Saturday, December 31, 2005

Because You're Dull, Spying On You Is Okay

I was checking out the blog World O' Crap's very funny and very troubling "Ultimate Wingnut of 2005" contest (whose nominees include some of the leading lights of the RadCon right such as John Hindrocket and Michelle Malkin, when I clicked on a link that took me to a column by Kathleen Parker --Spies Like Us-- on Townhall.com.

The conservative columnist Kathleen Parker seeks through the trivialization of our right to privacy to justify the Bush administration's warrantless domestic spying. Her main justification is that those who have nothing to fear from government spying should have nothing to fear from government spying. She also tells us that it's better to have our embarrassingly dull lives exposed to government scrutiny than to be exposed to death by terrorism. Here's a key paragraph:

"Sometimes we might get it right and prevent another attack; sometimes we might mistakenly eavesdrop on an innocent conversation. What we save - possibly thousands of lives - compared with what we lose (mostly the exposure of our embarrassingly dull lives) would seem sufficiently self-evident to preclude the meme-driven hysteria now clotting airwaves: Bush lied; Bush spied. And, oh yes, People Died.

What's fascinating here is Kathleen Parker's temporization of the rights of Americans. I thought liberals did that. I thought conservatives had hard and fast beliefs about good and evil. I would have thought that government spying is evil -- a black deed, not a gray deed as Kathleen Parker seems to be saying. And here I thought liberals were the ones who always saw things in shades of gray.

If America is to be a moral examplar of Western civilazation -- one of the key tenets of conservatives (Remember The Lewinsky)-- then shouldn't America practice what it preaches? Especially during a war that was justified on the basis of liberation from a totalitarian regime which spied on its own citizens and intimidated its citizens through its surveillance of them?

In addition to not invading the privacy of its own citizens, the morally superior invading/liberating Bush administration should have also refrained from ignoring the rights of Iraqi citizens in the country it was invading/liberating, too. I'm referring here to the administration's justification of torture, which is an extremely serious abrogation of human rights. Previous administrations had promised never to engage in such acts, endorsing the idea that there are certain human rights which should never be violated. And once the United States was universally recognized by other countries for its absolute moral commitment to that ideal.

Kathleen Parker says she "can't muster outrage over what appears to be a reasonable action in the wake of 9/11." The problem with "resaonableness" in this case is that what one person or one organization thinks is reasonable, may only reasonably serve the interests of that individual or organization. Te problem with reasonableness as practiced by a government which engages in secret acts like executive fiats undoing privacy rights and writes secret torture memos undoing human rights is that reasonableness tends to wither in the corridors of power. The NSA thought it reasonable to spy on a vegan group, and to spy on Greenpeace. The Bush administration thought it was reasonable to suspend previous agreements on the rights of prisoners.

Democracies attempt to promote reasonableness by encouraging lots of people with different views to talk about what should and shouldn't be done. In the case of warrantless spying, for instance, by having to obtain a warrant from a judge another party would have been introduced into the decision-making process. Perhaps another kind of reason might have prevailed. In the case of the torture memo, perhaps Congress, as the representatives of the people, could have been consulted and a more reasonable course of action would have been pursued.

It also occurs to me that if Congress and the American people hadn't been disinformed by the Bush administration about Iraq's (non-existent) WMD to justify the invasion, that if there had been a truthful and reasonable national discussion of the known potentialities for anarchy and chaos in the wake of the invasion, then perhaps our national reputation as moral exemplar supreme would have remained at least somewhat inctact.

No matter how embarrassingly dull our lives, the obdurateness of prisoners, or the real facts about WMD in Iraq, the Bush administration does not have the right to unilaterally decide what's best for us. Nor does have the right to torture prisonders, or to manufacture intelligence to support its invasion plans. These acts are immoral and anti-democratic. If Kathleen Parker is truly on the side of due process as she claims, which in a democracy means lots of people have a say in that process, her trivialization of these rights is truly troubling. Another quote from the column:

"In theory, I don't want to be wiretapped without due process, no matter how unlikely it is that anyone would want to know the shade of my highlights."

We have certainly come a long way from the American conservative movement of the 50s and 60s which used to warn of the fearsome power of the State, whether totalitarian or liberal. Now conservatives apparently support a surveillance state, believing that because they control the state they have the best interests of its citizens at heart. The benevolent state -- that would have been a real stretch for conservatives like William F. Buckley back in 50s and 60s.

Particularly ironic then is that Kathleen Parker is director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina, founded by Reid Buckley, William F. Buckley's brother. Apparently the Old Model Conservative who used to fear the power of the "State" was replaced once the insurgency took over the reins of power. How remarakable that the New Model Conservative now sees the State as a benevolent surveillor of its embarrassingly dull citizens, a role it must take up to protect them against the communists -- oops, I meant terrorists.

The supposedly New Model conservative apologists like Kathleen Parker and David Brooks (on the NewsHour last week) justify their temporization of the right to privacy by advancing the notion that the terror threat constitutes a brave new set of circumstances which requires that rights be trampled because there is a new set of circumstances which require that rights be trampled because the terror threat …etc., etc., etc.

What is particularly ironic here is that in the 50s and 60s the threat of total nuclear annihilation was much more real and immediate, with circumstances that were truly unique. We were told that Russian spies were everywhere. It was a time of one of modern U.S. conservatism's great early triumphs -- the House Un-Aemrican Activities Committee presided over by McCarthy and ably assisted by a young William F. Buckley, Jr. What seems clear is that those with authoritarian bent, whether New or Old Models, although they claim otherwise, can always find a new "unique" set of circumstances to justify that the U.S. spy on its citizens.

Did the NSA spy on Kathleen Parker, I wonder? Or Mr. Brooks? Probably not. As New/Old Model conservative apologists, I somehow doubt they represent much of a threat to the State.

Friday, December 30, 2005

Go, Krugman, Go!

Krugman's column today is a real demolition of the Bush administration. Below are some key paragraphs. I've linked back to some of my older posts that speak to the lies Krugman reveals.

Heck of a Job, Bushie, Paul Krugman
...
A year ago, before "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" became a national punch line, the rising tide of cronyism in government agencies and the rapid replacement of competent professionals with unqualified political appointees attracted hardly any national attention.
...
A year ago, Dick Cheney, who repeatedly cited discredited evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and promised that invading Americans would be welcomed as liberators - although he hadn't yet declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes" - was widely admired for his "gravitas."
...
A year ago, it was clear that before the Iraq war, the administration suppressed information suggesting that Iraq was not, in fact, trying to build nuclear weapons. Yet few people in Washington or in the news media were willing to say that the nation was deliberately misled into war until polls showed that most Americans already believed it.
...
A year ago, when everyone respectable agreed that we must "stay the course," only a handful of war critics suggested that the U.S. presence in Iraq might be making the violence worse, not better. It would have been hard to imagine the top U.S. commander in Iraq saying, as Gen. George Casey recently did, that a smaller foreign force is better "because it doesn't feed the notion of occupation."
...

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Deconstructing the American Sublime

Below is my review of The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History by Richard Haw. I think the book is quite a remarkable achievement, and recommend it.

