Monday, January 31, 2005Condemned to repeat? In the midst of all the celebrations, bought and unbought, of Iraqi democracy, patachon on Daily Kos turns up a reminder, from the Times, of a previous epoch of celebration:
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The story is reprinted in patachon's Daily Kos diary. By all means, take a look. And thanks to The Cunctator for pointing it out.
posted by michael 10:37:31 AM
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Sunday, January 30, 2005Follow the bagels, Adam, follow the bagels. When a Times political reporter leads with his stomach, be warned: whether it's PBJ sandwiches or cheescake and bagels, you're in for a moveable feast of snark:
For Democrats looking for free food in New York, there was a cheesecake reception on Friday night and a bagel reception yesterday morning, courtesy of Donnie Fowler Jr. Across town, Simon Rosenberg, one of Mr. Fowler's competitors to be Democratic Party chairman, took the Rev. Al Sharpton to lunch at the Four Seasons.
Don't you love the "free food" crack? 'Cause, you know, there were probably some poor people among the Dem crowd, oh and also they're the party of handouts ... It just works on so many levels!
Ostensibly a piece about yesterday's DNC Regional Caucus—fourth and last in an extraordinary series in an extraordinary public campaign for election to the party chairmanship—the piece is really about its lead writer, Adam Nagourney, his smug anti-intellectualism and his ingrained contempt for losers. Nagourney, the Times' appointed political worrywart (a recent headline, "Some See Risks For the G.O.P. in New Strength," is an almost self-parodically perfect example of the trademark Nagourney tack), is usually more circumspect than this, but perhaps he reads the Bush "mandate" as his own permission to unleash the hounds:
The prize is to be leader of a party that is arguably in the worst shape it has been since before Bill Clinton's election in 1992. [The authentic Nagourney weakness-in-strength trope there—ed.] But as the seven candidates for the job appeared in Manhattan yesterday for a forum before Democratic leaders, there was little doubt that they were clawing for the job as if it were the presidential nomination itself. ...
For two hours, the seven men talked at length about what needs to be done to fix the party - in short, learn how to fight like Republicans - as they bemoaned the state of their party. They spun out well-practiced phrases that seemed aimed at the few cameras in the back of the room. ...
This is not the first time that the competition to run a party has been intense, particularly on the Republican side. The job can be a steppingstone to money (Ed Gillespie, the former Republican Party chairman, is now a lobbyist in Washington) or political stature (Haley Barbour is now the governor of Mississippi, and Jim Nicholson is the new secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.)
The fractiousness of this race reflects the state of the party in what is the first real competitive contest for party chairman since 1988, as well as a vacuum in personality and power that is allowing some arguably obscure figures in the party to get some attention for a few weeks.
The forum yesterday - the fourth and final one, intended to give members of the Democratic National Committee a chance to view the candidates - was nearly overshadowed by the extravagance of campaigns that had been on display for weeks, and verged on an over-the-top peak in New York.
I quote liberally, to make sure the through-line of the piece is as clear as it can be. Democratic pissants are wasting my time: a buncha no-names (and wierdo Dean) trying to grab some spotlight and their losers' spoils, and I, Adam Nagourney, am forced to lower myself (for more than two hours) to witness the sorry affair.
But this is what happens when you think with your belly: all you can see of others is that they're trying to fill their own. ("Clawing" to do it, in fact, like so many rodents.) That intellectual activity is going on—that a significant contest of ideas has been joined around the election of a Democratic party chairman, that a back-door process has been remarkably thrown wide open to the scrutiny of the party rank-and-file, that the intensity of electioneering in this process ("extravagant" as it seems to Adam) is an artifact and measure of the range and intensity of debate—such things are meaningless to Adam Nagourney, and would be even if (as I doubt) he had the wit to understand them. Do any of the men running for DNC chair have a program, a vision for the future of—in spite of everything, Adam, what remains—a party that commands the allegiance of half of American voters? Ought any of this be of interest to readers of the New York Times, many of whom are themselves however unaccountably still Democrats?
But, dude, c'mon—they're losers, says Adam. Pass the bagels!
[And thanks to The Cunctator for setting me on to respond to this one. These days I usually just avert my eyes whenever I see Nagourney's byline.]
posted by michael 8:24:50 PM
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Saturday, January 29, 2005Smackdown. Moderate applause to Benedict Carey, who responds to a Bush gay-marriage lie today with a well researched, unambiguous smackdown:
Are children worse off being raised by gay or lesbian couples than by heterosexual parents?
Responding on Thursday to a question about gay adoption, President Bush suggested that they were. "Studies have shown," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The New York Times, "that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman."
But experts say there is no scientific evidence that children raised by gay couples do any worse - socially, academically or emotionally - than their peers raised in more traditional households.
Unsurprisingly, no such studies as Bush alludes to actually exist. I say "moderate applause" because, after all, it shouldn't really be an occasion for remark when a paper challenges a false claim from a Presidential interview conducted by that very paper. That's right—the quote was featured prominently in Friday's pathetic A1-leading interview with Bush, where it went (of course) completely unchallenged, indeed uncommented on. Today's gesture toward reality is not written by one of the Bush-interview trio of big Times hacks, nor does it receive more prominent placement than A12.
But I guess you take what you can get. Tough times when you have to pat the NYT on the back just for belatedly assigning somebody to do a basic damn journalist's job.
Addendum: What I ought to have made clear above is that Carey's piece is just as much, if not more, a smackdown of Bumiller et al. for their dead-from-the-neck-up interview as it is of Bush for lying in the first place. You have to wonder whether some editor at the Times—outside the Washington bureau, presumably, where such atrocities pass regularly unrebuked—decided this was just one toke too many over the line, and set Carey to amend the record that the senior writers had botched. (Hard to imagine that Carey, a science writer who only moved to the NYT in the last half-year, would have pitched this on his own, though of course I'm in no position to know.) If so, it's good to see that there's at least someone with some pull inside the paper who can recognize journalistic nonfeasance, and has enough moxie to make a protest. Think Bumiller's stewing over this one?
posted by michael 1:50:51 PM
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From the Department of Distinctions without a Difference. David Johnston et al. report today on Homeland Security nominee Michael Chertoff's "previously undisclosed involvement" in evaluating how far CIA interrogators could go in abusing the agency's terror detainees.
