Great Argument! Uh, Except For That One Thing...

The Self-Destruction of the 1% by Chrystia Freeland, NYT Magazine

Oh, she has the right thesis.  Categorizing states as more or less extractive is a logical framework, and it's almost obvious to say that those which are less so, countries which have more opportunities for wealth, are more egalitarian and will have more dynamic economies, whereas those in which only a small group is allowed to get paid, those will do worse. Freeland calls out America's plutocracy as (a) extant, thanks to the concentration of power that goes with the concentration of wealth (i.e., they get to advocate for their benefit much more effectively) and (b) not especially good for the rest of the country (our social mobility is worse than socialist Europe's), and it's good to see something like this break through into mainstream reading. About time, in fact.  But it's a very frustrating article, and it cops out on arguing some of the major points. I wonder if she knows Tom Friedman.

1. In the light of population pressures, land overuse, climate change, and approaching resource pressures, I don't think "growth" is the success metric that the human race needs going forward. And I am highly ambivalent about growth when it comes to the economy of scale vs. the barbarity of scale. (I dunno, maybe you've read my blog?)

Clearly what Freeland is trying to do is present an impartial argument--that cornering wealth goes against the ultimate self-interest of the wealthy--and okay, it's true, kinda sorta, when taking a generalized view of the wealthy.  For individual families, maybe their behavior is not so irrational as all that: even if a more egalitarian economy did create more expansion, the future wealthy might very well be other people.  I am sure that it's fun to believe that you perch at the top of the pyramid by virtue of your sheer awesomeness, but who really wants to put it to the test? 

It's a subjective argument that's trying to masquerade as an analytical one. (And isn't this always the case with economics?) But if you made a straight-up moral case for a better distribution of opportunity, then you're accused of being hopelessly naive or something.

2a. I can't speak to her history of Venice, but I'm given pause, remembering my Machiavelli, that there were no doubt corroborating factors that contributed to its decline among the other Italian city-states. They did fight each other pretty much constantly for a couple hundred years, and supported a variety of governmental models.  The publication of the Golden Book was certainly repulsive (a moral case!), but did the Serrata lead to the relative decline of Venice (instead of just being evil on its own merits)? Maybe, but I do recall that ascending Florence was explicitly run by a banking cartel.

2b. I can speak a little bit more to American history, and this article has a gigantic flaming you-must-be-shitting-me moment at the very core of its argument.

In the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”

For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”

Is she fucking serious? I mean, we understand that Mr. Jefferson was a man of his times, and we tend to excuse a great deal of his business life out of respect for the rational principles he argued in other spheres. But this is a bad time to go here.

It's true that the laboring class in 18th century Virginia were not paupers. They were in even worse shape. Jefferson, sadly, had a difficult time seeing them as part of "our" population.

2c. Freeland follows with "[t]that all changed with industrialization." Well, that and a bloody civil war.

By the time we get from the 1860s to Roosevelt's 1932, we not only had an industrial revolution, but also a new population, this one of immigrants, getting ground into the gears to serve it. FDR may have warned in 1932 against the robber barons (which Freeland says "America may have needed"), but like the world of the Medicis, I don't think there's a simple argument that they stoppered growth. The building of the railroads, for example, was not precisely competitive and entrepreneurial. I agree that epic inequality made the expansion rockier and nastier, and may have limited it eventually, with too much investment money trying to capitalize on not enough demand.

More to the point, between 1865 and 1932, the labor force was getting agitated about being so expendable. It fills up the literature of the day, and it led to revolutions worldwide. Ongoing labor unrest at a time when the costs of inequality were salient: that fire lit under FDR's ass went far toward getting the benefits and the opportunities spread around.

3. Also, it's not always good to entertain an opposing "reasonable" viewpoint just for the sake of doing so.

In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail). There is some truth in [that argument].

Old-fashioned work ethic and family values? Yeah, that must have been what kept the laboring class from getting ahead in Jefferson's time.

[Charles Murray is not a go-to person to cite as a thoughtful opponent.  He's the creep who wrote The Bell Curve, that faux-intellectual justification for racism, which should be enough to remove the obligation to entertain any of his demographic arguments ever.]

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It's too bad, because Freeland comes, I think, to the right conclusion. Inequality is wrong, and the current economic and political climate is making it worse. But she takes a full libertoonian account of history to get to that point. Even with my comic-book level of understanding, I'm kind of embarrassed to read this stuff.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Maybe it's just because I've paid attention to a few of them by now, but it seems that each presidential campaign ushers in levels of intellectual dissociation unimaginable even in the last unholy go-round.  I don't expect the truth exactly, but I suppose there's a piece of me that anticipates something like honest rationalizations.  Or if I'm being scammed, then I expect at least enough effort on their part to willingly suspend disbelief and let me participate in the process.  Veracity is a tall order, in other words, but for god's sake, verisimilitude doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Some brands of doublespeak we're used to.  I mean, it's not as if the war machine has slowed down under Barack Obama's tenure, and if it's horrifying that we're all so inured to the serial bombing approach to foreign policy that the president can riff comfortable Newspeak ("riffing Newspeak" is an oxymoron, of course, but in 1984, Orwell didn't really predict the American style of saying nothing) before the Nobel Peace committee.  And anyway, it's not as though the trust was founded by the Swedish defense contractor who invented dynamite or anything--wait, it was?--well at least we can claim that there's a consistent equilibrium of irony when it comes to matters of death and war. 

I'm not intending to be centrist here.  There's a political party in this country that habitually speaks within the allowed contradictions (which is the definition of "conservative," but surprise, it's the other party), and then there are the sick fucks who want to take it all up--actually, take it back--to a more impoverished (intellectually and otherwise) level.  The former can be caught rationalizing for good intentions and consistency, but the other spews nothing but bullshit--the difference, as has been noted, is that with bullshit, the truth simply doesn't matter.  Nothing is believed by these guys.  You can pull apart the Romney campaign and try and piece together what the dude's convictions are, but, once you get past "wealth is good," the rest is merely expedient.  And even that is something he can't quite hold onto.  I mean, I don't fucking like politics, and yet some things crystallize with such bizarre bipolar clarity, it's impossible not to appreciate the absurd perfection of it.

I saw on the morning news the other day a regrettably earnest analysis of the claims made by a new group called Swiftboat Veterans for Truth  Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc., accusing president Obama of not killing Public Enemy Number One all by himself, as he would totally prefer you to believe.  Here's a news source, but all I only saw clips of the video itself, which I won't link to.  It had an (alleged) Navy SEAL growling (with Batman-like menace), "the work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not."   "You did not kill Osama bin Laden.  America did."  I mean yeah, we can spot the hypocrisy of this by imagining how Deadeye George would have handled things if it happened on his watch, and lots of bloggers have done that by now, but even that falls short of the contradictory perfection of the charge.

Mr. Smith, folks, is championing the Labor Theory of Value.  It (a) proposes that the "producers" are the people who actually do the work, supposing that the worth of any object or service correlates directly to the amount and quality of labor, the efforts of the people that had their hands on the hammers, and (b) explicitly downplays (or at least coughs up apologies for) the role of deciders and funders in that estimation.  It struggles to justify, you know, capitalists--Karl Marx was all over this--and it undermines hiearchies, such as the military (not that history's commies had a tough time with that particular contradiction, however).  This video, meanwhile, features soldiers who are disowning their commander in chief, and supporting a presidential campaign that is headed by one guy who's an Ayn-Rand-loving capitalist true-believer, and another guy who's Mitt friggin' Romney.  You have to admire the churchbell-sized opppositeness of it all. 

I mean yeah, Mitt, let's run with this.  You didn't create all that wealth, it was the workers who did.  Maybe you should have paid them instead.  Holy fuck, do they have any idea what they're inciting?

One thing I like to observe from time to time is that even if you're sold on various market theories as accurate descriptions of economic dynamics, people still use social measurements to estimate the success of one strategy or another.  The selling point of unregulated capitalism is that it's supposed to make people live longer and happier lives, permit societies to reach greater heights of achievement, use resources most efficiently, and so forth.  These are the kinds of things that the military's alleged to protect as well.  And of course, by 2012, the body of evidence for the American model is a tad inconvenient for those beliefs, and it's down at this point to the integrity of the brand itself, the consistency of the argument.  That the modern Republican party of the last 30 or 40 years could embrace some form of populism was always a shade ironic, but outright pulling for labor over management is a new feat of disingenuousness.  Despite myself, I'm impressed.

UPDATE:  I guess there have been some problems with the captcha thingie in the comments.  I obviously have no control over how it works, and I've just turned it off for the time being.  It's kind of fortunate, because it gave me a chance to soften my crimes against scholarship and the English language in the above post!

