. We won't for quite a while. So please. To all progressives, liberals, union activists and Democrats who think that feeling "demoralized" is a valid reason for making illogical decisions with your vote. Grow up.

Edit: Nancy Pelosi is the picture of governmental/congressional competence. She effectively gets her party in line, she clearly states her party's beliefs, the beliefs she states are usually closer to correct than other members of the Democratic party and she makes sure that government not only functions and works, but she left no doubt about government's stability while she had the power to do anything about it (and she's even integral to doing that now). When I say that there can be no Nancy Pelosi's in the Republican party, I mean that the attributes that make her exceptional would exile her from Republican politics. Nature of the beast and all that.

The Danger of Making Obama the Face of the Democratic Party and Liberal Activism

2011-08-02T17:25:00.004-05:00

Much as I'd enjoy joining the internet in another cycle of liberal disappointment, I have to express my discontent at the quality of the liberal blogosphere's Obama criticism. He is not a Republican. He is not like Republicans. And the more this has to be constantly reasserted, the more liberals will continue to ineffectually flounder in search of legitimate complaints. Every "this is exactly what Obama wanted" argument, every "Obama is a weak president/negotiator" argument, every "Obama isn't a True Liberal" argument betrays how thoroughly liberal disappointment rests on idealistic projection. Instead of criticizing the president, the left has contented itself with whining about Obama's failure to live up to the ideals of their strawknight while ignoring unfavorable political realities (like Republican intransigence and the media embrace thereof). This is a fine tactic for e-venting and the inevitable circle-jerking it produces, but it fails as political expression and political analysis.

This isn't to say that the linked arguments don't have minimal grains of truth - they do. But the image they rely on and the narrative they contribute to couldn't be further away from explaining the discrepancy that makes Obama the right president for a misinformed and centrist electorate and the wrong president for an unflinchingly destructive opposition or the left. Ironically, no one can illustrate why better than Barack Obama himself:

It's quite possible - and indeed, likely - that President Obama is either a liberal or mostly-liberal. It's likely that if he sat down at a table with Paul Krugman, Digby and Ezra Klein, he would either agree with or be sympathetic to many of their arguments. Why, it's even likely that he could sit down and have a productive conversation about something like unions or education reform with self-proclaimed Real Leftist Freddie deBoer. What almost none of these parties seem to understand is that the specifics of the issues in question are completely secondary to Obama's priorities.

In his mind, he's not president to fulfill the "WE NEED TO GET THIS DONE NOW!" quota of the left. His responsibility is to the institutions that he feels makes discussion of those issues - and progress generally - possible. To put it in construction terms, Obama is a janitor most of the time a repairman some of the time and almost never an architect. No effort to understand or persuasively critique Obama can happen until these details are internalized. The main flaw with from-the-left efforts to comprehend Obama is that while they're looking at it on an issue-by-issue and case-by-case basis, Obama feels he has an obligation to something greater than his - or even his party's - political preferences. He feels he an obligation to the office itself. In his eyes, his goal isn't to use the office or government to enact what he feels is societally superior (though he will try when he can, and consider it a bonus when he succeeds). His goal begins and ends with institutional functionality.

When he wanted healthcare reform, he made sure that congress was nigh exclusively responsible for conceptualizing, writing and voting for it. When he made his moves in support of gay marriage and against DADT, he went through the pentagon, which went through Congress in the form of "recommendations", and then waited for the process to prepare itself to vote on it. When he stopped enforcing DOMA, he waited until he had cover from elements of the judicial branch to do it. When he faced the possibility of a government shutdown, he took the strongest option he could that would not upset the established status quo. An approach he again repeated with the recent debt ceiling "deal". Even his consistent desire for compromise is best viewed through the lens of institutional attachment.

The way he works and the way he wants congress to work (i.e through compromise) is precisely how the government functioned before the last two decades. His loyalty isn't to liberals or conservatives, it isn't to Democrats or Republicans, it isn't even to what's "best" or "worst" for America's standard of living. Obama's loyalty is to a lost vision of the American system, and nearly every decision he's made (from avoiding his 14th Amendment options to constantly meeting with Republicans as though they're somehow good-faith negotiators) is his conformity to a role and to a functional norm that the American government feels it's been forced to collectively discard. This is the scope of Obama's vision, this is the basis for the "transformative" power he so admires in other presidents, this is the justification for every compromise, every posture, every "cave" he's made. As long as institutional functionality is maintained, in Obama's mind, he didn't cave at all. He stopped the system from irreparably breaking, which he feels is the extent of his purpose.

This isn't just an unsurprising summary of his philosophy. It's completely consistent with his political views going as far back as at least The Audacity of Hope. His belief that government can and should work is inseparably tied to his belief that government works best as it is/was. This perspective is a lot of things. A lot. But it's breathtakingly short sighted and blind to view Obama's stubborn insistence on it as naive and illegitimate or to view his distinctly conservative impulses as inherently illiberal.

Obama is a product of, an admirer of and an embodiment of the American political system and no attempt to critique Obama will have lasting value until and unless they can engage his philosophy on the terms he's outlined for himself and with a full understanding of what, exactly, they're attacking when they attack Obama. This is much, much more important than Liberal Issue Du Jour and any attempt to provide insight is going to have to confront the conclusion that by criticizing Obama, you're criticizing a comprehensive and historically informed vision of American government. You're not only saying that his conception of government can't work: you're saying it shouldn't. This isn't a moral or qualitative judgment, it's just a fact. I repeat: disagreeing with Obama's philosophy is saying that the way American government has worked for the past 200 years is not how America can or should work in the future.

The left's primary failing arises from from similarly sentimental attachment to the status quo that's tempered (in ways that Obama's isn't) by an empirically informed disloyalty to it. That means that the left sees the factual justifications for political change, sees what's wrong with society, sees where we've erred as an electorate and how the system rewards and encourages those errors, but wishes to and thinks that it can fix these problems in the same way every single democratic movement in America has fixed the problems of their time. To put it another way, the left's problems with America are systemic. They're fixtures of our government, they're codified by law, and they're perpetuated by politicians that we elect. And despite that, the left is reluctant to take its feelings to their logical conclusion. They're willing to say that the system is broken, but they're unwilling to treat the system like it's broken.

I've long complained about the stupidity of organizing around Obama in 2008. I thought it was incomparably foolish and short-sighted to create a movement around a candidate instead of influencing a candidate with a movement. But that short-sightedness and liberal susceptibility to it is significantly motivated by that sentiment. In Obama, the left confused a maintainer for a radical. They looked at Obama and projected onto him what they wanted: systemic change without systemic destruction. In doing so, however, the left revealed how little it understands itself and its motivations. Just think about it.

Through the Senate, redistricting and Republican thievery in 2000 and 2004 and journalistic internalization of Republican arguments, the system has proven incapable of being democratic. Through campaign contributions, Supreme Court removal of campaign financing laws, and the overwhelmingly white/male/rich demographic/income representation of its government, the system is highly distorted to disproportionately represent the wealthy. Through "looking forward and not backward" rhetoric, the system forgives wrongdoing from politicians while cruelly punishing the poorest and weakest of its citizens with inane laws and extraordinarily long prison sentences. Through its failure to meaningfully police Wall Street or even set up a means of addressing climate change, the system has proven to be fundamentally averse to regulation. Through the continuation of systemic and cultural inequality the system still manages to be both racist and sexist. Through our ability to call for and wage war on countries that have done nothing to us without even requiring the pretense of an internal debate, the system institutionalizes war and makes carrying it out as easy and consequence-free as possible. Through the loss of privacy protections, civil liberties protections, and even effective safeguards against police brutality, the system spits on civil liberties while giving the most power to the people best positioned to abuse it. Through a society that values making money more than it values what's done to make it, the system doesn't just ignore income inequality, it creates it. Through its complete removal from nearly all national and political conversation, the system has shown complete indifference to unemployment and underemployment. The system birthed the circumstances that led to every decision the left has disliked in the past 20 years.

When the left saw Obama, they saw a way to address their complaints without giving the system up. They saw a way to say that their goals, their ideals and their principles were in-keeping with the best traditions of American progress. They saw the system as benign and abused instead of resistant and antagonistic. For them, Obama didn't just represent a dream of calm, liberal resurgence; he represented a vision of America that didn't have to destroy itself to become its ideal embodiment of self. What the left didn't - and still doesn't - want to do is take those principles to their logical conclusion.

Here's a hint: that conclusion isn't the sudden appearance of a candidate and a congress sometime in the distant future that somehow fixes everything we dislike - after the poor have died and after tens or hundreds of millions have suffered from our government's ailments and limitations. It isn't the slow, gradual, grassroots attempt to galvanize the electorate while the media pretends it isn't happening if there's even a hint success. If we wanted to be completely honest, completely open, and utterly clear about what the stakes are and what the left wants, the left has to admit that the logical conclusion posits that the system itself causes and represents the things the left dislikes. That what we see and despise are not systemic anomalies, but are wholly inevitable - and possibly even intended - results of a system that is actively compliant in America's most toxic ailments. Obama-hatred is simply a proxy. A symptom of a considerably deeper problem the left has with American governance. In fact, one could say that the unique passion behind Obama hatred is because many of the left have reached this conclusion without formulating it and internalizing it.

If Obama is a perfect representative of the American political system - and I think that anyone who pays attention to politics must conclude that he is - then contempt for Obama, Obama's methods, Obama's policies and Obama's approach is tantamount to contempt for the system, contempt for the methods the system requires for functionality and contempt for what's in the realm of systemic possibility for policy. When the left made Obama the face of liberalism, they weren't aware that all they were doing was wearing a mask. The failure to introspectively reach this conclusion themselves has made a liberalism that's bitterly fractured, completely unfocused and disastrously unwilling to understand the scope of their critiques and apply methods that appreciate the proportion of that scope. "Part of America" isn't wrong. America is wrong. And changing America as an entity is the only thing that could make it right. This is not in any way inconsistent with what liberals do or need to think. It's not wrong to think that. It's the key to the left's intellectual liberation.

We are radicals tied to a malignant system that institutionally diminishes the power of radicals - even when they're right. And the left should say that until the word is robbed of its marginalizing potential. We. Are. Radicals. And there's nothing wrong with that. We belong to a system where a black president can talk about the Emancipation Proclamation's retaining of slaves to a group of white people and collectively laugh at the prospect of anyone criticizing the compromise. How is it illegitimate to be its opposition?

The left faces a crisis of identity. And whether it becomes the true form of itself is entirely incumbent on whether it premises its opposition to Obama on the proper grounds. Ultimately, Obama is one man. Even in constitutional terms, his power is remarkably limited. Institutions don't merely exist to limit the power of men. They exist to shape what's permissible to say and do in a modern society. As long as the institution insists it is right, there's no institutional pretext to treat it as though it's innately flawed. We don't need new candidates because as long as this system exists, it's impossible for them to do anything worthwhile. We need new political environments for the next generation of candidates to function in.

None of this is to say that we should discard the concept of a democracy/republic or discard the spirit of our founders and dismiss the extent of what America has inadvertently done right. This post merely exists to highlight the fact that everything the left finds wrong is as attached to the system as my arm is attached to me. You can patch it up, euphemize it and rearrange it, but as long as the system exists you can't fix it.

If we're to be active visionaries and not unwitting victims of power struggles we're barely able to participate in, we must approach our arguments with total clarity. We need to know and bravely explore what we want. And we need to reach the final, painful realization that what we want is completely incompatible with the America that exists in front of us. We need to understand that Obama's failures are not Obama's: they're ours. And they'll continue to be as long as America continues to be seen as something to defend instead of something to dismantle. Obama is not, never was and never can be the face of liberalism. He's merely the face of all that liberalism can do under our current institutional framework. If that's what you want, support him. If that's what you don't want, oppose him. But understand what you're doing. Understand why. Understand its enormity. Own it.

A Response To Jonathan Rauch's Trolling

2011-07-15T01:20:00.011-05:00

I suppose Rauch believes he's communicating some edgy, insightful truth that blogger self-righteousness censors when he makes his maiden post a treatise against blogging as a medium, but really, his critique is little more than a commentary on the limits of his tastes - which are often extensions of limitations in exposure. Like most crypto-conservatives, he veils his distaste in the language of concern for some broader principle (in this case, quality in the whole of writing and thinking) and fear that a blasphemous new thing can presume to rival or take over something he's familiar with. And like all crypto-conservatism, it's simply a reworded variant of the same refrain: "how dare something new come up and get popular without me liking it":

Every time someone who could have done good science does sloppy science, or does worse journalism instead of better journalism, or mediocre writing instead of fine writing, it's a loss. When resources are scarce—and of course human talent is the most scarce and precious resource of all—it matters if blogging is inducing ADD in many of our best writers and thinkers, or driving talent away altogether.
I watch with growing concern as young journalists get channeled into content mills where they post three, seven, who knows how many blog snippets a day. I spoke with one young guy who told me he puts up seven posts a day and would like to break into longer form by doing only three. One of the most promising young journalists I know couldn't take it and quit for medical school. Another young writer tells me he longs to "get off the hamster wheel."

To learn writing and thinking in this environment is to be conditioned to compete with a blizzard of links and ads and comments and emails and IMs and...and...and... You can't assume the reader will stay with you beyond the next link. You learn to deliver a payoff in every sentence and apply attitude with a trowel. Once you acclimate to pushy, punchy blogspeak, the habit can be hard to break.

Naturally, he ignores how easily this vacuous and non-specific list of complaints can be switched. One could complain that reporting is inherently bad because you can't assume that the reader will stay beyond the next page. Or how the conventions of traditional reporting are structurally hazardous to creativity in prose and exhaustive explanations of policy. Or how the political environment of reporting creates a philosophical restriction on the kinds of view one can express and the level of openness they can be expressed with. Or how the economic constraints of magazines and newspapers inherently limits the flow of information - both in amount and variety. Or how the nature of hiring tends to overwhelmingly favor people from backgrounds that are detached from the class-concerns and class-realities of the less financed and less educated. But I'm not going to do that because I've read enough reporting to see how its flaws don't diminish its capacity for value, which is the key problem with Rauch's posts. He thinks the flaws are definining and insurmountable while ignoring the two sentences that undermine the medium-inherent scope of his case:

There are a few great bloggers out there. Andrew Sullivan is one of them.

He didn't expound, but a few assumptions can be made about why he thinks this: Sullivan's supposed quality as a blogger doesn't solely come from his value as a writer - and I'm sure he doesn't think that. It comes from his ability to manipulate the demands of the medium to produce a steady flow of art, link aggregation and real-time analysis. You don't just get to see the completed forms of his "developed thoughts", you can see the information and the arguments that inspired his conclusions. It's not a detached "View From Olympus" presented as something he's always thought and felt; it's an exhaustive, understandable and - sometimes - human framework that isn't fairly processed in one-post snippets but in whole months of posts. That's something that only writing combined with the internet can accomplish and it's something that blogging has accomplished continuously. If the medium is inherently bad, how can quality material that couldn't be produced without the medium be possible?

Seeing what caused John Cole's gradual, information/event-led evolution from a conservative reactionary/Bush supporter to being one of the most openly supportive Democratic/liberal voices on the internet is something that couldn't have been observed through just a magazine or a newspaper. The impact of Ta-Nehisi's righteous several year project to understand and contextualize the Civil War couldn't have happened in a book or a newspaper (nor could his exceptional Confederate History Month series). Bloggers who rely on insightful-but-pithy descriptions of institutions they have little respect for (like Atrios or Digby) wouldn't be able to bring concepts like "The Village" and "High Broderism" into full view without spending months (if not years) linking examples and tying those examples into longstanding concepts. The entire campaign against torture (and, indeed, the popularizing of torture writers like Scott Horton, Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald) wouldn't have been nearly as pronounced without blogging's ability to frame a collection of constant thoughts into a narrative and rawly express the shock and disgust Bush's torture regime (and its defenses) evoked.

Jonathan Rauch's argument is conveniently detached from these events, so there's no reality for him to be accountable to. As long as his argument about the Superiority of Other Mediums is premised entirely on whether it coincides with the reading standard he's used to, or "editorial standards" that limit the range of available voices, he feels he has no reason to note them. By basing his standards on nostalgia, he merely serves to obscure his argument from any reality or standard contrary to the one he's cultivated for himself. He will continue to wriggle and wail against the Uncivil, Useless Blogging strawman he's propped up to justify his narrowly antiquated tastes, and the blogosphere will persevere without his acknowledgment. And in the end, he's either wittingly or unwittingly left with the unsettling truth that the only thing a newspaper and a magazine can do that a blog can't is be liked by him. An endorsement that will be met by the blogosphere with all the relevance it warrants.

Edit: None of this is a de-endorsement of my posts praising Rauch for his excellent pro-gay marriage arguments nor is this a re-endorsement of Sullivan, whose stock in my eyes has decreased even further.

Edit 2: In case the title doesn't make it clear, I'm engaging his argument seriously, even if I'm aware that its presentation, wording, and substance means that it's likely not. I'll be disappointed if his closing post isn't "syke!"

Decoration Day

2011-05-30T17:43:00.013-05:00

America's pride is uniquely contingent on the passive-aggressive denial of its history. By solely focusing on the benefits of the present, Americans are positioned to pretend that its fruits were not harvested through past sins. As such, America to Americans is only a large, resource-rich, agricultural and industrial powerhouse instead of the intentional and concerted byproduct of Mexican/Native American conquest, successful Native American genocide and chattel slavery. To Americans, America is what it is because it is what it is. How what it was contributes to that has an irrelevant status in the pantheon of American consciousness. The fragility of our pride isn't measured by the strength with which we declare it. It's measured by how foundational cultural amnesia and moral dissonance is to its maintenance. That characteristic has a dual role - and one we ignore to avoid owning moral culpability.

By removing the present from the ethical and intellectual restraints of context, we insulate ourselves from the requirement of understanding it. And by disguising self-constructed ignorance as patriotic nationalism, we avoid the moral requirement to identify, address and correct the very sins we act as beneficiaries to. Because of this, questions of how we should address institutional inequity become questions of why we should if citizens feel they've done nothing unequal today. Questions of how we can help the impoverished become indictments of lazy thieves who simply take advantage of the government help supplied by your hard earned tax dollars. Questions of educational differences are changed into questions of capability instead of assessments of how resource/access disparities influence results. In this self-constructed reality, our collective successes and failures are not the sum of historical consequences. We become conveniently absolved from not just taking responsibility for the sins we benefit from: we're absolved from acknowledging them.

America's expressions of exceptionalism rest on that dissonance. Our perceived innocence is wholly premised on not only forgetting our guilt, but on never knowing what we're guilty of. The myth of the rugged individualist, strapping himself by his bootstraps to succeed exclusively on his own hard earned merits is one that can only come from that typically American framing. As is the myth that cultural and societal disadvantages are chosen by those who suffer from them, and are absolved/fixed whenever the most paltry fig leafs are presented in their direction. To accept that fiction, you'd have to accept that a classist and racially biased society is neither. To accept that fiction, you'd have to think that societal progression is solely determined by individual capacity. To be a True American, you must simultaneously deny what America is while never questioning what made it so.

Memorial Day has, historically, been a testament to that founding contradiction. Its genesis as something initiated by newly freed slaves - who honored union soldiers by giving individual burials to a those corpses thrown into a mass graveyard - has been successfully paved over by those who simply want another thoughtless celebration of America's righteousness. Its significance to the Lost Cause as a rallying point to engage in the collective fantasy that the War Between The States was about something other than the militarized enforcement of white supremacy has similarly been erased from our minds. Noted historian David W. Blight (who did this marvelous lecture on the Civil War) reminds us of both points:

At the end of the Civil War, Americans faced a formidable challenge: how to memorialize 625,000 dead soldiers, Northern and Southern. As Walt Whitman mused, it was “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead — or South or North, ours all” that preoccupied the country. After all, if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, instead of 58,000.
Officially, in the North, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, called on communities to conduct grave-decorating ceremonies. On May 30, funereal events attracted thousands of people at hundreds of cemeteries in countless towns, cities and mere crossroads. By the 1870s, one could not live in an American town, North or South, and be unaware of the spring ritual.
But the practice of decorating graves — which gave rise to an alternative name, Decoration Day — didn’t start with the 1868 events, nor was it an exclusively Northern practice. In 1866 the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Columbus, Ga., chose April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph Johnston’s final surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman, to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers. Later, both May 10, the anniversary of Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s death, and June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, were designated Confederate Memorial Day in different states.
Memorial Days were initially occasions of sacred bereavement, and from the war’s end to the early 20th century they helped forge national reconciliation around soldierly sacrifice, regardless of cause. In North and South, orators and participants frequently called Memorial Day an “American All Saints Day,” likening it to the European Catholic tradition of whole towns marching to churchyards to honor dead loved ones.
But the ritual quickly became the tool of partisan memory as well, at least through the violent Reconstruction years. In the South, Memorial Day was a means of confronting the Confederacy’s defeat but without repudiating its cause. Some Southern orators stressed Christian notions of noble sacrifice. Others, however, used the ritual for Confederate vindication and renewed assertions of white supremacy. Blacks had a place in this Confederate narrative, but only as time-warped loyal slaves who were supposed to remain frozen in the past.
The Lost Cause tradition thrived in Confederate Memorial Day rhetoric; the Southern dead were honored as the true “patriots,” defenders of their homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order and a “cause” that had been overwhelmed by “numbers and resources” but never defeated on battlefields.
Yankee Memorial Day orations often righteously claimed the high ground of blood sacrifice to save the Union and destroy slavery. It was not uncommon for a speaker to honor the fallen of both sides, but still lay the war guilt on the “rebel dead.” Many a lonely widow or mother at these observances painfully endured expressions of joyous death on the altars of national survival.
Some events even stressed the Union dead as the source of a new egalitarian America, and a civic rather than a racial or ethnic definition of citizenship. In Wilmington, Del., in 1869, Memorial Day included a procession of Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians and Catholics; white Grand Army of the Republic posts in parade with a black post; and the “Mount Vernon Cornet Band (colored)” keeping step with the “Irish Nationalists with the harp and the sunburst flag of Erin.”
But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.
Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.
The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

I had no idea about any of this until this weekend, and I can assure that this is the case for most Americans. For as long as I can remember, Memorial Day has been a paint-by-numbers long weekend where we cook out with family members to an uncontroversial background of veteran-worship. And while its shift from a memorial to the Civil War to a catch-all celebration of our wars and our dead has little to do with paving over that history, its function has only served to help us ignore one the most fundamentally defining cultural/domestic events in American history.

We see its traces when - in 2010 - the governor of Virginia rejoined several other states and declared a Confederate History Month to "understand and remember" that its leaders "fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth". We notice its taint when the Confederate Battle Flag and the Confederate National Flag have been unapologetically incorporated into the state flags of many southern states. We see remnants of its effects when, in 2011, Nathan Bedford Forrest was considered in Mississippi as someone who should be specially incorporated into licenses. We hear its echos when the "states rights" refrain - the legal justification for post-Civil War responses to freed slaves like Jim Crow and segregation - is repeated by modern and prominent politicians. We suffer under the unsettled nature of its history when the Southern Strategy can not only be adopted, but be almost uncontroversially successful in the context of political dialogue and strategy. We adopt its legacy when - in 2011 - we let states like Alabama reenact the inauguration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis without challenge. To understand the severity of this, to understand what we as Americans are and what we tolerate, this is what the Confederacy was about according to the Vice President of the CSA:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

This is the declaration of secession in Virginia:

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitition were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.

This is the declaration of secession for Texas:

...in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states....

This is the declaration of secession for Mississippi:

....Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin...

And on and on and on. This is what significant elements of our country continue to lionize and celebrate. This is the treasured but never discussed history our politicians play to with dog whistles. This - and the institution the Confederates fought for - is the source of the innumerable disparities that American society has had to (and continues to have to) address. This is the one conflict that inspires the widening gulf in our political differences. This is the context that undergirds American sociological and political understanding. This is what we intentionally forget when we pretend that American culture started with a declaration of liberty for all and upheld it. This is what we ignore when we praise figures who declared that "all men are created equal" while owning slaves. This is what we ethically evade when we comment on the unique wonder of a constitution that contained a clause which argued that its black, enslaved millions only counted as 3/5's of a white man.