Depending on the circumstances, [Chertoff] told the intelligence agency, some coercive methods could be legal, but he advised against others ... The advice came in the form of responses to agency inquiries asking whether C.I.A. employees risked being charged with crimes if particular interrogation techniques were used on specific detainees.
Asked about the interaction between the C.I.A. and Mr. Chertoff, now a federal appeals court judge in Newark, Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman, said, "Judge Chertoff did not approve interrogation techniques as head of the criminal division." Ms. Healy added, "We're not aware that anyone in the criminal division was involved in approving techniques because that responsibility would have belonged in the Office of Legal Counsel," another Justice Department unit.
One current and two former senior officials with firsthand knowledge of the interaction between the C.I.A. and the Justice Department said that while the criminal division did not explicitly approve any requests by the agency, it did discuss what conditions could protect agency personnel from prosecution.
Even in the act of breaking news, the Times seems paradoxically eager to soften the blow; the report makes as much as it can of Chertoff's having recommended against various techniques of coercion, rather than having devised or given actual sanction to them. Because of course there's such a wide gulf, practically and morally, between formulating torture policy, and merely advising the torturers on policy so as to give them maximum cover from whatever pathetic threat of law the administration might yet have left in force. Yeah, Chertoff has nothing on his conscience.
posted by michael 1:23:48 PM
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Snark-queen Jodi Wilgoren gets off the attitude bus this morning just long enough to cheerlead for American-sponsored Iraqi democracy®:
Ali Mohammed, who spent eight years in the Abu Ghraib prison in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, called the owner of the grocery store where he is a stock clerk before sunup on Friday to say he was putting on his best suit, the charcoal pinstripe he usually saves for weddings.
Glowing like proud papas, Mr. Mohammed and his supervisor, Hussain al-Jebori, cast the first ballots of their lives and lingered at the polling place here for three hours, clapping for friends and strangers and searching for familiar names, including a former cellmate, on the daunting list of 7,700 Iraqi legislative candidates. Mr. Mohammed, 39, said he decided on Friday to start a family, "because now my children's future is secure." Mr. Jebori, 35, planned to return here on Saturday and Sunday with his five children, ages 4 to 17, "to read the happiness in Iraqi people's eyes."
As moving as it genuinely is to see people realize—in however fragile, partial and equivocal a form—their aspirations for democracy, isn't this laying it on a bit thick?
Add to this the grudging, parenthetical appearance of Wilgoren's sole admission, six grafs in, that the scope of the expatriate-voting event is somewhat, well, limited—
Although registration in the United States was sparse, with 1 in 10 signing up among the estimated 240,000 eligible Iraqis, the first day attracted a steady stream of voters to a former home-improvement store here [in Michigan] and to similar sites in Nashville and the suburbs of Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles—
add as well the story's A1 above-the-fold placement, under a photo of a tearful elderly Iraqi submitting his ballot, and I can't help wondering why the Times believes it has to pimp the feel-good of this latest Iraq Liberation moment quite as hard as it does here. The LA Times, by contrast, offers no front-page coverage of the domestic voting. And while the Washington Post makes just as much A1 splash as the NYT, its treatment of the event is noticeably more reality-based:
In the United States, polling stations were set up in the Washington area, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Nashville. Security was tight, and turnout appeared relatively light at the sites yesterday, although no estimates were released by election organizers.
Some Iraqi immigrants have complained that there were too few voting sites. Nearly 26,000 Iraqi Americans registered for the election, about 10 percent of those eligible.
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) dropped by the Ramada yesterday, where 2,048 people have registered. He praised the voters but criticized the International Organization for Migration, which received $92 million from Iraq's electoral authorities to coordinate the vote abroad.
"People were excited. People were hopeful. Clearly, in their view, this was a positive day for themselves and for their families still in Iraq," Hoyer said. "I would have hoped that with a $92 million contract, more people would have come to the polls." ...
The fault lines in Iraqi society appeared evident among voters in the Washington area. Those casting ballots appeared to be mainly Kurds and Shiites, both groups oppressed by Hussein's government. There were few Arab Sunnis, the minority that dominated Iraq under Hussein. Many Sunnis in Iraq have decided to stay away from the polls.
Some Iraqis made no secret of the fact they were voting on ethnic lines.
No such untoward facts are allowed to damage the mood in the Times' reporting. Then again, the paper has a history of excessive genuflection when it comes to Bush-defined Great Moments in Iraqi History, so I guess this is really no surprise.
posted by michael 11:54:51 AM
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Friday, January 28, 2005Oh my god he talked to me! He likes me again! It's nice, I guess, that all the recent whoring for Presidential favor on A1 has finally paid off: today the zombie trio of Elisabeth Bumiller, Richard Stevenson and Donald Sanger, having been suffered to present themselves in the Oval Office for forty minutes of (futile) brain-hunting, do the best typing they're capable of and serve up the results as the Times' lead article.
President Bush said in an interview on Thursday that he would withdraw American forces from Iraq if the new government that is elected on Sunday asked him to do so, but that he expected Iraq's first democratically elected leaders would want the troops to remain as helpers, not as occupiers.
That lead paragraph, by the way, represents the highest pitch of newsworthiness the interview manages to reach, so you can spare yourself the rest of the thing. Focusless, contentless, ever so carefully deferential: for all the writers bring to it they might just as well have delivered the transcript straight, though at least this is shorter.
