eye of the storm

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.

really i'm not going to bother to link it up, but how can the washington post and etc, write the lead for the 'house passes healthcare bill' like this: "landmark, historical, crucial victory." well, it will be a landmark historical turning point in the march of human history (or not) if it passes the senate and is signed into law. but it won't be. really, they should tone down the enthusing and report the news, if any. it could hardly be more slanted if they just wrote "the house of representatives today passed an incredibly cool and lovable bill, demonstrating again the wonder that is nancy pelosi's beautiful inner light, which is our tanning bed."

i wish i had something enlightening to say about fort hood. but on another topic, there should be some pointed way to redecouple tea parties from the republican party. any subversive insurgent event at which john boehner is waving around a copy of the constitution is, um, horseshit. the good part about the tea party movement is that there was no organization, no spokespeople, etc. it had a nice anti-statist flava, albeit with little chunks of, you know, racism and stupidity thrown in. now i think they'd better come up with another name/strategy for the movement. you need to come up with something that boehner can't use or simulate. truly, if you had actual libertarians and fiscal conservatives out there, they'd have grabbed john boehner and waterboarded him.

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.

here's the sort of reason that obama shouldn't be gettin no nobel. and here's a piece of the announcement:

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

one suspects that obama was awarded the prize for the devastating 'hope' poster, which uplifted and yet bored us all; perhaps it should have gone to shepard fairey instead. but wait a second. why should it be a matter of 'sharing values and attitudes with a majority of the world's population'? and what the hell are these attitudes and values anyway? there are a lot of muslim fundamentalists or peasant communists, i believe. if you found that liberty or peace weren't polling very well (and liberty has an advocacy group in the u.s. that's smaller than the margin of error), would you think that our most inspiring leaders must lead on the basis of unfreedom and war? did martin luther king speak for a majority?

other americans who have "captured the world's attention": michael jackson, angelina jolie, charles manson. anyway, the nobel heads might want to re-think their criteria, or perhaps hire someone to try to think through their basic concepts or something so that the text of the next announcement isn't just slop, or is better slop.

dude. you have got to be kidding me. i guess i always find it a bit puzzling when, in charge of "the greatest military the world has ever known," or in general a world-annihilating power, you are saluted as the personification of peace. barack obama has no power that does not rest on violence. truly: let him disarm entirely and then see what he can do with healthcare reform. no i'm serious: it's great he wants everybody to have health insurance: now enforce an individual mandate with no coercive force: no prisons, no weapons, by sheer inspiration.  but as he prosecutes his wars, he's trying to minimize civilian casualties.

give it to you again: the nobel laureate is martin luther king...with predator drones. anyway, obviously i would always choose a dissident, and to be fair the nobel often goes to dissidents. in my view, ron paul would be a more plausible choice than barack obama. not only does he want to radically curtail our military adventures, but he wants to radically curtail the power of government, i.e. violence.

i propose this to you: every principled advocate of peace is an anarchist or is embroiled in massive internal inconsistency: just p and not-p in your face.

one correlate of the idea that time is progressive and that we are it which should give progressives pause is the way the idea has articulated cultures. so, for example, hegel held that africa had no history, was outside of history. in anthropology into the midlate twentieth century, you got the idea of some cultures at history's cutting edge, and others scattered along the way, abandoned at one or another moment of time. so our distant past was the present of "stone age" or "primitive" or "savage" societies. we had detected the direction of history and y'all weren't it. almost self-evidently, you had to be brought up to speed, i.e. annihilated as a culture.

i'm just going to state what we all know. whoever the san people or the aborigines may have been in 1830, they were then the exact contemporaries of hegel. every culture that exists right now exists right now. the amish live precisely in the present. dirt poor rednecks in bama exist as much in 2009 as does al gore.the fight of islamic terrorists against the west is not a battle of the medieval against the modern, though it is often portrayed that way (again today by thomas friedman); they are exactly as in the present as we are, conceptually and in a million perfectly practical mundane respects. of course, if they were fighting on behalf of the year 1200, we could not by definition lose.

