cheese it, the cops!

watchin the "beer summit," which seems kind of clumsily handled. they should have decided whether this was a public or a private meeting. if it was private, then they should have done it without reporters and millions of photographers forty feet away: i can't even imagine what'd be like to be a cambridge cop in that situation in the rose garden. not exactly a good situation for anyone to express themselves without pile-driving self-consciousness. on the other hand, if you were going to do it publicly, then mic up and put a camera at the table. this just seems like useless grandstanding.

dangling-mod ad for abc's absurd-looking astronaut show defying gravity: "as astronaut candidates, we are going to challenge you." quite the little role reversal, in which the trainees kick their instructors' sorry little butts.

profound yet half-assed observations on the future of beauty (and sex).

pretty amazing that one thing that peter hart asked a focus group is what substance barack obama's spine is made of: that's pretty far into metaphor for a political scientist. still, a nice question. and i expect that this will end up being obama's problem .

When Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who moderated the session, asked them what Obama's spine was made of, only two chose such strong substances as steel or metal.

The others' choices ranged from Teflon and plastic to bamboo and wood. "Wet cement," said Marsha Welder, 59, the account manager at a security firm, "because it's going to dry."

Afterwards, Hart said Obama's strategists might well be concerned about those choices, which he called "pretty malleable."

i'm not sure that there's a place that obama will really stand, or a conviction so deep that he can't compromise it, and i would think that's one thing we look for in leaders. now bush - or at least his persona - was just the opposite: rigid, always in the middle of a gut-check. and we saw exactly why that has drawbacks in a leader. but the other also has drawbacks.

the reaction to obama, as a saint and a savior, a martin luther king etc, was never going to survive everyday politics. but it was also more a projection of a hungry electorate than a reality: that's just not the sort of person obama is. he's bound to be disappointing if that's the expectation.

sometimes you see why it's hard to negotiate with israelis. that latimes piece by yisrael medad is just...strange. the conclusion appears to be that jerusalem should be immediately recognized as part of israel. but i don't actually get the argument, and the napoleon anecdote is positively weird. is the argument actually that millennia of jewish lamentation should determine geo-political boundaries? (anyway, i guess i find it a bit odd to sob over events of 2,000 years ago, and if i wanted to use sobbing as a political argument, i'd want to evaluate it for...sincerity, immediacy, applicability; i'd want to quantify the sobbing of various peoples in evaluating their claims.)

And there is more State Department trickery. Births of children of American citizens in any of the Arab towns or Jewish communities outside of Jerusalem and beyond the Green Line will have their birthplace noted, as per the above-mentioned regulations, as the "West Bank." Is the "West Bank" a state? Is the State Department engaged in creating new states? ...

The "West Bank" never existed as a geopolitical entity until April 1950, when Jordan annexed the area. That annexation, incidentally, was considered by all the world -- except for Britain -- as an illegal occupation. Yet the U.S. has established the "West Bank," with the stroke of a pen, as if it were a state entity.

If the U.S. insists on using boundaries dating to 1948, shouldn't it also use the place names in use at that time? "Judea" and "Samaria" were both names written into the U.N. partition resolution. A baby born to U.S. citizens in Shiloh, for example, should therefore be registered as having been born in "Shiloh, Samaria."

um. is the claim that the interior details of passport entries of american citizens born in the west bank - in their myriads - is a major or substantive or any sort of issue? at any rate, spending the next couple of years on that, or its ilk, will keep us from taking up any actual issue; if nothing else, it's a delaying tactic. why in the world would you insist that if we are (supposedly) consulting the 1948 borders on this massively trivial issue, we should use the names extant (only among israelis!) for place names in that year? obviously, to insist that we call a place by the name it is called in your holy book but not in theirs is just a demand for an empty subordination to your ideology.