The Devils We Know

It gets to the point of cliché to observe this, but through every new election cycle I've tried to stay awake for, it's that much more obvious that we're meant to judge our candidates by some kind of cultural shorthand more than by their positions and views, or the historical evidence they present for pursuing them. [Would we have a beer with this guy is the dumb shorthand, but it's not like I'm a special flower, above all this. For me, I found that George Bush's dumbfuck fake cowboy routine made my teeth grind, but I was occasionally susceptible to more mature poses, such as Al Gore's or Barack Obama's ability to patiently speak in complete sentences containing polysyllabic words. It's not less an act, it's just one that is meant to appeal to knowledge-worker tools such as myself.] Expectations are justifiably low. The human concerns that most desperately require collective action (such as looming environmental crises, resource management plans, egregious class inequality, and the well-being of the non-elect) require a serious disruption of the existing power structure to achieve, and I have a cynic's faith that that it won't be achieved using that structure. Which isn't to say that any of these guys, when elected, won't turn that machine toward making things actively worse for the species. That cynic in me expects new and expanded wars as a matter of course, but the boundaries of the in-group, who is included and who isn't, is given as a sort of wildcard, and that's the place where our votes may actually help. I don't think the dominant ideologies will push any other big issue forward much, but if some of our would-be leaders really believe in turning back the clock on equality, then that's all too feasible.

Which brings us to Rick Santorum. There is much about that vindictive cracker that seriously bugs me, but I can't tell if he's only offering cues to a tribe that's not mine, or if he does in fact contain an extra level of evil in his tortured soul. It's not like he lacks for insincerity, and the anti-intellectualism isn't exactly unusual from what you get from team Republican, but when it comes to religious types with a taste for power, it can be hard to tell where the scam ends and the conviction begins. In the puckered little sphincter of Rick Santorum's mind, any belief is automatically justified because he sees himself as a godly sort. Last week's soundbite about the theology of radical environmentalism ("not real theology" says Rick) gets me to the core, as if any kind of theology should dictate environmental policy. Mixing religion and politics buys a super-secret mystical threat to underline every statement and action he may pursue: if you don't support this guy, if you believe anything other than what he says, then you don't just disagree with him, you sin. When it comes to Santorum, the froth doesn't even stop at vague righteousness. He's doubled down on the usual evangelical language, named names, called out God and the Adversary to perch on his shoulders and look down at you. Maybe it's the natural progression of all this "under god" shuck and jive, the crumbling wall between church and state has let through a refutation-proof justification for anything and everything when someone professes loudly enough that they have the big bearded dude on their side. Scary to consider Santorum a would-be theocrat.

Here's Rick back in 2008 (via, which got it from the Drudge report, of all places, which I ain't gonna link). Tremble in holy fear:

“While we all see all this as a great political conflict in warfare between the Obama camp and the McCain camp and culture wars, what Bishop Aquila put his finger on and what I think, I suspect those of you who are here understand, this is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war.”

“And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost 200 years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.”

The thing is, I know this schtick. And I am a little resentful for the experience. I'm a little surprised to find it rendered as a Catholic thing: Guilt? The (negotiable) threat of hell? Those as Catholic menaces I know of, but Satan walking among us, tricking the naïve out of their souls, that's a lot more like the televangelist grift I grew up with. It was the early eighties, okay? And there was an active hysteria about corruption of young minds through rock music,* which took some purchase among the minds of worried church parents, and those lessons filtered down to us kids, about how Satan might be invited into our lives unknowingly: how participating in innocent-seeming secular rituals might be a subversive form of witchcraft; how the wrong music might subconsciously turn us to the dark side, through overt irreverence or secret backwards messages; how we might mutter the wrong figure of speech and actually end up selling our precious soul for a donut.

And y'know, it's funny. Although you'd routinely pray for sick people and so on, the best that the personal relationship with Jesus was really supposed to afford you was a sort of meditative serenity, a knowing of some kind. It was implied that Satan, meanwhile, if you gave up enough, could actually accomplish stuff in the material world. It was an insidious superstition to a little ambivalent type like me,** considering that (a) I had none of the private epiphanies that were supposed to be the route to Christian salvation, and (b) I did occasionally, more or less, accomplish stuff--did every step forward in my life come at the expense of some portion of my soul? Neither of these conditionals coule be disproven. There was no promise of miracles if I did believe, and no way was I going to take the gamble of dealing with the big red feller on purpose (although an attempt would have no doubt been instructively futile). Effects to my invisible soul from these purported bargains were ineffable by definition, and I could always fail any test with insufficient faith, which for me, was inevitable.

The most insightful thinking on obsessive-compulsive disorders that I've read (or heard about--I think it was an NPR segment actually) is that they are essentially a bodily expression of mental anxiety, and not centered on beliefs that compulsive actions will influence things. That seems like a correct understanding to me. It makes sense that concern about your kids' rebellion could get you obsessively overturning rocks to find a reinvented Satan living under them. And it made sense that an 11- or 12-year-old could find mortality such a cosmic affront that he'd resort to superstition, especially when the nicer adults I knew had bought in and sold it to me as pure truth.

As things scale up, I am undecided on whether puissant pissants such as the guiding stars of the Christian Coalition, or Rick Santorum, are merely in the business of transferring their doubt and superstition to the public because they're in a position to do so, like parents worried about their kids' music habits or if they are exploiting the religious fears of the little peaople. Are they cynically assuaging the legions of OCD-style moralists out in the world to make them follow, or are they simply speaking the language of shared anxieties? Maybe paternalism is just a viable route to power, and god knows it's been tried. I am not sure those things are exclusive, or whether the reasons matter. It'll be hell on those of us who have grown up.


*I actually must have been around 14 or 15 for this anecdote (my daughter's age!), which tells me that the desire for belief went on longer than I prefer to think. I can place it because my brother had a Guns n Roses T-shirt on, skulls on a cross, which puts him at about 13 and the year about 1987. The poor kid ended up being the perfect person from the crowd to draw out and shame. The lecture was in a church basement somewhere, and we were brought there out of a very sincere concern that some kids from the youth group didn't quite bring themselves to renounce Led Zeppelin, etc., who were, we were told, indeed proselytizing on behalf of Satan himself. Until this point, the faithful people that I'd encountered had been very honest and well-meaning, good examples, and this con artist might have been the first person in my consciousness to finally cross the streams of Selling Something and Good People, and it was a big turning point. To this day, the motivations puzzle me, but most likely, it was a paid seminar, and this fuckhead was the spiritual equivalent of the unaccountable consultant uselessly instructing corporate drones to think outside the box or some other such happy horseshit.

I remember that the course opened with a quote (from Nietzsche?), that I've since been unable to find. Something about how if you wish to control a people, you first must control their music. It's an aphorism that I'd in fact prefer to locate, because like much that's used to mislead, there's an element of truth to it. Revolutions and movements have all had their theme songs, as do nations, and the twentieth century tapped some of that stuff intentionally. It's an interesting theme to riff on, but there was, to the point of the talk, no devil that was whispering in the ears of rock and roll musicians to further his nefarious ends. This guy played us kids on a great big false syllogism.

Not to say there wasn't explicitly anti-Christian music out there at the time, not that I'd expect any promoter putting himself on the side of Jesus H. Christ to address very honestly the various reason that it was written or would sell. The thing is, he drew that kind of iconography down so far as to include anyone who'd ponder spirituality at all, lumping in any reasonably honest disagreement or question or disillusionment, and, because no countervailing discourse could be tolerated, everything not on the overt God list got lumped in with Slayer. (Seriously, Hall and fucking Oates was one of the bands he tried to make us worry about.) Call it guilt by association maybe. Even the most negative stuff, my adult self realizes, was probably only ever meant ironically, or as sincere criticism. And what wasn't those things was most likely a marketing gimmick, those bands manipulating their audience's irreverence just as cynically as this guy who was peddling Christian angst. I love me a heartfelt dissent, but I tend to remain unimpressed with rebellion that's done without honesty or humor or artistry. Those fuckers are making a different buck, but they're grifters too.

At the end of the seminar, we were all asked to close our eyes. Everyone who's accepted Christ raise your hands. I wonder, as he counted, what he thought. Probably it was just gauging success of the lecture, how long could he keep up the racket. Maybe there was some personal satisfaction at conversion, thinking he had worked the audience, maybe turning them to what he saw as the good. My own eyes were shut tight, and I was trying hard, but not succeeding, to accept this line of crackpottery, almost certainly for the last time. I wonder how many of my peers kept 'em open. I wonder what they thought as they did, if they were wise enough to realize the crowd was getting played. I wonder who raised their hands.

**Even today, I tend to view the world with a great deal of ambivalence, coming to conclusions only after a very lengthy devil's advocacy (so to speak). Eventually, it gave way to a naturalist perspective, and I hope I've become the right sort of skeptic as a result. I had an ear for profundity as a kid too, a need to find deep meaning in existence, and I really wanted to believe in a higher order of things. In those days, Middle Earth was even more compelling than Christian salvation, and it's maybe a good thing no one was telling me that was real. I am fortunate that I had some good anti-authoritarian influences, but there was no one at that age to really show me how beauty and depth is compatible with empiricism, and I think it's kind of a shame that I didn't find any of that reading until much later.

Obligatory thoughts on the Arizona shooting

Obviously nobody's pestering me for my thoughts here, but I've seen so damn much CNN in the last two days, that it's hard to avoid forming an opinion or two. I'd like to get it off my chest before I go and try to be entertaining.

1. A nine-year-old girl as well as half a dozen grownups were killed. This kind of thing just ties me up in knots, and I wish I could stop thinking about it. I mean, if you're losing your positive outlook on the human race, then the best thing you can do is to get to know a well-balanced nine-year-old girl. Taking that away is the stuff of enduring heartbreak and terrifying nightmares. When little girls start to fall under your vision of acceptable collateral damage, then maybe it's time it's time to give a serious second thought to what you imagine it is you're trying to accomplish.

