eye of the storm

gene robinson, making the good argument vs the krauthammer etc, somehow got all messed up this morning:

In the enemy's version of history, the West -- meaning the United States, Israel, Britain and what used to be called Christendom -- has a long history of exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves. In this warped worldview, we deserve any atrocities that jihadist "warriors" might commit against us.

Protesting that all this is absurd and obscene does not make it go away. And our troops' military success actually helps to further the jihadist narrative about a "crusade" against Islam.

wait. is he saying that it's absurd and obscene to assert that the west has a long history of exploiting and occupying the muslim world? or that we never install corrupt lackeys, like we did this week in afghanistan? i guess the kind interpretation would be that what is absurd and obscene is the claim that these things justify atrocities (well, it is absurd to claim of anything that it justifies atrocities), but it certainly appears to say that it is absurd and obscene to assert what is obviously true.

me on texting and driving in today's phily inquirer.

how not to write an opinion piece, cont'd:

For this past weekend saw not only the political sleight of hand that stripped millions of women’s abortion coverage from the House’s health care reform bill; it also brought the season finale of AMC’s highly popular pre-Roe-era series, which concluded with the unhappy housewife heroine Betty Draper leaving her philandering husband, Don, for the promise of marriage to another man she barely knows.

an astonishing coincidence of reactionary backlashes! to which the only real response is: so, judith, which do you think is worse?

dude. this "we live in stories" crap is so over. actually, if we were the stories we tell, there'd be no evil at all. your body getting riddled by bullets is not a story. at any rate, i just want to point out that the wearethestorieswetell thing originated with literary critics, who really wanted to live in stories - that is, curled up on their couch with books - and then somehow entered public consciousness in a kind of hackchump postmodernism. it sort of sounds good, or like an explanation or something. push it even slightly and you realize it's a bizarrely backwards and misleading metaphor. it doesn't help with the ethics, the aesthetics, the metaphysics, the science, the history, the psychology. it's a gigantic univocal pseudo-explanation that does absolutely nothing.

brooks: "Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged." ok. so. i freely select my story, and i select a story that leads to cooperation and goodness. (really?) what is my story, my story of the whole world and human history? ain't got one, dave. maybe you do. but if you do i can guarantee you this: it's false. but of course "false" makes no sense in a world consisting of stories, whatever that could possibly mean. actually i have a thousand stories and a thousand beliefs and experiences that don't fit into my thousand stories. it's a mess out here. but at any rate, if you wanted to explain islamic extremism, how useful is it to say that they selected a bad story? =0.

how am i ever going to deal with my envy of slavoj zizek? christ now he's writing for the nytimes. well, maybe like this: for all of zizek's super-bold rhetoric etc - admittedly toned down here - the position is an extremely conventional statist leftism; really he just wants us all to be swedes. the great imagination of the prose is matched by the utter dullness of the actual positions. it's cool that he loves utopian thinking: a kind of nice reversal. but what does he actually want? "socialism with a human face." gee whiz.

just to give the capsule refutation: once you've constituted a state sufficient to give you your socialism, then whether it retains a human face is entirely at the whim of those who operate the power you've constituted.

e.j. dionne : tuesday's elections "were a timely reminder that President Obama needs to tune up his celebrated political organization and find a way to make Americans feel hopeful again." er. why 'timely'? because 'reminder' takes 'timely' as 'rhetoric' takes 'empty.' notice that it's not a timely reminder to lower unemployment or stop engaging in an orgy of debt, but to crank up the 'celebrated' (that should be 'much-vaunted') political organization. what we need is...even more hope-y posters. we need to induce a soaring feeling or impression of hope, without origin or object. ah the power of words, of vision, of hoohah! for we are humans, and humans hope like earths quake. we are the stories we tell, so never, ever stop yapping.

ross douthat's columns have been a mixed bag. he hasn't, you know, riveted me. this is good stuff, though, and i might especially point to the characterization of the function of the president in our system: "part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat."

as i've often indicated, i like david brooks. he's a more thoughtful person than the average columnist (more thoughtful than me, for example); he reads and thinks more than most columnists; he writes better than most columnists. sometimes, however, like today, you'd have to say that he's a bit out of his element. few columnists would go anywhere near the question of different conceptions of the human self, so points for that. but when he sets this up as philosophers vs psychologists, he just has no idea what he's talking about.

