cheese it, the cops!

maybe i just don't understand the meaning of leadership. obama's visit to tuscaloosa today (then off to the scuttled shuttle launch!) was a bigger story than the aftermath of the disaster. ok he was there, but the practical steps he took he took from dc last night. it's a constant stream of mayors, governors, senators expressing their shock and resolve in the very same scripted words. excuse me, but that is not the story. cover any serious practical measures they take, or new actual information that they announce,but it's far more relevant to hear someone who just lost their town than to hear richard shelby with 'we will emerge stronger' or deeply regretting the loss of life or whatever it may be. i can deeply regret the loss of life for myself. i don't need an authority to validate my belief that there has been a disaster or to tell me what to feel, and neither does cnn. and i don't need another dozen rehearsals of the same words from last time, the time before, etc etc. our model is that something is only real when the president says so or something. no wonder we end up expecting these people to fix everything - gas prices say. reality is for us only exactly what they say it is: an astounding power for people pretty much just like everyone else.

this piece by niall ferguson, arguing that now that we have literate populations and the internet, we don't need rulers, is extremely interesting. now i want to point out that a remarkably similar argument was made with regard to the printing press by a radical and radically underappreciated jeffersonian democrat: john taylor of caroline in an inquiry into the principles and policy of the government of the united states (1814). 

the first and most pointed section of taylor's inquiry is an attack on john adams's (and not only his of course) notion of a natural aristocracy. taylor strives to prove that inequalities in all the suggested dimensions are enforced social structures and do not reflect natural differences, or in other words that political hierarchies are not inevitable.

Superior abilities constitutes one among the enumerated causes of a natural aristocracy. This cause is evidently as fluctuating as knowledge and ignorance; and its capacity to produce aristocracy must depend upon this fluctuation. The aristocracy of superior abilities will be regulated by the extent of space between knowledge and ignorance. As the space contracts or widens, it will be diminished or increased; and if aristocracy may be thus diminished, it follows that it may be thus destroyed

No certain state of knowledge is a natural or unavoidable quality of man. As an intellectual or moral quality, it may be created, destroyed, or modified by human power. Can that which may be created, destroyed, and modified by human power, be a natural and inevitable cause of aristocracy?

It has been modified in an extent which Mr. Adams does not even compute, by the art of printing....The peerage of knowledge or abilities, in consequence of its enlargement by the effects of printing, can no longer be collected and controlled in the shape of a noble order or a legislative department. The great body of this peerage must remain scattered throughout every nation, by the enjoyment of the benefit of the press.

 

thanks henry!

p.s. i cannot believe what happened to tuscaloosa, a town i lived in for a couple of years and that i thought was a very good place to be.

i was happy to see that the death toll of the royal wedding has reached over 300. the aesthetic toll, however, is world-annihilating. sometimes the juxtapositions at the top of the front page are just odd.

hey so long poly styrene. 

 

one great thing about x-ray spex was that they brought horns into punk, courtesy of lorna logic. poly herself brought a much-needed, bent-girl feminism to the table.

bashar really has his fan club, like hillary clinton and whoever put together this site, describing him as "a younger, more moderate, more progressive Arab voice."

As one of the self-styled, “next generation” of Middle East leaders, like King Abdullah of Jordan, Bashar, with his technological X-Box savvy and love of Phil Collins, has managed to weather the domestic and regional storms thus far.  One of the youngest Middle Eastern leaders in power, he is likely to be around for a long time, and he along with his smokin’ hot wife is certainly going to be changing the landscape of the region.

i must say that the phil collins thing should have made us all see that bashar el-assad is a monster, even with his smokin wife. soon, perhaps, he will himself be smokin. he's earned it.

