But aren't those little caps cute? Several days late, the Times has taken notice of the controversy over ownership of the Washington Nationals—specifically, over barely-veiled threats from Tom Davis (R-Protection Racket) that some of baseball's stuff (like its antitrust exemption) might get, ya know, broke if an investor group including George Soros as a junior partner were to win the bidding. And on A1 no less: which makes it all the more bizarre that Sheryl Gay Stolberg should be reporting it as a lifestyle piece.

You know things are primed to go south when the first few grafs set the story up as a wry slice-of-Washington about how not even a winning ballclub can dispel partisan rancor among those nutty, politically obsessed D.C.-tonians:

In a city where politics course through the veins of the inhabitants, where Republicans run the show and the man in the White House is himself a former baseball team owner, it was probably too much to expect the Washington Nationals to usher in a bipartisan era of peace, love and understanding.

Sure, James Carville, the Democratic political consultant, can be spotted at games sitting in the same row as Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff. But now that George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who spent millions of dollars trying to defeat Mr. Bush last year, is competing for ownership of the team against bidders who include Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state, and Peter Fitzgerald, a former Republican senator, the mood on Capitol Hill isn't exactly Mom and apple pie.

" Where Baseball Has Become a Political Football "

Nevertheless, for a few grafs, right around the jump, it looks almost as if a story might break out here:

Mr. Davis and other Republicans did not back down from their criticism of Mr. Soros, who, they took pains to note, has been convicted of insider trading in France - a ruling he is appealing - and has supported ballot initiatives to legalize medical marijuana.

"We finally got a winning team," Representative Davis said. "Now they're going to hand it over to a convicted felon who wants to legalize drugs and who lives in New York and spent $5 million trying to defeat the president? How's he going to get him out to the opening game?" ...

At the same time, it was not lost on Democrats that another group of bidders - the one that includes General Powell - is led by a major Republican donor, Fred Malek, a former aide to President Richard M. Nixon who runs Thayer Capital Partners, a private equity investment firm.

"This is K Street run amok," complained Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, referring to the Republican "K Street Project," an effort to encourage businesses and trade associations to hire Republican lobbyists. "The message they're sending to baseball here is no different than the message they send to corporations: unless you play ball with us and our people, forget access to the halls of our democracy."

While this is certainly no more cogent than critique that's already appeared in the blogspace—and Stolberg misses the opportunity to rebut Davis with the case of another convicted felon and political spender who currently owns a team, ironically, in her paper's very own city—it does manage, somewhat unusually, to demonstrate an actual and balanced grasp of facts and issues.

Well, that can't last. Here's the very next graf, and watch how Sheryl segues out of the uncomfortable territory she finds herself in:

As if the feud over ownership is not enough, the Nationals appear to have created a sartorial quandary for some. Certain Democrats, it seems, feel queasy about wearing the team's signature "W" caps, which evoke a certain former part-owner of the Texas Rangers.

Not to mention that the caps the team wears at home games are red - as in red state.

And that's that, as far as any substantive joining of the issues goes. You can practically feel Stolberg's relief—so much pleasanter to talk about logos and freakin' cap colors than nasty ol' politics.

Now, I know from experience not to expect anything of a reporter like Stolberg—and I realize that, as long as the Times is going to employ her, they've got to give her stuff to do. But honestly, why bother paying any attention at all to a story like this if you're just going to go through these cretinous nothing-to-see-here motions? And play it (three days old) on the front page, no less?

posted by michael  2:22:01 PM  
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NYT hearts Billy. Completing the thought about Keller's memo (below) and the cultural politics thereof, let's remark on how diligently the Times is implementing the Credibility Group's recommendation that the paper cover religion more extensively. (Keller was, as one expected at the time, blowing smoke up his readers' asses when his Editor's Note on the Times' WMD reporting promised diligence in making up for its Judith Miller-era lapses; but this here is a credibility matter.) "More extensive coverage of religion" of course means, in the language of capitulation the Times has been learning to speak, free marketing copy for megachurch-style evangelical Protestantism.

Billy Graham, superannuated bigot and grandpappy warrior of know-nothing apocalyptic Christianity (who only looks moderate because he's lived long enough to be surpassed by his progeny, both spiritual and in the flesh), concluded a three-day "crusade" in New York City on Sunday—but you could be forgiven, reading the Times, if you thought the Graham NYC crusade had been running longer than Cats. In the past nine days, the Times has devoted a total of thirteen articles (as referenced on the NYT site) to Graham and his religion show, missing only one day (last Monday) in its Grahamapalooza coverage: several thousand words, including an op-ed, a week-in-review piece, and at least two splashy, above-the-fold-with-photo A1 articles that I'm aware of (not all of my print editions got to me last week). Exactly one of those articles (an inner-pager, of course) gestures substantially toward criticism of Graham, and then only for the purpose of smoothing it all over. I'm not sure even the Catholic Pope warranted the kind of wide-eyed, happy-making color commentary that Billy Graham's dotage has evoked in the Times this past week.

Today, beneath a three-column, nearly half-page hero shot of Pope Billy at the lectern before a sea of blue-shirted minions (looking like nothing so much as a similar front-page photo of Dubya before a mass of soldiers from a few months back), we have indefatigable Graham-celebrater Andy Newman holding forth reverently on the crusade's final sermon ("Graham Ends Crusade in City Urging Repentance and Hope"):

The Rev. Billy Graham, global ambassador for Christ and the most prominent American evangelist of the past century, concluded what might be his final American crusade yesterday with a sermon both apocalyptic and hopeful before a joyously polyglot throng in a New York City park.

On a hazy, sun-scorched afternoon, Mr. Graham, 86 years old and long in failing health, rallied his strength to mesmerize what his organization said were 90,000 people at the former World's Fair site at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. He used his own frailty to underscore the urgency of repentance, warning that the end - of a person's life, and of the world - may very well be imminent

After thanking his 96-year-old musical associate, George Beverly Shea, Mr. Graham said: "I know that it won't be long before both of us are going to be in heaven. You know, Jesus said, 'Be ready, for in such an hour that you know not, the son of man comes.' In Amos, the fourth chapter, it says, 'Prepare to meet your God.' Are you prepared? Have you opened your heart to Jesus? Have you repented of your sins?". ...

More than 230,000 people attended the crusade over the three days, Graham officials said, adding to the 83 million who have seen him preach in person in his 417 crusades over the years. Yesterday, the rapt audience spread across 93 acres, filling a vast lawn ringed by London plane and linden trees and overflowing into three more sites where Mr. Graham's visage, rugged and worn but still startlingly handsome, spoke to them from enormous video screens.

Especially ick-making bits of hagiographic enthusiasm highlighted, though it's by no means an exhaustive survey.

I'll give Newman this, he's clearly worked hard at studying the canonical moves in the Times sucking-up-to-power game: you don't come to write this sort of sonorous, manipulative pap just by luck. Looks like Todd Purdum and Elisabeth Bumiller have a competitor. Keep it up, Andy; you're a natural for the Washington bureau.

posted by michael  5:12:38 PM  
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Judases. Just in case there was any question whether I was right last month, when I read the coded language of the report of the Times' so-called Credibility Group as a capitulation to the right-wing PC howler monkeys, Bill Keller kindly dots the remaining "t"s and crosses the "i"s for us.

In a lengthy memo published the newspaper's Web site, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, announced several new policies in response to a recent report by the paper's Credibility Committee. Among them is a fresh attempt to diversify the Times' staff and viewpoints, and not in the usual racial or gender ways, but in political, religious and cultural areas as well. ...

The point, Keller wrote, "is not that we should begin recruiting reporters and editors for their political outlook; it is part of our professional code that we keep our political views out of the paper. The point is that we want a range of experience. ... First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class."

Keller said there had already been successes, namely, the coverage of conservatives by David Kirkpatrick and Jason DeParle, and a number of recent Sunday magazine pieces. "I intend to keep pushing us in this direction," Keller declared.

For all the fine talk about keeping political views out of the news columns, Keller couldn't be plainer about where the "diversity" action really is: he has set the Times squarely on the long path of apology for the ideological sins of its former "liberal" incarnation. Expect (what will at least feel like) an endless series of genuflections toward the right and its language police—it'll have to be endless, because Keller's an idiot if he thinks the wingers are ever going to let the Times up off the mat, now that the paper's fallen to its knees. I've written before about the kind of success David Kirkpatrick has been as Keller's ambassador to the conservatives; today, in a happy juxtaposition with Keller's memo, we get a big, off-lead A1 taste of what Jason DeParle is going to bring to the table ("In Battle to Pick Next Justice, Right Says, Avoid a Kennedy").