Of course, this draws up the usual unsettling disconnect. How many little girls are getting shot, orphaned, abused, and starved thanks to accepted violence? It happens far too commonly outside of society's purview or its capability to control, and that's awful enough, but we're out there killing them too, on purpose, or as an accepted consequence, through intentional policy, domestic and foreign. Political violence is common and condoned, while violence against politics has been pretty rare here by comparison in the last hundred years, and roundly condemned. Increasingly, I find I am sick with both. If you want to remember what the middle east wars cost, then try to imagine the thousands of nine-year-old kids, if you can take it.

2. I tend to agree that inflammatory rhetoric and the more-belligerent pose of the right wing is partly to blame here. I think that actual concentration and expression of economic power is also part of the problem. Powerlessness and ignorance seem to be common themes of many a confused American revolutionary poser, if you want to call in the Truthers and Birthers and the rest, not to mention the Tea Party. I don't think that's an entirely wrong perception: the political representation in our system is not engineered to make the system fair even according to the points of its own narrative, or to give these folks much of a voice. I mean, people have obviously been incited from time to time in history, and oppression and (limited) freedom are the fuel and oxygen of certain kinds of political conflagration. Are we there yet? I don't know. I think it's early to spot a general trend from this (not that it matters what I think), and occasional violent outbursts seem to be part of human behavior, no matter what causes the stress.

Of course, glibly supporting violence and throwing around martial rhetoric beforehand sure does make you look like an asshole when it finally does occur.

3. I liked the sherriff dude abetter on an extended interview this morning (I actually plugged into the sound!), but still, "consequences" sounds like a menacing addendum to free speech. It's worrying what people choose to believe, but if we're talking susceptibility to propaganda, then I find that our media is similarly infuriating. I think I'd still care, but if it weren't for twenty-four hours of concerned opinion, then I don't think I'd be this fucking irritated. Every time I calm down, I go a round on the hamster wheel and read one of the zillions of blog posts on the subject and I get annoyed again. We have several familiar themes emerging in the professional press, including that the dude was nuts, that you shouldn't challenge authority, that he was incoherently political, that both sides have troublemakers, that the political climate is just too nasty and it must unite for healing. Maybe he's nuts, and probably he's a poor thinker, and sure, people should calm the fuck down, but I'm not learning anything here about what people get angry about. I'm annoyed that this lone whackjob is a standard script for someone who does not speak with an accent. I think reporting like this is why people question authority.

I worry about cracking down, as false syllogisms continue to emerge with respect to violence and dissent. All terrorists disagree with the system, but not all complainers are violent, right? A high fraction of people against the establishment are selfish and too stupid to breathe, but that's true of people for it too. If our governing outlook does change as a response, it will probably be at the expense of the lower economic orders, who usually bear it. I suspect that amendments 1 and 4-10 are at more danger of being compromised than the second one. More than that, I'm worried about what we get for this affirmation of bipartisanship, if no one dares protest a crazy idea from the establishment. The last few times they came together as a concerned whole, we got bailouts, and a war, and a Patriot act.

4. This kind of false syllogism thing writes itself: Obviously these damn white dudes are nothing but trouble, and the only rational response is to crack down on them. I don't think we should randomly pull them over or anything, but airports? In schools? The bleeding hearts call it "profiling" but if they are the ones who commit these terrorist acts, then that's only a matter of using the information we have. Maybe there are good white guys out there (maybe!) but until they get together and keep their nutjobs in line, then they obviously don't deserve to be treated like real citizens. If they want respect, they have to earn it. They say it's a culture of peace, but really, who we kidding here?

5. What to make of the reading list? The nooze cites Animal Farm, The Communist Manifesto, and Mein Kampf, and although you can sense a theme there, that's a pretty contradictory set of inspirations. The liberal blogs add that an Ayn Rand doorstop or two was in the mix, perhaps omitted in the media since that's too close to our own governing madness. Now, I've read Animal Farm a couple of times, and the first time I did it was assigned. I haven't read Marx's manifesto but I've heard that it is powerful as a critique (and not so controversial as advertised), even if it turned out to be a terrible prescription when it got into certain hands. You couldn't fucking pay me enough to read Mein Kampf, but I think that there's an argument that it should be read, to help understand where a fascist monster came from. I don't see the reading list as sufficient evidence of lunacy, in other words, but it's been hauled up a lot.

Based on reports from people who read his screeds, the guy really does look unhinged, but I still think it was an early call by the media. Like "radicalized," it's a facile judgement that dismisses all disagreement with the dominant narrative as bonkers. Meanwhile, the same simple view can be applied to policy and our dominant ideologies when we look at what those things actually do--they're nuts too!

Well, maybe they all are. Maybe the sane people are the ones who don't waste their lives thinking about this crap. Right up to the point when they have to live with it.

Review: Griftopia, by Matt Taibbi

I can't believe it. It's even worse than I thought.

In Griftopia, Matt Taibbi takes us through the series of financial disasters of the last decade, presenting them to us as a succession of long cons on the American consuming public, enabled by the government and perpetrated by the finance industry. He bookends the drama by a bit of political analysis, pointing out some basic and comic misunderstandings of the "Tea Party" demonstrators with a dollop of sympathy. They're right that the government is crapping on them. They just don't understand how it works, or who wins. (Writing this now with a family-time turkey hangover, and I'm appreciating Matt's point more than when I read it last week.) He tells us how it's intentionally complex, to obscure what the hell is going on, buried in miles of double negatives and lawyerly fine print, mostly as a justification for separating the rubes from their bucks. In the epilogue he notes how the political campaigns have sifted it down into idiotic narratives that ignore the essential conflict. In between, Matt offers the quasi-philosophical excuses for graft that began to seep up in the Reagan years, walks us through the tech bubble, the recent commodities spike, skims across the health insurance morrass, and spends a good couple chapters on the current real estate mess and its corrolary finance disasters, each given as a different view of the whole enterprise too structural to call a scam, each a different tentacle of some gigantic insensate octopus (his imagery), not much aware of the activities of the rest of it. At least one of the chapters is a reprise of one of his big Rolling Stone pieces, but the format is logical enough.

Most of the criticisms I've seen Matt Taibbi receive from his articles have boiled down to attacks on his style, or hurt feelings. (The multitrillion net grift that he tosses up once or twice is something I've seen disputed, but he's obviously including some lending actions of the federal reserve that's not well-disclosed, and is necessarily estimated, and is used in the text as a synonym for "huge" I think with the appropriate amount of confidence.) Me, I like the colorful language so much (evidence: this-here blog, although both us might go a little heavy on the adjectives) that I worry that it probably soften up my objectivity, although I can see how for normal people, frequent superlative use of words like "collossal" and "insane" and "fuck-ton" may be mistaken for an absence of mathematical precision, and how calling Alan Greenspan "the biggest asshole in the universe" or Rick Santelli a "shameless douchewad" or Lloyd Blankfein a "motherfucker" may worry semantic purists that Matt could be offering a smidgen too much of a personal hit. But keep in mind that attacking the man doesn't necessary mean it's an ad hominem fallacy. Matt's not calling them names in order to discredit their argument. For that, he's offering a couple hundred pages of evidence. What Taibbi is instead doing is examining their behavior and reporting the logical conclusion that they are, according to any useful colloquial understanding, major-league assholes. Sure it's an opinion, but it's supported. And it's a good antidote for the beetle-browed driness, jargon-heavy passion, or Delphic gobbldegook that is the usually accepted tone for the financial discussion, at least when it is directed toward the public. The admonition against strong words can serve as a cover for behavior that is outrageous enough to be worthy of them. Taibbi's technique of generating an emotional connection is useful. And it's worth noting that some the basic humanity in the big-time profit-seeking calculus is so deeply ignored. Call it an incredulous style, but I would likewise avoid calling it a fallacious appeal to incredulity. It's more like a comic act of frantically trying to point out something too large and obvious to easily notice. ("The fucking elephant! Don't you see?") And yeah, even if you want to argue (and I don't really) that Taibbi's a one-eyed journalist, it still puts him among the sparse royalty of that profession. He's not a comedian, but fuck it, he's funny, and the emotional connection he generates is of that vein, the sort that can help you accept uncomfortable little truths.

My objections to Griftopia are small, and run in the territory of praising the book with faint damns. I appreciate the research Taibbi did here, and his willingness to explain and condense things for his readers is bloody useful. But on the other hand, I'm wary of entertaining explanations of boring subjects. My spider-sense occasionally got tingling, got me thinking it's little too like an "edgy" kids' science show or something (a certain glibness that sometimes generates allergy symptoms, even if I don't generally find them to be wrong), and maybe he's missing important subtleties in the service of a greater valid point. The issue is that the grift penetrates deeper into some economic sectors than others, and even there, on some firms and practices more than others. I don't think this is lost exactly, but the chapters are given approximately equal emphasis, and I don't think all of them have purely economic causes, or were generated with the same level of gleeful amorality or outright contempt toward the lower classes.

