cheese it, the cops!

re krauthammer etc:we should probably think about what justice actually is. i think of it as a kind of generalized or socialized revenge. the mechanism by which revenge gets socialized is empathy. so: someone hurts someone. in an attenuated way, other people can feel the harm, and through that, the desire or necessity of striking back at the perpetrator. in other words, justice, it seems to me, is a slightlly rationalized or regularized vengeance, made possible by empathy. surely you can't contemplate a judge who has no way of entering imaginatively into the experience of a victim of violence or something? otherwise you might just as well just let a computer or something take care of this, just mechanically categorize the case and prescribe a punishment. even then, the only reason you're doing this is because you feel something for the victim. the problem with the ricci verdict, obviously, isn't empathy, but lack of empathy.

this indeed makes things like group membership potentially relevant, because the question is: what is your empathy class? the ideal is universality, of course, and we probably all do have some tendency that way. but the more elaborate the identification, the more vivid the empathy, and to the extent that various group orderings mark or create limits on similarity, they suggest limits on the scope of empathy. anyone is going to have an easier time empathizing with someone who is very much in their own situation. this is a limited argument for representation of groups on the bench, but also for melting down barriers, or engaging in a personal discipline of entering into the experience of people in other places or groups. this requires actual worlk, not a mere declaration.

now here is an astoundingly strange column by the krauthammer. the first thing he does is work hard to cultivate our empathy for ricci, which is the right way to show that injustice has been done, which it has been. i was writing the second half of the column in my head: the decision, and some of her remarks, call into question the universality of sotomayor's empathy; if she can empathize for the most part only with members of certain (historically-oppressed) groups, this affects the quality of the justice she dispenses. instead, after massively mobilizing our empathy, the hammer just condemns it as irrelevant.

david brooks says with circumspection what i've been shouting. but there is a reason i've been shouting it, and brooks might go ahead and start drawing conclusions. if american jurisprudence really rests on fictions, and not only fictions but fantasies, might there not be a bit of a problem? and it's one thing to to say that the fiction is useful, another thing to show that it is. in fact, though its results might be useful on some occasions, the whole haze of mythological claptrap is devastating. for example, the delusion of impartiality disguises massive prejudices, and one might think that if brooks were black or poor or under arrest, he might think about this sucker a wee bit differently. people whose actual motives or decision-making procedures are opaque to themselves and disguised from the public by clouds of hooha are liable to do terrible things, and the best approach is surely to know as much as possible about how one is actually making decisions, which is the only way actually to try to filter for irrational prejudice.

and let me just add a statement of my religious creed. there may be useful illusions. there may be necessary illusions. i intend to pound the living crap out of them.

a constant approach of popular science these days is to trace all sorts of behaviors, attitudes, decisions, to neurology. now the first thing i would say is that every event or expression of an attitude is connected to a neural event: that is trivial if you're any kind of materialist. but this stuff is by and large amazing crap. try this from the neurologist nicholas kristof, for instance. now the attitudinal distinctions - conservatives don't like dirty faucets, say - are sort of interesting if true. but lighting up cortexes is not interesting, and it also deploys about fifty fallacies. of course it bears not at all on the truth or the effects of beliefs or policies. it vaguely suggests that people are born liberals or conservatives, which just takes a taxonomy of political positions that has existed for two centuries at the outside and tries to make it into some biological condition of mammalian life.

everything is neuroscience these days: the neuroscience of marketing or investing or homo/hetero or...whatever. the problem is that these approaches work backwards from social categories to neurology and enshrine momentary social formations, which are essentially created by power, as inescapable bio-destinies. the entire scientificness of the thing is usually presented in a few phrases - 'medial prefrontal cortex,' say - which function essentially as authorities: they're supposed to show you that you're too ignorant to assess what's being said, to put the actual ethical/political/economic conclusions beyond the realm of disagreement, to flummox you into nodding vaguely along. if you don't, you must be a dolt. they function like phrases from the koran or something. they actually do no work except to assert a kind of prestige.

all the work is done in the initial taxonomy. if people were actually divided into two fundamental kinds - liberal and conservative, say, or boring and interesting - since lucy, then of course there would have to be some underlying biological distinction, which we might work backwards towards. but really we just enshrine whatever little political distinctions we find useful - for example to stigmatize sarah palin or something - and then say: medial prefrontal cortex.

i'd say it's getting to the point at which a military attack on north korea is less impossible to contemplate than no attack. they're practically insisting on it.