Slavery is the gaping hole in this country's history. And the fact that it was never filled is the source of many of its most recent disasters. The Civil War wasn't merely the expression of disagreement between two kinds of states. It was the most direct culmination of a century of compromise for a country of racists and a region which culturally and economically profited from racism. Everyone from our "Founding Fathers" to Lincoln himself pined for a circumstance where the issue could languish unaddressed. The South refused to let that happen when Lincoln was elected. Then it rebelled when he became the haunting specter of a movement that dared to raise objections to chattel slavery and dared to reflect a potentially damning political consensus against their economic well-being. American history and American modernity is determined by many essential truths, but none so essential as this: we did not win the Civil War. We simply stopped fighting it openly.

This is the electoral map for 2000:

This is the electoral map for 2004:

This is the electoral map for 2008:

This is the electoral map for 1860:

This is not the face of a country that can listlessly indulge the fantasy that the past is past. This is not the face of a country that's gotten over or beyond the repugnance of what half of it fought for. Our refusal to address the evils of our forefathers and correct the cascading series of wrongs those evils have produced is the lingering stain we collectively assume we're too good to have and too detached to remove. And our desire to pretend that being beneficiaries of that legacy isn't in the same realm of evil as contributing to it has corroded our capacity to discuss this in the proper terms. A denial of these facts is a denial of American wrong. And the flagrant cultural legitimization of the Confederacy - particularly in the south - is a monument to our cultural failures. The Lost Cause and the politically weaselly overlooking of past and continuing malfeasance has made modern leaders complicit in the continuation of our worst legacies. And the ease with which we ignore that truth has made that complicity bereft of consequences.

The Confederacy was a traitor-regime that fed its existence through forced subservience, murder, torture and rape. It was their legacy and their wishes that were embodied in Jim Crow laws, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan and other forms of terrorism and discrimination. They are our Nazi's. But we speak fondly of them in state capitals as though they're tragic figures and misunderstood, wrongfully maligned parties.

Those pictures are not so much delineations of political differences as they are the stark outline of America's tribal differences. An entire party apparatus has risen up to not only cater to that cultural divide, but to perpetuate it. Harry S. Dent knew what it meant when he created the Southern Strategy. Lee Atwater knew what it meant when he whispered it in Reagan's ear. And Reagan knew what it meant to make a states rights argument in Philadelphia Mississippi - the site of the murder of several civil rights workers. They're playing a tune that's been humming in the background for 140 years. And they're playing a tune that regions of this country have been historically taught to dance to. No attempt to grasp America's political expression can be understood without knowing it. No attempt to comprehend its pervasiveness can be made without hearing what it sounds like:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Improvement is not negation. But we exist in a country that wants to avoid distinguishing between the two. Just as our pride is contingent on a denial of history, our perceived innocence - and argued moral superiority - is contingent on our ignorance. If we pretend to not know the dynamics at play when Gingrich calls Obama a "Food Stamp President", we can pass off any indifference to that rhetoric as a defect in Gingrich instead of a defect in the country that allows Gingrich to exist. America's political and historical consciousness isn't so much a reflection of willful stupidity as it's a continued and continuing deflection of culpability. By characterizing our past as past, by thinking of racial inequity as an individual defect instead of a societally/institutionally enforced one, we ignore the fluidity of that history and the extent of our contributions to it. But to think this is merely about race is to simplify the complexity of the dynamics involved.

This is about entitlement. This is about a nation of people that feels it can ignore the problems it causes. It's about a country that feels that the capacity to overlook is a right afforded by justifiable circumstance instead of a privilege afforded by self-interested detachment. It's about a country that maintains a permanent underclass and pretends that its culture is exclusively defined by those who aren't apart of it. It's about a country that removes the ability to progress from an entire bloc of people and then mocks and ignores them when - after the potential to compete comes - their success isn't immediate. And none of this happened in a vacuum. It's all informed and inspired by an established institutional and cultural norm that refuses to admit that it benefits from oppression. Just as it's established by a history that - until the 60's - enforced the belief that color marked the level of equality you could appreciate and the level of freedom you could enjoy.

Entitlement is what marks its persistence. And entitlement is what inspires the south to pretend that such a history can be celebrated as though there's a history worth celebration. As with Gingrich, I don't merely fault them, I fault the cultural context that allows them to exist. I fault the history books that mention the Civil War and the Confederacy's evils in passing. I fault the failure to discuss, analyze and criticize the sources and expressions of Dixie Pride. I fault the way our discussion of the south - like our discussion of race - has fallen into the comfortable realm of "it's solved enough, so there's nothing left we can do". I fault a country that erases the diversity of its artistic, cultural, historic and political inspirations in favor of a "safe" history of familiar, uncontroversial and often, primarily white, male faces as though all other demographics were background noise. I fault the budding desire to pretend that unseen and silently processed inequity is proof of its nonexistence.

We've nationally internalized an inability to acknowledge our problems, and we've made that failure the string from which our patriotism dangles. That we've bought into the fiction that unconscious contribution is the same as no contribution has done little more than infect a wound we think we've healed by covering it up. And very little of our most damning qualms can be fixed without addressing these facts. American culture has made an alter to forgetfulness, and in our collective laziness, we've embraced a moral authority we have not earned, and we've cultivated a sense of progression that our institutions fail to reflect. And worse, we've made these problems persist by willfully refusing to notice them.

I daresay America not only has a responsibility to notice them, it has a moral obligation to remove them. And we should start by putting the Confederacy in its place and by putting the continuing pertinence of black oppression as a foundation of our democracy and our history at the forefront. It's an evil we all recognize. It's an evil we constantly hear about. But it's an evil we've failed to contextualize. We see its ghosts in the crevices of our cultural mainstays, but we've made its stain so translucent that we shield ourselves from having to notice them. It's time to not only own the fullness of that history, but to acknowledge our place in marginalizing and indifferently indulging its consequences.

None of that happens without awareness.

Awareness of not only what that history is, but of the little ways that history and its effects are maintained by us. The ongoing delusion of America doesn't have to be embodied by "remembering" the elective deaths of well paid soldiers in politically and morally questionable wars. There are other, deeper things at play that not only warrant our attention, but our exertion. How many of us have the courage to face them?

"We Shall Overcome": An Indictment of Gay Activism

2011-05-23T13:55:00.027-05:00

There are real issues to write about, and I'm sorry that I make my return by writing about none of them. This country is in crisis, and I apologize for my failure to do any part in highlighting that. But some spectacles are so unexpected and jarring that you can do little but ride the crest of your reaction. This is one of them:

I have never opposed gay marriage. I have never argued against the truth that homosexuals warrant the same legal sanctions as everyone else. As far as I'm concerned, this is not only incontestable, but uncontested in the context of my writing. But there's something about that clip that hearkens back to my reaction to the unaccountable tone-deafness of the Prop 8 aftermath. The mixture of annoyance and anger on display in my writing had a reason that might not have been reflected by those semi-coherent screeds, so I'm going to try to give voice to those complaints again. Both because I need to and because I understand my reaction better.

The gay rights movement is not a movement for anything we've traditionally understood as a right. No governmental institution has impeded their right to political representation. No governmental institution has thwarted their ability to use the political process to affect legal change. No governmental institution has removed their ability to vote. No government has made active efforts to create a two tiered society where they are the instantly known and permanently marginalized underclass. No governmental institution has risen up to give the terrorists that exclusively target them and their supporters legal and cultural immunity from any act committed against them. No governmental institution has made an effort to make and enforce laws in ways that disproportionately target and disadvantage them. The American gay rights movement was and is primarily about the right to get married. All other rights are provided for. And all other issues - including ENDA and the repeal of DADT - are rhetorically and materially incidental.

The picture I paint isn't some lazy effort to draw a contrast between the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement. It's a simple and necessary acknowledgment of just a few of the reasons why no contrast can be made. The unflinching conceit which attempts to draw parallels that don't exist isn't a testament to the movement's malice; it's revealing of the demographic make-up that inspires their collective lack of perspective. The one inescapable fact of the "gay rights movement" is that it functions as little more than a mechanism for white suburban outrage. It's a movement staffed by, headed by, popularized by and argued by people who are largely foreign to genuine, systemic disadvantage.

While many of them may understand that being deprived of the right to be married isn't the same as being deprived of the right to have basic societal/political equality, that intellectual judgment is nullified by the emotional unfamiliarity of not having your political wishes handed to you. The defining characteristic of the gay rights movement isn't that it's a "battle for equality", it's that it's a response to and reflection of privilege. They are comfortably well off, conveniently blind to the plight of people-not-them, and genuinely perplexed that even a taste of the behavior that other demographics have experienced can even conceptually be levied toward them.

The gay rights movement was never a response to systemic inequity because that's not an accurate description for what they experience. At its most repugnant, it's an embodiment of white shock; expressed by parties who have the convenience of seeing discrimination as an abstraction. The tortured analogues to the civil rights movement aren't beyond the pale because the unspoken assumption of the movement is that anything unfavorable happening to white suburbanites is equal in spirit - if not in kind - to what happened - and continues to happen - to women and blacks. The outrage isn't inspired by the nature of what they're being deprived of. It's inspired by the parties being targeted for deprivation. It's a movement that's animated less by "How could this happen?" sentiments and more by wondering "How could this happen to us?" That complaint - so blissfully detached from unfavorable realities - has become the hallmark of a privilege that's more prepared to vent about injustices than discern them.

For these people, the civil rights movement is simply a weapon. Useful for the starkness of its imagery and powerful for the now-uncontroversial nature of what it symbolizes. What it was about, what it meant, what it stood for and who was involved are secondary to its popularity. Which is why someone who mainstreamed a book saying that blacks are inherent intellectual inferiors to all other races feels that he's capable of identifying the "Arc of History" by linking the above clip. It's why a throng of smiling, unmolested, exclusively white faces can sing the anthem of the civil rights movement inside their capitol building without a police presence and not be moved by the irony of how impossible such circumstances were for the people they're trying to invoke.

The wonder of numerical and ethnic privilege is that it can claim victory without ever having to fight. It can borrow the successes of others without request and portray its thievery as consensus. It can disrespect and insult the very people they pretend to respect and be entirely insulated from the substance of minority complaints and any requirement to understand them. It can disgracefully portray themselves as high-minded Freedom Riders fighting the New Civil Rights Battle of the Era and not realize the extent to which they mock black struggles in their pitiful effort to act as self-appointed successors to their legacy.

I have no patience for this anymore. The singular innovation of post-racist/racism thinking is that it can use the presumption of racist-eradication and marginalization as an excuse for never having to confront it. It can think of the problem of racism - and the lingering consequences of its effects - as something that's already been solved, which means they can move on to things post-racists actually want to think about. It's easy to pretend that getting married is an issue when you can look at a 17% unemployment rate (double the national average), limited economic mobility, a drug war that disproportionately targets and imprisons blacks, and institutionally/systemically enforced discrimination as "Their Problem". It's even easier when they're issues you don't have to look at all. But its convenience serves to enable the very lack of recognition that allows racism to fester. And it lets those who do this operate without ever taking responsibility for the consequences of what they allow.

This isn't to say that gays are any more racist than anyone else. They're likely not. But their adoption of civil rights parallels, civil rights themes and civil rights language makes them responsible for the rather conspicuous lack of civil rights beneficiaries as leaders, activists, politically targeted demographics or even models. Much ink has been spilled fallaciously scapegoating blacks (and promoting the projects of people who scapegoat blacks) for being exceptionally homophobic. One would think that when more has been written about that than has been written about issues that disproportionately affect blacks that they'd be slightly more reluctant to use black history as some kind of event that they're uncontroversial successors to. The glaring lack of concern for those issues has been on display - particularly in the last two years - and it's shamelessly cynical to try and hijack a movement very few of these people seem to genuinely care about for the sake of political gain.

But look. I'm reasonable. Let's say that Andrew Sullivan suddenly apologized for his Bell Curve pushing and tried to analyze blacks from a lens that didn't exclusively relate to their supposed homophobia. Let's say that John Aravosis isn't an obnoxiously repugnant, race-centered anti-Obama partisan that doesn't use glib segregation parallels in service of lies. Let's say that Dan Savage retracted his months of blaming blacks for the passage of Prop 8 despite the fact that the statistics he used were disproven. Let's say that The Advocate and other such gay media sources suddenly started hiring/showing more black people. Let's say that the civil rights parallels died. There's still a basic issue here that not a single activist has tried to or even cared to answer: why should black people care?

The issues they face are related their livelihood, their well-being, their health, their living circumstances, their ability to economically progress, the removal of the institutional mechanisms that stunt that progression and - in the case of the War on Drugs - their freedom. What, exactly, about your ability (or lack thereof) to get married prioritizes that rather insignificant desire over concerns that affect quality/length of life?

As far as I can tell, my fundamental issue with the gay movement is that it subsists on a lack of perspective. It employs hyperbole that deceptively frames the relevance of menial concerns. It makes arguments that present the passage of their pet projects as somehow worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as legislation that affects job growth, economic growth or health care. It plagiarizes the spirit of movements they couldn't care less about and it does so without understanding why they shouldn't. And it argues itself as disadvantaged while using the very mechanisms of privilege to mainstream their issues much faster than any other demographic ever could.

This is not a battle that affects black people. This is not a battle that affects most Americans. I would even argue that this isn't a battle that substantively affects gays. This is a pissing contest for the institutionally and culturally established - be they religious, political or activist in the mold of HRC. And while it may be in service to a supportable cause, its proponents are insulting and corrosive in ways they're too homogeneous to appreciate. In 10-20 years when gays rightfully have "their rights", it's likely that no one will analyze this movement's methods or its cynicism. But for posterity, I simply want to go on record in saying that it did so with incidental success, minimal respect, flagrant dishonesty and limited dignity.

The pursuit of equality is noble and worthy goal. That nobility is tarnished when it's fed by using the inequality of others as marketing gimmick without doing anything to fight it. You don't get to demand supporters and use morally duplicitous "I'm disappointed in blacks! They're black! They should have understood/supported us!" arguments and think you're doing anything but showing the extent of your entitlement and post-racist apathy. While decency and basic common sense dictates that of course gays should get married if they want (it's not like the concept had any prominence before the 90's); decency and basic common sense should also dictate that the "gay movement" in its current form is worthy of neither veneration or support.

There's something deeply, deeply wrong with this movement and its flaws taint the legacy of genuine thoughtful, genuinely relevant social and civil rights movements under the guise of drawing inspiration from them. I wish there were prominent people capable of effectively pointing that out.

Lines Drawn In The Sand

2011-02-21T16:26:00.015-06:00

This is an Event Horizon for American politics, and it's one that - as Freddie deBoer notes - "reveals the basic character of the people who talk about it". It's no coincidence that the very people who reject and ignore the protests in Wisconsin and Ohio are the exact same as the people who never needed the rights the protesters are fighting for. They are the privileged who assume that their privileges are hard earned and fought for. They are the privileged who assume that your lack of privilege is a result of imperfections in your behavior. And when they dismiss, belittle, and scornfully mock the rightful protests in Wisconsin they reveal themselves as acquiescently servile agents of corporate oppressors. And for no other reason than because they can afford to be.

It doesn't matter whether you belong to a union, or whether you agree with what they say, or whether you buy into their issues, or whether you belong to the upper class yourself. Unions are either historically responsible for your paycheck and benefits, or they're responsible for the people who buy and pay for your products. Advocating their destruction and calling for their end isn't just a clear assault on first amendment rights, it is an assault on the autonomy of the American citizen. Genuine independence cannot be secured without economic independence. Economic independence cannot be secured without livable wages. And livable wages cannot be secured without the ability to politically account for the fairness of your employers. The attempted removal of unions should be seen for precisely what it is: the removal of the American citizen as a political force against corporate dominion. It is not enough for them to have us weakened: we're to be silenced.

In order to grasp their stratagem, you must first think on their terms. The wealthy own 80% of this country's money. After Citizens United and the Chamber of Commerce, politicians are disproportionately dependent on the donations they give to fund campaigns. Lobbyists frequently have the ear of lawmakers. In order to pass something, they have to make sure their political contributors find it palatable. Washington DC is a revolving door for Wall Street, where they can get people from Wall Street employed in the White House who quit after a couple of years to take 7 figure jobs as "consultants" in some investment firm. The media is primarily owned by the supremely wealthy, and they have no incentive to speak against their bosses. Even if they did, most of the media either come from or wish to belong to the same class of people that corporate CEO's are in, so the media is - if nothing else - sympathetic to wealth. The last possible vestige of opposition is the average American citizen, who - for basic survival - must become the average American worker.

Our effective neutralization is premised on a system that assures our dependence. What separates us from the wealthy and those who aspire to wealth is that it doesn't assure our loyalty. We will work two jobs not because we want to, not because we like the companies in question, but because we have to. We don't merely struggle to advance our status and work off the extra wing of our house; we struggle to eat and to possibly make sure we aren't rained on while we're eating. The only thing that serves to make that struggle bearable is that there's a minimal standard we can rightfully expect from the work we do. The only thing that makes it bearable is that while we need the crumbs corporations let fall on our laps, we are not subject to something as arbitrary as their whims to make sure we get them.

We do not have to hope - without a possibility of legal recourse - that our construction equipment won't explode in our faces. They have to make sure they don't. We do not have to hope - without the possibility of legal recourse - that the coal mines we work in won't collapse on our head without escape plans. We do not have to hope - without a possibility of legal recourse - that your boss won't take your failure to do a demeaning job that's beyond the demands of your job description will arbitrarily come out of your paycheck as a punishment.

We are dependent on them, but that dependency goes both ways. We need them to live, yes, but they need us to function. And they have to pay for that functionality. While it's true that they give only the bare minimum required and - in many cases, less than that - the point is that they give considerably more than they want to. And that pittance is secured by two things: the federal government (which they now own), and unions, which they're on the verge of destroying. This exposes two weaknesses, and no one is more aware of them than the business class.

The first - and main - weakness was their dependence on our purchasing power and worker productivity to secure profits. In order for us to purchase things, however, they had to give us jobs, and the presence of working standards meant giving us jobs negatively affected their profit margin. The worker problem was wholly negated by the success of globalization. China, India and similar countries gave them an impoverished work force to hire en masse for almost nothing, which meant they could throw bones to a population of people who were too poor and economically weakened to expect meat. The problem inherent to our dying purchasing power was negated by the presence of emerging markets that met it or surpassed it collectively. That means they could not only offset our diminished clout as a market; they could usurp it by making up the difference everywhere else. This is how America's economy and job market has floundered while the same companies that should be suffering with us are making record profits. This is how the American worker is written out of its own economy by its own would-be employers:

From 1995 to 2008, the American economy grew by a yearly average of 2.9 percent. During that time, the yearly economic growth rates in the world's two largest nations, China and India, averaged 9.6 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively. Increasing U.S. presence in the Chinese and Indian markets followed as the night the day.
As growth in the U.S. economy continues to lag behind that of much of the rest of the world, those U.S.-based companies able to sell more abroad gain a clear advantage over those companies whose sales are more domestic. An analysis by The Wall Street Journal's Justin Lahart of the 30 companies included in the Dow Jones industrial averages concluded that the 10 with the largest share of their sales abroad were projected to increase their revenues by an average of 8.3 percent over last year, while those with the lowest share of sales abroad were looking at increased revenues of just 1.6 percent. This puts Coca-Cola, which gets 75 percent of its sales overseas, at a distinct advantage over the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which gets 90 percent of its sales in the U.S.

In industry after industry, foreign markets are offering more opportunity than domestic ones. The foreign affiliates owned in part or in full by U.S.-based multinationals now bring in just about as much money to their parent corporations as their domestic counterparts. A study published last year by the Business Roundtable and the United States Council Foundation concluded that in 2006, 48.6 percent of profits of U.S.-based multinationals came from their foreign affiliates, compared to just 17 percent in 1977 and 27 percent in 1994. What this means is that the equilibrium between production, pay, and purchasing -- the equilibrium that Henry Ford famously recognized when he upped his workers' wages to an unheard-of $5 a day in 1914, the equilibrium that became the model for 20th-century American capitalism -- has been shattered. Making and selling their goods abroad, U.S. multinationals can slash their workforces and wages at home while retaining their revenue and increasing their profits. And that's exactly what they've done.

For many, this would be a victory subtly fought and thoroughly won, but greed is aspirational. Its satisfaction is contingent on our consumption, not our neutralization. When they've secured our impotence, we become indistinct from the machines that depreciate the need to employ us. We become tools. Expendable. Replaceable. Cheap. This is not a fight to secure a pittance of political power just to be able to golf with some Senator or Governor. This is a concerted attempt to dismantle the foundational premise of freedom and dignity: choice. Their vision is not realized by the exclusive distribution of power to them: it is realized by the complete removal of power from us.

Despotism will not take the shape of conservative specters. It will not be Big Government taking away your guns and issuing death panels. It will not be the micro-legislation of every detail of your life. It will be you living in a shack or on the streets because it's all you can afford on what you now make. It will be you working 15 hours a day for 5 cents in conditions that affect your short-term and long-term health. It will be you begging your employer for a raise with the knowledge that the only thing that can assure it is his charity. The successful destruction of unions and collective bargaining doesn't merely secure this. It is the abolishment of your power to say "no" to it. Our ability to do that is the last ounce of strength we have left, and our "no" is the only thing that can uproot the encroachment of corporate oppression.

We are their last weakness. We are the last mechanisms of opposition. And we are positioned to remind them that their wealth is an us-given privilege and use political power to enforce that philosophy. Every word that regards these truths with tacit rejection, meek equivocation or silence is a word that loudly proclaims that an antidote to plutocracy shouldn't exist. Every "journalist" and pundit that ignores the meaning of this story and ignores the profound implications this imparts to Americans is a journalist that's complicit with the attempted destruction of the American worker. Every American that closes their eyes to this assault is an American that's comfortable with being a foundation for oligarchy. Ignorance is a luxury that only serves to afford our marginalization, and those who propagate it are heralds of a future that wishes to erase our ability to influence it.

This is not a defining moment for the question of whether we'll recapture the political process that's abandoned us. This moment defines whether we're capable of seeing that we should fight. The character of this country is on trial, and we're all witting and unwitting participants in how its longevity will be assessed. I choose to be conscious of my participation. Just as I choose to stand with those who envision this country's evolution over its corporate ownership. Our self-appointed overlords have made their move. They've chosen to assert that their right to own us overrides our right to question the extent of that ownership. Our political inaction is their weapon.

There are those who think that democracy is only valid or interesting when it's exercised in the Middle East. There are those who think that handling our affairs is exclusively defined by debating what to cut. There are those who are apathetic to the pain of what they propose, just as they're apathetic to the enormity of what they ignore. Those people have chosen their place, and it is not with you. It is with a future where America is China.

The Wages of Civic Nihilism

2011-02-20T13:24:00.014-06:00

The resurgence of conservative and libertarian-fueled Republicanism is not an excuse to embrace Manichean thinking. Its continuance as a dominant political philosophy is a collective sin; one which draws its energy and roots from parties that remain as our brothers and sisters. The wrongs that feed its presence don't merely begin with those who stalwartly propagate and apologize for evil. Their genesis is in the segment of the politically conscious electorate that took insufficient liberalism as an excuse for protest voting and civic disengagement. Irresponsible journalists and hyperbole fueled hysteria have subtly and directly augured a new equivalence that's equally as duplicitous and mistaken as the assertion that the Democrats and Republicans are equally right and wrong in different ways. The equivalence that confuses superficial similarities for evidence of no difference.

This strain is not new, but the practice of its current form needs to be looked at for what it is: a lever through which Republicanism gains traction. That strain does not call for or support evil, but it's complicit in its existence. No amount of slogans or protestations of "independence" and "standing for your principles" can change that. Portions of the left cannot unrelentingly call Obama a "continuation of the Bush presidency", "a bought and paid for stooge of Wall Street and the Koch brothers", "a DINO" or a "secret conservative" and think that they're doing anything but saying that the empowerment of Republicans will lead to the same results as the empowerment of Democrats. This is not just wrong. It's disastrously wrong. And it's a wrong that's acted as an extension of the magical thinking that's surrounded Obama's candidacy since his election.