For example, like most people, I suspected that speculation played a role in the 2008commodities bubble, but how much of a role? Now, I didn't realize how much was of the disruptive speculation was of a newly legal type, and Matt makes a good case explaining what useful service commoditiy futures have provided since the Depression, and for the role the empowered commodity futures trading commission made in creating a structure so damn fragile and ripe for collapse. It explains why some worries about regional stability made the futures market go so much more flighty and generally fucktarded (not to be so casual about this--it made people go hungry, a worse thing than losing your house) than investors normally make things. But dude, there are very good reasons why "anyone would want to invest in a rise in commodoties prices over time". I don't think in the long term that we can really count on technologies to continually improve yields and so forth, not without a brand new energy source and a revolutionary chemicals infrastructure. The market scare that sparked it--middle east instability sparked by U.S. military actions there--were real, and if there was still any of the shit in Texas, wouldn't have been an issue in the first place. It's a response to oil peaking (and I'd love to see Matt Taibbi on oil, by the way). The spike was caused by the futures overinvestment, but I think it's still governed by gradual resource depletion. I think the inappropriateness of long futures in normally-functioning commodities markets makes sense. Would it be good to be able to short oil on some long-term scale?

There is a later chapter on last year's health care reform, and Taibbi makes the case that, like other corporate actors, Washington sees insurers as among their real constituents, who need to be served more than they need to be legislated against on behalf of us lowly worker bees. He is certainly right to trash the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by the health insurance market, which flies against the public interest, and is, you know, completely inconsistent with the sorts of pluralist models that most people believe apply to our country and economy. It still takes amazing balls to ignore medical or insurance that work cheaply, and after basing parts of your campaign on spelling them out, to then take 'em right off the table before negotiations even start. Matt acknowledges that it's well-impossible to buck the insurers when you're a senator, for those even inclined to, but didn't any politician imagine an ounce of good could be done, that chink in the armor was useful as a price to give 'em something they'd get anyway? Aren't some of them merely misguided compromisers instead of pure sellouts? Isn't it good that at least some people are insured and we have a medical complex that works even if its finances amount to extortion? I am Taibbi's side here, but he offers evidence more than proof. Failing to rescind something evil is perfectly consistent with cluelessness or a broken system, but isn't actively malicious in the way that a financial con can be. And when they get that far in the book, Matt's going to make the commenters at Balloon Juice hate him all over again.

When it gets to auctioning public utilities for short-term budget-balancing, I was similarly educated on the extent of it all, although I'm not sure if I've been convinced that foreign wealth funds are any specific problem here. Makes it seem more like "looting" than anything else. But Matt's at his best going over the stuff he researched so heavily for the Rolling Stone pieces. If the grift is merely good for commodities and health care markets, it's been grrrreat! for the investment banks, who, at the top eschelons, have not failed to garner their cut, even as pensions tank and our governors eye our federal benefits to fight the deficits they suddenly care about. I've read a fair amount about this (much like any reluctantly responsible citizen), and I liked how he added some depth and, really, some perspective to the mortgage racket as it all went down. There are so many details of this game, that it's difficult to organize and prioritize, and I thought as a summary of the chain of fraud it was splendid, and the wrapup (p. 121) was artful. I liked his quip that it's Griftopia for the handful powerful entities working in the priveleged sphere where they can manipulate the economy, while it's the free market for the rest of us. Which is the exact opposite of the message they sell.

[Wrapped this one up in a hurry. Happy holidays, everyone.]

Unpacking Ayn Rand

It's weird to think about it, but I've been haunting the internet for a long time--about twenty years if we count the time that my then-friend Mang (it got so I didn't see him so much sophomore year, and later I'd heard he pretty much disowned me when he found out I was pledging a fraternity) showed me some tricks with the email, where to ftp a few naughty pictures and local urban legends, and some especially nerdy ways to waste time--it puts me approximately in the Precambrian era of its evolution, just before AOL exploded the place with a diversity of lusers. A minor, sporadic and unnoticed spook I was then (and am now), but it was a long enough stretch for me to have eyeballed a few types, observe them, get bored by them, and still here they fucking are. One of these long-established members of the internet prickarazzi is the Objectivist (close! but this guy's too astute), the serious spouter of Ayn Rand's claptrap, typically a pustule-faced nineteen-year-old Rush fan, but also trending toward those unlovable middle-age stiffs who'd manage to be excitable and passionless at the same time, whatever humor generally veering to the nasty sort, the sorts of people who had unshakable theoretical views of human behavior, and whom you'd pray would never, ever have any kids. (And of course that's not fair, because even here I'm remembering "libertarian" types more clearly than "objectivists." The Randites were narrower and stupider.) Or that's how I grew to picture them anyway, while the characters who later evolved to pick on John Galt (or at a minimum, pick on his prose), enjoyed a mental picture that included a healthy laugh and a charming joi de vivre. In the meat world, most people seem to separate their beliefs from their lives, reserving philosophical passion for the rare times those worlds happen to intersect: it's turned out that either of these groups of people are indistinguishable from my officemates.

I am embarrassed to come back to all this pseudo-philosophy as much as I do. It's sort of like being annoyed as an adult about Dr. Seuss's inaccurate grasp of physics and biology. (An elephant bird? You don't transfer genes by just sitting on an egg! And for that matter how did that tree hold Horton up, Ted? Answer me that one!) I never went so that far down as to believe in "rational self interest," but it's the sort of idea that I associate with those formative times. Being surrounded by other baby engineers was part of it, but our freshman experience was more about playing tennis, computer games, and endless rounds of Asshole, and, hard as this is to believe, never getting laid. To fill out the requisite dormroom bullshitting, I was forced to go online. I don't want to offer the impression that most engineers are so closed-minded, and there remain an abundance of people on the other side of the screen who aren't antisocial kooks, but bright, arrogant and immature? All I'm saying is that I know the type.

I've read far more about Ayn Rand than I've read anything she wrote. And the anecdote doesn't lead up to a review of Atlas Shrugged even now. Still don't have the stomach for that one. No, I'm reading Matt Taibbi's Griftopia (good for a tangential post or two before the review), and it's a kick to read someone introducing Rand and the world of objectivism to newbies with appropriate contempt. It's a critique addressed to an audience insufficiently geeky, or composed of the wrong sort of geek, an audience lucky enough to have never inadvertantly let this crap suffuse anything in their thinking lives before Taibbi told them about it.

Here's Matt, quoting:

Rand's rhetorical strategy was to create the impression of depth through overwhelming verbal quanitity, battering the reader with a relentless barrage of meaningless literary curlicues. Take this bit from Galt's famous speech in Atlas Shrugged:

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over the act of perceiving it, which is thinking--that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action--that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise--that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from teh task of perceiving to the task of faking reality--that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind--that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.

If you're sane, you skimmed that, and depending on what you're looking for, you might have come away with (a) that an external reality is important and is independent of belief, or (b) some unsettling bullshit about the infallibility of the rational mind. The former seems a reasonable-ish philosophical view, but the latter seems like a disturbing justification for something or other. Taibbi goes on to sum up the whole deal in four bullet points:

1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools.

I love Matt Taibbi.

Once you account for the hyperbole, this is not really so far from the Wikipedia entry (and if Wiki's going to represent anything more thoroughly and charitably than Star Wars, it's Ayn friggin' Rand). I look at the promulgation of "objective reality," and I worry. Why, that's not so much different from my own struggled-at epistemology! The one which I can't get myself to shut the fuck up about. I wouldn't go so far as to call "facts" unassailable, but on the question of whether there is a universe separated from our consciousness by our senses, then I have to agree that there is. I guess it's classified generally as a materialist viewpoint, a label to which Rand felt herself above, to the extent she acknowledged the history of the art at all. But objectivist philosophy seems to fall apart going forward from that. Details of knowing probably matter, but as a bottom line, I contend that knowledge of the world should, as a necessary minimum, not violate evidence. Objective reality taken as the-universe-is-the-universe (of which we are part, and not above) is something I get behind, and have blathered about. Getting down, however, toward such derivative concepts as facts-is-facts and existence-exists, well that now seems confuse subjective and objective realities (and is also conveniently circular), regardless of how the Randies prefer to organize their labels. How, after all, do you judge something a fact?

My favorite summary joke about Ayn Rand (and I've mentioned this before) comes from Matt Ruff's book, Sewer, Gas and Electric (a near-future romp from ten years ago--I thought about re-reading it recently, but I wasn't in the mood to find humor in some of his structural gags). It features a pocket-sized Rand advising characters, and while Ruff mocks her, he does so fondly. He'd been a regular at rec.arts.sf.written, so maybe given that early internet environment, that's not completely surprising. In any case, my favorite quote still makes me laugh for its capsule perfection:

"'Ayn' rhymes with 'sane'?"

"Rhymes with 'mine'."

My observations are that while objectivism looks evidence-based, it carefully limits the allowable evidence and then goes even further and supports its ideas with elaborate and boring fiction. It looks like it pushes a certain logical amorality, but it instead constructs a morality that is whatever the fuck creepy Ayn says it is. I like a focus on the value of inductive reasoning, but it appears to not think very hard about induction, to the point where assertion of "facts" is enough to support their validity. It is a "philosophy" that tells people that they're indeed exceptional and limited by a globe-full of littlebrains, which strikes me as more than a little dangerous. My long-standing impression, never disproven, is that objectivism is to real philosophy like scientology is to real cognitive science. No coincidence it rose to a similar sort of cult.

