cheese it, the cops!

i always love this sort of idea: obama: honduras coup illegal. illegal! these people seem a bit confused about what law is. no doubt, according to the former government, it was illegal to overthrow the former government. but i'm betting the new government has legalized their own coup. but on the other hand, why bother? or maybe it's against international law to overthrow your government? what's the origin of the governments who ratified such a law? at any rate: why not cruel, counter-productive, oppressive, vicious etc? 'illegal' is as weak and irrelevant as it is conceptually confused.

i think eventually people might realize that ivy league law schools of today - which produce our entire leadership class - are more or less like the medieval university of paris or worse: an endless scholastic discourse, based on a series of false or perhaps literally meaningless postulates: infinite refinements, the foundation of which is an incoherent ontology: a gigantic edifice based on absolutely nothing. a noble, touching testament to human perversity and industry, but an idiotic detour into arbitrary incoherent superstition.

i'm saying this seriously and literally. our understanding of law is full-bore theology; our law schools are seminaries; our government is a theocracy. it worships a being it can't even describe coherently, interpreting its will in whatever way serves its actual human purposes. it enthralls and flummoxes you with its esoteric texts and incomprehensible ceremonial mumbo-jumbo. it runs you through a ritual cycle and tests your loyalty. it launches crusades or inquisitions. and it makes no sense.

first, you invent it. then you declare it to be the ultimate external reality and power. and then you spend the next x centuries interpreting its will. a century or two after it's over, people can't even enter far enough into the system to understand how anyone could ever have believed it, or what it means to believe it. one can still read the texts, but one cannot actually know what such people believed; their fantasy world is dead.

there is a story to tell of our law schools and the transition from catholic theology to our theology. aquinas essentially replaced the active, arbitrary intervention of god with the idea of natural law: god's will expressed in the nature of his creatures. the supreme being is manifest in the universe as law: the origin of the modern shift to a scientistic conception.legalistic protestantism and its political theory - in locke, or madison, say - avails itself of these conceptions: one word for it might later be "deism." if obama declares a coup to be "illegal," he is evidently appealing to precisely an aquinas conception.

but it's the commonalities of the kingsdom of god and the rule of law i want to emphasize. "the law" is not a concrete object: it's an abstract or spiritual object. but, amazingly, it has a will and is active in moving around physical objects. "it" rules. like protestantism, its religion is scripture-heavy, and is expressed above all in texts. like catholicism it is an instrument wherewith some people tell other people what to do or articulate their lives, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.

its will is not capricious, but (supposedly) rational and universally valid, like the "physical laws" of the universe: it's not emotional, like a pagan or jewish-type god. it's an enlightenment god. still, it does not, it cannot exist in an actual universe. we are ruled by human beings, because abstract objects exercise no authority and have no physical effects.

could better cpr have saved michael jackson? nothing could have saved michael jackson. he'd already had far too many comebacks. like britney, he was too good, too pure, for this world.

truly the class of 1958 seems to be checking out en masse. kind of disconcerting. say so long to iz the wiz.

 

iz was famous for a couple of things. first off: quantity over quality. he was no dondi or zephyr or futura artistically, but he was everywhere. that was central to the graff idea circa 1980. he "went over" people, taking special pleasure in ruining your masterpiece: he wanted graff to be a crime, not an art. he was the definition of kinging lines and going all-city. he's important in representing in pure form a particular idea about what graff is and what it means. he was the darth vader of the classic documentary style wars.

no way! billy mays is dead? geez, i loved billy mays. should have been on my list of artists better than michael. i'm never going to buy anything, ever again.

here's the basic problem with...all political positions, more or less. let's say that you have some really good ideas about how the future should be. and let's leave out of consideration your fallibility, and just stipulate that these are, really, good ideas. it's a further assertion, and does not follow trivially, that you should seize and wield political power sufficient to realize these goals. and whether the idea with all the mechanisms needed to enforce it is still a good idea is an open question. education is good and important, and is basically to be articulated in a no child left behind kind of way. this is wrong. but say it was obviously right. now would it follow that you should not allow high school dropouts to drive? or that you should triple taxes and invest them in schools? or that you should remove truants from their families? well, no. not at all: a thousand other considerations, policies, values, budgets are engaged.