TOKYO, May 27 -- North Korea vowed Wednesday to attack South Korea if its ships are searched as part a U.S.-led effort to interdict vessels carrying missiles or weapons of mass destruction. It also declared that the truce that ended the Korean War was no longer valid.

"Those who provoke [North Korea] once will not be able to escape its unimaginable and merciless punishment," the North's official news agency said.

now surely the cia and defense intelligence have been working on nk somehow? is there any prospect of disabling all the nukes in a strike?
is it really as completely blank as it appears to be? who, internally, objects to the regime, and how? even the chinese must be going: ok maybe it's time.

this is really also a case where you could do some actual liberating from a nightmare dictatorship, though the complete mystery of what happens next would give anyone pause.

from washpost, a selection of responses to the sotomayor nomination:

"Senate Republicans will treat Judge Sotomayor fairly. But we will thoroughly examine her record to ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law evenhandedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences." _ Senate Republican leader  Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

"We must determine if Ms. Sotomayor understands that the proper role of a judge is to act as a neutral umpire of the law, calling balls and strikes fairly without regard to one's own personal preferences or political views." _  Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the Judiciary Committee's top Republican.

"She must prove her commitment to impartially deciding cases based on the law, rather than based on her own personal politics, feelings and preferences." _  Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, member of the Judiciary Committee.

"The Judiciary Committee should take time to ensure that the nominee will be true to the Constitution and apply the law, not personal politics, feelings or preferences." _  Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, member of the Judiciary Committee.

well, obviously, these boys are reading the same email...from whom? what i guess i can't understand is why these slave babies have no self-respect or manifest no independent thought or initiative or powers of composition. like, i'm a united states senator, a prominent lawyer etc. do i have no idea what to say? wouldn't it be a matter of pride that when you quote me, i'm speaking something like my own words? why would i be trying to make it obvious that i cannot write a press release, or utter an actual sentence without someone's hand up my ass operating my mouth?

anyone besides me cringe when a newspaper comes up with a headline like sotomayor, trailblazer and dreamer ? it's mythology and advocacy. but is it journalism?

from the ca gay marriage ruling.

The 136-page majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, noted that it's not up to the court to determine whether the ban, known as Proposition 8, "is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals believe it should be a part of the California constitution," but rather "is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values."

i just want to point out that this discourse of transcending one's own opinions and values is completely routine and central to the law. but it is just obviously absurd. who is, actually, reading the proposition or the law or the constitution or the precedents? who is responsible for the words coming out of your mouth and their actual effects? you can't just rest your whole system of government on a contradiction - can you? - my opinions aren't my opinions, my interpretations aren't my interpretations, my actions aren't my actions. or is the claim really to have literally transcended all human limitations, to have become an abstract object like the number 7 or a little god or something?

you have got to do something like this: i'm trying from an actual human perspective to read the law as plausibly as i can, speak the truth, and do justice. that has to be enough, since it's all any actual human being can claim without lurching into insanity. if that's not enough to give the law and the people practicing it enough prestige to command allegiance etc, then it has to do without.

every time during the sotomayor process some senator says something that is just obviously absurd, impossible, and contradictory along these lines, i assign you to sit on your couch and shake your head.

"before starting enbrel, your doctor should check you for tuberculosis," no doubt because, in such circumstances, he might contract it himself. on the other hand, probably it would be wiser for your doctor, before starting enbrel, to have someone else check you for tb.

worth remembering the greatest supreme court nomination ever made: georgie throwing down harriet miers, using no standard but the imperative to choose the most qualified candidate.

one thing we'd have to say about ruth padel: her work is radical not only in the realm of poetry, but in the genre of email, where she pursues a sort of automatic surrealism.

"ON the CHair, there is still no other nomination except (so extraordinarily) Derek W and me. But thye close on 29th April so another or others may well turnup...

"THere is aupposed to be a book called The Lecherous Professor, which has 6 pages on Derek Walcott's two cases of sexual harassment, which might provide interestigfn copy on what Oxford wants from its professors.. ALl best, Ruth."

as well, she is one of many innovators in the genre of postpostmodernist apology, where you're terribly sorry for being willfully misunderstood:

"I apologise for anything I have done that can be misconstrued as having been against him."

the sotomayor confirmation hearings will be a little less entertaining because joe biden won't be sitting on the judiciary committee, with his subjects without verbs, verbs without subjects, stories without shape or context, seven-minute questions without sense or structure. nevertheless, i'm sure a lot of senators will  be showing their asses, so we'll have to tune in.