Chris Geidner is ample on his blog about the intellectual dishonesty in the structure of DeParle's right-wing hatchet job, so I don't feel I have anything much to do on that score. What Chris doesn't mention, though, is the passage—right up there at the top of the article—that made me drop my bagel (as always, cream-cheese side down) this morning:

When Anthony M. Kennedy was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, he took the place of a fallen conservative icon, Robert H. Bork, whose defeat in a Senate conflagration still shapes judicial politics. Sunny while Mr. Bork emanated gloom, clean-shaven while Mr. Bork was bearded, Justice Kennedy was above all philosophically undefined while Mr. Bork's conservatism was chiseled.

But for the next few years, Justice Kennedy sided so reliably with the court's right flank that relieved conservatives proclaimed him an ally: "Bork without the beard."

No one calls him that now. Instead, some notable conservatives are calling for his impeachment. For more than a decade, Justice Kennedy has infuriated the right, writing decisions in cases that struck down prayer at public school graduations, upheld abortion rights, gave constitutional protections to pornography and gay sex and banned the death penalty for juveniles. ...

A genial apostle of tolerance and consensus, Justice Kennedy, 68, is an unlikely lightning rod, one whose traditional Catholic background has little in common with the flag-burners, pornographers or abortion advocates his reading of the Constitution protects. In an interview last week, he responded to a question about what it was like to be cast as a Judas justice.

If self-satisfaction had an odor, I'd have smelled that last graf before the paper was even out of its wrapper. (Not that there aren't other odors wafting about here.) Can't you just see little Jason preening himself, in that alliterative "Judas justice," over his talent (if that's what it ought to be called) for spiteful, leering Cornerite invective? Hard to imagine a catalog like this one, "flag-burners, pornographers or abortion advocates," stated in just this demonizing language, appearing in a discussion of Supreme Court jurisprudence anywhere outside the hard right-wing press: the source, no doubt, of DeParle's inspiration here. It's something of a wonder to me that DeParle left "child molesters" out of the rogue's gallery that he claims Kennedy—obviously in Jason's book a "genial," "tolerant" muddlehead—has come to defend. Did he just not think to add it?

Must have: certainly "Judas justice" suggests that Jason DeParle is singularly unhindered by self-restraint when it comes to the task of fellating wingers. And no editor took it out: no editor with an interest in maintaining rhetorical decorum in the news columns (or with a vestige of self-respect) would have left any of that last graf standing. But it appears that decorum is a thing of that past at the Times: when you're trying to get yourself right with Stalinists, after all, you don't win points for mincing words. Which casts this piece of Bill Keller's memo in perhaps its true light:

We must, as the committee says, be more alert to nuances of language when writing about contentious issues. The committee picked a few examples — the way the word "moderate" conveys a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme, the misuse of "religious fundamentalists" to describe religious conservatives — but there are many pitfalls involved when we try to convey complex ideas as simply as possible, on deadline. I’ve asked Al (the last item on poor Al’s check list) to assure that our training and orientation include sessions with reporters who have proven particularly skillful at avoiding these pitfalls, and also to report periodically to the staff on language issues that have been brought to his attention.

There are nuances, of course, and then there are nuances, and I don't think Keller's suggesting sensitivity training here. Will Jason DeParle be one of the "skillful" rhetoricians Keller taps to do Newspeak orientation for the Times staff?

posted by michael  11:54:13 AM  
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Less-than-eminent domain. Yesterday's Supreme Court eminent-domain decision (Kelo v. City of New London) gets a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-their-mouths editorial today from the Times, which declares it "a welcome vindication of cities' ability to act in the public interest." Welcome to whom is, of course, the rub. It's difficult not to feel for the dispossesed plaintiffs in the case (in the language of the Court):

Petitioner Susette Kelo has lived in the Fort Trumbull area since 1997. She has made extensive improvements to her house, which she prizes for its water view. Petitioner Wilhelmina Dery was born in her Fort Trumbull house in 1918 and has lived there her entire life. Her husband Charles (also a petitioner) has lived in the house since they married some 60 years ago. ... There is no allegation that any of these properties is blighted or otherwise in poor condition; rather, they were condemned only because they happen to be located in the development area.

Unless, of course, you're a Times editorialist, and have the ability to wave them all away rhetorically as "a few small property owners, who will, in any case, be fully compensated." AKA people of no importance.

The public interest the Times sees vindicated in Kelo may not, however, be quite as public as the editorial lets on. A once-sentence disclaimer in the piece mentions that "the New York Times benefited from eminent domain in clearing the land for the new building it is constructing opposite the Port Authority Bus Terminal." Perhaps unsurprisingly, there hangs a story, one the Times would rather not tell in full, about just how corrupting the power of eminent domain can be in those fortunate enough to wield it on their own behalf:

The short version is this (the Village Voice has the long version here): a couple of years back, the NY Times decided it wanted to build a big shiny new headquarters.  And it wanted to built it on Eighth Avenue near the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan.  Unfortunately, other people owned some of the land - Scot Cohen, for example, who owned B&J Fabrics, a family business that had been there for almost 50 years.  To get the land owned by Cohen and others, the Times resorted to what is now apparently the Supreme Court approved American way: it used its political influence, and that of its developer, to work a deal with the city and state whereby New York's economic development agency would take the land and reconvey it to the developer on extremely favorable financial terms. ...

Here's the hilarious part: at the time, a communications professor noted that the Times's involvement might "undermine the Times' ability to criticize similar arrangements between government and business."  The Times, of course, insisted that its journalistic and editorial operations were pristine and could not possibly be influenced by what its business folks were up to: "This real estate transaction does not compromise the independence or credibility of the Times editorial voice or the integrity of the Times reporting in any way. Our business and news functions operate separately." 

The very picture of probity, our Times editorial page. [Thanks to The Cunctator for pointing me to Blue Mass. Group for the item.]

posted by michael  1:34:53 PM  
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Against utilitarianism. I notice this morning that Brad DeLong has joined an argument about utilitarianism, sparked by Richard Layard's defence of the Benthamite calculus in his book Happiness. (Disclaimer: I haven't read the book myself, and thus can offer no opinion about it. And I barely know Bentham from a hole in the ground.) DeLong takes a Layard critic, Will Wilkinson, to task in a couple of posts, with what I have to say are unimpressive results.

DeLong quotes Wilkinson to the effect that

The chapter at the middle of Happiness defending the principle of utility as the sole standard for judging right action and public policy is just laughably dumb. If I was still TA-ing ethical theory classes, and Layard turned this in, he'd get a solid 'B':

Why should we take the greatest happiness as the goal for society? Why not some other goal--or indeed many? What about health, autonomy, accomplishment or freedom? The problem with many goals is that they often conflict, and then we have to balance them against each other. So we naturally look for one ultimate goal that enables us to judge other goals by how they contribute to it. Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.

How is it that health, autonomy, accomplishment, and freedom are not self-evidently good? Layard will want to insist that we only want these other things for the sake of happiness. But that is just so much table pounding, and it is false. I am, in fact, willing to sacrifice some measure of happiness to ensure my autonomy, or to accomplish something of great value. I would, in fact, be willing to face suffering and death if that was required to preserve my freedom. And it's pretty easy to point out that happiness is instrumental to other values. ...

Individual moral intelligence involves weighing competing values and making judgments about their ordering according to standards that vary with context, relationship, social role, and more. It is hard to be a good person because it is hard to make out all the morally relevant characteristics of one's situation, and it is hard to know how to trade values against each other, and to be modest but resolute in the face of complexity--not because it is hard to be motivated to maximize something ridiculous like net aggregate utility.

DeLong claims to "save" Layard with this response, against which, he says, "Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink":

Wilkinson believes that if he were to sacrifice his freedom for his happiness, that if he were to do so he would then look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life, and that he would be unhappy. If Wilkinson says otherwise--that he would look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life and be happy, but that he would still regret what he had done and wish he had done otherwise--Wilkinson is simply saying, "Baa baa buff." He would be demonstrating that he does not understand the rules of conversation using the English language.