What I particularly like about Haw's work is its identification of the end the Grand Experiment of American democracy with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is with the dedication of the bridge that the anti-democratic ethos of the plutocracy is made visible, where the early workings of the public relations state and the softer techniques of domination it employs is made manifest.

We hardly notice the extent to which we have been drafted into the discourse of the American technological sublime nowadays; that's why books such as Haw's are important. To see and understand the beginnings of the discourses of cultural domination, to experience them in their nascent, still rough-around-the-edges form, is to peek behind the curtain and see through the smoke and mirrors of the Bush administration's present construction of reality.

Like me, author Haw clearly admires cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg's work, citing Trachtenberg's Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, as a seminal text of the "myth and symbol" school of U.S. historical discourse, holding it in even higher regard as such widely praised works as Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden. Based on Haw's recommendation and my own reading of Mr. Trachtenberg's other works, I plan to read Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol soon.


Deconstructing the American Sublime
For students of U.S. cultural history, Richard Haw's The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History offers a complete, and engagingly written interpretation of the cultural meanings and materials inspired and evoked by this iconic American structure. Those who work in cultural studies would be wise to acquire this book, not only for Haw's superlative treatment of the bridge's cultural history, but because Mr. Haw also identifies and nimbly employs the discipline's key theoretical texts. His end notes are especially detailed and useful.

Mr. Haw seems to have read or viewed every cultural text that references the bridge and this extensive scholarship is laudable. At the same time, Mr. Haw, whose main theme is officialdom's exclusion of countervailing interpretations and histories of the bridge, should have given more thought to excluding some of the minor works he cites. True, there are works once thought to be minor whose reputations have waxed over time and vice versa. In addition, minor works can be employed to exemplify important insights, a strategy Mr. Haw uses very effectively, but a more rigorous selection of such minor works would have served to sharpen this history with little cost to it comprehensiveness. But this is a minor quibble.

As Mr. Haw's relates the official and non-official versions of the bridge's history and the meanings ascribed to it, he shows how official versions, such as the opening day speeches, present an idealized bridge freighted with high civic aspirations – democracy, social and economic justice, etc. -- but actually exclude the voice of the average citizen and worker, and not just from the speeches and images, but from the ceremonies, too. He notes, for instance, that the opening day ceremony on May 24, 1883 and during the subsequent 50th and centennial celebrations, it was only government and business elites who through speeches interpreted the bridge's meanings and walked its walkway during the ceremonies.

On opening day, for instance, the mostly Irish immigrant men who built the bridge were excluded from the ceremony. Earlier, they had protested the fact that the date coincided with Queen Victoria's birthday. When they asked for the event to be rescheduled, the organizers refused and called in extra police to quell a potential disturbance (which did not materialize). Contrast this with the opening of the Ead bridge across the Mississippi in St. Louis 10 years before, an occasion where workers, citizens and city officials all participated in a massive 15 mile parade across the bridge. In the 1983 ceremony, which I personally observed from a tightly policed East Side highway along with thousands of other average New Yorkers, the more well-heeled citizens, those who could afford a $500 ticket were enjoying back-stage access to New York's other movers and shakers, where they could drink complimentary cocktails well away from lesser mortals.

This points up another of Haw's observations: the exclusionary tactics of Brooklyn Bridge's opening day ceremony where the average citizen participates only as a distant spectator has been the ruling condition of such events ever since. As Haw points out, this is an era in American history where the conditions of mass industrialization and the concomitant exploitation of workers was rampant, where, in the years immediately following, "strike actions would sweep through Jay Gould's expansive railroad network, and troops would be dispatched to the streets of Cincinnati. In just two years, the Haymarket affair would divide the nation. At this time of national crisis, the men responsible for the bridge's opening manufactured an image that blurred the realities of life in America and sponsored a wholly conservative vision. At the day's speeches, amelioration was less the promise than the desired effect" (page 32). Mr. Haw suggests that opening day was perhaps the first public relations event, or citing Daniel Boorstin's construction, the first pseudo-event, the beginning of the society of the spectacle.

Mr. Haw's discussion of Walker Evans' Depression era photographs of the bridge offers an example of how most depictions of the bridge serve the official version of reality. This version makes reference to the soaring aspirations of the American people, suggests that only a free people could build such a marvelous structure, that it is in keeping with Americans' innovative and daring spirit that the world's first suspension bridge was built in America, etc. So, unlike the powerfully affecting Evans' photographs of destitute farm families in the 30s Dustbowl, when he photographed the bridge Evans captured the socially approved version empty of individuals, a modernist emblem of the "technological sublime" to which people need not apply, except perhaps as witnesses kept well off-stage.

Haw makes brief reference to the "New Criticism" as a parallel manifestation of the modernist sensibility which preferred aestheticized interpretations of texts and provided readings shorn of social context, sealed off from an examination the political and economic arrangements. Having been schooled, albeit sloppily, in the New Criticism, I can attest to the powerful attraction of the method as entrée to an intellectual priesthood. I am also aware that because the method mostly treats the surface of works that yields mostly surface insights. It was perhaps the most politically acceptable method for American intellectuals at mid-century, a time when to question the political orthodoxies of the Cold War was to invite blacklisting. And so we of the next generation were taught to look at the urn and its well-wroughtness, and not to wonder at the circumstances that supported or impeded its manufacture.

Until I read The Brooklyn Bridge, I was not aware of the place the bridge occupies in the firmament of America's civic religion. Mr. Haw convinced me of its importance as a sign of the plutocratic takeover of America political and economic system, the first "revolution of the bosses," a reprise of which we are experiencing today. Indeed Mr. Haw obliquely suggests that there are many parallels between the late 19th, late 20th and early 21st centuries, that the cynical coupling of exclusionary tactics and inclusionary rhetoric practiced on opening day continue to be employed now with an ever more cynical intent and to greater and more pernicious effect.

Monday, December 26, 2005

Masters of the Sublime

As absolutists, the administration insists that only one view is possible. As propogandists, they insist that there are always at least two sides to every question. They employ this cynical assertion in their dealings with the media, a credulous media held captive to false "standards" of what constitutes "fair" journalistic practices.

This morning on NPR, Lewis Lapham was being interviewed by Steve Inskeep. Lapham, 70, is leaving Harper's Magazine to start a new magazine on history. Asked why, he cited Cicero who said "Those who do not know the history of what has come before are like children." Lapham was critical of the Bush administration, saying that he'd never been witness to such an anti-democratic administration in all his life.

Inskeep, apparently distressed that Lapham is so angry at what's going on in the U.S. under the current regime, felt compelled to present a counter to Lapham's views, quoting Kurt Andersen (the young man's Charlie Rose), who wrote something to the effect that Lapham's views have become stiff and doctrinaire. Then he questioned Lapham about whether he had ever published anything by neo-cons. This sounded like an attempt at questioning Lapham's credentials for "fair and balanced" journalism.

What's clear in the interview is that Inskeep, so conditioned by the idea of journalistic "balance," can't see how he and his brother and sister journalists have been duped by the neo-cons pundit class. There is no "on the other hand" possible when Bush gives the NSA the go-ahead to spy on the American people without a warrant. Only condemnation and outrage are possible. There is no "other hand" possible with cooked-up intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons. (Although Bush gamely offered one the other day: the intelligence was wrong, but it the invasion of Iraq was still necessary anyway.