But I'd be remiss if I didn't quote you the moment of pure cringe-making weirdness that intrudes in the middle of the article:
But even while acknowledging that Iraq is at a pivotal point in its history, Mr. Bush appeared far more relaxed than he was in August, when he was last interviewed by The Times, in a changing area off a men's room, during a campaign stop in New Mexico.
Which conjures up images of the poor thwarted Times minions hiding behind the coat hangers waiting to ambush Dubya and by God make him acknowledge their existence. Possibly the more relaxed affect now has less to do with Dear Leader's optimism about Iraq and more to do with his not being accosted this time in a changing room—especially considering how Lizzy Boo probably just couldn't stop eyeing his Little General through those flimsy boxers ...
posted by michael 9:24:21 PM
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Wednesday, January 26, 2005Fake populism. Two articles in today's Times deal with working-class issues. Below, the news peg in both instances: see if you can guess which story gets A1 play, and which is buried on A13.
Over decades of wars and death and grieving and regret, the gratuity [a one-time payment for death in the line of duty] has remained one of the military's unbending traditions. It may be less majestic and moving than taps and crisply folded flags, perhaps, but it is no less a part of the rituals and routines surrounding a soldier's death.
As the war in Iraq grinds on, a dozen or so death gratuity checks are handed out across the country in a typical week. Some families say $12,000 is not enough, even though it is double what the military paid from 1991 until Congress approved an increase in 2003, and even though soldiers now automatically have life insurance.
In Congress, there are [bipartisan] proposals to raise the gratuity again.James Barron, "For Families of Fallen Soldiers, the 2nd Knock Brings $12,000"
For the first time, Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that working conditions among the nation's meatpackers and slaughterhouses are so bad that they violate basic human rights. ...It finds that jobs in many beef, pork and poultry plants are sufficiently dangerous to breach international agreements promising a safe workplace. ...
[The report] describes plants where exhausted employees slice into carcasses at a frenzied pace hour after hour, often suffering injuries from a slip of the knife or from repeating a single motion more than 10,000 times a day. It tells of workers' being asphyxiated by fumes from decaying matter, of legs cut off, of hands crushed.Steven Greenhouse, "Rights Group Condemns Meatpackers on Job Safety"
Do you even need me to tell you the answer?
James Barron dully, dutifully makes the rounds of a few New York-area families who have been delivered the death gratuity recently, throws in some potted history, quotes a little political grandstanding, and calls it a day. Maybe having to shlep between Gloucester City, NJ and White Plains took it out of him—certainly when it comes to the writing he seems to have expended only the minimum of energy. But it's enough for A1.
Meanwhile, actual news—of workplace safety violations so systematic and severe, and government watchdogs so toothless, that it was necessary to bring the violations to the attention of the international community as human rights abuses—well, that gets stuffed as far into the hole as the editors can decently manage.
I bring this up because it illustrates as sharply as possible the NYT's way with the working classes. Every so often, A1 features a "populist" story like Barron's: and always to retail a soft populism, opportunistic, one focused on the military or on comfortably distant red-staters, preferably rural. These are stories that are essentially there to flatter the reader's capacity for empathy—and they solicit nothing else, no outrage, no real solidarity. The working-class people in them are sentimental props, at best objects of charity, not fellow citizens whose problems might demand a political response. A1 will take on the easy targets—a set of articles in the last year on unscrupulous insurance providers preying on soldiers about to deploy to Iraq comes to mind—but when do you ever see the Times giving real attention to the plight of laborers where the economic interests opposing them are powerful and politically well-armored?
posted by michael 10:28:42 PM
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Tuesday, January 25, 2005Sneak preview. Peon that I am, and far from the centers of power, I can nevertheless tell you what one of the highlights of the upcoming State of the Union speech is going to be: the case for medical liability reform, otherwise known as "let's fuck the trial lawyers once and for all."
Now, it wouldn't necessarily be a great leap from the available evidence to make this inference: Bush delivered a widely reported speech on the subject earlier this month in Madison County, Illinois (chosen for the occasion as the alleged "epicenter" of the liability "crisis"), with the promise of legislative action to follow in Congress. The speech, and (an extremely well massaged summary of) the proposed legislation, is featured prominently on the White House propaganda site: so clearly the timing is being set for the SOTU, and a Congressional push shortly thereafter. (In a nutshell, the legislation would federalize what is now a state-by-state medical malpractice system and drastically hinder the ability of patients to bring suit, or to receive significant payouts when harmed.)
My inference, though, has a different basis. I still have some contacts within the Chicago ad world, and I learned today that the AMA (headquartered in Chicago) is seeking spec designs from several agencies for a print ad that will run, full-page and in color, in the major national newspapers (the NY Times and USA Today among them) on the morning after Bush delivers the State of the Union. I've actually seen a few of the design treatments. The ads are going to flack the President's deep concern over the medical liability crisis and pledge the AMA to stand with him in the cause of reform.
There's even a poster child, at least in some versions of the ad: a young man of seventeen who, we're told, didn't make it to eighteen because "the neurosurgeon who might have saved him" was forced to move to Florida, in flight from rising insurance premiums. The notion that access to medical care is compromised due to the burden imposed by malpractice lawsuits is essentially a canard, as the GAO has reported: see the citations in this useful mythbusting document from the Center for Justice and Democracy. (It's a measure of just how aggressively the phrase "medical liability reform" is being marketed that the CJD doc is the first piece of critical commentary to be turned up by a Google search on the phrase, and doesn't show until you're about five pages deep in the results.) But it'll make a great sob story; what are the odds that some version gets flacked in the SOTU?
Now, as inside information goes, this don't exactly make me Deep Throat. But it's a nice glimpse into how the system works, and into just how coordinated it is in that corporate-state way, between the official agencies of the government on the one hand, and on the other the supposedly "private" groups that in a case like this operate as arms of the state in all but name. The White House tips the AMA to the content and emphasis of the health part of the State of the Union speech; it wouldn't in the least surprise me if the AMA's PR people had played a role in consulting on the language to be used. And then the doc lobby turns around and keys a prominent, expensive ad buy to the lead it knows the speech will provide it. Which to this extent makes our constitutionally-mandated SOTU, as interpreted by the Bush regime, little more than the free-media cog in a big public relations scam.
posted by michael 10:02:40 PM
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No government that does not aspire to tyranny has any need to permit itself the practice of torture.