"Baa baa buff," indeed. I find this remarkable, and kind of sad: does DeLong really not understand regret, or believe that it has an ethical meaning? What rules of English conversation does it violate to say, "I'm happy, but I bought my happiness at too high a price"? More to the point, what rules of story does it violate? To say, "I'm happy, but I'm a lesser person than I might have been because of the bargains I made"? There's a whole world of moral narrative that DeLong's defense of utilitarianism seems to foreclose, including the narratives of a passel of novels that (I would bet) DeLong himself may have read and enjoyed. (And if he hasn't already, I'd be glad to turn him on to, say, Middlemarch, a novel dedicated to exploring just the ethical position that DeLong dismisses out of hand here as incoherent. I'd say George Eliot has a somewhat wider moral imagination than friend Brad.)

Part of the problem here is that the argument is joined at the wrong level (which is an incoherence Wilkinson introduced, not Brad). "Utility" has always struck me as a philosophical chimera, rather like the supposed unitary faculty of "intelligence" measured by intelligence tests. It's the merely nominal product, in other words, of a project of circular definition: as "intelligence" only exists as an artifact of testing, "utility" simply boils down to that thing, whatever it is, that's produced by all the utility-producing decisions people make. Positing such a thing may have some heuristic benefit in economics, but it seems self-evident that in any larger scope "utility" is an entirely contentless concept. But to the extent that there's something genuinely being talked about when we talk about "utility," surely it's only present at the level of social aggregates—where utilitarianism offers a language for rationalizing the choices that are made by, and for, large groups of people. For all the reasons that Wilkinson articulates in the last paragraph of the excerpt above, it should be obvious (and Brad's response makes it obvious) that a reductive account of human choice is useless, worse than useless, as a way of addressing individual moral existence.

Put it another way: we don't make choices, except for ethically trivial ones, based on a calculus of utilities. We rarely know enough to make such a calculus in the case of serious things, even if it were otherwise possible. We conduct our ethical lives largely by telling ourselves competing stories, and trying to pick the best one—with the definition of "best" itself contingent on just what stories we're telling at any given juncture. That kind of "calculus" isn't reducible even in principle to a single, linear axis of measurement.

As to whether utilitarianism does us any good at the social level: that I'm unsure about. My instinct is that it doesn't, but I want to think more about why I have that instinct. On the other hand, I'm sure that Brad's "obvious and unexceptionable" utilitarian formulation of the principle of the good society, which concludes his post, is neither:

• Respect people's choices--those made with enough information, after sufficient deliberation, when they are in possession of their faculties. You want to know what is good for someone? Watch the choices that he or she makes. Watch them carefully.
• A good society is one in which as much of what people would choose for themselves--with enough information, after sufficient deliberation, when they are in possession of their faculties--is attained, taking care that when there is a tradeoff between one person's preferences and another's, each one counts equally.

I don't know that I could boil down my recipe for the good society into two talking points, but I'm sure that if I did it wouldn't look like this. This only sounds good so long as you don't think about it for more than ten seconds. The highlighted piece is one of those qualifications that hide so much as to make the assertion they qualify all but meaningless. We are bound to maximize the equal opportunity for people to attain what they choose for themselves, provided the choice meets Brad's criteria for rationality. Well, who gets to say what constitutes "enough" information, "sufficient" deliberation, not to mention who is and isn't in possession of their faculties? The devil's in the details, after all. (I won't even touch Brad's happy assumption that "tradeoffs" in competing preferences are simply and uncontroversially to be managed.) And beyond that: how much of anyone's good, or any society's, is comprised within this carefully narrowed sphere of supposedly rational decision-making? We are instinctual creatures, who vaunt our knowledge beyond what we actually possess of it, who know the world only at a distance, through forms of mediation, and who act differently (often worse) in masses than we do as individuals—all things the great storytellers and the great moral philosophers understand, and take as constraints on their projects. All things utilitarianism, in pursuit of its blinkered notion of a science of ethical decision, has to ignore if its calculus is to get anywhere. We are not rational actors, not even primarily rational actors, not at least as utilitarianism understands rationality. That seems to me as significant a practical objection to the utilitarian idea as there can be.

posted by michael  4:08:15 PM  
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Naturally Republican. Pondering the Bolton nomination yesterday, I passed my eyes over Sheryl Gay Stolberg's article for the Times on Monday's failed cloture vote ("Democrats Block a Vote on Bolton for the Second Time"). Stolberg is one of the duller and more reflexively Republican of the Times' Washington-bureau pack: a reporter for whom, like far too many of her colleagues, Republicanism simply and completely defines the political norm. Republican assertion is presumed to be honest; Republican rhetoric is the natural language of politics. Republican narratives are the standard against which Democratic actions are evaluated. It's pervasive in what Stolberg writes, so pervasive that I suspect she doesn't even notice (nor would care if it were pointed out) how thoroughly mind-melded she is with the powers that be.

It'd be far more effort than it's worth to unpack all the manifold distortions and inadequacies of Stolberg's piece; hold it up against the parallel WaPo effort if you want to see the difference between the Times piece and a mainstream article that actually tries to play it straight. For Stolberg, pretty much all you need to know to know that the rhetorical fix is in is in the first couple of grafs:

The final tally was 54 to 38, six votes short of the 60 required to break a filibuster, the parliamentary tactic that Democrats have used to forestall a final vote on the confirmation.

The vote, a setback for both President Bush and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, came after the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., made a fruitless attempt to negotiate an end to the impasse with one of Mr. Bolton's chief Democratic opponents, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. ...

The next move, then, is up to the president, who must decide whether to use his constitutional authority to put Mr. Bolton in the ambassador's job when Congress takes a vacation, perhaps as early as the July 4 break.

Is there any question in this as to which side the honest brokers come from? It's no accident at all that Stolberg concludes her piece with a quote from Bill Frist complaining about the minority's resort to "parliamentary maneuvers to thwart the President's choice": Frist's language is uncomplicatedly her own. What other language would a Washington apparatchik think to adopt, after all? And if that language forwards a narrative of Democratic illegitimacy, well, that's just the breaks of the game. But I have to give Stolberg points for the phrase "constitutional authority," nicely echoing as it does the GOP-confected "constitutional option" that the filibuster debate treated us to: rather than risk finding herself left behind in the terminology battles, Stolberg leaps pre-emptively to the sanitizing rhetoric we'll no doubt be treated to should Bolton in fact be given that recess appointment.

But all this is par for the course. What really caught me was this passage at the end of the article, which (of course) gives pride of place to another unanswered litany of Republican complaints about bad Democratic manners.

After the vote, Republicans complained bitterly that Democrats were "on a fishing expedition," in the words of Mr. Allen, a leading backer of Mr. Bolton. Mr. Frist has said repeatedly that Democrats keep changing their demands; other Republicans, including the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, are now adopting his language.

"We have worked in good faith, yet Democratic leaders continue to move the goal posts," Mr. McClellan said after the vote on Monday night. "They are not interested in documents, they are only interested in preventing progress and blocking John Bolton."

Stolberg retails this "moving the goalposts" rhetoric without the slightest concern for telling her readers what, in fact, it might actually mean in the history of the Bolton tussle—much less whether it's a fair charge or even manages to correspond minimally to reality. (Naturally, it doesn't: Senate Democrats have been trying since the nomination fight started to get full disclosure of the contentious NSA intercepts—presumably the demand behind the "moving goalposts" talk—and have been insisting for weeks now that they regard disclosure as a requirement and a matter of Senate privilege in the exercise of its advise-and-consent role.) Stolberg doesn't care about any of that, which us naive non-journalists might think is a crucial part of the work of reporting. No, for her she is reporting, and reporting the only thing that really matters: Republicans have picked up a new talking point!

Spend a little time wrapping your mind around that one. Sheryl Gay Stolberg thinks that the mere fact of Republicans adopting a language in a political fight is news—and that mention of it is self-justifying, and requires nothing by way of evaluation or even contextualizing. It doesn't seem even to have entered Stolberg's mind (what there is of it) that statements like Frist's and McClellan's might have some determinable degree of truth or falsehood in them. What can this mean, except that for Stolberg Republican language has been so thoroughly naturalized that it's like nothing so much as a feature of the landscape: that it isn't really language at all?

posted by michael  2:31:56 PM  
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Policy? That's so ... Clinton-era. There was an illuminating article in Monday's Washington Post that I'm surprised hasn't gotten more attention in Blogovia, what with the fight over John Bolton heating up again and all:

For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.

Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs.