and it has some sort of magical claim or force, i think: the names we print on passports are going to, say, ameliorate or erase concrete forms of injustice, or concrete exclusions from citizenship etc. in its typical waffling between realities of the current situation and the teachings of the hebrew bible and the lamentations of millennia, along with talmudic parsings of irrelevant details as slights, we see a consciousness that simply cannot be turned to compromise. and we see, ultimately, a consciousness that doesn't register any practical interests, even its own, that ultimately displays no everyday contact with everyday reality.

the argument, it seems to me, is that all this is ours and your claims have no basis, on the grounds that my religion teaches that it is, or in short, that only we count or have access to the truth. ok, well, i guess if that makes you happy or keeps your traditions alive. but obviously it makes no claim whatever on people who don't share your elaborate and, er, completely arbitrary or contingent belief system. if medad is actually trying to say that the obama admin should do something differently, he needs - putting it mildly - a form of argument that is recognized more widely than in some group of esoteric kabbalists.

this, we might say, is the legitimate function of "reason," of which, as you may know, i am often skeptical. i will argue about what might bring peace or prosperity or reduce oppression and so on. but, like obama and anyone else who is not inside your hermetic discourse, i cannot take seriously as guidelines for policy the names by which places are called in your holy book and suchlike. you cannot take your esoteric doctrines and use them as a mode of outreach, or an appeal to policy-makers who don't really know or care to know what your esoteric doctrines are.

to be honest, i'd like to know who decided to publish that as an op-ed column in the latimes (for which i've written dozens of essays over the years). it just doesn't appear to be comprehensible to anyone outside a small fundamentalist community. how insular or detached from reality that community is is demonstrated by the fact that medad appears to believe he is making some kind of argument for a general audience.

another monstrous crime in terrifying new freedom, pa.

one thing about being 51:  i'm beginning to live on the timescale of trees. i've had that experience a lot lately. when i was a teenager, i hiked through the shenandoah national park a number of times. it was a lovely park. but going back there a couple of weeks ago, staying in the remarkable skyland with joanie, i realized that it is now something like a wilderness, or at any rate it is a mature forest; it might almost never have been logged. trees that were thirty years old in 1974 are in their sixties. now it's closer to 1830 than to 1960. the whole vibe of the place is different, more hushed and alien.

and i've suddenly noticed this in other spots i've been hitting again on this summer's road trips. i remember specific trees on the campus of the university of virginia - where i was in the 80s - that are massive now, and are creating quite different micro-environments. also in dc: even the cherries around the tidal basin, which i remember as saplings in the 1960s, are serious trees, but the whole area has grown up - rock creek park, for instance - though dutch elm disease wiped out the huge elms of the previous generation.

this is just one man's opinion, but i could do without many aspects of the contemporary art world, or rather, the avant-garde artworld for decades. the figure of the young baudelaire, a la dash snow, is just not a good thing: anyway, you better figure out whether you're a happy party-boy or a tortured genius. but either persona is insufferable. we're far too far from the real romance of making things, the actual work, which has to be the point. i was sort of hoping that jeff koons would collapse, but he's always back. stop the super-astonishing exception to all rules crap and fucking do your work. remember when pomo killed "the genius"? but the genius is unkillable even though he's always od-ing. if i might, let me just say that i am inexorably opposed to art. we need a couple of centuries of craft.

i was watching a documentary on climate change last night. admittedly, it was from 2006, right at the height of the apocalypse. but both al gore and a climate scientist were comparing climate-change skeptics to holocaust deniers. now i say that when that is your approach, the claim to be talking for science is absurd. to express skepticism about the data etc is to be a monster. i propose to you that a scientific inquiry cannot be conducted at all on this basis. if the wrong results show that you are a monster who must be repressed, then the science cannot be, is not being, pursued. it is far more like the enforcement of theological orthodoxy by the medieval catholic church - complete with burning at the stake - than like the open inquiry we'd associate with science.

