Us and Dems

Mr. Obama and his top aides have in recent days launched a rhetorical
assault against their own supporters, telling them to “buck up” and
“stop whining” in advance of the election on Nov. 2. In interviews,
they have expressed anger about the lack of enthusiasm for what the
Obama administration has accomplished. NYT, 28 Sep 2010

Sure, I’ll vote for his party again.  How could I do anything else?  I’ve never considered sitting it out—-that’s the kind of purist suicide that has helped to bring forth some of the true monsters of history.

I don’t have a beef with his domestic agenda.  I’m impressed by some of his accomplishments, especially on health care, which represents a useful set of new boundary conditions for further improvement.  In some areas like financial regulation, I’m surprised he’s done so little, given the circumstances both fiduciary and political.  After all, there are a lot of guys at Goldman and the other large investment banks who should be doing time for criminal fraud in the mortgage resellers market—-a call even a lot of investors would approve, not to mention Joseph and Josephine Retirement Fund down on main street, the Independents who put Obama into the presidency.

Doug Mills / The New York Times

The one big issue that carried Obama into office is the one that he hasn’t delivered on—-the war.  This is where the real passion of progressive ire is coming from.  Drawing down in Iraq to 50,000 hostages to fortune is not a brilliant result to be  sure.  But ramping up in Afghanistan is nothing more than the perpetuation of war crimes committed throughout the preceding Bush administrations.  The invasion of Afghanistan was always a dubious proposition in terms of ‘wars of right’.  On a far more pragmatic plane, it has done nothing to make us safer.  The militarization of our response to the 9/11 attack has been an unmitigated disaster in almost every dimension.  What we needed (and lacked in the run-up so glaringly) was and is better intelligence and better police work.  What we got is GWOT.

People my age, even some who felt differently at the time, have had enough of this militaristic self-immolation.  We still remember with deep distress and enduring outrage the johnsons who couldn’t help but insert us and the dicks who couldn’t pull us out.  The issue transcends Republican and Democrat.  Nothing brands Obama more completely as not about change than his persistence in this reflexive war.  It has poisoned our relationships with our allies and others around the world, inflamed our domestic discourse to the point of insanity, and emboldened all sorts of little domestic Hitlerites who in a country more faithful to is founders would be laughed out of the media and out of our faces.  I never expected Obama to blaze any kind of trail into Leftwing Glory.  But I guess it was too much to expect him to have the common sense to just stop all the killing.  If anyone came into office with the opportunity to change our utterly ineffective efforts to protect our “homeland” (hard not to feel a hearty ‘heil’ coming on when I hear this phrase even now) it was Barack Obama.  Yet he has done nothing to make us safer.

I’ll vote for him—-but without any diminishment of my feeling that we’re headed down a slippery police state slope which will make him—-and us—-look like a modern US version of the Weimar republic.

From the Land of 1000 Judy Millers

David Carr, who survived cocaine addiction to end up writing for the Times, has a snarky little piece about an old acquaintance in today’s paper.  Nikki Finke, manifesting as the blog Deadline Hollywood Daily, apparently strikes fear into any number of executive Hollywood hearts.

Among movie executives, the stories of Ms. Finke’s aggressiveness are legion, but they remain mostly unspoken because people fear being the target of one of her withering takedowns.

“I’d prefer not to ever deal with her,” said a senior communications executive at a studio who declined to be identified. Many others declined comment saying, variously, “she gave me a nervous breakdown,” “she terrifies me,” and “there’s no percentage in me saying anything to you about Nikki no matter what it is.”

Of course, if any of these unnamed sources wanted to say something about Ms. Finke that was both accurate and not likely to boomerang, all they need to mention is that she’s a hard-working reporter whose exhaustive management of what must be a truly formidable list of informants yields her valuable and highly readable material every day on the entertainment industry and its bizarrely ego-ridden palace politics.  She’s actually a business reporter, and has little time for the celebrity PR-driven side of the biz.  Her writing style may be torrid, but it seems strangely apt—attitude whose main point is to deliver an enormous amount of information, especially for a solo reporter.

Unintended self-revelation is becoming a bit of an artform over at the Times.  Mr. Carr packs up the apparent conveyance of bland information with a healthy amount of attitude himself. “As a traditional print reporter, she had a problem with deadlines, trying the patience of many editors”…which, of course, has never been true of most other reporters.

To admirers and detractors, she is the perfect expression of the Web’s original premise, which suggested that a lone obsessive could own the conversation, which she punctuates with the phrase TOLDJA in capital letters.

Ms. Finke emerges from this article as a lone obsessive hermit, hunched over a computer in Westwood, needing to get out far more than she does, shredding player after player across the wealthier neighborhoods of LA.

But luckily for her,

Her liabilities in the world of print — a penchant for innuendo and unnamed sources — became assets online.

Not the sort of thing that happens at the Times.
From an editorial perspective, it appears the Times’ media business columnist needs to establish as much non-specific doubt as possible about Ms. Finke’s work, while being constrained by the facts to also report that she is almost always correct and frequently far ahead in breaking her news.  To his credit, her quotes are uniformly sensible and anything but strident.  But the surrounding story is going in quite a different direction.

Her aggression is not limited to journalism. Ms. Finke is a frequent and enthusiastic litigant. She sued The New York Post, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company for wrongful dismissal after she wrote an unflattering article about Disney. According to numerous media accounts, she received a settlement.

Too bad Carr has to mention that the massive corporations that she single-handedly sued had to settle—would that be an example of aggression, or justice?

As Ms. Finke is aggressively going around, nailing “Hollywood suits” like “pelt[s] on her wall”, I’d like to suggest just this kind of approach to the Times.  They can let Ms. Finke, the solo blogging reporter, aggressively cover the precious entertainment industry—which is only drugging us into a somnolent state of material envy and acceptable bloody violence, after all.

Imagine the same kind of aggression applied by a Judy Miller to the Bush Administration’s fomenting of the Iraq war (Where are the Weapons of Mass 1st Amendment Destruction?)!  Judy could learn something about reporting from Deadline Hollywood Daily.  Carr quotes Ms. Finke:

“I just don’t go out to industry events, in part because it puts my sources in an awkward situation,” she said, adding that “the other thing about going out with these people is that when it comes time to cover something involving them, they say, ‘But, Nikki, we’re friends.’ I don’t want those kind of friends.”

Judy, on the other hand, had a Secret clearance which enabled her, and no other reporter, to participate in the hunt for WMDs.

…in an independent critique, Norman Solomon points out some disturbing details in Miller’s account, such as her admission that she was given “clearance” by the Pentagon “to see secret information” which she “was not permitted to discuss” with her own editors. [8]
“There’s nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the U.S. government,” Solomon states. “But if she’s supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation — and the fact that The New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.” [9]

Of course, Judy is no longer on the gray lady’s roster.  In the day, however, some aggressive reporting and a few “withering takedowns” might have ended up not just puncturing egos and deflating some Hollywood financial bubbles, but saving lives and preventing the rampant destruction of the benighted country of Iraq by the late lamented criminal conspiracy known as the Bush Administration.  But I suppose the mainstream media knows best how to report all the news that’s fit to print.