the progressive politics of today is still connected to the anthropology of the primitive: you are living back there, but we will bring you into now and into the future: our generosity = the destruction of your society = time. the backward and ignorant must be educated and nurtured until they catch up.truly, it is exactly the same basic structure of thought that had the u.s. government kidnapping indian children and sticking them in missionary schools. the left hates that idea. but they're still kidnapping children and sticking them in their missionary schools. only their god isn't jesus, it's the future. with regard to both, i am an atheist.

this is a very hard tension at the heart of progressivism: the pc equality/democratic stuff vs the we are the agents of the future and you are our raw material stuff. it's why instead of letting people of all kinds go - which would seem to make sense if you are in favor of gay rights, indigenous rights, women's rights, everybody's rights - we are constantly engineering, manipulating, dragging people kicking and screaming into the future. it's at once a mellow democratic egalitarianism and an unbelievably presumptuous (and of course entirely incoherent) nonstop paternalism.

first of all, i would say that the idea that time is progressive traces to a millenial, christian tradition. you see it going mad in the nineteenth century: everyone anticipating one or another version of the ecstasy at the end of history, and there is a transition from pietism to the perfectionism of the shakers, for example, to a hegel/marx conception of the end of history. you get a milder but just as definite conception in pragmatist meliorism, which prescribes eternal progress wih no end-state. let's just say there are other ways of conceiving time: cyclically, for example, or as one damn thing after another (which is my astonishing account).

to give a progressive account of history, and then to be a "progressive," is to identify your own position with the unfolding of time, an idea which, if nothing else, is magnificently or satanically arrogant, and would of course make all resistance useless. then you get the political spectrum (as divided by progressives) taxonomized into progressives and reactionaries: people pushing forward and those pushing against the unfolding of history. the first thing i want to point out is that this structure of thought is optional: it's not the only idea about history. which is good, because it's also silly. really it's as though the ticking of clocks should slow when a republican gets elected, or as though time curves around glenn beck as around a black hole.

here is one massive paradox: time has a certain directionality, but we are called upon to make this actual: we are the agents of time: time (god) requires our assistance in its inevitable progressive unfolding. this is the craziness at the heart of marx: the proletarian revolution and subsequent millennial communism is strictly speaking inevitable. but we must hasten the day. what this means in practice is that the people who are holding up time - the bachmans throwing their bodies in front of time's bulldozer - must be liquidated. and the ignorant must be constrained to actually enter time.

in other words, with one sentence we identify ourselves with history. with the next we are deploying totalitarian power to make time actual. the first, we might say, is the rhetorical flourish and the egomania. the latter is the only actual agent of time as conceived progressively. time can only be pushed forward by coercion or if necessary genocide etc. meanwhile, the time of this world - as opposed to the time of progressive fantasy - just tick tick ticks at the same rate wherever it is found. right now it's 7:34 est at michelle bachman's place too. you can't slow it down, and you can't speed it up. you can't be an agent of the future or an agent of the past: all you're doing you're doing now.

conservatives fear change. on the other hand by the same reasoning it is evident that liberals quake in bug-eyed, screeching, unreasoning horror at reality as it now stands, which they negate and despise. fear of the entirety of actuality is going to make it difficult even to hide in your room under the covers, which are, indeed, part of what liberals so cravenly quake in the presence of. i will note that it is almost impossible to fear anything other than the future, though liberals may be gearing up to fear the past, which is always chasing us in extremely close carnivorous proximity. fortunately, liberals are completely immune to fear of...global warming, the palin administration, etc. and they, unlike everyone else, are extremely impressed by their own courage, which is scary.

that conservatives fear the future appears to entail that human history is a triumphant march of progress, which is inspiring though obviously false, and that this triumphant march of progress consists of the public healthcare option, or, well, anything we advocate. let's just say that the claim to be able to understand the direction of history and drive it forward - a lovely conceit shared by hegel, marx, nietzsche, hitler, and madam zelda - is a pathetic delusion, as a brief survey of the astonishing predictions of these figures will reveal. but that i am a spokesman for the future, sent here as it were from it to drag you there (under fullbore coercion), sure makes me feel excellent, which as i keep pointing out, is what the entire structure of thought is for.