The prospective revival of the plutonium disposal project underlines a noticeable change since Bolton's departure from his old job as arms control chief. ... Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Bolton had also resisted using the so-called New York channel for communications with North Korea, a one-on-one meeting used sporadically through Bush's presidency and most recently revived in May. And fellow U.S. officials said Bolton had opposed a new strategic opening to India offering the prospect of sharing civilian nuclear technology, a move made in March.

Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer, "Policy Shifts Felt After Bolton's Departure From State Dept."

My first reaction reading this was, how could the Bush administration have suffered John Bolton to become such a policy obstacle? To the extent that, before he was entirely moved out of State, arms control negotiators had to contrive (with Elliott Abrams' connivance) to keep a multilateral "brainstorming" session on Iran with European allies secret from Bolton, presumably lest he throw bombs. His mere departure from the scene seems to have created a thaw across the entire arms-control landscape. And all the movement since would seem to carry the presidential imprimatur: so why was Bolton allowed to hold so many things up for so long?

The WaPo article, too, worries over that question, with limited results:

Whether the shifting policies reflect Bolton's absence or his absence reflects shifting policies remains a point of debate. ... "It's less a question of these decisions being taken because John was no longer in the policy loop," said Robert J. Einhorn, who was assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation at the beginning of the Bush presidency. "It's that John was no longer in the Washington-based policymaking loop because the second Bush administration wants to adopt a different approach to dealing with the rest of the world."

Still, other specialists cautioned against overstating the extent of the changes since Bolton's departure and noted that he was always acting in concert with the president's broad wishes. "He was a lightning rod because of his strong and blunt statements," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy organization. "But this Bush administration is not going to become the Adlai Stevenson administration just because John Bolton has left the State Department."

Bolton interpreted his arms-control portfolio as a license to disrupt any policy initiative, however virtuous, that even smacked of legitimizing international cooperation—which means, pretty much by definition, any arms-control initiative whatever. Was he doing Bush's will? If not, how could he have held onto his job? If so, what could so dramatically have changed the policy landscape since the election, that seemingly everything Bolton dedicated himself to obstructing is back on track?

The problem with all these questions is that they reflect an outdated mindset. Even with more than four years' unhappy experience, we still tend to speak of Bush administration policy in the language of intention. But it should be obvious by now that, with few exceptions, there is really no such thing as intentional policy in this administration, and the Bolton example is as telling an illustration of that point as any I've seen.

Bolton wasn't given his job at State in order to articulate some set of policies, for whose accomplishment he'd be held responsible. He was put in place as a reward for past service, and because he could be trusted to make a reliably loyal fink: he was the capo, the Bush syndicate's inside guy in the external power center of Colin Powell's State Department. As such, he was free to do anything on the policy side he damn well wanted, so long as he kept his sponsors in the know about what was happening in the State bureaucracy (hence the NSC intercepts, and why they're so intent on keeping them under wraps) and worked hard to make Colin's life miserable. (Powell being essentially a Bush I Republican, and to some extent Poppy's foreign-policy minder for George during the 2000 campaign, we can think of Bolton at State as a rather raw expression of Bush II's Oedipal urges.)

Bolton, in short, represented and manifested Party power within what would otherwise have been an independent bureaucracy. It may be that allegiance to the Fuhrerprinzip represents the Bush administration's only genuine ideological commitment; certainly nothing in the working of that principle has changed with Gauleiter Bolton's departure from the State Department. Nor have any new policy directions been established, except in a purely contingent manner. (The current movement on the arms-control front merely reflects the management style of the administration's new capo, Condi Rice. Without Bolton's particular axes to grind, and more interested in her relationship with her husband than in hands-on management, Condi by default has more or less liberated the arms-control people to do what comes naturally.) The only significant thing is that Dear Leader have his personal representative running the show—or obstructing the running of the show, as need be. Bolton and Rice may seem like opposites in the policy dimension: but in the only dimension that counts in this administration, they're functionally equivalent.

posted by michael  10:48:36 PM  
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Anybody remember the Times' Editors Note of last May, its very own critique of the paper's lapses in covering the WMD story (better, its consistent, uncritical retailing of the Bush administration's WMD fantasies) in the runup to the Iraq invasion? Those were the days, huh? The note concluded (having nowhere specifically mentioned she who must not be named) with a pious flourish: it offered as to how the Times considered "the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation" about those weapons that it helped promote, as "unfinished business," and promised that the editors "fully intend[ed] to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight." So, yeah, how's that been going lately?

By now you've probably seen the detailed takeouts of David Sanger's foolish, haphazard, intellectually dishonest Monday article on another recently leaked British prewar memo, an article in which Sanger perversely builds a single clause (of a document written prior to the Downing Street Memo, not that Sanger makes that clear) into a refutation of the DSM-supported claim that the administration had secretly committed to war in Iraq long before it engaged in what amounted to a sham political process to determine on war. If you haven't, then Nico at ThinkProgress, eRobin at Fact-esque, and Riggsveda at Corrente will clue you in on the contortionate misreading (and selective quotation) required to allow Sanger to come up with his line: more from me would be superfluous.

The point here is that David Sanger is a known quantity. He's been one of the Times' more consistent, not to say committed, purveyors of pro-war trash for quite some time now. Last March, for instance, (when, alas, I was better than the half-assed blogger I've since become) I noted Sanger repeatedly promoting the administration line—in the face of his own reporting, strangely enough—that the Spanish vote rejecting Jose Maria Aznar was a capitulation to Al Qaeda in the wake of the Madrid bombing. He also took a (rather futile) turn assisting the GOP high command in smearing Richard Clarke. So when the Times editors assign a cynical suck-up to power like Sanger to write a lead article taking essentially the paper's first real, belated notice of the Downing Street Memo controversy—well, they know exactly what they're going to get.

It might seem that this is another instance of the Times flagrantly demonstrating allegiance to the Bushian Overlords—and while that may be part of the deal, I think the real energy behind the Sanger article comes from elsewhere. Last year, reviewing the Times' WMD Editor's Note, I suggested that it served to give merely "an appearance of self-critique while cleaving to some deep principle of corporate omerta." I'd say we're in similar territory here: that the real context, though Sanger's piece of course doesn't mention it, is the demand from the antiwar Left that the mainstream press notice the Downing Street Memo, and (perhaps) notice and account for its dereliction of duty in failing for so long to report on it. Putting Sanger on the case is the Times' calculated way of giving a big fuck-you to its critics on the Left. "You wanted us to write about this, you pissants? Well, be careful what you wish for."

By way of contrast, think of what it meant when the Washington Post gave front-page (Sunday) placement in late May to an article on the Downing Street Memo by Walter Pincus—whose incisive, critical pre-war reporting on the WMD claims had so often been shoved into the paper's back pages. (Not to mention that it was Pincus on Sunday who broke the second memo, the one David Sanger so diligently misread a day later.) However implicit, there's an actual apology in the gesture, some measure at least of humility—as opposed to the phony apology of the Editor's Note, which now appears as nothing so much as a line drawn in the sand. "This is where criticism stops," says the Times: "ask us to go further and you'll get a stick in the eye." Put the Sanger article (as gesture) alongside the intellectual capitulation represented by the paper's so-called Credibility Group report, which I wrote about last month. One gets the impression, at the institutional level, that the paper has been by this point thoroughly Hitchens-ized, or maybe Jarvis-ized. Just how poisonously resentful, how reactionary, has the editorial culture of the Times become? And how much worse is it going to get?

posted by michael  1:43:39 PM  
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Meditation and perception. I'll link to this just because, as a meditator myself, I think it's cool:

To gain insight into how visual perception is regulated within the brain, researchers in [an Australian study reported in Current Biology] study chose to investigate the extent to which certain types of trained meditative practice can influence the conscious experience of visual perceptual rivalry. ...

Perceptual rivalry arises normally when two different images are presented to each eye, and it is manifested as a fluctuation--typically, over the course of seconds--in the "dominant" image that is consciously perceived. The neural events underlying perceptual rivalry are not well understood but are thought to involve brain mechanisms that regulate attention and conscious awareness. ...

The researchers tested the experience of visual rivalry by [experienced Tibetan Buddhist] monks during the practice of two types of meditation: a "compassion"-oriented meditation, described as a contemplation of suffering within the world combined with an emanation of loving kindness, and "one-point" meditation, described as the maintained focus of attention on a single object or thought, a focus that leads to a stability and clarity of mind.

