Nobody here but us Chicken Littles. I managed to depress my blog friend eRobin (of Fact-esque) with my post a week ago about the likelihood that Saudi oil production is at or near peak. (Though I can't take too much credit: what really depressed eRobin was my sending her off, from the comments, to read the enormously depressing James Howard Kunstler on the Long Emergency, aka the coming permanent oil decline.) eRobin, bless her, took it to heart, and went off across the Internets seeking solace, finding some in a post at In Search of Telford that takes issue with Kunstler's dismissal of biomass fuels as a partial solution to petroleum shortages. (An argument I'm not going to take up, as it's beside the point of this post anyway.)

And she found some solace in the comments on that post, which is what interests me here. (And eRobin, I hope it doesn't seem like I'm making fun, 'cause I'm not.) It interests me as illustrating a powerful emotional pattern in response to warnings of catastrophe: because the comments eRobin responded gratefully to were, in fact, utterly without argumentative content—something I think eRobin would have seen if she hadn't wanted so badly to get past the doom-and-gloom. That is, the commenters are basically just calling Kunstler bad names—"catastrophist," "Chicken Little." Those are the same bad names people have been calling environmentalists for years, and while the name-calling may be satisfying in some emotional way, it doesn't address any of the questions actually being raised.

Of course you want to pull your head in when you hear the sky is falling. You want to find ways to be reassured that it's not really falling: and reassurance isn't hard to find, especially when—since the Chicken Littles are forced to be over-eager, and early, and repeated, in their warnings, hoping to goad people into working to prop up the sky before it's too late—there are a lot of people standing around, saying, hey, look, the sky's still up there, isn't it? Maybe slipped a bit in one or two spots, couple of cracks here or there, but still basically the same old sky it's always been, and always will be. No particular urgency about patching it. And since, in fact, the sky-propping project is enormous, and far beyond the power of any one person to undertake, and we're all disposed to believe in the timeless permanance of the way things are—it takes almost nothing to convince people that Chicken Littles are just killjoys who get some sick pleasure out of making everybody else miserable and afraid.

And yet there's a fundamental truth the Chicken Littles have been articulating for lo these thirty years and more, since the first Club of Rome report, and it's not really going away. Thirty years of history haven't even changed its shape much: they've only added precision and reinforcement. There are natural limits that must collide with our regime of essentially unlimited growth in human consumption, and the point of collision (once we're sufficiently far down the path, as we are now) is available to be extrapolated.

And what's ironic is that the longer we ignore that truth, the longer we persist in comforting ourselves that the sky can't really fall, we can't possibly be faced with a fundamental change in the ratios of our economy, the more we guarantee that those natural limits, once they express themselves, will express themselves catastrophically. One doesn't insist on acknowledging those limits because one hates life, but because the outcome is so much worse to the extent we fail to acknowledge them. The Telford commenters seem to think it's some kind of devastating (and not trite at all) critique of Kunstler to note that he doesn't offer solutions. Well, so what? If the thing you're sounding alarms about is a real threat, isn't ringing the bell and shouting the first, essential step toward a solution? Isn't diving back under the covers precisely the thing that prevents any solution being reached?

posted by michael  9:50:11 PM  
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Signals. There's an air of desperate unreality in the fact that the WaPo story about Bush's unproductive man date with Saudi Prince Abdullah yesterday is focused on gas prices.

President Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah emerged from their meeting here Monday with no agreement that would lower gasoline prices in the near term, although Saudi Arabia reiterated plans to increase oil production capacity in coming years in an effort to meeting fast-growing world demand.

Bush has pressed the Saudis in recent weeks to help lower gasoline prices soon by increasing crude oil production, but Abdullah and his delegation responded here by explaining their long-term strategy to invest $50 billion over five years in a plan that would eventually increase the kingdom's oil production capacity by close to 50 percent.

In closely related news, I'm announcing a plan today to sacrifice several goats in a long-term strategy that will eventually more than double my chances of winning the lottery.

And we're supposed to be concerned about gas prices for the summer driving season? Listen carefully: beneath the noise about lack of American refinery capacity and worries over Iraqi violence, beneath the comforting hum of good and unrealizable intentions, Prince Abdullah has delivered Dull George a message. Saudi production is peaking. The Prince can't help a brotha out, because Saudi Aramco is pumping as hard as it can, and there's basically nowhere to go now but down.

Consider what physicist David Goodstein of Caltech, author of Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, had to say in a presentation last year:

In 1997, Kenneth Deffeyes, a former Shell Oil geologist who's now an emeritus professor of geosciences at Princeton, published a book he entitled Hubbert's Peak—The Impending World Oil Shortage. In it, Deffeyes said he knew that Hubbert had been right and that the peak for domestic production had been reached when he saw this sentence in 1971 in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Texas Railroad Commission announced a 100% allowable for next month."

To demystify that sentence, the Texas Railroad Commission was the quaintly named cartel that controlled the U.S. oil industry by making strategic use of the excess capacity for pumping in Texas. When the commission said, "100% allowable for next month," it meant that there was no longer any excess capacity. They were pumping flat-out, and therefore Hubbert's Peak had been reached.

Ever since reading this, I've thought that the signal that the worldwide peak had been reached would be when we found out that Saudi Arabian production had peaked. For the last few decades, the Saudis have been using excess pumping capacity to manipulate the world oil market in exactly the same way the Texans once did.

Anybody got a flare gun?

posted by michael  3:22:22 PM  
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Quote of the day—OK, quote of yesterday, but what the hell, I've been distracted—comes from a piece by Bob Cusack in The Hill on "GOP finger-pointing." Let the circular firing squad commence:

Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) who is credited as the author of the Ryan-Sununu [Social Security privatization] bill, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Times two months ago that mocked the White House for trying to send the president out to sell personal accounts with a message that they don't really solve the problem. Ferrara wrote, "Is it any wonder then that the more George W. Bush talks about personal accounts the lower they sink in the polls?"

Ferrara told The Hill he is trying to help Republicans get on track on Social Security. He accused top Bush administration officials — including Rove and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card — of urging people to tell him to "shut the hell up."

Ferrara, who is scheduled to testify on Social Security before the Senate Finance Committee today, said Rove, Card and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Josh Bolten lack expertise on the entitlement system and mistakenly believe some Democrats are close to embracing the president's plan.

"Rove thinks he's been beatified by the last election," Ferrara added.

Possibly he can get Ratzinger to help him with that.

posted by michael  2:31:17 PM  
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Light posting for a little bit: I've been working (with Tex MacRae, my research partner) on another piece of the "Jeff Gannon" story, which has taken much of my attention the last day or two. (Not a feature this time, something a little more news oriented.) I'll let you know if/when it sees the light of day.

I've also been dealing, quite reluctantly, with some fallout from the Gannon article I published on Alternet. You can read a few of the gory details in my comments there, if you have a mind—I'm not inclined at this point to post the argument here. Short (and admittedly biased) version: I stuck my head up out of the ePluribusMedia grass, and got it lopped off for my pains. [You'll have noticed, if you've seen recent ePM diaries at Daily Kos, that if Susan Gardner isn't bylined, nobody is—just the corporate identity. Apparently the citizen's journalism revolution has declared an end to the bourgeois fiction of individual identity—at least so long as the individual's not named Susan.] Having my user account peremptorily deleted on the Propagannon forum doesn't cause me much grief, since I wasn't a regular there, particularly after the shabby treatment I got during the story process: the fact that they also deleted Tex's account (and blogslut's, the third culprit connected with the Alternet piece)—Tex having been the forum's most passionate and commited researcher—speaks sad volumes about the organization's tendency to defensiveness and insularity under its founding leadership. (Even a last-gasp forum post that Tex wrote attempting to air out the disagreement, along with a growing and productive comment thread on it, got itself deleted by Susan's outraged minions.) I'm sorry to see it, since I had real hopes for the ePM experiment. I'll continue to hope, as far as possible, but paranoia doesn't look good on anybody.

posted by michael  2:58:30 PM  
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No Act II for oil. Some very unpleasant information about peak oil comes via Just a Bump in the Beltway: the source is old, from last August, but I hadn't seen it cited before now. Matt Simmons, founder of one of the world's largest energy investment groups and with thirty years of experience in the field (and author of the forthcoming Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy), has analyzed Saudi oil production and is convinced that it's near or even likely past its peak. Particularly ugly is what Simmons has to say about the way the Saudis have historically managed extraction:

Normally, ... Saudi fields would be subject to the same decline curves as those experienced by any of the world’s oil fields, once reservoir pressure begins to dwindle. The difference is, he said, Saudi Aramco doubled up to catch up, almost from the start, by keeping reservoir pressures — and individual well flow rates — as high as possible, seemingly for as long as possible.