Lapham during the interview offers an image of America that sits under a bubble, a bubble that reflects back only the ideas of the conservative punditry and the administration. He suggests that US media doesn't attempt to get outside the bubble, that no other perspectives exist. Inskeep is incredulous at this characterization, which, to my mind, just goes to show how he is a captive of the bubble.

Memory is a political act. Cicero knew that. Men like Lapham know that. Both of them know that without history, knowledge, understanding, outrage and resistance can be held in check. As propogandists, the Bush administration insists on both "sides" being presented. Rarely, if ever is the "side" of history presented, however. When it is, the history quoted by the Bush administration is the Ronald Reagan version of history where America and democracy triumph over evil. The media prefers argumentation devoid of history, name-calling, contradiction, or if history is to be included, they accept the prevailing view that history tells us that democracy is inevitable.

With no point of comparison, historical or otherwise, outside of the bubble, the Bush cabal has been able to claim without fear of contradiction (at least until relatively recently) that they are ushering in a new democratic sublime, the best of all possible worlds with both hands. "Liberals" on the other hand are accused, like they were during Vietnam, of tying one of these hands of the administration behind the back.

Incidentally, Lapham told Inskeep he had not published an article by a neo-con in a long time because, in his view, the neo-con clique has not produced anything of note in quite some time. Indeed, it is the neo-cons who have become doctrinally-driven, who, now that they have assumed power, can no longer conceive of an other hand to their smug, morally bankrupt ideology.

Friday, December 23, 2005

Automatic for the Pulpit

If only the propaganda team in the White House could give it a rest. Just for a few days over the holidays. Even a few hours. If only they would desist from designing news stories that innocent, unsophisticated preachers will cite from pulpits all over America as a hopeful sign that peace is on the way in Iraq. If only they would stop pretending they are the peacemakers, stop polluting the season with PR perfidy.

But, no, it's too much to ask from this gang. It's what they do. They wake up spinning. Lies, falsehoods, prevarications, fake history. And because it's what they do and what they have done so effectively, the cabal doesn't miss a trick when it comes to the tone and the timing of its propaganda announcements for maximum positive impact during the holiday season.

Last week Bush gave a speech in which he scaled back his apocalyptic "my way or the highway" rhetoric. He "admitted" that the intelligence he used to justify the invasion of Iraq was "wrong" but defended the invasion anyway as a good idea. This was a stunning breach of logic for some of us -- like Mike Malloy on Air America who was practically spitting blood the other night when he nailed this for the lie that it was. But Bush mostly received good notices from the pundit class, none of whom pointed out that the "wrong" intelligence was actually cooked up by the cabal itself. Instead they noted the change in tone and style, connected it with better poll numbers and decided the new style was good. Confession is good for the poll.

Then few days ago we had Cheney making his first visit to Iraq, a big non-story as far as I could see, but one which the media dutifully covered. The message seemed to be that this was an on-site announcement, and hence more dramatic, restatement of the perennial "Iraq: On the Verge of Democracy" story of which the administration is so very fond. There was the exciting possibility that Dick would have a heart attack and die in a bunker other than those here in the States, but that's about all I myself could detect in terms of dramatic interest.

The headline story today is that Rummy announced a troop withdrawal from Iraq. Just in time for Christmas. Just in time to be the lead story for the Sunday talking head shows. Of course, it's not a withdrawal or a "draw down," it's actually a non-sending of 5000 troops to Iraq from elsewhere. But no matter, it's being reported as a "draw-down," one of those official, irrefutable, military industrial locutions that the media loves to parrot.

Ah, how readily most journalists ape their masters language and promulgate their assumptions. How they love to feel like insiders, preferring it to actual reporting. But then again, you can't expect too much of these note takers, these uncritical circulators of the administrations latest PR offensive.

Sentimentalists, they are easily gulled into reporting this make-believe pilgrimage toward peace. May Santa draw down their presents or, better yet, terminate their gifts with extreme prejudice!

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Right Wing Ideologues for Hire

Paul Krugman's December 19, 2005 column, the first two paragraphs of which are excerpted below, supports Carol Brightman's point in TOTAL INSECURITY: THE MYTH OF AMERICAN OMNIPOTENCE that the low wall that once existed between government and business has been trampled into dust.

Tankers on the Take
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NY Times Op-Ed Columnist, Dec. 19

Not long ago Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Policy Innovation, seemed on the verge of becoming a conservative icon. Before the Bush administration's sales pitch for Social Security privatization fell flat, admiring articles about the Bush plan's genesis often gave Mr. Ferrara credit for starting the privatization movement back in 1979.

Now Mr. Ferrara has become a different sort of icon. BusinessWeek Online reports that both Mr. Ferrara and Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, were paid by the ubiquitous Jack Abramoff to write "op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients."
In the current regime this probably doesn't even qualify as an ethical breach. Since the "government" is now filled with right wing ideologues and former / future lobbyists and corporate execs who employ the intellectually and morally bankrupt rationalizations provided by places like the Cato Institute, it's hard to see where any ethical line would even exist. And since the economic "theories" they propound posit that government should give way to the Market God anyway, there's not even a theoretical reason to see government and business as different institutions with different ends.

Not surprising either is that the theories these right-wing think tankers have been hawking for the past 30 years serve to justify the constant expansion of benefits for the super-rich at the expense of benefits for anyone else. After all, these theories were commissioned by billionaire trust fund babies with names like Mellon Scaife and Coors. All in all, these "thinkers" are just following the money, which for them that amounts to a perfect alignment of personal, social, spirtual and economic goals.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Born Under a Bad Sign

Indented below under this introduction is the review of "TULIA: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town" that I submitted to Amazon yesterday. Under that in a separate post is the review that I did not submit to Amazon. In the review I submitted to Amazon I employed an unironic, unscornful, factual diction. The "un-Amazon" review attempts to get behind the facts to examine the New Model Conservatives' self-congratulatory tale about the end of racism, a phrase which some may recognize as the title of a book by Dinesh D'Souza, written in 1996.

It is indicative of the weightlessnes of much of conservative thinking that D'Souza would title his book "The End of Racism," a strategy also used in what may be a better known example, Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History." By acclamation alone it seems, D'Souza wishes to end those troublesome impediments to the hegemony of conservative doctrine. Unlike the Old Model Conservatives who naturalized the arrangements of previous periods as "traditional" in order to defend their reactionary politics, the New Model Conservative merely declares that racism has ended, that capitalism has won the battle of competing idelogies, that now a new more perfect era can be born out of the smoking wreck of misguided liberal policies, case closed, case closed, and finally, case closed!

I'm going over old ground here -- D'Souza's book was published in '96, which in today's hyperactive newsosphere is the eqivalent of the Iron Age. Every day we the American people are energetically reminded that there is a lot of news and that news is something we must be engaged in. The news, however, I would suggest has become a relentless recycling of conservative news hooks that always point back to conservative wedge issues -- abortion, homosexuality, law and order, religious values, etc. The wedge issues nowadays exist inside the larger construct of the War on Terror. Since there is a fundamental sameness to the news; I would argue that paying attention to the latest gyrations of the right wing propoganda machine and its many servants is to be recruited into conservatives' long-term program of coverting every American into a belligerent, intolerant bigot.