perhaps aristotle had some kind of unitary or atomic conception of the self (though that's a hard and interesting question). but no major philosopher who i can think of in the twentieth century who considered the matter at all didn't see that there was a problem, and whole movements of philosophy have shattered that sucker more thoroughly than any psychologist could.

for example, hume totally ripped up the cartesian self in the mid-eighteenth century. hegel socialized, historicalized, and smacked the self in 1810. multiple complex selves were flying all around the philosophy of nietzsche. you know, dewey, gilbert ryle, wittgenstein, foucault, derrida, deleuze etc etc: not a single single self to be found anywhere. 

"philosophy says x" is never a good idea. but here it's just completely uninformed.

bono really always has a profound, comprehensive vision, as measured by the profundity and comprehensiveness of his astounding sunglasses. that's why i take him seriously, even while he's muttering cliches in unison with everyone else.

since i frequently slap at frank rich, i want to say that this is good. but i also want to say that it's caught up in the anachronistic state vs corporation, pre-squishy-t conceptuality. so, ok, let's say that we create a new bureaucracy, a financial consumer protection agency. who do you think would staff such an agency? well, who understands the arcane workings of investment banks, etc? it sounds good, but in effect it will be a gov/industry cooperative that will wield the gov's resources in such a way as to benefit both. "consumers" can't be represented, because they've got no idea what's going on. 

here's the sentence on the opinion page of the nyt , jumping us off into tom friedman's column: 'There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” can only manage, let alone fix, our huge problems if there is a collective “we” at work.' i would just declare my unalterable opposition to this point of view. only the first question is: what language is that? pig latin?

alright, we need we. or at least, you need we. we need to reforge a collective identity. the right wing is fucking with our we, or else we could merge like drops of water into an ecstatic quasi-sexual unity with one another. or: the blender of history, or education, can turn us all into a homogeneous human goop. and here's how we can form a we: you agree with me. then we will be as one! only a we can save...us. therefore, you had better acquiesce in obama/friedman globalism etc. it'll be organic and orgasmic!

i don't wanna be me. i've got to be we! wheeee!

sometimes david brooks is really good. actually, he's often really good, though it's personally hard for me to imagine a less similar temperament to  my own.

as you know, i take thomas friedman to be a pre-eminent advocate of what i have called squishy totalitarianism, which marries economy and state into an unstoppable military/money juggernaut, and which the u.s. and china are approaching in different directions. in case you think that's too rough, check this column, showing you what's wrong with democracy in friedman-world, where you've got to control populations through education, and every aspect of economic activity to deal with global warming, etc. but he seems to be losing all focus and just kind of wanders away as column goes on.

richard cohen gives one of the few actually thoughtful treatments of a rich theme: the role of revenge in, let's say, international affairs.  it's there. and when people say it's not - when, for example, they try to draw some hard-and-fast distinction between vengeance and justice - and portray themselves as advocates of the latter and not the former - they lurch into extremely palpable dishonesty. "justice" in a criminal or war-type sense, is a slightly rationalized or systematized or delegated revenge, and by the same token, the sense for revenge harbors within it a feeling of a universe that rests on a balance which, disturbed, ought to be restored.

you know michael gerson, an ex bush speechwriter who's now a washpost columnist, is really interesting. he's a religious conservative who writes about surprising subjects in surprising ways. the column on obamacare linked above seems really smart and right to me. i guess while i'm at it i might say that one sometimes forgets that bush had good writing at times. the 2005 inaugural, for instance, seemed bizarrely and dangerously hypocritical at that moment, but it was actually a well-written speech that would have been inspiring in another context.  

the left seems confused. take this typical formulation; indeed virtually every columnist, blogger, and hawking ted is uttering the very same words in the very same order. they decry their opponents' attempt to "vilify" their beloved pres. then they mechanically reel off a series of vilifications of their opponents, with all the imagination of xerox machines: wing-nuts, wack-jobs, mobs, teabaggers, racists, extremists. "wingnuts dehumanize their opponents" is an extremely odd formulation, as though you are incapable of applying your own dearest principle consistently even for the length of the single sentence in which you are expressing your devotion to that very principle.