the holocaust-denial analogy is enough to sustain the skepticism: science has an institutional and social/political context, and that context right now is one in which no result is plausible: the motivations for taking a particular position are too disconnected from the question of truth. we're devoted to trying to eliminate the opposition by slander, or by any means whatever: it is a moral imperative to repress data that throw the thing into question. imagine what it would be like to be a climate-change skeptic in a university environment. what you have to understand is that this discredits the scientific status of the dominant position.

all of this, of course, does not decide or even really bear on the question of whether and to what extent and why the climate is warming, either way. but it has to make you think twice about just nodding along. these folks are trying to produce by shame and preachery a total consensus. then they're claiming to speak on behalf of neutral science. it's ridiculous.

now just to worry the holocaust-denier analogy for a moment: there is all the difference in the world between denying an extremely-well-documented historical event, and questioning predictions about the future made on extremely complex grounds. one thing you might notice: the predictions are all over the place, though there is a contest to come up with the most dire, because in this situation, the "scientist" issuing the most dire predictions is the morally best person. there is no historical question, essentially, about the existence and scope of the holocaust. obviously, there are a million open questions in the climate change debate. now the best moral posture might be to assume that the most dire predictions are true. that, of course, does not show that they're true.

so this is the coolest summer i can recall in this region. now, that has no - or little - bearing on the question of global warming. but let me ask you this: if this had been, in your region, the hottest summer on record, what would you or the so-called experts (there are real experts: i'm talking about the spokespeople), take that to show? i think you'd better get worried when all data supporting x is relentlessly emphasized, while all data in tension with x is dismissed. the global warming debate has an a priori moral edge: questioning it doesn't merely supposedly display your ignorance; it displays your evil. the running-together of the scientific and moral aspects - fact and value - make the actual research doubtful: the researchers already know, as a matter of commitment or personal moral display, how the thing has to turn out. what if you were a serious climate researcher and your data seemed to show that the world was cooling, or that the warming was slowing, or that it would level off at a reasonable level, or that it wasn't primarily due to human emissions? well, if you were to report that, you'd be an evil crank in the pay of exxon. you will be discredited, without actual wrestling with your data. your academic position would be endangered. so you'd have to retrench, re-interpret, re-research etc. i say this corrupts the research fundamentally.

some things are simply unforgivable here in obamaworld, such as failing to put your education system wholly at the service of test scores.

i wish i had something clear to say on the skip gates matter.

i can certainly speak to the excellence of his scholarship, which i availed myself of in act like you know. the person who comes through in his writings - scholarly, personal, etc. - is certainly affable and admirable. he is as good as any academic in the fields he essays: with a coherent point of view and a fine prose style. he is a first-rate scholar and thinker. his understanding of race is serious, nuanced, and right, basically: treating race both as a fact and as a social construction of extreme interesting complexity. his writing is non-reductive, but congenial in a way to liberation movements, but itself manifesting considerable scholarly detachment from the whole configuration of race. that is, he's a post-modern scholar of race, foucauldian in his way, and perhaps the very best and most thoughtful.

he grew up in rural west virginia, and has written beautifully about that. it's funny that he went all "yo mama"; he himself wrote beautifully about the dozens.

this run-in might be "reverse-profiling" in which gates was what appeared to be insanely sensitive to the police presence. in that situation, you greet the officer in a friendly way and explain the sit. you greet him like a white homeowner greets a cop, with the happy presumption that we're all on the same side. i'll give you lessons; this is literally something i've tried to teach my kids; the catechism in status and playing things cool (which is how i might put it to gates: wwmd: what would miles do?) the "do you know who i am?" approach is never the right one, because it's an insult to everyone who is not-you, e.g. the cop himself: sheer hubris doesn't help anything, and if your bellowing could be mistaken for drunkenness etc, that doesn't make for a successful interchange. the only response to "do you know who i am?" is: i don't give a fuck who you are.