My general feeling is that as basis of reason, objectivism is comically underripe. I may be philosophically impaired, but I'm smart enough to catch on to what's the kiddie material. Digging around, I found some excellent critiques. Here's popular blogger Incertus worrying about the inevitable hangers-on now that Rand disciple Alan Greenspan, with his copy of The Virtue of Selfishness under his arm, has pretty well fucked the whole place up. It's a good post, but I am hesitant about damning a philosophy just because the resulting movement was comprised of the worst sorts of assholes. That hardly seems exceptional. I also want to be careful about dismissing Rand on the basis of her wretched personal life, or of her turgid writing style (even though it's so very, very tempting to do this; I also want to be careful about confusing Taibbi's felicity for truth, although I admit I'm still riding on some ideas of humor and power). Her scholarship has been accused as, um, lacking, which I take as a serious accusation, although I don't really know if philosophy is enough like physical science to say that violating established thinking requires extraordinary evidence, but the contrarian approach doesn't strike me as a likely road to honest investigation. Here's a guy named Rob Bass dissecting the epistemology, and outlines the appeal and concerns better than I just did. I like this dude--he makes clear and interesting arguments in comfortable modern language, and he appears be coming from a similar direction, uncovering similar questions, as I have been over the last several years. I will try to remember to follow up with his papers. (Does Rob want to rock right now? I was curious enough to do a where-are-they-now search, and both he and Gary Merrill (the guy from the previous link) are in the UNC academic system these days, and good for them. Is the fact that these posts are 1993-vintage Usenet material also revealing of my formative experiences? It's not out of the question.)

I entertain cautious apologies on behalf of Rand because I still haven't made myself read the doorstops, and that fact limits any substantive arguments I might raise against them, even though I find the objections quite convincing. Ordinarily, what with the limited lifespan and all, it'd be sufficient to weed out those bad ideas, but Ayn Rand has somehow managed to be important. I have read that even beyond her cultish band of followers, she grew into a more influential sort of quackery back in the 1950s, the results of which have helped fuck the country over for at least another half-century. You can imagine how people with money and power may have felt to consider that their self-interest was virtuous.

If there's more evidence needed of objectivism as philosophical juvenilia, then there's always the fact that so many of those college kids grew out of it. I mentioned Rush, but Neal Peart never claimed inspiration deeper than a damned short story, hasn't gone down that road in his lyrics since he was 23 or so, and even back then he wrote about relationships, youthfulness, fantasy books, anti-authoritarianism, and balancing logic with compassion as much as he wrote about anything else. It's good to grow up: one thing you realize is that there's nothing wrong with empathy, that the world outside your experience is every bit as valid as the one between your ears. I can see the appeal of allegedly objective realith and intellectual isolation, especially when you're young and bright and dorky--lots of engineers are also capable--at least they were before colleges capitalized so heavily on the game--and anyone fucking around on the message boards before ca. 1990 had an independent streak--so maybe it's reasonable that my proxy bullshitting sessions were biased this way. But the most damning thing about objectivism is that objective reality has pretty well proven Ayn Rand's philosophy to be a collossal disaster, isn't that right Mr. Greenspan? Can we let the damn thing go now?

Cognitive Dissidents

Sorry to be caught blogging again, not to mention riding this hobby horse once more, but I'd like to use up my monthly allotment of diacriticals to recommend this article by Slavoj Žižek at the London Review of Books (via). It's a discussion of the relationship between the Party and the government using a couple of famous Communist examples (he is reviewing a book called The Party, by Allen Lane), dwelling on the carefully held democratic fiction (as he calls it), especially prevalent in China, that the entities are separate, that the central role of the Communists remains the country's biggest open secret. Since you may have problems with the LRB link (it has made my computer implode five or six times now, although I can see the article on my Blackberry), here are some pull-quotes and paraphrases:

"One consequence of the [Chinese Communist] Party’s need to maintain hegemony is its close monitoring and regulation of the way Chinese history is presented, especially that of the last two centuries. [...] When history is used for the purposes of legitimation, it cannot support any substantial self-critique.[...]"

"The government and other state organs, ‘which ostensibly behave much as they do in many countries’, are centre stage: the Ministry of Finance proposes the budget, courts deliver verdicts, universities teach and award degrees, priests lead rituals. So, on the one hand, we have the legal system, the government, the elected national assembly, the judiciary, the rule of law etc. But on the other [...] we have the Party, which is omnipresent but always in the background [...] The Party committees (known as ‘leading small groups’) which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn have the job of executing it, work out of sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions."

"The irony is that the Party itself, its complex workings hidden from public scrutiny, is the ultimate source of corruption. The inner circle, comprising top Party and state functionaries as well as chiefs of industry, communicate via an exclusive phone network, the ‘Red Machine’ – possessing one of its unlisted numbers is a clear sign of one’s status. A vice-minister tells McGregor that ‘more than half of the calls he received on his “red machine” were requests for favours from senior Party officials, along the lines of: “Can you give my son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin or good friend and so on, a job?”’"

"This model will, of course, be criticised as being non-democratic. The ethico-political preference for a democratic model in which parties are – formally, at least – subordinate to state mechanisms falls into the trap of the ‘democratic fiction’. It ignores the fact that, in a ‘free’ society, domination and servitude are located in the ‘apolitical’ economic sphere of property and managerial power."

Žižek doesn't go to the next step here, to relate it to western democracies, and I want to be careful myself with those sorts of extrapolations. Obviously the U.S. is not China: we have no formal Party in place to secretly pull strings and direct both the government and economy. Whatever networks inform these things here are more de facto affairs, composed of, I think, the integrated total of individual or corporate acts of opportunism, as mild as padding a bonus or hiring your son-in-law, or as nasty as Dick Cheney's energy task force. The existence of a class on this continent that is both more capable and less encumbered by legal constraints than the rest of the citizenry might similarly appear to be a more free-form and emergent, an outgrowth of our establishment of separate legal classifications for businesses, investments, and property. There has been justification for this—companies do different things than citizens do, and there are advantages to forming groups of similar or competing interests which will naturally behave differently than individuals—and it's inevitable that any social institution will coalesce around its own jargon. But you know, all this was true of Communism too, and of the perceived need for Communism. In the U.S., there are limits to business success without moving into, employing, and acting within that loose network. It's not the same as The Party, but I see each manifestation as something consistent with a general human organizational behavior under the parameters of modern times (which doesn't get less boring the more I write about it). Whether the U.S. version has been based on egalitarian first-principles—which is one of our democratic fictions—or whether it's been designed from the get-go to enable an American-style class distinction is an open question. Personally, I don't think those aims have proved mutually exclusive.

It should probably also be noted that we have a different history of what those democratic fictions belie. Rarely has the United States approached Communist levels of murder and disappearance of political dissenters, and speech here remains relatively free, among other things—I'm happy that writing my conscience is unlikely to get me jailed. But that's not to say that everything is just awesome. [To point out the more obvious cracks in our democratic fiction, we shutter up the underclass at a rate six or seven times that of China, while looking the other way at a finance apparatus whose collective effect has been to claim jus primae noctis on our savings and assets as a condition of managing them, and we also hesitate to acknowledge this loose internal network that would rather avoid paying workers (or paying benefits for workers or other citizens) even while they want them to buy stuff (and let the people at large pick up the tab for punishing the deprivations of the destitute, among other externalities). We're also the most recent major power to cultivate a slave class, and we've rounded up and penned the indiginous people we didn't roll over or outright butcher. To say nothing of 200 years of dubious foreign adventures. No saints, us.] I don't want to sound too radical in this post, but let's admit we have our own brand of governing lies and undiscussed licenses. The tendency to avoid any substantial self-critique is what I am calling out as the similar thing.

I am sick of weaseling that a flawed democracy is better than anything else. The flaws suck. What gets me is that if there are any objective historians several hundred years from now, the social conditions of current empires will look obvious, or at least the will not be argued about too much: overextended military, insufficient domestic economy, costly maintenance of various forms of class segregation, and, probably, a wind-down of readily available fossil fuel energy. But when we're living in it, it's hard to see (I mean, how isn't seven and a half percent of the population in jail what oppression looks like?) and the discussion on those stark and universal terms isn't taken very seriously among people who would be criticized under them. To make a metaphor, we constantly bitch about the weather, and obsess over the mapped fronts and the three-day forecasts, when so many of the problems are really associated with the political climate. We can judge easily across geography too, calling out, as a hilarious example, the corruption of leaders who take money from other people than us. But looking at corruption at home? So much of the anger seems to miss its target, or even when it's pointed the right way, the target is too well-protected for it to matter. We can't easily believe how thoroughly we fail ourselves. We have too much invested in our own mythology here too.

(Title stolen from a William Gibson novel.)

Ad Hominem Three-fer

Let's face it, it's not like I have much mojo to lose here. I look around and think that I'm clearly doing it the hard way, too few naked links and too many big questions that I address in too poor a generalizing manner. Reviews of unpopular books, and of literature above my reading level. Science for dummies. The ticket to this blog thing, where the big bucks really start to flow in, is in baseless opinions, mercurial little eels that they may be, and in current events, the dynamic national equilibrium, as it were, where the sum total of all that sound and fury really gets together to signify nothing. Well, why can't I be that idiot?