Idiot Wind

As in the primaries and in the national campaign, the Obama krew are happy to keep their own counsel.  There is a lot passing in the media slipstream on which a less disciplined operation might be inclined to bite, if only as a warning to keep some distance.  They might be forgiven for thinking that, having campaigned in fifty states and won Indiana for Democrats for only the second time since 1932, they have earned the right to some decision-making away from the blast of the idiot wind generators of the mainstream media.

Detroit, 23 July 1967

Of course, when the Executive Branch changes hands, it stimulates a variety of looting behavior amongst the denizens of the recently downtrodden party ghetto.  All the more so this time, as the Bush Republican Guards  vanish in the electoral blast of the surplus millions, some even from their own party, who banished them from office.  Too tempting in the absence of party overlordship not to smash a few store windows and run off with some expensive TVs.

It’s the way: patronage proceeds any change in governance.  But this year, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, it is not just the rabid Bush right that has been dethroned but also the Clinton DNC.  Having campaigned in a manner suspiciously hard to differentiate from their Republican opponents at times too frequent to be random, the Hillary and Bill wing of the Democratic party need not skulk off into the crimson sunset of fratricidal warfare like the various factions of defeated Republicans.  Like Senator Lieberman, they can mysteriously transmute back into real Democrats, and claim their share of the spoils.

One of the more restful aspects of the general election, for me anyway, has been the absence off-stage of the Clinton spin squad, except for the rearguard elements left to man the ramparts of the New York Times.  Of course we had to listen to McCain as he grew hair all over his body politic and bayed at the moon, not to mention his Bride of Frankenstein, the supernaturally well-groomed handmaiden from the far northern wastes, Governor Palin.  But Obama simply repeated the same things he’s been saying since the start of his campaign two years ago, if not four years ago at his Democratic Convention speech.  When you’re consistent, you don’t need any spin.  Political consistency is a very simple state of spinlessness, whether you’re consistently lunatic or otherwise.  That is what was so attractive to the media (and a significantly non-denominational segment of the electorate) about the pre-Werewolf McCain and his Straight-Talk Express.

Now, with the hostile occupation of the seat of power in full retreat, the Clintonian wing of the party is spinning madly once again.  Why would this be any less obnoxious to the drama-free, extraordinarily well-organized Obama campaign in its transition team manifestation than it was during the primaries?  It didn’t convince enough of the voters, and it never moved the needle of the Obama campaign a millimeter off consistent and purposeful.  

Well, not to worry: Hillary is not sure she wants to accept the offer of State.  This most recent posture from the ex-candidate brings the spinification of the State Department in full circle.  

Lincoln's first inauguration, 4 March 1861

Barack could surprise me and offer Hillary State.  He might be interested in Lincoln’s relationship with Steward, which at least gained Abe the beautiful peroration “better angels of our nature” for his first inaugural.  But I am inclined to wait for what the President-elect actually has to say.  Maybe the Clinton’s counsel will become AG, maybe Herself will get State, but we shouldn’t let the naming of Obama’s chief of staff confuse us—he was a brawlin’ Chicago pol long before he ran any part of the Clinton machine.  Obama’s people have remained firmly on the command deck amidst the gales of Clintonian spin for an extended cruise already.  No reason to think they are more, and much more reason the think the are less influenced by it, now.

Post Massacre Mob Confab Revealed

A little over fifty years ago, NY state police broke up a large meeting in the boondocks town of Apalachin, NY, and one of the results of the ensuing publicity was that, despite years of FBI propaganda to the contrary, Americans started to believe that Our Thing, a well organized national syndicate of gangsters, really existed.  After ten years of an attempt to keep the Mafia as a whole out of narcotics, the embargo had started to completely break down.  Albert Anastasia, for one, wanted to keep out of narcotics, particularly since a recent law mandating sentences made buying judges useless.  Vito Genovese, on the other hand, wanted to plug in fully to the massive cash flow that narcotics obviously represented.  Frank Costello, like Anastasia, wanted to maintain the ban, and was almost rubbed out in May of 1957.  Anastasia wanted to hit Genovese in return, but was convinced to hold off, just long enough it turned out to get whacked himself on October 25, 1957.  The image of Albert dead on the barbershop floor is one of the iconic mobster images of the twentieth century.

Amidst the carnage and the potential all-out gang war, a meeting was called at Joseph Barbera’s “estate” in the small town of Apalachin.  It is speculated that the meeting’s purpose was to arrange the relevant truces, including a hit list minimally necessary to settle scores, and to agree a syndicate position on narcotics. Over one hundred made guys attended, from all over the country.  Unfortunately for discretion, a couple of state cops noticed an suspiciously large influx of well-dressed gents in fancy cars descending on the burg, and after making a bunch of them from their license plates, they triggered a police raid that sent scores of besuited borsalino-wearing gents rushing through the cow patties in their Florsheims.

I thought of this event today when I saw an article in the NYT about Palin’s prospects for 2012, and how the Republican party (la Loro Nostra, you might say) was starting to plan for that.

Whether the Republican presidential ticket wins or loses on Tuesday, a group of prominent conservatives are planning to meet the next day to discuss the way forward, and whatever the outcome, Gov. Sarah Palin will be high on the agenda. [...]

Her prospects, in or out of government, are the subject of intensive conversations among conservative leaders, including the group that will meet next Wednesday in rural Virginia to weigh social, foreign policy and economic issues, as well as the political landscape and the next presidential election.

Of course, if they thought they were going to win, the meeting would be scheduled for Washington, D.C.  As it is, I wonder if someone in the area can take some plate numbers, and alert the police?  I think these guys are part of a syndicate that has been robbing us all blind for years now.  I know most people don’t believe that this syndicate exists.  If we can bust up this meeting, perhaps people will begin to understand what has been going on…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Images from Ernie Santa Ana’s blog, reproduced there from an exhibit created by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese.)

Appearing in a privately funded exhibit at the New York Public Library called Line Up are six photos that have stirred political controversy. The exhibit opened November 29, 2007 and runs until January 27, 2008.

Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese are the Brooklyn artists who digitally modified these images. At the library display, videos of each politician accompany the presentation with matching dates and times of the photos.

In the videos, when each politician makes statements about the Iraq War that the artists feel are criminal, camera flashes appear and the politicians’ appear in freeze frames, and jail bars shut in front them.

Race

For the first time in my life as a voting citizen, I cast my ballot for a presidential candidate for whom I’m truly happy to vote: Barack Hussein Obama.  I voted absentee and early in my town in Massachusetts, as I’ll be out of the country next week.  Since my first vote, against Nixon in the NY primary during his 1972 campaign (I was a registered Republican due to some historical confusion on the part of my Australian immigrant father, which gave me an opportunity to vote against Tricky Dick on my first outing), it has been, at best, the lesser of two mediocrities.

I could consider this is my first vote for a black president.  But I’ve come to realize that it is much more—and much less.  The media constantly call Barack an African-American, but I think this is actually a piece of typical racism.  It embodies the blood rule that anyone with some black African blood is African-American, as if being white were a state of non-pollution.  Besides the basic issue that any “white” in this country has at least a one-in-five chance of having a “black” relation from the not-too-distant past, Barack is not the offspring of two African-Americans, but of a white American woman and an African man. 