In simple terms, says Simmons, the Saudis have produced their fields under simultaneous primary and secondary recovery, having instituted huge waterflooding programs relatively soon after completing field development.

"All of these fields are old," he pointed out, "but Saudi Aramco has managed them in a 'gold standard' fashion by instituting careful and rigorous water injection to maintain very high reservoir pressures. They’re effectively sweeping the reservoirs until the easily recoverable oil is gone. In so doing, they have defied the standard decline curves. With water injection, they’ve maintained reservoir pressures above the bubble point. The trouble is, once they finally finish the sweep, they’ve done both primary and secondary depletion. There isn’t any Act 2." ...

"If I’m correct about my concerns, Saudi Arabia is now producing more than they should to sustain their oil output," he deadpanned. "The harder you pull a field in its production, the faster you bring on the end of its reservoir pressure. So, I could argue that for the well-being of the world, Saudi Arabia probably ought to back off and start producing 3 to 4 million bpd so that their oil might last another 30 to 50 years. However, they may already have peaked in their ability to grow oil production, and if that’s so, the world has peaked, as well."

[Go here for a full transcript of the Hudson Institute presentation on which this article is based.]

In other words: rather than pursue an extraction policy that would mitigate the post-peak falloff, Saudi Aramco has actually managed its fields in a way that will steepen the falloff once it begins to happen. Given how much of world demand is met by Saudi oil, and given that the world oil production system is essentially maxed out already to meet demand, this opens the really terrifying possibility of major, sharp energy and economic dislocations in the very near future.

To the extent that Simmons can offer a "solution," he suggests that greater transparency in reserve estimates ("greater" in this context would seem to mean, any) might encourage a sane (but shocking) upward revision of oil prices, say in the neighborhood of $200 per barrel—and that we might thus buy some time to adjust to the oil-decline regime now looming, and bridge to a sustainable energy economy.

Nice try. But let's face it, it's too late. A general, irreversible, steep decline in the entire world's productive base is not something you prepare for in two or three years, or even in a decade or two (and it seems increasingly certain that we don't have a clear, i.e. non-decline, decade or two left anyway). Maybe, if Americans had begun planning after the U.S. peak and after the (artificial) oil shocks of the '70s—if we'd even managed to moderate our irrational over-consumption—we'd be better able to manage the systemic shocks that are coming. But we squandered the opportunity provided by that epoch's very clear warning, and having sown the wind we can expect to reap the whirlwind.

Think the Republican crypto-fascism of the moment is bad enough? Imagine the full-on variety we're likely to get with a sudden slide into (long-term) economic depression. (And by long-term, I mean, for the remainder of my life, as a man in his mid-forties, at the very least.) No combination of policies or technical or organizational innovations can do much, at this late date, even to mitigate the disaster. Get ready, folks: the long night approaches.

posted by michael  11:39:58 AM  
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A deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool. I'm catching The Fly (1986) again this evening, excuse the pun—no particular message in this one, just thought I'd share. The meagerness of the film's conception is borderline painful: the trite weasely-ex-boyfriend backstory, the bald, silly thematic pronouncements about "the flesh." ("Only inanimate objects. I have to learn about the flesh." "I have to teach the computer to be crazy about the flesh," which must have sounded every bit as implausible a thing to teach a computer when the film was made, in a more innocent era.) But the flesh stuff is just a Maguffin, anyway. And the cheapness is somehow instrumental to the film's operatic camp.

In the service of that camp, Jeff Goldblum gives what must be the only great performance he ever had in him. I've always found Goldblum's predominant affect of smarmy self-satisfaction off-putting, but it's hardly apparent here, and when it is it's perfectly deployed. Goldblum gives two great performances, in fact, set-piece performances—one psychological, in the post-teleportation sequence where Brundle goes from hypomania to full-on delusions of grandeur, and the other ... My first temptation is to call the other one, Brundle's fly-ification, physical, but I think it's better called moral. Mediated by Goldblum's odd physical awkwardness, which is a perfect substrate for David Cronenberg's body-disgust, but with a dimension of horrified self-awareness that strikes me as genuinely remarkable (from an actorly standpoint) and is genuinely moving, especially contrasted with the furious loss of self-awareness in the manic episode that precedes it. I'm hard put to think of another actor who could simultaneously have managed to hit all the camp notes in the great "insect politician" speech and reveal such a pathos of moral and intellectual self-disgust. The rickety structure of the movie around him is almost necessary, as a foil to set off the brilliance and depth of Goldblum's work.

posted by michael  9:25:08 PM  
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Dept. of Self-Promotion. My feature article on James Guckert/Jeff Gannon, "Becoming Jeff Gannon," is up now on Alternet. I mention it because it's the first thing of this sort I've published, if you discount some local journalism I did while I lived in Baton Rouge, and I'm pleased with it (in spite of a couple of slightly tone-deaf edits in the intro). Also because Alternet, presumably following its standard practice for assigning credit, has somewhat misrepresented things: it cites Tex MacRae and blogslut at the bottom of the piece for "additional research," but that's not good enough. "Additional" implies that the primary research was mine—it wasn't; Tex was responsible for the research, and for the initiative that brought me on to write the thing at all. I just slung the words together. Tex did all the hard stuff, the spadework, and without blogslut's analysis of Guckert's Web pornmastering I wouldn't have come close to getting that part of the story right. Much thanks to them both. (It's a bonus of my collaboration with Tex that we've kind of become buddies as a result.) I think I could get a taste for doing this sort of writing regularly.

Now for the acid test—let's see if the tough audience of Freepa hatas over at Clown Posse think the piece is worth something.

Oh and Jeff, if you work your way over here, I owe you thanks, too. There's something about your story that just works for me, you know? And you open such a nice, wide avenue into understanding how the noise machine gets put together ...

posted by michael  12:28:11 AM  
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Today's lesson in pop aesthetics. I had a different post in mind for today, but it's going to have to wait, now that I've discovered that Michael Bérubé has nominated Nick Lowe's "Cruel to Be Kind" as "the most perfect pop song ever written." This is wrong, a result of incorrect theory, and must be combatted.

Though Prof. B. claims to eschew "rockism" in his critique, his definition of "pop" does seem largely based on a series of anti-rock negatives:

This blog does not recognize any firm distinction between “rock” and “pop.” We do not think that the former category is inhabited by edgy artists and assorted Culture Heroes whereas the latter is inhabited by Tommy James and the Shondells. ... Still, it remains true that if a song has too much fire and/or grit and/or passion in it, it exceeds the “Cruel to Be Kind” standard in obvious ways. “Cruel to Be Kind” is airtight: there are no hidden emotional depths, no sudden bursts of instrumental virtuosity, no startling production quirks, no compositional seams.

But what kind of lover of pop music is it who takes an "airtight," not to say soulless, machine like "Cruel to Be Kind" as a standard of judgement for "pop perfection"? How is that a perfection worth celebrating? Where, for God's sake, is the love a pop song ought to make you feel? Later in the post, Bérubé elaborates a pop aesthetic that refuses elaboration or intensity:

The surface of the perfect pop song is clear and untroubled; and below the surface . . . there is no below the surface. See “no emotional depths,” above.

And I think I see the problem here: it's not that Bérubé's heart is two sizes too small, it's that he's unwittingly accepted a Modernist—not to say positively Greenbergian—reductivism in accounting for the function of the pop "surface."