Whereas no observable change in the rate of "visual switching" during rivalry was seen in monks practicing compassion meditation, major increases in the durations of perceptual dominance were experienced by monks practicing one-point meditation. Within this group, three monks, including two of the retreatists, reported complete visual stability during the entire five-minute meditation period. Increases in duration of perceptual dominance were also seen in monks after a period of one-point meditation.

In a different test of perceptual rivalry, in this case prior to any meditation, the duration of stable perception experienced by monks averaged 4.1 seconds, compared to 2.6 seconds for meditation-naïve control subjects. Remarkably, when instructed to actively maintain the duration, one of the retreatist monks could maintain a constant visual perception during this test for 723 seconds.

posted by michael  2:48:14 PM  
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Whack-proof. I signed a nifty, quick online petition this morning addressed to congressional Democrats, whose simple message is: "Howard Dean speaks for me." Go thou, and do likewise.

Though the message may, indeed, have already gotten through (not that there's anything wrong with overkill in these matters): let's take note of a couple of reports coming from the weekend's meeting of the DNC executive committee. From Reuters, via dKos:

Democratic National Committee leaders embraced feisty party boss Howard Dean on Saturday and urged him to keep fighting despite a flap over his blunt comments on Republicans. ...

"I hope Governor Dean will remember that he didn't get elected to be a wimp," said DNC member Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a South Carolina state representative. "We have been waiting a long time for someone to stand up for Democrats." ...

"Howard Dean is going to be much more aggressive, much more outspoken and much more of a risk-taker outside the Beltway than any chairman has been. We knew that," said Alvaro Cifuentes, chairman of the DNC Hispanic caucus.

"We have to get our politics out of Washington. We cannot continue to be held captive by party leaders who I respect but who have to play their own local politics," Cifuentes said, calling congressional Democrats "timid" and the flap over his comments "mostly a Beltway play." ...

Several DNC members said Dean had done what he promised -- shift the party's focus to local races rather than concentrate solely on the White House, and pump money into "red" states dominated in recent years by Republicans.

And this, still more telling, from Mike Allen in the WaPo:

"People want us to fight, and we are here to fight," Dean said during a quarterly meeting of the party's 64-member executive committee. "We are not going to lie down in front of the Republican machine anymore."

Dean's aides said he now realizes he needs to choose his words more carefully but plans to keep the pressure on Republicans.

Several key Democrats had said early last week that Dean should resign but concluded by week's end that there was no viable movement to oust him. Dean yesterday embraced his reputation for volatility, saying he is being buoyed by activists and donors. At one point, Chicago alderman Joseph A. Moore had trouble getting recognized and joked that next time he would "jump up and down."

It's the hoariest of cliches in Left Blogovia, the success the right wing's "work the refs" strategy has had in making the national media safe for all forms of conservative propaganda. It's somewhat less remarked on how useful, even central, that strategy is in coordinating the winger political base. When rightist figures come under mainstream criticism (though how rarely for mere rhetorical excess!), a significant population is already inoculated against it: the "liberal" media is simply showing its bias again. Criticism thus confirms the "liberal media" myth, and strengthens the identification of the base with its leadership.

I take the stories emerging from the DNC meeting as confirmation that a similar process has now taken hold within the Democratic rank and file. In sharp contrast to where the early reaction that followed last week's Dean "gaffes" was leading, it seems that HoDo's hand has, if anything, been strengthened: the liberal/left has its own narrative of media perfidy firmly in place, and the MSM's transparent interest in organizing another round of Dean-baiting has managed to do nothing more, really, than reinforce that part of the story in which Howard is the lefty John McCain, the maverick they hate because he tells it straight.

Our narrative has a couple of prongs, of course: the corporate media, become a crypto-right institution from a combination of privileged laziness and political cowardice, is mated in it with the national Democratic leadership, too beholden to inside-the-Beltway standards of discourse to be able to do anything except take with polite demurrers what the attack-dog Republicans dish out. Here, too, the reactions of the Edwards, the Bidens, the Obamas, played to the hilt the roles scripted for such figures in the left's own media myth. (By the way, I mean "myth" purely as a term of art here, not a pejorative. True things can be myths, too.) They were too eager to rush into the breach (or what they thought was the breach), too insensitive to the engaged (and enraged) rank and file to realize that the game has changed, and that the blogosphere and the netroots have done a great deal to change it: you fall out of step at your peril now. It's not for nothing that HoDo can claim that he's "buoyed by activists and donors." [I'm reminded, in that highlighted sentence about the coup that couldn't get off the ground, of that episode of the Sopranos where Richie Aprile fails to enlist support from any of the other bosses to take down Tony—and Uncle Junior realizes that he can't ride to power on Richie's back, because he doesn't command respect. Thus putting Richie on the endangered list. Word to the wise, Senator Edwards.] Hell, if I were Dean's PR guy I think I'd try to schedule one or two more of these feeding frenzies over the next year, just to keep things nicely goosed.

Dean has entered the realm, I think, in which attacks on him, on his rhetoric anyway, are only going to legitimize him with the base—and de-legitimize any Democrats foolish or retrograde enough to think about piling on. (Though I imagine a few people are feeling a little too burned, after last week, to try anything like that again soon.) And as little patience as I have with most forms of blog triumphalism, I think it deserves a mention here how remarkable a development this is. The left corporate-media critique I'm gesturing to here—that I only need to gesture to, because it's so ingrained at this point—where was it three or four years ago? Now it's not just on the radar, it's become part of the common consciousness of the activist base of the Democratic party, so much so that the party leadership is being forced to adapt to it. That's an extraordinary work, in a short time, of the formation of opinion, and I think a great deal of that is owing to the relentlessness with which the narrative has been pushed by the blogs.

posted by michael  3:39:11 PM  
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The sincerest form of parasitism. It's a compliment, really. Having been involved (however abortively) in an effort last year to begin establishing the term "progressive" as a political identifier in the wider discourse, I take a certain jaundiced pleasure in seeing how much equity the word has acquired in this last little while, at least within Democratic policy circles: enough, that is to say, to tempt various unprincipled opportunists to try to rip some of it off.

Consider the unprincipled opportunists of Third Way, a Democratic policy shop that recently opened its doors on L Street in D.C. (Ain't it just like the DINOs? Hey, if Tom DeLay won't let you onto K Street anymore, just accommodate by moving over a block!) They call themselves a "Senate-focused progressive advocacy group," claiming, per a prominently displayed slogan, an interest in "modernizing the progressive cause." (If you made a drinking game out of it, the number of instances of "progressive" on their homepage alone would get you loopy before you'd had the opportunity to explore further.) The slogan would appear to rest on some rather fancy defining of the words "modernize" and "progressive," something you might suspect from the list of Senators that Third Way says its founder have "recruited ... to champion their efforts in Congress":

Third Way’s honorary co-chairs are Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Tom Carper (D-DE). Three others, Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Ken Salazar (D-CO), serve as the group’s honorary vice-chairs. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) is chairing the Third Way National Security Project. These Senators are leading progressive Senate voices.

Let me just say that mere highlighting can't do justice to the comic intensity of the spit-take I performed reading that last sentence.

Third Way grabbed itself some buzz this week (via an admiring Kenneth Baer at TPMCafe) with an analysis, based on last year's election returns, demonstrating that "the Democrats are no longer the party of the middle class." Third Way evidently wants us to understand this as fearless, "progressive" truth-telling—and I guess it is, in Joementum land, where the measure of your courage is how eager you are publicly to trash your own when they're down. A courage our leading Dems, of course, have in no short supply in these Dean-bashing days. (Given how much of the buzz around the Third Way report came in the form of gleeful crowing from the likes of the Washington Times and Laura Ingraham, I'd say there's very little room for question about how the game's being played here. Though I'll notice that Ruy Teixeira gave the report some respectful, if critical attention. Teixeira, for the record, considers the Third Wayers "serious, thoughtful Democrats.") After all, the "middle class" in question is, specifically, the white middle class: whose defection from the Dems in a supposed "landslide" last year, point one of the report, is helpfully, er, contextualized by point two, namely that "unlike other voters, blacks conferred overwhelming majorities to Democrats, regardless of income level."