Which means that it's incumbent on me as a citizen to oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be Attorney General of the United States. This is posted in solidarity with the statement today on Daily Kos: "The policies for which Gonzales provided a cover of legality - views which he expressly reasserted in his Senate confirmation hearings - inexorably led to abuses that have undermined military discipline and the moral authority our nation once carried. His actions led directly to documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and widespread abusive conduct in locales around the world." The nomination of this man is repugnant, or ought to be, to the conscience of every American and indeed of every civilized person.
And, as a practical matter, I add this, which I've communicated to my Senators, Dick Durbin and Barack Obama: I consider the Gonzalez nomination a litmus test, and I make a pledge that I will refuse to vote for, or in any other way support, now and in the future, any Senator who fails to oppose it.
posted by michael 6:02:34 PM
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Monday, January 24, 2005Shoveling Pentagon shit. Here's a nice division of labor: the Washington Post breaks news, and the Times dutifully comes along a day later on the administration's behalf to try to police the resulting mess.
On Sunday, Barton Gellman reported the existence of a clandestine initiative within the Defense Department, based on perverse reinterpretation of existing law and funded with secretly diverted appropriations, that gives Donald Rumsfeld unprecedented authority to direct aggressive, covert operations, aka "black reconnaissance":
The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.
[Unnoticed in blog commentary on this has been the degree to which Gellman's story provides substantial grounding for one of the key assertions in Seymour Hersh's recent New Yorker article, that Rumsfeld is seeking expanded authority "to run operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A." as part of a second-term agenda to widen the TerrorWar.]
Following up on A1 today, Eric Schmitt produces an extended exercise in missing the fucking point ("Pentagon Sends Its Spies to Join Fight on Terror", a gung-ho headline if ever there was one). [Read Corrente's Lambert on this topic, by the way, if you want to contrast Schmitt with someone actually getting the point.] It's almost impressive, the careful way Schmitt entirely denudes the story of its significance: nothing about (potentially) illegally diverted funds, nothing about the Pentagon arrogating to itself the judiciary's right to interpret the law, nothing about the history of Rumsfeld's "brain trust" in this matter, the loathsome Stephen Cambone and Gen. William "Crusader" Boykin—nothing about what amounts to Rumsfeld's elaboration of something that begins to look like a personal dictatorship within the American military establishment. The Times piece reads essentially as an extended gloss on Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita's statement dismissing the WaPo article, a statement quoted extensively throughout the piece in such a way as to suggest that it represents the appropriate (practically the sole) context for understanding the story. Di Rita's statement in fact provides the article its central "nothing-to-see-here" dynamic—this isn't really anything knew, and besides, didn't you guys want us to beef up human intelligence, 9/11 9/11 9/11?
"It is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its longstanding human intelligence capability," the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said in a statement on Sunday. "A principal conclusion of the 9/11 commission report is that the U.S. human intelligence capability must be improved across the board."
Some intelligence experts said the creation of the units was the latest chapter in a long-running battle for intelligence dominance between Mr. Rumsfeld's Defense Department and the C.I.A. ... Among the C.I.A.'s concerns, former intelligence officials have said, are that an expanded Pentagon role in intelligence-gathering could, by design or effect, escape the strict Congressional oversight imposed by law on such operations when they are carried out by intelligence agencies. ...
But other analysts said the teams were merely the latest incarnation of intelligence units that the Army, Navy and Air Force operated throughout the cold war to recruit spies, debrief defectors and gather information about foreign weapons systems in countries like China and the Soviet Union. "D.O.D. is not looking to go develop strategic intelligence," said one senior adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld who has an intelligence background.
Even the institutional implications, glanced at in the above excerpt, are allowed to be dismissed by a Defense Intelligence Agency official—named, no less, hence clearly offering an approved opinion—calling that whole aspect of the thing just "really a giant turf battle."
Only at the end of the article, in a vestigial set of paragraphs, do we get a suggestion that there's been something less than entirely forthright and above-board about this whole deal:
A former senior intelligence official who left his post last year said he had known that the Defense Department was seeking a greater role in human intelligence. But he said he had not known that the Defense Department had begun any such effort, and said he did not believe that the Central Intelligence Agency had been notified. "I was astounded, and it's the sort of thing I should have known about, given the perch I had," he said of the details reported by The Post.
Given that Douglas Jehl is credited with additional reporting for the article, I'm guessing this emanates from him, and that Schmitt dangles it from the end of the piece to cordon it off as much as possible from his otherwise clean parroting of the official storyline. Wouldn't do to get Larry Di Rita mad, now, would it, Eric? Keep shoveling!
posted by michael 5:58:48 PM
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For some unknown reason, I'm unable to leave a comment on my own freakin' blog today: so I'll do it here.
A little while ago, a post on Alicublog that made reference to a series of Lexus-under-the-Christmas tree commercials led me to think a bit about the aspirational qualities of luxury brands, and about consumerist envy as a property of brand equity. Roy Edroso stopped by to add a comment, to wit:
You're right about the aspirational angle (I worked on Mad Ave awhile too) -- you also explain it better than most.
I would only rejoin that, while you can see that process at work in more typical luxury ads (thanks to deBeers advertising, everyone can relate to the magic a gift of diamonds can grant, and that goes especially for those of us who cannot afford to give them), Lexus-for-Christmas does not seem engineered to inspire envy so much as to inspire actual holiday sales.