Liberalism has become spoiled. It's forgotten that before a government can work better, it must first work period. The failure of Obama to descend from the sun and act as anything but a maintainer of the status quo isn't the fault of Obama or even the process. It's the fault of a liberalism that assumed that advocacy and the expectation of results should begin and end with the election of one person. It's the fault of a liberalism that assumed that "pressure" was the same as adopting the argumentatively specious exaggerations of conservatism with a progressive framing. And what's more, it's the fault of a liberalism that marginalized itself by declaring itself an enemy of the system instead of informed advocates for its improvement.

There's a malignant strain of liberalism informed by a malignant strain of liberal journalism that's mistaken what they want for what they can have. The political impotence resulting from their hubris stems not from systemic bias, but from a liberalism that sought to declare that the system denied them the fruits of victory before they ever even tried to fight. Again and again we saw assertions floated about what "should" happen with absolutely no feasible discussion of how it could happen. And when they discovered that assertions of righteousness weren't enough to uproot interests that have been entrenched for decades, they figured that the span of two years was too long to wait. This didn't merely coax their argumentative collapse. It birthed a temper tantrum disguised in a simplistic axiom: "because both sides are denying our opinions, both sides are denying them for the same reason and thus, are equal!"

This logic is fundamental to the case of the newly appointed Purity Police, but delusion has blinded them from concluding that the apathy their logic inspires isn't a seed for revolution. It's the soil that gives Republicanism room for growth. Republicans don't just appear with gubernatorial and congressional authority. They need supporters. More importantly, they need people who fail to oppose them. And the Purity Police act as vanguards for the civic withdrawal that passively allows their presence under the pretense of being "independent" and saying "neither party supports me". What they've forgotten is that whether their perspective is true is immaterial to the question of whether it's responsible. It's not. And because they've made "standing for your principles" more important than the people "standing for your principles" hurt, we live in a reality where one party can declare that a fetus has more rights than a woman while saying that freedom of assembly doesn't exist, and they can cry "they're both the same!".

Really?

When we're beset by radicals and regressive sociopaths, your choice to sit out an election or make your vote functionally useless is a choice that empowers the people that think that Americans don't get a seat at the same table as our employers. A vote for nothing is a vote for the default, and if the default goes to the Republicans, their presence is something you have to live with, because you did nothing materially helpful to stop it. Republicanism is the consequence of a perspective that makes elections "principled stands" that "send a message to the parties that don't support you" by either not voting, or not voting for someone with a reasonable chance of victory. Republicanism is the consequence of a segment of the population that confuses elections for intellectual and political gimmicks. It's the consequence of people who disrespect the electoral process and take the basic functioning of the system for granted. And who do it at the expense of everyone - including themselves.

The belief that be-all-end-all elections are mechanisms for political activism instead of reflections of successful political activism is one of the most corrosive byproducts of America's civic laziness. Instead of making an argument, persuasively articulating it to the masses, organizing, getting people to agree with it and rally around it as an issue, we've internalized the entitled mindset which presumes that the only thing we have to do to politically express our perspectives is vote. We've made the simple act of drawing a line on a ballot the primary expression of political thought.

It's been collectively forgotten that no one is obligated to hold your perspective. Just as it's been collectively forgotten that it takes more than fussing at screens and calling non-anarchists corporatists to create political movement. The understanding that it's up to us to argue for ourselves instead of having Big Time Political Figures argue for us has been lost. And in our search for a leader, we've abandoned the conclusion that we should be leading. In a democracy, the actions that give power are not the most important. The actions that create power are. Elections are not changed by rejecting their relevance just because we don't love the people we're voting for. They're changed by evolving the discussion between elections. In the absence of the will to do that, you vote for the party that preserves the system over the party that dismantles it, and you do it until you can make a better party that serves the same function.

Historical turn-out being higher in Presidential elections is absolutely no excuse to sit-out midterms. The Republicans are here not just because their dying electorate turned out in greater numbers. Republicans are here because there are Democrats who stayed at home and independents who thought that "dissatisfaction" was an excuse to say "well, I guess it's the Republican's turn". When we vote, we don't need to think in terms of what we "could" or "should" have. Not when a vote can prevent the party that advocates the collapse of our most basic and least controversial rights. "Less bad" is not just a responsible choice in this context, it's the only one. Our suffering is the result of those who found elections to be podiums to ignore that, and those who offered the philosophical basis for that negligence.

Edit: I shouldn't have to make this caveat, because anyone familiar with this blog or my writing should know that I think this:

It is absolutely not wrong to hold Democrats accountable and try to push/advocate your view. I do it constantly. That's not just a good service, it needs to be done with as much frequency as circumstance warrants. What I reject is the argumentative dishonesty and irresponsibility that fails to put that criticism in perspective. To simplify: "Democrats suck" is a logically valid and perfectly acceptable position to take. "Democrats suck as much as Republicans and are just like them" is not. It's not factually supportable, it's not sensible, and anyone proclaiming that it's the only view that reasonable, non-partisan, non-Obot, Real Independents can hold is lying to you or engaging in contemptibly sloppy argumentation.

They've Gone Too Far

2011-02-19T13:30:00.006-06:00

Governor Walker's decision to effectively and legally remove all unionizing and bargaining power from the workers of his state wasn't a call to war against Americans and our ability to effectively use political measures to challenge a selfishly entrenched establishment. It's simply the final straw in a war that was already underway. Conservative judges are speciously and dishonestly challenging the premise that healthcare reform is constitutional. Conservative legislators are mounting a concerted attack on women by giving doctors the authority to let women die over giving them an abortion in emergency situations, defunding Planned Parenthood - which gives a plethora of uncontroversial services which saves the lives of the millions of women without threatening them with bankruptcy - and a failed attempt to redefine rape so that pregnant women would be forced to have their rapists child. Conservative executives/governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich, and Rick Scott are slashing any and all funding that relates to our livelihood, job security, job/economic growth and our ability to politically contest them and the world watching every second of it. We're watching every second of it. And what we're seeing is the last trace of blood being drained from America's progressive advances from a party with absolutely no mandate to do it.

They didn't think to inform us of their intents when they were campaigning. They didn't think to tell us before they started doing mass-budget slashes in the middle of union busting that electing them was the embrace of a false choice between serfdom or starvation. They just assume that philosophical principle and a single election cycle gave them carte blanche to overturn nearly a century of labor precedent while eradicating the only non-labor alternatives we have to maintain a survivable standard of living. This is an unconscionable, unjustifiable overreach and it's as disgusting as it is concerted. I understand that elections have consequences, and as a political loser in the previous election during a period when those who philosophically align with me were being stupid, I accept them. What I do not accept is that the previous election - or any other - is a signal to suddenly - and without debate, dissent, qualification or reason - rewrite the fabric of American livelihood.

The labor movement gave us the concept of paid overtime, minimum wage, safety laws, retirement, family and medical leave, collective bargaining, but more importantly, the labor movement gave us the middle class - the backbone of America's economic might and longevity. You don't suddenly declare a false, self-contributed economic crisis after a 100 million dollar benefit/pay concession from unions, and then assume that's a reason to just rip it out of American consciousness. In Republican willingness to give tax cuts to rich people while running gigantic deficits (which everyone else suffers for), they've forgotten that our economic straits are the byproduct of a Ponzi economy constructed by the amoral greed of people rich enough to pay the government for get-out-of-jail cards. Unions are not the cause. State overspending on entitlements are not the cause. The average American is not the case. But they're seeing the aftermath of the financial crash that decisively discredited plutocracy, and oligarchical capitalism as their opportunity to make those virtues permanent, and they're perfectly willing to starve us and strip away our most basic rights to do it. I reject the premise that they have that authority. And so should every American.

They're spitting on the American public with the contempt built up from decades of failure and philosophical impotence. Their righteousness is confirmed by their echo chamber. Their flaws are concealed by a corporatist, aristocratic media establishment. And their wrongness is accentuated by the delusions they've fed to legions of their truest believers. But the strength of their assault shouldn't veil its desperation. If they thought they could do this legitimately, they would. But they operate through subversion, deception and manipulation when they deign to do anything at all, so we should start seeing this for what it is: the final gasp of a movement with no real solution beyond the forced, avoidable degradation of our living standards. Their miscalculation is that they think they can use this false mandate to give their unaccepted policies and unsupported arguments a legitimacy that society hasn't accorded it. Their undoing will be in the assumption that we lack the teeth to bite the hand that's feeding us bones while promising meat.

This isn't the Gingrich or Bush era. Internet organization isn't outside of our imagination or a floundering concept in its infancy. They cannot do this and hide. What's more, they cannot continue this and get away with it. They've made this more than political. They've made this more than an honest disagreement between multiple parties who have reasonably divergent views. They've made this more than a practical or necessary measure. They've made it personal. And by doing so, they're cementing the radicalization that Obama's presidency made dormant.

These recent events don't call for centrism, or restraint. They don't even call for an exclusively partisan embrace of the Democrats. They call for anti-Republicanism. They call for pro-labor liberalism. They call for a liberalism that assumes that a social safety net should be a societal guarantee and not some abstract privilege for rich people to negotiate away when they feel like adding an extra billion to their profits. They call for a liberalism that assumes that the government's primary responsibility is the resistance of plutocracy, not subservience to it. They call for a liberalism that assumes that we've paid our fair share to the rich and we've suffered on their behalf for the last time. They call for a liberalism that assumes that now's the time for them to acknowledge that.

But first, we have to acknowledge that we have a philosophical stumbling block that fancies itself as a wall. There are still reasonable conservatives, and good Republicans. There will always be reasonable conservatives and good Republicans. But honesty should compel us to admit that the most reasonable ones have abandoned all that the party stands for long ago, and what it currently represents and what it speaks for either represses or perverts the good that exists in it. Nothing can happen as long as Republicanism is a dominant political option. It has long since gone past merely "wrong". It's become evil - and I do not use that word lightly. They're morally bankrupt, insurmountably corrupt, profoundly irresponsible, insufferably incompetent and utterly, thoughtlessly callous. While it's true that these faults are bipartisan, only one party has embraced them as inherent features. What recent events demonstrate is becoming clearer with every day that passes without the slightest hint of reflection or concession. The Republicans don't just need to be defeated: conservatism needs to be permanently exiled from political consciousness.

It has brought us less than nothing as a social, political or philosophical model, and its almost religiously inflexible application has brought us completely avoidable pain. What's more, it's acted as a mechanism for the unaccountable wealthy and affluent to exert unchecked influence on our dialogue, at our expense without giving us the power to respond to the same degree. This was permitted because they always fielded politicians who were just stupid enough to weaken us but not stupid enough to do it swiftly or openly. But the media-created Tea Party sensation has caused them to let their useful idiots outpace their propaganda, and True Believers without the duplicitous vetting have been elected in place of the normal pro-plutocracy order. What I call evil is little more than the purest and most honest expression of Republican policies and their end results.

It means a state of being where a woman's uterus is state property. It means a fiscal discussion that makes sure that the standard of living for everyone is lowered for the sake of raising the finances of the wealthy - regardless of our capacity to pay for it. It means that civil liberties are situationally negotiable. It means that minority protection against institutional bias should never exist. It means that something as constitutionally basic as freedom of assembly is something to remove for unions that are perceived to vote Democrat, but preserved for unions perceived to vote Republican. It means that food and a place to live and a place to work are privileges to be stripped at leisure instead of reasonable expectations. It means that research and investment in the future of our infrastructure and technology is unthinkable. It means that lowering the standard of living for American citizens is more responsible than encouraging economic growth. It means coaxing extremism, racism and bigotry through lies and manipulation and then acting shocked when people assume you want others to act on it. It means denial of facts, denial of opposition, and an inability to compromise. It means making the foundations of our human security something that's open to question. It means the casual removal of every form of advanced distinction that conservatives rhetorically manipulate through the language of exceptionalism.

They have gone too far. And I'm no longer stoically disgusted by their policies.

I am angry.

Life As A Political Abstraction

2011-02-17T16:39:00.013-06:00

As a preemptive corrective to populist backlash and as a means of insulating their arguments from the meaning of their arguments, austerity debates maintain an air of constant euphemism. They're entirely open about the presence of debt and a deficit. They're open about their belief that it's a problem that needs to be addressed now - often with apocalyptic undertones. They're open about their solutions primarily involving cuts to education, social safety nets, scientific research, infrastructure and regulation. Why, they're even open about how much will be cut and from what - sometimes with the benefit of figures. It's just simple math, isn't it? If we spend more than we make, we run a deficit. If we have to borrow money to offset spending we can't afford, we're in debt to whomever or whatever we borrow from. We have a fiscal obligation to pay it back with whatever means necessary, as soon as possible - or else we invite economic instability as our creditors lose faith in our ability to compensate them.

And that is exactly how the euphemism works.

I spent an entire paragraph describing a series of problems and solutions that would cause the labor market to implode (resulting in mass job loss), prices to go up (resulting in mass unaffordability), further weaken our already weakened infrastructure/job creation/social safety net and lower our overall standard of living. In this scenario, people would lose their homes, their credit, their basic means of survival, and even the regulations we use to test the viability of our food/water. A solution was outlined that would encompass all of that without ever informing you about the broad, human effects of such proposals; and that's the function of our austerity euphemisms. If this becomes a matter of "responsibly" cutting money, you avoid the discussion about the effects of cutting livelihood.

They shape a reality that doesn't just evade the presence of human repercussion; it goes out of its way to remove the idea that humans are being discussed when we propose defunding the FDA, social security and medicare/medicaid. If we're just numbers and the measures to handle our finances are just numbers, then whatever suffering we endure as a result of their "responsibility" would also just be a number. By divorcing their proposals from the face of what those proposals look like, they evade the very concept of consequence.

It's easier to avoid outraged protests when the people living from inadequate pay check to inadequate paycheck are spoken of in clinical "x out of every x are y" terms, and the reasons for that are simple. It's one thing to watch a mother describe her failure to feed and educate her kids because of newly enacted budgetary measures. But if she becomes a faceless, nameless number - indistinguishable from any other - the empathy elicited from her avoidable plight vanishes, and she becomes just another statistic to forget when you find the next shiny thing. The discussion is as much contingent on erasing the possibility of thinking about economic matters on these terms as it is about persuading you to reach their conclusions.

The human dimension to their solutions isn't to be gravely discussed and contemplated. You're not supposed to measure the morality of starving someone against sitting on an eventual surplus in 5-10 years. You're not supposed to wonder if our obligation to provide shelter for aged American workers outweighs our obligation to pay debt to foreign countries. No. Their first goal is to make pain invisible. Their next is to make it a statistic. After that, it's status quo.

A charitable reading would assume that this is another expression of the class disparity between the aristocratic Washington Beltway culture and broader American culture, and I can see how that's arguable for some of the dimmer, more sycophantic careerists and yes-men. But much as I'd like to attribute this to elitist indifference and ignorance, I can't. There's something painfully deliberate about the perspectives that have become canon in all discussions about American fiscal policy. The push to be "serious" about the budget and to "be the grown up" and "make the tough decisions" is too pervasive. Not simply for what it says about their superficial grasp of economic affairs, but for what they leave almost intentionally unsaid.

You rarely hear that revenue derived from taxes and economic growth (which can come from investment) are also deficit reduction measures (that worked in the Clinton years, no less). In fact, taxes doesn't exist at all for them as a "serious" solution. You never hear about the centrality of health care to the deficit, and how measures to address that with reform are amongst the most revenue-saving solutions attempted. You never hear about the bottom 50% of America owning only 2.5% of the wealth in this country. You don't really see them getting self-righteous about 20% of the country owning a whopping 85% of the wealth. In fact, a tax deal that shifted even more wealth toward the top 1-20% was widely supported by the beltway as a brave, bipartisan compromise (despite drastically increasing the deficit for limited material gain). One can spend hours documenting the incoherence of beltway rhetoric. At least until you understand that when you're talking about "tax cuts for the rich" you're talking about "tax cuts for politicians, their donors, and the media who covers them", and that when they talk about, they're talking about themselves. You can only call them indifferent or ignorant to the implications of their rhetoric if you think they don't know that.

They're activists posing as prophets, and their posture shapes everyone who isn't them into sponges that absorb the hardship of their proposals. The consequences become invisible because it's in their favor to make them that way. As long as they can avoid being counted amongst those who feel the burn caused by their fire, they can always go to someone else's neighborhood and have a teary-eyed interview with a homeless person before winding down for a hot bath in their mansion after work. The tonal and rhetorical shift to austerity serves to cleanse all gruesomeness from the reality they advocate. This is what they do. And the power of euphemism transforms the more we allow them to do it.

It evolves from a mechanism to say what they want to say without saying it, to a tool that erases the very thought that dissent is necessary. You think too small when you assume their goal is to manipulate your self interest. Their goal is much more elegant: they want self interest to be utterly foreign to any political interest you have. When you're characterized as figures; as part of a lingering, amorphous unemployment rate or a sympathetically discussed but swiftly glossed over foreclosure rate, or as "living in poverty", you become less than faceless. You become dehumanized. Ignorable. Immune to empathy. And easily forgotten.

As long as we think of "consequences" as something happening to an undefined and indistinct "them" or "other", we can avoid the chilling conclusion that such consequences will eventually extend to encompass us. But just us. As Yglesias insightfully pointed out, the politicians don't just insulate themselves from such a calculus, they make sure that the specific nature of our suffering is just enough to hurt us, but not enough to make us notice immediately. And they make sure their supporters are just as insulated from suffering as the politicians and media themselves are:

But if we are going to cut Social Security benefits, I think it doesn’t make sense to do what the Obama administration has done and make “No current beneficiaries should see their basic benefits reduced” one of the bargaining points.
After all, this isn’t how any other kind of benefit cuts work. When Obama proposes cutting oil and gas subsidies, they propose cutting them right away. When Obama proposes a nominal freeze in federal pay, he’s proposing a real cut right away. When LIHEAP gets the ax, it gets the ax right away. When Arizona cuts Medicaid, people can’t get organ transplants right away.
And on the politics, it’s a mess. Right now we have conservatives simultaneously calling for huge spending cuts and also getting the line’s share of old people’s votes even while the vast majority of non-security spending is on old people. In essence, by first separating the domestic budget into “discretionary” and “entitlement” portions and then dividing the entitlement programs up into “what today’s old people get” versus “what tomorrow’s old people will get” the political class has created a large and vociferously right-wing class of people who are completely immune from the impact of their own calls for fiscal austerity.

Isn't that a daisy?

What we've found in this debate is the ease with which people can demand that others sacrifice for the greater good. All taking place in a system where the nature of that sacrifice is rarely talked about and never seen.

As an aside, I just want to again note that the least regarded, the least discussed, the least understood and the least respected segment of America's electorate is forced - without so much as a say, or a request for an opinion - to act as a crutch for many of the incoming demands for austerity. They're not talking about cutting their own social security in their demands for budget cuts. They're talking about cutting mine. And while the lacking mention of taxes, jobs, economic growth and health care can all be attributed to the force of conservative rhetoric and the media's acceptance of it, it can equally be attributed to the continued marginalization of my generation.

It's common for us to get wide-eyed, passionate mentions as the "future of America" while President's verbally ruffle our hair. Equally common are the vague sentiments expressing the need to invest in us. But the truth is that as long as we don't politically organize and as long as we're seen as electorally negligible, we're the rug that the rest of the country sweeps its dirt under. Something tells me that in a situation where America's overwhelming amounts of youth are organized, tax increases for an upper class that can take them would like slightly better than losing a whole age demographic of voters by slashing any prospect of them getting retirement benefits. Our exclusion from the political levers of authority doesn't simply continue the stagnancy of our institutions, it makes us and our political repression just another story that's successfully erased from America's political consciousness. Doesn't that sound familiar?

Edit: The segue at the end of this essay was a recurring theme for many of last year's posts, such as this one:

We're politically positioned in a way that encourages, forces and creates our political impotence while rhetorically calling it our fault. They've internalized the "out of sight, out of mind" narrative while never wondering why we're out of sight or even recognizing that we are. Wilkinson's position comes from a place of ignorance that's not only fundamental to his exposure, but fundamental to politics generally. Younger voters can be caricatured precisely because they have little control over how they're presented. Politicians and pundits can give disproportionate favoritism and power to older generations without recognizing that as what they're doing, and they can infantilize younger voters because beyond detached studies, it's not an issue they're informed about. And due to the impotence they've fed, it's not an issue they have to be informed about. Who, afterall, is going to react to a group of teenagers, young adults and college-age, inexperienced hippies complaining that someone was unfair to them?

And of course, there's this astute observation from an actual economist:

The answer, once you think about it, is obvious: sacrifice the future. Focus the cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy.
If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)
Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.

Not to criticize Krugman since I wholly agree with this, but these debates - and the observations they produce - are really jarring in their omission of Millennials as active political entities. For us, "tomorrow" isn't some distant abstraction that takes place 10 years before or after we're dead. It's going to metastasize in the prime of our professional lives, and while it's not intentional, the fact that the actual people affected by that - who are alive and who vote - weren't so much as mentioned is a damning indictment to the generational imbalances in our press corps and political cultures. There are obvious details involved that are not at all obvious to these people, and that's because the debate rages by parties who are nominally deemed "adults". We're probably young enough to be the children of a vast majority of the figures talking right now, and it's with that misguided perspective that we're seen.

What they're doing to the poor and elderly potentially affected by these cuts has already been to us. We've been wiped from the conversation unless some rare soul seeks to mention us as a stray side note - and always from an angle that relates exclusively to boomers and their antecedents. "These cuts are for your children and grandchildren" etc, etc. I again emphasize that this is not Krugman's fault, but there's something pernicious about a blindspot that fails to mention us - as liberals often do, or that claims to speak for us and think about us without ever representing anything that we'd do or want - as conservatives often do. It's endemic to the beltway's political culture and not a single person in it - including what few prominent Millennials it has - seems to be saying anything.

The Vindication of Al Jazeera

2011-01-31T07:28:00.010-06:00

The striking characteristic of American news isn't necessarily its lacking quality, it's the provincial insularity of it. By encumbering themselves in fantasies of inherent American exceptionalism and inherent American relevance, the media - particularly cable news - manages to treat all instances of non-American significance as though part of what makes it news is the fact that American actions are irrelevant to the enormity of what's taking place. The desire to shift the tenor of the discussion into speculation about how "the Obama administration should respond" and whether their responses are "strong enough" and "what they suggest" and "what Egypt means for our foreign policy" is revealing.

It doesn't merely portray an ignorance about Egypt's protests, its implications and a subtle attempt to take away the Egyptian people's centrality to Egypt's events. They portray a media culture that's so thoroughly detached from the world - beyond the going-ons of Washington and Washington's political ramifications - that an event that has nothing whatsoever to do with America can only be discussed if they pretend otherwise. When there are no political briefings to unquestioningly report on, or polls to mindlessly repeat, or "sensational" clips from politicians to draw basslessly broad narratives on, you have a media that's woefully unprepared for not just articulating nuanced and incisively informative thought, but for confronting, absorbing and deconstructing the unique realities and histories of other countries.

That's why the secondary story wasn't the American government's reaction to the events. It was that the Egyptian protest could not be covered by any existing American cable news source without drawing footage and commentary from Al Jazeera. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with borrowing coverage, but it's certainly odd when the station that the MSNBC/CNN/Fox News triumvirate is borrowing their news from is - to quote the words of Al Jazeera English's managing Director - "effectively being blocked from being broadcast in the United States of America". Dating as far back as 2001, Al Jazeera has been something of a dirty word in politics. Bush officials enjoyed claiming Al Jazeera's critical and nuanced coverage was "anti-American" (even going so far as to send Colin Powell to get it shut down). Even worse, it's been censored on numerous occasions and there are even instances where the US is implied to have bombed its stations, or was at least in a position to have President Bush consider it.

