cheese it, the cops!

sarah palin, american

sarah palin is a formidable candidate, and i think that's because, for better or worse, she's just so american. no one in contemporary politics has her mastery of the symbolism of america. she hangs out on the frontier, outdoors, shooting stuff. she rides into rolling thunder on a motorcycle. she's on a bus tour of mt. vernon, gettysburg, etc; i think this media blitz is much better than tv pundits seem to believe. she's dramatically, pointedly, white. listen to that whitegirl voice! it's like somebody reached deep into li'l wayne and pulled him inside out. her leadership style is as chaotic as freedom itself. her rhetoric is non-stop founding: individual rights; live free or die. her family is both a traditional and a contemporary american family. she didn't go to yale and - putting it mildly - she's no smarter than you are. every candidate between here and nov '12 will be talking american exceptionalism: sarah embodies it in all its glorious weirdness. she's exactly who that great-because-he-sucks baltimore-american, john waters, would cast as president of the united states (of america!). and there's a hole on the right among the existing republican candidates.

really the palin admin is not going to be that bad! i don't think she can be more expensive, or more belligerent and warlike, or more yes! to the patriot act than obama. true, true, there might be a leetle issue with your bornthisway gayness, or that abortion you've been planning. but the tv news will be mightily improved.

dob bylan is 70

bob dylan is 70, etc. i don't think there has ever been a more overrated figure in the arts, every assessment by greil marcus etc huger in its gaseous emptiness than the last. can a whole generation be a charlatan? it can, if it's the generation emblematized by bob dylan. the daily beast: 'All along the way, he wrote songs that would last forever. “Mr. Tambourine Man” was an eternal plea for the sublime.' maybe that's a joke or a parody? really, people in a consensus, especially one the actual occasion or content of which is so flimsy, just enter into a hyperbole contest to see who can develop the dullest, most mechanical, most overblown, most flatulent expression of the unanimous jive. 

so long gil scott-heron. i hope he died without cocaine in his system. i was never much of an aficianado, though of course i used to listen to 'the revolution will not be televised.' i think he's mischaracterized as the father of hip hop, though he did spoken-word over music. (i'd say the same about last poets.) i'm not certain that the people who actually originated hip hop, such a kool herc and grandmaster flash, had ever heard these folks, though they may have. but the fundamental source is jamaican dub and dj music. hip hop is only in place when you have turntabling/sampling, and if you listen to early emcees like the cold crush brothers, it certainly would be hard to detect an influence from people like heron, in style or content: early hip hop emceeing was characterized by extreme rhythmic structure and rhyme that just wasn't there in heron or last poets, and there's almost no politics for awhile: it's a party style. one might say he anticipated hip hop to some extent, and he may even have been an influence on the political turn in the late 80s (as in krs one), or on later use of jazz by people like guru, but even on that i would take some convincing. that's not say the stuff isn't good. that last album - i'm new here - was quite something.

splittism contd

the chinese authorities respond to splittists.

splittism

from the inspiring pages of the people's daily.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met in Almaty Friday with his Kyrgyz counterpart Ruslan Kazakbayev to discuss regional peace and security.

During their talks on the sidelines of the meeting of Foreign Ministers' Council of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Yang said that China is ready to work with Kyrgyzstan within the SCO and other multilateral frameworks to jointly combat the "three evil forces" of terrorism, splittism and extremism in a bid to safeguard regional peace, security and stability.

a lot of times it's hard to tell whether there's a translation problem, or whether china is ruled by lobotomy patients, or whether chinese culture really is grotesque because, as people often assert, it denies or actually successfully expunges the human individual. chinese people are naturally all merged with each other; they are non-individuals, as though god dropped them into a blender and hit frappe. that's why westerners often yearn toward the china they imagine, or that the chinese state portrays. the fantasy of politics, in rousseau, hegel, marx, hitler, in left right and center, etc is self-annihilation: becoming one with others, as the fantasy of religion is becoming one with god etc.

at any rate, i love the coinage 'splittist,' which the chinese always throw at the dalai lama. so in this sentence, the idea is that he is equivalent in his evil to osama bin laden or something: self-evidently a refusal to merge entirely with the chinese state is the essence of evil. but i am a proud splittist. i wonder whether anyone owns 'splittist.com'? who will join me in splittism? we can all be one in our resolution to split and keep splitting, both to fragment the society and to take our leave. we can split with each other as an expression of our solidarity. and then we can each permit ourselves to fragment within.

thesaurus.com gives nice guidelines for splittist action: bifurcate, branch, break, burst, cleave, come apart, come undone, crack, dichotomize, disband, disjoin, dissever, disunite, diverge, divide, divorce, fork, gape, give way, go separate ways, hack, isolate, open,part, part company, put asunder, rend, rip, rive, separate, sever, slash, slit, snap, splinter, sunder, tear, whack.

a rich plan of action.

see ya!