This fact makes my vote more than a vote for the first African-American president—in terms of the American racist equation, I’m voting for the first miscengenated president.  Besides being an objectionably racist term, this phrase actually has an electoral origin.  Its first use, according to the OED, was in the title of a pamphlet issued in New York City in December of 1863:

The word was coined in an anonymous propaganda pamphlet published in New York City in December 1863, during the American Civil War. The pamphlet was entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. It purported to advocate the intermarriage of whites and blacks until they were indistinguishably mixed as a desirable goal, and further asserted that this was the goal of the Republican Party. The pamphlet was in fact a hoax, concocted by Democrats, to discredit the Republicans by imputing to them radical views that offended the racist attitudes common among whites, even those who opposed slavery. In New York in particular there was much opposition to the Federal war effort, such as the Draft Riots that included numerous lynchings.

The pamphlet and variations on it were reprinted widely in both the North and the Confederacy by Democrats and rebels. Only in November 1864 was the pamphlet exposed as a hoax. The hoax pamphlet was written by David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a Democratic Party paper, and George Wakeman, a World reporter.

By then, the word miscegenation had entered the common language of the day as a popular buzzword in political and social discourse. The issue of miscegenation, raised by the opponents of Lincoln, featured prominently in the election campaign of 1864. 

[Wikipedia]

Apparently (and a surprise, I’m sure, to all the white rural voters of downstate Illinois whose strong support of a black Chicago politician first caught my attention in the case of Obama) I have also voted for a Marxist, a Socialist, a hardened ideologue and a charismatic demagogue.  

The latter pair of scare-mongering handles are but a small sample of the veritable encyclopedia of right-wing obsessions on display in Mark Levin’s recent screed at The Corner.  This is actually a minor masterpiece of self-revelation, such as Freud recounts in analyzing the dreams of neurotic patients.  It’s so densely loaded with the arcana of wingnuttery that it’s difficult to unpack.  For example, Levin claims there is a “cult-like atmosphere around Obama”, including

Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama’s name on it, which adorns everything from Obama’s plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama’s name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world.

If I’m not misusing my special handshake and wingnut apron in my effort to pick up this peculiar transmission, I think he’s actually calling Obama a closet Nazi in combining “world” and “Berlin” in that final sentence there.  I am particularly delighted by the daft image of camouflaged teenagers chanting the professions Obama will open to them.  Other than being a bizarre importation of Kim-Il-Jung-speak into US punditry, what would be so strange about teenagers excited by new professional possibilities?…I mean, other than the camo…

But what is worse than any of this?  What does Levin come down to at the end of his confession?

“Obama’s appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the “the proletariat,” as an infamous philosopher once described it”…

Answer: the non-renewal of the Bush tax cuts.  These cuts, which mathematically and demonstrably give back taxes at previous rates to the most wealthy Americans, will not be renewed by Comrade Obama, and the revenue from restoring the upper crust tax rate of the pre-W era will fund middle-class tax cuts (in fact, for 95% of us “middle-class” people earning under $250K a year).   

Obama replied that those making over $250,000 would be taxed more but that money would be returned to the middle-class through tax cuts. “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” Obama said.

The McCain campaign seized on that remark.

“When politicians talk about taking your money and spreading it around, you’d better hold on to your wallet,” McCain told a Miami crowd. “Senator Obama claims that he wants to give a tax break to the middle class, but not only did he vote for higher taxes for the middle class in the Senate, his plan gives away your tax dollars to those who don’t pay taxes. That’s not a tax cut; that’s welfare.”

[AP in Newsday]

Tax cuts for the middle class, unless I’m missing something basic, will mean that more middle class income stays in our pockets.  There’s nothing to redistribute but the tax break that five percent of the richest Americans have received under George W. Bush, that by definition came out of the rest of our hides.  This is a restoration, not a redistribution.

But that’s not really the point of McCain’s essentially mendacious rendering.  It has three key racist evocations: street crime (“hold on to your wallet”), giving tax dollars to “those who don’t pay taxes”, and “welfare”.  McCain’s misinterpretation has been often repeated since then by the ticket under the rubric “spread the wealth around”.  

Despite the superficial dressing, it is not about anti-socialism.  McCain is probably pretty secure in assuming that his Miami audience relates to “their” tax dollars being given away—but they will also get the sub rosa message as well: be afraid, be very afraid, because worse than a socialist, worse than a Marxist, worse than a pal of domestic terrorists, Obama is…Black!  And the purpose of this rhetorical tactic is exactly the same as the purpose of the pamphlet that first introduced the term “miscegenation” in an election 150 years ago, except with the parties reversed: to “discredit the Republicans [Democrats] by imputing to them radical views that offended the racist attitudes common among whites”.  

But appealing to racism presents a surprising problem in the case of Barack Obama.  I’m certain that he would prefer something altogether different at this point for his grandmother than her descent into an apparently life-threatening condition.  Seeing her picture in the news as Obama took two days off from campaigning during the last two weeks of the race to visit the oldest survivor of his mother’s white family brought home again what we are really dealing with here in the candidate’s race.  I would be proud enough to vote for the first black president, but this vote is for something really much less dramatic than that, something more ambiguous and something more inclusive in terms of race in America.  And because of that, I can say I’m even more proud today to vote for someone who is neither black nor white, who is black and white, who is descended from Kenya and from Kansas, and who will help us demonstrate as a first step in healing our body politic that we are capable of political acts without regard to race, creed or color.

Cursing both houses…

There is an interesting clip from a Real News interview of Howard Zinn up on Al Giordano’s top-quality blog, The Field.  Responding to questions about Nader, a third party, and how to break out of the two-party system in order to drive more radical change, Zinn points out that Nader’s transplantation into the electoral arena has been self-marginalizing.  He asserts more generally that entering the electoral process without dominating impact tends to marginalize the progressive movement as a whole.

Rather than displacing the Democratic party, the idea is to surround it with a progressive movement so coherent and ineluctable that Obama’s administration must manifest his ideas in their most progressive form.  Zinn’s historical analogy, as often with Obama, is to that Hudson Valley grandee Franklin Roosevelt, who in nothing but his expression of his ideas could in 1932 be understood as a progressive.  

This encourages me to point out something I’ve been watching since Howard Dean took over the DNC, and especially since Obama started to get any traction in the primary race against Clinton.  

But first, something now far more obvious but not then necessarily predictable seems more and more likely: a huge rout of the GOP in less than two weeks.  When a black, racially-mixed ex-community organizer with Hussein as his middle name is 4 points up in Indiana, something is seriously going wrong with the Republican Stuka Squadrons.  

One can attribute this turn of the tide to a lot of factors, but on the day, the reality of an Obama victory of the proportions I expect will be purely down to one thing: the ground game.  There is simply nothing in recent US electoral history to compare to the unswerving strategic vision, superb management and organization, and massively effective field organization that David Plouffe and his team have put together for Obama.  This is the organization that will turn today’s polling numbers into countable votes on Election Day, and in pluralities far too large to be bothered by any criminal tampering by the remaining Rovians in the losing party.  

The catastrophe this represents for the Far Right wing that has utterly dominated the GOP since the 1994 election is difficult to understate.  The Senate minority leader himself has his head on the block—a loss you would have to go back to 1932 to match.  The Rockefeller Rump of the party has somehow come out from behind its protective wingnut screen and started to denounce it’s own party’s candidate, and to endorse a Democrat.  And the less mentally balanced of the wingnuts are frantically launching themselves into rhetorical space and electorial oblivion.  