In one sense, yes, a work of pop art is all surface: but that doesn't mean there's no dialectic playing over that surface. For my money, the greatest pop music effortlessly manages the incommensurate work of being simultaneously surprising and inevitable: the sort of work no one has ever done better (over the course of a career) than the Beatles, who were forever somehow discovering the logic of the forms they imitated (while ratifying that logic), and whose most radical innovations somehow sounded as if they had always already existed in Pop Heaven. "Surface," in this kind of art, is always threatening to "hole through" (to use a Greenberg phrase) into depth, and any depth apparently disclosed is always immediately reassimilated to surface.

There is yet another side to surface in the modern era. Surface, with its emphasis on materiality, superficiality, and immediacy, rings of capitalistic commodification and the newly industrialized modern world. Siegfried Kracauer noted a strange elision of distance and depth in his account of the "mass ornament," in 1927, which he described as "a pattern of unimaginable dimension." Using the dances of the Tiller Girls as an example of modern "simple surface manifestations," Kracauer described the impossibility of navigating or gaining dominance over the visual display that confronts the modern viewer--depth is condensed and everything is reduced to the same plane, an "aesthetic reflex," says Kracauer, "of the rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system."

Part of the unique capacity of pop art—pop music in particular—to provoke a sense of liberation in its audience (from which perspective it will be clear how wrong a choice "Cruel to Be Kind" is) is in the paradoxical way it celebrates its commodity status in order to (at least appear to) negate or recuperate it.

All of which should make it obvious, without my having to draw the lines of the proof, that the perfect pop song is Big Star's "September Gurls." QED.

posted by michael  3:20:43 PM  
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Devil's dictionary, new media. Jon Garfunkel has noticed that a new verb has entered the language, via David Weinberger: jarvis, in this sentence on Joho the Blog, "I'm jarvising on MSNBC this afternoon." Jeff Jarvis's own proffered definition ("to have psycho fit") is clearly defective; Jon has asked a few of his correspondents for lexicographic help, and I'm glad to oblige:

jarvis, v. intr. 1. To measure the utopian potential of a new medium by the scope it provides one's capacity for self-promotion. "Once he started podcasting, he jarvised endlessly about how podcasts were going to reshape the media landscape."

2. To rely on old-media platform(s) to hype the advantages of new media. Broadly, to promote any new technology or practice by means of the technology or practice it is supposed to replace. "He jarvised about how blogs would kill traditional journalism in all his TV and print interviews."

posted by michael  12:31:50 PM  
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Ratzinger. Billmon's got the post you need to read. The only thing I'll add is that, at 78, Ratzinger's is almost certainly intended as a caretaker papacy, and it must be on that basis that a consensus coalesced so rapidly around him. (As Atrios notes, this early in the game Ratzinger had to be a consensus choice, rather than a marginal one.)

There are no doubt a few theological moderates left in the College of Cardinals, in spite of the Rat's and JPII's best efforts—enough that Ratzinger couldn't have been put over the top (in an early ballot) without them. I can't imagine they'd have acquiesced to him, not without a good bit more of a fight than can have taken place, if Ratzinger were, say, ten years younger. Perhaps the hope, on the side not actively pro-Inquisition, is that the destined brevity of the new Benedict's reign will, as they say, sharpen the contradictions—and that by the time of the next selection the situation for the Church will be dire enough to force some kind of reckoning on the back-to-the-11th-century bloc.

Because things can only get worse under Ratzinger. His papacy is likely to promote a significant exodus of the faithful in the Northern hemisphere, and probably a further, steeper drop in vocations—not even JPII's enormous personal cult was able to stanch the bleeding much, and Ratzinger is (laughably!) no JPII from the charisma perspective. (Nor will he be able to do anything to shore up Catholicism's embattled position wrt evangelical Protestantism in South America.) Expect Catholicism in our own country in the next few years to become that much more reactionary, that much more closely aligned with the worst of the Christian revanchist tendencies in the GOP. The old liberal American Catholicism has just had the last nail driven into its coffin.

Konstantin Chernenko, anybody?

posted by michael  2:41:58 PM  
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Non-nuclear. Thanks to this fine post at Lawyers, Guns and Money, I've finally gotten around to reviewing the question of the filibuster—and, specifically, the progressive argument against it—in a little more depth. (Julie Saltman's "I kinda like the filibuster" post, to which LGM links, has a roundup of the anti-filibuster action in and out of Blogtopia. Rik Hertzberg's discussion in the New Yorker, which for some reason I hadn't seen before though it's a month old, is the gold standard here.)

I've been more or less unreflectively pro-filibuster, on the generally sensible (and time-saving) principle that anything the Republican leadership wants to do is Bad and must be Opposed. But the argument that the filibuster represents, on the historical scale, a net loss for progressivism (and likely to remain so, more important) is a pretty persuasive one. [It's an argument not made, though its outlines can be seen there, by a callow and stupid FactCheck.org critique of a pro-filibuster PDA ad that I criticized pretty severely at the beginning of this month. Just to insist that my current rethinking doesn't imply that I'm stepping back in any way from that post.] Scott at LGM rather elegantly marries the argument from expediency (progressives generally need to make it easier for majorities to enact their will) with the argument from Constitutional theory:

Julie notes that "I'd argue that the whole point of the system Madison envisioned and realized in the Constitution is to seriously slow things down." This is certainly correct. My response would simply be that Madison was, in this case, wrong. Obviously, any democratic political system makes tradeoffs between efficiency and protecting minority rights. But I think the Madisonian system goes too far in the latter direction. It's simply too easy for powerful minorities to oppose social change; the last thing this system needs is more veto points. ...

It seems to me that the American system is plagued far more by the inability of the federal government to react and experiment with policy solutions to social problems than by the risk of passing unwise legislation. ... The way I would look at it is this: comparable liberal democratic systems with fewer veto points, such as the UK and Canada, have much better policy outcomes (health care being the most striking example) without any noticeable sacrifice of minority rights. For progressives, I think, the evidence makes it clear that the costs of the filibuster will always outweigh the benefits in the long run.

So should the Democrats be fighting the nuclear option in the first place? The answer is a pretty obvious yes: particularly now that Bill Frist, the genius, has decided to go and Schiavo the debate. (Can somebody splain me how anyone as politically inept as Frist has managed to weasel his way into a position of leadership? That's some sense of timing there. Let me offer an early endorsement for Bill Frist for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008: not because I think he won't win—any Republican nominee will—but because for someone with gifts like his they'll have to escalate the voting fraud to such an obvious level that it might actually succeed in sparking a revolt.) Whether or not the filibuster ought to be jettisoned, in the long term, in the immediate term it makes a significant play in the emerging strategy, helpfully handed us by Tom DeLay, of positioning the Democrats to the electorate at large as the party of responsible government and constitutional preservation.

The filibuster fight is important—too important, I think, not to lose. After all, what does a win buy you? The underlying battle, over the composition of the federal judiciary, is already lost. There's even a case to be made that victory against the nuclear option would be Pyrrhic: win, and the Right gets to keep the anti-judicial flamethrower in its arsenal, against only a few measly news cycles of "Democratic success" on the plus side. (And the defeat of a handful of the most extreme of the extreme judicial rightists, but on balance what does that really matter?) Lose, though, and not only have the Democrats gone down fighting for principle—something they've managed to do only too rarely these last few lifetimes—but Harry Reid's promise to bring the business of the Senate to a virtual halt, in the post-nuclear era, allows him to extend the narrative for far longer than victory does, and turns the Senate into a media-friendly platform for displaying the Dem commitment to anti-extremist opposition. And the worst-of-the-worst judicial nominees in question will have to endure much wider and harsher scrutiny as beneficiaries of the nuclear option than they have, or ever will, as filibuster victims.

So, pace MoveOn et al., I think I'm going to sit this activism opportunity out. Let's see if Harry Reid can lose one for the home team.

posted by michael  2:36:44 PM  
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Misery loves blogging. Actually, it doesn't—not much heart for it at the moment, after a borderline-disastrous Tax Day yesterday. Still, it's an essential part of any practice that you do it when you don't feel like doing it. (And by all means, after an anti-introduction like that, you have my permission to avoid reading the rest of this.)

