cheese it, the cops!

if you want to get a picture of how fast the federal government is growing, i would point out that obama's supposedly cut-down and austere budget clocks in at $3.7 trillion. it has doubled since 2001. keep doubling every decade and this thing will eat the world. this is a pretty good measure of the scope and power of the federal government. 

i often hear people ridiculing the pretensions of the tea party to represent the position of the founders. well, this is an extremely complex question! if the assertion is that we are a 'christian nation,' for example, i'd point out that most of the founders were enlightenment-style religious skeptics of various sorts: deists and unitarians, for example. on the other hand, the basic set of values derives from protestantism (as well as ancient republicanism). cf. roger williams, and also the role of the protestant churches throughout the 18th century in agitating for freedom of conscience and against tyranny.  the extent to which locke was a sincere believer is too often overlooked, and his ideas are inconceivable without radical protestantism.

the tea party, i believe, is profoundly divided on defense and security-state-type issues. but i will note that many of the founders opposed nothing more vigorously than a 'standing army.' we have come a long long way since then in this and many other areas, and the scope of federal power is exponentially greater than any of the major figures, with the possible exception of hamilton (a constitutional monarchist) could have envisioned. i can see why the individual mandate to buy health insurance makes sense and solves a problem. i also think it's clearly unconstitutional and will be found so. and the idea that the patriot act is consistent with our form of government is baldly ludicrous.

and we might remind ourselves of a few simple, obvious facts.

(1) the american revolution was to a large extent a tax revolt. the revolutionaries saw excessive or arbitrary taxation as the very essence of tyranny.

(2) the tradition of the founding is a tradition based around individual rights, both a radical protestant individualism and a more urbane or tempered lockean liberalism.

(3) though the founders disagreed profoundly on the scope of federal power, almost all agreed that it should be carefully circumscribed, in contrast to the british and european monarchies. this is enshrined in statements in both the articles of confederation and the constitution (e.g. the tenth amendment).

i don't think the left, and for that matter the neo-cons, really care what the framers had in mind, and that truly they could give a shit about the constitution; the left actually prefers the swedish constitution, while security-state rightists prefer hosni's pharaoh-style system. but they can't just say that without abandoning the debate, and all in all i am glad the constitution still plays that role. however, we might also point out that the constitutional convention was called explicitly to invest the federal government with much more scope. and then point out that it would not have been ratified without further attempts at limitation, enshrined in the bill of rights. etc.

ok but if you're just giggling at the idea that tea-party types have a connection to our actual traditions, you might read or re-read jefferson's kentucky resolutions, opposing the alien and sedition acts. among the many benefits to be derived from a perusal of this document is that you get to try to read the longest english sentence ever composed (section 8).

 

 

obviously the right really has no idea how to respond to egypt. they kind of like freedom and stuff, but then again they are pro-israeli and anti-muslim freaks. this has something to do with how israel is necessary to the rapture or something. i love clear, realistic thinking. anyway, hit that first link and say it with me: thank the good lord for ron paul.

ok, cb, i did have a crack at this marx was a totalitarian thing.

i certainly have enjoyed the various slams of the spider-man musical. for one thing, it finally dawned on someone that however admirable bono might be as a humanitarian, or however monumental his sunglasses, the music is incessant, pretentious, trivial, and profoundly tiresome. it's funny because once rolling stone or whomever anoints someone, all the rock critics fall into line, as i found out to my cost in 1984 when i tried to slam springsteen's born in the usa for rolling stone's sub-mag record. really go back and listen to that song again, though the album has some moments: it reminded me too much of my own chronic pounding headaches for me actually to endorse it wholeheartedly. anyway, in music criticism there's always a consensus. but confront theater critics with the same thing and they see it from a different angle or don't feel the same pressure.

don't let these fucking totalitarian lefties tell you that freedom is bourgeois. first of all it's not an argument, it's just a insult. second the rigid class divisions etc are just an artifact of an 1850 theorization that is optional, putting it mildly. third. so fucking what if it is, whatever it means? it's all marx ever said to his opponents. yeah ok i am bourgeois and so are you and now let's go on to some actual goddamn ideas. if the left ever recovers from marx, give me a call. i guess unfreedom is proletarian. get your ass to the factory, bitch!