the use of "the future" by blow etc is rather odd. it does not refer at all to what may happen after now.  it refers, rather, to their present policy positions. the 2013-2021 glenn beck presidency, though it will happen in a period subsequent to the present period, is not the future. it's the past, which is interesting. historians should now be studying the michelle bachman administration of the 2030s, which, since "the future" refers to policies she rejects, is already long over. charles blow may fear the abject failure of the obama administration: the destruction of the healthcare bill, the sex scandal, the afghan quagmire, etc. however, such a failure is a priori impossible, because 'obama's policies' and 'the future' are synonymous terms. thus, if such failures are ever actualized, and since they would be extended in time, they can only have happened in the past. i.e. the obama administration has already failed. but that's a priori impossible, etc.

let's just say that this picture where my ideas are the future while your ideas are the past is incompatible with...time. a thousand paradoxes spin out from this slop immediately. sometimes when you examine the merest commonplaces of political discourse you find a complete mess, a hyper-intense unanimous idiocy.

i don't really understand the criticism of obama for trying to sell chicago to the ioc in copenhagen. hey the outcome was genuinely uncertain, and he gave it a shot. why not? what was he actually gonna do for healthcare in that 24 hours or whatever?

yes that's interesting what you say about capitalism, andrew. and this is also a problematical strand that runs through the american libertarian-type tradition, why it's infested with randians, e.g. sometimes. what that kind of libertarian needs to understand is the ways that corporate capitalism is in itself a form of oppressive power. we need to scout alternatives, e.g. josiah warren. but capitalism too runs all the way to the founding and is not only circumstantially connected to the basic theory and history of democracy.

that is, the connecton between capitalism and the american conception of liberty is intrinsic, while the connection between that conception and racism is completely contingent. so: an important dimension of freedom is to dispose of your resources as you see fit, to purchase what you want and can afford, and so on. this is why in a republican rhetoric, transforming china into a capitalist economy would entail transforming its polity into a democracy, which appears false.

at any rate, i really think the task for the libertarian right has to be to come up with something more inspiring - even in pure economic theory - than nonstop acquisition or accumulation. it has to take seriously that severe inequality of resources and severe poverty are severe limitations on freedom, that the leverage of employers etc is a real form of power, even in a case of voluntary-seeming contracts.

one angle on this might be provided by the basic idea of squishy totalitarianism. so the libertarian types stop celebrating the american economy as gloriously capitalistic, and start criticizing it on the ground that state and economy have merged here, as in china. this at least gets you out of defending the status quo, and is compatible with a celebration of small business and entrepreneurialism etc.

here's a way to think about the incredible political doctrine of sartwellianism. say you get a bunch of protestors in pittsburgh for the g-20. and say they're radical squatters, internet pirates, anti-globalization people, vegans, anarchists, earthfirsters, etc. now: some of these folks have a lot in common with some of the folks who have been going to tea parties. both you and the tea partiers are looking for a place outside the structures of power, where you can live as you think is right. what y'all have in common is the right approach. join hands, my children.

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.

i'd watch glenn beck crucify himself only to return reborn tomorrow at 5; it is an amazing thing. but i'm too into chris matthews, who is very excellent.

the joe wilson thing has got the most remarkable people trance-channeling richard nixon. so you ask a couple of black women downtown and they're all like: "i thought it was disrespectful to the Office of the Presidency." now i wonder how worried you've really been over the decades about disrespect for the Office of the Presidency, which was ultimately nixon's argument: it would be bad for the Office of the Presidency to reveal evidence of the felonies and general disgusting basic behavior of the individual who holds that office. to be totally honest, i think that "the Office of the Presidency" is rather an abstract, empty, or imaginary object to sustain real respect or for that matter to be disrespected. in fact, if it weren't some kind of ontological mistake, i'd pistol-whip and then ass-rape the Office of the President of the United States. wait: the Office of the Presidency ain't got no ass! i want to make this clear to the secret service. i would never harm barack obama or any human being. but i herewith threaten to assassinate the Office of the Presidency. only: which way do i shoot? actually, it seems hard to express disrespect for the Office of the President of the United States. it's not as good as the Office of the Register of Wills! i don't know. maybe i should stick to expressing disrespect for actual human beings. of course, that you can't successfully disrespect the Office of the President of the United States entails that you can't successfully respect it. it's like respecting the number '5' or the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme or something. it's kind of indifferent to your positive regard. the idea appears to be that wilson is calling "the Office of the President of the United States" a liar, rather than barack obama, the alleged individual human being, if any. but the Office of the President of the United States doesn't even have lips in order to make assertions that could turn out to be true or false. or maybe the idea is that by insulting the concrete individual human being - if obama still is a concrete individual human being, which seems unlikely - we are insulting the persisting eternal abstract object that currently inhabits or possesses obama's body. good luck making that make sense, but the very charm of primitive supernatural explanations is their wondrous whimsicality.