But besides the barely visible protrusion of the witch legs from under the House that’s about to drop on the party of Rove, a few other institutions have been smashed to pieces.  These are the less obvious casualties of the popular juggernaut that Obama has let loose and helped organize.

First, the previous and anaemic public campaign finance system is gone forever.  Obama is the first national candidate to fully deploy the vast and decentralized set of interconnections known as the Internet for his campaign.  Among other things, he has effectively built a new public campaign finance system, bypassing the federally administered one to which McCain’s mavericky ways obliged him, and reaching directly into millions of supporters’ pockets for their change.  Eighty three bucks is not chicken feed for most people, but it is the average donation with which the Obama campaign built September’s 130 million dollar inflow of cash, and far less than the 2300 dollars that maxes out an individual contributor.

Second, and more important for our future, the Democratic party machine, most recently in the possession of the Clinton camorra, has been defenestrated.  The immediate move of DNC headquarters to Chicago the day after the Democratic convention was just a particularly dramatic example of this.  There is now a national organization, wired together via the Internet and cellphone technology (and texting), which will be rolling off the energy of a victorious Presidential campaign, and ready to go to work the day after Inauguration as the New Democratic Party.  This party, in urban areas, is organized down to the block level.  It understands how to raise funds in a way that is unstoppable from any centralized position.  It is decentralized, heterogeneous, and has strong but not exclusively progressive tendencies.  It will not be the party of Barak, but rather troops loyal to his administration to the extent they believe he is carrying out his promises.  And, as we will see, it will be flexing its muscles before too long in the 2010 congressional races, blasting away any lingering wingnuts in reach.  

As for the wingnuts, they have nothing to fear but our fear of nothing.

That One

 

That One

Laura Rozen was asking yesterday over at Warandpiece “what does the right want?”  Her almost anguished musings in reaction to the rising hysteria of the right-wing base must be echoing across the normal political universe in one form or another.  After all, Obama has done nothing but be a competent campaigner.  It is the behavior of the Republican ticket which is veering dramatically toward the bizarre.  It would be funny to think that McCain and Palin might have pulled on their Halloween costumes a little early this year, except that there’s nothing particularly amusing about inciting crowds to racial epithets, literal media-bashing, or assassination.

It has been noted that McCain has a history of demonizing his opponents, which is not surprising, given what he’s been through.  Addressing a rally as “my fellow prisoners” is a small but incredibly public window into a personality holding itself together by persona.  The mask of McCain is avuncular (Laura compared his affect in the Nashville debate to a doddering elder relative who has to reach back to the days of Reagan and the occupation of Beirut for relevant facts).  But it seems he’s never stopped standing up to his enemies as if it were a matter of life or death.

Some of us experience our views of politics as a contingent relationship with the world, where we constantly reframe our questions and responses as we move through a series of events so we can derive an understanding of why things happen that is most personally compatible.  I don’t mean we are rational; rather, we can tolerate a contingent relationship, in which our understanding is merely possibly correct.  

For wingnuts, understanding is not personally contingent, but global and eternal—sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza says:

We conceive of things as actual in two ways: either in so far as we conceive them as related to a fixed time and place [contingent], or in so far as we conceive them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of divine nature.  Now the things that are conceived as true or real in this second way, we conceive under a form of eternity, and their ideas involve the eternal and infinite essence of God.

You could not survive as Ann Coulter, or Michelle Malkin, or Jonah Goldberg, or any of the rest of the Townhall tribe, without believing that what you see is the true world, partaking of the essence of God, as opposed to a personal interpretation of a contingent here and now.  So, bested simply by greater clarity, consistency, common sense, more basic and demonstrable understanding of what people are really worried about, more inclusive concern with where America is going—all that undramatic but fundamental Obama stuff—part of the reason that the wingnuts take leave on flights of obnoxious paranoic effusion is this: when things conceived sub specie aeternitatis appear to shatter, it is God who is deserting them, and the eternal which is collapsing.  In such a case it is no wonder Obama must be the antichrist.

Thus all the dark mutterings about the never yet uncovered corruption of Obama in Chicago, the secret cabal he is part of that will foist a far-left agenda on us all (or worse yet, one built around the “view that black assimilation [is] a form of self-enslavement to an irredeemably racist system…thus has he become “that one”.  I expected McCain to begin the Ritual of Exorcism then and there at the debate (no doubt with  Tom Brokaw’s able assistance).

Laura wants to know who would be the wingnuts’ perfect candidate.  The perfect candidate for them is one that can win, since it is by God’s grace rather than any quality of the candidate that winning comes to pass.  Conversely, when politics fails these believers, they cannot examine themselves and their position in any contingent way, but must blame the false conservatives, the conniving media, the infested immigrants, the Gigantic Left-wing Conspiracy that so inconveniently votes from time to time in the majority, and all the rest of the the stabs-in-the-back.

Laura’s avuncular model for McCain is apt but superficial (and, of course, rhetorical).  It is superficial because he is really a nasty piece of work, far nastier than Bush.  It is deeply fulfilling to watch the Obama campaign slowly but surely crush his ticket flat.  After all, he’s the only major republican candidate who even stood a chance against Obama, since he was the only one who could also conjure up any mavericky outsiderness.  It is looking more and more like the republican party itself, not just its presidential candidate, is getting crushed flat.

They will lose power, and this they fear greatly, not least because some of the most prominent of their number will now be subject to criminal prosecution.  But what we shouldn’t underestimate is the powerless rage of those who have seen their Gods destroyed.

Tears of rage

John salutes his father

Ted Kennedy’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention last night brought tears to my eyes, and I was surprised, until I examined my reactions and understood something about this moment in time and its relation to a moment forty years ago that I had only vaguely felt before.

Caroline introduced him.  We both look a whole lot older since the last time I ran into her—she bummed a cigarette off me in the smoking lounge at Lamont Library, where we were both at Harvard.  Her life was full of fawning professors and trailing wannabes, so I didn’t feel like pursuing acquaintance beyond discussing Ross Terrill’s China course over a smoke.  

Despite the pitifully short time she had him as a father, it’s hard for me and most Americans my age to see her and not think of JFK.  She succinctly explained my feeling by saying last night:

“I have never had someone inspire me the way people tell me my father inspired them – but I do now.”

Time will tell if Barack Obama is all he’s presenting himself as.  I will vote for him without a doubt about doing so.  But I’m not naive enough to take him at face value.  As I considered my teary reaction to Teddy last night, I understood a few more levels of the Barack Obama phenomenon, at least as it affects me and perhaps others of my vintage.

First of all, I realized that all the “we can work together” flowing out of Obama and his campaign is just a really elaborate version of what FDR meant when he pointed out in 1932 that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”.  For FDR, pulling together was a necessary minimum for a way out of the economic crisis, and fear was the great solvent of success.  This is an emotionally basic proposition, and perhaps too cute, but it’s worth considering that it came from someone who, far from being a starry-eyed dreamer, was the most consumate political schemer of the 20th century.

For it seems so far to have caused a lot of cognitive dissonance, at least among the chattering political classes, that Barak can talk about everyone coming together to solve our problems, at the same time as he ruthlessly operates the best organized political campaign in anyone’s memory.  This has given rise on the one hand to criticism from his right (both Clintonists in the party and Republicans) that there is no substance to his planning, and on the other (from his left) that he is not committed to his ideals.  Far from being a contradiction, I think this apparent duality is really a result of the corrosion of US politics from the right over the last twenty-five years.  