and as that google dude emphasized, they did it without leaders. now we want to assign them leaders, we'll slap el baradei on them or whomever, so that the thing will be comprehensible to us. that tells you a lot about us, about our passivity, about our own need for pharaohs. it has nothing to do with them.

you know, i have plenty of impulses to doubt the outcome, to emphasize that it's the military etc. but i was hearing an egyptian human rights activist on al jazeera today, maybe 15 minutes after the resignation. she was sobbbing, having trouble getting it out. she said: 'all that stuff about the egyptian people or arabs being passive, or always worshipping their pharaoh, or being naturally or happily or culturally subordinate: all that is proven wrong today. i don't know what will happen, but today, anything is possible.' and i realized: i want to share in that moment in a small way from here. i just want to celebrate what the egyptian people accomplished. 

nothing is more inspiring than people power. nothing.

america's political class need to hire roget as a consultant. i don't think i can take another orderly transition or any more legitimate aspirations. my main argument for anarchism is that then these people (or perhaps cleverly camouflaged parrots or mp3 players) won't be on television all day saying the same thing over and over and over and so on and so forth.

one piece of autonomic rhetoric that always irks me is 'just like you.' you know, 'witf is supported by contributions from listeners just like you.' 'tax masters has helped many good people just like you.' just like me in every respect? say, whose bodies occupy precisely the same portion of space as mine? i wish they'd let me maintain my illusion that there is no person other than myself who is precisely like me, much less that there are oodles or scads of such people.

one sees pie charts of the distribution of u.s. aid to egypt: you know, $1.3 billion to the military, $250 million for non-military. well now, there are various estimates (up to $70 billion) of hosni mubarak's personal fortune. i would assume that a central part of our military aid package to egypt consists of stealth bomber runs, dropping bales of million dollar bills on swiss banks, 'hosni' stenciled on their sides. well, you know, dictators have legitimate aspirations too!  

 

i'm teaching a course on 'american political thought' and i've been reading pretty hard in the founders. i've drawn the conclusion (not that many haven't drawn it before me) that john adams was, by a ways, the best, the most formidable, the most knowledgeable, the most scholarly, the sharpest-edged intellect among the founders. one extremely neglected just virtuoso moment is a defence of the constitutions of government of the united states of america (it's a defense of the state constitutions (including his own constitution for massachusetts), written before the national constitution was ratified). it's a three-volume response to a three-page letter from the french thinker/statesman turgot that constitutes an exhaustive history of republican ideas. he's got all the roman historians, machiavelli, harrington, locke, montesquieu, and many others all in their original languages. he's got the swiss cantons, the italian city-states, the dutch republics, an exhaustive sense of english political history, and then there are the incas, zoroaster, india etc etc: an absolutely exhaustive history of republican ideas.

no other founder could have done this; none could even have assayed it. jefferson was a formidable intellect, but by comparison a dilettante. franklin was delightful and sharp as a tack, but not a scholar on this level. it's an intimidating book - though adams can be quite a delightful writer - but still it deserves a lot better than it has gotten; it's out of print, and has rarely even been issued as a book; people who read it usually read it as part of the complete works. well i daresay it needs a revival and a new scholarly edition. but that itself is a vast and intimidating project.

and adams' thought is the most influential on the shape of the american constitution, though all these guys were separation of powers type republicans of one sort of another. and i love his marriage best of all: he loved the fact that abby kicked ass.

update: well i guess it's not out of print if you're ready to drop $250. geez.