Let me suggest that what really might be useful is an exploration of the politics of resentment. This idea is not original with me, of course. The marvelous Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Schivelbusch is a tremendous, pathbreaking achievement on this topic, and I'm sure there must be others. I was reminded of this work recently when reading The Abuse of Evil by Richard Bernstein (reviewed below). Bernstein refers to the politics of "humiliation" as being one of the driving forces of this century, and worthy of study.

The current administration has sharpened the politics of resentment into its main ideological weapon. This is one of the main reasons why the current regime is so redolent of Facism, the ne plus ultra of the politics of resentment. Importantly, resentment is intimately linked to humiliation. People resent being humiliated, and they seek to humiliate their enemies in return. This is an ever expanding and self-perpetuating cycle. In fact, recently, the mobilization of resentment to humiliate one's enemies has become so widespread and so vicious that many now take the ranting of conservative like Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Coulter to be what politics is.

Liberal politicians have yet to find an issue that can fan the flames of resentment to the extent neccessary to convert voters to their side. And it may be that they incapable of fanning the flames even if they can find an issue. Playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules, liberals still hope for a reasonable 'fact-based' dicussion, while conservatives simply go for the juglar. I mean that in a near literal sense. In fact conservatives never go anywhere else but straight at their enemies, favoring the ad hominen attack, or variations on the attack, nearly every time.

One variation of the ad hominen attack conservatives deploy is to attempt to set the "qualifications" for disputants. For example, Cindy Sheehan was deemed unqualified as a critic of the Bush administration's colonial adventure in Iraq because she held views conservatives identified with the "hard left." This immediately called into question her standing as a disputant by suggesting that she was a dupe of the "hard left" or, using older conservative language, a "communist dupe."

Conservatives also qualify disputants by setting up the terms of "authenticity." Cindy Sheehan was disqualified by conservative O'Reilly and his many friends because "authentic" grieving mothers were supposed to grieve either apolitically or to grieve but still support the Commander in Chief at the same time. Sheehan was deemed unqualified in the lowest, meanest manner possible by one attack pundit who said that her own son, Casey, would be ashamed of what she was doing. In one stroke both as a mother and as grieving mother was attacked. This attack suggested that she couldn't speak for her son because since she didn't support the President, she couldn't understand what her son really thought. Shame on her. Shame, shame, shame, bad Mom. In the shame-based universe of the New Model Conservative, liberals or anyone who questions the current regime should be made to feel ashamed of their beliefs. Shame, shame, shame, case closed.

This idea of authenticity and qualification occured to me when I posted the second review of TULIA below. Conservatives cannot accept that there might be more than one way to look at at anything. To them it is a sign of deceit that anyone could hold more than one view in mind at the same time, or that there might be more than one voice inside of an individual. Since they insist on absolutes, on the division of "us against them" they categorize thoughtfulness as weakness. They claim to have one view and are so intent upon forcing that single-minded view upon everyone else that they do not have the time or the patience or, perhaps the courage, to question their views or to listen to other points of view.

That is why democracy is under serious threat under the current regime. Critics are constatntly disqualified based on spurious conditions. The radical conservative "base" is stoked on a constant diet of resentment, and rewarded with the fantasies of their enemies' humiliation or powerlessness or exposure, etc.

Born Under A Bad Sign, December 17, 2005

"TULIA: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town" can be read any number of ways: as a legal thriller; a true crime tale; a sociological case study of a town and its people; an examination of the innerworkings of law enforcement across local, state and federal institutions; a hopeful tale of everyday American heroes coming to aid of victims of a renegade cop; an examination of the social and political arrangements that reinforces the interests of the powerful; as a troubling description of an increasingly repressive society reforging formerly blunt instruments of racist control into sharp new weapons of surveillance and incarceration that are guided and informed by a creed of punishment flowing out of hell and damnation readings of the Bible and law enforcement's "three strikes and you're out" ideological counterpart.

What "TULIA" shows most compellingly is the extent to which racism, which Blakeslee shows is nowadays most often expressed in economic terms, lies just below the surface in the everyday assumptions of life in small southern towns. While the town's elite knows that the "N" word is no longer acceptable in polite society, they have found ways to enforce the old status quo with a new rhetorical spin. For instance, the head of the Tulia Chamber of Commerce, Lena Barnett, speaking resentfully about county tax money being spent on court appointed attorneys for the 39 African Americans nefariously accused of dealing drugs, says, "If you can't afford insurance, then you don't go to the doctor... If you can't afford to hire a lawyer, then you go without" (page 183). This says much about what towns like Tulia and states like Texas are willing to pay to balance the scales of justice.

Blakeslee ties this observation to a larger critique of government spending, pointing out that while white Tulians resent their tax money being spent to defend the legal rights of blacks or on the poverty programs used predominantly by African Americans because of the economic discrimation they suffer under, they conveniently forget the welfare programs that are solidly in place for the white farm owners. Here's Blakeslee in one of his typically insightful examples of how the deck is stacked in favor of those citizens deemed important by the political classes:

"The total tax dollars invested in poverty programs in Swisher County, controversial thought it may be is dwarfed by the subsidies the county receives through the various federal farm programs. In 1990, farm subsidies totaled $28.7 million for Swisher County. Much of that money subsidized cotton and wheat grown for the export market, where U.S. farmers would otherwise be unable to compete with low cost operations in Latin American and Asia. The farms that keep the county alive would likely be gone in a generation if the government checks ever stopped arriving, which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of race, relies on a handout of some kind, either directly or indirectly. Most American taxpayers are unaware of the extent of such programs; if they were it would be a hard pill to swallow. Indeed, critics of farm programs have observed that in some counties (including many in the panhandle), the government could simply buy out most of the farms in the county--land, buildings, and equipment--for roughly what it will spend on subsidies over a ten- to fifteen-year period"(page 188).

Blakeslee shows elsewhere that these Federal dollars tend to find their way disproportionately into the pockets of those who have more money to begin with. Like the cocaine the 39 black Tulian's were accused of selling, it has been "stepped on" by a lot of people further up the line. In the case of the cocaine, the stepping on was done by the rogue cop who fabricated these cases so he could pocket most of the "buy money" he was provided. In the case of the government checks, the farmers keep as much of the money as they can by planting grass instead of crops under a government program designed to keep the next Dust Bowl at bay, as well as manage market prices. Day laborers, crews of cotton pickers just aren't needed for fields of grass.

For some readers, TULIA may seem to digress too far from its basic narrative thrust which is the story the unmasking of a crooked cop and the collusion of law enforcement, the courts and government in the enforcement of racism. But these "digressions" on political expediencies, on government spending, on the assumptions about human nature made by fundamentalist religion, on the vast new penal system that has been growing exponentially through politically motivated law enforcement programs and punitive, inflexible laws, all of these additional explorations are necessary to understanding the social and political arrangements that, regrettably, only prick nation's conscience on the rare occaions when concerned citizens and activists shine the light into the dark corners of America's latest, more sophisticated, disciplinary regime.