Got dinged for almost $700, state and federal, yesterday, which I can ill afford. (Call it death by self-employment tax.) This last year has been a buzz saw. Just over twelve months ago I was in D.C., attending a leadership conference put together by National Voice. I was part of the team from my then employer, Grant-Jacoby, presenting our winning proposal for an ad campaign, to be jointly sponsored by National Voice and MoveOn, that was going to begin a long-term effort to brand the term "progressive" and move it, as a political identity, into mainstream awareness. By "part of the team" I mean that I was one of three of us there, the guy that Andy, our Larry Tate-ish creative director—the health of whose ego you can gauge by the fact that his first act on coming to GJ was to throw up a great wall of shelving to display every cheap hunk of glass he'd ever been awarded in the course of his ad career—was all but borrowing elbows to shove off the podium and away from the notice of anybody of any influence, like Wes Boyd or George Lakoff.

I didn't much care about star-fucking, though. The strategy that won us the account was mine (the chief reason for Andy's determined elbow-throwing), as was the commitment to try to win it in the first place: I pushed for an all-out agency response as soon as the RFP passed in front of me (as the Web developer, strategizing on a branding pitch was well outside my normal role), and I pushed again, a lot, when the deep unenthusiasm of some very Republican senior management threatened to derail the effort. (Which I couldn't have done without the backing of our very Democratic CEO, who knew my politics and my public-affairs knowledge and on that basis had put me in charge of the pitch strategy.) What mattered to me was that the prospect had opened of my doing something in the agency that would be more engaged and more significant, intellectually and politically, than just building another set of damn widget-selling websites.

Well, the Tax Day woes will give you some idea how all that went. For reasons I won't get into now, MoveOn was handed sole responsibility for seeing the branding campaign through, and proceeded to piss it away in a series of ever more timid scope-narrowing decisions, before tabling the campaign till some undetermined time after the "distraction" of the November elections. (The original rationale for the campaign launch had been to take advantage of the atmosphere of heightened political awareness in the months leading to November.) Which meant, of course, consigning it (and the relatively small amount then spent on it) to the region of wind and ghosts. But by the time they announced that decision, Grant-Jacoby was already beginning its strange, unnecessary death spiral.

[You want to know how last year went for me, in a nutshell? The day I came back to work after my father's funeral, the very day, was the day I got laid off, by none other than the aforementioned Andy. Who felt compelled to waste half an hour of my suddenly uncompensated time telling me that the "restructuring" was going to be a good thing, ultimately, for all of us. That's my 2004. Anybody who looked in here last year and wondered about my unexplained absence, well, you've got most of it right there.]

So here I am now, trying to sustain myself with scraps of freelance programming work, watching jobs and contracts continually hovering on the verge only to melt away, watching my savings dwindle perilously low and hoping I don't get sick or injured, because when GJ closed our CEO decided to save herself some money by cutting off COBRA coverage for the ex-employees she professed such fondness for. (Not that I could afford the coverage at this point anyway.) God, poverty sucks. Don't get me wrong: I've been poor, or poor-ish, more of my adult life than I've been comfortable—and by comparison with real poverty, it's an abuse of the term to apply it to my case—but I've had six years of steady, decently middle-class income, enough even to start saving belatedly for retirement, and being in a state again where I have to justify practically every dollar of expenditure feels like a slow, heavy weight on my chest. (You'd think it'd be a mindfulness practice to notice consistently how and what you spend, but really it's just exhausting.) I wake up most mornings, and I can watch the knowledge re-present itself that it's going to be another day of money going out and none coming in—a bit like the way it is after a breakup, when it takes you a few moments at the start of the day to reawaken to the fact that you're alone.

Alright, there, I've vented. Maybe it'll give me a bit of psychic room, which I feel sorely in need of just now. And if you've persisted through this post—well, I'm sorry you had to see that. (Not my most attractive side.) I'll try to offer something better, not to mention more public-spirited, next time.

posted by michael  3:54:27 PM  
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Most entertaining NY Times-related item(s) in—well, forever, as far as this blog is concerned—are on offer today in the NY Observer. (Much thanks to The Cunctator for the tip.) Tom Scocca reports on an upcoming book by NYT metro reporter Alan Feuer, who did a brief and apparently inglorious three-week stint as a war correspondent in Baghdad two years ago, and is telling—not all, maybe, but stuff you for sure won't get anywhere else:

The proofs of [Feuer's] book have been something of a samizdat sensation on West 43rd Street—not because of what he saw in Baghdad, but because of what he claims to have missed.

Mr. Feuer—writing in the third person—recounts in one section how he filled gaps in his handwritten notes by taking liberties with the facts: TThere was a name in the pad, Haidar something, A-R-something, Aruban or Arubay, it was impossible to tell. He bore down on the notebook and tried to sort it out. Aruban or Arubay—what difference did it make? All right, Mr. Arubay, speak some words to the readers of the Times."

Later in that passage, Mr. Feuer reproduces notes describing a source's age as "maybe 50 55," which becomes a definitive "50" in his news story.

A story including both bits of allegedly fudged copy—"Haidar Arubay" and "Nashet Maktouf, 50"—appeared in The Times on April 14, 2003.

It's impossible to tell from Scocca's account whether the book is intended to be a genuine (if inexplicable) memoir, or some sort of weird, self-destructive comic riff on journalistic fecklessness—though my money's on the latter:

The book begins with [Feuer's] third-person narrator—"T.R.", for "this reporter"—receiving his assignment in New York, and follows him through the minutiae of packing, traveling and waiting. The chapter "Welcome to Iraq" is No. 19 out of 27.

"He made his way to the elevator now with every neuron in his head on fire," Mr. Feuer writes at one point, "feeling itchy, feeling anxious—no way for a war reporter to feel, unless—forgive him, Father—he was no thing of the sort." That piece of head-spinning war-zone psychodrama takes place at the InterContinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan.

The really bizarre dimension to this, though, is that Feuer has apparently been weighed in the balance by his superiors at the Times, and found not wanting:

Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis, via e-mail, said that when the proofs of Mr. Feuer's book came out, metro editor Susan Edgerley "asked him flat out whether he was saying he had faked material in The Times, and whether he ever had. He told her he had not, and we know of no plausible assertion that he has."

In the front of the book, Mr. Feuer writes that it is "a book of recollected memory, not recorded fact." According to Ms. Mathis, the paper concluded that "T.R." is an unreliable narrator, but Mr. Feuer is a reliable reporter.  ... Mr. Feuer, reached by phone, said he hadn't received much grief about his account of fudging, "because I think it's a reality."

[Can't help thinking in this context of the Seinfeld episode where George tries, heroically but ineffectively, to get himself fired from the Yankees. What's a guy got to do to get noticed around here, spill soup on Abe Rosenthal's old fedora?] Love the way literary-critical sophisitication (the unreliable narrator) gets deployed as an ass-coverer here. And certainly, there's "no plausible assertion" that Feuer ever faked anything in his reporting, if you're prepared to discount Feuer's own assertions—but perhaps he's also an "unreliable narrator" when he's narrating to an interviewer over the phone.

Of course, there are offenses against journalistic propriety, and then there are offenses against propriety. Scocca's second item concerns the the Times Baghdad bureau and the various shenanigans therein, the struggle for power (and the struggle for a good cappucino). Alan Feuer's job may be OK (at least for now), but it's good to see there's still a line no Timesperson is allowed to cross:

Less than five months after bureau chief Susan Sachs arrived [in Baghdad] in October of 2003, she was called back to New York, overthrown in a rebellion led by entrenched Iraq correspondents John Burns and Dexter Filkins.

But last week, The Times concluded that Ms. Sachs, like a car-bombing Sunni, had mounted an insurgent action of her own in defeat. According to multiple Times sources, the paper fired her for allegedly sending missives to the wives of Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins, accusing the reporters of marital infidelity on the front lines.

You wanna make shit up about the towelheads, that's your business—but goddamn it you don't fuck with a senior correspondent's pursuit of the nookie! (Though it seems to me that, given what the item goes on to report about Dexter Filkins's "swashbuckling loner's" penchant for packing heat, mere self-preservation would have told Sachs not to go there.)