Occasional guest/pirate bloger...

Crispin has now got a great burden, as the sole remaining articulate, anarchist philosopher cum 3 card monte dealer in the world of...blogs, the articulate, the anarchists, the philosophers since IOZ has probably announced either his apotheosis or his retirement from this stuff. Me, I'm studying to be a homeless street musician. Anway, an occasional visit, and in this case to help a bit with Crispin's hard work, and turn on readers of this blog to a really marvelous resource.

 

 
From the Internet Archive, a live recent performance of Alejandro Escovedo and band. Escovedo is a fascinating artist, who has done lots of gigs in places like Austin, Huntsville State Prison, various places like CBGBs and the Democratic National Convention that nominated our current president. The Internet Archive is a marvelous tool for musicians, researchers, and people who just want to noodle around in books, live music, early 78s, speeches and whatever else they've managed to throw up there.

Enjoy!

against 2012

the fact that ron wyden and ron paul are working against the continued expansion of government surveillance, or that they are not perfectly comfortable with the new national motto - "report suspicious activity" - is kind of a...model. i have to say i live in fear of the 2012 campaign, which - if the congressional election this week in new york is any indication - will continue the terminal degeneration of american political discourse into meaningless idiocy. really, i don't quite understand how something like the medicare debate can be so entirely polarized when it's conducted in terms this debased: there's nothing you believe if you agree with either side. if you're not actually saying anything, i can't agree or disagree with you, and the same result follows if there is no you: that's what we professors of communications actually mean by 'messaging': annihilation. 'message' is the opposite of 'meaning.' i hope that messaging is an expression of contempt for the electorate: that would indicate that the people who do it have the capacity to do something else, that they could say something substantial if they thought the audience had minds. surely the contempt of the electorate for the messagers is a reasonable response either way. we're right back to al gore focus-grouping 'risky scheme' and then basing a campaign on the phrase, throwing it down a thousand times. the policies are irrelevant to these 'people'; the only thing they care about is saying what other devices like themselves are saying. they might as well just sing along to nursery rhymes or maybe chorus 'gaga oohlala' for the next 18 months; that would be a more authentic expression of your unity with one another. where's the off switch? just smile at each other or slap one another on the back: there's no call to use words, 'ending medicare as we know it' or 'bankrupting the country' etc. the twin lineups of mp3 players all saying the same words in unison themselves embody an argument for anarchism, or at least an outright refutation of the very idea of democracy. if everything you say is just an attempt to manipulate the electorate by muttering the right words in order, i say quit. go away. 

sovereigns

well, i'm not down with the violence, but i like the sovereign citizens' approach of revolution through paperwork: bringing resistance to where the bureaucracy lives. and they sure are good lookin.

meanwhile, i'm indexing my book on josiah warren, whose central concept was the sovereignty of the individual. perhaps he didn't quite grasp the richness and beauty of the applications.

thanks, adam!

tornadic rhetoric

this is quite the rhetorical deluge by bill mckibben. i just want to point out that while it is important to make connections, it is important not to make them willy-nilly, or get obsessed with them. harold camping makes connections. every conspiracy theorist gives you an 'argument' like this: coincidence? in such cases, one good question is: what could actually happen to make you doubt it? or has anything ever happened that gave you pause, or that didn't confirm your belief, or was in tension with it? if not, it's not empirical. now, i don't think mckibben is really giving an argument, and i do think that the crazy-bad meteorology should make you wonder. ok, i'm wondering! now the actual argument would have to be a systematic causal account of the connection, using, i would suggest, something besides retroactive computer modeling wherein we ask: how could all these events be explained by climate change? that is, we need information that doesn't assume the conclusion is true. is the weather - the droughts, the floods, the tornadoes, the fires, the hurricanes, etc - worse than it was two hundred years ago? alright convince me (don't just bludgeon me). are simultaneous droughts and floods, fires and deluges, explicable on the same causal basis? (ok, maybe we need some computer modeling after all.) one thing i want to point out about the tornadoes: partly it's a matter of bad luck: you could get an outbreak of ef4 tornadoes, and there'd be minimal loss of life or property if they didn't rake a big town. in fact that is usually the case, and it would be a hard argument i think that the route of the storm through tuscaloosa or joplin rather than the vast countrysides that surround them was itself caused by global warming. the death tolls and the images of nuclear-blast-style devastation are extremely compelling, but not in themselves evidence of the effects of climate change. but i'll go with bill this far: i definitely think we should be wondering. 