now partly this is a matter of figuring out what the priorities are among competing agendas, or the effectiveness or cost/benefit or unforeseen consequences, of a particular policy. but it also raises  fundamental matters of value: to what extent does implementing this idea compromise freedom or whatever else you might value? what does it imply about power relations in the culture? if you thought that essentially no policy passes this test - that the power required to implement an idea was never sufficiently justified by the outcome, then you'd be an anarchist. for example, since every implementation of every policy legitimates power inequalities and expands them, you might think no political program could be justified.

but it's also a basic problem within mainstream politics: you just nod along going: health care, energy independence, environment, education. but what resources are necessary and to what extent are these in competition? and what powers are you consituting and what might be done with them in...the palin administration?

the casual totalitarianism of the technocrat:

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

let me briefly enumerate some of the ways this is wrong. first of all, it does not follow from the fact that you didn't finish high school that you can barely add. friedman appears to believe that the only way to find out anything is in an institution. and of course it doesn't follow from the fact that you can barely add that you don't drive well.  second, driving is an embodied skill, not measurable by the sats, though the idea that anything of human value might not be standardized testable is of course profoundly alien to an intelligence of friedman's caliber. but that's of course not the point: the point for friedman is how, by hedging people's lives around with police power, we can manufacture the sort of people he thinks ought to exist. third, this is a flat redoubling of class divisions, a way to make poverty or family/neighborhood problems ever more endemic, to just literally stick people where they are like a roach motel. just consider the way a regulation like that would differentially effect black people, or poor people, or latinos, etc. fourth, it just casually assumes that extreme limitations on basic freedoms - such as mobility - can legitimately be imposed unilaterally by state authorities. in other words, it gives you a perfect view of a certain kind of american liberalism, a mind-numbing totalitarian rational standardization of the species. we'd be far better served by...i don't know, a shiite theocracy.

notice that this little brownshirt moment is followed by a series of cliches to which it is entirely irrelevant; it's just there to establish the forward-looking totalitarian bona fides, so that when we go on to say "innovate!" no one can misunderstand what the mechanism of innovation is going to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY-rPDwzM9M

here's a piece on michael jackson, prince, and madonna from say 2005.

and here's an assessment of the career of michael jackson.
ok most of this will be obvious, more or less. jackson was an excellent singer and a great dancer. he was not an independent artist, in the sense that everything depended on the writing and production of others. the jackson five were delightful; he was good in the disco era; he was good circa thriller, with a great stage act; but in no case was he original or innovative. his talent was quite the opposite of that: he combined existing elements and crafted the product extremely well: the first j5 album (a sweet synthesis of motown and bubblegum which completely dominated my mostly-black junior high circa 1971) and thriller were the only moments he really sounded extremely fresh, but surely the motown folk and quincy jones get a lot of the credit. thriller was important in establishing a new basic pop: post-disco/funk, and an alternative to "new wave." partly it was a return to pop-soul; partly it was an incorporation of the mainstream rock of the time.

the overwhelming moment came because you couldn't sell enough funk or hip hop to white people; thriller embodied a racial synthesis, even a kind of reconciliation. (eventually he became some kind of racial monster, an argument for the wholesomeness of existing racial identities.) michael jackson made good or at least elaborate and memorable videos (they're unwatchable now), which right at that moment became the key.

it was paradigm pop because it didn't instantiate any other particular genre: it was syncretic, masterfully so. and it was the occasion of a great coalescing of audiences or stampede of lemmings, depending on your mood. one reason to mourn jackson's passing is that thriller was a moment of cultural solidarity: one of the last times the whole culture was listening to the same thing, more or less. if jackson had not made thriller, his death would have been merely a lead obit, like bo diddley's, say. but i have to say that the decentralization or balkanization of pop music is a good thing, overall, and that mass art necessarily is fundamentally uninteresting.