then, there's guilt-by-free-association, and anyone who ever put a question to her congressman is connected to the alleged rerise of right-wing militias, murderers and so on. then they decry the disintegration of civil discourse. one thing that the death panels could help them with: if the brain displays no intellectual activity at all, it's time to pull the plug, though these zombies retain a rudimentary capacity for mimicry: dead three days, but doing the macarena.

anyway, what i don't understand is the editors. paul krugman or maureen dowd or e.j. dionne or frank rich or gene robinson or your pale imitation of them writes today exactly what the others wrote yesterday, down to the sentence structure. and i guess you go, that's clever. let's print that. again and again and again. if there's one thing no one can stand, it's a fresh juxtaposition of words or ideas, which might compromise our undoubted status as automota or somniloquists.

one would think that after awhile you'd get sick of writing the same column over and over again, or of writing the same column as everyone else, or of reading the same column for the thousandth time. but if you think that the deepest need of human beings isn't to all say together the same thing, and then when we are done to say it together again, and so on, you do not understand our species. man is a social animal - a herd or hive animal - and we are, each of us, exactly the same as the rest of us, from our most fundamental conviction and identity to our most trivial gesture.

because i've been ragging frank rich unmercifully for weeks, i want to say that this is a good column.

time for my weekly frank rich slam, i guess.
i think he's sort of saying what i said here. but instead of, you know, developing a point of view, he  recites every scandal that the people he's writing about have ever been near, and many that they haven't been near. he could have actually done some cultural analysis, but instead he does what - i'm realizing - frank rich does: just smear, in the sense of drawing vague associations meant to discredit everybody across the right of the spectrum: he wants you to leave the column just feeling that every person he mentions is personally polluted. even if that were true (and as a tendentious hit job, there have been worse), it wouldn't really get to the heart of these questions.

you know, he's even throwing out gay rumors about the lt. gov. of sc, no doubt in order to accuse him and every person to the right of michelle obama, of hypocrisy, but also of course without any evidence, and just that hint of sexsmarm that characterizes the whole piece.

and of course, it's an easy strategy for anyone to employ, and if you weren't, you know, the kind of columnist who would defend bill clinton no matter what, you could frank rich everybody over on the other half with cigars etc. the current secretary of state, selected by the president, is bill clinton's wife. remember when she said "i'm no tammy wynette, standing by her man"? really, do you think the main or most substantive problem with republican politics is sexual misbehavior? is that what we learned from the sotomayor hearings? i don't think this does anyone any good, even frank rich himself, who should think rather than merely smear shit all over everything.

let's ay you think lindsay graham and tom coburn are completely wrong about everything. nothing requires you to nod along as frank rich just tosses in ensign, sanford, mark foley, jack abramoff, etc in order to discredit them by mutual party affiliation. you could repudiate this merely irrelevant claptrap and try to say, exactly, why lindsay graham and tom coburn are wrong.

frank rich, building a tissue of vicious, irrelevant innuendo, comes up with some sort of substantive point.

Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind.

ok, so, i guess by the end of the 21st century, america will be one gigantic city from sea to shining sea. the idea that there could be a nonurban america is i guess just entirely alien. or: living outside nyc is plainly wrong. he slams palin for her income. perhaps he should report his own. take this in: "she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage." i suppose rich was concealed in the corner when bristol broke the news of her pregnancy. and i suppose rich thinks she should have merely disowned her daughter. (what rich thinks is in fact that she should have driven her immediately to the abortion clinic.)

what i want you to take in is that rich doesn't deal with any of palin's positions, and doesn't really try to deal with her cultural meaning, such as it is: he just utters slanders and innuendos, while his mindless readers nod along like a line of bobbleheads. if someone did to al gore or barack obama what he does to palin in this piece - you know, fuck with their families, impugn them on the grounds that they made $x last year (and i want to note that if you compared palin's $211,000 to any major liberal political figure, all of whom are speaking for the poor, you'd see that her income is relatively modest; it's less than the mere salary of the president, much less his royalties etc) - frank rich would bellow about the unfairness or sheer irrelevance of it all.