i've had a mixed response to cornel west over the years. there were great essays in race matters, and he could actually do some interesting philosophy and history of philosophy, as in the american evasion of philosophy. and he had his inspirational pastoral mode, as in the at-times incandescent prophesy deliverance! i've never heard a better speaker at a philosophy conference. however, i'd say i've lost the faith. the blowup with lawrence summers indicated rather bloated egos in both men. but this stuff with obama has gotten really strange. 

Focusing on Obama and race, West said: “I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men . . . It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation.”

(i hear west from time to time on tavis smiley, and i have to say this 'my brother' thing is getting old; it begins to sound to me like 'comrade': it could express something inspiring if it wasn't autonomic.) this is incoherent, to begin with. a fear of being a white man with black skin is definitely not the same thing as fearing free black men. now, there are good reasons for progressive people to be disappointed with obama, among other things on race: west brought up incarceration rates, which we should all worry about. but to frame it in such a personal psychological way, as a black man's fear of free black men, just seems gratuitous, and bizarrely personal. 

During the 2008 campaign, West said, he traveled to 65 campaign events for the presidential candidate. But West complains that he was not given inauguration tickets for his brother and mother and that Obama did not return his phone calls.

ok one has to suppose that when west says bo is afraid of free black men, he means himself, this fear being expressed by not coughing up the tickets for the fam. what i want to add is that that lawrence summers was a or the key economic policy guy for the first two years; this makes you wonder about west's comment about obama being 'a puppet of wall street.' again, not that there might not be a point, it's just that this really looks like it is polluted by egomania, a series of perceived personal slights. i just want to point out that - though i don't know what, if anything, west is ingesting - he certainly has looked stoned every time i've seen him in the last few years. maybe that's my fear of a free black man.

objectivity

one thing that bothers me - though i'm also capable of getting it wrong - is the use of the nominative case of the pronoun in situations where the objective case is called for: "frieda met with james and i,' for example (should be 'james and me'). 'debbie bought the napalm for she and i' ('her' or 'herself and me'). i seem to hear this more and more, and see it in writing, too, even among, um, professors. what bothers me is that it's pseudo-educated: wrong, yet pretentious. it comes from a punctilious observation of grammatical correctness, leading ironically to error. in fact, i find it easier to tolerate the opposite mistake, which i used to throw down habitually: 'her and me went to the weapons outlet': obviously wrong, but proceeding from an intention to be non-pretentious, slangy. 

the republican field

believe it or not, i was standing around yesterday morning on the front porch of a (classic) general store in rural virginia, drinking coffee with a bunch of conservative old fuddy-duddies (their own self-description). this included some high-level tea party organizers, the occasional former cabinet secretary, recovering ambassador, federal judge. and one guy (whom i'm not quite naming because i didn't ask permission) who's an extremely well-known, pretty far-right political organizer/activist/consultant, famous for his mastery of direct mail in the campaigns of ronald reagan. i must say i found the atmosphere refreshing, since i live in a world of absolute left unanimity. (no doubt if i was around such people a lot, i'd launch. but meanwhile i was basically interested in listening.)

alright he was bummed, but not terribly bummed, that mitch daniels is out, and he seemed to take more seriously than most of the guys standing around the 'my wife said no' explanation. ('if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy,' he very sensibly pointed out.) he didn't regard bachmann or palin as serious people, though i would think his politics lines up pretty well with theirs. he dismissed romney and huntsman as entirely, obviously unacceptable. on pawlenty, he was ambiguous. he waved him off by saying that 'these country club republicans are so over.' on the other hand, he didn't rule him out outofhand, which kind of backs up my argument that pawlenty might well be the last man standing as the only guy that no one among republicans just hates.

he was funny on newt: "we were placing bets on whether he'd self-destruct on monday or thursday. i had monday. i won twenty bucks!'

also there was universal reserved respect for ron paul, and my dude said that 'what people don't understand is that he doesn't want to be president; it's an educational effort.' of course, none of these folks is down with paul on 'social issues.' (personally i think people are going to be surprised at paul's traction over the next year.)