Go read. Do they actually hire any adults at the Times?

posted by michael  2:40:43 PM  
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Ultimate Pantywaists. Via Atrios, I see that Something Awful has an entertaining account of a "legal" tiff it found itself engaged in with one Chris Lewis, lawyer (and Director of Communications, which appears to mean he's the one who records the voice mail message) for washed-up ex-wrestler turned-wannabe-Michael-Savage The Ultimate Warrior. Mr. Warrior (as his buds know him) turned up at U. Conn. last week to deliver himself of some well-judged attacks on, well, the usual laundry list of winger attackees, and the event seems to have gone pretty much according to WWF form:

The night quickly changed from a love fest over the Ultimate Warrior and his career in what was then known as the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to an attack on his personal beliefs. The Warrior - who Norm Moghtaderi, a 10th-semester sociology and history major, felt was homophobic and racist - was met with unhappy members of the Tent City protest group.

"People like this should not be allowed to spat this off without being countered," said Geoff Traugh, a 4th-semester peace studies and political science major.

The dispute between Traugh and Warrior escalated. Warrior screamed back and stomped on the stage saying questions would be answered during the question and answer segment. ...

The College Republicans, who sponsored the event with the Undergraduate Student Government, said the organization was just trying to add another point of view to the discussion.  ...The group said they had worked hard to bring another view to add to respectful debates. They thought Warrior would represent new ideas after members saw him live. The organization felt compelled to send out a press release apologizing for the event.

Warrior got an unfavorable response from the crowd when he discussed homosexuals.

"Queering don't make the world work," Warrior said. ...

Warrior's comments forced one man to yell at him and ask him to apologize to Moghtaderi. While listening to Moghtaderi, Warrior said he needed to get a towel. Moghtaderi is Iranian and his friend took offense, causing an outburst.

All of which caused Something Awful to make Mr. Warrior's home page its "Awful Link of the Day" last Friday, which in turn caused Mr. Lewis to lower the legal boom:

As Director of Communications for Ultimate Creations, Inc. - which owns all rights associated with the wrestling character Ultimate Warrior - part of my job is to address any violations of Ultimate Creations' intellectual property rights associated with the character. Consider this email as your fair notice that we consider your site to be in violation of those rights.

A current posting on your site refers to the Ultimate Warrior as a "racist" - a statement that is not true, and is clearly libelous.

Furthermore, Ultimate Creations, Inc. has never authorized you or anyone affiliated with your website to use the image or likeness of Ultimate Warrior.

Watching Lewis climb down from this—after a detour through vague and hapless episode of telephone harrassment, Lewis finally allows as to how he's just got too many "irons in the fire right now for Warrior" to "piddle" further with the threat he himself initiated—is a fine thing: but with all due respect to all parties, I think there's a real missed opportunity here, and somebody ought to remark on it before it gets lost entirely.

Mr. Lewis seems not to have recognized that he's stumbled on a significant innovation in legal practice, and more important one that is almost infinitely monetizable. In Lewis's theory, the fact that the Ultimate Warrior has constituted himself as a brand means that any criticism of him, qua Ultimate Warrior, is a violation of intellectual property rights! (Hell, you can't talk about him without using the intellectual property of his brand name, right?) Now, I realize that un-American, life-hating, activist judges might balk at such an extension of the domain of intellectual property—but I think we (I say we, because I expect to end up with a cut of this action) can certainly find enough funding to intimidate gently persuade them away from their reluctance.

I mean, think of it! Here's the solution to Tom DeLay's problems right in front of them, and Lewis (and Something Awful) just blow right past it. All we have to do is trademark Tom as The Ultimate Bugman, and poof! No more ethics charges! Democrats better think twice about saying unauthorized nasty things about him, unless they want to face the wrath of Ultimate Pantywaist Productions (a name I'm toying with for our new company). We'll do it for Jeb Bush, too, to ward off any fallout from the Terri Schiavo fiasco—meet (we need something Floridian here) The Ultimate Swamp Adder! And for Rick Santorum, The Ultimate Anal Lubricant! How much do you think these guys would pay us to make them attack-proof this way?

The potential revenue stream here is enormous. I'm sure that a guy as pro-active as Chris Lewis, even with all those irons firing, won't hesitate to pick up on this once I alert him to it. Since Something Awful was good enough to post his email address, I'm going to get my giant moneymaking proposition right over to him. I'll let you know just as soon as I hear anything back.

posted by michael  10:58:24 AM  
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I haven't been much good for anything today, fending off a semi-migraine—but I'm catching up on some blog reading I've missed, and want to point to this post ("Radical Literary Theorists") of Henry Farrell's on Crooked Timber. It's about The Valve, the new lit-crit group blog with CT affiliations, about criticism of its surprisingly right-wing organizational provenance, and about what it might mean to want academic literary study to make a place for itself in the wider public discourse.

I have one or two things to add to the discussion, and will, when (and as) I can collect my thoughts. (And I've paid scant attention to The Valve so far, and I really need to look in to get a sense of what they think their practice is.) For now, I'm just going to gesture: this, from Henry, resonates—he quotes Scott McLemee (writing on Saul Bellow) about the state of "anxious low-grade misery" that seems endemic in the literary academy, and adds:

An "anxious kind of low-grade misery," which is connected directly to the conditions of production in the academy. If you don’t produce work which fits a certain set of professional criteria, you aren’t going to get tenure. However, these criteria have perverse consequences. You spend your life studying work which you aren’t supposed to enjoy on its own terms; too high a degree of enthusiasm is anathema, unless it’s couched in political or critical terms that disconnect the value of the text from the text itself ... You aspire to a certain vision of literary studies as politics – but are aware (have to be aware) that your profession is almost entirely disconnected from politics as it is practiced in everyday life. You simply don’t have much to say that’s politically useful. It’s a particularly unpleasant version of Weber’s “iron cage.”

I don't think it's riding the theory horse too hard to note that Henry's appeal to the value of "the text itself," or the proposition that enjoyment "on its own terms" (what terms are those?) might be a meaningful ground of professional literary study, won't bear much scrutiny. Nevertheless, as I said, this resonates, particularly in its awareness of a kind of self-thwarting political idiocy in the literary academy. (I can't think of "literary study as politics" without a little vision in my head of my last Marxist Literary Group cash bar—if your head doesn't explode at the thought of a Marxist cash bar—at the MLA, all the chic, pomo types in knots practicing their cooloer-than-thou ...)

Do yourself a favor, if this is the sort of thing that interests you, and read all the way through the comments thread. Great stuff—exactly the reason blogs have comments, to promote this kind of argument. Damn if there isn't a flow to it: watch as Cultural Revolution (whose critical post on The Valve's relation to the anti-MLA Association of Literary Scholars and Critics got the whole ball rolling) starts spraying hits around in the middle innings, giving every appearance that the visitors have the game in hand. But then Timothy Burke comes back with a couple of well-timed knocks, and the Big Mo swings back to the home side! I won't even attempt to summarize the play, but it's fun to watch.

posted by michael  11:11:18 PM  
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Of time immemorial. Via Bitch Ph.D., in her campaign to annex the whole blogosphere, a bad (undergraduate) writing contest announced over at Waste (herewith added to my Bloglines blogroll) that gave me a bit of a jump start this morning. I'll let Ben tell you about it.

Here's the basic idea. Write an essay starting with either sentence two or four from this post of Hirta's. Let's say it should be no more than ... two pages. Let's call it 500 words. ... Anyone who writes, in response to Beginning Sentence Two, a brief history of the attempt to measure longitude and its solution with the invention of accurate naval chronometers will be summarily shot.

Essays essayed, the enblogged can post it to their blogs and include a link back here or use the trackback mechanism or make a note in the comments or some such. The disenblogged, or those who don't want to sully the purity of their blogs with this kind of drivel, can email me their entries and I'll post them in some fashion.

And yes, this is what I'm doing instead of Monday-morning job-hunt stuff. (Or taxes, even worse.) But I started thinking about it, and damn if I could keep myself from following through. I'm writing from Beginning Sentence Two, which is a beaut, namely:

For many millennia, man has tried to create ways to measure time.