I'm not going to try to critique the Third Way report in detail, beyond making the rather obvious point that a "middle class" defined as all voters (or all white voters), regardless of region or educational level or professional status, reporting household incomes between $30 and $75K, is a statistical shibboleth on which no serious political strategy could ever reasonably be predicated. Why bother with critique, when the agenda is so readily apparent, and we can just cut to the chase? Third Way claims, as one of its core strategy points, that it's "launching initiatives to help progressives reconnect with the mainstream of America on cultural issues while retaining progressive values." "Reconnect with the mainstream" is codespeak, of course, but it's not a very obfuscated code, even without the report as a guide: translation; White suburban cultural resentment's been awfully good to the Republicans. And it's not like the blacks are going anywhere: so why don't we grab ourselves a little of that pissed-off Whitey action, put ourselves over the top with it? I mean, is there any serious question that that's the territory we're in with this thing?

I'm not going to waste time critiquing the utter boneheaded lack of political imagination in that "strategy," either. I can't imagine why anybody with any strategic or historical insight wouldn't realize that the white-resentment ship, as far as the Democrats go, had pretty much sailed by the time Arthur Bremer decided to help elect Richard Nixon in 1972: questions of taste aside, it's awfully late in the game to be chasing after it now.

It occurs to me, after all, that Third Way isn't really making an argument about political strategy: or rather, the argument it's making is just so much intellectual kabuki. What it's really doing is defining a marketing niche: and the chief thing being marketed are the Third Way careerists themselves, who hope with reports such as these to occupy a nice, rewarding slot in the Democratic consulting ecology. (As far as what I mean by careerism: the principals of Third Way all seem to have cut their teeth on a would-be grassroots group turned insider advocacy shop called Americans for Gun Safety, and are now trying to leverage that earlier work into some sort of franchise. Nick Confessore has the goods on AGS in this 2002 American Prospect article.) You almost can't fault the Third Wayers for the disgusting trash they're purveying: which is, after all, simply an expression of the sort of thing that their Senate patrons are most comfortable hearing. The real story here isn't Third Way, it's the parlous moral and intellectual state of the Democratic center-right that Third Way has been custom-designed to serve.

And if an honorable, historically rich term like "progressive" has to get hollowed out for Third Way to perform that service: well, what's a little linguistic collateral damage? It's not like history means anything to these people, anyway.

posted by michael  5:41:29 PM  
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This is what a Democrat sounds like:

This is not just picking on the President or playing petty partisan politics. This is a matter of profound truth. We’ve lost thousands of lives, and we stand to lose many more yet in a war that the President refuses to tell the Congress what his plans are for getting out of Iraq. He wouldn’t tell us he was going into Iraq, and now he won’t tell us how he plans to get out of Iraq. Something’s wrong here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it no matter how much of our time and energy it takes.

And this is what a temporizing, mealy-mouthed jackass sounds like [via]:

Obama told reporters gathered at the Rock the Vote awards dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., that Dean needs to tone down his rhetoric.  ... "As somebody who is a Christian myself, I don’t like it when people use religion to divide, whether that is Republican or Democrat," Obama said. "I think in terms of his role as party spokesman, [Dean] probably needs to be a little more careful and I suspect that is a message he is going to be getting from a number of us," Obama explained.

I know that it's early in his Senate career, and I know that patience is required ... But I also remember how elated we all were when Obama won his seat, and Jesus it hasn't taken long for all that emotion to leak away, has it? Between his vote to confirm Rice for State, his miserably uninformed (not to say callous) constituent letter on torture, and now his Joementum-style leap onto the Dean pile-on: remind me what exactly progressives were hoping for with this guy?

posted by michael  8:11:04 PM  
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Scallions. Suddenly, last weekend, all the scallions disappeared from the Jewel where I shop. (In Chicago, it's always either a Jewel or a Dominick's, unless you live within range of an independent grocer. This is a city built in neighborhoods: most anywhere you are, you're within walking distance of a major grocery store and a major pharmacy. I go to the Jewel on an almost daily basis, which allows for serendipity and spares me having to plan my food purchases by the week; if I need to bring home anything big, I trundle my handy fold-up cart behind me. I'd feel ridiculous driving the four blocks from my house, so I never do.) This was an annoyance, since I wanted to whip up my favorite scrambled egg recipe and it really doesn't work without scallions (onions are too heavy for the job, and shallots would work but they're sold at such a ridiculous price I won't buy them on principle).

Today, they're back, and I can't tell you how much more annoyed I am. I can no longer buy a simple bunch of scallions: you know, the common, small, rubber-banded bunch that suffices for one or maybe two recipes. What we've got instead, now, is a heavy, sealed plastic bag containing the equivalent of two bunches, the bag designed so that it's impossible even to visually inspect the scallions. (The business end is concealed under an opaque area of the package, and don't tell me that's not deliberate. Not to mention, why is it exactly that I need goddamn scallions to be sold to me with branding all over them?)

As simple a produce item as there is, and all of a sudden I have to deal with environmentally stupid packaging (I could reuse the old rubber bands), a wasteful change of unit size (I can't use as much as I'm forced to buy now without some of the amount going bad), compounded by the insult that eliminates my ability to actually see and choose what I'm buying—oh, and they've upped the price by about ten percent. (Which I'm not supposed to notice, since for the first week or so they're being offered at just a buck a bag.) Sure, in most respects this is a small thing: it's a great deal less small, though, when you multiply it across a Chicago's worth of Jewel produce sections, and then add the constant encroachment of plastic wrapping and item-bulking generally in supermarket produce, and I'm left to wonder just what the fuck these people are thinking. (It's at the point where I can't buy a head of lettuce that isn't sealed in cellophane, or as esoteric an item as a single carrot.) They're sure as hell not thinking about their customers, that much I'm sure of.

Since we're talking about a chain grocery, the local produce manager is of course no help at all. I've emailed; no doubt I'll get some mealy-mouthed bullshit in reply, and my protest will have done nothing except raise my blood pressure a bit. After all, why should anybody care about how scallions are sold?

posted by michael  12:35:10 PM  
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Movie tag. eRobin of Fact-esque has tagged me with the latest one of these blog frivolities, and, well, there's hardly anything more fun than gassing about movies. So here ya go:

How many movies do you own? Right now, it's over fifty and under a hundred. Better than that I can't do: some of my movies are still hidden in boxes from my last move—because I'm lazy—and anyway I don't have a real cataloging system—because I'm poor and decent shelving's expensive.

What's the last movie you bought? Probably Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—Charlie Kaufmann films (Human Nature aside, which I just find puzzling) are worth owning. That's not the last movie I got, though, since (see above) I've been poor lately and loath to spend money on DVDs—so gifts have had to pick up the slack. At Christmas I came in for something of a haul: the Warner Bros. film noir collection, Stroszek, and The Singing Detective.

What's the last film you watched? If filmic TV series count—ah, no, that way madness lies. (I'll just mention my devotion to The Sopranos and leave it at that.) In the theater, I think it'd be Vera Drake—it's been a while since I've gone to the theater, or felt especially drawn to go. I thought the film was extraordinary, as a piece of claustrophobic period realism, but modest to a fault and less resonant dramatically, at last, than I wanted it to be. On DVD, Asphalt Jungle, from that Warners set, the Ur heist film. Which I basically only watched with one eye, and need to see again to have anything intelligent to say about it.

Name five films you watch a lot or have special meaning for you. These are all going to be ones I own. That's pretty much the principle on which I buy films: I won't, unless I feel that the movie's really going to repay multiple viewings. The aforementioned Charlie Kaufmans aside, I own hardly anything made in the last ten years—not because my movie tastes have ossified, I think/hope, but because the steady diet of blockbusters and actioners and what have you just gives me nothing I can sink my teeth into. I like story, I like character, I like rich imagery, I like language.