For example, we are a state with an official policy of kidnapping, imprisonment without habeus, and torture.  We are told by those who regard themselves as the supreme realists of the post-9/11 world (the Cheneys and Addingtons) that this is an absolute necessity for our survival.  We are told by our most senior government officials including the President that we must make war in order to fight terrorism.  If these are the valid bases for policy, how can “coming together” have anything to do with the “real” world?

In fact, these policies are not realism, but a kind of right-wing paranoic opportunism.  It is worth considering calling them Fascism.  They are policies consumed by fear and in fear.  This is the fear that is Roosevelt’s “fear itself”.

Fear does not conduce successful defense.  This is true in all sorts of martial arts;  it is true during interrogation, where torture mainly elicits the results the torturer requires, rather than useful information.  It is true for grand policy and military strategy as well—fear did not drive the survival of the British during the Blitz or the invaders of Normandy, or for that matter the Japanese destroyers of Pearl Harbor.  Fear dissolves critical social bonds which are the only basis for safety and defense.  

So when Barak is talking about “coming together”, he is opposing these policies of fear—for example, in speaking recently to the national VFW convention:

I will let no one question my love of this country. I love America, so do you, and so does John McCain. When I look out at this audience, I see people of different political views. You are Democrats and Republicans and Independents. But you all served together, and fought together, and bled together under the same proud flag. You did not serve a Red America or a Blue America – you served the United States of America.

Furthermore, governing the US together is true realism, because it seeks to place us on a social footing that can actually focus our energies where they need to go—for example, on trying to prevent terrorists from further acts of destruction here or anywhere else, or on bringing home our troops from Iraq—really soon—to prevent further death and destruction on all sides.

Fearlessness is realistic—it is not pie-in-the-sky.  It is not the opposite of pragmatism.  And it is certainly not a tool that Bush or Cheney or Addington have ever sought to use as an instrument of policy.  Fearful leaders, like all fearful people, believe that only through responding out of fear can they gain control of any dangerous situation.  But this is a delusion, propagating more fear, not more safety.  Security does not depend on control, but on cooperation.

If Barak is the true pragmatist in his embrace of fearless cooperation, so also is he correct to fight the political battle with the hard-nosed practicality he and his team are exhibiting.  The choice of Biden over Sibelius is a good example of this practical political calculation—because why should the defense of ideals be sacrificed to some kind of idealized politics?  One assumes that Caroline Kennedy felt as much, as a key player in the vetting process that resulted in Biden’s selection.

And where is the most recent example we can find of this combination of ruthless political skill and clearly articulated, constructive, progressive policy?  I would have to answer, the Kennedy brothers, perhaps Teddie the most, given his long tenure in the Senate, followed by Bobby, who traveled much further down the road that he and his older brother started on in the early 60s.

Seeing Teddy reminded me in a deep, deep way of what has been stolen from us.  Losing JFK, RFK, and MLK was not an accident of nature.  They were crushed because they not only showed no political fear—they showed they could move us all with their constructive fearlessness, and they also showed a grasp of practical politics so acute that the masters of power truly feared their ascendency.  Not only did killing them deprive us of fearless leadership, and set the stage for the criminal theft of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, our environment, our treasure, and so much else we have owned—it defined the cost of basic change in a way that made us all so much more fearful.

Listening to Teddy Kennedy on the podium last night, thinking about all that has been stolen from us since the violent truncation of the Kennedy clan forty years ago, I see Obama and the hope he articulates, not through tears of grief, but tears of rage.

McCain’s voting record

As a West Wing junkie (at least for the first three or four seasons, via DVD!) I’m really tickled by the fiction-meets-reality of the current kerfuffle about whether McLame voted for Bush in 2000, as reported by the NYT.  Arianna made the charge on Monday:

On her Huffington Post Web site on Monday, Ms. Huffington, the liberal blogger, said she had heard Mr. McCain say at a Los Angeles dinner party shortly after the 2000 election that he had not voted for the president he has now publicly embraced in his own quest for the White House.

The McLame campaign begged to differ:

“She’s a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva,” Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest aides, told The Washington Post.

So far, so usual.  We’re starting to see the little cracks in the McCain facade, most of which are distinctly fishier than not voting for Bush.  The land deals, the secret family tax returns, the manifest contradictions between the talk and the walk on everything from mortage-crisis aid to education for GIs.  The McCain krew are starting to adjust to the fact that they have lost an ideal democratic opponent, despite the O’Reillyites best efforts to reverse the democratic verdict in Indiana (which appears to have succeeded—the final margin was a bit over 11,000 votes, well within the extrapolation from the number of self-professed republican Clinton voters who claimed in exit polling that will not vote democrat in November).  What they don’t understand quite yet is the unflashy but extraordinarily durable power of a candidate who sticks to his truth.

In the case of the immediate issue, a few experts have been stepping forward to back up her story.  Brad Whitford and Richard Schiff, better known as Josh Lyman and Toby Zeigler, deputy White House Chief of Staff and Communications Director, respectively, for President Martin Sheen (the best president we’ve had in a long time), both remember McCain saying he didn’t vote for Bush in 2000.  Brad was sitting at the same table:

Mr. Whitford, who played Josh Lyman, the deputy White House chief of staff on the NBC series, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he was sitting across from Mr. McCain and next to Ms. Huffington at the small dinner and that he was startled to hear the senator sharply criticize Mr. Bush. The senator has long blamed the Bush campaign for smear tactics against his family in the 2000 South Carolina primary, but by the end of the campaign Mr. McCain was publicly supporting his rival.

“McCain was just sort of going off on how much he disliked Bush and the horrible things that the Bush campaign had done to his family in South Carolina, and his exasperation with Bush about his ridiculous tax cuts and he really wanted to talk to him about it, but he said the guy doesn’t have the concentration, and you talk for 10 minutes and then the guy wants to talk about baseball,” Mr. Whitford said.

Another guest then asked Mr. McCain, Mr. Whitford recalled, whether he had voted for Mr. Bush. “And he put his finger in front of his mouth and mouthed, ‘No way,’ ” Mr. Whitford said.

Toby, I mean Richard, was sitting at the next table, so we can discount his supporting evidence, plus everyone knows he’s always very preoccupied with evolving speeches and with his complicated personal life. 

Unfortuntately, Whitford’s testimony sounds too much like the sane opinion of a normal non-candidate, not to mention a guy who’s adoptive family, which is not lily-white, had been made into primary campaign fodder by George W in that very receptive state of South Carolina.

All we need now is for CJ (Allison Janney) to plant a question at the daily gaggle about whether President Bartlet has anything to say about McCain’s apparent inconsistency. 

What’s actually not quite so funny is his instinct to lie about it.  We’ve had quite enough of that over the last couple of terms…

 

Depart, I say!

You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing.  Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.  In the name of God, go!

—MP Leo Amery, using the works of Oliver Cromwell to berate Neville Chamberlain, 9 May 1940

No one can accuse Hillary Clinton of sitting around, but large numbers of us heartily wish she would depart.