texting

is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

i'd say whatever the younguns are doin - you know, readin comics, watchin tv, playin video games, listenin to...rock 'n roll, hip hop, death metal - becomes a fad as well among healthcare professionals, who are no less flighty and crisis-oriented, no more circumspect or systematic, than the average thirteen-year-old.

nothing quite matches the savage politics of poetry professors. she lasted, like, a week. but now they've had a woman, and can go back to another three centuries of men. it was a bad sign early on when padel hired karl rove as a consultant. i also dig her statement:

I acted in complete good faith and would have been happy to lose to Derek.

words of the scandal-decimated politician.

and so the era of anti-latte terrorism begins.

oprah initially defended frey by saying that, though a million little pieces wasn't factually true, it was emotionally true. well, no, it was factually and emotionally false. but if you want to see how one would write something that is at once fiction and sincere autobiography, you could do a lot worse than sitting with rehab, taking notes.

the international country music conference was cool. where else are you going to get a complete and precise taxonomy of yodels? or hear the truth about that amazing brother duo, kierkegaard and bill monroe? i took emma to the grand old opry, where whispering bill anderson did a version of "god bless america again" which invcluded a trademark recitation, this one on 9.11. it got a standing ovation, as flags billowed on the jumbotron. em's reaction? (she studies performance art at nyu):
i don't know how to incorporate this into my reality." gonna have to, though.

wisdom from "the daisy".

for millions of females “you’re too fat” are the three most terrifying words in the English language.

well, i think we could come up with a few more horrifying than that, even for oprah and wintour and daisy. it would be a pleasure to try out some material. perhaps eminem can help with the writing and the delivery. if those are your most horrifying words, consider yourself extremely fortunate. and eat me, idjit.

well sure, eden, we can say how misogynist em is. and how homophobic. and how, generally, ill and wrong. on the other hand, you can't just read this as some kind political speech or something: elements of fiction and autobiography, horror and comedy, freud and circus, dali and dre.

my mom loved valium and lots of drugs
that's why i am like i am
cause i'm like her

my mom loved valium and lots of drugs
that's why i'm on what i'm on
cause i'm my mom

(go find you a white crayon
and color a fucking zebra)

ok how many gangsta rappers are going to come up with "i'm my mom"? it's an ultra-compacted literary form, in which the status of any particular line or assertion is completely up fdor grabs: is it truth or fiction? does he loathe or love himself for saying that? the best analogues might be...henry miller, or like i say, edgar allan poe.
on the other hand, the fantasy life that is revealed is straight up sick in its simultaneously violent and libidinous content directed at women and gay men. it might be truer than memoir, in a way, and so just straight-up scary.
and i'll say this again: the real horrors of addiction have never been more carefully expressed, more intensely translated into art. rehab makes a million little pieces or whatever your favorite jive may be look false not only because it is, actually, false, but because it's insincere in its neat shaped narrative. with em, the fiction intensifies rather than undercuts the truth at the heart.

i'll do some kind of review of relapse after i've listened through a couple of times (and actually i might not be blogging until monday or tuesday), but i'll respond briefly to j. freedom du lac, the unbelievably named washpost pop critic. he's certainly right to praise the dre production, which is, of course, loping, melodic, absorbing. he's right also to be impressed - as how could one not be? - by the verbal gymnastics. i think it's also right to have some misgivings about the persona, which remains pretty much unchanged. i'd like to see eminem mature...and i fear his maturation. he could apply the killer skills to things other than his maniacal internal dialogue that's somewhere between entertainment tonight and nightmare on elm street. of course, sometimes maturity in a pop act is just deadly, like when the delightful romonettes the donnas went from "get out of my room" and "40 boys in 40 nights" to the deadly melancholic love poetry of the american 23-year-old female. or when the beatles went from crack r&b unit to melancholic oompah band.

but eminem is not the donnas. he writes amazingly well, and could express almost anything. i'd like to see him try some things, though doing what he does with dre at the mantrols is plenty.

and my first impression is that the horror of addiction is at once explored devastatingly and also turned around into sick fatalist humor in these songs, which are like fever screams, deathbound hallucinations, like edgar allan poe, gangsta rapper and comedian. and so i'm gonna listen again and think about where this material really is. there's no doubt it still in a sick way romanticizes pills and booze etc. but there's no doubt it goes beyond that first move, and em has always oscillated between sensationalism and psychic suffering. it's getting on toward twenty years since the chronic and i think that dre probably feels a little differently about dope, even if he still smokes all the time. but these people have a professional interest in recommending drug abuse. it must, in some ways, be a terrible place to be.