My own interpretation of the contest—which I strongly recommend to anybody else willing to misallocate their time this way—is that it ought to strive for verisimilitude, the ideal target being the inadequate-but-honorable C essay. In other words, don't go for the easy laughs; you need to try to reproduce the texture of half understanding, missed connections, and word-count sweat that constitutes the real pathos of the middling.

My entry's probably too well organized, on the macro level, to make an absolute bull's-eye, but I've tried to compensate with various local confusions. My undergrad also has a bit of a lyrical bent, which helps with the padding and also to cover for argumentative gaps. [The fact that the essay clocks in at exactly 500 words is just icing on the cake.] Really, for a C essay I think this is A+ work. I'm especially proud of the penultimate graf:

In the era of the Cold War, which ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, time became atomic. The US and the USSR (Soviet Union) each had giant nuclear missiles facing each other, as well as a Space Race. President Kennedy proclaimed that man would go to the moon, and within a mere decade. All of these systems needed absolute precision, which was measured using atomic nuclei. The Star Wars (Missile Defense Shield) took this idea even further, when it was decided to use missiles to pinpoint other missiles and knock them out of the sky. With this, we see that man was not merely subject to time any more, but now believed he was in control of time itself.

The idea here is of a course where the prof is teaching against her students' unthought belief in time as a given of the physical world; the essay represents the necessarily paradoxical result of undergrad inattention trying to negotiate a complex account of time as a social technology, a product of need and the limits of invention. And that's way more highfalutin explanation than could possibly be appropriate to this dopey exercise, which probably ought to count as a points deduction. Anyway, the complete mess is safely stowed away on the jump page, if you want to look.

Read "Time and Measurement through History" >>

posted by michael  11:03:56 AM  
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For Patti. I've been feeling uninspired these last few days, for posting and for most other things—strange, that I had to jog my memory to know why. I always tend to fall into an eclipse this time of year: tomorrow is the anniversary of my sister's death. Thirty-five years ago she was eight, just a week from her First Communion, and I was almost ten; she and I and our two younger sisters had all had chickenpox, but Patti got sick again as the rest of us recovered. (Some weeks after her death, I heard the word "encephalitis"—from a friend, who had heard it from his parents; my own parents never spoke Patti's name to me again, or even alluded to her having existed, after she was gone. It was only many years later that I learned that it was Reye's Syndrome, little known at the time, that had killed her.) My last memory of her alive is of a little girl, delirious with fever, stretched out on the back seat of our big Chevy, my sisters and I crowded in the front. My mother has Patti's head in her lap, trying to cool her with a washcloth and ice. We're on our way to be dropped off at my grandparents', where we'll be staying, before they take Patti to the hospital. An image presents itself to me, a gravestone with my sister's name on it and the year, 1970, marked as the second date. In a guilty panic I try to shove it out of my mind: days later, when my priest uncle comes to tell us she's died, my first thought is that it was my imagination that made it happen.

For Patti, then, and because I have no power to write it for myself, Emily Dickinson: even if it's a poem of romatnic mourning, still the most intense, compressed expression of grief I know in the language:

I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!

Angels — twice descending
Reimbursed my store —
Burglar! Banker — Father!
I am poor once more!

posted by michael  7:28:39 PM  
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Speaking of intelligence failures ... What looks like a qualified mea culpa on Richard Cohen's part in today's Washington Post ("A Failure of More than Intelligence") ends up in a whole nother place.

Shortly before the United States went to war in Iraq, I was in contact with a former member of the American intelligence community. This is what he told me: Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program, no chemical or biological weapons program to speak of, and no link to al Qaeda. He said that if America invaded, it would cost us "perhaps 1,000 casualties" and would lead to prolonged "terrorism and harassment." I thanked him very much for his views -- and urged the United States to attack anyway. Along with Don Quixote, I sometimes feel that facts are the enemy of truth.

The record will show, however, that as war approached I was expressing second thoughts. I urged patience since it was becoming obvious that my source might be right ... I knew that the most alarming case against Saddam Hussein -- that he was an imminent threat to the United States -- was a lie.

Urging "patience" in face of a determined rush to war, knowing the case being made for the war is founded in a lie, might seem to fall somewhat shy of the vigorous defense a journalist owes the truth; Cohen seems to think, though, that it's as much moral courage as could reasonably have been expected of him. This sort of bland, "I loved not wisely but too well" self-absolution may be the default position at this point of the pro-war liberal (Richard Cohen is nothing if not an articulator of the default position)—that doesn't make it any less infuriating.

It doesn't become positively disgusting, though, till Cohen allows himself this smarmy little flight of revisionist fantasy:

From the very start, [President Bush] had expressed the view that he had no need to read newspapers because, as he insisted, he got everything he needed from briefings. Unlike Bill Clinton, who got the PDB (the President's Daily Brief) on paper and routinely defaced it with questions and comments, Bush had briefings that were delivered orally, much like children's medicine. Much was made of them, but we now know they were worthless and sometimes misleading. ...

Had the president read the local newspaper, however, he might have raised the question of whether much of what he was being told was nonsense. Every piece of evidence the Bush administration was citing to support its assertion that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program was being challenged, usually by United Nations weapons inspectors. Sometimes these officials announced their findings; sometimes they were leaked in advance. Sometimes others made the case, even journalists in Iraq. All of this was in the press.

God help us, this Richard Cohen wants us to take as a stern, truth-to-power-speaking judgement on George Bush. If only the President had read the Washington Post, he might have learned skepticism. Oh yeah, Richard? In what alternate reality was that skeptical WaPo published, anyway? Because those of us who aren't privileged to live within the comfortable precincts of Cohenville never saw it.

With many [intelligence] analysts prepared to discuss the competing claims over the intelligence on Iraq, the press was in a good position to educate the public on the administration's justifications for war. Yet for the most part, it never did so. A survey of the coverage in November, December, and January reveals relatively few articles about the debate inside the intelligence community. Those articles that did run tended to appear on the inside pages. Most investigative energy was directed at stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration's case.

Michael Massing, "Now They Tell Us"

An examination of the [Washington Post's] coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

Howard Kurtz, "The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story"

"If only George Bush had read diligently deep into the inner pages to which the Post relegated it, when it wasn't being suppressed entirely, he might have learned skepticism" doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?

Cohen ends his piece claiming, sententiously, that "the failure was not in intelligence. It was in political character." Obviously, I have a somewhat different take on whose character is being revealed here. If Richard Cohen wants to pretend to himself that his journalist's conscience was—is—decently active in the matter of the Iraq war, well, it's not like anyone can stop him. But he ought not to be allowed to lie about the record of his paper's coverage in the process.

posted by michael  1:11:39 PM  
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The life of the mind. Adam Kotsko writes something honest, if despairing, about graduate study in the humanities and about how people are socialized in it:

Much of what passes for "philosophy" is just a series of formulaic exercises that demonstrate their belonging to a particular discipline -- a certain writing style, a certain approach to authoritative figures, etc. Most "philosophers" are far more formed by some idea of professionalism than by the texts themselves, and I suspect that a genuine formation by those texts would not comport well with the goals of the university, which is to produce a particular class of workers who fit well within a rubric of professionalism. And as I think of taking a meditative approach to texts, I think: I don't have time for this. I need to make these texts into something, turn them toward the goal of producing my own piece of writing so that I will continue to meet the requirements of scholarly productivity which graduate study is socializing into me.

The professionalistic approach -- which, for many of us lovers of texts, is initially the necessary evil that will allow us to live "the life of the mind" -- quickly becomes the primary consideration; public standing in a particular type of game trumps all other possible standards of value in the final analysis. ...

I met a student after [attending a philosophy lecture], obviously a very bright guy, who had hit the jackpot and been accepted to DePaul. We got to talking about various things, and I think that in essence, he treated me like shit. He had to have his little pissing match with the kid from Nowhere Theological Seminary, who came to the lecture with his overeager undergrad friends. I wonder how much different I would really be, even if I had gotten into a program that would make it so that I won't have to worry for a few years -- maybe part of the reason it's so grating is that this gnawing sense of insufficiency keeps getting grilled into me, such that even when I'd "arrived," I would still feel like I constantly need to prove myself, just like him. Because I wouldn't feel like I deserve it, because there is no deserving -- there is no available way to determine deserving. And so, prove yourself -- for nothing, to no one, to no end.