Friday, December 16, 2005

The End of Racism

One of the revisionist tales told by New Model Conservatives is that racism no longer exists in the U.S.. It goes something like this: Once upon a time a long, long ago time there were troubles with racism. No one knows how it got started, although it might have had something to do with slavery. But one day the Good Hearted American People awakened to the fact that non-white people were not being treated equally, even after Lincoln freed the slaves. Then sometime back in the 60s, virtually overnight, the People put an end to this bad behavior in American Society.

In this mendacious, soft-focus, self-congratulatory version of history, the real work of fixing the unfairness was accomplished in large part by the Good Hearted People who were actually always against racism and were always going to get around to stopping it. In this self-forgiving fairy tale, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are mentioned as minor heroes whose contributions are limited to King making a speech about Freedom, and Parks being too tired to move to the back of a bus. The prodding from King and Parks merely moved things along a tad faster, that's all. It was mostly the Good Hearted American People who made sure non-white persons got their voting rights and ended segregation, because the People knew then and still know now that all people are supposed to be Free and Equal in America, even if they are not white.

What's particularly remarkable about this revisionist history is that by "ending" racism in America sometime in the 60s, the New Model Conservative could then put a stopwatch on the progress of of non-whites and immediately find them wanting. In their estimation, since people of color have had Equality for two generations then these non-whites have had more than enough time to pull themselves up by their bootstratps and become white and middle class. Since for the New Model Conservative moral character is almost entirely bound to economic deserts, poor non-whites now have no one to blame but themselves for their inability to achieve the American Dream. That most have not is taken as evidence their intransigence, their lack of discipline, their lack of moral character. For those who pay attention to such things, these descriptions of non-whites sound suspicously like the descriptions of non-whites from the olden times before racism ended.

I'm reading TULIA: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town. What's remarkable is the extent to which racism, often expressed in economic terms, lies just below the surface in everyday assumptions the town's whites make about the non-whites. For instance, the head of the Tulia Chamber of Commerce, Lena Barnett, speaking resentfully about county tax money being spent on court appointed attorneys for 35 African Americans accused of dealing drugs, said "If you can't afford insurance, then you don't go to the doctor... If you can't afford to hire a lawyer, then you go without" (page 183).

Blakeslee points out that while white Tulians resent their tax money being spent to defend the legal rights of blacks or on poverty programs used by African Americans, they conveniently forget the welfare programs in place mainly for white farm owners.

The total tax dollars invested in poverty programs in Swisher County, controversial thought it may be, is dwarfed by the subsidies the county receives through the various federal farm programs. In 1990, farm subsidies totaled $28.7 million for Swisher County. Much of that money subsidized cotton and wheat grown for the export market, where U.S. farmers would otherwise be unable to compete with low cost operations in Latin American and Asia. The farms that keep the county alive would likely be gone in a generation if the government checks ever stopped arriving, which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of race, relies on a handout of some kind, either directly or indirectly. Most American taxpayers are unaware of the extent of such programs; if they were it would be a hard pill to swallow. Indeed, critics of farm programs have observed that in some counties (including many in the panhandle), the government could simply buy out most of the farms in the county--land, buildings, and equipment--for roughly what it will spend on subsidies over a ten- to fifteen-year period. (page 188)
How unsurprising is it that the Good Hearted American People seem to be blind to the mostly hidden machinery that puts bread on their tables, and to be resentful of the few crumbs, scraps and sops that fall elsewhere.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Memory is a Political Act

I'm back reading Jesus Is Not A Republican, The Religious Right's War on America, and have come across some good quotes.



"How Americans remember their country's use of terror bombing affects how they think of terrorism; how they remember the first use of nuclear weapons has a profound relevance for how the United States behaves in relation to nuclear weapons today. If the long American embrace of nuclear "mutual assured destruction" is unexamined; if the Pentagon's treaty-violating rejection of the ideal of eventual nuclear abolition is unquestioned--then the Bush administration's embrace of nukes as normal, usable weapons will not seem offensive.

"Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny. The Bush administration is fully committed to maintaining what the historian Marc Trachtenberg calls our "nuclear amnesia" even as the administration seeks to impose a unilateral structure of control on the world. As it pursues a world-treatening campaign against other peoples' weapons of mass destruction, that is, the Bush administrations refuses to confront the moral meaning of American's own weapons of mass destruction, not to mention their viral character, as other nations seek smaller versions of the American arsenal, if only to deter Bush's next "preventive war" war. The United States' own arsenal, in other words, remains the primordial cause of the WMD plague. (Quoted from James Carroll's book Crusade, pages 113-114.)
In the Cloud of Unknowing and Unreason promoted by the Bush administration, the past is a grab bag of ahistorical Bible lessons, mostly from the Old Testament, which Bush uses in his role as prophet to justify his actions. In the same manner that Christians see the Old Testament as the back story of the New Testament, for Bush the past is only a prelude to the now, the arrival of the New Messiah bringing forth a new birth of freedom: omnibeneficent American-style democracy.

Many of Bush's fundamentalist followers believe the War on Terror is part of the march toward Argmageddon, an Armageddon they welcome and embrace. In the best tradition of the politics of resentment, they believe they will be transported to Heaven and that those "left behind" will be subjected to the real terror, care of His terrible swift sword. What better reward for fundamentalists, resentful of dislocations caused by the modern project and the "liberal elites" who they believe run it, than to watch the destruction of their enemies in an orgy of blood and fire?

Now that's the ultimate "sacrifice" for this crowd!

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Travels with Mammon

As the ungentle conversion of every man, woman and child into management consultants continues apace, we are fortunate to have Martin Kihn's highly readable, mordantly funny HOUSE OF LIES: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time to remind us how deeply this enterprise has come to penetrate our souls. So deeply have these "core values" (to use an egregious elocution of the consultant class) been inscribed into our hearts that to believe in anything else is now made to seem utter madness, suspiciously perverse, to partake of a dangerous agnosticism.

If you've ever been in a meeting where data was "socialized," attended an "off-site" for "team-building," you will no doubt gasp with laughter at Kihn's well-turned tales of consulting engagements gone awry, of destructive and unexpected outcomes engendered by the very consulting culture itself. Beginning with Kihn's discovery that a star partner at his firm is a self-promoting fraud, and ending with his unexpected ascension to Senior Associate status in the wake of a botched assignment where he was neatly snaked by one of the factions within the client firm, Kihn takes us deep into the necrotic, nervous bowels of the American business elite.

One of the best sections is Kihn's summaries of the top three business books of all time. They are as follows: Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors." His one word summary: "Differentiation." His ten word summary: "Power of buyers and sellers, Entry barriers. Substitutes, Industry rationality." He does the same for "In Search of Excellence" ("Open," "Spartan settings, open doors, fewer walls, fewer offices, Less Layering), and Built to Last ("Goals," "Big hairy audacious goals, childlike cultures, more demanding home-grown management).

Devastatingly funny too is Kihn's admission of the two fallback positions to use in a desperate client situation, what Kihn calls "Consultant's Panic Buttons: 1) Flatter the clients, and 2) Ask for their opinions. Then there's his dictionary of consulting terminology, "The Complete Consultant's Dictionary" which features such putrid locutions and constructions as "pushback," "skillset," "knowledgeware," "visioning," "work streams," "step change," "incrementals," "environmentals" and "journeyline."