well, gene, i do refer to everyone from james madison to benito mussolini as a 'statist,' and to myself as an 'anti-statist.' this does not of course entail that madison and mussolini agree on everything, but it does pick out the fact that they agree on one big thing. (of course for another purpose or at another moment, i use words like 'republican' or 'fascist' and distinguish the positions carefully.) one reason i think the usage is worthwhile is because the political state seems inevitable to most people at this point in human history, and the entire political spectrum is conceived as ranging from left to right as varieties of ideas about how to fund and arrange the government. one might be concerned for certain purposes with what these positions have in common, as well as about what they don't. it's important to keep suggesting that there are problems with the state in general, to try to make people see that there could be things outside or after it. 

i wonder what he thinks about lumping jews, christians, muslims, and hindus together as 'theists,' while sketching out a position that doesn't believe there is a god or any gods as 'atheism.' if that was your only taxonomy of religion, or if you just flatly denied that there were any differences between jews and hindus, that would be unfortunate. for other purposes it might be important to distinguish your own position from all of these together, or point to what they have in common.

thanks, adam!

we've got to get over this living god business, whether it's selassie or schneerson, obama or lennon, david foster wallace or kurt cobain (oops some of these people are dead).

The saffron-robed Sathya Sai Baba had a huge following with ashrams in more than 126 countries. He was said to perform miracles — conjuring rings and watches and “vibhuti,” a sacred ash that his followers applied on their foreheads — from his overgrown and unkempt Afro-style hair.

um, yeah! give me a couple of says to practice up and i'll conjure rings and watches too, albeit rather badly. i wonder if he did card tricks.

if i was in the business of endorsing presidential candidates, i might endorse gary johnson. so, so much better than anyone else out there at the moment.

for some reason, every media outlet favors the formulation 'forces loyal to moammar gaddafi,' as also to assad or mubarak. i think they should stop reading minds. it seems particularly odd with regard to libya, where a goodly portion of gaddafi's force evidently consists of mercenaries. and 'loyalty' is actually the name for a virtue: i notice that carmelo anthony - who had an amazing game against the celtics last night - has it tattooed on his arm. but his approach is stop snitchin, which i sort of doubt is at the heart of the practice of assad 'loyalists.'

anyway, just go for 'the forces of moammar gaddafi.' it's neutral, shorter, and picks out the same people.

one symptom of the crisis crisis is all these forty or fifty-year states of emergency. i like the idea of spending decades panicking. i assume bashar al-assad has been screaming in unreasoning terror since birth.

perhaps the state of emergency was imposed and kept in place for so long as a response to the gluten crisis. or the dilbert crisis. or the crisis crisis itself.

if i was interested in starting a...resistance movement, i would proceed by simulated terrorism. such a procedure is suggested by things like this, where i'm thinking the authorities evacuated a mall or at least closed in en masse to get a guy wandering around a mall with a rifle, when it was in fact a sap with an umbrella. i'm telling you our hyper-vigilant security condition allows anyone to shut down any facility, or indeed bring to gridlock any major metropolitan area, without actually doing anything that would directly harm anyone. (of course, harm would be done; and yet it would be the response and not the act that caused it.) a few random backpacks with goodwill books or gideon bibles could shut down any transit system. you could disrupt whole military installations or airports with the right umbrella or some empty boxes. not that i'm advocating this, mind you, at least not until i work up a coherent set of demands (perhaps i'd start with: keep chocolate milk in the schools). but hyper-vigilance makes you vulnerable to freakouts; it is in fact a form of unreasoning fear. in a way, you'd give a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that a whole society can be mobilized into a surveillance machine to prevent terrorism.

has anyone in american public life - never mind politics - endured a more constant and extreme flood of vituperation than has sarah palin? it's interesting to think about what sp means. but even more interesting to think about what that means. it's like she's joseph mccarthy, charles manson, and lady gaga all rolled into one. at least she's not george michael (who comes right after gaga on that entertainment vid). now they're criticizing her for not liking all the criticism. imagine that!

chris draws our attention to this ecstatic reception of the obama speech i called 'debased schlock.' it would surprise me if the founders had in mind the cradle-to-grave welfare state, but i guess they wanted to form a more perfect union movement.