the visuals were...idiotic: plastic sequined militariana and processed hair, race change surgery, a crust or bark of make-up, masks, etc. his tastelessness in every dimension was extreme. extraordinary. pitiful. cf. "neverland." it would be surprising if someone whose taste was that appalling could make really good music; on what principles is he going to select repertoire etc? and he made a lot of extremely boring or ridiculous music: essentially a lot of thriller and everything thereafter, more or less. but also before: play "ben." now play it again. now frisbee the thing into the ether. there wasn't a single really good moment after the early 80s, and there was a lot of incredibly cliched or self-indulgent horseshit.

he was a study in human misery for decades: continuously disintegrating into mental illness, addiction,  sexual strangeness, conspicuous continual tastelessness, extreme embarrassing stupidity, a world of delusion: the worst case of celebrity implosion since elvis. or, really, the worst of all times. it seemed to last forever. you kept waiting for some kind of redemptive moment or a moment of perspective or self-reflection, waiting for him to talk to the man in the mirror. or at any rate to make a decent album. even if he had, i wouldn't have bought it (well i never bought any of his albums; no need to; the question was how to avoid his music). to be honest, i don't think it was about to happen, as everyone seems to be asserting; i don't think it was going to ever happen. but i guess we don't know. it's not hard to predict the toxicology: opiates, anti-depressants, ambien, and three things you didn't know existed.

the king of pop, artist of the century, etc.: in my view he compares unfavorably to dozens of actually important musicians: louis armstrong, or jimi hendrix, or janis joplin, or muddy waters, or sonny boy williamson, or john coltrane, or miles davis, or bessie smith, or blind lemon jefferson, or blind willie mctell, or robert johnson, or hank williams, or tammy wynette, or merle haggard, or johnny cash, or patsy cline, or george jones, or the rolling stones, or professor longhair, or john prine, or the pretenders, or blondie, or bob marley, or lee perry, or king tubby, or augustus pablo, or toots and the maytals, or fats domino, or prince, or smokey robinson, or martha reeves and the vandellas, or aretha franklin, or otis redding, or wilson pickett, or al green, or the dixie hummingbirds, or james cleveland, or james brown, or thomas dorsey, or parliament-funkadelic, or the allman brothers, or the louvin brothers, or lotte lenya, or sarah vaughn, or bonnie raitt, or the bar-kays, or dave brubek, or the grateful dead, or led zep, or ac/dc, or jerry lee lewis, or the temptations, or the four tops, or jimmie rogers, or bob wills and the texas playboys, or sam cooke, or billie holiday, or howlin wolf, or little richard, or chuck berry, or bo diddley, or mahalia jackson, or shirley ceasar, or snoop dogg, or grandmaster flash, or public enemy, or dre, or wu-tang clan, or biggie, or eminem, or buck owens, or bill monroe, or ella fitzgerald, or benny goodman, or duke ellington, or b.b. king, or albert king, or freddy king, or otis rush, or magic sam, or loretta lynn, or waylon jennings, or the skatalites, or fela kuti, or creedence, or van morrison, or elvis costello, or count basie, or ornette coleman, or django reinhardt, or charlie christian, or charlie parker, or ma rainey, or elmore james, or lucinda williams, or bobby bland, or little walter, or brian wilson, or the ramones, or the dead kennedys, or minor threat, or nirvana, or the white stripes, or chet atkins, or dwight yoakam, or the seldom scene, or flatt and scruggs, or the stanley brothers, or les paul, or the clash, or jelly roll morton, or immortal technique, or woody guthrie, etc. leaving aside composition, production, or instrumental vituosity, all of these are, like mj,  recording artists, and even on that basis, with regard to many of them (such as hendrix, armstrong, hank williams, marley, coltrane, monroe, ellington, waters) mentioning jackson in the same breath would be madness. i think of him more like...aly and aj. nothing wrong with that - aly and aj are excellent pop artists - but the 48 hours of continuous programming is just a misunderstanding.

hoothe bad?