As with her partner, she has no one to blame but herself.  She never trusted her own instincts, perhaps because she couldn’t hear them over the static of image management and positioning that has gone on since she arrived in the Senate.  Lots of people come to New York state to run for higher office, but few have been as effective as Senators, at least to judge by the breadth of her support there.  You might say her original campaign for the Senate was a 62-county strategy, no mean feat especially for someone not naturally at home in the rural burgs and depressed ex-factory towns of upstate and the west.

She never needed to get stuck with her husband’s political inheritance, and she could have managed some distance from it without at all appearing to be disloyal.  After all, she endured the worst kind of public private humiliation and stuck with him.  She didn’t need to belittle her primary opponent’s rhetoric about coming together to get problems solved—her record of bipartisan management in the Senate, even as a rank freshman, has been impressive.  She didn’t need to put on the tank-helmet of sniper fire in Kosovo—she has built a credible enough history on the Armed Services committee to withstand the sniping of misogynist Republican warmongers.  And she particularly didn’t need all the pretzel logic around her Iraq vote, when like many of the rest of us, she believed that the Bushrovers could never be so ultimately and criminally mendacious as to completely stack the intelligence deck about WMDs and hang Colin Powell out to dry, live, in front of a world-wide audience.

All she had to do was say she was wrong.

She might have had a good run from Barak Obama, who as we have since seen in abundance, would have conducted a campaign in no way detrimental to the greater interests of the popular Democratic Party.  She had the brand, the organization, the early money (and a lot of it), the personal fortune (as we have since come to understand), the cadres of field ops, managers, advisors, and in-place pols at every level of government.  Regardless of Obama’s obvious qualities, it’s been Hillary’s to lose all along.

And the fallout from the initial shock of not just walking away with the prize has been ugly and depressing to watch.  How long have some of us waited for a truly viable female Presidential candidate?  How ridiculous is it that this has not happened yet in the US?  And yet, the kind of mandate of democratic heaven that Hillary Clinton started with seemed to bemuse her with a sense of personal inevitability that is almost always a fatal condition in US politics.  The historical rectitude of a woman president somehow converted to a far-too-obvious sense of personal entitlement, which in the context of dynastic family presidential politics of late should have been the last sensation to exhibit to the voters, sick to death, some literally, of the Bushes and all their works.

Now, in the latter days of her grimly smiling impersonation of indomitability, she has produced a truly terrifying display of posturing and pandering to deeply suspect tendencies.  Interviewer: “Is Obama a Muslim?”  Hillary: “No, of course not, not to my knowledge”.  That sneaky little phrase, with its outrageous but deniable innuendo, has been followed by any number of essentially right-wing republican maneuvers, of which the gas-tax holiday is only the latest.  The charges of elitism are so manifestly more accurate when reversed.  The idea that she is valuable because she has a lock on the white man redneck vote, which is just a veiled piece of racism—these guys are never gonna vote democrat anyway.  The escalating tendency to lump the black vote into a pro-Obama block, as if her own race-baiting didn’t make it so.  (Certainly her’s is a subtler species of racial polarization than, say, George Wallace’s, but no less toxic.)  

And now, soldiering on in the face of any kind of populist mathematics, the bottom line of all her current rationales cannot be other than inciting the super-delegates to overturn a pledged delegate and popular vote plurality.  If it were to come to pass, the Democratic party in one blow would sever its future life in a country that is increasingly of color and, as politicians are always the last to understand, inherited by our children.  She would be crushed by the republican machine in a race of unequaled vitriol, fueled by over a decade of monomaniacal opposition research, unable to effectively counter McLame on the war, or on most other aspects of a disastrous Republican foreign policy which has destroyed our credibility abroad and our credit at home.    

It is very difficult to see how Hillary can understand the value of continuing to fight the battle at this point.  It is not as if she will be seen as a weakling by bowing out.  I think she has burned up a huge amount of good will all over her party, and with independents, but she cannot even at this moment be seen as other than a formidable politician.  

But she doesn’t seem to know how to stop.  That’s really the veridical resonance of Samantha Power’s offhand remark to The Scotsman: “She’s a monster.”  Of course, she isn’t—she’s a first class politician who could have been the first female president of the United States.  That’s a painful prize to surrender.  But it’s even more painful to watch her frantically twisting to outrace her self-induced defeat.

Out with the “new”

An interesting synchronicity is presenting itself on either side of the anglophone Atlantic—New is looking pretty Old.  In the UK, Gordon Brown’s New Labour (well, Blair’s New Labour and Gordon’s inheritance) has taken a blasting in local council elections.  The highlight of this disaster has been the replacement of Red Ken as London’s mayor by Boris Johnson, an Etonian friend of the Tory leader and poster boy David Cameron.  London is obviously highly visible politically, but also is hosting the 2012 Olympics, so Boris will be getting his hands on some lush greenery with which to ease the financial way of backers and constituents alike as London dolls up for the show.  

The BBC’s analysis projects the local council results to a national vote share model, showing a result of 44% Conservative, 25% Liberal Democrat, and a paltry 24% Labour.  While the relative balance of Conservative and Labour are reversed compared to the 1995 results, which presaged the 1997 rout that brought Blair and New Labour to power, the Conservative percentage lead over Labour where they do indeed lead is about a third of that of Labour over Tory in 1995.  Still, it’s a huge blow for Brown.

It’s also a huge blow for New Labour.  The party seems to have been deserted by its left and left/center base, not least over the Iraq War disaster and its concomitant lies.  This despite the fact that Blair has been unquestionably the most telegenic and rhetorically adept PM in recent history.  Desertion by the base is never an inevitable result of running to the center in the short term, but (I submit) it always is in the long.

And what’s up over here, in the US, with the New Democrats?  The Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, was founded in 1985 as a way of repositioning the Democratic party to somehow metabolize the apparent lessons of Ronald Reagan’s success.  Bill Clinton left its chairmanship while the governor of Arkansas to run for president in the 1992 elections.  At first he was just one of the so-called Seven Dwarves, a phrase which captured the esteem that year’s candidates were held in by the then-traditional-leadership of the party.  But of course Bill broke away from the pack, and two terms and one impeachment later, his vice president lost in an election stolen by the Bushrovers with help from the Supremes.

This year, in synch with Gordon’s travails in the Motherland, the DLC is again running a candidate named Clinton.  On the surface, she seems to be doing a bit better than Gordon, given the near impossibility of a Democrat losing after eight years of the worst president in modern history, and considering the current spin that she’s fighting back from a delegate deficit versus Obama.  But really, this is just a fantasy narrative concocted by news reporters in order to stay with the campaign as a story, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Hillary is toast, and she hasn’t gone about getting toasted in a very constructive way, either.  In fact, the comparison to Brown breaks down a bit because we really can’t say he’s pandered to traditional Tory postures the way Hillary has to Republican (even down to an Iran policy by that bomber extraordinaire, Curtis LeMay).  

Looking underneath her supposed support, we can see that a new set of constituencies is forming within the Democratic party, out of disgust with the performance not only of the dominant Republican governments of the last decade or so, but also of the more recently bare majorities of Democrats as well.  The kind of centrist trimming that has gone on for years now amongst Democrats in opposition, trying to keep the New Democrat/DLC formula alive, has fatally sapped the Democratic congressional party (just as it is the Parliamentary Labour Party).  Only Obama can revive the Democrats for the future, and by building a new coalition that is unafraid to move left but is also determined to build a majority.  We will see how Gordon attempts to do the same—there does not seem to be an Obama in the Labour Party.