I take this from the way the ads mutated over two seasons. The first wave of the ads were all magic and wonder -- how splendid to give a car for Xmas! This year we saw more self-deprecating comedy ("How did you get a bow that big?"). I think this is not so much a refreshment as a normalization of the theme: we aren't gonna blow smoke up your ass about how wonderful this is, we're just reminding you to buy it. Which you were gonna do anyway, right?
I think the Jaguar campaign is more middle-class aspirational. Those folks are so close to normal that you have to think, "How the fuck can they buy a Jag and I can't?"
To which the Salon comment system won't let me reply:
Roy, I like your distinction between "refreshment" and "normalization" of the Lexus-for-Christmas theme—and I'd say that normalization does double duty, both in the immediate term to move sales, and over the longer term to establish the Lexus brand in the consumerist pantheon as a standard of the unattainably desirable (or the desirably unattainable).
There are aspirational products I can imagine buying, or imagine somebody much like me (who'd made better life choices) buying; but I think the category of stuff-I-know-I'll-never-get-close-to is aspirational in its own way—if only by defining the limit at which aspiration fails. And prophetic, I'm afraid, of the utter Texas-Republicanization of American culture (one of your ongoing themes on Alicublog): all that Dallas trash rising to walk again. Which was basically farce the first time around—so what does it become on the flip?
Marx would have called a psychology of class resentment that systematically repressed or perverted revolutionary desire, petit-bourgeois: but I don't know that he ever really elaborated that psychology, much less imagined it as the dominant mode of feeling throughout the entire spectrum of non-owner classes. That psychology seems to be the crucial production of our advertising-industrial complex, and the chief service that the corporate masters pay for, whether they know it or not. It strikes me as a nice irony that my training in Marxist cultural theory gave me a leg up on the B-school types in being able to shill brands: and thank God for downsizing, which happened to me before I had to choose whether or not to really blacken my soul with that kind of work.
posted by michael 2:38:05 PM
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Sunday, January 23, 2005Speaking of stalking horses ... It's remarkable to find, in the same A section that gives us Rick Lyman's report on Medicaid privatization in Florida (post below), John M. Broder writing about the Gubernator's proposal to "reform" Calpers, California's state pension system, along with the state's parallel system covering its teachers. Taken together, the two pieces make it abundantly clear that the national Republican party has determined to proceed on a broad front to gut all social insurance programs of any size—and that these are merely the opening salvos of a years-long battle.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, echoing language used by those who claim Social Security is headed for a crisis, contends that California can no longer afford a generous traditional pension plan for state employees and teachers and should force all new workers into a 401(k)-style plan of private accounts.
Again, not a piece that makes it all the way to A1, though it is the lead article in the interior National Report.
And congratulations to Broder, who nails this one down tight. His piece is significantly more thorough and tough-minded than Lyman's; Broder thoroughly understands the implications of what Schwarzenegger is up to and has no qualms about stating them. Nor does he allow the privatizers to control the piece's agenda, where they can be called out on the facts:
Mr. Schwarzenegger, in his State of the State address earlier this month, described California's pension system as "another government program out of control," careering toward fiscal ruin. He cited the state's obligation to inject $2.6 billion into the system this year to keep it actuarially sound, compared with $160 million four years ago ...Self-evidently, the ginning up of a "crisis" in the well run, well funded Calpers system follows exactly the national Social Security playbook. [Anyone out there still sold on the notion of the Ahnud's "moderation"?] Writing about Lyman's piece, I wondered about the operation of the privatization apparat in coordinating the attack a state level, and Broder's right there with me:
Although Mr. Schwarzenegger described the plans as a looming train wreck, even advocates of privatization in his own administration say the system is currently sound. The plans, taken together, are nearly 90 percent funded, a level that most experts consider quite healthy ...
The state contribution to the system this year is large because of a downturn in the market, not because of extravagant benefits paid to retirees ... The state has benefited in the past from a strong stock market and in some years has had to make no payments into the funds.
"Calpers investments have generated $173 billion over the last 20 years," said Patricia K. Macht, a spokeswoman for the fund. "Why would anyone want to throw away the chance to add another $173 billion over the next 20 years? People see this as an opportunity to use a temporary downturn to drive a stake into the heart of a well-funded system."
The impetus for Mr. Schwarzenegger's plan comes from some of the same antitax advocates, free-market enthusiasts and Wall Street interests pushing President Bush's Social Security initiative. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a Washington lobbying and research group, has endorsed the plan. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, in California, is sponsoring a similar measure ...
Although Social Security and the California pension plans have important differences and different long-term challenges, the proposed solution - private accounts managed by individual workers with a predetermined contribution by employers - is basically the same.
"They certainly are kissing sisters," said Stephen Moore, the former director of the conservative Club for Growth who is now the president of a political action committee, the Free Enterprise Fund, which is dedicated to remaking Social Security. "These are proposals that aim toward giving people real ownership and a real stake in how the economy and the stock market perform."
Mr. Moore, who has advised Mr. Schwarzenegger on economic policy and participated in an independent audit of state finances last year, said that California tends to lead the nation on social policy. If California moves from a traditional defined-benefit pension plan to a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan, the nation is likely to follow, he said.
And Broder winds up the piece by noting the wider social dimensions of a Calpers privatization, in a way almost calculated to make the right-wing bias hunters howl:
Some opponents of privatization also detect a subtler agenda among those pushing private accounts - to silence the voice of workers and their pension fund managers, who oversee some of the largest institutional investment accounts in the nation. Calpers has been a leader in an effort to bring greater accountability to corporate boardrooms ...
Richard C. Ferlauto, director of pension investment policy for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said that Mr. Schwarzenegger and others were manufacturing a crisis to justify sweeping changes to the retirement systems that millions of workers rely on and to throttle the influence the workers wield through their pension plan investments.
"The debate around private accounts will be fought in California before the outcome of the Social Security debate is determined," Mr. Ferlauto said. "The attempt in California is the stalking horse for whether private accounts can be sold to the American public."