 

 

well maybe mubarak is leaving after all. quite the obscure situation! just to hit my cult of wolf blitzer thing: his interview with the egyptian ambassador to the u.s. just now was exemplary. polite, but really really pushing for the precise details.

i'll tell you why the obama admin is shitting bricks right at this moment. they were hoping to preserve the whole damn thing - the military and intelligence establishments, the basic control of the population - minus mubarak, as politicians the world over like to believe that swapping symbols or shifting rhetoric or something actually is a transformation. they're confused as between change and 'change.' really, that's the basic political delusion: yapping will make it so, or words and pictures are the only real things, or symbolic action is the realest action. this is precisely the sort of moment - when people are doing more than making good television commercials - that shows the limits of this bizarre delusion. they fantasize that you can just re-narrate the world or change everything with a better logo or something, or that there is nothing outside the text. this is a very this-era belief, our characteristic delusion: it's the essence of barack obama's approach, e.g. well, it breaks down everywhere allthetime. but sometimes you have to become aware of it, you get bitchslapped by concrete actualities. these folks will not be satisfied with a re-adjustment of the symbols or telling a different story. this must really bum out the pr machines that run the world. getting beaten by thugs: that'll teach you real quick that we are not the stories we tell.

suleiman: "do not listen to the satellite stations!" now there's a person who is accustomed to autocratic power. he seems to expect people to listen to whatever crap he may frame as an order.

one thing that would piss me off if i was an egyptian protestor is the extremely paternalistic tone of both mubarak and suleiman. he addresses them as 'children,' etc. i don't think you're going to really make it stick that that's 'cultural.'

give it up for the anti-patriot-act alliance of dennis kucinich and ron paul, dana rohrabacher and john lewis, waving around the constitution and making sense. now you're beginning at least to get a picture of what this tea party thing actually is. complicated, but with liberty at its heart. and it would be so so good to see a re-emergence of a left that is suspicious of state power and dedicated to freedom. i remember people like that!

 

tom friedman continues. he hopes that the army can persist in power. and he notices that the egypt revolt has nothing to do with freedom. it's about insufficient standardized testing, which accounts for the fact that egypt has fallen behind china as an engine of growth and capitulation. why don't people understand how hateful and totalitarian this worldview is? and it is precisely the worldview of the obama administration.

this restores my faith very slightly. at least someone has actually noticed! it absolutely could not be more obvious, from the sheer fact of unanimity, that this group of psychologists polled by haidt, believes only because of social cohesion among their demographic, that is for no reasons related to the truth of what they believe. any academic conference would yield the same result. what's really annoying in the case of profs is that they will then also continuously assert that anyone who disagrees is irrational or impervious to evidence. har har. you have to experience the unanimity, the pressure, the extreme arrogance all at once - that is, you have to be a member of the group who doesn't hop on the consensus - actually to see what this means and how it is enforced. as i say, these folks are supposed to be educators and experts. you'd be better off with the rankest group of rednecks, where there is a lot more diversity of opinion, much more capacity for independent thought, much more tolerance for diversity. 

i have few goals left in my pathetic, failed life. one of them, as veteran readers of this blog will recall, is not to die by auto-erotic asphyxiation. the other is not to die at the hampton inn after an injection designed to enlarge my buttocks. i may not be the david hume of the twenty-first century, but i feel that it's doable not to leave as my legacy the world's most, as it were, mortifying obit.

well, if the obamas' relationship is anything like mine have been, i wouldn't just take michelle's word for it that barack has stopped smoking. been on both ends of: smoking (etc)? of course not! yo what were you doing down there in the garage, over at her house, driving around in the car? oh, you know, adjusting the belts on the ride-on mower or whatever it may be. but smoking (etc)? i told you i quit! no secrets between you and me, michelle. don't you trust me?! i am deeply deeply offended.

and aside from all that, something tells me that michelle might be someone with whom many people - even the commander-in-chief of the greatest military the world has ever known - might try to avoid conflict at almost any cost. prosecuting the afghan conflict might seem easier, though of course buying time with big fibbing might also not be the best long-term strategy for conflict avoidance. cute and formidable is a hot combination, though, so i'm thinking the whole thing might have its...compensations.

al gore and keith olbermann will be quite a team. keith can simulate emotion while al simulates intellection.

i've been listening to jazz obsessively, and was listening to louie armstrong a couple of days ago. 10-year old jane: 'that louis armstrong person is everywhere! isn't he a champion bike racer? and he walked on the moon!' this stuff is very delightful; i got a lot of mileage out of marshall tito puente in the same vein.