Why was *he* in Vietnam?

Something even Barak Obama has been doing this primary season has been irritating the heck out of me, and I wonder if I’m the only one. For context, I should say that I’m of an age to have the dubious pleasure of already loathing a US president so intensely that I don’t have enough room in my loathing heart to loath W as I know he should be loathed. I could only be talking about Richard Milhous Nixon. You know, the ex-Quaker president from 1968-1974?

Georgie is a frat boy whom They let have a little war to distract him while They were busy ripping us all off blind. By comparison, Nixon was They. Sure, not the Real They (after all, he was originally a poor sniveler from Whittier, California). But whereas one catastrophe at a time is enough to keep W occupied, Dick Nixon could manage both the contemptuous attitude as well as the serious felonious activity all at the same time. And actually give enough people the impression that he was a statesman.

Sure Dick didn’t start the Vietnam war, but he lied through his teeth to get elected on a peace platform and then let it go on and on and on. All this in the face of years of well organized and vociferous opposition from a wider and wider spectrum of even the US World of Whitepeople. Nixon certainly didn’t flip the voters off in public like W (and his henchman and handler, the other Dick) routinely does, but I was not in the least surprised when I heard the tapes he made of his Oval Office ramblings, full of psychotic threats and compensating profanity. (Pretty funny in a macabre way to hear Henry the K egging him on in his hyper-intellectual Mittleuropa diction.)

Besides over a million Vietnamese, who mainly did nothing to deserve annihilation beyond living in Vietnam, a lot of guys got wasted out there in the jungle. Everyone knew that the Navy was one thing, firing the big guns from some miles offshore (though swiftboats like Kerry’s were extremely dangerous) but boots on the ground totally another. If you were a Marine or in the Army, you not infrequently got to go through some unimaginable hell. And there were flyers who chose to get as crazy as the river boat patrols, and fly choppers into battle zones to deliver troops or extract them and the wounded, guys so nuts that even the soldiers thought they were beyond it, despite their gratitude.

High above it all, there were the the B-52s. These guys had a truly remote-control war. Somewhat closer to the fire, Navy carrier-based pilots flew (after the early part of the war when A-1s were used) the A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft. These had a couple of 20mm cannons, and could mount 4 Sidewinders, an air-to-air heat-seeking missile, although an official Navy history lists only one air-to-air victory by an A-4 in the entire war.

What they mainly carried were ASMs (air-to-surface missiles) and bombs. Missiles included Shrikes (anti-radiation missiles that homed on antiaircraft radars); Mavericks (air-to-ground missiles for use in close support of ground troops) as well as the Bullpup and Walleye glide bombs that the Mavericks replaced; a variety of anti-personnel cluster bombs; and a massive number of Mk. 81 and 82 “dumb” bombs. The Skyhawk could carry up to almost 5 tons of bombs on five external hardpoints. They flew close enough support to be vulnerable to North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire, which around places like Hanoi and Haiphong created reputedly the most heavily defended airspace in the world.

This is where John McCain got shot down in late October 1967. Thus began for him a truly harrowing captivity including two years of solitary and frequent torture, on top of extensive and untreated injuries from his downing and subsequent beatings. Refusing to be released in a propaganda ploy ahead of those in longer captivity, merely because his father was named commander of all US forces in Vietnam, shows his enormous self-control in the situation.

So when Barak honors McCain for this military service, to which service is he referring? The self-sacrificing captivity? Or the 23 bombing missions?

McCain’s calvary was a part of an infinitely larger catalog of horrors and inhumanity. Nothing about this diminishes his suffering or his manifestation of a perhaps unusual level of self-abnegation. Neither does retelling the story of this famous white man warrior’s captivity recall to us the hundreds of thousands of equally horrific maimings, burnings, killings, rapings, tortures, mass conflagrations, poisonings of land, air and water, starvations and unimaginably painful deaths from pestilence and random fire amongst Vietnamese and fellow US servicemen alike. A feast, an overload of death that McCain fully and enthusiastically participated in delivering.

This is the contradiction we’re all carefully avoiding this primary season. Barak (and Hillary, who in any case has carefully constructed her White Warrior persona since becoming a Senator and at the same time Presidential candidate-in-training) feels compelled to “honor” McCain’s “service”. Why? Why was he in Vietnam?

Why are we in Vietnam?

The one time I saw Norman Mailer in the flesh, he was drunk, and getting drunker and cantankerous, fueled by Marty Peretz’s no doubt more than adequate quality bourbon. It was a gathering in the fall of 1972 of undergraduates in the common room of a Prestigious East Coast College. Norman was clearly convinced that he was surrounded by anything but real men (I cannot even project what he might have been feeling about the college women).

Before he became totally combative, he held forth for a while about a theory that as I recall wasn’t uniquely his: that the Watergate break-in was actually an attempt to bug the Federal Reserve Bank offices on the floor above the DNC headquarters where the actual entry occurred. He was impressed by the fact that, according to the experts he had consulted, you didn’t actually need to put bugs right where you wanted to hear something. In the case of the Fed at Watergate, you would put them into the DNC’s ceiling, concealed and still able to eavesdrop on the floor above.

After that, and some razzing of Marty as a college professor and therefore, by definition, wimp, Norman tried to stir up a bit of race war by baiting one of my black classmates, imitating his southern black accent and pretty much carrying on like any drunken guttersnipe looking for a fight. By that point, he was clearly too loaded for anyone to take him on with honor.

It’s hard to really mourn the passing of, among other less-than-admirable qualities, such an inveterate misogynist. But it is telling that even as an 80+ year old artist, his loss will be felt. Whatever the literati might have been saying at any point, his writing in all its forms has always seemed to me utterly committed and fearlessly itself, supremely unconcerned with anything beyond manifesting his concerns and sense of his art. I imagine him as someone who loved the act of writing so much that he had no time amidst its effort to worry about the critics. (For sure he didn’t mind going round-for-round with them afterward.)

More than that, he pursued a craft that I think is key to our survival, if that is still possible in any form we would welcome. There is a real world behind the one we see in the news, in the halls of Congress and on the campaign trail. It is the place where our lives and fortunes are actually disposed of. This is not a paranoid delusion. It is simply a recognition of the fact that the Roman Circus of the media and of our visible governance process is a critical feature of a dictatorship that seeks to preserve the illusion of participatory democracy.

I think Mailer believed that, while he couldn’t sit in the smoky rooms and record the disposition of true power, he could imaginatively reconstruct the parts of it that interested him, without conceding that the result was “only” fiction. He never stopped and never flagged in this—most recently re-imagining the family and youth of Adolf Hitler no less. This superb assurance that he could pierce the veil of misdirection in this way, by right and by the strength of his own hand, is what we have lost in his inevitable passing. If we don’t tell each other these kinds of stories, we have no hope of understanding how our world is being destroyed, much less striking back at the true villains to save ourselves and our descendants. That is a kind of pugnacity, in the defense of individual human creation, without which we will not survive.

Twisty’s law

Twisty at I Blame The Patriarchy has proposed a radical revision of the legal concept of rape. As a het guy who believes that the more I can internalize the Twisty creed, the better my life as a man will be, I sometimes hold forth over there along with the able resident commentariate. I’m always (even in agreement) in some discomfort that it ain’t my living room but a women’s space. (Let’s just stipulate to all the role definitions that are anti-hetero-normative in using these terms.)