what might be newsy is that he was saying he's urging jim demint to run. and he says there are others doing the same. i haven't heard much noise around a demint presidential bid. he's perhaps the single most rock-ribbed conservative in the senate. the tea party guys were nodding along enthusiastically (though the ambassador and the cabinet secretary seemed less happy at the prospect), and i'd have to say that if palin doesn't run, and bachmann undergoes a much-deserved quick fade, it seems almost inevitable that someone will emerge from the right of the party to try to stop romney. nor do i think that it's impossible that someone like demint could be the nominee. (the wisdom is that pawlenty, romney, and huntsman have to 'swing right' to capture 'the base.' but the base, one would think, is opposed to swingers.)

meanwhile the tea party people are trying to figure out how to educate and mobilize what they described as a movement without leaders, a movement of people most of whom got into politics two years ago, and who don't know where to focus their dissatisfaction. one guy was talking about going with 'audit the fed and the pentagon.' 'tell these people that the pentagon has never been audited, and they go nuts!' another was pushing obama's abuse of the war powers act as an emerging central issue. i must say the anti-militarist angle is interesting, and it shows you the strangeness and ambiguity of the american political spectrum.

austerity and krugman's surprising agreement with himself

krug starts his column out with : 'i often complain, with reason, about x.' which is a nice rhetorical flourish wherein his agreement with himself begins to constitute a consensus. but i really think, with ample justification, that what's happening in europe tends to undermine those doctrines on which krugman agrees with krugman. i'm not sure how you can exactly be an actual economist while also being this much of a partisan hack. the reason the european situation challenges the krug approach is because krugman has been an extreme cheerleader for government debt. now he's an extreme opponent of 'austerity measures.' but even the socialist government in spain has had to face the music in some form: you just can't manufacture money and give everybody everything. krugman refutes those 'republicans' who think that defaulting on the debt would be 'no big deal' (i'm not sure who he means, actually), while if i understand him he's also saying that the right approach to debt-well-beyond gdp in the eu is to force creditors to take 'haircuts': to accept less than they lent etc. that is default, bankruptcy, etc. i think krugman's position is actually this: keep borrowing. raise the debt ceiling beyond infinity. you can always ditch out later. but if anyone stated it that way who had actual responsibility, no one would buy government securities, and we'd spin into bankruptcy instantaneously. if you really think that austerity programs etc are just right-wing capitalist opportunism, then i'd say: increase taxes and borrowing, and see what actually does happen to your economy. well, they already have in europe.

even an anti-capitalist, i think, can see that a government that literally spends more than the whole economy produces is in the long run impossible. really, we'll all learn this the hard way, i suspect.

snitchin

so one might still be a bit disappointed, though hardly surprised, that lance armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs. but i also have to say that the network of tattle-tales and informers is not exactly wholesome, either. that's one problem with this and various other kinds of drug enforcement (and public education, for example): there are very good reasons that no one likes a snitch, and very good reasons to not try to create a society of snitches by pressuring people to become turncoats, or to manifest loyalty (under pressure) to authorities or institutions rather than to the people in their immediate vicinity.

or get out the way

assad leads the reform.

israeli patriots running for president of the united states

few things are more disturbing than the approach of american politicians to israel. indeed they often seem to be actual agents - spokesmen, mouthpieces - of the israeli government, repeating its formulations and recapitulating its rigidity mechanically. every consideration of this matter in the media connects the response of presidential candidates to fundraising, which i must say is an observation that, if it came from anyone besides everyone, would sound amazingly anti-semitic: everyone knows where the money is, i guess, or who controls the banking system or something. but even if all that is true, it would be (or, it is) a devastating indictment of the american political system to attribute all these people's positions to $$$. steve rattner said it on morning joe. commentary magazine (for god's sake) talked about how the move will "depress" democratic fundraising. obviously, the united states can have no role in making peace if any of the republicans running get elected, since their position is word-for-word the position of one of the parties, and it's entirely non-negotiable because they can't finance their campaigns otherwise. palestinians' influence on the republican party - like any group's, i suppose - is precisely proportional to their presence on wall street. 

meanwhile, i would have thought that what obama said yesterday was simply a slightly-more straightforward formulation of the obvious basis of negotiations for decades. but even that is an insane radical departure in the eyes of netanyahu and hence in the eyes of mitt romney, tim pawlenty, jon huntsman, etc etc. it's not like obama actually criticized the brutality of israel's blockade of gaza or something, or went all "apartheid wall." can you imagine if he did? just to begin with, it'd be "anti-semitism!" tell you what, and speaking of campaign contributions and who's operating mitt romney's mouth: why don't you concentrate on making anti-semitic stereotypes false, rather than pointedly confirming them while constantly using the accusation to short-circuit even a rudimentary discussion of what is actually going on?