yes, it was predictable, even to me, that i would become a whole-hog reactionary six months into an obama administration. forward, my minions.

alright. this is my approach: no matter who you are, if you're out there saying that obama is expanding the power and scope of state power - continuously, enthusiastically, and with regard to every possible subject-matter - then i am going to nod along enthusiastically. if you start spouting racism etc, then i am going to condemn you. but i am not going to condemn you for criticizing obama's programs, or his truthfulness, etc, on the grounds that only a racist could condemn obama, or on the notion that if we peeled back the subconscious layers we would find racism, or on the grounds that you come from south carolina. i'm not reading minds; i'm reading signs.

know what? i agree with glenn beck just so far and on just those matters where i agree with him. if he thinks that the national debt will swallow the economy or something, then i say: good point. if it's some conspiracy crap or whatever, then i'm not there. i don't have to love the whole idea of the obama admin to distance myself from glenn beck, and all things considered i so far am basically liking the form of the right-wing backlash: the libertarian tone is precisely right. many conservatives have been improved and sharpened by the obama administration. this is the only moment in american politics that i can recal - with the exception of ronnie's 1980 campaign - where anti-statism actually seems to be a viable stance (and it's quite a bit more radical at the moment than it was in ronnie's time). this is the best development in american politics in a long while, in my view.

i do think that for a certain segment of the pop, obama arrived as an avatar of the future, an embodiment of the dream etc etc, and any criticism is intolerable or evil. this entails a complete loss of critical leverage on the american state. i still endorse the american traditions of protest and suspicion of government power. and the racism charge is getting way too easy and indiscriminate: not that americans aren't racists, but that it's an attempt not even to deal with criticism.

my speculation on the reasoning behind the day-glo red panstsuit is something like this: hillary and nancy are relatively small people. and because of lingering sexist attitudes, a female presence doesn't command a room in the same way that a man's might. but it's their job to command a room. so some consultant figured out that if the clothing screeches, all eyes are riveted by the pulsing glow. thus what barack can do in a black suit, hilary can only do by looking something like a pylon. let me point out some of the problems with this. one way that obama can actually command a room is by quiet dignity. hard to muster quiet dignity in a fire-engine-red faux-silk pantsuit. and of course, personally, i select my leaders by their taste: when bill used "don't stop thinking about tomorrow" as his theme song,i became an implacable foe. and whatever "i'm pissing blood!" red expresses, it's not taste.

what i think you want to project is total assurance that you are in fact the center of power in the room. screeching "look at meeee!", putting it mildly, doesn't do that. even if you're 5'3" or whatever it may be, i'd try to express dignified, perfect self-assurance.

so you could think of this as part of our cultural adjustment to women in power. but part of that in turn is women's adjustment to their own power. now a secretary of state or speaker of the house has no reason feel insecure in her power. if she doesn't like you, you can expect a visit from the irs or the us army or whatever. compared to you, they're colossi, little gods who hold over you the power of life and death. they don't need to emphasize that at all; it's much more disconcerting when the power itself is the only radiance. that's why no one dresses in imperial robes anymore except catholic cardinals: the hooha isn't convincing anymore; but the implacable stripped-bare reality is impossible to deny.

watching the kennedy memorial reminds us all again how full of funkiness catholicism really is. the vestments, the eucharist, all those golden goblets, images everywhere. that is some wild shit!

i might have been skeptical of obama's healthcare/deficit-increase program. but after seeing the all-star tribute to ted kennedy, all my reservations have been put to rest with the corpus delicti. the performances by brooke shields and usher were shatteringly emotional. only a monster could oppose a healthcare bill now. (of course, only monsters ever opposed it, or even asked any questions about it.)