Bracing to see such clear-headed work from Broder: if only the crew who write for the Times about Social Security privatization could manage as well.
posted by michael 12:19:20 PM
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Privatization: Not just for Social Security anymore. Arguably the most important piece in the Times' A section today, for its national implications, doesn't make it further to the front than A18 (though, to be fair, how can it when the competition includes Eric Wilson's heartbreaking account of troubles at "the revered fashion house of Givenchy," surely a topic of concern to every American who's ever bought a couture gown?). Rick Lyman writes from Florida about the possibility of that state radically restructuring its Medicaid program, and it's a telling glimpse into our future:
America's governors, struggling for a grip on mounting Medicaid costs, are restricting access, squeezing providers and chipping away at services. But perhaps no one is proposing changes as far-reaching and fundamental as Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida.
Mr. Bush is proposing that the state's 2.1 million Medicaid recipients be allotted money to buy their own health care coverage from managed care organizations and other private medical networks. If enacted, the program would make Florida the first state to allow private companies, not the state, to decide the scope and extent of services to the elderly, the disabled and the poor, half of them children.
Sound like any other currently proposed social-spending overhaul you can think of?
The piece is workmanlike and evenhanded—which would sound like faint praise, but is not, in view of the Times' generally miserable track record in anything having to do with Jeb Bush—and does not shy away from justifiable use of the term "radical" to characterize the Florida proposal. (Nor does it shy away from use of the terms "private" or "privatization," even though it's clear that they're on the Republican proscription list, at least as regards the parallel Social Security, uh, reform. They're likely to be proscribed for Medicaid privatization, too; amusingly, Lyman reports that the Jeb plan is officially called "empowered care.") And though it comes late in the piece, Lyman is forthright enough to articulate the necessary critical context for what Jeb wants to do to Medicaid:
The far-reaching nature of the proposal is similar to ideas Republicans in Congress have put forward for Medicare and has led some critics to wonder whether Governor Bush is providing a preview of the kind of health care system President Bush would like to see nationwide.
"This is all part of the scheme of privatizing all of government," said Karen Woodall, a longtime Florida lobbyist for social services.
Even if the President Bush who ushers us into the paradise of national health care privatization turns out to be President Jeb rather than President Dubya. (Don't know about you, but I can't hardly wait for 2008!)
It'd be a real service if some enterprising reporter tried poking around at the network of think tanks and consultancies responsible for creating Jeb's Medicaid plan, looking for overlaps with the Social Security privatization apparat. What are the odds that this thing hasn't been coordinated at a high level within the national GOP, and that Medicaid privatization is not in fact a well-designed stalking horse for Jeb's Presidential ambitions? Knowing its attention-impaired approach to stories like these, though, that poking-around will probably have to come from somewhere other than the Times: I wouldn't be surprised if this were the last we heard from the Paper of Record about the Florida Medicaid overhaul till it's become a foregone conclusion.
posted by michael 10:42:56 AM
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Friday, January 21, 2005Idealism. Knowing that the Times' inauguration lead was the joint product of Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard Stevenson ("Bush, at 2nd Inaugural, Says Spread of Liberty Is the 'Calling of Our Time'"), you could expect a dutiful, not to say relentless, adherence to the script of Bushie triumphalism; nor would you be disappointed. (By all means, compare the lead articles in the Washington Post and the L.A. Times; the NYT's is by far the most lickspittle, the least willing to entertain uncomfortble truths, of the set.) George II, beginning his second term "as a leader tested and altered by the terrible events of one day in his first,"
was sworn in on Thursday ... and in an inaugural address striking for its idealism told Americans that spreading liberty around the world was "the calling of our time" and that the nation's "vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."
[One thing Bumiller and Stevenson work hard at, whenever they're in range of The Speech, is attempting to answer Bush's lyrical flow with one of their own. That's the genuine courtier's instinct at work there. It's also striking how in tune they are with the Leader's unexpressed thoughts: "As general as his words were, they were intended to justify the invasion of Iraq and offer a reason for Americans to be patient with his efforts to quell a violent insurgency." The fact the the words "Iraq" and "insurgency" were never uttered in the speech presents no obstacle to the deep Stevenmillerian intuition.]
Frankly, the thought of taking Dubya's thin gruel of cliché as having substance enough to chew over—even to the extent of critiquing what Bumenson make of it in the Times today—fills me with ennui. And why bother with writers who demonstrate, in almost every assignment, their equal lack of political conscience and of journalistic self-respect? (A question that defines, perhaps, the diminishing returns of a blog project like this one.) Still, I can't forego one small protest, however sure I am that it has no hope of registering:
I like the word "idealism." I think it designates, or ought to designate, something fine: an unwillingness to submerge one's innate sense of possibility in the mereness of the world-as-it-is. At the very least, I think it ought to be reserved for better than the ceremonial rehearsal of the Big Lie* of the moment. "Idealism" may embrace many kinds of antagonism to reality: but the propaganidst's cynical refusal to allow reality to intrude on his rhetorical formulas isn't one of them. Shame on Bumiller and Stevenson for their descent into Orwellian doublespeak, and shame on the Times for giving it a place.
*Update [Saturday, 10 am]: Dan Balz and Jim VanDehei, on A1 in today's WaPo, allow us the chance to, er, contextualize the "idealism" of Bush's inaugural address: "Bush Speech Not a Sign of Policy Shift, Officials Say." My, that was quick. Think A1'll notice?
posted by michael 10:18:39 PM
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Thursday, January 20, 2005Somebody hates Todd Purdum. Somebody at the Times, that is, not at Reading A1.
Somebody has to: how else to explain his recent run of assignments? Today Todd is forced into ignoble service as A1's fluffer to Laura Bush ("A More Relaxed Laura Bush Shows Complexity Under Calm"). (Teaching the valuable lesson that we must never think the Times has reached bottom in its effort to curry favor with our Republican masters—taxing as it is to imagine something more debased than today's installment.) The lead offers us the War First Lady in historical context:
She sits on a red damask settee in the White House Map Room, where Franklin D. Roosevelt plotted the Allied victory in World War II, stroking Miss Beazley, her new Scottie puppy, a tiny feminine form of Roosevelt's beloved Fala. Her gray pinstriped pantsuit is soft and perfectly put together, and so is she.