Obviously, instead of beating up on myself, it's healthier to go after deserving targets. Research is difficult though, and getting accurate details of these actors is only going to end up revealing them as challengingly human, or else frighteningly reptilian, and who wants to go to either of those places. It's a lot easier to speculate and embellish, to create characters out of them, than it is go into the subtle territory of really knowing someone. It's not as though they're insufficiently loathsome. For your reading pleasure, here is the newest edition of my nasty book:

1. Chuck Todd
Elections are sort of like the holiday season of the television networks. The whole dynamic of reporting changes: festive bunting rolling across the screen, and there's a certain cheer in the air. The Nooze is in its most energetic element when there's a campaign on. There are observances to be kept, rubber chickens to consume, and cash bars to be swarmed. Powerful people pay attention to the reporters for awhile, and the new kids get a chance to clamor for the freely given facetime, and some cynical old Scrooge or other may choke up with emotion on election morning.

Reporting is never easier than during an election. They might smugly get a "fact-check" or two in, but by and large, it's a business of monitoring ad campaigns, speculating about murky polls, retrofitting the same contest stories yet again. A reporter is called upon to demonstrate his vast knowledge of left/right stereotypes and faux demographic and geographical niches. The guy or gal who comes up with this year's "Soccer Moms" ("Twitter Youth?" "Working Hispanics?" "Heartland Knowledge-Voters?" "Medicare Patriots?") gets some kind of prize. The truly great thing about elections, for reporters, is that the most ludicrous campaign-related crap counts as newsworthy, and any analysis that's not based on utterly unquantifiable garbage like compellingness of narratives, resonance of platforms, or feelings about ideologies can be safely avoided. It's not a discussion of facts, not even of reasoned arguments, but of weighing opinions, which gleefully can never be refuted. Cost analysis? Historical context? That shit's for suckers, and where's your campaign spirit anyway?

It seems unfair to single out Chuck Todd for this, not that he doesn't deserve it as much as anybody (one may remember Glenn Greenwald embarrassing the little guy in an argument a while ago). It might be because he (Todd) is my age, and I feel like I could place him in one of my old homerooms. He was that dim but eager little fellow who'd occasionally become animated in class with an idea, jaw slightly adrop, and eyes flickering, as if the lightbulb were struggling for an audible crackle or two, and invariably ask a stupid question to which he'd fail to understand the answer. I don't want to confuse that kind of enthusiasm with energy or animation (and certainly not with creativity), but more a kind of a benign and unresourceful persistence, the basically happy kid who wouldn't lose interest, no matter how many times things were repeated. He once called himself a news junkie (not a historian, demographer, etc, "oddly excited" as Peter Sagal put it) in a way that did bother me, for which those character traits must be his major qualification. He probably watches it for hours and claps like a three-year-old parked in front of Sesame Street. Fuck, maybe he's my generation's legacy of being babysat by the tube.

Anyway, this otherwise harmless dude would be perfectly tolerable if his job wasn't to inform me of stuff. Hell, in other circumstances, I'd be more appreciative (or jealous) of his ability to happily pretend. There, but for self-awareness, go I. He's avoided my radar screen since the Greenwald thing, and I'd actually forgotten that he was NBC's head Washington correspondent, but now it's mid-term elections, and there he is again, dully unflappable, opining about the Commuter-rail Grandpas, or something like that, on the morning fare that even news junkies must find insipid, and my teeth grind. Thank god the sound was off.

2. Virginia Thomas
When my daughter was a little younger, she'd storm around the house in certain moods (usually after we'd been asking for a week that she do some avoided chore), performing inconsequential services, and growling out a "You're welcome!" after every one.

"C—, could you hand me a pencil?"

[pause, scowl]

"Uh, could you hand that to me?"

[glower, thrust] "You're welcome, Daddy. I said, you're welcome!"

It's textbook passive aggression, perhaps not rare in seven-year-olds, and of course you could imagine how the exasperated requests to stop screaming at her sister tended to go. I've never been the sort of parent to demand insincere apologies (which has to count for something in the cosmic balance), but it's not exactly a stretch to extrapolate how they might have gone.

It's just not how you normally go about mending fences. "Hey Anita, I know it's been twenty years since my husband allegedly harassed you, but I thought I'd call and give you the opportunity to apologize for nearly ruining his prestigious career of shaping the Republic."

"Um, is this..."

" You're welcome."

What do you suppose the interior lives of the Thomases is like? Ginny is the acerbic sweetheart that dresses up in a foam Statue of Liberty hat, breaking out as a would-be star in the currently popular role of inciting the rubes, fomenting angry cognitive dissonance. Clarence is the guy in perpetual danger of a broken nose should Antonin Scalia ever stop suddenly, and would surely be adjudicating with a faceguard were not both men so amply padded. I imagine Clarence and Ginny as either incredibly frustrated sexually, taking it out, in their respective ways, on the American public, or else as totally uninhibited freaks, pursuing their passions outside the boudoir as much as they do inside it, a lot of dominance play, insults (which is fine among the consenting, don't get me wrong, but where's my safe word when the cops are rifling the closet at gunpoint), nasty porn flickering on the big-screen. Either would be consistent with their antipathy for women, or for people with less power than them. Since this is America, and they're conservative, I'm voting for the frustrated perversion. For Clarence, there's testimony to the fact.

3. Juan Williams
I've never been a fan of this guy as a commentator. On NPR, his job was to report, in the usual boring sort of both-sidesism, the conservative point of view in a reasonable-sounding but unconvincing way. On FOX, (best I can tell with the mute on, anyway) his job is to do the same thing describing a liberal point of view. By this, I conclude that (a) he has no point of view of his own, and (b) he is generally unconvincing. I guess that leaves reasonable-sounding, which is everything you need to explain his NPR career. Good riddance and all, but it was pretty hard this morning to stomach the always-gloating Fox and Friends as they struggled to find NPR stories that proved who the real bigots are. Or that Everybody Does It, or whatever the fuck it was that they were trying to scold. Why, one time Public Television weighted a discussion with panelists who were against the Israeli commando raid on peace activists, which makes them total hypocrites, not like those gentlefolks at FOX. (They also did not decline the opportunity to shit on the continued employment of Nina Totenberg, a little revenge ploy no doubt too subtle for their viewers.) Assholes.

I wanted to call out Williams' chief sin as hackery (I mean, uninspired careerism is endemic to the biz, but I'll take ten Helen Thomases over that schmuck), but that's already been done better than I was about to. Maybe if their hands are digging among the pink slips, they can finally shitcan Mara Liasson as well? (Dammit, beat to that one too!)

Death, Violence, Grief, War, Brain-Eater, Tea Parties

It's been bugging me for a very long time, and who knows, I may yet be motivated to finish that ginormous post expressing my opinion of the long trajectory of civilization and our point on the arc. The short version is that I think there has in fact been progress in several important measures, and, like any miniature Odysseus who imagines that the gods are swirling portentiously around me, that the progress of the world has peaked, or is peaking, in my lifetime. Not peaking culturally—that's an even more foolish conceit—but in terms of the opportunity to attain and examine that which makes it all feel worth doing. Is there a good basic measure for the quality of our lives? There are a lot of lines that I liked in Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors, but one that took it home pitted the human spirit against an excess of grief:

Love wanes, life weighs, death wastes.

Some griefs are inevitable. That is the way it is, and not much can be done about it.

But those in charge of the planet pile grief on top of grief, and then charge us for the favor.

We pay the value-added tax every day in cold hard cash.

And every day in cold hard misfortune, we pay the grief-added tax.

The added grief comes disguised as fate or destiny, as if the anguish born of the fleeting nature of life were the same as the anguish born of the fleeting nature of jobs.

Well, the spirit of the book is to extend it beyond an economic argument, but death and taxes have always gone together. There is no doubt that sadness is our ultimate due, but a good evaluation of the state of the species is a number for how long how big a fraction of us can coast without a loved one dying in our arms, without suffering crippling pain, succumbing to disease, isolating ourselves, becoming impoverished, or any of the mountain of things that make the big nap seem like a fitting end. (There are many more subjective ways that the quality of life is limited—subjectivity is one thing that has held back that awful post—although it's telling who gets to assert what experience you deserve, and how stable it is perceived to be.) It's difficult to really work out a balance of things in our own times, never mind in the long view back. For example, in the United States, crime statistics suggest that we are less likely to suffer violence from each other, but these analyses usually fail to consider that we've got a greater number of people suffering the official and pre-emptive version, wasting in our teeming jails or simmering in our shantytowns. It also soft-pedals any crimes rich people might do, even if they add grief to the lives of the underclass or to other populations. Arrestable crime in this country has zigzagged over a more or less constant mean value for the past century or so. If you go back to the centuries before that, then the likelihood of murder and assault was depressingly higher. We're a good deal less likely be killed by another civilian here and now than if we lived in 14th century Europe, which enjoyed a homicide rate that was ten times higher than America's today.

Life expectency and other mortality rates are frequent measures of progress when pitting the first world against the third, or when making comparisons between groups. Mortality rates (I like to cope here with jokes about inevitability, but any good physical chemist will automatically think of a rate as 1/lifetime) are a good measure of excess grief in Galeano's sense: we all die, but how often are people dropping around us? Statistics for mortality are also more accessable and less debatable than other measures of misery. In those terms, humans appear to have improved drastically. Life expectancy in U.S. has nearly doubled since 1850, and infant mortality has dropped by an order of magnitude, which puts us (much as with other useful measures) at about number 20 in the world, but it's still pretty awesome historically. In the greater impoverished globe, the death rate has dropped by a factor of three over the last century. It appears to be more due to a scientific understanding of health and hygiene than anything else, whatever political ideologes like to claim. It may also be due to a more universal discovery and dissemination of knowledge, images and communication technologies take us to the battlefronts, wide access to art and literature that gives us personal glimpses into other lives—all modern vehicles to help establish empathy. But that's probably more hopeful than true.