• The Godfather. One, of course—though I have a long-standing argument with a former English Dept. colleague over the merits of One vs. Two. And I don't care if it's obvious. GF I is as resonant an exposition of American identity as there is, in a period full of great expositions of American identity. ("I believe in America": that line, and the way the movie slowly opens into its first shot, still catches my breath, and I've seen it at least a dozen times. And that classic, operatic use of Catholic ceremony at the end—...)
• The Lady Eve. Not enough people nowadays know who Preston Sturges was, and for my money this is his best comedy. When I first saw this, I only knew Barbara Stanwyck as the matriarch of the old TV western The Big Valley: the idea that she could be sexy had never entered my mind (much less the idea that a film would make me fall in love with her). Or that Henry Fonda could do slapstick. But what hooked me was the magnificent, off-kilter loopiness of Sturges' dialogue: "I need him like the axe needs the turkey." "The fish was a poem." Not to mention the brilliant, zero-degree use of the mask device: practically postmodern, and funny as hell. ("I tell ya, it's the same dame!") After you've watched this one, go on to The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and The Palm Beach Story, at the very least. And come back and tell me how much you like them.
• Swingers. Hardly one of the Great Movies, and totally a chick flick for straight guys, but fuck it, it makes me happy. Vince Vaughan as Trent is one of the iconic recent movie characters. "I'm gonna ask you a simple question and I want you to listen to me: who's the big winner here tonight at the casino? Huh? Mikey, that's who. Mikey's the big winner. Mikey wins." "You're like a big bear with claws and with fangs ... And you're looking at your claws and you're looking at your fangs. And you're thinking to yourself, you don't know what to do, man. 'I don't know how to kill the bunny.' With this you don't know how to kill the bunny!"
• La règle du jeu. An even thicker film, in the anthropological sense, than The Godfather. I saw this for the first time in college, and it was a revelation: especially in teaching me that there was an art to watching films, as surely as there was an art to making them. It's been a while since the last time I viewed La règle, in part just because it does place demands, and I have to feel I'm up to them. But the shot of Marquis Robert standing in front of his calliope to show it off to his guests—just standing, little more—has remained with me since the first time I saw it, as something like a perfect piece of cinema.
• Lost in Translation. Another small, perfect moment of cinema: Scarlett Johansson rests her head on Bill Murray's shoulder, and he displaces the answering gesture that he wants to make by folding his hands together on top of his knee. The pathos of that reticence gets me every time, and not just because it translates a moment of my own hopeless romantic history. I have mixed feelings about the film as a whole—the satirical stuff, in particular, just doesn't hold up—but at its core it's a minor wonder of economy and emotional transparency. And another film where I fall in love with the lead actress—where you have to, I think, if the movie's going to work.

OK, since the form requires that you pass the tag along, here are mine: Tex, just because we've never talked about movies, and I'm curious; Jesse, because he wants to be less confrontational; and Patrick, who's new to my blogroll and probably doesn't know this blog from a hole in the ground—but how many chances do I get to ask a redneck leftist musician to talk about films? (I mean, who isn't my brother-in-law ...) As always, if you want to play along, just leave your own responses in the comments.

posted by michael  9:09:53 AM  
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I'm not crazy about doing the inside-blog-baseball thing, but via Telford's Jesse I came on a post by Steve Gilliard that has me in a bit of a preachin' mood. Gilliard takes an item about grade-grubbing, a complete yawn as far as I'm concerned, and stretches the point about as far as it'll go, to launch a complaint about small-fish bloggers "complaining that their blogs don't get enough attention from the likes of Atrios and Kos."

As if they are owed some kind of recognition because they blog. They spend hours whinging (I love that britishism)about how other people don't recognize their work and we all need to promote each other and all that nonsense.

My reply was simple: write better. ...

If you want to grab an audience, you have to work at it. You have to do it every day and not expect an ounce of help. Not one link, not one kind reference. You have to do the work to get noticed. Some of us are more talented than others, but if you work hard and show effort others will appreciate it. ...

The problem is that we live in a performance based world. If you can't perform, you are not going to have a job or be taken seriously. It's easy to criticize and hard to do. It's easy to ask for a break, but hard to work to a point where you would find that insulting.

And what went through my head as I read this was, Well, isn't Steve Gilliard just one of nature's Republicans?

I mean, it's all there, isn't it? The self-pitying, all-but-presidential self-righteousness about one's own "hard work"—the hysterical, defensive sense of entitlement, the conviction that success is validation, the aggressive insistence that anybody who hasn't made a killing in the lottery is a LOSER, a whining (excuse me, whinging) nobody. The conviction that there's a club, and that merit ("performance") and nothing but has secured you your deserved membership in it. (Never mind that Gilliard is hardly one of the better prose stylists working in Blog these days.) No doubt Steve will find it a relatively smooth transition from his current stance to the more sensible one that'll someday net him some of that nice "the liberals left me" money.

Has Steve Gilliard ever happened across Clay Shirky's work on power laws in the distribution of attention in the blog space? (I've got an earlier post on the topic here.) It might teach him some humility. But put that aside. The preaching point here is something I remember going on about during my grad school days, with respect to all the good liberals on the faculty whose liberalism proved no impediment at all to their opposing (often with an edge of gratuitous nastiness) their students' efforts to unionize and improve their living conditions.

More than anything, the difference between left and right seems to me to have to do with empathy, with the capacity and the willingness to extend yourself imaginatively. When you're confronted with somebody disadvantaged—say, someone laboring under disadvantages you yourself have to some degree overcome—what's your instinctive response? Do you think yourself into their place? Or do you hug what you've got tighter to your chest, and give thanks you're not one of the bums, that you got yours? Do you congratulate yourself that the world has been organized for your good, or do you reflect a little on contingency? Politics isn't what you say about policy and about national affairs. It isn't, really, what you say at all. It's how you act when you have power—especially in relation to those who have less of it. From that aspect, I'd say I know all about Steve Gilliard's politics I want or need to. Enough at least to know they aren't mine—or those of anybody I'd care to spend time with.

posted by michael  4:18:15 PM  
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Hillary Clinton can kiss my progressive ass. Last week, as you're no doubt aware, the progressive "Take Back America" conference was getting plenty of blogospheric buzz—while generating something less in the way of actual rhetorical thunder. David Corn wrote about a certain word having gone missing from the foreign policy discussion:

Former (and current?) presidential aspirant John Edwards addressed a crowd of hundreds at lunch. He talked earnestly (as he does) about the need to help all those sons and daughters of mill workers (and other hardworking Americans) who didn't get the breaks he received as a son of a mill worker. And when it came to foreign policy, he passionately discussed promoting moral values and development abroad. He denigrated a foreign policy that delivers the rhetoric of freedom and not the reality of economic progress and true liberty. Is a six-year-old girl in Sudan really free, he asked, if she goes to bed each day hungry? But throughout his 25-minute-long speech, Edwards did not make a single reference to Iraq. How, you might ask, can anyone speechify about US foreign policy without mentioning Iraq? Well, it's not too difficult. When Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean spoke to the group in the morning, he too said not a word about the war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton not only didn't say anything at the conference about Iraq (which didn't prevent Ariana Huffington from excoriating her for having earlier declined to discuss an exit strategy, claiming "discomfort" with the topic)—she didn't say anything at the conference, period. Hillary was a no-show, preferring to spend her time bagging herself a million in pre-campaign cash at a Hollywood fundraiser.

Corn writes that the leadership's "don't mention the war" stance is symptomatic of a troubling disconnect between them and the troops:

What strikes me now is the asymmetry between the left and right on this topic. If you were to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (the grand meeting of rightwingers in Washington), you undoubtedly would hear many speakers from the platform--particularly Republican leaders--talk supportively about the war without hesitation. And the crowd would be in sync with these speakers. But over on the left, the friendly political leaders who drop by to address the troops avoid Iraq, and the crowd is disappointed and even angry. The bottom line: there is a disconnect in the progressive/Democratic world that does not exist in the conservative/Republican world. As long as that remains, it will likely be harder for the gang here to "take back" America.

Bad enough that the nearest thing to "progressive" national leadership the party has is unwilling to speak forthrightly to the one issue that, more than any other, currently defines progressive activism. (Or at least, establishes the bedrock concern on which progressive, grass-roots activism is being built.) How much worse is it that Hillary Clinton has given the TBA activists the back of her hand? We're talking about the only genuine source of passion and political commitment the Democratic party currently has, or will have for the foreseeable future: and Hillary'd rather schmooze Maggie and Jake Gyllenhall? Cash, apparently, is better than troops, at least as a corporatist Dem like Hillary understands things. (Which means that the last couple of elections haven't taught her much of anything.)

Marc Cooper spins this into the conclusion that progressives can't take back America because they don't even have a hope of taking back the Democratic party:

This is, of course, how real politics are conducted in this country. Take your name recognition, mix in your network of entrenched party operatives, hacks and local elected officials, water it with plenty of campaign cash a coupla-three years out, and eventually make yourself inevitable. ...

Hillary, of course, didn’t show at the confab. Why should she? She knows very well that if she runs for president, about 99.9% of the people in that room are going to vote for her anyway. Isn’t that what progressives always do? Bitch for four years about the “rightward drift “ of the party and then vote for the nominee, whomever it is?

The last time I bothered to check, there were no real grass-roots political parties in America... There were only campaign vehicles. Hillary’s building hers while the progs spend all week talking to each other. Take Back What?