But, either the strain imposed by the historical elevation proves too great, or Todd may be deliberately parodying his assignment. It's possible that, even if A1 proves incapable of embarrassment, Todd Purdum has found his own personal level of shame. (And, based on his track record, it's a dire sign indeed when you've sounded Todd Purdum's level of shame.) Consider the not-so-implicit protest—a passage hinting, astonishingly, almost at political rebuke—registered in Purdum's third and fourth grafs:
The book on her night table these days? The "really, really wonderful" "Essays of E. B. White," that gentle liberal who wrote at the height of Eisenhower era conformity that "democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home."
Her favorite topic of campaign conversation with her mother-in-law last year? "We loved to complain about various media." Institutions or individuals? "All."
That "all" has kind of a chilling ring, doesn't it? (Especially when you consider Waura's profoundly scary interlocutor.) Given the cowardice that reigns in the Times' Washington bureau, Purdum here might as well be running down Pennsylvania avenue waving the hammer and sickle. You almost wonder how his editors allowed it. (Oh my God: have I found the Times' dreaded liberal bias at long last?)
For the rest, it's a sad enough spectacle, and one has the sense of wanting to draw the curtain for Todd out of sympathy. Let's just cite a representative graf:
In a 45-minute interview with reporters in Washington the other day, [Mrs. Bush said] that she hates it when people suggest that her husband "doesn't like to read or, you know, whatever." She said the 41st president of the United States "is the sweetest man you've ever known" and a "wonderful grandfather to the girls," while his wife is a "terrific mother-in-law" but "more intimidating, maybe"
where the chopped-up quotes suggest nothing so much as the writerly equivalent of someone carrying a particularly redolent diaper at arm's length. So possibly any protest here is simply a courtier's pique: no doubt Todd feels the Ladies-of-Bush-II beat (first Condi, now Waura) as an affront to his dignity. Somebody should tell him that dignity is too expensive a commodity for A1 these days.
posted by michael 2:11:31 PM
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Tuesday, January 18, 2005Condi in the Big Chair. Todd Purdum ends yesterday's big, wet kiss to Condoleeza Rice on her imminent ascension to the State Department (hopefully headlined "As Rice Prepares to Move Up, Diplomacy May Be on Rise, Too") with an anonymously hopeful quote:
If Ms. Rice's management of the several dozen members of the National Security Council was not always seen as effective, her skills in running a huge bureaucracy will be tested in ways that even the powerful provost's post at Stanford did not. But at least one senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed optimism.Awwww ... Who knew that Foggy Bottom had become the Island of Misfit Toys?
"I think," the official said, "we have a sense that we're at a moment in history with the president's agenda of fighting terrorism, building democracy, but also re-establishing relations with allies and dealing with the Middle East, when we feel like we're going to fit in."
Part of an informal pre-inauguration series of A1 pieces in which the Times strives to flatter the self-mythologizing of the Big Repubs, Purdum's article is a farrago of wishful pieties, with hardly enough substance in it to make good fish wrapping. Writing in a tone of pie-eyed innocence, Purdum worries with every appearance of seriousness at the question—none "looms larger" as Rice faces confirmation, he says—of "just what kind of secretary of state Ms. Rice will be." Only friends and bipartisan well-wishers are invited to this party; "critics" are given a single, two-sentence paragraph early in the piece to say their worst of her NSC tenure—a paragraph plus a sentence, if you count Purdum's belated, glancing refrence to that half-forgotten little tussle over terrorism preparedness that Richard Clark started last summer. (A few of us, not Todd obviously, still remember Condi squirming at having to speak the title of that unfortunate August 6 PDB.) None of which matters, we're asked to believe, because even in the worst case past is not prolog here: Purdum closes out every major division of the article with a fetishistic tribute to the transformative power of the Big Chair that Condi inherits, with the most egregious saved for last:
"Her role will be different institutionally, as well as practically," said the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. No longer will she be expected to summarize the views of others, but to state her own ...
"I think we can expect her to be a strong, visible, articulate secretary of state who is going to do her best to function as the administration's chief foreign policy spokesman ... She's going to be more reflective, she's going to be more expressive, she's going to stake out positions in ways she's felt constrained from doing." [quoting Condi's friend Coit D. Blacker] ...
"One of the true maxims of Washington is that where you sit is where you stand," said [David] Rothkopf, who interviewed Ms. Rice for his [forthcoming history of the National Security Council]. "She will soon find that instead of being surrounded by people in the White House who are thinking about the president's agenda all the time, she's surrounded by career Foreign Service officers in a massive bureaucracy that has its own agenda and its own traditions.
"She's also a nice person, an open person, who will listen to those people, and be changed by them. And sooner or later, many of the State Department's initiatives will begin having her imprint, and she's going to have pride of authorship."
Why Purdum or his editors think that well-meaning pap like this can pass muster as genuine analysis is beyond me—or would be, if I thought they thought that genuine analysis was being perpetrated here. This is mere dues-paying, more evidence of the depths to which the Times' self-respect (at least the self-respect of the Washington bureau) has sunk under the current regime. Rice, following administration protocol, "declined to be interviewed for this article," Purdum admits in his second graf: on the outs with the powers that be, the Times begs for mercy like a whipped puppy.