let me go another way, for a second, on sanford and ensign. it is very easy to take a hyper-christian who, you know, turns out to be gay, or an adulterer, etc etc and say he's a hypocrite, or that his religious professions, or even attempts to legislate some set of religious values, are simply self-righteous dishonesty. it's possible, especially in the context of politics, that someone's religious commitments are merely insincere: politics is a constant temptation to manufacture a false self. but on the other hand, the situation is likely to be far more complicated, and to engage a fundamental human dilemma.

we are non-ideal creatures with ideal aspirations. our moral principles are pristine. our actual lives and personalities are a mess. everyone with a set of moral ideals comes up short of these ideals. and the force of the ideal itself is embodied in the self-laceration that ensues. even the most basic transgression/mistake-and-apology displays this structure.

now you really don't want to play this out in public, which is why you should not be a politician. the drama is internal, and it is polluted by an audience, which presents a constant temptation to simulation. on the other hand the public spectacle of this drama is weirdly compelling, because you already know what it's like; something deeply familiar and important is being enacted, or represented.

and failure to achieve the perfection to which you aspire or to which you urge others to aspire is not itself hypocrisy. on the other hand, manufacturing a false perfect self to enact on the public stage is hypocrisy. on the third, we obviously demand and reward that.

even if you can't relate to the religious source or form of the principles of an ensign or a sanford, much less to the public spectacle of it all, you should be able to connect to the basic dilemma: aspiration and failure: the most touching thing about us, and the route to whatever decency we ever do achieve.

this is a disturbing thing to say about someone who was born the same year as i was, but michael jackson lived too long.

well, that's right. you wonder how clarence thomas is going to dissent. just way into tyranny, i suppose, and passing it on as a legacy to our children.

arresting professors? ok. now i'm ticked off. what am i gonna do about it, pda? get outta my way: i'm gonna blog, bitch.

sometimes, apologies are just stupid, or are actually wrong. i don't think that mark sanford regretted his decisions, you know, the day before yesterday, when he was in the process of screwing miss argentina again. but he regretted them three seconds after getting caught. he let down his wife, his children, his state, etc...by getting caught. you could apologize before getting caught: that would carry with it a presumption of sincerity. or you could get caught, and then engage in a long deep process of reflection, transformation, and exploratory regret. but don't fly home from your date and apologize: that's horseshit.

now it seems obvious that a lot of guys who can't play the guitar go into politics to get laid. that is, you know, morally unfortunate. really you might blame the women who make this strategy successful, but of course blaming women for anything would be wrong. but engaging in the noble self-sacrificing career of public service in order to get laid is not nearly as morally unfortunate as are these apologies, for which these public servants ought to be pistol-whipped by rabid munchkins.

thomas friedman is an excellent practitioner of a basic art of the pundit and politician: take whatever might be happening now and feed it into your a priori positions: everything is an argument for whatever: in this case, the iranian rebellion is an argument for energy independence, the green economy of the 400th century, or whatever friedman and al gore are cooking up for our bright-with-promise superbureaucratic, extremely regulated future. now you might think that if everyone stopped buying oil from iran, then the ayatollahs would go gently into that good night. but perhaps they'd just crack down harder. if we really wanted to support the iranian people, friedman sagely points out, we'd work on making their economy collapse. at any rate the price of oil is half what it was a year ago, and the iranian economy has, in fact, tanked.

however, the iranians are rebelling right now, whereas the green economy of the 400th century will be achieved in the 400th century. now you could drop a $1 a gallon new tax on oil (well, no you couldn't, because congress would refuse, not being interested in hanging themselves publicly.). you could, if you had unilateral total sway, pass it in a matter of months. and you could send us into another recessive spiral and end up with a perpetual republican government. but if you think that taking such steps is going to help the rebels in tehran next weekend, you're just being silly and insincere. if it's leverage you want, start buying all your oil from iran at double the current price. then in a year or two, you'll have them over a barrel, as it were. if they don't need your business, where is the leverage coming from?

hard not to see that this is obama's basic strategy (well, it's everyone's, even mine). economic crisis=gov health care, his favorite education initiatives or whatever. in other words, anything is a good enough reason to do what you want to do. if it was bush, of course, an economic crisis would be a good reason to cut taxes or or encourage oil drilling in alaska or...you know, torture people. the iranian rebellion would be a neat confirmation of supply-side economics, the godhead of jesus, and various weapons systems.