obama and assad

well obama is capable of giving an excellent speech. one thing i just don't understand: why he's still saying that 'assad faces a choice,' and that he 'can lead a transition.' assad has killed hundreds, interned more than 10,000 people, etc. the hope that the obama admin continues to hold out for assad is odd, even on completely other grounds: that syria is aligned with iran, for instance. i keep thinking that there's something we don't know, some substantial u.s. stake in the syrian regime that we don't understand, or some intelligence about the internal dialogue in the syrian regime, or something. otherwise this approach doesn't seem consistent or sensible or even fully comprehensible.

sex and power

one obvious thing about extreme asymmetries of power - from corporate hierarchies to armed forces to institutional religions to welfare states - is that they are typically infested with sexual predation (of various forms). one has to be a bit suspicious of almost anyone who devotes their lives to ascending these hierarchies on these grounds. that's one reason why i sometimes cringe when i hear such ascenscions described as selfless devotions to public service, especially when people are describing themselves that way. not that that is impossible as a motivation; it's just that you very frequently are confronted with the extreme dark side. i don't think one should endorse various hierarchical structures without also confronting the extremely fraught connections between sex and power.

how i am an anarchist

some folks who know me well have lately been saying to me that i'm a "theoretical" anarchist, or that i'm an anarchist because of the philosophical leverage or point of view it yields. well, there's something to this. as i urged in against the state, anarchism performs the function in political philosophy that skepticism performs in epistemology; it presses people to justify their fundamental assumptions. 

but they're also gently saying i'm a hypocrite, because i pay taxes and use roads, for example, and because i do not take up arms against the state. not that the accusation of hypocrisy is entirely unwarranted, but let me respond briefly. there are things i actually want to do in this world - like teach, and write books, and raise kids. i don't hate the world, even with the state in it, and i will point out that i reject the idea that the state makes everything about our lives together possible: all kinds of things happen outside or in spite of it, and all kinds of things it does are things i think might be done in some form without it. i oppose the state, but there are other things i want to do besides merely constantly oppose it; on a good day i want to be able to ignore it, and i live in such circumstances that i often can, and i take advantage of these circumstances and try to appreciate them. what i'm interested in primarily is doing what i want, and i pay taxes so i won't have to enter into some nightmare hassle with the authorities.

i went through a period as an actual revolutionary of sorts; but then i sort of realized that that would condemn me to a personal history consumed by rage and unproductive activity. (well a lot of folks who were revolutionaries in 1973 realized it wasn't going to work out.) and also i realized that i can comfortably be part of no movement, that i'm temperamentally unsuited to solidarity. one way i continue to realize this; anarchists don't think i'm an anarchist. libertarians don't think i'm a libertarian. even tiny fringe splinters of the ideological spectrum extrude me, until i'm a movement of one. not exactly your effective revolutionary front!

in this and in many other senses (though not all!) i am an individualist. (not all: i do not endorse greed or think that human beings are naturally only self-seeking, e.g.) (not all: i think human individuals exist only in and as relation: to each other but also to non-human things.)

my life included an extreme anti-authority rebellion, expressed with regard to my parents and my schools. i still have that, and it takes the form of what you might call epistemic perversity; it is extremely important to me, evidently, to reject the consensus of the people around me; i constantly really feel reverse peer-pressure, i might say. i've had to learn to compromise with this, because mere rejectionism doesn't really lead you to truth either. i make an effort to listen and try to find a consensus plausible. but i never am perfectly clear on the extent to which i believe what i believe for anti-social reasons. on the other hand, i also think that real insights are available here; if i am proud of anything, it's that i often see things from a different angle than other people, and see things they don't or can't. obviously, i also have my blind spots. but on the other hand, i do immediately detect the authoritarian elements in any discourse, practice, or policy (including the benevolent, good-hearted ones), and work to expose them.

non-anarchists often tease me about being an anarchist; they assume this means that i'm a libertine, and that i can't stand any rules or principles. they think i'm a hypocrite for wearing clothes or writing syllabi with grading standards, or in admiring or practicing or demanding monogamy or sobriety or industriousness or, um, punctuality (cs: the punctual anarchist). but here i'm just going to say that that's wrong. it's coercion i reject, not rules or principles or self-discipline. you can't play chess without rules; the rules are the game. emerson said that "Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience." my desire is to live by rules i impose on myself, and by rules we make together in social activities, or in play. my idea is that rules imposed by coercion make people worse, make conscience and self-discipline and cooperation apparently unnecessary. my ex-wife regards me as puritanical. well, i am puritanical, in proportion as i am always about to tumble into vice. but being that and expressing it or even expecting it of others is not itself incompatible with my anarchism. (that's why i no longer believe a lot of what i wrote in obscenity, anarchy, reality, much to the disappointment of a few fans of that approach.)

so anyway, it is a complex position/life, and complexly related to the various things people - both those who account themselves anarchists and those who don't - mean by 'anarchism.' but there it is.