Instead of drawing the obvious and disturbing conclusions from the above details, I'll simply note that the events in Egypt and the media's use of Al Jazeera's outline its journalistic relevance. The importance of international politics is not defined by America's involvement in it, and our general news outlets are amongst the last parties to acknowledge this. While most instances of misunderstood American ignorance are a result of geographical distance and lacking penetration of the media from other countries, Al Jazeera stands as an exception - both because it gives us the benefit of a perspective that's detached from American interests and because it's actually capable of showing in this country. The only thing that keeps it out is our cable providers, and this needs to be recognized as a travesty; just as their penetration despite their invisibility should be seen as a success.

It's an embarrassment for a country so heavily involved in Middle Eastern affairs to have such a limited understanding of Muslims, the Muslim world, their political opinions and the state of their countries. And their exclusion from America's political considerations only serves to further their dehumanization. Caricatures about "Islamofascism", "Islamic terrorists" and "Evil Muslim Fundamentalism" couldn't exist if we were aware of how unrepresentative they are. And our penchant for silently acquiescing to the Muslim world's treatment as "other" would be considerably more difficult if we could put actual information to the names we randomly hear when our political officials deign to bomb them.

The cable companies insistence on treating Americans like children by keeping Al Jazeera marginalized is not a reflection of our wishes; it's reflective of the way our political culture thrives on depriving its citizens of dimension. Allowing Al Jazeera publicly wouldn't simply serve as a panacea to that; it could serve as a means of piercing the bubble our elites have formed around this country and its citizenry. I don't endorse everything Al Jazeera has done - I don't even have a fully developed opinion on its quality as a news source. But I support my privilege to form one and to change the channel if my favor for it somehow changes in the future. Why can't they?

As these events have shown, the legitimacy of Al Jazeera is unquestionable. It's not only flaunted a remarkable reach (despite being essentially banned from the country), but it's shown a consistent professionalism in its free coverage and consistent appearances on the (considerably less informative) cable news programs. Given that it has more on-the-ground journalists than any news organization in America, the excuses for not showing it are strikingly limited. The only thing that keeps it out of this country is the insistence of a limited few and a growing disrespect for the necessity of combative journalism and international realities.

There's a reason Al Jazeera's site traffic has gone up by 2600% (with half of that coming from America). It's because it offers something that the rest of our pathetic news divisions are incapable of offering: scope. And it does so with a sensitivity and awareness that's sorely lacking in the self-congratulatory culture that Washington feeds off and articulates. Al Jazeera is not just a testament to journalism, but to the ease with which political realities can be shaped to exclude perspectives that can be useful for us. Our government (which has been hostile to Al Jazeera) and our cable services (which have been overly compliant to the government) don't quell their willful coddling of American ignorance by continuing their hostility. They do it by recognizing that the presence of a world beyond our borders is - by itself - a justification for receiving news from beyond our borders.

Edit: Wadah Khanfar makes a lengthy and worthwhile observation about the apparent interest and near-complete lack of resistance to their coverage. I again emphasize that American ignorance is not a function of American stupidity. It never was. Other countries are only overwhelmingly aware of us because we have the strongest media penetration and overwhelming international influence. Our stamp is utterly unavoidable and the product of that inescapable influence is that you're, well, influenced. You can discuss our television, our cinema, our music, our pop culture, our idioms, our accents, our politics - whatever - because you're exposed to it. That's the consequence of power.

We can't discuss yours because we're not. That's the consequence of no country having similar power. That is not the fault of America or Americans, and it's both ignorant and dishonest to pretend that's the case. Al Jazeera represents a rare example to change that because they're one of the only international brands with the power influence to make that change. Ignorance is not a metric for assessing intelligence, and I think people who want to see American insularity as the fault of Americans demonstrates a lack of appreciation for the disproportion in media power/penetration. If we had the same chance for the same levels of exposure, the condescension would be warranted. We don't, so it's not. Few things are rarely that simple, but this certainly is.

Edit 2: Here's the URL to demand it for your area.

Wiping Off The Dust

2011-01-31T06:50:00.005-06:00

As a reward for the patience of my nonexistent readership, I'm simply going to announce my return and similarly announce that regular posts can again be expected. I've avoided several relevant political, entertainment and social issues and my silence is simply an expression of my confidence that they'll persist and develop without my commentary. While it's true that failing to write about them can inspire complacency, it's similarly true that the urge - and, indeed, demand - to opine on the latest "Big Topic" can be a catalyst for reactionary, sloppy argumentation.

The need to simmer and think is an underrated commodity; particularly in the blogosophere, where real time thoughts on initial impressions are prized. Discourse would be much improved if bloggers didn't feel that the presence of an opinion is the same as a requirement to express it. I justify my absence under the assumption that such a sentiment is accurate. And I justify my presence under the assumption that there are things yet to be said, and that silence is an inadequate mechanism to say them.

::Jukebox::

2010-11-30T23:33:00.002-06:00

Documenting The Media's Role As Government Publicists

2010-11-30T19:41:00.008-06:00

Let the record forever show that when presented with the ability to document the extent of the government's unaccountable Secret State, our noble paper of record decided to ask Daddy Government's permission first. The New York Times can bask in its righteous independence for painstakingly determining that these cables are in its public interest (gee, really?), but two things should never be forgotten: A) Despite these files existing in a low security area for well over a decade, the New York Times was so uncritically accepting of government doctrine that it not only never thought to find this information themselves, they almost never questioned the logic that kept an enormous number of completely innocuous documents a secret. And B) When faced with a deluge of government files outlining our foreign policy incentives and giving lie to the narrative that presents all given information as a "threat" to "national security", they not only decided to not publish most of the files, they decided to make sure we knew that they only published the things that wouldn't hurt the government's most important interests:

The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public “several hundred thousand” cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.

The bolded text is a telling example of why the New York Times - and much of the American media is compromised on the issue. Their starting assumption is that American intelligence gathering and American foreign policy efforts are automatically good enough to not compromise. They're incapable of acting as watchdogs against the government because their default position is to think that they're agents of government interests and that what the government does is only worth reporting and never worth impugning except in the most dire of circumstances (which, strangely, never come). The government says it's secret, so it's secret. An anonymous political operative gives a falsehood under the veil of anonymity, but it's news from a source that demands protection (and gets it) because s/he talks about the administration from the view of Republicans or Democrats (regardless of whether that view is factually correct/provable or not). The government uses techniques that have been historically defined as torture, but because the government says they're not torture, it suddenly refuses to call them torture. These are stances that have been widely adopted by America's media, and adopted specifically by the New York Times - as anti-torture advocates like Andrew Sullivan have documented.

We can spend days talking about government inefficiency, unaccounted incompetence and uncontrolled bureaucracy, but they can't be adequately discussed unless it's internalized that none of it could have happen if it weren't for a compliant press that simply uses its media power to act as amplifiers and creators of government propaganda. The docility and ignorance of the American public is enhanced by the media's constant failure to correct - and in fact, feed - that ignorance. Their overriding goal isn't to inform, it's to euphemize. They're simply government advocates whose only demonstration of non-bias is in their willingness to roll over for any administration, regardless of party. And they're advocates of the government at no one's expense but ours. Why else do you think that of all the cables it decides to publicize, it's the one that could send us into another government-supported war that gets the most attention:

The Times' account seems to rely almost entirely on one cable in the WikiLeaks archive-- a "detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation." The Times wastes no time in conveying the danger:

The missiles could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow, and American officials warned that their advanced propulsion could speed Iran's development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

At issue are 19 missiles that Iran allegedly bought from North Korea. It's hard to know how definitive this evidence might be. (There are likely many secret documents pertaining to Iraq's WMDs that proved to be entirely incorrect; because something is secret or confidential does not mean it's uniquely candid or truthful.) The Times does not seem at all skeptical about the story, but there's one thing they won't do: publish the actual cable:

At the request of the Obama administration, The New York Times has agreed not to publish the text of the cable.

So the paper will publish a story that reiterates the most explosive allegations in the cable, but not the cable itself. This is curious.

Luckily WikiLeaks did publish it. And the most interesting thing one learns is that the Russians were deeply skeptical of the U.S. allegations about these missiles:

Russia said that during its presentations in Moscow and its comments thus far during the current talks, the U.S. has discussed the BM-25 as an existing system. Russia questioned the basis for this assumption and asked for any facts the U.S. had to provide its existence such as launches, photos etc. For Russia, the BM-25 is a mysterious missile. North Korea has not conducted any tests of this missile, but the U.S. has said that North Korea transferred 19 of these missiles to Iran. It is hard for Russia to follow the logic trail on this. Since Russia has not seen any evidence of this missile being developed or tested, it is hard for Russia to imagine that Iran would buy an untested system. Russia does not understand how a deal would be made for an untested missile. References to the missile's existence are more in the domain of political literature than technical fact. In short, for Russia, there is a question about the existence of this system.

In other words, not only were the Russians not convinced that Iran had purchased these missiles, they weren't sure that these missiles even existed.

The cable went on to note that the U.S. view is that the Iranians might be buying a system that doesn't work in order to adapt the technology to its existing missiles:

The U.S. repeated its earlier comment that Iran and North Korea have different standards of missile development than many other countries, including the U.S. and Russia. North Korea exported No Dong missiles after only one flight test, so it is not unimaginable that it would build and seek to export a system that has not been tested. This is especially true for North Korea because of its need for hard currency. In the U.S. view, the more interesting question is why would Iran buy a missile that has not been tested. One possible answer is that Iran has recognized that the BM-25's propulsion technology exceeds the capabilities of that used in the Shahab-3, and that acquiring such technology was very attractive. Iran wanted engines capable of using more-energetic fuels, and buying a batch of BM-25 missiles gives Iran a set it can work on for reverse engineering. This estimate would be consistent with the second stage of the Safir SLV using steering engines from the BM-25 missile.

I indicated in an earlier post that freedom of press is one of the fundamental issues at stake, but what do you do when the press has that freedom but - because of its incestuous relationship government - has no wish to use it? There's a profound issue at stake here, and it's one that can be traced to the media's complicity with the existence of a corporately submissive government whose corruption luxuriously pays and coddles them. They're not agents against power, they're not informants on behalf of the people - they're barely informed themselves. They serve a role to power, for power and the last decade's government overreaches are simply the culmination of that reality. They don't hate WikiLeaks because WikiLeaks is doing their job for them (they think acting as unthinking government parrots is their job). They hate WikiLeaks because it challenges the very centralization of power they benefit from.

That is the fundamental reason why these leaks weren't made until now. That is why the Secrecy State managed to grow unhinged and unchallenged. That is why the continuance of that secrecy goes unquestioned. That is why when the government says something, they simply go "ok" and parrot it as though their obligations are being met. And ultimately, it's why they've chosen to express contempt for WikiLeaks in the language of nationalistic outrage. They're simply eating their bread on the side that's been most liberally buttered. It's much easier to defend your aristocratic stature in Beltway social circles if you're denouncing the rowdy upstarts who dare question American integrity; particularly when the alternative is celebrating the injection of transparency and actual knowledge to the people Washington has spent decades politically neutering (and who, paradoxically, fund the very Secret State that the government is proclaiming we're too stupid/dangerous to actually know about).

Every suggestion that WikiLeaks/Assange should be imprisoned for releasing the documents is a suggestion that the press should have less freedom. Every proclamation of the recklessness of releasing documents that reveal such national security threatening details like Qadhafi preference for blonds is a proclamation that America should have not only have no idea what's done its name, but that we shouldn't have an informed international perspective. Every attempt at sensationalized moralism that claims that this is an "attack on America" is an embrace of the very "This-World-Is-Our-Land" hubris that warrants direct challenging.

Government - and its media appendage - is a powerful entity, but it is not an unlimitedly privileged entity. Wallowing in that privilege has made them forget that. What's more, it's made us forget that. This is not a perfect step toward dismantling and supplanting the public conformity and uniform oligarchy that embodies aristocratic concerns, but it's one of the best that can be taken. What does it say about us and our media that such measures had to be taken by a foreign party? And what does it say of our future when institutional collapse, corruption and inefficiency are met with disinterest and boredom by the people tasked with documenting it? Something is wrong when sentiments like the one's expressed here are almost unimaginable from establishment journalistic sources.

Edit: Greenwald's piece is a must read distillation of everything wrong with the coverage about this:

It's one thing for the Government to shield its conduct from public disclosure, but it's another thing entirely for the U.S. media to be active participants in that concealment effort. As The Guardian's Simon Jenkins put it in a superb column that I can't recommend highly enough: "The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. . . . Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets." But that's just it: the media does exactly what Jenkins says is not their job, which -- along with envy over WikiLeaks' superior access to confidential information -- is what accounts for so much media hostility toward that group. As the headline of John Kampfner's column in The Independent put it: "Wikileaks shows up our media for their docility at the feet of authority."
Most political journalists rely on their relationships with government officials and come to like them and both identify and empathize with them. By contrast, WikiLeaks is truly adversarial to those powerful factions in exactly the way that these media figures are not: hence, the widespread media hatred and contempt for what WikiLeaks does. Just look at how important it was for Bill Keller to emphasize that the Government is criticizing WikiLeaks but not The New York Times; having the Government pleased with his behavior is his metric for assessing how good his "journalism" is. If the Government is patting him on the head, then it's proof that he acted "responsibly." That servile-to-power mentality is what gets exposed by the contrast Wikileaks provides.

WikiLeaks Doesn't Understand The Relevance of WikiLeaks

2010-11-29T16:06:00.016-06:00

It's necessary to preemptively note that there's no contradiction in supporting government transparency, supporting the availability of the now-leaked diplomatic cables, opposing the cavalier use of secrecy as a means of avoiding accountability and thinking that WikiLeaks' recent actions were either apathetic or unthinking as to what the potential ramifications could be.

If WikiLeaks wants to make the steps toward nuclear non-proliferation with the ratification of START, sensationalizing accurate assessments of who controls Russia strikes me as counterproductive. If Wikileaks wants us to withdraw from Afghanistan, then WikiLeaks wouldn't compromise the nearly nonexistent leverage we have over Karzai by publicizing (correct) suggestions that he's both corrupt and incompetent. If WikiLeaks wants Iran protected from the umbrella of aggressive militarism that seeks to damage/eradicated it, then it makes little sense to post cables that suggest that a not-inconsiderable portion of Middle East powers would actually want that to happen (thus marginally deflating the argument that such a thing would cause Middle East panic). Indeed, if WikiLeaks opposes war and wishes to continue its opposition to it, then it's not even minimally practical to make diplomacy - a well accepted alternative to conflict - more difficult and less direct or to damage diplomatic relations with countries who could use the leaks as a basis for closing diplomatic options while opening aggressive/militaristic ones.

There's a certain pettiness to the rationale behind the leaks that we'd be remiss to ignore - not just because it calls into question their goals and the nobility thereof, but because it calls into question whether they have a sense of what accomplishes them. If you look at the reasoning on the Cablegate site, there's no mention of the very things that justify this kind of leaking. There's no acknowledgment that the Secrecy State undermines democracy by making its citizenry unaware of government actions and incapable of assessing (or even processing) them. There's no acknowledgment that the Secrecy State foments ignorance regarding our government's actions and their understanding/rationale for those actions. There's no indication that they even care that most of the parties giving these assessments are unaccountable careerists who are as immune to accountability as they are to judgment. Instead, there's this:

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments -- even the most corrupt -- around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

This is embarrassingly silly nonsense from a party that should know enough to state valid reasons to oppose American actions. And it's indicative of a world in which reflexive and ignorant anti-Americanism is Hip, Trendy and Informed by virtue of being anti-American. There are any number of reasons to be against American hegemony, American actions and American secrecy. Why does WikiLeaks' justification for posting the cables manage to ignore all of them? I mean, does he really think that diplomatic spying - even on allies - is a uniquely American trend? Does he think that America is the only country that ignores the human rights abuses of allies? And if America "spoke against" those abuses, wouldn't we be labeled "hypocrites" for having abuses of our own (a classic no-win situation)?

Is America the only country that should expected to speak against human rights abuses? Does he think that America is the only country that has foreign dealings with countries that declare themselves neutral? Does he think it's bad to deal with neutral countries? Does he think it's diplomatically immoral, indefensible or even unexpected for diplomats to reward those who deal with them? If he thinks none of this, then why single out American actions with an expectation that their behavior should be higher and different than everyone else's?

Literally none of what he listed is unique to America or unjustified by most standards, and yet America is the exclusive focus of these leaks. I'd understand if WikiLeaks was against covert diplomatic assessments on principle, but the leaks seem to indicate that WikiLeaks (and multiple European sites) are just against America making covert diplomatic assessments without presenting any reason as to why. It seems willfully oblivious as to what qualifies as amoral on the international stage and few things outline that obliviousness more than the fact that "saying bad things about leaders while publicly supporting them" is some sign of Evil Hypocrisy that should be exposed because America is Mean.

If anyone thought that Medvedev was anything more than Putin's puppet, they should be fired. If there were perceptions of Berlusconi that presented him as anything more than an incompetent playboy, I would think considerably less of our diplomats. If accurate and informed assessments of French and German governments weren't caustic and didn't accurately present many of their citizens as opposed to them, then they should have no basis to give assessments. If calling an illegitimately installed puppet leader like Karzai corrupt is an evil sin to diplomatic discourse, then WikiLeaks doesn't want diplomacy to employ informed honesty about the state and tenor of foreign governments. And if there was no acknowledgment that Europe's (and particularly, the UK's) influence and economic might were faltering while the influence and economic might of Asian countries like China, India and Japan were rising, then the diplomats would be completely blind to global realities. There's an incoherence to WikiLeaks' goal that seems to decry vocalizing international realities in clear terms. I find it ironic that a party that wishes to publicize the actions of American governments is against America frankly articulating the actions/state of foreign governments.

What sets me apart from those who employ hyperbole to castigate WikiLeaks while proclaiming that it's a Unique Evil is that not only do I think this leak was useful and necessary, I don't think either Assange or WikiLeaks has any obligation to perform actions that coincide with American interests. They're not American citizens, they're not subject to any demand to respect or ease the difficulties of American foreign action (and neither - might I add - are actual American citizens). If someone gave Assange diplomatic cables and he wants to publicize them, there is absolutely nothing that should legally or ethically stop him from doing it as long as no life is harmed. He should be - and is - perfectly free to disadvantage American diplomacy and expose American action, and he doesn't even require a logically sensible justification to do it. We have journalists for a reason, and the capacity to expose government action - including those actions the government doesn't want exposed - is one of them. If our media frequently fails to do that job and - in fact - deferentially allows the government to edit their work, then others are going to fill that vacuum. Assange is not required to determine or even know the relevance of the information he posts, and him being absolutely wrong about why he posted the information doesn't make the information less valid or relevant.

Democracy can't work if we're incapable of knowing the actions of our leaders and what's done in our name. How can we know who to elect if an overwhelming portion of what they do is concealed from us? What's more, how can we be informed about foreign policy if the specifics of foreign governments and our interests in them aren't known to us and open to public dissection? It's been taken on faith that because the government says almost all foreign policy is "classified" and "secret" that it's classified and secret for a reason. If Cablegate does anything, it incisively outlines how much of a lie that assumption is. Is an informative legal analysis of the Honduras's coup really something that should be kept top secret? Is an insightful assessment of Iran's post-election position and what leaders will attempt to rise once Khamenei dies of cancer really something that would harm/kill Americans if we knew? Of course not. But our government - and our media's subservient, uncritical collusion with it - has infantilized and undermined perceptions of the American public so successfully that not only is it determined that we shouldn't be aware of what our government thinks and what it does, but that we can't grasp the nature of our political/foreign policy realities.

More damningly, it's not American politicians who are making this assessment. It's a cabal of unelected, unknown and unaccountable nobodies who act as permanent cogs of the state apparatus that make this determination. They're not bound by term limits. They aren't bound by the possibility of media/public criticism. They're shielded by anonymity and fully funded by the taxpayer while never having to show their face or the nature of their usefulness to the people that fund their existence. Months ago, the Washington Post's Dana Priest outlined the full extent of the bureaucratic Secrecy State identifying no less than 800,000 people - almost 1.5 times more than the population of Washington DC - with top secret clearance spread across 3000 government and private corporations in 10,000 areas and with no one having a precise idea of who they are and what they're doing.

This isn't just an unacceptable expansion of public ignorance in the interest of unknown and unknowable ends. It's a demonstration of government ignorance because the government itself is incapable of keeping track of the information, who has access to it, what's being done with that access, who adds to what's known and whether those who do are actually doing a good job. With the presence of nonexistent accountability, you have an immeasurably expansive state with limited checks on their actions and an interest in making sure they keep getting money funneled to them without anyone questioning whether they deserve it. When you combine this with the condescension inherent to believing that the American public is too stupid to know what's being done, you don't just produce and cradle public ignorance. You create the grounds for intelligence disasters with no means of analyzing them, understanding them or correcting them.

In one sense, it's heartening to see an incomparably large number of documents demonstrating the professionalism, knowledge and intelligence of our unknown diplomats and agents. In another sense, what we're viewing is a government within the government that has all the faults of unbridled power and nonexistent checks on that power and none of the balance or oversight:

The money‑wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world's superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.
America's foreign policy is revealed as a slave to rightwing drift, terrified of a bomb exploding abroad or of a pro-Israeli congressman at home. If the cables tell of the progress to war over Iran or Pakistan or Gaza or Yemen, their revelation might help debate the inanity of policies which, as Patterson says, seem to be leading in just that direction. Perhaps we can now see how catastrophe unfolds when there is time to avert it, rather than having to await a Chilcot report after the event. If that is not in the public's interest, I fail to see what is.

WikiLeaks doesn't paint a picture of an evil or amorally self-interested government. It illuminates something far worse: a government that successfully excludes the very people it governs from being parties with a say in its actions. They didn't do this by taking away our power to vote, they did this by letting corporations and the interests of the Military Industrial Complex form a gigantic entity that not only has no electoral remedy that we can use to correct and change its existence/objectives, but can legally shield our eyes from where it is, what it does, how much it costs and how expansive it is. Attempts to do this have been decades in the making - going at least as far back as the Cold War and perhaps even WWII - and it's an embarrassment to American journalism that it took a foreign site to make more than a few ignored whistleblowers talk about it.

The government/media collusion that I spoke of previously doesn't simply express itself with the media being deferential to government wishes. It's expressed by their complete obliviousness to the implications of such a massive, secret security apparatus that veils itself for no other reason than showing off the fact that it can. The interests of the media and the interests of the politicians have become one and the same: the perpetuation of the current power structure. A goal that's both to our exclusion and our detriment. WikiLeaks didn't seem to publicize the diplomatic cables with the intent to do that, but it didn't have to in order for such a trend to be visible. And as the government - in response to WikiLeaks - makes efforts to curtail the two most important foundations of our democracy (freedom of speech and freedom of press), it's slowly becoming clear how much the government wants us to be able to do in response to its excesses: nothing.

The question isn't whether WikiLeaks should or shouldn't publish the documents or even whether the documents reveal American hypocrisy. The question is how much longer are the American people willing to allow a plutocracy of unaccountable oligarchs perpetuate our impotence by encouraging both our ignorance and our apathy.

::Jukebox::

2010-10-31T22:15:00.004-05:00

A "Credible" Terrorist Threat

2010-10-30T03:59:00.015-05:00

I don't dispute calling the attempted Chicago bombing an act of attempted terrorism, I dispute the apparent refusal to look at it in the context of our policies. Obama's otherwise sober press conference betrayed an acquiescence to what has been our general policy so far: to hammer at mansions in a quest to find nails, and then call for more hammers when one is uncovered. Threats aren't just threats in the language of foreign policy, they're molded into direct justifications of current actions, even in the face of evidence that "current actions" are what creates those threats. As others have noted, a 2004 inquiry into the effects of our foreign policy (by Donald Rumsfeld, no less) yielded the simple truth that our actions have reactions, and those reactions have consequences that express themselves either unfavorably or violently. The trick isn't to look at the reactions. The trick is to observe the things that create them:

Negative attitudes and the conditions that create them are the underlying sources of threats to America’s national security and reduced ability to leverage diplomatic opportunities.