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

exhibit b: russia. before energy prices skyrocketed, putin started imposing a repressive, militaristic regime. when they skyrocketed, he continued. when they dropped, he redoubled his efforts. in the green economy of the 400th century, he'll be doing the same, because vlad putin is immortal.

more brutal bad news from here in small-town pa:

Wet, windy weather makes balloon fest iffy

exactly. the notion that the government of france should be able to tell people how to dress can only be the result of some kind of fundamental confusion.

let's just say that it wouldn't be shocking to find out that mark sanford has an argentine girlfriend. and a self-destructive streak.

trying to protest in the streets is good. but if i were, let's say, a young person in tehran today sympathetic to the opposition, i'd be thinking in terms of urban guerilla actions, sabotage, sniper work/molotov cocktails on the paramilitaries, etc. these fuckheads are killing young women in the streets etc. time to fuck some shit up. the authorities are begging for actual physical resistance. you'd be surprised what a little knot of pissed-off teenage boys can do in their own city if they can stop to think and plan.

i don't think you're going to have a soft/eastern-europe-style revolution, because i don't think that the religious hierarchy is going to suddenly realize that they have no will or moral claim.

today's dose of law:

"Everyone should respect the law. Once lawlessness becomes a norm, things will be complicated and interest of people will be undermined," said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ultimate authority over political and religious life in Iran. "We will not step an inch beyond the law: our law, our country's law, the Islamic Republic's law."

this overweening respect for the law expresses itself by arming thugs, beating people, shooting them, throwing them off bridges, etc. now if you did stuff like that, it would be murder. but when we do it, we are enforcing the law. the rule of law = unconditional submission to our every whim. or: the law is a decent, neutral arbiter, indifferent as to persons. and it is identical to the will of a particular person.

have to say that the basic iranian chant form - "death to x" - seems a bit repetitive and not all that inspiring. they need a writer over there. all they are saying is give death a chance.

i guess i'm in mega-blog-mode today, my 51st birthday. hard to believe i've survived, but here i am.

anyway, i might point out that the story everyone has been pursuing is how the iran regime cannot control info in the age of facebook, twitter, youtube. but it's hard not to notice that cnn today just basically does not know what's happening on the streets, other than that perhaps the crackdown has come. but they're not confident even on that. explosion at the tomb of khomeini? what's happening? who knows, exactly? the crackdown on media, in other words, has been basically effective, and we won't know what's happening until it's over, if then. and the people of iran, also, probably are in the regime-generated fog.

let's take an emerson/thoreau american political position, which antedates the left-right taxonomy. it's easy to see why, if you were an extreme individualist and advocate of liberty, you would, for example, favor the abolition of slavery. but the paternalism of an obama - where we're transforming you and constraining you for your own good, providing you with health care or childcare or whatever else we in our wisdom see that you need - is closer to calhoun's argument for slavery: we're seizing control of you for your own good. in other words, the progressives of today employ the arguments of the reactionaries of yesterday. thoreau's position is perfectly coherent and consistent. for just that reason, it cannot fit into the political spectrum now at all.

there is a story about how left and right politics became incoherent. or actually, the left-right spectrum is simply a way to mark out the contest between incoherent positions, and has no purchase much before the twentieth century. but at any rate, the left and the right both develop out of a republican tradition: the left out of rousseau, for example, or the right out of...i don't know, schiller or john c. calhoun (who is, actually, an amazing political philosopher). alright, so both have this element of liberatory rhetoric, rights, and so on. but as we segue into the twentieth century, technological innovations - communications, transportation, weaponry - make possible the idea of totalitarianism, and both left and right totalitarianisms arise, of course. and in ideology, you have the admixture of hegel to rousseau, marx to hegel on one side, the development of romantic nationalism, race theory, and so on on the other. and also a teleological view of history. where the republican tradition looks backward to the greeks and romans, the totalitarian left and right ditch that and push ahead toward a transformed species, a utopian endstate, which can of course only be achieved by the force of the state. that's what the state is for, what it is.: a machine for species-transformation.