the other day i was watching the eminem "artist collection" on mtv with little sammy. (em's new album rehab - oops that's relapse - is out today.) i keep thinking he can't be as good as i remember him being, but he is. there has never been a rapper with a better flow. (the only serious candidate sam and i could think of offhand is immortal technique.) we saw the video from "lose yourself," for example (from the eight mile soundtrack). it is astonishing. every verse builds in intensity, driving home the rhythm perfectly. every frigging word makes sense, even at maximum velocity. every bit is just bristling with rhyme, alliteration, assonance. truly a work of art, driving our language forward. the fictionalized or fabulized autobiography is amazing: a literary achievement: half gangster movie, half brutal self-examination. the political texts (such as "white america") are central documents his time. i'll let you know what i think of rehab in a bit.

the paper i'll be delivering at the international country music conference on thursday: reactionary progressivism: bill monroe, political philosopher.

people i know keep showing up in the nytimes, lately. like chris francese, marion winik and nick gillespie. but i have to say that gillespie's proposal - legalizing, regulating, and taxing all vice - is not groovy. i just want to start out by pointing out that such policies lead to bizarre ironies, like the gov working to stop smoking, and running on tobacco taxes and settlement money. indeed, i could see a state that depends utterly on the illness of its citizens and also provides them with healthcare, which is cool in its ironies, but senseless. in a way, this makes it perfectly clear that the state is a parasite and a faction of society - an independent group of people with a set of common interests, as opposed to a bunch of public servants - and i guess eventually that would just make anarchism obvious. so that would be good.

i think all these vices should be legal and, um, unregulated. but a government that's your pornographer and pimp and bookie and supplier of meth is caught in an infinite moral loop, a perfect cycle of hypocrisy, even more than it is now. the state of pennsylvania currently asserts a monopoly on gambling and booze, and seeks to ban or control or tax up the wazoo most other forms of vice. well that makes our bureaucrats exactly as good as our bookies and moonshiners (if any remain). that is a blow for reality, but hardly a formula for improving our wretched little lives.

pa funds education in part through gambling. i remember when there was a set of ads that tried to connect drugs to terrorism, and say that if you were using drugs you were supporting terrorists. that was ridiculous, but in these circumstances, it is an act of public service to gamble, and the most addicted are the most generous. if we fund education through tobacco, or booze, or pot sales, then we're making our children's welfare vary proportionately with our illness and addiction: it suggests the shape of a whole human life, from eager, well-resourced kindergartner to vice-ridden middle aged schlumph whose slow descent into degradation and death is an act of charity.

the same things that make addictive substances, activities, and services excellent commodities, make them excellent targets for taxation.people will tend to keep using them almost no matter how expensive they become, and anyone who objects to your raising the tax is apparently in favor of vice. no one wants to be the state legislator favoring cheap tobacco or whiskey. on the other hand, it puts you straight into the sickness and death biz.

i actually think a thriving black market economy is ok. it gives much of the population a stake in crime, and hence a basic anti-statist stance. it allows many people to make a living who might otherwise be starving etc. it encourages resourcefulness and self-reliance. on the other hand there are drawbacks, such as very high rates of violence. but every rose has its thorn. in an era in which every single segment of our lives is permeated by state power, we ought to try to keep the bureaucracy off our vices.

i take seriously the basic insights of "standpoint epistemology," the idea that people in different social positions or groups have access to knowledge that may not be available at other standpoints. in particular, i take seriously the idea that members of oppressed groups have access to knowledge - particularly of the oppressing group and the circumstances of opression - that are systematically erased from the dominant standpoint. still, i find it a bit disconcerting that gonads, skintone, and surname seem to be primary criteria for appointment to the supreme court, and that one can't criticize this without being a racist/sexist etc.

i've probably said this before, and i preface by saying that i am uncomfortably in favor of abortion rights. but the common ground on which obama (and his ilk) want to meet the other side is this: "we all agree that we want to reduce the number of abortions." (i just heard kerry kennedy say the same on morning joe). ok: why, exactly? taking abortion seriously as a moral quandary, which obama does explicitly, is not compatible with pro-choice dogma: that it's a matter of a woman's control over her own body, or that it's adequately framed as "the right to choose" (a truly empty focus-grouped formulation). these positions are calculated to project the idea that abortion is morally equivalent to, you know, having a mole removed or preferring bud to coors. once you allow that there is, actually, a moral issue, you've left the basic repertoire of pro-choice rhetoric.