...

American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.

Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.

Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that “freedom is the future of the Middle East” is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World — but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.

Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim selfdetermination.

Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack — to broad public support.

The stark, one-sided focus on what "they" do to "us", with almost no focus on what we do to them is what typically leads to tone deaf remarks like "[these attacks] underscore the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism". Not only does it undermine our national security by actively pretending to do the opposite; it puts us in a position to conveniently ignore how our "vigilance" tends to give terrorists more cause to attack. Which, of course, gets morphed into a rationale to continue our attacks. In a congressional election that's had a near-exclusive focus on political reactionaries and the economy, Obama - and congress - have been conveniently shielded from having to explain what, exactly, we're doing in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen and how to measure the effectiveness of what's being done. What's more, they no longer have to.

The success of the Military Industrial Complex isn't just uniformity in power, money and political influence. Its success lies in the fact that the constancy of war has made the presence and pursuit of war a non-issue. It's no longer shocking to us when we hear about a few dozen dying during a "Major Afghanistan Operation". It's no longer Big News when a few soldiers get shot in Iraq. It's no longer a massive, consequential decision when a president commits overworked and battle-fatigued soldiers and undisclosed amounts of money to a mission that eludes definition. And the death and destruction to culture, people and livelihood that our ventures bring is worse than defended by the media: it's invisible.

His remarks weren't just reminiscent of the constant need to restate and affirm our commitment to counterproductive mistakes; they're reflective of the nonexistent introspection we accord to our foreign policy generally. While the blame for that is almost entirely institutional, our inclination to ignore it is a factor we encourage. "Out of sight, out of mind" might be a perfect and non-malicious rationale, but there's something disturbing about the enforcement of cultural and moral convenience. Drone strikes kill real people. Soldiers uproot and displace real civilizations. The trend of doing this without accountability or regard insults real cultures. Why is it that we're supposed to automatically play the part of the child on our father's lap after a terrorist attack that's likely a direct response to our actions? And why should we accept that posture as defensible?

It would have been a tragic loss of innocent life if those bombs had have gone off, but we are not the only innocent life that's placed in jeopardy by wanton violence. That they tried this is certainly an indictment on them, but dismissing their rationale and the ways our government encourages that rationale is an indictment on us. Responsibility for and engagement with our foreign policy has largely been abdicated, and in doing so, we've made the blanket concept of "security" a justification for the unjustifiable. It's true that our institutions (particularly the media) have gone far in lowering what's rhetorically and logically required from our politicians, but we're only pacified to the extent that we let ourselves be.

I frequently see teary-eyed prospective's about what future historians will think of x disliked media figures, or y embarrassing/stupid/counterproductive politician, but if I were to borrow that silly cliche, I'd think they'd blame the people most responsible: us. How is it that we can face a plutocracy-favorable financial collapse and end up having our most ineffectual (but popular) protests toward the wrong people (funded by the same plutocrats, of course)? It similarly eludes me how one can look at this era note the entirely avoidable destruction it's produced, and not notice the lack of protests, the lack of advocacy groups, the lack of political organizations and the entire absence of will to form them. What's stunning isn't the pitiful nature of our politicians and our options. What's stunning is that this is the standard we accept. As though if "change" were possible, it'd crop up by itself.

The "Commander in Chief" may have active control over the military, but that control only exists with congress's consent. Guess who elects congress? We do. Every day America's function as an inflammatory force continues is yet another day we let it continue. It's impossible to process our daily political affairs without realizing the small ways their nuances are still in our control. It's incumbent on us to not just recognize that control, but exert it. And more important than understanding the power of what can happen when we exert that control is understanding the consequences for when we don't.

There are innumerable articles about "enthusiasm gaps" and "excitement" about elections. In the speculative and useless analysis that follows is something considerably more telling than the articles themselves: the omission of the truth that both qualities are entirely irrelevant grasp and exercise civic responsibility. You don't vote because it makes you feel good, you vote because not voting produces the very America we're collectively whining about today.

The positions of our politicians are responsive to our needs to the exact degree that we vocalize them. If we say nothing - as has been the case - then they do nothing. Or worse, they do what whoever has the most money tells them to. Right now, it's the military contractors who uniformly profit from our useless engagements, tomorrow it could be the banks who've fertilized the banks with an avoidable foreclosure crisis. But none of this changes without questioning and studying about it, but what's more, nothing changes without saying something about it. It's too easy to look at destructive decisions and their inevitable consequences and blame those in charge. It's considerably more instructive to pay attention to not only who puts them in charge, but to analyze the ways our passivity lets blood-letting fester in other places while we cry "WHY US?" behind the protective wall of two oceans.

Edit: And before the expected parties see this as another symbol of Muslim antagonism, they should bear in mind that it was a Muslim country that informed us of the attack.

When Projection Evolves Into Analysis

2010-10-22T15:16:00.008-05:00

Yes, this is a Mad Men post temporarily disguised as something else. Yes, this has spoilers. Embrace or avoid at leisure.

Regardless of my distaste for the once-a-week episodic format, the fact that waiting fans tend to produce lively participation and keen analysis about their favorite shows is a benefit that shouldn't be dismissed. Not only does it express involvement in the way the show progresses, it enhances enjoyment of the show by providing insights and perspectives that go either unnoticed or unarticulated. At a point when everyone bemoans the consistently paltry ratings of most television shows, the ones that have the benefit of "fans" and a "community" go the furthest in granting television the narrative attention and gravity the medium warrants. But the medium's ability to validly inspire meaningful analysis shouldn't blind us from the truth that not every show does.

Once you internalize that many shows aren't plotted passed the episode you're watching, and that most characters are as simple as they seem at face value, the benefits of participation that after-viewing analysis brings begins to crumble under its most glaring potential flaw: the celebration of a show's qualities can become a celebration of your imagination under the guise of discussing a show's qualities. What forums and comment sections abroad have encouraged (mostly due to viewer interest combined with overly long waiting times between episodes) is an imaginary reality where what you want the show to say or do becomes confused for what the show is actually saying or doing. Vagueness becomes mistaken for deliberate implication. Insignificance gets confused for importance. Delays in plotting or pacing magically become signs of building anticipation. And understated two dimensionality becomes confused for depth.

In giving the pretext for a committed culture of viewers to organize and form, their imaginative capabilities are encouraged, assisted, expressed and furthered by making analysis and theories that serve to overstate the quality of what's being watched. And because that imagination has the show as a foundation, good writing and incisive analysis from viewers is credited to the writers - regardless of whether what's stated is more intricate what's done.

By itself, such artistic seriousness is commendable and valid, but its influence has caused the acidic inflation of mediocre shows because there's been little effort to make a distinction between theory and actuality. A fact that's furthered by the failure to distinguish between genuine plotting/foreshadowing and the wishful projection of genuine/plotting and foreshadowing. As a result, what's developed isn't a sect of committed and insightful viewers so much as a community that mistakes observations of what could/should be for analysis of what the show is. While this absolutely enhances the viewing experience, it's gone far in undermining critical perception of the show; since scrutiny of what a show has done is based more on what the fans say instead of what the show accomplishes. While this certainly feels better, it does absolutely nothing to compel shows to be better - which undermines the potential of the medium under the pretense of propelling it.

Under this dynamic, a show can be little more than a sequence of inconclusive red herrings, dropped plot points, unexplained character arcs, random deus ex machina's or unelaborated scenes and because delays and indulgence give viewers a window to explain the unexplained/unexplainable, a fanbase can use their collective communication to pretend that nothing is simply the build-up to something more than nothing.

This doesn't work because it's valid; it works because it's unfalsifiable. It's easy to comment on a future that hasn't arrived, but more importantly, it's easy to write for a future that hasn't arrived. If you're a hack that's only capable of making expectation the hallmark of your show, viewers can act as a dependable and unwitting mechanism to fill in what the writers leave out. And when what the show inspires (instead of what the show does) becomes the foundation for its appeal, things like Lost can become sensations without doing anything sensational.

If for no other reason, this is why I think commentary about Mad Men's finale is just as telling as the finale itself. Forget the question of whether you agree or disagree with the remarks, or whether you like the writing. Look at the common ground between them. Every single one of them is rooted in basis. When a show has good writing, you're not going to intensely focus on what's coming up. You're going to focus on how what's happening is consistent with what has happened. And you're going to analyze the mechanics of what took place with the confidence that the nuances are deeper than face value would suggest. That doesn't immunize it from contemplation about where it's going or how x "twist" will be used, but it is immunized from having to fear that even the most surprising of plot trajectories will materialize out of thin air.

Mad Men's present is invariably derived from its past. It's the televised variant of seeing something built from the ground up and what's more, it's the exact kind of show that's conducive to fans who seek out communal entertainment just as readily as traditional entertainment. Good writing doesn't just produce good art, it creates the pretext for looking at intricately developed characters like Don, Peggy, Betty or Sally and saying they're the way they are because of established traits that were gradually demonstrated over the course of the series. It's one thing to type out a thoughtful, well written and lengthy review of a show. It's quite another to do it with the understanding that you're reading between lines that were intentionally left to interpretation without running from being concrete.

It's treated its fanbase like adults and three dimensionally presented characters, events and culturally mindsets that we'd swiftly call "offensive" or "repugnant" if we saw them today. There's an impressive and obvious attention to detail in every aspect of the story that wisely gives us the tools to judge without doing the judging for us. It demonstrates sexism without having characters that call it sexist. It gives backstories to womanizers, rapists, racists, elitists and careerists while leaving the question of whether those characteristics are defensible or defining for the characters open to you. It doesn't hold your hand by asking questions and then answering them. It paints a scenario where the answer to one question isn't and can't be your only avenue to fairly assess a character. There's a maturity and confidence to this story telling that goes beyond skill, and as such, it has effects beyond enjoyment.

Again, just look at the reviews. Read them. Read the comments that follow them. There's something to seeing people discuss a show strictly on the terms it's outlined (instead of just the terms placed by their imagination) that's commendable not just because they're doing it, but because the show presented a basis for them to. What Mad Men has solidified is a situation where the viewers aren't tasked with crafting the edifice for their pleasures, they simply walk through it. By drawing a distinction between what's unsaid and what's unknown/unknowable, Mad Men has avoided the simplicity that plagues most television and given the viewer interpretive power in tandem with the writers instead of for them. I could make any number of posts about how and why Season 4 is the best season of Mad Men (and I just might, eventually), but for now, I appreciate the rarity of being contented with letting everyone else do that for me.

The Caricatured Youth Vote

2010-10-19T10:52:00.010-05:00

Why is it that every time efforts to legalize pot are mentioned by pundits and political commentators, it's framed in terms that make it a boon for Obama's status with youth voters? Apparently, what positions we have on other issues aren't "real positions". What we actually care about are Cool Presidents we can emotionally got behind, and people who legalize our weed because we're uninformed, indecisive creatures who are only positioned to understand and care about the unique qualities of getting high. Its like reading a series of articles from people whose only exposure to "youth" is watching The Breakfast Club and Ferris Beuller's Day Off before deciding they "understand us". Just look at Will Wilkinson:

I think the president's triangulation problem is largely explained by this generation gap. Defending status-quo policy on gays in the military or the drug war is bound to alienate many of Mr Obama's most enthusiastic young supporters. But younger voters are a fickle lot in any case. Their turnout in 2008 was an anomaly. It would be imprudent for Mr Obama and the Democrats to count on an equal showing this fall or in 2012. In contrast, you can be sure the always-reliable 65 and older crowd will show up in droves. The stances that would help Mr Obama consolidate support among especially young or especially liberal voters also risk scaring off older voters and capricious independents, and it's clear which tack the White House is taking. Either way, he may be in trouble.

It's very easy to read and react to the dripping condescension of posts like these, but they're reflective of an environment that already excludes what's traditionally identified as "youth" and "youth interests" so it's only natural that he assumes the commonality of that exclusion is warranted, self-induced and defensible. Particularly when punditry and politicians are drawn from a pool that's often generations removed from those that are newly able to vote or become politically active. In order to grasp what he's saying, you simply have to take note that they're drawn from a context that revels in youth marginalization. We're voters, yes, but comparatively we're neither as rich, as established, as institutionally invested or as large as the combined numbers of our generational predecessors, so our interests are automatically determined as less important which, in political terms, means our concerns have the function of muted whispers instead of echoing shrieks.

What makes this paragraph irksome isn't so much that he's acknowledging the above reality (which, while unfair, is at least honest); it's that he's presenting an intellectual rationale for marginalization that's premised on falsehoods. If he's speaking of "fickleness" in terms of numbers, he couldn't be any more incorrect. The 2004 election saw Millennial participation from the 18-29 demographic increased by 9%. In the mid-terms - which are notorious for low turnouts - participants from the ages of 18-29 increased their participation by 2-4 points from 2000's turnout. In the now-famous 2008 election, young adult voting turnout increased again by another 2%. The only demonstration of "fickleness" is the number our civic participation rises by.

If he's trying to use the word "fickle" as shorthand to invoke the tired, disproven cliches of civic apathy amongst youth, statistics from the recent elections render him entirely incorrect. If he's trying to use it to say that our views aren't set in stone he'll also find himself disproven by any poll that seeks to describe the political views of Millennials. According to a recent Pew poll, Millennials are considerably likelier than any other generation to be liberal. Not only that, they're the only demographic that has more people that self-identify as liberal than conservative. On everything from social issues, to concepts of government intervention, to negative opinions on income inequality, to global inclusiveness and near-pacifism in foreign policy Millennials are decidedly more progressive, inclusive, open to criticism and less set in the tired backdrop of Vietnam, the Cold War and reactionary neoconservatism that informs most political opinions on the subject. What's more, we've been consistently so.

When Millennials are discussed in terms that seek to present our interests as one dimensional and poorly formed. What's conveniently omitted is that in addition to being amongst the most education generation in American history, we also stand one of the most politically active and current. I don't have any particular wish to start a "WHO'S THE BEST GENERATION EVER" war, but the bizarre rise of articles that generalize Millennials and "youth voters" without actually being aware of what they're generalizing is growing tedious. Even thinking in terms that assess decreasing party loyalty as a factor for youth voting betrays a fundamental ignorance of how Millennials have been demonstrated to think about and understand politics. The trends show a greater interest in issues, not parties.

If Obama and the Democratic party are losing their interest, it's because the Democratic party isn't liberal enough to accommodate their political wishes. Coincidentally, the lowering enthusiasm and growing political disenchantment isn't the result of increasing contempt for Obama. It's the symptom of the very exclusion that Will Wilkinson subtly enforces when he breathlessly proclaims that older voters warrant appeasement at the expense of Millennial concerns. It's an exclusion that he enforces when he says that "fickleness" and "anomalous" turnout rates are reasons to think that our political stamp is impermanent and thus, dismissible. It's an exclusion he amplifies when he relegates the things young voters care about to something as inconsequential as marijuana. If that disenchantment exists, it's not because the government has failed to legalize our pot, it's because we're systemically isolated and removed from any concept of genuine political power and influence.

If you're skeptical about the claim, just think of it like this: if the Tea Party demographics consisted of people between 18-24 voicing our concerns in the same numbers, would we have gotten the same degree of political coverage? Of course not. It wouldn't have been seen as a revolution against the system. It wouldn't have been seen as a sign that liberalism warrants political embrace. It wouldn't have been adopted by either of the two parties as something to get behind, encourage and fund. It would have been ignored.

We're politically positioned in a way that encourages, forces and creates our political impotence while rhetorically calling it our fault. They've internalized the "out of sight, out of mind" narrative while never wondering why we're out of sight or even recognizing that we are. Wilkinson's position comes from a place of ignorance that's not only fundamental to his exposure, but fundamental to politics generally. Younger voters can be caricatured precisely because they have little control over how they're presented. Politicians and pundits can give disproportionate favoritism and power to older generations without recognizing that as what they're doing, and they can infantilize younger voters because beyond detached studies, it's not an issue they're informed about. And due to the impotence they've fed, it's not an issue they have to be informed about. Who, afterall, is going to react to a group of teenagers, young adults and college-age, inexperienced hippies complaining that someone was unfair to them?

This isn't going to last forever. I suspect that in a decade or so when we become more established and have a stronger sense of our economic prospects, we'll see more representation. But it's important to notice what's being done and it's important to understand the extent to which such fallaciously premised caricaturing and exclusion undermines our political ends. Processing these arguments doesn't just illuminate a pervasive media bias, it gives you the pretext to internalize what they haven't: after a certain point, the only thing your age can accurately determine is how long you've been alive. Their dismissal of that fact is just another face of societies most accepted variant of prejudice: ageism.

Vulgarity In Online Gaming Is Exactly Like Real Life Bullying! Except...

2010-10-14T13:44:00.009-05:00

...it's not. I'm not even going to lie. I laughed through half of this video. What makes real life bullying distinct from the puerile, tedious, racist/sexist/homophobic/sex-starved musings of 13-17 year olds in PC gaming/Xbox Live is that I can leave the internet any time I want to. And I can do it with no repercussions whatsoever. The same can't be said of school. Not only that, but having your tender little feelings hurt by a slur from someone you've never met, you'll never see again, who knows nothing about you and can never actually affect you is a little different from people seeing you day to day, cornering you, physically intimidating you, potentially assaulting you, mocking/belittling your physical differences, and making a point of ostracizing you for those differences. The very fact that you can ban people is a testament to how completely different the online world is.

Are they jerks? Absolutely. In fact, it's very easy to make defensible arguments for why they're intolerable. Which is why it makes no sense to compare non-serious "game-bullying" to something serious like real life bullying. There's already a case for it to be made on its merits without drawing laughably hyperbolic parallels. But that's hardly an excuse to completely divorce yourself from reality. Let's apply a little perspective, please. The only thing someone on a video game can do is make your gaming experience inconvenient. That inconvenience can be easily remedied. I have a very difficult time fitting my experiences with online silliness with something, like, say, this.

I understand that the It Gets Better project has - no thanks to Dan Savage - slightly evolved into a gay-tinted but largely general renunciation of bullying, and I love many of the contributions people have made to it and the fact that as a result of them, the issue of bullying - which has been an issue for many teenagers for years (regardless of sexuality) - is finally getting the negative attention and seriousness it deserves, but that's not a license to trivialize their experiences by lumping "bullying" with "everything you find unpleasant".

How To Measure Your Gay Activist Authenticity

2010-10-14T11:23:00.020-05:00

It's quite simple, really. Without making an effort to google reactions, m easure the offensiveness of Valerie Jarrett's comments on a scale from 1 to 10:

Capeheart: One of the things you've put a spotlight on, and to veer sharply away from infrastructure, and that was on the rash of suicides of gay youth. You gave a speech to the Human Rights Campaign annual dinner, where you named the victims. You talked about the President's committment to making a more inclusive, tolerant, accepting country. Why did you feel it was important to deliver that message, and deliver it there?

Jarrett: Well, I think what we've seen over the last few months are some very tragic deaths of young people, our children. And avoidable deaths. They were driven to committ suicide because they were being harassed in school, and driven to do something that no child should ever be driven to do. And in many cases, the parents are doing a good job. Their families are supportive. Before I spoke at the HRC dinner, I met backstage with Tammy Aarberg, her son Andrew. These are good people. They were aware that their son was gay. They embraced him. They loved him. They supported his lifestyle choice.

But yet when he left the home & he went to school, he was tortured by his classmates. What the President asked me to do was to go and deliver his message that this is an issue that's important and it needs to be addressed now. We've got to stop condoning this in the school, and acting like this is a rite of passage or something that we can't do anything about.

If you read this as an innocuous, supportive, and completely sympathetic comment that went out of its way to make common cause with the intents, focus and plight of present-day gay politics you are absolutely not a gay activist. You're actually normal, politically sane and have basic reading comprehension - which tends to go far in disqualifying you. However, if you thought this comment was proof of the deep seated homophobia that characterizes the Obama administration's political approach, if you thought the comments were on par with uttering a procession of ethnic slurs, or if you thought the comment was a validation of the far right, Family Research Council, Tony Perkins approved anti-gay agenda, then guess what? You're a gay activist. It's true. I can show you:

Michael Petrelis:

The last time I heard anyone use the obnoxious phrase "lifestyle choice" to describe a gay person's sexual orientation was during the Bill Clinton presidency when the gays were accused of wanting "special rights." Today the Washington Post's gay kapo Jonathan Capehart shares a video interview he conducted on Monday with senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. She clearly states a belief that Minnesota gay teen Justin Aarberg, who committed suicide in July after being bullied, made a "lifestyle choice."

...

What an outrage to claim that the 15-year-old Aarberg made a choice to be gay, and that sexual orientation is a lifestyle. Did she get her talking points from Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council?

Andrew Sullivan:

Those are the words Obama aide Valerie Jarrett uses to describe one of the recent gay suicide victims. "Lifestyle choice." Yes, the Obamaites mean well, even if they've done so little. But they really are completely clueless, utterly tone-deaf, and completely out to lunch on gay issues, aren't they? Lifestyle choice? A 15 year old boy is gay, and has a sexual orientation, not a "lifestyle choice," for Pete's sake. What's next: sexual preference?

Gary Chapelhill:

This is exactly the kind of talking point that the Christian extremists like to use to justify our persecution and deny our civil rights. Not only does it negate the fact that being gay is a core part of our identity, it fits neatly into Christian dogma about free will and the belief that sin is a choice. It is the very basis for their justification of the demonization of gay people. The kind of demonization that leads to discrimination, bullying, and yes, even the suicide deaths of countless gay teens who are made to feel like they are defective human beings.

We must be very clear. This is not just some “gaffe” or “slip of the tongue”, it is proof that Obama’s very top leadership is deeply homophobic. Nobody who has had any kind of interaction with the gay community would ever use this kind of language to describe gay people. Yet this is the person the HRC decided to honor by making her their keynote speaker at their annual dinner gala. And the fact that Capeheart remained silent in the face of this ugly, offensive description of gay people is proof positive of where his sympathies lie, and it isn’t with the gay community.

dakinikat:

WAPO reporter Jonathan Capo interviewed Obama loyalist Valerie Jarrett who is rumored to be on the short list for Chief of Staff. One of her answers showed how little support there really is in the West Wing for civil rights for GLBT citizens. This is appalling and explains why we can t see a change in DOMA or DADT.

Teddy Partridge:

If the closest adviser to the President on LGBT issues — the one he sent to make nice with the Human Rights Campaign’s black-tie supporters last Saturday — describes a 15-year-old suicide as having "made a lifestyle choice" we are absolutely doomed.

This is why gay marriage doesn't exist.

Anti-homosexual thinking doesn't dominate cultural perceptions and discourse because people are innately evil and have a desire to go out of their way to be bigots. Anti-homosexual thinking dominates because the people tasked with attempting to persuasively combat it have the temperamental maturity and perspective of brain-deprived children. The suffocating sensitivity on display here positions them to - of course - play the victim and make their baseless victimization a logic that's expected to function without actual logic. It actually gets more confusing when you try to make sense of it, too.

Someone - who clearly gains nothing politically from doing so - goes out of her way to not only take a strong stand against bullying, but suggests that it could be fixed by assertive intervention is an anti-gay, anti-homosexual, pro-homophobic, Family Research Council supporting bigot for...using two words. And the worst thing is that "lifestyle choice" wasn't attempting to be a descriptor of sexuality in general, it was just an addition of things to make the suicide of the teenager seem more unwarranted. Somehow, this is being turned into a springboard to further indict the entire Obama administration's remarkably pro-gay agenda because...well. They don't really say. But they don't have to, since by adopting far-right, stridently homophobic rhetoric, she's essentially responsible for the 15 year old's suicide now. It's fun having martyrs.

I'm tired of having to consistently restate these obvious but unheeded points, but given the upsurge of coverage in bullying (and, tangentially, gay rights), it's often enlightening to have a full awareness of the kind of people you're politically advantaging with your sympathy. It's similarly enlightening to see the largely dishonest, self-interested and insensitively callous way that sympathy is exploited. They've made emotionally charged political entitlement the highlight of their attempted activism and what you see are simply the results of bitterness and unearned clout being clumsily wielded by clear amateurs. We absolutely need to be supportive of gay rights, but it needs to be ingrained into our memory that should this country get them, it would be in spite of gay activists, not because of them.