suddenly, everyone is going: we can make this happen. whatever your vision of how things should be, there is a machine adequate to imposing that vision on history. and that is what totalitarianism is, becuase to make your vision real, people must be constrained to realize it.

so both of these views retain a little hangover of republicanism, and a rhetoric of freedom, and even an origin in liberatory revolutions, in resistance to tyranny. and both graft onto that a massive totalitarian nation-state (or in the left vision, a world-state), a species transformation machine. both are going to seize control of history: definitely not how let's say john adams saw the function of the state. so both left and right both push forward the liberatory rhetoric of their origins, and both betray that origin in every moment, every policy and program. this reached its hysterical height in the conetst between nazism and communism in the 1930s, but muddles on yet.

the left accuses the right of being nazis; the right accuses the left of being communists. and this would be basically right, except that the actual left and right are incoherent, not actually bold enough to take a position, and still not able simply to jettison the idea of freedom (and also not able to endorse it in any meaningful way).

there wil be another political spectrum after left/right. it will still emerge historically. but let's hope it makes some kind of rudimentary sense.

one thing to point out is that neither extreme american leftism nor extreme american rightism is a coherent position, and both break down on the rhetoric of freedom. this is also true of mainstream american leftism and rightism: they are chimeras: monsters that combine two bizarrely different creatures. but the herbert piece connects the libertarian impulse with white suprematism or neo-nazism, or as i quoted an msnbc anchor, "these neo-nazi and anti-government groups." so the notion that people have the right to bear arms is connected to anti-semitism or white suprematism: or, ron paul is a nazi. but obviously, you can't be a nazi and a libertarian! the danger that lurks in these identifications is that if you perform them, then attacking white suprematism entails attacking freedom, which i must say is exactly what herbert does in his piece. or in other words, in characterizing your opponents incoherently you not only eliminate what in their position you could endorse on your own principles, you introduce a mirror-image incoherence into your own position. you're a huge advocate of, you know, civil rights or freedom of the press, etc. but you are basically expressing your opposition to liberty as an extreme right-wing fascist plot.

you can't tell me that sarah palin has a coherent position: minimal government, and state supervision of your bedroom. and you can't tell me that obama can double the size and power of the state in twenty minutes and be a consistent advocate of human rights. the left-right way of understanding the political spectrum makes the whole thing a conflict of incoherences. american conservatism and american progressivism are silly or pathetic intellectually, even if they seem to monopolize the practical possibilities. they demand that you stop trying to understand, and just nod along with a blank look in your eyes. you must stop thinking. and you have.

you can't be a nazi and a libertarian if you can think these things through, can you be? well you also can't endorse massive pervasion of state power and be in favor of equal rights - or any rights - i would think. in a way, the function of liberty is primarily rhetorical for both most of the left and most of the right: they nod in that direction as a kind of tribute to the american vocabulary, but neither of them approach the actual liberty of actual persons with any enthusiasm. both want to free you, where freeing you means imposing their values on you by force, made possible by an unlimited power to tax and borrow, exclusive access to weaponry, etc.

perhaps coherence is overrated, and let's say ron paul's coherence might just amount to a rigid ideology that would have disastrous results on the ground. on the other hand, you might want, in the still of the night, to become aware of the fact that your actual position is senseless or the merest paradox. there's one drawback to an incoherent position: it simply cannot be true.