Kihn's keen eye for outbreaks of humanity into inhuman corporate spaces, his awareness of the rapacity and amorality of a system designed to increase shareholder value at the expense of every other value, as an essentially feudal structure designed to benefit the investor class at the expense at every other class, and his descriptions of how consultants and their clients seek to reduce all human endeavor into the cold analytical siftings and sortings of multivariate models, is certainly a welcome counter to all the triumphalist business-as-salvation nonsense that is now shouted from the rooftops without respite at a staggering and struggling public.

For someone as insightful and apparently decent as Kihn it's a bit disheartening that, according to his bio, he writes for Fast Company, that egregious relic of the bubble economy, a column called the "Consultant Debunking Unit." Kihn is smart enough to know that it's not just consultants who need debunking (although they are a choice and appropriate target) but the entire neo-liberal corporate business ideology, an ideology which has swallowed our entire society and is salivating for and slouching after the rest of the world.

In such an environment it may not necessarily seem to be a coincidence that consultants use the term "black factory" to describe a "place where consultants go when they're doing an open-ended study that no one will ever read," and the CIA refers to secret torture facilities in the former Soviet Union as "black sites." It's also hard to believe that it is only a coincidence that our Vice President is the former principal of a firm which has been making money hand over fist since the open-ended declaration of the "war on terror." . Or that this President, who is the scion of a family with deep roots in oil, the stock market, the foreign intelligence and munitions businesses proactively started a war against a nation afloat on a sea of oil, is untroubled by torture, by "black sites," and the wholesale slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians.

Certainly, however, it is easy to believe, and Kihn shows, that management consultants have become tools of their tools, and like McNamara and the other Whiz Kids in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that they are more than willing to sacrifice the moral scruples they might have encountered in the occasional business ethics class on the latest Taylorite altar. That's funny as far as it goes.

And it may even be funny that management consultants abase themselves to the gods Downsize and Rightsize, Outsource and Offshore, and kneel slavishly before the latest, most fashionable most anti-human algorithm. We can certainly laugh and feel superior to these mendacious instrumentalists who work for firms that piously espouse such "core values" as integrity, honesty, quality, and even fun. But the fun stops when the ultimate client, Mammon, insists in the name of "client service" on our anxious and abject obedience.

Like most people born without trust funds – a great moral failing of most Americans in this country run by billionaire trust fund babies – Kihn has had to choose one of the two vexed "journeylines" provided by late capitalism: management consulting to the military industrial infotainment energy defense complex, or clerking for same. HOUSE OF LIES does reveal some of the dark practices of this roving packs of priests of the Dollar Almighty, and does succeed in letting some of the air out of the pernicious puffery the business class subjects us to in our every waking hour. For that, in these days of business triumphant, though we might want a more thoroughgoing critique, we must be grateful for every satiric sally, every well-aimed dart, every unmasking and demystification of the malign methods of the corporatocracy.

Friday, December 09, 2005

Pinter and, me, Panoptionman

The excerpt below from Harold Pinter's Nobel prize acceptance speech yesterday summarizes about 95% of what I'm saying in this blog. (That's Pinter, not me, in the photo).



I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

"God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it."

God and Halliburton Revisited

Why the steadily advancing Halliburton profits? Because in Bushworld when you do God's (and your buddies') work, God rewards you!

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

How to Improve Your Amazon Reviewer Ranking

My ascension in the Amazon reviewer hierarchy was inadvertent, unstudied. When one day, magically, the tag TOP 1000 REVIEWER appeared under my Amazon nom de guerre, I was so uneducated about the innerworkings of how one rose in the rankings that I thought it all depended on the number of reviews a reader posted, and not related to the exploitation of the Amazon systerm and common human failings to climb to the lofty heights of top reviewerdom.

Then one day I stumbled across some backchannel gossip on the Amazon site about one reviewer who had double posted slightly different reviews in order to reap more helpful votes, and the scales fell from my eyes. I realized there were some reviewers who were actively pursuing higher rankings. That they were gaming the Amazon system to more up the ladder. I still find this astounding, but it takes all kinds, I suppose.

My "case study" on which I base my suggestions for how to improve your Amazon ranking is my review of Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It's the review I've gotten the most helpful votes for, nearly 200 at this point.

Here some reasons why. First off, it's an Amazon "Spotlight Review." Amazon selects reviews to be featured as first position or second position "Spotlight Reviews" from among existing reviews that have a lot of helpful votes already. That means these reviews are the first or second reviews people encounter when they check out the Customer Reviews for a book.

Being first or second or at least being on the first page, is a huge advantage when it comes to getting votes. Once a review is pushed to the second page (as new reviews come in older reviews get pushed back), the number of votes you receive falls dramatically. In fact, a review may never get a vote again. That's happened to me on a number of occasions.

Very positive reviews with 5 stars get more helpful votes than lukewarm reviews with 3 or 4 stars. Negative reviews get the fewest helpful votes of all. I think this is because if people are looking for book on a subject or by an author they are interested in and so are predisposed to wanting it. Negative or lukewarm reviews are not appreciated. On a related note, I have discovered negative reviews of conservative books, espeecially those by conservative provocateurs like those on Fox cable, call forth swarms of negative votes. And, of course, conservatives being conservatives, ad hominen attacks against the reviewer, too. The same holds true in the opposite case as well, although it appears that the volume and intensity of the attacks are not as extreme.

The initial interest in a book generally wears out fast, for example, reviews that are a couple of months past the publication date don't get much voting activity. This is especially true of topical books. Although when the paperback comes out, there's usually another flurry of activity.

So for those interested in getting lots and lots of helpful votes on Amazon, here's these findings operationalized for that end:

Try to be the first reviewer of the book, and get the most helpful votes you can so that your review will be chosen as a Spotlight Review. You will greatly benefit from this because of first or second position bias.

Topical books that play on any right wing / left controversy attract the most vociferous comments, votes, and presumably, a good deal of site traffic. So if you want to get lots of helpful votes, strenuously agree with the author and rave about their book, then sit back and watch the helpful votes roll in.

Conversely, avoid unhelpful votes. Don't go into the lion's den and attack conservative books because you will pay a big price. "Unhelpful" votes will be subtracted from your "helpful" votes and your ranking will suffer accordingly.

In short, the Amazon voting system rewards very positive reviews and recency and punishes negative reviews and lack of recency. Enthusiasm and speed are everything!

Me? I call 'em as a see 'em and let the votes fall where they may.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Tales of the Counter Reformation

Reading the first few essays in Jesus Is Not A Republican, The Religious Right's War on America, edited by Clint Willis and Nate Hardcastle, I came across two sentences in two different essays that go to the heart of the dissembling practiced by both political and religious conservatives.

"They [Neo-Con followers of Leo Strauss] really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy." Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right quoted by Jim Lobe in his article Leo Strauss's Philosophy of Deception, page 22).

"As seekers of mainstream credibility, they [purveyors of Intelligent Design] don't want to be associated with the medieval persecutors of Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, they try to present themselves as heirs to those very visionaries, insisting that dogmatic secularists desperate to deny God are thwarting their open-minded quest for truth." The New Monkey Trial, Michelle Goldberg, page 22.