Edit: Unfortunately, instead of telling people to stop being ridiculous, she makes a rather good but entirely unneeded apology:

In a recent interview I was asked about the recent tragedies about gay youth who have committed suicide, and I misspoke when I referred to someone's sexual identity as a "lifestyle choice." I meant no disrespect to the LGBT community, and I apologize to any who have taken offense at my poor choice of words. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not a choice, and anyone who knows me and my work over the years knows that I am a firm believer and supporter in the rights of LGBT Americans. Most of all, I hope this does not distract from the issue I was asked about -- the desperate, tragic decision by some young people who feel that their only recourse is to take their own lives because they are being bullied or harassed because they are gay, or because others believe they are gay. We must instill in young people respect for one another, and we must set an example of mutual regard and civility to create an environment that is safe for every person, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Of course, the substance of that clarification is little more than a restatement of already articulated support for their cause. And predictably, extending her kindness to parties that have done scarce little to warrant it is still not enough:

Jarrett apologizes: it's a fine apology, just interesting that focus is on "choice" rather than the far worse "lifestyle"

I don't even know what this means. I do know what "interesting" means, though. It means that she's still a secret homophobe with concealed, outdated, anti-homosexual views that temporarily came to the surface and magically reflect on Obama. One day, the administration is going to stop pretending these people are possible to placate.

Edit 2: Good christ, the comments for these places are even worse:

Jonathan Capeheart is a traitor to the gay community. It comes as no surprise that he would defend Jarrett's bigoted, homophobic description of being gay as a "choice". She is not Tony Perkins, she is worse, because she is the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. At least Perkins doesn't hide his bigotry. Capeheart should be deeply ashamed, and this apology for Jarrett's hateful rhetoric means that he has the blood of dead gay teens on his hands too.

Seriously? Seriously?

Quote of the Day

2010-10-13T21:03:00.001-05:00

"I remain surprised how ingrained it is that the White House and Democrats are just supposed to sit around and get beat on, and if they fight back, they are out of bounds. When they point out that Rush Limbaugh is the spokesman of the GOP and they are all insane like him, Peter Daou and numerous others lose their shit. When they point out that it would be horrible if Democrats listened to the non-stop drumbeat of negativity of the “Professional Left” and sit out the election, people freak out. When they point out that there were actually a lot of positive pieces of legislation passed the past year, the same crowd freaks out and says “Yeah, but what about…” When they point out that Fox News isn’t a news organization but the PR wing of the GOP, the beltway boys freak out. When they point out that the Matthew Shepard Act as well as any number of other positive gay friendly legislation was passed, they are met with screaming about DADT (which, btw, near every Democrat supported). And now, when they point out that the Chamber of Commerce and Republicans are hiding who is funding them, they are accused of “McCarthyite innuendo.”

I have no idea why anyone would want to be President, and I have no clue why anyone would want to be a Democratic President. It isn’t just the GOP and the media making up special rules for the Democrats, it is everyone. At this point, if Obama were to come to a podium in 2011 and say “Fuck you all, Hillary can have this job, figure 2012 out on your own, you ass clowns” my only response would be “Right on” and then to offer him a beer.

But it would have to be a faggy microbrew, because that’s how us Kenyan Muslim Socialists (who aren’t allowed to engage in politics while the other people beat the fuck out of us) like to roll these days." - John Cole, who's fulfilling the function of putting my eye-rolls into words.

::Jukebox::

2010-10-13T20:33:00.000-05:00

The Church's Backwards Societal Role

2010-10-13T15:06:00.008-05:00

An influential public figure once penned the following words:

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leader era; an too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, on Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Walleye gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Naturally, that influential public figure is none other than Martin Luther King. Unbeknownst to him, however, the institutional pathology he described is no longer the malady of the white church and white religious influence. More than half a century later that same function is now filled by the church and religious influence generally. In historical terms, the church as a mechanism for civil rights and social progress is - with far too few exceptions - a function of the religious - but disadvantaged and aware - working against broader theological/institutional underpinnings (usually in the form of independent movements or branched denominations) instead working with or for them. Mostly because you couldn't. Almost consistently, religious institutions and theology have acted as not just the mechanism for societal and cultural stagnancy but as an enforcer of it. It was those same structures that provided the political power and - more damagingly - the political rhetoric for the maintenance of institutions and cultural logic that undermine the rights and perceptions of others.

Jefferson Davis - the President of the Confederacy during the Civil War - said that "[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts". George Whitefield - who's almost singularly responsible for the Great Awakening and the rise of evangelicalism - overturned a province-wide banning of slavery and proceeded to own hundreds of slaves himself. Historians have further noted that religious justification of slavery was integral to southern identity and arguments regarding the maintenance of slavery were justified by the Bible itself using verses like Genesis 9:25-27.

Unintentionally, what Martin Luther King expressed disappointment in wasn't the racism of the church, but rather, the role of the church. He idealistically saw it as something that should be actively involved in overturning societal and cultural inequality instead of what it is: something that identifies and unquestioningly preserves the most outdated excesses/sins of traditional society. It doesn't demonstrate a desire for seeking higher thought, it simply expresses a bias for older thinking - regardless of its intellectual, moral, political or practical implications. When I read his statement, I'm struck by its present-day applicability, and I'm similarly struck by his surprise at the church's apathy to social modernity. Given that he was a Baptist, I'm kind of stunned that he ignored his own religious history in formulating his religious perspective. The split from "Baptist" to Southern and Northern (American) Baptists happened precisely because the Southern Baptists wished to maintain the institution of slavery. A split happened again between black and white Baptists for the same reason. Even in the annals of his own religion, the role of the church is clear.

The church is not a mechanism for change - though it can be. The church functions as a cultural relic. Within it walls, it can stay frozen in amber while the rest of the world thaws from enlightenment. And then from its largely unearned cultural perch it can and does question and resist movements that respond to that enlightenment with tolerance. That tradition of resistance is the foundation for organizations like the Mormon church, the Catholic church, the Southern Baptists and the National Organization for Marriage, and just like all of those institutions, once that resistance is defeated, it'll persist and belatedly apologize as though its delayed recognition absolves its lack of participation in social progression.

While the individually religious absolutely cannot have their perspective generalized by their association with religion, but the institutions themselves (and those who defend its most divisive, unequal and thoughtlessly traditional thinking) should be seen as what they are: strident maintainers of the status quo that express indifference or antipathy to the question of whether that status quo is fair or just. Often because those who maintain it don't suffer from the status quo's more oppressive qualities. In processing this perspective, note what I didn't do: I didn't characterize those who maintain that status quo as evil, I didn't say that merely belonging to a religion means you're apart of those who wish to maintain its more thoughtlessly establishmentarian tendencies and more importantly, I didn't characterize them as lost causes. They aren't.

One of the most common traps in recognizing the thoughtlessly counterproductive and regressive role institutional religion plays on cultural and political discourse is to think that the institutions represent the people that conform to them. Conformity is not always acceptance or assent. Oftentimes - particularly in religious contexts - conformity is an expression of apathy. Sentiments like "x doesn't affect me so why bother?" or "I never thought/think about that" are not statements of resistance, they're reflections of a pervasive lack of empathy that's as much cultural as it is religious. And it doesn't come from evil, or meanness, or even incuriosity, it comes from one mindset predominating the regional dialogue and blinding them to its implications and repercussions. In righteously railing against the excesses of religious institutions, it serves to keep in mind that we harm any efforts to alter or moderate cultural opinion when we mistake caricatures of the religious for characterizations.

When a minister says something repulsive from the pulpit, it should be noted that the minister is only giving his opinion, in his words that only he chose. That said opinion is usually reflective of a hierarchy that includes him but has little to do with the members should go without saying. As should the fact that the religious have very, very little say in constructing their denomination's templates. In our desire to stand against these institutions we mustn't forget that these people are not buildings with bylaws and stated prefaces: they're individuals. Who approach things from perspectives, experiences, moral systems and understandings as varied as you or I. Confronting them and looking at them as though we don't know all of them (because we don't) and as though we don't know their opinions on most subjects (because we don't), is a requirement for understanding and engagement. Someone saying they're a Christian or even someone going to a church shouldn't be looked at as an impediment to outreach, it should be looked as a challenge to your cause, and as one that can be conquered with the proper arguments and approach.

When I commented last week about Dan Savage's inept response to a reader, I was responding both to the absurdity of the approach, and the ignorantly sweeping prejudice behind it. It's a prejudice that discredits his cause under the pretense of speaking for it. It also betrays the lack of understanding that comes with the wave of mindless anti-theism that turns an indictment of beliefs and institutions into an indictment of its believers in tandem. The cartoonish caricature of Christians as uniform bigots has its genesis in this woefully common mistake, and secular causes have no chance gaining religious understanding without first demonstrating religious understanding.

For America, religion isn't just an expression of belief in God, or a belief in the theological rightness of "The Church" as juxtaposed to every other denomination. It's barely even an expression of spirituality. The church is an embodiment of two things: society and cultural history - the latter of which explains why its positions are inherently backwards. In our desire to look at religion's significantly large participation, we forget that religion is frequently something that goes unchosen by its participants. It's an amorphous entity that - for absolute (but largely non-malicious) ill - many grow up with, are raised inside of and learn to use as a social/cultural anchor. This is the crux of the church. Culture develops around the church instead of the church developing around the culture.

The place where many people's ancestors "worshiped", the place that has "always been there" where many have eaten, laughed, spent a good portion of time with extended and immediate family becomes an unquestioned staple of "life as it should be" that's rationalized in theological language without grasping that what they're attached to is its history and its roots to existing family.

Mockery of it becomes mockery of what their family believed in. Mockery of it becomes mockery of their history. What's more, mockery of it becomes a mockery of those unconscious rationales which are considerably more secular and justifiable than both the religious and non-religious realize. It's why such thinking is followed uncritically. It's why religious attendance doesn't correspond with religious knowledge. It's why religious offspring and parents tend to share the same denomination. And it's why it's remarkably unwise to assume that religious self-identification implies spirituality, unmovable bigotry or stupidity. Religion is a cultural marker, not a spiritual one. Which is why its beliefs tend to conveniently correspond with the trends of the society it belongs to. It's either a reflection of what a culture already believes, or a reflection of what it wants to believe. When it's not, the church either modifies its perspective, or it fractures into branches that are representative of those beliefs.

In our fascination with its theological/mythological literalism and the perfectly acceptable/correct desire to combat the ignorance it produces with existing realities, it's very easy to forget an important truth: the church can't be a cultural bulwark without being culturally representative. The status quo isn't something the church creates, it's something the church justifies. Slavery predates American religious tradition, and when slavery was threatened - using its already present cultural status - it created new rationales to contest its abolition and premised them on The Book That Shall Not Be Questioned. The churches in the north - which did not have a strong tradition of slavery - coincidentally refused to accept it whereas the churches in the south - who did have a history of slavery - were welcoming of the institution. Such small examples can be found in many aspects of American society, and have parallels in the present.

Anything from America's already-present scientific ignorance, to our cultural/religious embrace of sexism and patriarchy, to America's anti-homosexual legislative priorities begins first with the culture, and ends with religion either affirming or defending what the culture has already deemed proper. You don't attack religion by approaching it with the desire to change it. You target individuals, you target dissenters, you target the culture itself, and the church will inevitably change with it. It will fulfill its pitiful - but predictable - role as the last front between tradition and progression, and then it will make every effort to forget (and compel us to forget) what role it had in delaying attempts at equality. Afterall, when was the last time you heard Genesis cited as a defense for racism and slavery in mainstream religious tradition?

Falsely, we assume that religion is the source of cultural revulsion instead of a mechanism to express cultural revulsion and it's attacked in a foolish - almost entirely backwards - fashion that simultaneously fails to identify the misapprehensions that define cultural distaste and allows an ignorance that expends political energy to chase false targets. Political campaigns that number the religious institutions amongst their opponents would do well to remember that ministers are not arbiters of their congregations opinions, and that almost no Christian has problems holding positions that are counter to the belief systems of the structure/denomination they belong to. It's silly to pretend it's difficult to make a defensible cause just one more ulterior position.

For all of its efforts to pretend that it's separate or higher than the society it belongs to, the church is little more than a product of it. The difference is that the oratorical inclination to posture theological logic as unquestionably perfect and divine makes people ignore its cultural inception while being more ardent in defending its veracity. There's not an existing Christian that doesn't make exceptions to even those elements of the Bible that are supposed to be unquestioned Biblical truth. The trick isn't to rhetorically or culturally force rejection, the trick is simply to compel others to accept your agenda as another one of those exceptions. The trick is also to accept that resistance to things like homosexuality and gender equality come from places that are expressed and justified by religion, but have inceptions that are more experience-related, visceral, unconscious and subject to misunderstanding than mere association with religion would suggest.

This, more than anything, is why cultural persuasion needs to work on an individual basis instead of by lazy generalities. It's also why going after "religion" as though it's representative of people and as though association with religion says anything about a person is both misguided and counterproductive. Furthermore, we need to remember that all advocacy should start with the presumption that absolutely no one agrees with you and that absolutely no one has any obligation to unless you present a reason for them to. Combating ugly smears, correcting prejudiced assumptions and attacking opponents has its place, but so does engaging opponents in debate without assuming that engaging them is a lost cause and that they're automatically evil for disagreeing with you. There are some people who are unreachable by the typical boundaries of logic, but you diminish the effectiveness of any cause when you assume that a sect that the vast majority of the population (rightly or wrongly) identify with is a sect that warrants disrespect, dismissal, and ostracizing by the mere fact of their association.

This is still a democracy of sorts, and recognizing the church's societal role is not a pretext to dismiss those in the church, it's a pretext to understand them in a light that's divorced from the stereotypes that define them in some circles. There are many reasons why I'm not impressed by the lazy undercurrent of Christian-bashing - not the least of which is because it almost always requires accepting a post hoc fallacy to entertain them. But there are even more reasons to avoid assuming that saying "YOU'RE A CHRISTIAN" means any more about that person than saying "YOU'RE AN AMERICAN", "YOU'RE WHITE/BLACK", or, you know, "YOU'RE GAY". One would hope I wouldn't have to state them.

And Then There Were Two

2010-10-13T13:03:00.005-05:00

It's poor form and hyperbolic to use DADT as the springboard to make this point, but our political dialogue can't sustain itself if we're operating as though only the Executive and Judicial branches are capable of shaping the political reality of the country. Likewise, our political system can't sustain itself if it functions as though responsibility for action, agenda setting and governance is something that can only be accomplished with the efforts of the President and the courts. In the absence of legislative teeth, we not only get policy stagnancy, we force the courts to make the stance that many of our supposed "representatives" will not:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday that abruptly ending the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy as a federal judge has ordered would have enormous consequences.
A day after a judge in California ordered the Pentagon to cease enforcement of its policy barring gays from openly serving in the military, Gates told reporters that the question of whether to repeal the law should be decided by Congress, and done only after the Pentagon completes its study on the issue.

Before even responding to this, let's make something clear. DADT is the very definition of an uncontroversial issue. 70% of respondents - that's 60% of Republicans and nearly 80% of Democrats - favor its repeal. The majority of the country has been against it going back to the Clinton years, and even more decisively in the Bush years. There is no political, ethical or practical reason to keep the policy in place. What's more, there are no repercussions to getting rid of it. And yet, in a decisive stance against the wishes of the majority of the country 40 Republicans stood together to vote against its repeal anyway.

I have no wish to make this about DADT. While I've never been for it, I've also never looked at it as a particularly relevant issue and - beyond hollow symbolism - I've never understood the passionate insistence on repealing it since it affects an utterly minuscule amount of people. But there are two implications for votes like this; neither of which are good. The first and most obvious is that by function of our political system, our media, and limited voter attention/care, a large portion of the government can contradict the desired wishes of the American public while still holding positions that imply that they're representatives of it. This is far more damaging than congressional impotence, since it demonstrates that nearly half of our governing system has to cater to the whims of a party that's only accountable to themselves - who are, in turn, only accountable to its political and financial interests. When the opinions of the public are non-issues to the government - particularly on social issues - we have a problem that's more systemic and damaging than simple corruption. We have a party contradicting the spirit of democracy for the short-term benefits of obstructionism.

I frequently comment on the necessity of persuasion, grassroots interaction and confronting misinformation/arguments on issues that are up for contention. It was done with cigarettes, it was done with guns, it's been done for civil and women's rights, and it should be done with gay rights. But if we don't have a government that's responsive to concerns about these issues then grassroots interaction is rendered meaningless. Political cowardice is simply a fact of our system, and I accept that, but I don't accept political resistance to public opinion without so much as an effort to question its basis. Government shouldn't be blindly acquiescent to the public, but it should absolutely be accountable to it, and opposition to something as harmless as DADT should come with something more than flippant contempt.

The less serious, but more pervasive problem with this is that - by function of Republican's abdication of governance, and the Senate's anti-democratic, woefully arcane structure - the responsibility of governing exclusively shifts to the Democrats, despite them comprising a little over half of available members of congress. This doesn't simply mean that they (unfairly) face consequences and expectations that take this automatic task to imply automatic power (i.e WHY DID THE DEMOCRATS LET ENERGY/GAY RIGHTS/HEALTH CARE REFORM/FINANCIAL REFORM FAIL), it means that only one party is engaged enough in policy to construct it in a way that's responsive to the interests of the country. This encourages the political narrative that makes Democratic failure the fault of Democratic desires while forgetting that the other side exists. It also enforces a scenario where Democrats are politically penalized for making their policy conducive to systemic realities while being the only people to functionally participate in that system.

This is partially why Democratic blame for watered down legislation doesn't make much sense to me. It's similarly why I'm confused when - in situations where an overwhelming majority of Democrats vote for something while an overwhelming majority of Republicans vote against it - Democrats will almost always get a blame that's out of proportion to their efforts in favor of progression. We're a country that requires a much, much larger stimulus, a considerably more intensive effort at job growth, added infrastructure spending, a rethinking of our finance and credit laws, and a safety net in place to avoid anything like a recession/depression happening again. The problem is that we require two parties to pass them and only one exists in function.

Update: Ezra Klein about the Senate's bizarre rules:

There's always been a certain amount of this stuff in the Senate, but in recent years, both individual obstruction, as manifested through holds, and team obstruction, as manifested through the filibuster, are getting worse. We saw Sen. Richard Shelby hold all of the president's nominees because he wanted more pork for Alabama. We've seen Senate Republicans launch record numbers of filibusters. All of this procedural hardball has made sense for the players behind it, but it carries a cost: As this behavior normalizes, everyone will do it. The Democrats will filibuster everything Republicans attempt. Individual senators will place larger holds more frequently in an attempt to get their way, get some media, or both. And if everyone does it, the Senate falls apart.

On some level, the Senate has always been riven by a collective action problem. If the individual senators and the two parties use the rules in the way that are rational for them, the chamber can't function. But there've been norms that held both sides, and most senators, in check. As those norms dissolve and the payoffs of obstruction become clearer to everyone, the collective restraint that allowed the Senate to function breaks down. And then the rules need to change. That, of course, is why the Rules Committee has been holding hearings on the filibuster. We're rapidly approaching the point at which the people who benefit most from the chamber's strange procedures are going to have to face the fact that they've made it necessary for the Senate to get rid of them altogether.

What do you do about a government with no wish to govern?

Andrew Sullivan's "Better Angel"

2010-10-12T12:00:00.016-05:00

When the piece that's designed to make you look better after you apologize for a repugnant comparison actually makes you look worse, perhaps you need to reconsider your standing to comment on politics. It's actually impossible to put into words how histrionic and profoundly ignorant the piece is, so I'll just quote Sullivan verbatim:

That is why this coming conflict is indeed as momentous and as grave as the last major conflicts, against Nazism and Communism, and why it is not hyperbole to see it in these epic terms. What is at stake is yet another battle against a religion that is succumbing to the temptation Jesus refused in the desert -- to rule by force. The difference is that this conflict is against a more formidable enemy than Nazism or Communism. The secular totalitarianisms of the 20th century were, in President Bush's memorable words, ''discarded lies.'' They were fundamentalisms built on the very weak intellectual conceits of a master race and a Communist revolution.
But Islamic fundamentalism is based on a glorious civilization and a great faith. It can harness and co-opt and corrupt true and good believers if it has a propitious and toxic enough environment. It has a more powerful logic than either Stalin's or Hitler's Godless ideology, and it can serve as a focal point for all the other societies in the world, whose resentment of Western success and civilization comes more easily than the arduous task of accommodation to modernity. We have to somehow defeat this without defeating or even opposing a great religion that is nonetheless extremely inexperienced in the toleration of other ascendant and more powerful faiths. It is hard to underestimate the extreme delicacy and difficulty of this task.

In this sense, the symbol of this conflict should not be Old Glory, however stirring it is. What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the separation of politics and religion. We are fighting not for our country as such or for our flag. We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution -- and the possibility of free religious faith it guarantees. We are fighting for religion against one of the deepest strains in religion there is. And not only our lives but our souls are at stake.

What do you even say to this? How do you respond to it? Every time someone points out Sullivan's toxically quixotic idiocy and philosophical vacuity, he either doubles down or he manages to unintentionally divert the topic to something that proves he's deserving of the ire that flows in his direction. It's amazing how rereading that piece after so long can clarify the precise areas he was wrong about and how Sullivan's frequent mea culpa's make no difference unless he can alter the silly assumptions and reactionary hysteria that animate his thinking. Sullivan's propensity to confuse polemics wrapped in elegant prose for logical thought undermines his use as a pundit and as a supposed "public intellectual".

I mean, just look at what he did there. He conflated Al Qaeda - whose lasting stain on human society is ramming airplanes into a whopping two buildings - to the European super power that bombarded all of Europe, nearly took over Africa, attempted to take over Russia and successfully executed a holocaust. He's equating Al Qaeda with the very same communists who - for decades - were and are still capable of plunging our country and the entire world into an unrecoverable nuclear war that would have collapsed every physical facet of modern civilization as we know it. And he does this not because they have manpower, not because they have advanced weaponry, not because they're well funded, not because they have broad international alliances, not because they have some underlying or successful political philosophy but...because - due to nothing but his say so - they're a threat to our constitution.

What does that even mean? How? As far as I know, our three branches are - almost a decade later - still there. And last I read the constitution only they were capable of changing anything about the constitution. But despite that and despite being no more than a rag-tag band of not-very-distinguishable criminals tacitly representing anything from western dissent to jihad, Sullivan felt the unmistakable pull of the moment and for the sake of The Argument he painted our opposition to Al Qaeda in completely apocalyptic terms. For him, it's not just an effort to bring fanatical crooks to justice, it's a holy war, a clash of civilizations, the guiding test of modern civilization's existence and a battle for our soul. I'd at least have the good sense to stop blogging if I wrote something that incomprehensibly stupid. Particularly when what I say that's supposed to "represent my real thinking" is a call for mass, unending war not one day after calling myself an "anti-war conservative".

I was going to refrain from commenting on Sullivan's nauseatingly masturbatory "HAPPY BIRTHDAY DISH!" session, but this was unbelievable. And it was a surprisingly characteristic example of the hollow nature of his thinking. As jfxgillis correctly noted, "Ultimately, Sullivan has no political principles, there's no core, no foundation, no worldview larger than his own likes and dislikes. He doesn't have principles, he has tastes". What makes this repugnant isn't just that these "tastes" apply to matters of life and death importance and grave policy considerations. What makes it repugnant is that this shallow thinking is incredibly influential, and part of what makes it influential is that he's approvingly linked by most of the people that would otherwise be his stalwart opponents if he weren't so supposedly gracious and personable.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to say that Sullivan is all bad, and I'm not trying to paint him as such. But I'm disappointed in the number of bloggers who think that Sullivan's success and influence should translate to us respecting Sullivan himself. It's true that his business model is excellent, and his approach to blogging has undeniably changed the medium. It's similarly true that there's an interesting person beyond the infuriating simplicity. But it's undeniable that he's also a sheltered, self-centered, self-interested figure who only decides to lend complete moral credence to white, male gays and colleagues who he considers "friend". Everyone else is suspect unless you're religious, in which case, your faults are a result of personal struggles with your faith that warrant reflection and sympathy. He makes these biases apparent with nearly every position he stakes out on social issues, and no amount of engagement or "willingness to admit error" or "honesty/openness" will make these features less repulsive. Mostly because he seems completely disinterested in shedding such obvious faults.