 

the welfare state

alright let me have a crack at the welfare state. before i start, let me say that if you accuse me of being a libertarian, i feel i will survive, as long as you don't conflate my position with that of ayn rand. i want to put this in the context of an overall reading of squishy totalitarianism: the basic left position is that you have two forces: government and capital or corporate power, and that the former must be employed to counter-balance the latter. i don't think this has by and large worked out, though that's not to deny that there have been some moments and that the terrain is complex. i think the powers are always merging, in marxist dictatorships where they are explicitly one, and in capitalist democracies where corporate interests constantly drive foreign and economic policy. basically, i think that state-style solutions - up to and including a world-state - to global capitalism are extremely naive, that you'll end up confronting a single hegemonic power.

my view is that every action of the state rests on coercion. i take that to be entirely obvious. on the other hand, on the ground the state - or let's take the u.s. gov and state and local govs here  - does accomplish many good things. so it might take a rapist off the streets. or it might help feed a family that would otherwise starve, or provide healthcare to a sick person who couldn't otherwise obtain it.

in the long run it is doing this in the context of extreme structural inequalities that it itself has a role in creating. there has never been a mode of social organization that achieves inequalities of power comparable to that which the state constitutes by definition: some people have a monopoly of force. in my opinion, this overall in the long run leads to structural inequalities of resources which the state then sometimes to some minimal extent ameliorates: partly in its own self-interest, to prevent its own destruction. (though it is also infested with actual idealists who basically are trying to help people.)

now along with asking whether we are prepared to watch people starve or die of untreated illnesses, we also have to ask ourselves who, in the long run, we are becoming and who, in the long run, we want to be. welfare programs are also ways that the state creates abject, permanently dependent populations, and their pervasion through the whole society puts us all at the mercy of the state. this can be really nightmarish: here you might think of the gigantic housing projects that arose in every major american city in the 1960s. they were intended to ameliorate homelessness and sub-standard housing; i do not doubt that the people who designed them and funded them meant well. they destroyed hundreds of real, vital communities, converted millions into complete dependence and put them under constant surveillance, and became nightmare pseudo-communities that the people embedded in them wanted to and actually did destroy.

a real welfare state requires total state surveillance: you've got to know who has what in order to know who gets what. you've got to know who's not in school, whose income is too high to qualify, and also who has to pay how much. malcolm x, for example, thought that the surveillance and abjection of his mother by the welfare authorities is what literally drove her mad, and destroyed his family. such an account is not atypical: one might look at sistah souljah's autobiography no disrespect, for example: they'd come to her housing project apartment and try to show that there was a man around, or ask her mom where she got that tv set.

i think if we actually wanted to move toward a better life, we would try to create a world of maximum self-reliance and maximum actual reliance on one another: not by coercion practiced on a scale of hundreds of millions, but on a local scale in which people know one another. moving the help we give to one another toward gigantism, and funding it coercively, means that we are not expressing any virtue by giving this help, because we do not give it freely, and that we are, in receiving it, wholly dependent on gigantic coercive bureaucracies for our very lives: we ought to and i think really do feel ashamed both ways round. and there has got to be a moment where we not only ask: what will happen to people if we take away their food stamps? but, what are we becoming?

and every step toward state dependence - its ever-growing pervasiveness - in the long run makes us all vulnerable to this power. it creates a power that is beyond accountability and beyond redress and beyond control. right now, even right here, it can kill millions if it wants, and many states have mutated into killing machines directed at their own populations; ours can too. we are its beneficiaries, its dependents, and always also its potential victims. but on a more everyday level here, being dependent on the government is being dependent on the whim of actual people who wield irresistible force. they can take away anyone's livelihood, anyone's healthcare, anyone's education at any time. our situation is desperate because our need is total and only satisfied from one source. our dependence is a total asymmetry of power, even if we want to eat and get healthcare.

so i think we should ask ourselves at every juncture where this power increases - even obamacare or whatever - not only who will do better because of this, but who we are becoming. there has to be a moment where on this slope the big question is asked, too.