If people can experience a greater freedom from grief, then what does that say about war? The univeral balance must include how much grief we spare ourselves, but also how much we spread to others. Would longer lives make them more precious, and be an impediment to large-scale murder? It doesn't seem to stop it. I remain unconvinced about the additional humanity that the modern American war strategy profers: hell of a low bar for one thing, and you know, the point is still to destroy people. COIN is shameful enough, but when the demons are really let fly, the murderous endeavor has become far more devastating in its scope and scale (and unthinkable in its potential scope and scale).

I spent some time wandering about this site, a compilation of mortality studies put together by one Matthew White. (It is very interesting to wade through, if you don't think too personally about the water. I wish the site had some interesting and handy compilation figures and was more conveniently indexed, but it was evidently produced a few web generations ago.) According to its stats, intentional death, mostly by war and its effects (attendant starvation and lawlessness, and other such minor details) in the 20th century was suffered by about 5% of the population, whereas "only" 1-2% of the world population suffered unnatural death in the nineteenth century. Beating the age of colonialism in a murder contest is a hell of an achievment. White finds a source estimating about a 15% likelihood of death by violence for prehistorical times, obviously a rough estimate, and some similar level of validation by other sources would have been nice. If it's true, it's a point for civilization. Finally.

A picture this big tends to smooth out the details to a point that can easily become offensively glib, which is another reason I keep not wanting to write these things up. Where war occurs, it has become more concentrated and more monstrous, and the quantity of dead has only grown. World War II remains, according to the same body of statistics, the singular horrorshow our species had yet produced by 2005. The disappearance of the Native Americans (however variously intentioned it may have been), and enslavement of native Africans also make the top ten (abetted by how long those things went on, but not a bad effort for an upstart empire), right up there with Stalin's purges and Mao's famine-enhanced revolution. Technology and (possibly) organization have decreased the overall mortality rate and may, arguably, palliate some burdens of living, but they have also let us achieve more spectacular evil, and we were more likely to be killed by other people last century than in the century before. I can not bring myself to say that the one justifies the other, especially when people have to face ever-more-unnatural death. Nor am I clear what the trend was between prehistory and 1900. It may have been better to live as some frictionless, spherical average world citizen in 1945 than it was in 1345, in other words, but it is hard to think of that in terms of anyone lucky enough to shamble out of a concentration camp or the ruins of Nagasaki.

I usually think of these things after reading a John Varley novel, but election season brings it out too. I've paid attention through several rounds of campaigns by now, and the recurrence of theme has become insufferable. Jesus fuck, how many times are they going to tell the lie that a budget has enough pareable waste to balance itself? How many times will they reinvent a dangerous Other to not quite threaten a dire world scenario? How many times are we going to try to introduce bogus economic fixes that enrich the rich and empower the powerful? We've been soaking in conservative principles for 40 years now (after a brief industrial-inspired disruption of the similar order that was going on 350 years or so on these shores), and the media fawns over the Tea Party when it spouts the same platitudes as if they've discovered a new continent. Are they retarded?

Well, they are probably not bright or motivated enough to carefully report and tell a new story, and campaigns, more than other reporting, don't require a presentation of challenging facts, and the thrill it induces in reporters should embarrass them. But more than that, politics survives when people keep stepping up to buy the same old snake oil. Where mortality rate comes in, is that it takes a steady supply of the inexperienced to keep the votes coming. P. T. Barnum obviously had it right, but looking closer at the aphorism, he was concerned about the birthrate of suckers, thinking perhaps, that after a few dozen times, even partisans might outgrow their faith in the more ludicrous cons. If economic impacts were to develop in the space of a generation, would we have as much faith in them? If generations were longer, then maybe we'd borrow less from the future. The news, too, is famously reported on a fifth grade level, and it's probably stayed back a year or two since the early telelvision era (but promoted from the early newspapers). Neglecting such variations, the tone of the news mostly stays constant as people mature around it. I suppose the average information consumer can expect to learn it the popular narrative, then embrace it, and finally outgrow it. If people had time to develop a more thorough understanding of things, would the representative grade-level also float up, and could we expect a better product? Or else maybe given enough time, the race for meaning would get less frenetic, and we'd give up on believing anything after a while.

It's a nice theory. The average age of the Tea Party doesn't inspire confidence (and it's probably worth noting that I'm writing as a middle-aged man) about the likelihood of people to know better by now. People like to get set in their ways, and don't like to change their minds even as circumstances evolve. The bullshit that Reagan told people resonated, dammit, and who wants to acknowledge that life isn't much like Mayberry, or that it wasn't like Mayberry back then either. In science fiction geekdom, it would be sometimes imagined that an author might succumb to brain-eater if he or she lived long enough, divested of all the good and original ideas that powered the early career. And any casual observation of sf nerds further suggests that people can hit a level of emotional maturity, and then stay there. Peak age is a common belief for other achievers too, from athletes to mathletes, there's a window at which we're the best. So let's extend the definition of the grief rate to include infirmity—would the world improve if we could live longer and also suffer less of our time enduring the depredations of age?

A correlated question is whether any intellectual change would occur if people didn't constantly replace themselves. Do we need to die off to change? (I know, time to read Kuhn, shut up.) But on the opposite side, I wonder if resistance is just the end game, the need to validate youth as the inevitability of death looms closer. If there's no lifetime benefit to changing your mind, then clinging to some notion of posterity seems more logical. I also wonder if the extreme late life of a thinker just tends to give way to fatalism or opportunism: I mean, if you grow out of the overheated race for meaning that the young pursue, and that causes you to stop believing in things, then what's left? Does it worry anyone else that we're ruled by an assembly of desiccated old bastards who have selected themselves out by their ability to peddle the same lies for 40 years?

Some people don't lose it, keeping their wonder of discovery, or keep developing their thoughtful sense of values. They manage to keep expanding their notions of dignity and decency and knowledge until it goes black, and it impresses the hell out of me. If I can't go out like that, then I hope that whatever understanding I attain leads me to ignore the bullshit, so that I am able to concentrate on the good stuff, the timeless stuff, that's left. Or maybe I can postpone the end indefinitely. That would be nice.

Is that a pistol in your pocket?

Guns: they're written into the Constitution from a time when a citizen militia was an essential tool of national defense, and today, enough people love the things to keep the second amendment free of any narrow-minded application (or amendment to a modern context) of that clause. Lobbying organizations dismiss gun violence with similar weasel-word qualifiers as A2. It ain't the guns, dude (they rarely discharge themselves), it's, like, the use of guns that's dangerous. I'm not a fan of the rhetorical technique, or the need for it, but I also don't quite go all the way down the hole of calling for a complete ban, in spite of everything. Maybe to shut the NRA up, we could ban people with guns, but the problem with this is that we'd still rely on other people with guns to uphold it. With this week's Supreme Court ruling to strike down a Chicago law against pistols, perhaps it's a good time to make a highly sought-after statement of my own principles on gun rights. (Readers--Smutty and that other one--might recognize this post as consisting of about 50% recycled material.)

Look, I admit I don't care about the things very much. First-hand experience leaves me agnostic. Shooting some .22 rifles in boy scout camp was fun, and playing with ersatz guns (from pea shooters to squirt guns to bows and arrows) has always been a blast. I'm not entirely sure, but I may not have even held one since I was twelve. Sometimes I tell people they make me uncomfortable, but it's not true (about the guns), I say that just so they'll leave me alone. There are a couple firearms floating around the immediate family, and when they eventually pass into my hands, they'll go out of their hidey-holes into similar ones accessible by me, as heirlooms and to have just in case the umbrella of civilization retracts. That's my model for responsible gun ownership.

Moving out a degree, my second-hand experiences with guns range from awkward to horrific. My notion of being prepared falls short of others', for example. It was one of my great-grandfather's generation who kept a loaded pistol under the pillow in case the colored folk ever had need for an uprising, which wasn't the phrasing he used. (It was another time, I tell myself, and it was a kooky scary thing even then, but my god, that's horrible. He's not from the named side of the family for whom I hold out hope of a genetic line.) I knew a good number of gun aficionados growing up, most of whom were not particularly annoying about it, not most of the time, or who just kept 'em for hunting, but I also know enthusiasts close enough to their aggression to make me discomfited to think what's under their bed. When I was a kid, two of the boys from my scout troop were playing with a parent's handgun, and I got to go to a funeral for one of my peers, one dead and half a dozen seriously fucked up. (I'll tell you, I often find it eye-opening to look at events from my past with a broader adult understanding of things.) One of my college buds tells a story of some guy who threatened him at a party by jamming a pistol in his mouth. Hilarious stuff. And do ask Cindy about the recent death of her young friend. If I'm just weighing anecdotal evidence, this ends up a lot heavier than the any number of successful counter-threats where potential harassment was thwarted, which, I'll add, I suspect are usually about as apocryphal as all those conversational triumphs people tell you about on the internets (of the 'and that shut him up' variety).