In other words, these thought leaders on the Right do whatever they need to do in order to advance their agendas. And if that means engaging in lying, dissembling, or intellectual dishonesty, these leaders of the counter-reformation of American life are more than willing to do whatever it takes and do it by whatever means necessary.

Monday, December 05, 2005

You Gotta Have Heart

Here's one of my earliest Amazon reviews. Nancy Folbre impressed me as not only a wonderful stylist, plainspoken and slyly humorous, but also as an economist with a real flair for uncomplicating the complications of most economists.

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values by Nancy Folbre

You Gotta Have Heart, May 22, 2001
Any economist whom the Wall Street Journal takes a swipe at is doing something right in my book. I don't recall the exact quote but the Journal says something like Folbre is a "feminist economist who studies family economics (socialism)." Folbre wonders aloud if the Journal believes families are necessarily socialist. Judging from their characterization of Folbre's work, and their endorsement of strict neoclassical econonmic theory in their editorial section, it appears that the Journal and other business and economic theorists of their ilk would prefer to simply call families names than deal with their true economic and moral value in the realm of capitalism.

Folbre's thesis is that capitalism has been enjoying a "free ride" on families and communitites from very early on. She further argues that capitalism is changing the ways people and families concieve of themselves. Using memorable examples, she makes a convincing case for the inclusion of traditional women's work such as child rearing in such measures as the GDP. After all, don't corporations need smart well-trained workers? And don't smart well-trained workers grow up inside families who nuture, care, and educate them? Further, don't families and workers mostly pay for their training?

Most economists are uncomfortable thinking about how the social and moral structure of society underpins capitalism. This is because they can't find ways to measure this "natural resource." Conservatives know that capitalism encourages radical individualism -- that's why they are always trying to impose "traditional values" on workers. Conservatives know that capitalism depletes people's sense of obligation and responsibility -- that's why they talk about it so much. What they don't talk about is that the encouragement of economic self-interest plays havoc with social reciprocity and moral standards. As Folbre points out, business contracts are almost meaningless in and of themselves. They are based on mutually accepted customs of reciprocity and obligation that have developed over the course of Western history. They are a simply a more elaborate version of the handshake.

Witty, pithy, and astute, Folbre's "Invisible Heart" is the perfect antidote to inane blatherings of the Chicago School knuckleheads and their mealy-mouthed descendants

Sunday, December 04, 2005

The Market God and the Other God

Senator Charles Grassley (R) from Iowa is attempting to close a loophole in the tax code that allows hunters on safari to write off the entire cost of their hunting trip as long as they gift their trophies to a museum. Grassley likened this loophole to someone flying to Paris, buying a sweater, donating it to the Salvation Army, then writing off the entire trip to Paris. (NY Times Editorial Page, Friday, Dec. 2, 2005).

According to the editorial, hundreds of glass-eyed trophies gather dust in storage facilities across the U.S., presumably in those precincts that service the special needs of the over privileged; museums have no use for the offerings as they are neither rare, nor of any scientific value: most of these "wild beasts" were raised in private game farms expressly for postmodern slaughter by quasi-Teddy Roosevelts. The editorial did not mention if the great white hunter’s gun bearers refer to their masters as “Bwana.” Neither did it mention if the hunters referred to their gun bearers as “Caddy.”

This is an example of the kind of entrepreneurialism that our business / corporative elite practices, an entrepreneurialism redolent of the grand old days of the robber barons when Thorstein Veblen christened this kind of activity "conspicuous consumption.” This kind of consumption is supported by a type of entrepreneurialism sometimes referred to as "sucking at the government teat."

This practice takes two basic forms, the first involving the bribing of government representatives (like "Duke" Cunningham most recently) to get lucrative no bid government contracts, and/or the opening up loopholes in the tax code so that one's masters and oneself can save government all the trouble of collecting it. This is one of the ways that business and government are working together to make government more cost effective. I use the terms business and government interchangeably here. In this case, a loophole was opened so the terminal pleasures of the hunt could remain unsullied by any expenditure other than the lives of the faux "wild beasts." This maneuver must be counted as a real "win win" for the brutalist classes. Not only are the empowered to kill farm animals posing as wild beasts, they let the average taxpayer pay for it all.

This kind of crony capitalism would be taken by strict neo-liberal free marketers as a corruption of the "free market," and rightly so. In this ideology, a truly free market would restrict government to the role of the "night watchman" state, and would not intefere in the production of the miraculous goods provided by that free market. The free market is thus raised up by the neo-liberal free marketers who reign in Washington as the absolute arbiter of good and bad, and quite remarkably, good and evil, too.

In this simple model of economic value in which all values are essentially economic values, whatever people buy is good; whatever they do not buy is bad. The number of items bought or unbought is also seen as indicative of goodness and badness. This ideology is, of course, is an apologia for the status quo. Those who wield the most economic and political power now are not about to give up their plutocratic prerogatives for some hare-brained free market economic theory.

But there's also another ideology that supports the notion of an infallible Market God. It is called Christian fundamentalism, many sects of which embrace the Calvinist inspired belief that to succeed in the marketplace is to succeed as a child of God. This mechanism is described in detail in BETWEEN JESUS AND THE MARKET: The Emotions that Matter in Right Wing America by Linda Kintz.

Of the funds it provides to faith-based initiatives, this current government / business combination favors those Fundamentalist churches which best enact and support the free market creed. These churches in turn offer to the poor stern lectures intended to install in them the discipline necessary to transform one's self into an entrepreneurial capitalist, (as well as a religious bigot).

In these faith-based initiatives, this powerful ideological combination – the dualistic divinity of the Market God and the Other God -- redeems social parasites with parables that prove the moral virtues of capitalism according to Ms. Kintz. Presumably this instruction includes the injunction that one must find in oneself the moral discipline required to ascend to the status of billionaire Bwana.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

Piercing the Cloud of Unreason

Here's my review of Robert Reich's Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America. Of the reviews I've written (131 at this point), this is is one that many find especialy helpful (164 "helpful votes" as of today).


Piercing the Cloud Of Unreason, May 11, 2004
A good and noble project is REASON, but one which ultimately fails. Not because Reich is not reasonable. Not because he is not clear-eyed, prudent, and good-humored as well.

No, REASON fails because fair reason, that powerful engine of the Enlightenment and a mainstay of the Founding Fathers, has been short-circuited by 1) the socially corrosive bought-and-paid-for cant of the right-wing libertarian think tank crowd, 2) the intolerant and divisive fulminations of Christian Right and their self-appointed public scolds, and 3) the tendentious free-market fables told by the Chicago "School" to serve and protect the prerogatives of the wealthy. Perhaps most threatening of all to sweet reason is 4) the trillion megawatt transmission system carved out of the public airwaves that stuffs this quasi-philosophic farrago of half-truths and outright lies into the ears of a stunned American public.

Reich intends REASON as a kind of handbook for the politically moderate American who knows that the grand egalitarian tradition is under siege, wants to understand how the Radcons have done it, and wants to do something about it. Reich knows that many Americans who grew up in a more optimistic, yes, a kinder and gentler liberal America are at a loss in trying to understand and counter the manipulative rhetorical tricks and absolutist dogma of the Radcon crowd. (Radcon is Reich's shorthand for the new model conservative -- the radical conservative -- a species of political animal bearing little resemblance to either the traditional Burkean conservative,or to that moderate, fiscally conservative Republican who until just recently held the Radcon's revanchist tendencies in check.)