on the other hand, that's also the stance one might take up as an officer, as in "excuse me, sir." you'd think that the very last thing a cambridge cop is going to want is an altercation with an eminent harvard prof, and how these cops manufactured this incident is worth asking. and i obviously am not going to dismiss the "black man in america" argument: that's the origin of gates's response even if there was no racism on the other side. and here's a problem: how,  if you are a white officer, do you know whether racial attitudes played a role in how you responded, even if you mean well? "would i have responded the same to a white guy?" is a hard question, unless you are explicitly in your own self-image a racist. the locked-out-of-your-own-house scenario is surely one that cops see every day. on most days, it's happy laughs all around when it's done. we'll get more info - obviously, more than we will ever want - on what actually happened.

obama should have been a bit more reticent. he's backpedaling on live tv right now. it's interesting that the right instantly denied that it was a case of racial "profiling," while the left (including obama) asserted it. neither had to wait and actually find out. it shows the status of facts in our political culture.

guess i had some stuff to say after all.

traveled to vermont with sammy the last few days. though i have been known to romanticize the south, i love new england, where i've never lived. vermont is incomparable: the mountainscapes, lake champlain, the tiny towns each with its own tiny eccentric congregational church. it's a bit quaintified into vermont-world, however. along the lake it reminds me of the coastal northwest, and the weather was cool and cloudy when we were there.

of course, my main men were new englanders, such as emerson and thoreau, nathaniel rogers, josiah warren, lysander spooner, adin ballou, mit romney, etc. they must be doing something right to produce such a cussed group of fierce, freedom-loving eccentrics. especially mit.

sam dug the u of vermont, the only place we took a tour and shit. we'll throw them an application, i would think. i'd never been to bennington college, which is obviously a highly eccentric institution. usually every college makes sure there are signs everywhere directing you to the campus. not so bennington which is entirely unsigned. we found it after wandering around. it was completely isolated in the countryside: no even little college strip or anything: a completely insular little academical world, lushly beautiful on a pond/marsh of the walden variety, with that-era buildings too as well as some distinctive modernist additions. i never would have gone there, and neither will sam, but it struck me that i would have actually flourished in a place like that, where you do nothing but read, think, and talk.

all over the world, candidates are annexing obama's rhetoric, as in this contentful flourish from karzai's main challenger in afghanistan:

“I have no doubt that people want change,” Dr. Abdullah said in an interview after a tumultuous day campaigning in Herat, in western Afghanistan, adding that his momentum was just building. “Today they are hopeful that change can come.”

now afghanistan has been extremely volatile and fluid for decades. one might try promising stability. but i have no doubt that abdullah is all "hope" and "yes, we can." let me just say that in a few years these particular little balloons will have floated into the ether and popped. they're not exactly geared for the campaigns of incumbents.

it's rather astonishing that the top headline on washpost.com right now is palin's favorability rating drops under 40%. i'd simply drop all foreign coverage (and of course nothing in this world is less interesting than healthcare) and give a minute-by-minute detailed tracking of palin's...numbers.

truly i can't get any head traction on healthcare. i can't seem to pay attention or evaluate any various plans, even though the fate of all of us hangs in the balance.

headin off to vermont on a college trip with little sammy.
but i thought i'd leave you with this. it must be really sad and feel futile to have conventional political views. say you're a really good person, and you want to make the world better, and you're an obama democrat. your views are completely useless! you've got nothing to say that thousands of people aren't saying right now in their little condos, coffee shops and wine bars across the country. you've got no column to write that hasn't been written before a thousand times, no witticism to throw down that isn't already incredibly exhausted. through no fault of your own, by the sheer, ahem, coincidence that you believe what everyone believes, your political life is perfectly useless and utterly boring. of course, everything you believe is true, and you believe with tremendous passion and conviction. and yet your believing it makes no contribution to anything; it's a drop of water in the deep blue sea. if we erased you and your passionate convictions entirely, no one could actually notice. it's hard to tell the unanimity from the anonymity, the comfort of rich social connections from another isolated case of redundancy. when god calls you home, he won't be able to identify your soul. but y'all are good people, and he'll wave you through en bloc.