So in recent strong agreement with her proposal that women be considered in a default state of “no”, where any entry of personal space sans explicit invitation constitutes a legal form of rape, I also felt like inviting other non-female (in non-hetero-normative terms) feminist men to have at this point over here, so as to declutter the Twisty virtual mansion of any male detritus.

Not sure about the blog-etiquette here, but given IBTP’s recent banning of some male logic-chopping commentary, I didn’t want to attract any more trolls, while still feeling impelled to explore what the Twisty Law might mean for men’s behavior and their standard-issue patriarchal set of conceptual norms.

Here’s a copy of a recent comment that invites “men” to participate in this exercise (trying reading Twisty’s original blog entry first):

I think the discussion of consent is useful only to remove it from the new situation being proposed—after all, Twisty’s Law is designed to vaporize the whole consent issue. What interests me at the moment is how the new situation might look in action.

First, forget about “romance” and “love”. The human spirit can soar, but not in those particular patriarchal coffins. What man can think about these concepts without an immediate context of hunt and chase? They are rooted in power-over and its uses, however witty and debonair.

Next, men have to deal with the fact that in a universe that continuously oppresses women in every manner available, only explicit agreement can be a basis for entering a woman’s space in any manner, let alone an intimate manner. (I’m not shying away from saying “sex” here, I’m just not sure what it means in the context of the Twisty Law.) The notion that the default situation is “no” makes this totally transparent and concrete as a personal interaction. The fundamental counterproposition to any male whining here is ask who would want to enter another’s space, no matter how previously intimate, when in any doubt of one’s welcome? To me the only answer here is simple—a rapist. Sure, its a strong term in the more subtle cases, but (a) lets own it because we do it, and (b) the intrinsic issue doesn’t change with the level of “subtlety”.

Furthermore, men who want to graduate to humanhood have to let go of our supposed right to “have sex”. This is just a removal of our object’s agency. (I mean, in terms of a “right” to “sex”, one can’t even speak of a “partner”.)

Rather than scare up any more male logic-shpielers here, don’t trash this tread with more mens’ rumination but join the comment thread on my blog (click my name).

Comments?

Comfort Women

The annals of the patriarchy manifested a particularly twisted conjunction today. I could not pass it up without some kind of deconstructive notice. The hook in the NYT story written with interesting diffidence by Norimitsu Onishi:

The long festering issue of Japan’s war-era sex slaves gained new prominence last week when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied the military’s role in coercing the women into servitude. The denial by Mr. Abe, Japan’s first prime minister born after the war, drew official protests from China, Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines, some of the countries from which the sex slaves were taken.

We needn’t tarry too long to consider the amazing stupidity of this comment. Applying the Mayer Principle that almost all international politics is domestically motivated, it would appear that Abe is reacting to a proposed non-binding resolution in the US Congress that would request Japan apologize for its military’s institutional brutalization of several hundred thousand abducted women over a period of years during WW2, and playing in his politically weakened condition to his far right wing (a move familiar outside Japan).

As to any debate that it was actually the Japanese military’s direct responsibility,

Ms. Ruff was living with her family in Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, when Japan invaded in 1942. She spent the first two years in a prison camp, she said, but Japanese officers arrived one day in 1944. They forced single girls and women to line up and eventually picked 10 of them, including Ms. Ruff, who was 21.

“On the first night, it was a high-ranking officer,” Ms. Ruff said. “It was so well organized. A military doctor came to our house regularly to examine us against venereal diseases, and I tell you, before I was examined the doctor raped me first. That’s how well organized it was.”

Abe’s LDP cronies are trying to “soften” a 1993 statement by the government admitting some kind of military involvement in the Japanese sexual slave system—they apparently believe that 200,000 women were prostitutes who volunteered.

The occasion for the 1993 statement was the activity of

a Japanese historian, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, outraged by government denials, [who] went to the Self-Defense Agency’s library and unearthed, after two days of searching, documents revealing military involvement in establishing brothels. One was titled “Regarding the Recruitment of Women for Military Brothels.”

One point I take from this, cited from an earlier NYT story by Onishi linked below, is that the evidence was publicly accessible and easy to find.

This is a famous instance of mass, continuous rape, clearly understandable as such even if you are someone who does not want to consider prostitution a form of rape. It was visited on thousands of captive women from conquered populations by the most rigorously organized military force in the world at the time, operating from one of the greatest imperial powers of the last century.

Many in the US consider Japan as having gone to war in 1941—which of course is when they attacked Pearl Harbor. But the Japanese were at war long before even the Germans, invading Manchuria in 1931, fighting intermittently with China until full-scale war (which westerners call the Second Sino-Japanese War) starting in 1937.

In its opening phase, the Japanese army conquered the Chinese city of Nanjing (Nanking), inland from the recently conquered Shanghai, subduing the city on 13 December 1937. In what is popularly known in the west as the “Rape of Nanking”, Japanese soldiers raped, pillaged and murdered for six weeks, throughout the city and surrounding area. Some 300,000 murders are usually cited, although there is still a Japanese nationalist element that denies the Rape ever happened.

Along with military freedom to murder civilian populations goes freedom to rape. During the Rape of Nanjing,

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East [the Pacific War's version of the Nuremburg Tribunal, for Japanese war crimes] stated that 20,000 (and perhaps up to 80,000) women were raped—their ages ranging from infants to the elderly (as old as 80). Rapes were often performed in public during the day, sometimes in front of spouses or family members. A large number of them were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were then killed immediately after the rape, often by mutilation. According to some testimonies, other women were forced into military prostitution as comfort women.

As to the “comfort women”, of whom one might argue (if they had been unlucky enough to live in Nanjing during the Japanese occupation) that they fared better than some of their raped, mutilated and murdered sisters, we have some useful analysis from a Japanese legislator allied with Abe (quoted in Onishi’s first NYT story at the time of Abe’s statement):

“Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs and set prices,” Nariaki Nakayama, the leader of 120 lawmakers who want to revise the declaration, said Thursday.

“Where there’s demand, business crops up,” Mr. Nakayama said, according to The Associated Press. “But to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark. This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth, for the sake of Japanese honor.”

For anyone in their right mind, this needs no further comment.

One graf in particular in today’s NYT story seemed to me to be positively booby-trapped and ready to explode in readers’ hands, with its presentation of complex layers of painful patriarchal logic:

Japan’s deep fear of rampaging soldiers also led it to establish brothels with Japanese prostitutes across Japan for American soldiers during the first months of the postwar occupation, a fact that complicates American involvement in the current debate.

This paragraph says that Japanese in the immediate post-war period, whose army murdered, raped and pillaged its way across much of Asia, and to a dependable level of historical certitude sexually enslaved several hundred thousand women from occupied populations in order to service the Japanese armies of occupation, feared the same treatment during their own occupation. To prevent this danger, they sexually enslaved Japanese women in order to service the Allied armies of occupation.

This is not an entry intended to slam Japan or Japanese. The sexual enslavement of Japanese women in order to prevent mass rape by the Allied occupation is just another example in an endless line of evidence that for women as a sex class, there is no liberation in sight.

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Norimitsu Onishi’s March 2 article; March 8 article