just watched the spirit, and it's got me thinking about comic books and movies. well, it is a failure as a movie, and it mystifies me a bit why that is. it's written and directed by frank miller, which ought to get some respect. the writing has a lot of wit: half campy hardboiled quasi-noir a la the original will eisner material, as in "i'm gonna kill ya real, real dead." the other half is pop culture references and high concept humor, as when scarlett johannson (playing silken floss) tries to explain why she's trying to help a madman (samuel jackson) become a god and take over the world: "my ph.d. will be paid for." the imagery is stunning, and it does seem like this is the time to do this: the time when film can create a true visual equivalent to the kind of stark power sometimes achieved in comics. miller's sin city was considerably more successful, maybe because it just wallowed in sickness, and the spirit uses the same visual vocabulary, such as making everything black and gray and then coloring in one neon-yellow or hot red thing. 

some of the failure has to do with pretty obvious stuff: it should be more of a tribute to eisner, and the decision to set it now instead of eisner's 1940s is questionable. or rather, it's set both in the 1940s and now (and also the future, maybe), which isn't a clever idea anymore, and is one of the factors disanchoring this movie from any discernible world. and though eisner and miller's visual sensibilities have some affinities, probably due to direct influence, ultimately miller erases eisner's look and substitutes his own, when trying for something more true to the original would have been appropriate (since eisner has himself become a god), and quite the little visual challenge. eisner's story arcs were short and often beautifully, perfectly constructed in their irony: i don't think miller actually gets that construction, and certainly doesn't try to achieve any cinematic equivalent for it.

other problems raise more general issues. i think film and comics have been in dialogue since there were comics. in some ways, of course, film and comics are very different. a comic book gives you a couple of hundred panels or whatever it may be. trying to get that kind of visual intensity into a moving image either breaks the cinematic flow into a series of frames - which miller does constantly - or it just visually overwhelms you: i almost felt assaulted by the visuals, even while i kept thinking how cool they were. sitting in a theater, you can't put the thing down and come back to it later, and 2 hours can be an awfully long time when it's that impacted. i think miller needed to back off or calm down: the striking frame has to emerge from a background or be suddenly salient; you have to build toward it.

comic books do not primarily rest on characterization, and eisner really did not. but if you don't feel anything for the hero, really, except vague admiration or something, you can't build a film around that character. and the movie star system is pretty central to film, but is kind of irrelevant to the comic medium, and we have to peel away too many layers to deal with actual human interactions. there aren't any in this movie at all, really. that's precisely why alan moore's v for vendetta worked infinitely better as a movie. it's also why, even though they are much less imaginative movies, the spider-man and x-men things have worked ok on the screen. the characterization might be lame or even pretty perfunctory, but it's central for giving the film some kind of arc and the viewer some kind of connection. again, what eisner substituted for character was perfect narrative construction; miller doesn't do that either.

the visual atmosphere is stuck between the real world and a comic book world; different directors have negotiated this in different ways, for example setting the comic book characters into the real world a la spider-man, or on the other hand trying to come up with a whole comic-book atmosphere through set design or cgi, a la batman. or: merely presenting the manga as an animation. miller seems to want to take the real world and paint on it, which works beautifully at moments, but seems mannered at others. i still think the visual vocabulary is developing

watchmen is not exactly my favorite graphic novel, but i'll probably give some commentary when it comes out on dvd.

obama's speech at notre dame was excellent: directly at abortion, for one thing. he told a nice story of an email he got while he was running for senate, from a pro-life doctor who voted for him in the primary, which objected to a bit of bo's website that talked about "right-wing ideologues who would take away a woman's right to choose." and the doc said: it's not that i want you to change your position; it's that i want you to speak of your opponents with respect.

meanwhile, at dickinson, christiane amanpour was also excellent: avoided most (well, some) of the cliches and was inspiring about journalism, though most of our grads are probably looking for jds or mbas.

in an era of fiends, nothing is more fiendish than  music torture, nevertheless, i'd like to offer my amazing expertise to the intelligence services as a music consultant. imagine "the long and wnding road," played at a pleasant low volume, over and over again. oy the melancholy!

pissing into old faithful is such a profound metaphor and reversal of all metaphors, such a densely replete semiotic system, that any comment would be strictly otiose.

here's some disturbing news about the new commander in afghanistan, from andrew sullivan's blog.