at any rate, you can see the general strategy, of course: use the acts of violence as a way to discredit more and more of the right spectrum. one moves, supposedly indetectably, from the murderer to the nra to limbaugh to, i don't know, susan collins. the bad thing about this is that you're also discrediting things like resistance to tyranny, once you move from the act to the rhetoric, and start drawing lines between the words. obviously this leaves you vulnerable to the same thing. i kind of dig the weather underground, but no doubt you could generate some rhetorical connections between them and...joe biden. one could start tracing words from marx or mao to barack, etc. marx said, for example, that the first phase of the communist consolidation will involve state control of the banking system. this is easy when you're preaching to the choir, but it also will slowly foreclose the possibility of dissent, or of a meaningful public debate about fundamental questions like the scope of government power.

bob herbert today, decrying "right-wing wackos" such as the abortion-doc and holocaust-museum shooters:

A new book by Dennis Henigan, a vice president at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, goes into detail on this point. In “Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy,” Mr. Henigan refers to a Harvard Law Journal article written by an N.R.A. lawyer titled, “The Second Amendment Ain’t About Hunting.” In the article, the lawyer makes it clear that for the N.R.A., the right to bear arms is “directed at maintaining an armed citizenry. ... to protect against the tyranny of our own government.”

well, that idea certainly was central to the constitutional right to bear arms. now herbert just leaves us to ponder the insanity of the idea that our own government could ever be tyrannical, a delusion of right-wing wack-jobs. it's amazing how quickly the obama admin has settled over the left as a permanent condition of life. but perhaps it would help them to recall that a few months ago there was an administration that was enthusing about universal surveillance, imprisonment without even the semblance of due process, instituting a world system of secret torture facilities,extreme manipulation of public opinion by disinformation toward the goal of killing people, etc. already, they seem to need a lesson from sarah palin on how to criminalize gay marriage, launch a crusade against islam, illegalize abortion, require christian prayer in schools, or throw you in prison for a decade for smoking pot.

herbert is certainly right, however, that only insane right-wing killers seem to worry at all about tyranny, and that all reasonable people have long ago resigned even the hint of independent thought and autonomous action to the beautiful bureaucracy. that, my friends, is what it means to be rational and progressive person. that is what it means to be an american: to suckle at the teat of the state from the womb to the grave: to give over your brain chemistry, your children, your intellection, into the hands of...whomever.

at any rate, i think you can tell from the herbert-style schtick that a progressive administration presents more or less the same threat of tyranny as a reactionary administration. this is evident precisely from the fact that herbert regards the very notion of tyranny as an absurd anachronism, an obvious impossibility, pretty much the stance of ayatollah khamenei, let's say. and you can definitely tell by that how far the american republic has come since the founding. indeed, american history is a kind of slowmo u-turn.

one thing we should agree on, i suppose: your .22 rifle is not going to help you to resist. there can be no resistance, a fact more evident with every passing hour.

sex-o-lette jessica cutler on how cynthia hampton should deal with her status as john ensign's best girl. the whole piece is rather disturbing (call the enquirer!), but she says this:

If you confess your wrongdoings, no one can hold them against you.

that doesn't seem quite right, does it? hell yes i killed your mom. at any rate, joe tex: loose caboose.

one inspiring feature of khamenei's approach is that he insists on the rule of law. if the protesters allege vote fraud, they should pursue the proper legal channels. the fact that the people who made the laws and who enforce them are the very same people who dicked the vote is of course neither here nor there, "the law" being a trans-human truth rather than an instrument of power.

one good thing about clerics as political leaders: having direct access to the will of god, they are free of petty constraints such as rationality or reality.

Speaking in front of an audience of thousands that included President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he endorsed the president’s policies and insisted that the margin of victory — 11 million votes — accorded to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the official tally was so big that it could not have been falsified. “How can 11 million votes be replaced or changed?” he said.

now you might answer: well, you could burn the ballots. or just throw them in a landfill and announce any result you like, etc. but khamenei understands that, in fact, no election has ever been rigged anywhere, because that would theologically impossible. now that the protestors can get this clever argument - or at any rate, this lobotomized rhetorical question - on board, they will no doubt go home satisfied.