And what might the naysayers say, if Purdum allowed them to say any nays? Well, how about connecting the dots from Seymour Hersh's new piece in the New Yorker on the second term's Rumsfeld Ascendancy and the consequent utter militarization of American foreign policy? Condi goes to State precisely as Porter Goss went to the CIA—less as a department head than as Dubya's proconsul. Her charge isn't to advocate for, or from, the State bureaucracy—it's to neutralize it, to keep it out of Rummy's faith-based way as he gets his next few wars on. With or without Hersh's reporting, it can't be clearer that that's what Dear Leader has in mind. How likely is it that Condi's loyalty to her hubby's going to wane just because she no longer has a desk in the White House?
Is there any chance that Todd Purdum isn't aware of this, or that with a little effort he couldn't have found somebody with a reputation to say it? To offer an actual critical perspective on the institutional politics, and what might be expected from Secretary of State Rice? Of course not. It's just that any such commentary would have violated the craven decorums by which the Times, when it comes to Bush and his gang, now instinctively operates.
posted by michael 3:44:20 PM
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Thursday, January 13, 2005I finished a poem. Which is an event in no world much larger than my own—then again, it's my damn blog.
As it happens, I finish numerous poems, or have in the last three years. This one, which fell into place finally last night, is a bit different: for one thing, it's long, for me anyway, at about 100 lines. More important, most of the poem—the first three of its four paragraphs—was written more than 10 years ago, toward the end of my stint in grad school. That's the point at which I was on the verge (as I could not have seen then) of working out a consistent poetic practice, the practice in fact that I have now. (Randall Jarrell said that poets were people who spent their lives standing outside in thunderstorms, waiting to be struck by lightning. My version of standing in the rain is writing a page of verse as close to daily as I can; most of the time it's just a matter of getting soaked to no purpose, but sticking by the practice means that I'm more likely to be there when the electricity's about to gather.) Then what I think of as the Long Silence intervened: I was hired to teach at LSU, endured a massive first-year depression, and spent most of the next decade working through those two intimately related events. There was no room in there for poetry, as it seemed; if you'd asked me four years ago if I thought I'd ever write a poem again, I'd have said no and I'd have felt certain about it.
What brought me back to writing is another topic—to the extent that it's not mysterious to me—but the new/old poem is of interest because it straddles the gap, and because it straddles it by way of being a kind of disguised, comic, much mythologized poetic autobiography. (Which is something I only recognized late, on this side of the gap. The poem is called "A history of poetry.") Since I started writing again in earnest, I've been looking at the poem's third paragraph, wondering how to follow on with a completion and whether I'd be able to, whether I could even harmonize with that earlier style—and wondering at how, in its fashion, the paragraph seems almost to have been prophesying the Long Silence that looked like it had swallowed up, not just that poem but all poems, for me. (Opening line of the paragraph: "And what happened/to that dream-of-falling poem that got you/locked in the cellar among tentacles/all those years?" I imagine my younger self saying that uncannily to me now.) I've taken four or five separate stabs at it, none of them even very close to right: but, like most things in this game, it was a matter of waiting until the right lines came along—or, more particularly, until I was able to recognize the lines that would work among all those that had come, and how to fit them together.
In other words, finishing this one is something of an event for me, as well as marking my first official poem of 2005. Here it is.
posted by michael 3:30:52 PM
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Friday cat blogging, special Thursday edition. Because my home broadband connection is down, and it's gonna be way too cold in Chicago tomorrow to venture out ...
This is Samson (Sam, to his friends), blog-appropriately pillowed on a Times delivery wrapper.
posted by michael 2:15:52 PM
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First, you have to need it. On the ever-recommendable Alicublog, Roy Edroso remarks on the economic elitism of a couple of right-wing wankers reviewing the new, cheaper iPod Shuffle. Roy says:
These are the kind of guys that probably saw all those ads last month with fucking NEW CARS under Christmas trees and said to themselves, "Why didn't someone think of that earlier, indeed?" instead of "Wow, that makes my Life Savers Sweet Storybook look even sadder."
The note about those (Lexus) ads gets some added work in the comments (Roy's got about the best comment board in the biz right now, certainly given the closure of the Whiskey Bar), and after one commenter asks, complainingly, "How big is the potential target these advertisers are trying to hit?" the proprietor himself chimes back in by saying that
The main thing about those car-for-christmas ads is, they reflect the new economy -- a smaller group of people have more of the money, so even in the lowest-common-denominator medium of network TV we see an increasing number of luxury ads. Soon the big boys will stop talking to the rest of us entirely and just sell diamonds and Beamers.
To which, as someone who's worked (peripherally! peripherally, I stress, for my soul's sake!) for the last couple of years in advertising, I feel the need to add a slight correction/elaboration. Don't think that the success of these sorts of luxury-goods ads is measured simply in terms of units—whether rated in carats or horsepower—pushed. These are brand-building exercises, even the event ads: which means that, pace Roy, they are indeed talking to the rest of us, whether or not we can afford a Lexus or ever will.
Lexus has had a remarkable success turning itself into a status brand. It's not enough that the car be conspicuously expensive: the name itself, the Lexus symbol, has to be visible to people who can't buy the car. It has to be what the marketers call aspirational—meaning, not so much unattainable as tantalizingly unattainable, at a closely calibrated just-beyond-the-reach of the wide middle class of consumers. (Hence the ad strategy of putting the car beneath that great symbol of middle-class consumer aspiration, the Christmas tree.) What the ads are promoting in us, the Lexus-less schnooks to whom they are also targeted, is resentment. The Lexus is made a focus of impotent, self-loathing consumerist envy: and that envy (the production of it in others) is one of the things that people who buy the cars are purchasing, as surely as they're purchasing leather upholstery. And it's what the client is purchasing with those ad buys, the emotional complex at the core of a status brand's equity.
While I'm sure it's not in any of the standard MBA texts, if you really want to understand the inner workings of branding, get yourself a copy of Louis Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus" (here's a reading guide) and consider carefully his discussion of interpellation. I'd argue that the advertising system, in our society, is an even more important, certainly more pervasive, ISA than education.
posted by michael 1:15:01 PM
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Last update: 5/12/2005; 11:21:36 AM .