re three cups of tea let me make a couple of remarks on memoir.

first off, though we think we can, we can't actually measure the truth of what someone's saying by just listening to what they say. this might make you see that truth has to be a relation to an external reality. that someone really really sounds sincere, or that you immediately connect to the voice or the content, has little tendency to show that what is saying is true. this is even more the case when you are reading than when you are sitting across from someone who is speaking. truth is not internal to discourse or the way you shape a story.

second, the idea that our lives are narratives or, applying the thing more specifically, that a memoir should take basically the form of a novel, is an extreme invitation to actually write fiction. the late manning marable's malcolm x: a life of reinvention apparently suggests that malcolm exaggerated his own criminal past. that would be typical, and one might also think about a million little pieces or even augustine's confessions: these tales of redemption gain shape from the degree of degradation overcome. but that is of course only one of myriad temptations.

i think that for that reason, the publishing industry has to take some responsibility: they want or need the thing to take a coherent, dramatic narrative shape. they actually select what memoirs to publish partly on this basis, and then they push authors into various rigid narrative formats. they view the whole of their fiction and non-fiction catalogues as story-telling. they ought to think about how that distorts not only memoir, but history and biography, for example. what we immediately need is a richer set of models and a little critical scrutiny of this idea that everything always boils down to story. and readers might need to examine their tolerance for actual facts, or polemics, or arguments, etc: none of which can simply be shoved into a narrative form without loss and falsification.

one might speculate that mortenson made up/exaggerated bits in order to illustrate or emphasize his moral stance, which is where the urgency and the sincerity actually originates. it's more in the nature of an allegory than a straight memoir. but perhaps people wouldn't have been so moved and persuaded if he'd actually just straightforwardly presented the moral stance or argument. that's a problem among readers as well as for mortenson's truthfulness.

there can be more-or-less true stories, and allegory is a legit literary form. but you can't insist on allegory, and a story isn't really a very good reason to form an opinion. and if you run the story into an allegory, you'll erase many realities and invent others. it has an element of condescension: you couldn't follow or pay attention if i actually made my point, so let's try pretending.

unbelievably, abc has canceled all my children and one life to live, though general hospital (my on-and-off addiction since the 70s) survives for now. i'd be sorry to see the long era of the soap at at an end. here's a gallery of actors who got their start in those soaps. elsewhere: demi moore was a luke love interest on gh and the lovely robin wright was kickin ass on santa barbara, the great soap from the 80s.

 

the discourse about failed states is calculated to disturb an anarchist, of course, so i like that piece, which contains actual information. the whole argument of gates or hillary is that it's self-evidently desirable or necessary to have a government with complete military control over its territory. now the chaos of somalia would be hard to live in. but obviously a powerful government brings with it its own little problems.

american political rhetoric is just the most debased worthless schlock that can be imagined. so in his speech today, obama said he wanted to eliminate tax deductions for the rich. he referred to these as 'tax expenditures' and thereafter he referred to tax increases as 'reducing spending in the tax code.' by this 'reasoning' taxing everyone at 100% would be dramatic reduction in government spending. or this: one minute he was saying that how much tax you pay shouldn't depend on how good an accountant you can hire. the next he was saying wealthy people wouldn't mind paying 'their fair share.' 'they want to give back to the country that has given them so much.' just a flat contradiction. i do not understand how people who talk like that can possibly expect anyone to listen to what they're saying. they're not trying to inform you; they're not even trying to persuade you; they're just trying to manipulate you, and that could not possibly be more inyourface obvious. and since it is, it can't even possibly have its intended manipulative effect. it's not that you don't believe what they're saying; it's that it's conceptually impossible to believe what they're saying. 

and these were substantive moments; most of the speech was foggy hooha about the america we all believe in and the greatest country in the history of the world and...winning the future. these are sentences he's produced by rote for years no matter what the topic: whether it's the oil spill or the inaugural, don't matter. it's like listening to the dying repetitive senseless mumbling of a victim of alzheimer's.

i haven't been a terrorist since high school. but if anything could get me blowing stuff up randomly, it would obama and his whole staff repeating the phrase 'win the future.' just once more, man. once more. don't make me come over there. there's a thin line between a hyper-violent random political killer and a very emphatic editor. ok, i'm the latter, but geez y'all are irritating.

now that i'm trying to avoid the nytimes, i'm having some trouble finding reasonable sites. current headlines on slate:

What's the Deal with Moms Who Won't Wash Their Hair?