the republicans are surely right that americans don't want bureaucrats making decisions about their health care. and of course, they don't want bureaucrats deciding whom they can marry, what wars their tax dollars will fund, whether they can be placed under surveillance, what they can put into their bodies, etc., and i applaud the republicans for their consistency on such matters.

oh well, let's just admit it: americans want to be told what to do all day every day on every single possible matter, by absolutely anyone.

i must say that i'm tiring of obama. the rhetoric is getting awfully repetitive, capable of providing ever-tinier quanta of inspiration, beginning to show its empty windbag quality. his policies are ever-more obviously the old saws of american liberalism. i'm tired of seeing him on my television; i turn him off. obviously, this is partly inevitable, but the particular form that the cynicism takes is shaped by the particular form of obama.

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

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

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

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

i must say that i appreciate coburn, in his last round, raising the tenth amendment and quoting madison on scope of federal power. he asked her specifically about the use of the commerce clause to justify almost any piece of legislation, or any expansion of federal authority. he asked her, at the widest scope, whether the size of the contemporary american state comports with the vision of the founders, to whom sotomayor genuflected, as a supreme court nominee must. he's right that the answer to that is utterly obvious. roughly, we do not have the form of government that the framers devised.

what this makes you realize is precisely that what groups you belong to does matter: the white republican guys are exquisitely sensitive to the way that white guys are discriminated against, though by any measure this is comparatively trivial, though of course if it directly affected your life, as it did ricci, you'd be rightly disturbed. but they've been remarkably blind, of course, to the ways that other groups are discriminated against. so maybe, first, oppression of white men would give white guys some connection to groups that have been discriminated against, or at least make them aware that, if you want to know whether latinas are discriminated against, and the details of that discrimination, you'd better ask a latina. if so, you need a latina on the court etc.

the senators ought to decide not simply to repeat themselves, or not more than three times or something. after awhile, you realize that it's pretty much narcissism, mere grandstanding: they're on television. they've run out of points to make or questions to ask. but they just keep going.

lindsay graham with a pretty sharp line of questioning: if you're trying to decide whether the right to bear arms is a fundamental right, don't you have to use your own judgment, your own sense of the american traditions, of who we are in relation to gun ownership etc? is there a cookbook that gives you the answer?

and her answers are, as he's pointing out, disingenuous: no, my own judgment is irrelevant. it's all precedent, technicalities etc.

as you may have gathered, one of my little lines is nineteenth-century american reform movements. i turn to these because they were the last movements of the american "left" that directly endorsed individuality and political freedom that was not itself grounded in political oppression, that wasn't just an attempt to wield state power. one problem with this material, for my money, is that it was connected with the fad of "spiritualism," into which it almost disintegrated after the civil war, but which infested it long before. (cf perhaps victoria woodhull. but i was also shocked to come across letters by my dude josiah warren taking the whole thing very seriously. (his long island utopia modern times (=brentwood) was a big center of this kind of junk, but i'd though him pretty immune.)

there have been various accounts of why this should be so. spiritualism was more or less anti-christian or at a minimum extremely unorthodox, so it was theologically liberating. it has often been pointed out that the fad was dominated by women, and had a feminist tinge: its "clergy" was female, which was an important development. but to make the case for it as a sociological development, you have to overlook the fact that its practitioners were charlatans (i mean, actual frauds), its doctrines moronic. and that it was a distraction from actual political reform, a frittering away of the energies of serious, committed people into an ether emitted by themselves.

that's why i was pleased to come across this in thoreau's correspondence, from a letter to his sister sophia, july 13, 1852:

Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings, Most people here believe in a spiritual world, . . .  in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. If I could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, I should make haste to get quit of my certificate of stock in this and the next world's enterprises, and buy a share in the first Immediate Annihilation Company that offered. I would exchange my immortality for a glass of small beer this hot weather. . . . Consider the dawn and the sunrise, - the rainbow and the evening, - the words of Christ and the aspirations of all the saints! Hear music! see, smell, taste, feel hear, - anything, -and then hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly asking, "Please, Spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table." ! ! ! ! ! ! !

i do think that the republicans on the judiciary comittee just seem absolutely obsessed with "wise latina" and ricci. ask her about it. but just hammer her over and over with the very same words, hour after hour? you start to realize that they take themselves to be members of an oppressed and endangered minority; their rhetoric has shifted toward what used to be called the "neo-nazi" "movement": they speak for an endangered white race, as though overly aggressive affirmative action programs were extermination camps. this becomes bizarrely disturbing when you hear it in the drawl of the former attorney general of alabama: jeff sessions.i actually thought alabama (where i used to live) had come a long way from bull connor or whatever.

but this really has a different flavor, where we white dudes are losing control of the judiciary etc. i think it has something to do with obama's election, and i think you actually are seeing and will see actual white suprematism in resurgence. but now it comes in response to actually losing (some) control over the power in our society; it has a pathetic edge, like after affirmative action has assisted all these minorities, we'll have to have an affirmative action program for white people.

what they don't see, because they still have these suddenly-anachronistic-sounding racial/gender/sexuality categories in the front of their minds, is that the emerging elites are massively similar to the traditional elites: in the class they now occupy, the manner of their education, where their money is, their spots on the bureaucratic spreadsheet of power, what they wear or eat, where and how they live. the people who wield this kind of power should just naturally club together, and there's no reason that a republican senator and a hispanic judge shouldn't be playing 18 together at congressional this weekend, talking in a friendly way about what their brokers are advising, how their daughters are doing at stanford, wine, and what a wrong sort of person sarah palin is: all they need to do is realize that their interests and identities are in fact aligned.

i'd think that we will also see more minority spokesmen on the right: as they ascend, they will have to divide: they can't all be liberals, any more than they're all republicans because lincoln won the war. and to the extent that republicans speak for various sorts of elite groups, they should see that they can do what they do in cooperation with other such people, no matter their race, gender or sexuality, as the newly-ascending elites would come in part to identify with, you know, country club values. they'll start pushing tax cuts. of course they will: that's the victory of liberalism construed in identity terms, and also its end.

that of course entails the transformation of the right, because it is evidently still dominated by these racial obsessives. but there is no reason, for example, that there can't be libertarian - or for that matter security-state - latinos or gay people etc. this is the way the obama election etc does actually signal a reconfiguration of american politics. only these fossils must be retired.

one realizes only now how very racialized american politics has been, on both sides. there cannot be liberalism or conservatism, left or right, democrat or republican in a post-identity-politics america. so we may be seeing a profound re-articulation of the political spectrum, and the victories of liberalism (such as affirmative action, or identity-politics itself) are the end not only of conservatism, but of liberalism as well.

more tammy wynette:

nothin wrong with franken as a questioner.

another essay by nathaniel rogers is up: tilling the ground.

it's really true, however, that we need joe biden on this committee still, to relieve the mediocrity with something transcendentally bad, with a ferocious buffoonery that is quintessentially american.

i do think we need diversity on the supreme court. clarence thomas adds soul. ruth bader ginsburg brings financial savvy. a latina would contribute spice and fiery passion. we definitely need an asian on the court, for innate mathematical ability and pointless industriousness. only a white man, of course, can give the court a neutral, objective, "unmarked" point of view. we should think of the supreme court like a sit-com or a children's show: we need one of each, with two white people. we need a supreme court that looks like america: covered in franchise fast food restaurants and asphalt. or like its population: there oughtta be a meth addict, a special needs child, three bikers, the crips, bernie madoff, and many functional illiterates with excellent sat scores.