And for my carrying friends, here's the problem with the social contract you advocate: if you require me to be comfortable with your preferred habit of gun-totin', demanding that I trust your judgment and discretion with a deadly weapon you insist on carrying among people who know you, then you're the one who has a problem. Namely, that you're a dick. Not just that big slick rod you're waving around, but you are a penis, in the colloquial sense. And hunters? You're dicks too. In principle, hunting wild animals is a respectable thing: I think it makes you an honest meat-eater; it's more humane than an automated feed lot; self-sufficiency is a salutary endeavor; it's got to taste good, or at least taste real. But if the idea of hunting is okay, then hunters are still dicks, they still demand to be in the gravitational center of a universe that alleges to be mutually consenting. I have to watch out for them in other words. Hunting season has made it harder for me to enjoy the woods going on thirty-something years now. Any wild-ish sanctuary is despoiled when you have to watch out for wretched coffee- (or maybe Budweiser-) breathed chuckleheads dressed in orange raincoats. And look, if you push for a rigorous, universal course of gun safety, so that anyone with a piece takes it as seriously as you take yourself, then you're furthermore an insufferable dick, even if you're right on your own terms. (Insufferable people are often narrowly correct.) This wonderful world where a society remains polite because we're all busy threatening one another? That's one of the sorriest utopias anyone has yet imagined.

(And yes, I think drivers are basically dicks too, but we can make a better case for the unfortunate necessity of piloting a car in the modern world.)

The thing with guns is that there are legitimate civilian uses for them, that don't even always involve killing people. They really are fun to shoot, and as gunpowder-fueled clockworks, they're outstanding little machines. Keep 'em in your cabinet, and impress your friends; take 'em to the range. Maybe someone out there still has to protect themselves from bears and wolves, I don't know. The problem is that the politically important uses of them are all hypothetical. The militia clause got out-dated by a standing army, but individual-minded folks often take the position that a means to resist the state itself is a good thing, even though actually resisting the state is near-impossible. So let's please count among the insufferable penii the Usenet-vintage internet libertarians. We're not going to keep our overlords in check with our guns, not without enormous violent upheaval, and that hardly ever goes disastrously wrong, right Mr. Robespierre? Consent of the governed is a fine political theory, but violent withdrawal of your consent is a self-inflicted sentence of martyrdom. Keeping yourself apart from the local state-like powers--such as the cops or the mob--isn't going to do you much better (but note below), but maybe after the apocalypse, you'll be glad of the guns to keep out the roving bands of mutants, or prevent the bandit sheriffs from running over your moonshine still. It's just paradoxical in the current American context: so long as the federal power infrastructure holds up, and to the extent it effectively circumscribes the local entities under it, the federally-honored right doesn't do much for you in its potential to confront it. Their guns are bigger, and everyone loves the winner that everyone already loves.

And that's why so much advocacy revolves around fantasy crime scenarios. Not so much real crime scenarios, although there may be some anecdotal for that sort of thing (much of it of the type mentioned above; I believe the statistical evidence has been long since shot down, so to speak). To be fair, if people legally holding their tools are annoying, then illegal gunslingers are much worse. It's just that I don't voluntarily associate with them very often. People feel threatened by crime a lot more than they feel threatened by the government, and given that making the armed boogeymen magically disappear is unlikely (especially when you need them around to blame stuff on), then a natural impulse is to become intimidating enough so that you're left alone. But it's a hypothetical defense, most of the time. Guns can't be brought to bear in a timely enough way to arrest most encounters in an otherwise civil environment (ask those poor Seattle cops, or all the soldiers at Fort Hood). Not without that special American movie fantasy of a society full of hair triggers, which, as I've mentioned, is only a paradise for dicks.

It may be what the Constitution says, but it's still a shame that this Chicago ruling reminds us that state and local regulations are subordinate to the second amendment. In more rural areas, you've got more legitimate uses for firearms, and I don't know if the stats bear out fewer gun deaths per capita in the less densely populated parts of the country, but I am sure the entire number of deaths is much lower. (It's funny how where there's lots of actual crime, like in Chicago, that's where guns are more likely to be controlled.) A troubling idea though, is that more traditionally rural areas, with more local independence and a more historical love for shootin' arns, correlate with those places once supportive of justice against hypothetical crimes committed by an unarmed classes of citizens. Gun rights for the protected members, maybe, such as my great-great-uncle considered himself. (A little closer to the perfectly isolated village, and the libertarian position looks less crazy, but then I don't think that's who has, um, called the shots among conservative gun proponents from those parts.) If we bear down hard on the Constitutional position that everyone should have a gun, then we'd have to manufacture some other paradigm under which to incarcerate the dusky-hued. A war on something would be our usual style. Sounds absolutely crazy in this country, I know, but it scares me to think it could actually happen.

Sympathy for the Devil You (Pretend to) Know and He is Us

I felt like writing a "perspective" post, one of those things where I get all uncomfortable with certain self-truths (about me, and about us, you buncha complicit fat-cats you), and I figured I'd take the double-edged sword to David Brooks, who pretty well deserves a twice-weekly evisceration (I originally had a whole over-complicated metaphor as my opening graph, by the way, which I've scrapped, only regretting that now I'll have to shelve the phrase "pissant Promethei" for some other time), and for whom I developed a small fascination with his particular form of contemptibility back when I was reading him a lot back in the firewall days (thanks, daveto). Instead of digging around for the best example of his form, I figured I'd just wait for his next column.

Here's today's. I regret for the purposes of this post that it's a little more coherent than usual--normally Dave likes to offer non-sequitur sorts of theses, conclusions that pretend to resolve to Republican wisdom as derived from the bigger ideas or the (better) counterarguments that precede the message, ideas which clearly grab his interest, but which he doesn't labor to understand (Last week's piece on the Enlightenment is a good example of this. Did you know that the whole intellectual movement hinged on arguments over "go fast," which is where deductive reasoning gets you, and which perfectly describes populists and Democrats today, versus "take it slow," because Edmund Burke? I'm no philosopher either, but that seems to, uh, elide some important thinking of the time.)--and that I disagree with him just a skosh less then usual this time around (He may be right, sort of, about complexity, or at least it's an idea that many people accept. But in the case of BP and minerals management in this country, not to mention his other examples, he kind of elides the long-standing and fundamental problems of resource extraction vis a vis the environment, of public vs. industrial interests, about which people have not quite been silent but they have certainly been marginalized by serious chin-strokers such as himself, and here he pops up like Wormtongue again, flattering the industry, telling the world on its behalf that it was inevitable anyway, and was in no way related to cost-cutting or insufficient attention to the dangers of drilling that have been known since 1853. Complex systems may or may not be extra sensitive to external shocks, but you know what Dave? Fuck you.), but it's not a bad example of the traits I most feel like picking on.

Bobo is forever about that critical elision. What gets me is that I can't tell if he's lazy or lying, if he's failing to apply the reason he celebrates because he's dumb, or because he purposely ignores it. I tend to think it's the latter, and my running images of him include a contented lickspittle in the service of power or a knowledgeable, self-selected operative (like that guy Syme in 1984, who understood what was going on with the Eurasian political philosophy, and bought in anyway; in the novel, they eventually disappeared him, as I recall), but there's really no evidence of inner intellectual turmoil in his writing or speaking gigs. Even if he's in the habit of skimming science and philosophy articles for smart-sounding quotes, his conclusions never stray from conservative cant, no matter how irrelevantly he introduces them or how soothingly he enunciates. There's never any work to show. Maybe I get this impression that he's too smart to believe this shit because Brooks is an okay writer, a guy who can master the tone of his arguments, clearly, and is capable of delivering the intellectual patina that thoughtful conservatives crave. Maybe he's just phoning in the columns that he knows will keep him in print, burnt out eons ago from actually believing (or disbelieving) in anything, regardless of however he claims to have seen the half-light of boring faux-moderation. (I was going with "low-rent Lucifers" in the first draft too. Just sayin'.)

And that brings me to my last mental image of the guy, the one where I project heavily. Two columns and a half-dozen television and radio appearances a week have got to shake the believerism out of all but the most clear-headed or righteous, and never mind that sincerity isn't really a job requirement anyway in his line of work. The David Brooks of my sometimes imagination has defended against this by not treating the subject seriously, and softens the usual bullshit with a dollop of the important stuff he imagines he's interested in. Here's the author authoring away on auto-pilot, and in his fantasies he's dreaming of a job where he could wear a white coat and and carry a lab notebook, hammering out the problems of cognition, philosophy, or whatever it that he imagines Richard Feynman did, never mind that he doesn't really have the analytical skills to really understand the subjects or the motivation to keep up the technical effort for very long.

And you know, here I am, a mediocre scientist in an unglamorous discipline, gliding along with what skills are easier for me, fucking around on my blog in my free time and wondering if I could have been a writer instead. There are natural and brilliant scientists out there (and far better opinion writers, Bobo), and I am not one, but I am even less well-suited to the job of my fantasy, as should be obvious. Even if Brooks is fatigued down to his soul, it doesn't excuse the stuff he writes, and in his public life, he's a terrible human being. But I look at what I'm supposed to be doing for a living, and even though I have a lot of good rationalizations, I'm in many ways feeding the same beast, with about as much passion. I'm struggling to discern a difference.

[Added: There are far better opinion writers out there.]