Trick-Shot Doc: You Won't' Believe what This Guy Can Do With a Tongue Depressor

Ode to a Composting Toilet

Prince William's College of Love: The Bizarre Sex Toy Collection at St. Andrews University, Where He and Kate Middleton Met

Are Those Texas Wildfires Really Setting Horses on Fire?

David Foster Wallace's Stunning Critique of Boredom

that sex toy thing is probably the most gratuitous headline ever written, like 'insane! the schizo dude located 23 miles south/southwest of kate middleton's dress designer.' who'd have thought that boredom required a critique? much less an interminable critique by our greatest postmodern intellect and transcendent genius novelist? i am literally stunned, so much so that i'm tempted to write a critique of stunnedness. if david foster wallace hadn't hanged himself, i'd hang him, if only to relieve the meta-tedium.

 

so someone in iowa asked michelle bachmann the following question: "Congresswoman, some groups — including this one, I believe — have argued that homosexuality is a public health crisis akin to second-hand smoking. I was wondering if you agreed with that."
   She responded, "Um. I — I don’t have an answer on that. I don’t have an answer. Why don’t I have another question." 

jonathan capehart is offended. and i imagine if you prodded bachmann on sexual-orientation-type issues, only disturbing things would come out. however, i want to point out that this question might flummox anyone. in what way is gayness like second-hand smoke? and the idea that second-hand smoke is a public-health crisis embodies so many pseudo-ideas that it is itself a labyrinth. so i'd have responded more or less the same way, probably. 

truly we're in a 'crisis' crisis.

 

hey i've been blogging for quite some time: since late 2004, as a matter of fact. but anyway eyeofthestorm has gone over 750,000 lifetime page views. there have been some spikes lately. i should keep endorsing airstrikes here and there if i want more traffic: at any rate there were nearly 5,000 views on april 4 for whatever reason, and though the average over the whole life of the blog is 330, we've been doing quite a bit better in recent months (for a long time it was around 150-200). now a day at 800 or 1000 isn't unusual.

there have been about 3,500 total posts, 8,500 comments.

anyway, thanks for reading and commenting and stuff! i don't know what i'd do without this outlet; probably be even more obnoxious to the people around me. i'm sorry if it's gotten repetitive over the years; obviously i have my little hobbyhorses, limited zones of expertise and so on. but so many comments have been useful, sharp, creative, or gotten me thinking in different directions about different things. i'm not a person with a big group of close friends; this community means a lot to me.

sincerely,

crispy

let me say this: if there is government education, then what your children eat in school - as well of course as what they learn and how they learn - must be political questions. if you federalize the thing - for example by creating a department of education - then they must be political questions to be decided, let's say, by john boehner and harry reid. if you're expending taxes, the policies must be answerable to the people, as their will is expressed in their representatives. if you fund the arts by taxpayer dollars, then what is art and what art there should be is a matter for joe biden or michelle bachman to decide. it ought to be; it has to be. then you will be subject to alternating political correctness and reactionary philistinism, etc. well, you asked for it; you demanded it; swallow it without chocolate.

admirable adam directs our attention to this extremely excellent anti-tax post on unqualified offerings.

see, this is why public education should immediately be banned.