cabrini-green:

if you're ron paul, you frame the question in terms of going broke: the welfare state is unsustainable because you end up with too few resources flowing in to give everybody everything you're promising: guaranteed pensions, healthcare, education, income: and you really do see economies collapsing under the weight (greece, e.g.) and then people completely shocked and outraged that the gov can't give them everything they need or demand: months off from work and retirement at 52, or whatever. honestly, i don't know if the situation is sustainable or not; at least i do think that it's not indefinitely expandable. but that's not how i would primarily frame the issue, and you can see that the right is taking the opportunity to achieve all sorts of purposes, including increasing inequalities of wealth. in the context of squishy totalitarianism, a constant emphasis on free markets and capitalist solutions is nothing like a liberating ideology, and we're constantly on the horns of a dilemma between state and corporate power, democrats and republicans. but this disguises their symbiosis.

what i ask instead is whether we want to be entirely dependent on a gigantic bureaucratic power that we cannot control, and what this is doing to our sense of ourselves and each other, and how it interrupts or destroys the possibilities of real community or collective action.

misrata a month ago

adams's jefferson

in henry adams's history of the united states in the administrations of thomas jefferson, jefferson is portrayed as a charming, good-hearted, and principled man. generous stuff from an adams. now there were many compromises of principle, but these had to do either with the fact that jefferson wanted everyone to like him (and so was always trying to find grounds to cooperate), or (in the humongous case of the louisiana purchase) just faced temptations that were too strong. he himself was trying to persuade his secretary of state madison, or the leaders of his party in congress (randolph, e.g.), that they needed to amend the constitution to make the buy. they were all like "shhhhhh!"

[really his positions were more or less what ron paul was saying today in various news outlets, announcing his candidacy for the presidency: neutrality in foreign conflicts, low taxes, individual liberty, states' rights, small government: we're too broke to go to war. "Peace was his passion," says Adams several times.]

he was always making grand democratic gestures, like riding horseback to his inauguration (rather than in a carriage). one episode. in 1803, he welcomed the brand-new british ambassador anthony merry to the white house, an occasion of solemn protocol and punctilious etiquette, even more because the french charge pichon was there and england and france were at war. yet jefferson's seating pattern was what he himself called "pell-mell; you sat wherever you wanted or wherever there a free seat, first come etc. and jefferson's appearance was described by a recently-elected senator as follows:

"A tall, high-boned man came into the room. He was dressed, or rather undressed, in an old brown coat, red waistcoat, old corduroy small-clothes much soiled, woolen hose, and slippers without heels. I thought him a servant, when General Varnum surprised me by announcing that it was the President."

nor did jeff bother to shave for the occasion. it was extreme anti-pomp, a pointed lesson for the old monarchy and the new empire (under the screeching anti-republican, napoleon) in democracy. jefferson wrote that after everything, merry 'perservered in a pretension to take precedence at dinner, etc. We have told him that the principle of society as well as of government with us is the equality of individuals composing it; that no man here would come to a dinner where he was to be marked by inferiority to any other."

and though the president was notably disarming on this as on so many occasions, merry was offended to the tune of writing an outraged letter to his boss, the foreign minister, regretting that he had ever been appointed: "In short [we] are now placed here in a situation so degrading to the countries [we] represent, and so personally disagreeable,...as to have become almost intolerable." 

mgl: nic gum

i want to write a paean to my great love: nicotine gum. i have been addicted to it literally for years. it has its drawbacks, especially that it's kind of expensive. but i'll tell you this: it shows addiction in its pristine form, and in my life the distractions and layers of jive have slowly been pared away through the administration of pain, and i realize that there's nothing left but an addict in his pristine form.

so, there are all kinds of reasons people engage in substance abuse, or that they say they do. they are medicating their depression/anxiety/psychosis. they love the social dimensions down at the bar and the crack house: it's the fellowship, baby. they love the ritual: filling the bong, fumbling with the cigarette, cooking the h. every and any reason besides that they are actually addicted to the active ingredient. now i suppose nicotine is some sort of mild stimulant: even if so, no dose at this point actually has any discernible psychotropic effects on me. the stuff makes no change in my consciousness that i am aware of. (of course, sadly, people can reach this point with vodka or crack too. but i don't think anyone would say they chew nic gum for the way it makes them feel, much less for the social aspect, or to treat their depression. indeed, i can keep drinking or smoking pot even though i actually hate the way it makes me feel. i've had moments where i liked the way booze or pot made me feel, but whole long periods where i didn't at all, where i just felt stupid and sick and profoundly inactive. that just isn't the reason i did them; indeed it might be closer to true to say that i did them because i wanted to feel bad. (maybe that sounds bizarre. but let me ask you this: have you ever wanted to be sick? every feigned sickness or convinced yourself you were sicker than you were? ever wallowed in sickness, lingered over it, delectated it?) but after a bit, it hardly mattered either way.)