Cooper appears to be saying that some progressives, someplace, should be constituting a "campaign vehicle" to challenge Clinton, and the rest of it is just so much hot air. Well, for starters, I have a hard time casting anybody in the candidate role for that putative campaign. There simply are no national (elected) progressive leaders, and so there's an anterior problem, one the TBA folks are trying to address: we need to get us some officeholders, and find a way to elevate their stature. More important, maybe: the last time I bothered to check, national political parties were—and had been, in most places and for as far back as I care to recall—real (if skeletal) organizations whose job is to maintain the machinery and the knowledge and the networks of partisan electoral politics between elections, ready for the time when flesh gets put back on the bones. If there's anything the history of the conservative takeover of the GOP tells us, it's that having control of the bones gives you a disproportionate amount of leverage over the long term.

In politics, the power to withhold is every bit as significant as the power to promote. And I think it's a key task now for progressives in the Democratic party to punish people like Hillary Clinton. Fuck her and her fundraising. You think you don't need progressives? Fine, then you don't get anything from us: no money, no troops, nothing. Let Hillary go her way, and let her sink—as, without progressive effort, she assuredly will. As far as I'm concerned, Clinton's just another aspirant to the mantle of Joementum: and Joementum, and the Joementum wing, has got to be purged if the Democrats are to rebound from the me-too hell into which the craven centrists have cast them.

posted by michael  12:45:57 PM  
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With what I can only assume is a motive of refined cruelty, the London Review of Books is featuring Christopher Hitchens' February 1998 review of Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot as an item from its archives today. At least, there's a cruel pleasure in the irony that, from the perspective of Bush's second inaugural, overtakes the opening of the review:

In Arthur Schlesinger's court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a 'White Paper' justifying Washington's destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire. This task he readily performed.

Not to mention Hitchens' later aphorism, a propos of the allegations that the Kennedys used Mob connections to swing a couple of key states in the 1960 election, that "an unscrupulous campaign doesn't have to undergo much in the way of metamorphosis to evolve into an unscrupulous administration." But for my money, since the subject has been much on my mind the last few days (despite, or because of, my current inability to write anything coherent about it), this is the seven-years-ago passage that most resonates now—particularly as it comes following some caustic remarks about the "junk thinking," the kind of "auto da fe among the intellectualoids," that promoted "unwholesome adoration" of the smarmily so-called Camelot:

One day, I am going to drop everything and think exclusively about America and its celebrated 'loss of innocence'. I have read that the country lost said innocence in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the First World War, during Prohibition, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is fairly easily regained - only to be (damn!) mislaid once more.

Hitch, of course, has honored his resolution to "drop everything" and think about American innocence only in the breach—assuming, that is, that the thinking he intended to do in 1998 was critical. (If there's a hell, I expect Hitchens' lot in it will be to listen as devils endless recite his pre-9/11, or maybe pre-Monica, writing. At each especially a propos passage, his head will explode anew.)

Come to think of it, the devils would do best to restrict themselves to the pre-Monica work. What's extraordinary about the LRB piece is that it makes it possible, not just to diagnose but to date, almost to the day, the moment that Hitch started coming unglued. Here's the envoi, which follows some remarks on the FBI's covert taping of Martin Luther King:

I had almost finished writing this on the Martin Luther King holiday, the day after which Bill Clinton's own vulgar and exploiting and finally trivial past almost caught up with him. It's in reading Branch's biography of King that one may still lay hold of a worthwhile strand in the narrative. While a succession of insecure and dishonest statesmen committed high crimes and misdemeanours at home and abroad, always justifying themselves by a fear of being thought weak, or by a terror of being undercut by a rival, or by simple fear of the contents of J. Edgar Hoover's private dossiers, Martin Luther King rescued the language from their clotted and conspiratorial style and made three ringing points. America had a bill coming due, to the descendants of its slaves, which it was morally obliged to redeem. There was unlikely to be domestic tranquillity, or the timely redemption of that bill, if a grossly expensive war of aggression was being prosecuted with a campaign of lies. ... What, then, is the 'linkage' between the private life of politicians and their public examples? There was certainly more on the King tapes than verbal obscenity. There is a great deal of foul-mouth talk on the Watergate tapes, much of it scabrously anti-semitic, but no sex. The Clinton tapes are of interest for serious purposes not because of the lipstick stains, but because of the possible use of lipstick subsidy (that of the Revlon Company, on whose board sits Vernon Jordan) to procure hush-money and soft jobs for friendly witnesses past and present. To take the two polar opposites, then, there is no discernible connection between King's lecherous indiscretions and his public persona, whereas there is at least a suggestive crossover between Kennedy's Mobbed-up sex-life and his thuggish foreign policy. Recall that Ian Fleming was one of his favourite authors. Bill Clinton has shown himself promiscuous about things like campaign finance and also about things like women met in a hurry along the trail. The two things may bear only an allegorical relationship. A baffled New York Times reporter noted from the heartland in the last days of January: 'Time and again, people invoked the widespread reports of former President John F. Kennedy's infidelities as evidence that sexual conduct had little to do with leadership capabilities.' This, as authors as different as Hersh and Wills have shown apparently in vain, is to get the personal and the political as confused as it is possible for them to be.

[I can't help highlighting the places in this where Hitchens' head will have to explode in the life to come.] There's almost a dimension of tragedy in this, of willful self-occlusion: Hitchens praises King's radical public honesty, in the face of a compromised private life, in the same breath as he insists (using the Kennedy precedent to mediate) on the most naive, the flattest possible reading of Bill Clinton's "promiscuity." The passage gets more schoolmarmish, more old-maidish, as it goes on. "The two things [private and public behavior] may bear only an allegorical relationship," Hitchens admits, which at least opens the possibility of falsification: but has he ever reckoned with himself over the undeniable fact that the Clinton prosecution never established any such "serious purpose" as he alleges for it, prospectively, here? On the contrary: as if to foreclose any future revisiting of the case, any confrontation of allegory with evidence, by the last sentence Hitchens has contorted himself into forgetting even the possibility of a distinction between personal and political. (Even his rhetorical command deserts him: one doesn't ordinarily use the word "confused" as a synonym for "disassociated.") As if, having once committed himself to a purely symbolic politics, to allegorizing private presidential sin as world-historical guilt, Hitchens can only forge on by commencing to set fire to his intellectual bridges. A strange, sad performance.

posted by michael  4:21:47 PM  
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I've been suffering from a (hopefully mild) case of Blog Aversion this last week, which manifests as an internal cringe every time I think about composing a post. So instead I've been allowing myself to enjoy my unemployment for a space: easy to do, since I'm a cheap date—a cloudless, cool Chicago spring afternoon, a baguette, and the leisure to walk wherever, and I'm reasonably satisfied.

I have three regular practices that sustain me, intellectually and creatively: Zen sitting, poetry writing, and blogging. (And of these, the least consistent practice is blogging. Probably because it's the one I'm most dubious about, in terms of its intrinsic worth and its impact on my psyche and disposition. It's just not good for anyone, over the long run, to be constantly stoking your political anger.) The job-and-money stress of the last couple of months has had an impact on all of them; in particular, I hardly feel like I've even approached a poetry-writing groove since practically the end of February. (Some of that has to do, beyond immediate circumstances, with the rhythm of the practice itself: I write in the morning, while I'm still drifting half asleep, trying to ride the linguistic fluidity of that state as long as I can, and as it gets lighter earlier that's harder to do—it takes time to adjust to the new shape of the day, as it takes time to adjust again when dawn starts retreating in the fall.) That's hard, because—though I've never published, don't know whether I ever will, and can't really know whether anything I'm writing is especially worthy—poetry is vastly more important to me than any other kind of writing I might do, and very close to the core of my self-concept.

Anyway, I don't usually do this on the front of the blog, since it's not what people really come here for, but I'm posting one of the few complete poems I've come up with in the last couple of months (one of the few I'm currently sure is complete, anyway)—short, and it speaks to the condition of semi-alienation from practice that I've been struggling with in the last little while. Take it as an earnest that some more regular blogging schedule will emerge here before too long.

Without its gorgeous implications the show
is over.  The old life has somehow ended
but we keep coming back for more.  
He finds that his property
is like the rain, which is speaking in tongues
no one will ever use.  (Being rational,
it does its best never
to stop.)  He writes it
as his obituary, I'd rather
be doing both, then steps aside
to answer the dull reassurances of the day.

posted by michael  10:15:35 AM  
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