People like Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and - to a lesser extent - John Cole should know better, and should be more apt to question the entirety of what makes him a mostly contemptible figure. I think they'd find that what makes him disagreeable on issues that inspire dissent isn't that he holds the wrong positions, it's the thinking he uses to reach those positions. In his efforts to grasp at nuance, everything comes down to caricatures and simplifications. Justifying executive assassination with a simple rhetorical pivot like "we are at war" is part and parcel of his sloppy, almost childish thinking. As though the invocation of war makes questionable anti-constitutional methods more defensible for Obama (instead of, you know, Bush).

Even on the issue of gay rights - where Dan Savage disgustingly characterized him as doing more to advance the cause of gay rights than anyone else in the country - Sullivan's legacy is tainted by his inability to see people he falsely deems "closeted" as equally homosexual and equally deserving of homosexual success as he is. He's a generational hold-over of the set of gays who lived through AIDS and government complacency with AIDS and reached the conclusion that - while he functions in a supposedly "straight world" - he lives in a gay one. Far from being the most important figure of gay rights, he represents a perspective that's detached from society and gleefully ensconced in the idolization that comes with being a part of the Queer Bubble. The world is still "us vs them" to him, and his inability to put gay equality in historical perspective (which is to say, lesser in scope and importance than equal rights for females/blacks but not to the point of irrelevance), much less acknowledge that there's variety in the way homosexuality can be expressed makes him more corrosive than helpful. Which is unfortunate, since on certain gay topics, he IS a uniquely clear and palatable advocate. He was certainly helpful to me in solidifying matters on the topic that were both personal and intellectual.

Unfortunately, the presence of things to praise him for doesn't absolve his deficiencies as a pundit and a social commentator. And I find myself annoyed by the blog-wide proclivity to say otherwise. He's not just someone who's sometimes right and sometimes wrong, he's someone whose fundamental world view and approach inherently compels him to be wrong consistently. People like praising his "intellectual honesty" and "openness to criticism", but his most contentious issues have gone entirely without apology or justification (i.e the amplification of Betsy McCaughey and Charles Murray), and he still refuses to open his blog to comments. A feature which would go far in exposing the policy flaws in Sullivan's thinking and denounce the innumerable fallacies, simplifications and rhetorical cheap shots that characterize his writing.

Being an entertaining link aggregator - which is something Sullivan excels at - is not the same as being a responsible, insightful, or penetrating pundit. He's none of the above while managing to profit from the pretense of being all three. This needs to stop. And instead of not reading him (completely impossible if you spend any time in the blogosphere) he needs to be put in perspective as the thoughtless reactionary that he is. His influence on politics has been corrosive, and blithe. Infrequent recognition of those corrosive qualities is not a pittance - it's not even a bare minimum. He's why we had to wait until 2010 to get health care reform. He's why racists have an intellectual foundation for arguing that their racism is supported by data. He was an outspoken, prolific supporter/hitman of both the Bush administration and the Iraq War when it would have mattered to have someone incisive enough to see their flaws to begin with. You can look at his comments about torture, gay marriage and find true gems, but none of them will wipe away the stain of his legacy. This isn't a matter that requires pretending that he's a deep, tragic, conflicted figure. He's not. He chose his positions, and he chooses to maintain the flaws that led his thinking to them. If he were anyone else, the blogosphere would be saying far worse things than I am, but since he's Andrew Sullivan - Blogging Pioneer - we're supposed to lionize him.

I refuse.

Edit: Not too long ago a particularly observant commentator from Daniel's Larison's blog made the following observation about Andrew Sullivan (using the same article as an inspiration, no less):

It’s important to take note of the mindset on display in the last passages of that essay. Sullivan’s impulse to expand the conflict to “epic” proportions, to compare bin Ladinism to Nazism and Communism, to argue that our security demanded that we take sides in intra-Islamic debates about how that religion should be interpreted and practiced–these are all symptoms of the mindset that would lead him and others to lobby so fiercely for the war in Iraq.
Many religious people agreed with him, but the mindset itself has no particular “religious” character. It seems much more like a more modern version of secular colonialism and imperialism–we in the West, having expanded our influence into parts of the world we don’t understand, cannot retreat and must therefore categorize the natives, civilize them, and accommodate them to our worldview and our institutions.

I remember, after Sullivan had supposedly turned against the war and was advocating the withdrawal of American troops, reading a post where he argued that we should leave Iraq so the inevitable bloody civil war within Islam could be fought. This, he argued, was necessary for the development of Muslim civilization. That argument made an impression on me because it demonstrated that Sullivan’s bloody-mindedness, his conviction that it’s acceptable to sit in Adams-Morgan or Provincetown and opine about the salutary effects of chaos and violence in distant parts of the world, were constants that would survive any possible “change” in his superficial political opinions.

Having advocated that the United States fight a religious war, and having advocated changing the world through the judicious application of violence, Sullivan can’t simply turn around and blame others for how things have spun out of control. Iraq is one example of how the advocacy of violence can have consequences not intended by the advocate. The rise of hostility towards Islam and Muslims is another example. Clearly Sullivan would never condone these things, that’s the whole point. He should try looking in the mirror the next time he wonders how things got so crazy in this country.

In the words of Brad DeLong, why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Education: Doing Unto Minors What Would Not Be Done To Adults

2010-10-12T05:18:00.009-05:00

In a post that more so feigns eloquence that demonstrates it, Keith Humphreys unintentionally stumbles on a good point:

American adults allow our nation’s children to live under a set of rules that we would never tolerate for ourselves.

Indeed they do. What he failed to note is that his point not only expands to how children and adolescents are expected to "handle" bullying, but to the concept of the American school system itself. Outside of prison, I can think of few environments where autonomous individuals are legally mandated to spend 8 unpaid hours of their day (and countless unpaid hours thereafter) performing monotonous activities that have questionable post-high school applicability. I can think of even fewer situations outside of prison where adults are legally compelled to spend time in an environment where the nigh unconstitutional suppression of free speech and expression has legal backing. We want to see bullies as the undesired effect of horrible parenting producing callous kids, but why are we avoiding the conclusion that they're products of compulsory education?

They're in an environment that almost no teenager likes outside of their limited ability to socialize, and they're forced to dedicate a lionshare of their childhood in service to an education that has questionable after-high-school applicability and almost no applicability to their present or future interests. In addition to that, they're barred from being expressive outside of high school's embarrassingly rigid structure, and there's a looming disincentive to take advantage of extra-curricular programs by virtue of most schools not having good ones. It makes no sense to spend countless hours giving armchair analysis about faceless bullies without analyzing the legal and cultural mindset that mindlessly keeps the children there. What the upsurge in suicide-attention represents isn't the awfulness of bullies so much as the awfulness of being placed into a consistently tormenting environment without having the option to leave.

If you're abused or harassed by your boss, you can press charges. If you don't like the administration at your current job, you can quit. If someone attempts to physically threaten you, you have the option of self defense. But if you're bullied at school, go to the administrators and nothing happens, you're still supposed to stay there. Because if you don't, you can't go to college - which is often shorthand for saying that you can't get a decent job. There's something really backwards about the cultural and occupational incentives relating to school, and it's entirely premised on our societal inclination to pretend that education magically implies intelligence. This isn't intended to absolve bullies so much as it's intended to highlight the inescapable nature of school environments. If we want to talk about things adults can do that children can't, there's absolutely no reason not to go all the way.

The necessity and benefits of education rests on pervasive cliches that can't be confronted or corrected until they're challenged. Conversely, the questionable benefits of education (and the implication that getting one means you automatically "know more") is amongst the topics we're least willing to discuss in a way that's sufficiently disparaging. This doesn't just lead to us maintaining a stagnant and clearly unproductive scholastic framework, it leads to our generation suffering the consequences for our parents' conceptual complacency.

Bullying isn't going to be understood as long as we keep simplifying it by making it an exclusive source of derision. It's not just malicious kids being mean to helpless parties. Bullying is something that can only take place in a forced social environment where people are legally compelled to not just spend time with people they don't like, but with people who actively attempt to harm them physically and emotionally. The victims in this situation are helpless because they're placed - with the consent of the parents, and with the help of school administrators - into situations that make them helpless. That's the fault of neither the bully nor the victim, and it's getting an almost non-existent amount of coverage. Just look at this telling exchange from CNN's Bullying: No Escape townhall to get a taste of what I mean:

COOPER: And, Sirdeaner, you actually went to Carl's school, you sat in on a classroom. You were involved.

S. WALKER: Yes, I was.

COOPER: Did you feel the school took it seriously?

S. WALKER: I don't think the school took it seriously. And I'd like to also make a comment that, you know, on the last day of Carl's life he was -- it was an incident at school, and the school did not inform me. And to this day, I don't know why the school did not call me and say that my son was threatened, his life was threatened.

And the mediation for that day was he had to sit down with the person that was bullying him and for the rest of the week they had to have lunch together. And when I asked the director of the school why would you allow some -- like, allow this to happen, she said that's what we do for mediation.

Would a judge order an adult female to eat lunch with her abusive husband? Would an adult be forced to spend half an hour in a park with their rapist? Would an adult male be asked to have a drink with someone that mugged him? Nope. But we can sure expect children to eat lunch with people who threaten their lives.

We can pretend that bullies are uniquely evil monsters if we wish, but doing so ignores the fact that what makes them monsters is the environment that forces constant contact. Just think, if that woman's son had offhandedly said "screw that" and ate at another table he'd be disciplined for disrespect. He'd also still be alive. Take a few moments to process how backwards that is.

Do note, I'm not saying this is common school policy. What I'm saying is that bullying can't be viewed separately from educational contexts - which encourages bullying, allows it to happen, and gives people who commit the grievous sin of wanting to do other things no ulterior recourse beyond high school. This can be attributed to many things - not the least of which being the baseless primacy of education in the minds of adults and elected officials alike. But it's also attributable to the fact that societal progression uses high school and college as arbitrary gates that determine entry into better jobs, higher salaries, superior social statuses, etc. The inability of suicidal kids to see beyond the trapping of forced environments isn't just a function of short-sightedness, it's a function of them hating what they have to do to get ahead while realizing that there's no option in place for them to do anything else. It's one of the only class-blind variants of oppression I can think of.

I suppose this is a wonderful time to remind you that - despite an innumerable amount of core systemic problems - Obama wants to increase the amount of hours and the amount of days children remain in school. Can you imagine being forced to spend 10 months out of the year with no pay, limited rights, no benefits, and the promise of nothing beyond culturally enforced tedium just for the crime of being a minor? In time, there will be people in America that won't have to imagine it. If the very same problems we see today increase, expect to have a large swathe of people prepared to blame bullies instead of their own thoughtless complacency on the education systems near-inherent flaws. Few things are more American than deflection, afterall.

Edit: Here's an essay on the subject that captures the demographically universal nature of bullying and the bizarre nature of being forced into such a soulless framework.

A Note To Gay Activists

2010-10-03T23:51:00.009-05:00

This is why gay marriage doesn't exist:

I was listening to the radio yesterday morning and I heard your interview with Beth McDonald. I have been thinking about it a lot since then and I feel compelled to share my thoughts with you. I was saddened and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bulling. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man that took his own life after being humiliated by people who should have known better. I think you need to be aware of your own prejuduces and how they might play into your thinking. At best I think your comments were hypocritical.

If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preferance, how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)? There is no part of me that took any pleasure in what happened to that young man and I know for a fact that is true of many other people who disagree with your viewpoint. Please be aware that your words are powerful and people are listening to you.

To that end, to imply that I would somehow encourage my children to mock, hurt, or intimidate another person for any reason is completely unfounded and offensive. Being a follower of Christ is, above all things, a recognition that we are imperfect, fallible and in desperate need of a savior. We cannot believe that we are better or more worthy than other people. I have never in my life know someone who loved the Lord who wished ill will on other people and certainly not death "so that [we] can perpetuate [our own] agenda."

Please consider your viewpoint and please be more careful with your words in the future.

L. R.

I'm sorry your feelings were hurt by my comments.

No, wait. I'm not. Gay kids are dying. So let's try to keep things in perspective: fuck your feelings.

Make no mistake, the seven kids who've committed suicide are no longer teenagers, they're no longer sons and daughters of grieving parents, they're no longer individuals with varying interests and aspirations - they're not even people. Gay activists have turned them into what was most politically expedient: martyrs. And the only things they think you should know about any of them is that they're gay, they're dead and they're victims. I mention this to illuminate the totality of the dehumanization that argues sexuality as so central to one's being that saying "they're gay" is expected to evoke an automatic kindredness. Their individuality and the components that comprise it are lost and all that remains is their ability to act as political metaphors for perceived oppression. Their memory is focused only on those elements that make them rallying cries for a preconceived narrative that we're not even certain applies to them. As such, campaigns to highlight bullying branch out and devolve; reducing the ended existence of these teenagers to little more than ciphers that conveniently encompass whatever the writer's pet issues are.

Their only function - as ordained by prima donnas like Savage - is to act as emotional weapons to glibly toss at dissenters. They've become crutches for poor arguments, and justifications for the lazy caricatures that inspire them. If you feel sorry for the teenagers but don't support gay marriage, the narrative dictates that you caused the suicide of seven gay victims. If you're devoutly religious, and truly hold the "Judge not" position while not being overly supportive of their politics, you've now enabled the deaths of several people you never knew, never interacted with and likely never heard about. If you think that being gay is a sin in the same sense as premarital sex or adultery but believe that perspective is personal and not something that should be shared and enforced, their lives are on your conscience. The trick is not just to emotionally bully you into agreeing with him without the benefit of arguing, it's to paint all political and philosophical opponents as murderers. You're not just wrong, incorrect, or mistaken for failing to hold his view, you're evil. And there's no satisfaction unless you come to the same baseless conclusion about yourself that he has.

This is not the tactic of a party with a defensible position, this is the tactic of a movement devoid of ethics. They want the benefits of democracy, but they don't want to actually make the effort to convince opponents to vote in their favor. They want to be judged as more than the caricatures associated with their sexuality, but they have no desire to look at their opponents as anything but monsters, bigots and homophobes. They say they want you to sympathize with these children, but that sympathy can only be expressed on their terms, by agreeing with their positions. It's noxious. But more than that, it's reflective of a movement in search of an actual movement.

Behind all of the supposedly righteous anger and victimizing self-pitying is a loud-but-small contingent of whiners that have receded into bitterness because they've yet to face the truth that underpins all of their political losses: no one really agrees with them, and most of those that do don't have much of a reason to care. It's easy to say it's the fault of those Evil Conservatives/Christians, it's easy to blame the efforts of a largely sympathetic administration. It's even easier to blame the faceless bullies we're supposed to automatically assume are homophobic, Christian and exclusive distributors of suffering; but it's only easy because it redirects the blame. It lets them look at some of the cultural revulsion they evoke, some of the disagreement they inspire, and the victims of their short-sighted political failures and say "it's not my fault. It's theirs!" Gay rights is a movement without distinction, and they know it. Which is why it desperately draws upon the successes of others.

Lazy invocations of civil rights and women's liberation are conveyed in the absence of their own unifying theme. Comparisons to both become clumsily stated in their inability to acknowledge the ways in which their own struggles are different and lesser in form. Even the clamor to hail these suicides as victims and Christians as murderers comes from the inclination to turn mostly innocuous entities into their very own KKK. They crawl in the shadow of superior movements and proceed under the assumption that because it happened to others, it should happen to them. They've scarcely given themselves the perspective to conceive of more inclusive methods and themes, and they've yet to identify the cultural qualms that successfully nudge against and underpin all of their political opposition, but they think that by virtue of having a chip on their shoulder that society is obliged to brush it off without question. In viewing Savage's outburst, you shouldn't see him as speaking truth to power, or telling it like it is or whatever other self-congratulatory cliche you'd prefer to describe his mindless generalizations. You should see him as doing no more than giving voice to the specters of his and his movement's impotence.

While much blame can be placed on the feet of Christianity, the shining distinction is that blame can't be placed on the feet of all or even most Christians. In engaging the whole of a demographic as though they're singularly responsible for the deaths of people they never knew, you not only create an antagonist from whole cloth, you undermine and ostracize the very people who could and should be courted into your fold. Christianity's perspective on homosexuality doesn't persist because its a unique and pervasive form of "evil" that's out to Kill All Gays. It persists because all activism inherently excludes them from consideration. They're preemptively deemed lost causes in the most condescending, needlessly acerbic language from those who frequently fail to convince them otherwise and then have to watch gay people act shocked when their propositions aren't voted for. By pretending they're responsible for every anti-gay thing they've ever heard, they're offered a disincentive to ever agree with gay-friendly political desires.

In their wish to be seen as deserving of the same privileges as everyone else, there's an irresponsible impulse that relishes in the reductionism of others. It's frequently forgotten that Christians have just as much capacity for variety as any other demographic, and that loudly proclaiming they're "Christian" says nothing about an individual Christian's beliefs. The same institution that holds the Catholic Church and Southern Baptists also holds Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ. Churches are known for marrying gay and straight people. Gays are also not excluded from having Christian faith. To pretend that "Christian" is any one thing is to buy into the lazy prejudices that take the worst of a particular demographic and applies them to the whole. It's strange that a movement can demand civil rights while avoiding most of its inclusive and ecumenical impulses. It's even stranger that they can avoid this, continuously lose legislative squabbles and still feign offense whenever they lose one of their hotly contested pro-marriage propositions.

As I've said before, it's very easy to conceive of a world where activists will stumble into gay marriage and other such positive initiatives. As statistics show, opposition is largely generational and the generation opposed to it is far from immortal. It's obvious that patience will bring what inept campaigning, and odious "gay leaders" can't. My clairvoyance becomes less effective when I try to wonder how the current crop of bitter, poisonous brats can positively contribute to that inevitability.

Pressure Points

2010-09-30T15:18:00.005-05:00

Statistically, gay youth are four times more likely to have attempted/committed suicide. In the case of family rejection of their sexuality, they are 8.4 times more likely to have attempted/committed suicide and 5.9 times more likely to have high levels of depression. Without segueing into pet theories, what these numbers most starkly demonstrate is vulnerability. They're not disadvantaged by familial rejection, bullying and teasing any more than any other person that goes through them, but they are likelier to react to them more strongly and negatively. The distinction between someone's behavior toward you and your reaction to that behavior is frequently lost in this discussion, and using that reaction as the basis for presuming that bullying, teasing and familial rejection is "worse" or "different" for gays than it is for straights is as specious as it is unsupported.

The approach that tries to understand this by focusing on probable, external catalysts for suicide (i.e anti-homosexual parents/bullying) is backwards precisely because it doesn't factor the internal motivations. By asking "why are gay people picked on?" they ignore the the substantially more relevant question of "why gay people react to being picked on by attempting suicide?". If you accept that gay people aren't the only people that go through this (they aren't), and if you similarly accept that there's no proof that the kind of bullying gay people go through is any worse than the bullying straight people go through, then it's intellectually unsupportable to assume that gay people commit suicide strictly because of these external factors. Gay suicide is absolutely a problem, but in seeking solutions, it makes no sense to make up and exaggerate the nature of the causes.

There's a dangerous and negligent inclination to think that bullies are viciously homophobic monsters that go around targeting gay people for being gay without realizing that their bullying is only made disproportionately negative in the context of the perspective of gay kids. That perspective might be emboldened, reinforced or furthered by instances of anti-homosexuality, but to automatically make the leap that it's caused by it is to ignore the cultural stigma that's still attached to homosexuality. There's an increasing acceptance of gays and homosexuality, but that acceptance - particularly from a generational perspective - isn't ubiquitous, and there's still a sense of "otherness" associated with being gay that gay children aren't equipped to respond to, since their differences are frequently contrasted with the adolescent inclination to not be different. That isn't an issue with bullying, that's an issue that's wrought from very typical adolescent insecurity and lacking self-respect being merged with perceived societal hostility and the belief that there's no one to talk to or go to about it.

When gay people are bullied, it's not that the bullying worse than it is when it's done to straights. It's that the bullying is seen from a lens of victimization that views it in the context of other forms of isolation and rejection - all or even most of which aren't caused by the bullies themselves. If a person is private about his sexuality out of fear of being judged incorrectly for it, then having that sexuality pointed out in a negative light will simply increase the basis for negativity. If a kid is in an overwhelmingly Christian home where gays are frequently talked about as though they're evil, depraved and disgusting, then it's likely that they'll process their sexuality through a lens that sees it in the same light. If their sexual awakening is in the context of hearing innocuous words like "faggot" and "gay" as pejoratives, then they'll see bullying using those words as proof that their sexuality is a pejorative. Confronting bullying as though it's a cause and enforcer of anti-homosexuality instead of a product of anti-homosexuality grants undue power to bullies while making no efforts to correct the actual problem: the fact that homosexuality hasn't been culturally and societally normalized.

Bullying is not an expression of distaste/belittlement of gayness, it's an expression of distaste/belittlement of otherness. Gay people aren't bullied because they're gay, they're bullied because the qualities that are identified with being gay are "different". High School culture - and, to some extent, college culture - are environments that idolize conformity. People who contradict those standards (i.e nerds, fat people, people with mockable characteristics like big noses, people who dress poorly, talk strangely, etc) are all subject to the same kind of treatment, and thinking that gayness invokes a noticeably harsher response than any other forms of difference is misunderstanding the dynamics involved in typical bullying.

What the suicides of 4-7 gay teenagers this month represents isn't the pervasiveness of homophobia so much as a failure to change the cultural lens that homosexuality is viewed with. Very seldomly do you you see people talking about "being gay" as though it's no different from being straight. Even more rarely do you see the differences between gay kids and straight kids minimized in a way that makes the kids themselves look at homosexuality as unremarkable. Instead of being presented as the inconsequential, boring detail that it is, it functions as a source of sensationalism, assumptions and projected experiences from both anti-homosexuals and gay activists/people. It's a cultural outlier because both parties have a vested interest in making it one, and the difference that's being targeted and suffered from has its corollary in our collective failure to emphasize that lack of difference.

Efforts like Dan Savage's otherwise laudable "It Gets Better" project are fascinating windows into this dynamic. It doesn't see bullying as something that needs to be stopped in itself. It doesn't see bullying as the general issue it is. It doesn't even see all bullied kids as requiring the kind of hope the video promises - even if its message is universally good/applicable and what it's fighting against is universally bad. It intentionally draws a distinction between gay youth and "everyone else", and sees gay people as uniquely requiring defense because - to them - self-determined "gay issues" are different than issues for everyone else. By describing gay people, gay culture and gay problems as things that are independent from broader culture, they actually increase the isolation that they deem as a motivation factor gay suicides. When "straight people" suddenly become "people who are incapable of understanding or relating to me", "different from me" or "people who are against me/can't be role models", they create an artificial antagonism between the two that emphasizes differences at the expense of acknowledging the myriad of shared interests.

By failing to include "everyone else" in things targeted to gays, they separate gays from broader culture and create a gulf that implicitly ignores the common experiences both heterosexuals and homosexuals share. Suicide isn't a "gay issue", it's a teenage and a human issue. Why isn't that being emphasized? Why do gay activists engage in the self-centered myopia that paints this in terms that only apply to and are beneficial for them? In this instance, cultural isolation can be as much of a self-induced woe as a culturally propelled one, and the desire to make victimization a catalyst for cultural separation harms more gays in the long term than any single instance of bullying. As long as homosexuality and gay culture are presented as outliers instead of part of a broad, cultural continuum that's blind to marginal variances like sexuality/race, the otherness that bullies target will continue to be a point of contention because no one has made an effort to convince them of its banality.