And Brad DeLong, on whose blog I found the reference, proceeds pontifically to blow smoke up his ass:

And I think, "Uh-oh." You see, when you think of what you are doing as "dissecting yet another text in order to produce a text of my own that will conform with the canons of professionality within certain circles of 'philosophical' and 'theological' discourse," you have fallen victim to the letter that killeth, while the spirit giveth life. ...

As long as Adam Kotsko views himself as turning the crank on a machine ("squeeze out a paper on Zizek's use of Kierkegaard, so that I can send it off and people will publish it, so that I can write down on a piece of paper that it has been published") he is doomed. But if he can shift his mental frames, and remember what is really going on--that Kierkegaard is desperately trying to communicate something difficult and important that he only half-grasps, and that Zizek is mulling this over and answering back--he may yet be saved. It's when the moment comes when Adam gets so excited by watching Zizek argue with Kierkegaard that he thinks, "I have something to add to this; I have something important to say too"--then is the moment to write down what you have to say, not in order to build your c.v. but because you have something to say. In fact, the only effective way to build your c.v. is to let it happen as a byproduct of your having something to say.

Look, I like Brad's blog, and Brad (from what his writerly tone tells me of him), but this just pisses me off. So I'll say it intemperately: tenured professors like DeLong, especially tenured professors with comfortable side-careers as public policy experts or whatever, have no fucking business at all lecturing younger scholars on their spiritual deficiencies. Not when said tenured professors are (this is a generic statement, by the way) the willing beneficiaries of a system that exploits the cheap, endlessly renewable labor of graduate students and adjunct/temporary faculty (the "gypsy scholars") while simultaneously ratcheting up the credentialing pressure on their junior colleagues.

Adam's supposed to avoid the sin of careerism for the sake of his soul; well, you're embedded in a system that all but forces intellectuals to become careerists—and has been biased increasingly in that direction in the last decade-plus. (Sorry, but having a passion for the pure life of the mind is manifestly not the best way to build a CV, not when you're competing for jobs and advancement with hundreds of other people who aren't burdened with illusions about the need to find a marketable niche and work it.) You know, Brad, if you tenured types really want to make it possible for your juniors to have more richly self-determining intellectual lives? Try admitting fewer students to your grad programs, hiring fewer adjuncts, and easing the credentials crunch in the tenure process. When you start working seriously to reduce the pressure on the lower ranks, I'll start believing you mean it about encouraging younger scholars to follow their bliss.

From my perspective—the perspective of an otherwise talented academic who got unlucky, got exhausted, and couldn't push through—Brad is a lottery winner. He's welcome to it: but I don't customarily enjoy hearing lottery winners lecture other people about the spiritual value of thrift. It's in the nature of the academic system that it mystifies success: that the winners feel their winning is an expression of virtue, rather than a complex interaction between personal ability, social formation, and unrepeatable opportunity. That mystification is no different from what you find in most other systems of reward, really, but academic self-consciousness ought to be a little better at cutting through it.

In other circumstances, there'd be things to like about Brad's post, in spite of its somewhat stale rehashing of Areopagitica, such as his nice account of Machiavelli reading in his personal library: but the complacency, the presumption, is impossible to like. Adam is struggling with something many, many younger scholars are forced to go through—forced, in the current configuration of things, to an unusually great degree—how to maintain a sense of genuine intellectual engagement, of selfhood even, in a system organized in such a way as to grind it down. Brad may be fortunate enough not to have had to go through the worst of that struggle, or to have put it safely in his past: but that's no excuse for failing to understand, or willfully obscuring, what the struggle is about.

In my own grad student days I worked as an organizer in the effort to unionize Yale teaching assistants. One afternoon, in a meeting with my DGS, Paul Fry, a man I liked and respected, I had to listen to him blather self-approvingly about the "scholar of one candle" in Stevens' Auroras of Autumn, adducing it to insist on the insuperable "contradiction" between collective action and the requirement of solitary contemplation that scholarship imposes. And I thought, what a load of pious horseshit. And I knew that, as far as the question of my working life was concerned, he and his sort were no friends of mine.

posted by michael  2:46:46 PM  
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Exactly my point. Thomas Cahill, op-ed in the Times today, says more compactly what I was fumbling for two days ago:

John Paul II has been almost the polar opposite of John XXIII, who dragged Catholicism to confront 20th-century realities after the regressive policies of Pius IX, who imposed the peculiar doctrine of papal infallibility on the First Vatican Council in 1870, and after the reign of terror inflicted by Pius X on Catholic theologians in the opening decades of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this pope was much closer to the traditions of Pius IX and Pius X than to his namesakes. Instead of mitigating the absurdities of Vatican I's novel declaration of papal infallibility, a declaration that stemmed almost wholly from Pius IX's paranoia about the evils ranged against him in the modern world, John Paul II tried to further it. ...

But John Paul II's most lasting legacy to Catholicism will come from the episcopal appointments he made. In order to have been named a bishop, a priest must have been seen to be absolutely opposed to masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests and any hint of Marxism. It is nearly impossible to find men who subscribe wholeheartedly to this entire catalogue of certitudes; as a result the ranks of the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual incompetents. The good priests have been passed over; and not a few, in their growing frustration as the pontificate of John Paul II stretched on, left the priesthood to seek fulfillment elsewhere. ...

Sadly, John Paul II represented a different tradition, one of aggressive papalism. Whereas John XXIII endeavored simply to show the validity of church teaching rather than to issue condemnations, John Paul II was an enthusiastic condemner. Yes, he will surely be remembered as one of the few great political figures of our age, a man of physical and moral courage more responsible than any other for bringing down the oppressive, antihuman Communism of Eastern Europe. But he was not a great religious figure. How could he be? He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church.

It seems to me that the notion that JP II is "more responsible than any other" man for the end of the neo-Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe is a pious canard, but let that pass for now. (I know how the Poles feel about the moral courage lent them by the example of the Polish Pope, and one has to honor that feeling—but there was moral courage coming from a lot of sources in the days of Solidarity, and great movements of social and political change don't well up because of any one person's will or example.)

My sense of what we were in for from the media in the wake of JP's death may have been off: it was easy to extrapolate from the priest-ridden gabble of the death watch, and last year's Reagan hagiography, and imagine the worst. Good to see genuine, informed critique find an opening.

posted by michael  9:04:44 AM  
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John Paul II is not the reason I'm no longer a believing Catholic: my lapse from the faith was set in motion well before I turned eighteen, the year Karol Wojtyla acceded to the papacy. He is, however, the reason I can no longer go to Mass.

It may seem incoherent to bear a grudge over being unable to practice a religion you don't believe in, much less to direct it at the head of the religion—but give me a minute to explain. By the time I reached my mid-twenties, the intensely emotional rejection of Catholicism of my adolescence had calmed down into a settled inability to believe: the doctrine was incredible, pure and simple, and I knew my own mind enough by that point to know I was never going to be able to reconcile with it, probably not even as pure mythopoesis. And yet I had a deep sense of the degree to which my formation, intellectual and aesthetic, was bound up with my Catholic history, and a wish to honor it. I had some hope that it might be possible to carve out a position as a Romish equivalent of a secular Jew, even to participate on that basis in the life of the Church. Latin Mass was being regularly indulged for the first time since Vatican II, and I went fairly often. I sang in a New Haven schola cantorum that performed Latin plainsong and the liturgical music of the great polyphonists: Palestrina, Josquin, Byrd, Tallis. (Singing the Missa Pange Lingua is still one of the great aesthetic experiences of my life.) The beauty of those musical structures seemed, obscurely, an argument for the worth of the greater structure they were created to serve.