this, brought to our attention by lisa, is interesting. and it's worth saying that, like the whole of the american left, feminism has mutated from an assertion of individual rights and a vision of individual liberation into a collectivist discourse (which always proceeds in terms of rules and restrictions accomplished by coercion). but the original impulse of american feminism, as expressed by figures such as elizabeth cady stanton, lucretia mott, susan b. anthony, voltairine de cleyre, emerged from the same world that produced radical abolitionism and the american peace movement: a discourse of liberty and self-sovereignty, and the idea that a husband can't own a wife any more than a white person can own a black person. (stanton: "We ask no more than the poor devils in the scripture asked, 'Let us alone.' In mercy, let us take care of ourselves, our property, our children, and our homes.')

i think one thing we should say, however, is that if yale males are out there chanting 'no means yes and yes means anal,' you're well within your rights to stage a counter-march and to confront them with their stupidity and extreme wrongness, or to ask them how they'd feel about having such notions applied to themselves, by other men, say. oh no! bruno!

that there is country music. the arrangement is based on billy sherrill's work with tammy wynette.

if i had to guess right now who the republican nominee will be in 2012, i'd guess tim pawlenty. he's kind of boring, but then again, boring can look pretty good next to rattletraps such as palin or bachmann. mitt will go down to his healthcare thingy and to extreme kendollishness, which he can't seem to ameliorate no matter what; i would think he's unacceptable to teaparty types on both counts. jon huntsman is interesting, but he's got problems too, including serving in the obama admin. huckabee has problems to the right, and even though i think he'd be a formidable general-election candidate, people don't seem to think he's running. newt? not. pawlenty is the only one right now who i can picture the whole party unifying behind, and he's been running since the last election. my impression is actually of a pretty bright, articulate person, though a rather unprepossessing one. but his very geekiness is somehow comforting, and you don't picture a scarlet fingernail on the button where you've got no idea what might happen on a given evening. 

this here is a pretty good summary of the seriously untenable situation of american statism, by robert samuelson.

i think if you ask yourself what could actually give other people the right to tell you what to wear, you'll see the problem with the state in a nutshell: it is entirely without moral justification. it has no defensible theoretical underpinnings. its overwhelming existence is perfectly proportioned to the lack of any actual reasons justifying that existence. is it because certain outfits violate a social contract? i'm not going to bother killing that again. is it because we are social creatures and the state embodies our collective, organic values? well then you'll be happy to dispense with the coercion, which is a lurid self-refutation of your theory. i'd urge all french men and women who own scarves or bandanas - even naked authoresses -  to cover their faces today, to express their shame as well as their civil disobedience.

henry adams is really an astonishing historian. he's way into the mechanics of legislation, the details of economy and demography: the dedication to the real detail is exemplary. and yet the characterizations are incredibly compelling and vivid. jefferson is beautifully delineated: fairly and definitively, with all the problems and all the compelling qualities. but also aaron burr or hamilton or napoleon or charles iv of spain and many fascinating figures now entirely forgotten.

the histories never take on a merely narrative or sing-song story quality in the contemporary fashion, but they nevertheless deploy characters in a compelling way, and track them through events in a manner that connects them and makes them comprehensible. and then there is the writing: full of sharp and felicitous and unique formulations, both clear and highly nuanced. and often very funny: gentle or ironical or even sarcastic; by turns cynical and deployed in the service of a kind of idealism.

one funny thing: he doesn't seem to want to write the name 'john adams'; it's always 'the previous president' and the like.

notre dame went well: threw down some immortal technique and anarchist political aesthetics to the catholics. obviously i am disappointed that there's not a permanent government shutdown. i expected the leaders of the legislative branch to resign in embarrassment after a sudden realization of who they actually are. i'm reading henry adams' beautifully-written and -researched history of the united states of america during the administrations of thomas jefferson. jefferson came in and eliminated all internal taxes (funding the federal government exclusively through excises and tariffs on imported goods), while his treasury secretary albert gallatin (a biography of whom henry adams also wrote) launched a systematic effort to eliminate the national debt. jeff wrote: 'Our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very unexpensive one - a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants." tea par-tay! (on the other hand, he was our least christian president, regarded as one of the most extreme religious skeptics in the world. try that in contemporary american politics.)