::Jukebox::

2010-09-17T23:38:00.000-05:00

When is Abbie Heppe Going To Address G4's Sexism?

2010-09-17T21:07:00.002-05:00

Duly noting that I completely support the content of her review of Metroid: Other M, there's something...precious about a person employed by G4 complaining about the sexist machinations of another company. I don't say this as a round-about way of demeaning or disparaging her entirely valid (and largely correct) perspective on the game. I'm saying this because her position undermines her commentary. If Other M's sexism can validly factor into her perception of the game's plot/story, then G4's sexism should warrant similar reactions about her placement.

There's more than just a kernel of truth to the backlash against Other M's portrayal of Samus, and most of what's being criticized are common facets of Japanese, anime and manga culture. This is something that needs to be said over and over and over again and that message doesn't need to be diluted by otherwise solid employees of a network that's been using female hosts as teleprompter guided cheerleaders/eye candy for ages. We've seen a brave stand against Metroid's sexism, and it's one that's going to induce/inspire important commentary and discussion on the topic. When are we going to see her comment about this?

How Gamers Make Gaming Suck

2010-09-17T17:58:00.010-05:00

Gamers are generally resistant to two things once a working formula has been established: change and contemptuous recognition of a lack of change. Advocates of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time engaged in an outpouring of outrage against Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for reasons that had nothing to do with the improved gameplay/design and everything to do with the menial aesthetics/character alterations. Jak 2 is a uniformly better game than Jak and Daxter, but the former was criticized for being "darker" despite being a more intensive, better designed and comprehensively packed game. Final Fantasy 8 is - by nearly any metric - one of the most significantly divergent sequels in an entirely basic and underwhelming RPG series, and the fan reaction to those changes was resistant if not entirely hostile. Resident Evil 4 - despite considerable critical acclaim - is still subject to fan-hatred for not focusing on Umbrella, or having ink cartridges, or being largely prerendered or for being too "actiony", or not having "classic controls" and not having a different inventory system. Metal Gear Solid 2 - despite being the most cohesive, polished and consistent game in a mostly mediocre series - is still subject to mass-mockery because of Raiden (who controls exactly like Snake, but who looks too girly!).

The one constant in each of these cases is that the pervasive nudging of fanboys caused the developers to release a sequel that was not only worse, but acted as a conceptually regressive rehash of a previously "loved" concepts. I can - and have - commented on the trajectory of the industry, I've commented on the elements the industry wrongfully focuses on, and I've commented on the generally uncritical subservience of "video game journalists". But commenting on just these things can lead one to ignore two important considerations. The first is that the developers are in a profit driven industry that doesn't make much of a profit. They make bad/lazy games to cater to the tastes of fans because they can't really afford to lose demographics they've previously won. The second is that a large portion of the pool of current video game journalism (particularly with the innumerable gaming start-up sites and blogs like Joystiq, Kotaku et al) are invariably stocked with "gamers" who have a reasonably high likelihood of fitting with the close-minded, inexperienced and mostly uncritical mold of the typical gaming fan.

You can't really expect better journalism, better games or more of an emphasis on serious criticism over intellectually/substantively vapid reviews if you have an entire base of consumers who refuse to demand it. Gamers appeal to the worst qualities in every facet of the medium, and they do so without the vaguest sense of introspection. So when the immensely valuable (and mostly correct) Michael Abbott fails to reach the ultimate conclusion his post inevitably supports, you have to wonder what's stopping him from making - what seems to me - a very obvious logical leap:

In his keynote address at PAX last week, Warren Spector warned that marginalizing casual games and gamers will ultimately limit the industry's ability to grow and mature. I think he's right, but that's only half the story.
Shouting down writers who adopt a principled, intellectual, political, theoretical or other disciplined approach to thinking about a game is ultimately no less self-defeating. There is no single "game culture" anymore, if one ever existed at all. There's a place for everyone at this table, and Ms. Heppe may have just helped the folks at Nintendo make the next Metroid a better, smarter game.

I think a lot of this is either incorrectly framed or wrong, but before I outline why, let's make a few important distinctions. The most actively retrogressive fans in the entire industry are casual gamers and franchise or genre exclusive fanboys. The former doesn't want change because they're not aware change is possible, and the latter doesn't want change because they think that the way it has been done is the same as the way it must continue to be done. While casual gamers have predominate and influential sales representation, the genre/franchise exclusive fanboys (i.e people who only play JRPG's/fighters or people who only play specific series') are the ones who have the overwhelming internet and journalistic presence. The entirety of what I outlined in the first paragraph was the result of people in the latter camp guiding the narrative for what's good or bad in a game based on their mono-directional concept of quality.

You can't understand video games' conceptual inflexibility without understanding the mindset and motivations behind these camps. What Abbott quoted from Heppe's despicable comments section wasn't just a taste of the imaginatively immobile musings of the critically unengaged. It was the tedious whining of loyalists who think Nintendo and Metroid (two sacred cows in themselves) can do no wrong. There are a number of fascinating dynamics at work here, and all of them focus on several pervasive issues with the industry. But all of them can be traced back to a simple axiom: we have the industry the overwhelming majority fights for. That doesn't make it remotely close to defensible, but it contextualizes the issues in question and it pushes against the cliche that there's "a place on the table for everyone".

While that might be technically true, the fact is, the industry is where it is because it's functioned by presuming the truth of that theorem. As such, we're in an artistic environment where the people who should have minimized/no voices have the most say, and it's only now that we're seeing a problem with this. That problem is only furthered by the fact that this kind of thinking was pushed against too late. This should have been addressed, talked about and stopped during the fifth generation, and we're now suffering from the silence of a group of gamers who were too young, too silent or too ignorant to rail against the onslaught of non-gamers who were swept up in the appeal of dated, ugly (but shiny!) 3d titles.

Abbott's analysis falters both because he (seemingly) thinks all gamer demographics have equally positive potential, and because he doesn't attribute the trends that depreciate gaming to the perspectives that define those demographics. When you have a group of fans who are willing to auto-dismiss, say, the new Devil May Cry for no other reason than a deviation from Dante's original hair color (just look at the comments in the video), you're not just looking at misguided fans; you're looking at people who think even menial demonstrations of change should be resisted. When you recall fundamental and baseless resistance to qualitative successes like the first Metroid Prime or Resident Evil 4 you're seeing extensions of the same dynamic. You can't divorce these positions from the people who hold them, and you can't address the qualitative depreciation of gaming (which leads to the devaluing of genuine game criticism) without addressing that these opinions don't exist in a vacuum. They're held by a very specific kind of fan.

Holding the perspective that casual gamers/fanboys are good and that those who demean gaming as a serious medium - worthy of critically addressing and substantively changing - are bad, is ignoring the degree to which one characteristic can lead to the other. The medium-ignorance of casual gamers combined with their attractiveness as potential consumers make developers overwhelmingly likely to try simplistic, gimmick-ridden premises to superficially attract them - even if it's at the expense of the medium from a qualitative perspective. And ignoring the influential pervasiveness of fanboys who've "grown up" with x series being one specific way (like, say, The Legend of Zelda) and think because it's been that way, it should stay that way ignores how their lack of taste, sophistication, genre flexibility and developer expectation guide not just developers but reviewers. Most of whom either belong to that demographic or want to avoid pissing it off by giving popular games the coveted 8-10/10 score. In doing so, they succeed in staving off fanboy assaults and enforcing a world where popular and playable is the same as "perfect".

If it weren't for the unreliability and ignorantly demeaning perspective of casual and non-gamers, the market would be more focused on qualitative improvement instead of trying to make bad games that only seem good to that demographic. And if it weren't for fanboys, Mario Galaxy 2 and StarCraft 2 (two games that are pitiful, minimally expanded rehashes of their predecessors) wouldn't exist with such uniform praise. Their problem isn't that Other M exists, their problem is that people dare to negatively talk about it by applying metrics their biases refuse to recognize as existent.

These are people that don't see gaming as a genuine artistic medium, they see it as a mechanism for a temporary kind of pleasure that can only be found in one source and one kind of way. Ultimately, it's that narrow frame of thought that leads to concentrations of people who undermine and underestimate gaming's potential. The only way they can be seen as integral to the industry's growth and maturity is if you base that growth and maturity purely off of the industry's financial potential. Really, that's all they can positively effect.

Other M (and the reactions it's produced) have been uniquely revealing because it shows that fanboyism has no practical limits. It isn't just that they can act as apologists for bad games or lazy retreads of tired/exhausted premises. They're also willing to use misogyny to try and defend the blatantly and offensively sexist approach behind the game's design and narrative philosophy. You're supposed to forget that it undermines almost 20 years of established, feminist success. Why? Because it's Metroid. You don't speak negatively about Metroid, ever.

We don't merely require more reviewers who are willing to assess games under more relevant premises than whether you should rent/buy it or not (like Heppe successfully did). We require perceptive commentators who are willing to ignore and critically remark on the trends that lead to gaming's currently awful state. The Next Generation has been little more than a backdrop for the crumbling the industry has been working toward for almost a decade now. There's a lot of rot in how we look at games, how we make them, how we judge them and how we react to them, and I highly doubt we'll see any dramatic improvements until the sources and presence of that rot is more decisively addressed. The next time you see a rehash, you shouldn't just think about how lazy the developers are, you should process how originality and complexity would lead to most people not buying or playing it. While the industry and its uniformly awful "journalists" overwhelmingly contribute to the existence of generic, underwhelming or offensive games, ultimately, it's the gamers that provide the incentive for mediocrity.

Update: You know, in the middle of doing some minimal research for my next post, I was going through G4's website looking for information and I ended up reflexively clicking Sessler's little web series - which I commented on a while back. Holy crap it was good. I'd actually ignored it for most of this year, but not only am I going to go through his archives and catch up from where I left off, I'm giving him a place on my blogroll. It just so happens that the video I saw was actually observing a phenomenon I described in this very piece:

How Many Homophobes Count As Andrew Sullivan's "Great Friends"?

2010-09-16T12:41:00.008-05:00

I'm not going to recount Marty Peretz's characteristically vile comments, but Sullivan's mealy-mouthed equivocation on the subject is both pitiful and predictable:

Many readers have taken me to task for allegedly allowing my personal feelings and gratitude toward Marty Peretz overwhelm the Dish's usual impatience with rank expressions of bigotry.

This is not true. Sullivan only demonstrates impatience for "rank expressions of bigotry" toward homosexuals and homosexuality. When it comes to subtler, "intellectually arguable" expressions of bigotry, Sullivan scarcely has a problem. A stated point of pride for Sullivan was pushing the transparently racist writings of Charles Murray, he's admitted to finding screeds defending anti-semitism "very moving", one of the articles he opened the new millennium with made an effort to wrap the qualities of sexuality, ambition, gender identity and gender superiority around masculine, manly testosterone (which women can have, too! So see? Not sexist!), he defended Rand Paul's support of corporate discrimination by saying "You have to concede that it [the Civil Rights act] restricted freedom for a few" and he's frequently expressed ambivalence about the standing of "closeted" gays.

The only constant in his arguments is that demographics he's incapable of relating to/belonging to suddenly become parties that are worthy of "questioning" as long as the language isn't offensive. As long as sorta-bigotry never veers into outright bigotry, we are expected to look at his more questionable tangents as "seeing other views", "keeping an open mind" and not being constrained by the pesky and constraining expectations of political correctness. This fine - often difficult to maneuver - distinction makes his heartfelt, passionate defenses for the demographics he does belong to all the more glaring. Take, for instance his clear denunciation of O'donnell's gay-baiting and anti-homosexuality:

O'Donnell emerges as a viciously anti-gay bigot, blaming people with HIV and AIDS for their illnesses and conflating homosexuality with pedophilia. Her gay-baiting was also central to her smear campaign against Castle, something even expert gay-baiter Karl Rove found too much.

It's interesting how when sexually emergent white, gay men are involved, the issue suddenly becomes considerably less nuanced. There's no analysis of whether O'donnell is standing by understandable principles of religious solidarity, there's no attempt to question whether Wade Richards had a right to be emotionally affected by O'donnell continuing to stand by her beliefs and apply theism in her political life. Why, there isn't even an attempt to question the political correctness of making a democratic, religiously intensive case against homosexuality.

Almost all of the usual, painstaking conflicts that go into Sullivan's "open-minded" "writing-as-I-think" thought process seem to magically vanish when he's commenting about someone just like him. So I admit to being somewhat less than shocked when overlooking Marty Peretz's contemptible bigotry has its genesis in Marty Peretz's opinions on gay people. Things like "He gave me a position was unqualified for!" "He let me run racist screeds!" and "he let me make arguments that took money from poor people and destroyed health care!" all pale in comparison to the real reason why Marty Peretz's Jewish supremacy and anti-Muslim/Arab rants are ignored: he said nice things about gay people. Read for yourself:

Two and three quarter cheers to that. When I was editor, I cannot imagine anyone else allowing me to air the kind of debates I did back then, against the teeth of many little orthodoxies, and throwing the dice on young talent like me or Kinsley or now Frank Foer. Time after time, when I went to bat for a magazine that would truly be open to debate, he backed me ... until the five-year cyclical Wieseltier coup against whichever editor he had come to envy. (The exception to open debate and intellectual honesty was and is anything to do with Israel, a subject where the debate at The New Republic is profoundly intellectually rigged, a fact that successive editors have simply had to accept or not take the job at all.)

Take gay rights, where Marty owned a magazine that pioneered the military and marriage debate that transformed a civil rights movement; or race, where his insistence on airing the really tough issues helped shift the debate, in my view, for the better.

Sullivan's subsequent walking back from his Peretz defense and his attempted martyrdom of Peretz by claiming there's a "war" on him for waiting so long to say he's a bigot strikes me as amusing. You can tell that Sullivan wants to maintain his position as a thoughtful, reasonable person and you can similarly tell that Sullivan doesn't actually care or see how troubling and corrosive Peretz's vicious strand of bigotry is. He's stuck between his actual position (i.e not minding bigoted commentary as long as it isn't that bigoted) and the one he knows is more defensible/acceptable (based on Fallows and Wright's arguments). He'll almost certainly stick with the latter because it's easier for him to, but this simply brings me to my point. What, exactly, is keeping Sullivan from reaching these conclusions himself?

We've observed that he's capable of seeing anti-homosexual language as, well, anti-homosexual. In the case of people like Karl Rove (who had a gay stepfather!) he doesn't have any difficulty ignoring a more complex answer (i.e that Karl Rove might have no problems with gay people given his love for his stepfather) in favor of calling him a homophobe and a gay-baiter. Why do objections and "questions" regarding race and gender require us to "keep an open mind" and comments from racists require us to "look at the whole picture" and see that "despite hating Arabs/Muslims, he's really a good, good big hearted person who understands the importance of The Argument" while all things anti-gay are immediately and unequivocally wrong? There's an answer to this, but I'll be more than willing to rethink it if I had an answer to a more telling question: is there any person that has made/stands by Peretz-style arguments against homosexuals who Sullivan considers a "great friend" and is "conflicted" about commenting on?

The nature of Sullivan's commentary on this subject not only demonstrates the way his biases undermine his prized independence, they outline an annoying trend with one of his topical blindspots. He's a superficial reactionary that's willing to entertain and embrace anything that presumes unfavorability/inferiority from other people, but when it comes to something Near and Dear to him, that "independent" desire to embrace faulty arguments based on similarly faulty premises seems to vanish. The immunity from criticism he garners from this is mostly due to the fact that he's smart enough to not do this blatantly, and he's likable/interesting enough for his qualities to not compromise his faults. This needs to stop. The lack of introspection involved in his haste to latch on to anything that undermines others is both stunning, repugnant and constant.

Recent events don't uniquely stand to reveal or expose Sullivan. They merely confirm traits that he'll probably never openly confront or make an effort to correct. Sullivan's rationalizations aren't simply derived from loyalty to his old boss or to people who are accepting of his sexuality. They're the result of him not really seeing proclamations of inferiority (euphemistically masked as "difference") as "bad", "wrong" or "contemptible". I'm not hoping that he'll change. I'm hoping that he'll start applying the lens he gives to white, gay, men to non-white, non-gay, non-males. The only thing this Peretz spat demonstrates is that every other demographic is open to insulting questioning except for the ones he belongs to. In his efforts to try and call out Peretz (more out of delayed professional obligation than principled conviction), Sullivan doesn't just make his apathy on the subject of racism damning. He makes it apparent.

Celebrating 9/11 Properly: A Chomsky Interview

2010-09-11T16:53:00.004-05:00

Fighting To Protect Our Freedoms!

2010-09-11T00:00:00.012-05:00

I'll be the first to acknowledge that the above is more of a propaganda mechanism from our politicians than a self-identification from actual soldiers, but properly viewing 9/11 requires us to view the ways in which our 9/11-inspired foreign policy involvements compel our leaders to "suggest" what we should and shouldn't do in the name of those commitments. Nearly everyone finds the suggested Qur'an burning to be either repugnant or in poor taste, but more offensive than that is the blindness and hypocrisy in the condemnation. Which, of course, Obama saw fit to continue during this week's press conference:

With respect to the individual down in Florida, let me just say — let me repeat what I said a couple of days ago. The idea that we would burn the sacred texts of someone else’s religion is contrary to what this country stands for. It’s contrary to what this country — this nation was founded on. And you know, my hope is that this individual prays on it and refrains from doing it.
But I’m also commander in chief, and we are seeing today riots in Kabul — riots in Afghanistan that threaten our young men and women in uniform.

And so we’ve got an obligation to send a very clear message that this kind of behavior or threats of action put our young men and women in harm’s way. And it’s also the best imaginable recruiting tool for al Qaeda.

And although this may be one individual in Florida, part of my concern is to make sure that we don’t start having a whole bunch of folks all across the country think this is the way to get attention. This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives who are sacrificing for us to keep us safe. And you don’t play games with that.

So, you know, I — I — I hardly think we’re the ones who elevated this story, but it is, in the age of the Internet, something that can cause us profound damage around the world. And so we’ve got to take it seriously.

You'll forgive me if I have a difficult time processing implicit and explicit condemnations of paper-burning from a President that decided to keep/put more troops in Middle Eastern countries and the general who agreed to execute the President's policy. The dishonesty required to argue that burning a book is more of a danger to "our men and women overseas" than invading and continuing the invasion of Middle Eastern countries is stunning. And the willful idiocy required to say that Qur'an burning is more insulting to Muslims than bombing their homes, striking them with drones, crumbling their infrastructure, setting up bases in their cities, and lending legitimacy to the questionable results of non-democratic elections is offensive. Yes, you can absolutely say that Dove World Outreach Center is an embarrassment to Americans everywhere, but you can't throw responsibility for militaristic risks on the domestic citizenry when the very nature of that risk stems from our presence overseas.

Abroad, the military acts as an extension of political will by force, domestically the military - still deified as heroes by the propaganda of a war that's almost a century past - is the figure that shall not be criticized while acting as a manipulative appeal to sympathy. When the soldiers were ones the Commander in Chief either places there or keeps there, then any harm that comes to them is a direct response to his choices. To say otherwise is to deflect a responsibility he was elected to embrace, and if he can't do that - if he can even think of arguing that Muslim actions are even potentially the fault of the domestic citizenry, then he's blind to his complicity in their deaths.

I can't begin to convey the inappropriateness of a non-elected non-leader of civilians telling us what to do and what not to do "for the troops", just as I can't express my disgust at Obama for continuing that tack by offering a mild rebuke "for the soldiers". It's a crass, disturbing appeal, and it's one that appeals to two tropes that are sacred to American rhetorical and political dialogue. The first being that well paid, well trained soldiers who are compensated with health care and near-guaranteed retirement are "sacrificing" by choosing to "serve". The other being that religion is sacred, worthy of reverence and respect, and worthy of regard over all else. Both tropes were disgustingly invoked here, and they were invoked in violation of principles of expression.

It's perfectly fine and justified to appreciate their membership in the military, but pretending as though that membership lacks its own rewards or is somehow higher or better than what any other American does is hero-worship of the most baseless sort. And it's hero-worship that ignores the military's benefits while forgetting that they're citizens exactly like everyone else. The military is not a special consideration, and to the extent that they are at risk is to the extent that the Commander In Chief puts them at risk. We are not beholden to the military, and domestically speaking, we aren't - nor should we be expected to be - beholden to a mindset that polices actions within our borders as though we have a responsibility to cater to foreign expectations. We don't. This is not an appeal to nationalism, this isn't attempt to justify Dove's offensive ignorance. But to the degree that he's wrong is to the degree that we, as Americans, determine he's wrong.

We can disagree with them without manipulative hero worship, and we can protest against his actions, and we can argue against them. But this is not for the President's generically termed "bully pulpit" to say and it's definitely not in the purview of Petraeus to decry as though his position carries any kind of authority over what non-military members do. Whether this "hurts the troops" is not a consideration we're practically or morally responsible for. Particularly when that "hurt" comes from their involvement in a war that most Americans oppose. I understand that no action was actually taken to thwart this, and there was nothing that could be done legally to stop it, however, I reject the notion that the affair was any of the President's or General Petraeus's business. If he put the troops in a position where they were susceptible to mass-riots about the mostly-rejected actions of lone nuts, then he should probably reconsider the strategy that placed them there.

"Burning another religion's sacred texts" or even our own is precisely in line with what this country stands for. And the ability to disagree with the rationale behind burning someone else's religious texts is also in line with what this country stands for. If you can't support a demonstration of free speech, you should - as parties sworn to uphold the constitution - shut up about it and don't let your platform poison the perceptions of what qualifies as acceptable dissent. It strikes me as remarkable that of all the impotent protests, all of the conspiracy theories/lies, all of the poisonous rhetoric and all of the demagoguery, that it requires the potential reaction from non-Americans for the President to give a clear condemnation and tell us to "tone it down". This doesn't suggest to me sympathy for Muslims, it suggests to me a mistaken sense of priority about what's damaging and what isn't.

Not condemning rhetoric to defund health care reform, not condemning a platform that's perfectly fine with hinting at a government shut down, not condemning members that propose the defunding of social security, maintaining the government structure that allows torture, warrantless wiretapping, rendition and even assassination of citizens are things that directly and adversely affect me. Why have these been met with either silence or resignation while a lone nut in the middle of a half-empty church gets the benefit of presidential attention? Obama is not the leader of the free world, we are not people of the free world and Americans shouldn't be held to a standard that compels us to be models for perfect behavior.

Al Qaeda's recruitment isn't affected by one man, it's affected by images and stories of people being sent to foreign prisons and tortured without charges or convictions. It's affect by whole villages being indiscriminately bombed to target a fractured and comparatively weak terrorist network. It's the thoughtless impunity with which we can invade other countries and shield countries like Israel from the consequences of apartheid. Leaders shouldn't be able to comment on the sins of their followers without acknowledging the sins they commit.

Unrelatedly, this is the anniversary of 9/11, and I have no wish to rehash my opinion of it. But its incredible historic importance can often serve to make us forget its relative unimportance. While it's awful that people were murdered and while it's entirely right to seek justice on behalf of those murders, being worried about foreign riots and having our "leaders" condemn domestically valid actions is a simple reminder of the consequences of our overreaction. We've embraced a state that's enhanced its more questionable powers in the name of security, and we've embraced a circumstance where we're militaristically engaged in a form of nation building that we derive few actual benefits from. Instead of accepting our current state as a given, 9/11 should serve as a reminder that there was a period where our politicians could have reacted differently.

A time where they could have looked at two fallen buildings and said "this is not worth upending the rights of a whole country". A time where they could have looked at our way of life and said "the lives of 3000 will not in any way change the governance of the remaining 300,000,000". Or a time where they could have looked at terrorists and said "this is not worth the commitment of a trillion dollars and several thousand lives". They didn't say that. And we're yet again finding that we have to reap the consequences of not the terrorists actions, but theirs. The overriding lesson of 9/11 isn't death, it's the consequences for accepting frames of nationalism, defenses of militarism and formations of police states just to avoid possibility for something that hasn't happened since. People want to look back to 9/11 and remember what happened and how we've been affected by what happened. I want to look forward to 9/11 being exactly what it is: another day.