you know the black-eyed peas' halftime show was amazing, with all those people drenched in led lights and the swirling lasers, a cast of thousands of robo-people and stuff. but looking back on it i just have to say it was excruciatingly tasteless. the music, if any, couldn't have mattered at all no matter what it was, and if 'love' was the logo they etched onto the field in light, it sure looked a lot more like 'money.' will.i.am made some sort of half-assed appeal to obama or something, but it didn't mean anything; he'd have done better to say something about egypt. but tahrir square vs dallas stadium yesterday would have been an exquisite contrast between meaning and meaninglessnes. and it really was meaningless: aesthetically and in every other respect empty. and when you get down to it what the hell was will.i.am wearing? a chrome toupee? and what really is the point of that body-armor thing? it looked like a convention of pudgy armadillos. i actually kind of like the black-eyed peas, but maybe they have no confidence that their own musical or performing abilities can actually keep people watching.

the whole look and sound is very 'post-human': you know, robotic, technological &c. but the post-human is turning out to be all-too-human: at the center of the gargantuan prostheses there's just this flawed little human body furiously working itself like a puppet. all the same glitches are there even more obviously because blown up to giant size: the twinned egomania and self-loathing, the infinite aspirations and the little-bitty actual reality. you know, start with will's little vocoder thing: it's robotic! it's cutting edge! it was ubiquitous in...1975. what fergie has done to make herself sort of seem like a beauty - even vast glowing shoulder-pads - hasn't actually worked. i don't think we should push on to the post-human until we can muster a little more dignity or self-awareness as humans.

 

it's not easy to root for a team that sucks, such as my redskins. however, there is a certain pride in it as well, and when i was a kid the redskins sucked beautifully, with players such as sonny jurgensen, with the beer belly and the arm of gold. (i had a pet named 'sonny gerbilson.') for one thing, you've got earn the pleasure of victory, and 'fans' that hop on when the team's winning and off when not are worth nothing. so when the skins were good in the george allen era or under joe gibbs (also an eminent nascar owner and classic rock steady record producer (har har)), one felt vindicated. but some ways of sucking are just hard to deal with, and that would be the redskins in the dan snyder era. you know, the league's highest payroll and a 4-12 record; offensive futility on a historic level; $100 million dollar free agents who pause in the middle of a play to get a nap and commit random assaults; an owner who sues when citicized on the grounds of anti-semitism, etc.) i find myself unable to hop off, but i would if i could.

the loathsome thomas friedman argues that the problem with egypt isn't its totalitarianism, but the fact that its totalitarianism is outdated. they need an chinese/singapore hyper-capitalist squishy totalitarianism if they are to remain competitive in the global economy of the 21st century. something tells me that obama reads friedman's column every sunday, groaning in a standardized ecstasy, and redoubles his commitment to winning the future. 

just a few minutes ago, cbs published a story with this headline: clinton advocates 'orderly transition' in egypt. see, my view is that you actually publish news; a random sentence by an average demonstrator would be more interesting. you can't make news out of continuous extreme redundancy, much less the 1,235th repetition of the same weasel words by the secretary of state, especially when you're getting precisely the same sentence every 30 seconds out of every administration official, every member of congress, every u.n official, every world leader and their press secretaries etc. the fact that the person who says it is important doesn't make it news unless it is something rather than nothing. you've got to coax these people toward content; publishing their white noise only encourages more of the same.

my daughter jane is an optimist. i tend toward the other extreme. she often frames the matter in terms of the classic chestnut of whether the glass is half empty or half full, which famously seems to be an insoluble dilemma. however, she has solved it. if you've just poured the juice into a glass up to half, then the glass is half full. if you've poured it full and just drained it off by half, then the glass is half empty. voila!

notes: according to wittgenstein, meaning is use, and this is precisely why and when we would actually describe a glass containing liquid at the halfway point as half full or half empty. second, this is an example of a wider idea: that the facts depend on an unfolding context, that truth is historical or that often isolating a truth from an unfolding temporal context is not possible or loses what is most important. what is true is a matter of an unfolding situation which itself emerges in a wider context.

and the moral lesson is that you should never fill your glass all the way up: fill it twice halfeway instead, and then the world is a lovely optimistic thing where stuff always turns out well! 

well, perhaps i was wrong about a crackdown on tahrir square today. that's good!