truly, as much as anything, this shows why you don't want to be a mullah, a priest, a rabbi. and why you don't want to be a king, a dictator, a supreme leader. and what you really don't want to be is both, because you undergo this long discipline in which the question is about texts and interpretations, and reasons or even basic ratiocination are entirely irrelevant. add extreme political power to that, in which whatever you might say, people just nod along, and pretty soon you're just spouting bullshit, expecting people to believe you. it's a personal disaster: you lose the ability to think at all. you're wise. but you're smart as a a shrubbery.

thought i might do a little rap on 12-step programs.

now first off, let me say that i got sober in aa in 1990, stayed sober until 2003 or so, relapsed for a few years, and then got sober without aa (sobriety date 1.1.08). aa got my dad off booze in the last years of his life, and na got my brother jim off heroin/cocaine. no program could help my brother adam, who died of an overdose while out from rehab for a court date.

there is one reason above all that the 12-step model is compelling: it was designed by alcoholics: people who actually knew from inside what addiction is, not doctors or priests or public health officials. every page of the aa "big book" comes from the actual experience of addiction from the inside. and the power of aa, of course, derives largely from the fact that the people in it share this experience.

aa is an amazing organization, for one thing a kind of model of anarchist organization. it has no leaders and no hierarchy. anyone can start an aa group, and "the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking."

the first step - "admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable" - is actually what allowed me to stop. it is a fundamental 12-step insight that the addict suffers not from too little but from too much willpower, or "self-will run riot." "i can stop anytime i want" is a lie in the service of death; admit you can't stop, just let go, and stopping becomes possible. this is a great paradox, but it is the only thing i've actually seen work. this is also a profound, let's say spiritual insight: letting the world or yourself be is the way to transform it or you.

aa promotes a very dogmatic "disease" model of addiction. at one point the big book refers to alcoholism as an "allergy." this is important for several reasons; it's a treatment for the overwhelming burden of shame which arises from and keeps you drinking. that is, i think the result is more strategic than medical.

the disease model seems, for one thing, to deny personal responsibility for decisions etc, or to deny the role of free will. this, again, is an important strategic moment and connected to "powerlessness," but actually much aa teaching is in direct tension with it. in the twelve steps, taking responsibility is the fulcrum, as in "made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all"; "made direct amends to such people wherever possible," etc. you wouldn't take a cancer survivor and tell him that to get better he has to make amends to everyone whom his cancerous condition has harmed. i think the disease model is interesting but inadequate, even from within the aa orientation, but try saying that in an aa meeting.

the question of moral responsibility and free will in addiction, i think, could make philosophers among others think harder about these issues. it is a tremendously complex matter. you can't force yourself to be sober if you're an addict by a sheer choice. on the other hand, without a sense of the moral significance, you wouldn't be trying, basically, and you want to reach a point where you can take responsibility fully even for actions that do not proceed precisely from free decisions. this, briefly, should be used to re-theorize the "free will problem."

the "spiritual dimension of the program" is of course a problem for an atheist like me. the aa conception is wide open, and your higher power can be anything but yourself. it also forms a way of describing the release moment, where you get out of the cycle of forcing yourself to not use, and then using anyway: let go and let god, as they say. and like the theme of service to others, it is a way to try to get the addict out of a narcissistic entrapedness in the self that is the most truly torturous part of addiction.

some aa groups are more open than others, however, and i'd be lying if i didn't say the very-christian orientation of groups i've been in in alabama and central pa wasn't offputting at times. other groups are far more mellow, including those i first got into in nashville. but the religious barrier can be overcome, and any decent aa group is pretty non-dogmatic about any religious orientation or doctrine, which is what the big book teaches.

on the other hand, aa does descend into very rigid doctrine, as in the unquestioning assertion of the disease model ("i'm not a bad person trying to get good; i'm a sick person trying to get well"). what keeps me away from aa meetings as much as anything is sheer repetition: let go and let god; one day at a time: i'm not sure i can even hear these things any more; i've heard them tens of thousands of times. they help, and the repetition helps, especially for "the newcomer," for whom it is best to "keep it simple." on the other hand, my god, and i'd like to go deeper. and a series of slogans is not, by itself, a way of life.