There was always a suspicion that my aesthetic Catholicism was going to prove untenable, given the ideological direction of the Church under JP II. I had known of the Pope's brutal treatment of Fr. Pohier and the attempted silencing of Hans Küng and others, which showed his heavy ideological hand early in his papacy, and my Jesuit friends had begun to complain of the way he was attempting to establish dominance over their traditionally independent (and, at least in terms of the American Church, intellectually liberal) order. At some point I became aware of the degree to which John Paul was committed to promoting the frightening reactionary cult of Opus Dei. I remember as a watershed driving home from a Holy Week service in Waterbury, where we'd sung Tallis' Lamentatio Jeremiae, with the director of the schola—he spent the drive attempting to persuade me, in all seriousness, that Vatican II had represented a Freemasonic plot against true doctrine, and that it was the God-given mission of the current Pope to undo the damage. That drive marked my exit from my career as a liturgical chorist.

The Church I grew up in, one sees now, was a brief historical anomaly. The reforms of Vatican II registered through the '60s and early '70s as a series of shocks, mostly unwelcome (certainly to traditional Catholics like my parents, whose Church was the only one I knew as a child)—but those shocks made a space for question and experiment the likes of which no one before that time would ever have imagined American papists capable of. [It's infuriating to see the period of intellectual and spiritual ferment during which I came to adult consciousness described, as Laurie Goodstein does in today's NYT, as a time of "lost moorings" that required JP II's "reassertion" of "order and discipline"—as if there were at this point no question that the rightist critique of the '60s should be treated as received truth.] That Church, the one in which I imagined room for my own sort of secularism, is dead, and John Paul II killed it. However the books on his papacy and its larger effect in the world might be closed out, I can't find it in me to forgive him that.

It's painful now to set foot inside a Catholic church—I half expect the walls to convulse and the building to spit me out, a pro-choice anti-misogynist non-homophobe. There's hardly room any more even for the most respectful dissent, much less for live debate: the idiocy and political narrowness of the typical Catholic sermon in particular is unbearable. Perhaps we can credit John Paul II with a genuine belief in what he called the "culture of life," in its widest scope. (Juan Cole has collected a generous sample of the late Pope's progressive statements to make that case.) But in the actual life of the Church—in the causes to which John Paul lent his institutional weight, in the ugly work of his ideological hatchetman, Joseph Ratzinger, in the sort of men he selected for episcopal leadership—the Pope's "culture of life" has become exactly what its meanest and most intolerant advocates wanted to make of it. It is the reduction of the Church's social mission to an insistance on sexual hypocrisy, to be maintained at all costs: as if the whole ancient wisdom of Catholicism had been condensed in Humanae Vitae, and everything else discardable. (The American hierarchy has all but lost its voice these last few years on any issues that don't involve opposition to abortion , contraception and homosexuality.)

John Paul II's papacy was exactly what Thomas Sheehan, writing in 1980, divined it would be: a "restoration papacy." While he was still young and vigorous himself, Wojtyla had committed the Church to a sclerotic, authoritarian anti-modernism, a project perfectly emblematized by his late beatification of the execrable Pius IX. [Read the Pope's beatification message, by the way, to see an extraordinary exercise in papal cynicism. There was much wondering comment at the time about how Pius and John XXIII were being beatified together: the message essentially hijacks the great conciliar work of John XXIII to justify the elevation of Pius, and Pius's ideology of Vatican absolutism.] Even the Pope's personal devotion to Mary, so little understood outside the Church (little understood even within it, for that matter), is part of that anti-modernist program. [Somewhat off-topic, but I can't resist shoehorning it in here: Non-Catholics, secular ones at least, often find something intriguing and even charming about the Catholic Marian cult: see, for instance, the passing mention in Billmon's post. Having seen it from the inside—my parents became devoted to it in their later years—I'm here to tell you it's nothing of the sort. Marian devotion, with its veneration of virginity, isn't just a crucial prop of the ideology of sexual hypocrisy: in the American Church, it represents a kind of doctrinal and imaginative impoverishment. A great deal of the emotional energy of eschatological, Mary-centric Catholicism derives from a kind of will to self-infantilization, most likely a defensive, anti-intellectual reaction to the complications of modernity.]

This is hardly a complete judgement of John Paul II's papacy: but no judgement of it will be complete without this sort of reckoning. (Which, of course, we have no hope of seeing while the mainstream media busies itself with hagiography.) He may have come in looking like Gorbachev, but he goes out looking like Brezhnev. With Jeanne d'Arc, thinking hesitantly along similar lines at Body and Soul, I suspect that the legacy of repression left by JP II will be lasting, and lastingly damaging. In fact, it's likely to have an immediate and unfortunate manifestation: John Paul's long and ideologically narrow papacy has almost certainly narrowed the intellectual (and moral) range of the College of Cardinals, the body from which his successor will be chosen. For a Church that has lost an entire, crucial generation of debate and dissent, glasnost is in sore need, and no doubt in desperately short supply.

posted by michael  3:55:44 PM  
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Just in time for April Fool's Day, the geniuses at FactCheck.org have promulgated what may be the most enlightened rule of democratic political argument ever: It's unfair to advocate a position without simultaneously advocating for the opposing position.

Actually, the FactCheck Principle is more enlightened even than that, if their illustration of it today is any indication. Fairness doesn't just require you to advocate for your opponents: it requires you to create arguments for them that they haven't made themselves, whether or not those arguments are relevant to the debate, if that would help your opponents throw dirt on your own position.

What other principle could possibly be extracted from FactCheck's critique of a new ad ("Save the Filibuster") produced by People for the American Way? (Link via Atrios.) The ad uses clips from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to illustrate its point that the filibuster rule offers a Senate minority the opportunity to "be heard" in the service of "what's right and fair." This may seem a fairly uncontroversial, if idealistic, way of arguing the utility of the rule, but the scolds at FactCheck are having none of it.

This ad uses a persuasion technique that might be called "innocence by association." It associates the filibuster with one of America's favorite movie heroes ["associates" by, er, showing him conducting a filibuster—but "associates" sounds so much more liberal-tricksier] while ignoring the sometimes dark purposes for which the filibuster has been used.  ...

In reality, the filibuster is simply and by definition the use of obstructionist tactics to delay legislative action. The legislation being blocked can be good, bad, or indifferent, depending on one's point of view. The historical reality is that the filibuster was the means by which the segregationist South blocked federal civil rights legislation for many decades after a majority favored it.

Now perhaps I just haven't been paying attention: but where, exactly, have proponents of the so-called "nuclear option" been insisting that we have to do away with the filibuster because they've (belatedly) realized that it bears the historic taint of segregationism? In what sense can you be accused of "ignoring" a critique of your position that none of your opponents has yet offered? Although, with water-carriers like FactCheck.org helpfully pointing the way, we can no doubt expect them to begin to now.

The fact that the filibuster has been used in the past for ugly purposes in no way precludes its future use for noble ones—past performance not an indicator of future returns, and all. Nor does it vitiate, or even touch, the argument from principle which PFAW and other opponents of the nuclear option are making: an argument on the necessity of the structural protection of minority rights in a republic, which, to anyone who remembers the Federalist Papers or has read the Constitution, has its own historical resonances. Willful obtuseness to such distinctions wouldn't seem the best way to establish your impartiality as a referee of political debate: but then, what do I know? I'm not one of them sophistimacated readers what they got at FactCheck.

Of course, establishing the organization's impartiality may be rather beside the point at this stage of the game. The FactCheck report winds up its little history lesson with a decorous, impartial belly flop right in the middle of the sleaze pool:

Filibusters continued to block serious civil rights legislation right up until 1964, when the Senate was finally able to muster the two-thirds majority that was then required to end debate. The last to filibuster against the landmark 1964 legislation was Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who spoke for 14 hours and 13 minutes, finishing the morning of June 10 – the 57th day of debate on the measure.

It is one of the ironies of US politics that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which lobbied so long for the 1964 civil rights bill, is currently lobbying to save the filibuster.

Byrd, of course, has for some time now been the most eloquent and prominent spokesman against the arrogance of the current Republican majority. And "it is one of the ironies," in this usage, means, "Hah! The NAACP is in bed with that old Klansman! Gotcha, hypocrites!" Guilt by association, anyone? It's another irony altogether that an organization called "FactCheck" should be deploying its "facts" for the purposes of making a stupid and irrelevant political smear: but I'll leave it to you to decide which irony is more corrosive.

posted by michael  11:28:14 AM  
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