With REASON, Reich shows how the Radcons have stacked the deck of public discourse through various debating club stratagems -- the classic argument from authority (because I said so and I'm in charge) and perhaps the even more favored "slippery slope" argument (if we let one person spit out their car window, then everyone will spit out their car windows and soon no one will be able to drive because all the spit will make it impossible to see out the windows and chaos and anarchy will ensue and that mustn't be allowed to happen, and so more police must be hired and more jails built).

Reich also shows how Radcon absolutism works, too. He shows that the seemingly contradictory Radcon "philosophies" -- libertarianism, "objectivism," fundamentalism -- do share one simple idea: that man and womankind are evil. Further, generally speaking, evil is in these philosophies anything that might give more power to those who traditionally have had less power. This means more power given to women, gays, and people who are not white is evil. It means that more power given to people who are not religious in the way that they ought to be religious, and people who are poor are evil. It means that people who do not believe that the Market God and His biblical counterpart form a perfect interlocking machine that impartially sorts humanity into the deserving and undeserving are evil. It means that anyone who believes that humanity can and should make decisions about what is good for humanity is evil. This, of course, describes a core liberal belief. It is also a core tenet of democracy which believes with some optimism tempered with some reasonable amount of pessimism that through discussion evil might avoided, that the common good might be found and that provision might be made for it.

REASON ultimately fails to do what Reich acknowledges must be done to stop the Radcon threat to American society: light a fire in the reader, a burning, all consuming fire of commitment to the tenets of liberalism that surpasses the absolutist Manichean view of the Radcon. Unfortunately, Reich's belief in and reliance on reason is exactly why traditional liberalism is fast disappearing as a viable political philosophy in these United States. Reason, at its heart is merely reasonable and as such is a weak argument against the overwhelming moral absolutes of the Market God,the other God, and their handservants, dissembling and deception. In this contest, REASON is overmatched, overwhelmed and overturned. When the liberal says "let us reason together," the Radcon cries "60s radicals almost destroyed this country, and you're just like them!"

Still, perhaps there is hope for Reich's cause. In books like REASON and MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS (by Godfrey Hodgson) one can begin to see a slow recovery of Liberalism's strength, i.e., its coherent philosophy of equality and justice and its abiding belief that man is more or less good, and capable of doing good through institutions in addition to churches, the market and the military which are the only institutions the Radcons endorse even as they have taken over the government, the one institution which is intended to be by the people, of the people and for the people, and which in the Radcon view is responsible for much of the evil in the world. Through such books, liberalism's condition has perhaps been stabilized. What is necessary now is a bold new prescription, a prescription building on a new COMMON SENSE, one that will cleanse and bind up the many wounds the Radcons have inflicted upon the American body politic, that will contain a message of hope and freedom that will lift its spirit, arm it properly against its powerful foes, and send it marching bravely into battle against this terrifying and unreasonable enemy of democracy.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Common Sense

A book review that explains, through a summary of Ivan Illich's radical traditionalist perspective as discussed in Ivan Illich in Conversation by David Cayley, why the New York Times is mostly unreadable. Not only unreadable, but laughable, and that is something the Times, that bastion of brownstone bourgeoisie liberalism, had mostly avoided.



Common Sense
The New York Times has been of many minds about Ivan Illich, beginning with its review of "Deschooling Society" in 1971. According to The Times' December 4, 2002 obituary of Illich, the Times reviewer found the book to be "'a mind-bending litany of abstraction' and a distraction from schools' all too real problems." In that same year however, Anatole Broyard found Illich's critiques "illuminating." But this was apparently a burst of youthful enthusiasm, for twenty years later in 1989, Broyard repented his earlier endorsement of Illich: in an article about winnowing down his library he said he would "especially" discard Mr. Illich's works.

It's not surprising Illich's project flummoxed the NYTimes. As progressive advocates of the modern project, and now the last outpost of bourgeoisie brownstone liberalism, the Times' promulgates a kind of idealist pragmatic middle ground where technocrats can dispassionately design and administer systems that will promote the Good and the Beautiful. Illich, on the other hand, ultimately rejected the modern project, whatever its political orientation, because he viewed it as inherently corrupt. In his earlier writings in the early 70s, such as TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY, he believed that it might be possible to stop, rethink and humanize mankind's relationship with man and the earth. But by the end of his life he saw that the modernist project could not be arrested in its destructive disenchantment of the earth and humankind.

The socio-philosophes employed by the Times were more willing to hear these critiques during the high-water mark of radical politics in the late 60s and early 70s. The center of political gravity was left of center then, pulling the pragmatic middle of The Times along with it. Now, of course, the Times employ liberal idealist philosophers like Thomas Friedman who preach the neo-liberal creed of economic expansion as the means to usher in a democratic millennium. Or David Brooks, the liberal's favorite conservative, who, like Friedman, routinely spouts tendentious and intellectually dishonest examples to buttress his dogmatic assertions on the moral rightness of the invasion of southern or eastern nations by Western powers. It's not surprising that in the current environment the NY Times obituary would characterize Illich's critique as "watered-down Marxism." In fact, Illich's critique is actually considerably more radical. Marx believed that once the expropriators were expropriated and the state withered away a worker's paradise would ensue. He didn't want to arrest industrialization, he wanted the workers to have control over their destiny. Illich thought the whole project was monstrous, no matter who owned or ran it.

Illich believed that the penetration of systems logic into the lifeworld had to be opposed on an individual basis. One way to do this was to engage in deep compassionate friendships. Another was to be sensitive to and eschew the kind of infernal comparisons technocrats make between people and technologies, i.e., that humans are systems consisting of software and hardware, inputs and outputs. As part of this, he also attacked the technocratic reconceptualization of mankind through new definitions of old words and their former meanings, e.g., the new notion of "life" as some general entity that can be nurtured on some general level, presumably by a technocrat or politician, i.e., the "culture of life." Rather he insisted that life is embodied in and inseparable from biological entities -- that there is no life, only lives. Illich also suggested reading history, especially the writings of key monastics from the 12th century, as a way to defamiliarize oneself the hegemonic power of the current version of "common sense" and so understand that other ways of living and interacting with each other and with the world were possible, and necessary. He sought by such readings to demonstrate that beyond a certain level of institutionalized expertise, most experts and their expert systems are actually counterproductive.

Illich's critique cannot be countenanced these days when the ideology of technical progress has so permeated us that the notion of organ repair kits (from our clones) seems like a good idea. It seems clear now that the desacralization of the lifeworld cannot be stopped. The spark of hope that it might was extinguished by the counterrevolution of the bosses in the mid-70s. The NY Times meekly fell back into line along with just about everyone else. Illich was a conscientious objector to modernism to the last, preferring to let a cancer on his jaw take his life slowly and painfully rather than surrender himself and his dignity to the anti-human ethos of the medico-technologico community.

IVAN ILLICH IN CONVERSATION is an excellent introduction to Illich's radical humanist perspective.