no, the only thing addiction to nicotine gum has going for it is that you chew it, then you spit it out, then you jones for another piece. believe it or not, you start to think it's beautiful; you start to love the non-flavor, the funky caulk-like texture. but that's just your mind, addicted: actually these things just can't be lovable; without nicotine they palpably would have no allure. i've heard people after they smoked like mad for years saying that they're as addicted to the ritual as to the nicotine, or even that nicotine has nothing to do with it. um, horseshit. you'll tell yourself any damn thing to keep going; you'll actually feel the amazing allure of the ritual or whatever even though you actually don't feel it at all, believe it or not. this shows you with extreme clarity the human capacity for self-delusion.

it would surprise me if alcohol or heroin was used as a treatment for depression: it makes depression worse in a dozen ways at once. that doesn't matter, because you're addicted. then you try to work it out in therapy. good luck.

addiction to nicotine gum won't destroy your life, or end you up in the cancer ward (i hope!). so it's a good addiction in that sense. on the other hand, it won't alter your consciousness, which might be unfortunate. but it is addiction - real disease and real commitment - in its crystalline form: the very essence. it is me, purified.

on to syria!

in case you're wondering: yes. i would endorse lobbing cruise missiles into the presidential palace in damascus. the idea that the obama admin is still urging assad to institute reforms, etc., rather than calling for his immediate unconditional resignation, is disturbing.

michael gerson is one of the most interesting - because one of the least mechanically ideological - opinion writers working today. i have a feeling that 'compassionate conservativism' was his invention, though obviously he didn't quite succeed in sneaking it by dick cheney. on the other hand, i'm not really sure that welfare-state right-wingers have a big future. they certainly don't have a bright present. one thing that a compassionate conservative is is the opposite of a libertarian, so it makes sense that gerson attacks ron paul's advocacy of legalizing all drugs and prostitution. it is astonishing, i must say, that a politician with as much mainstream play as paul - an actual congressman and a relatively credible candidate for president - can take this position. it's sort of an amazing moment in american politics; very fluid, for one thing.

and gerson's arguments are, if you ask me (and even if you don't, or even though you don't), confused in a fundamentally "statist" or "please oppress me" kind of way. when paul asks 'how many people out there would shoot heroin if it were legal?', he's pointing out that it's not the fact that it's a crime that keeps most people from riding the white pony. that's true, i believe. and when he 'mocks" addicts by saying “Oh yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don’t want to use heroin, so I need these laws,” he's pointing out that most addicts do not actually want to be arrested and imprisoned.

paul's idea of legalizing heroin, according to gerson, would "condemn a portion of his fellow citizens to self-destruction." but it's worth asking what imprisoning addicts condemns them to. it's worth asking whether the practice has actually had the effect of reducing heroin use or helping people overcome their addiction, overall. it's worth asking whether our vast gulag for drug offenders is an expression of our compassion. gerson says that paul's position expresses 'contempt for the vulnerable and suffering,' as if arresting them and throwing them in roach motels expresses just the opposite.

if you think the law against embezzlement expresses compassion for embezzlers or that constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage express compassion for gay couples, i say you are oddly confused.

let me put it like this: that we don't want people to be heroin addicts does not entail that we must treat addiction as a crime, any more than the fact that we disapprove of lady gaga videos entails that they should be censored, or that we disapprove of wal-marts entails that we should launch airstrikes. and long prison sentences are a hell of a way to show how deeply you care.

 

against the law

no one has a lower credibility index than the inhabitants of the upper regions of the legal profession: professors of constitutional law, supreme court justices, and so on, because no one short of scholastic theologians has as elaborate a machinery for making things come out however they want. no one has more intentionality about rationalizing their way to whatever factual claims prop up their ideologies: infinite equipment of quibbling hermeneutics. and no one is less honest about what they are actually doing, less self-reflective, less sincere even as they throw out a volcano of passion about how they are constrained by rules and documents and precedents and filter out their own opinions. really it's the least wholesome thing one can imagine: a thousand layers of self-delusion.

ronald dworkin is a beautiful example (sorry about the pay wall at nyrb). give him a liberal court and he'll give you back a living constitution. he'll be impressed by the quality of the reasoning almost no matter what, if he agrees with the conclusion. give him a conservative court and he goes fundamentalist: he's outraged by every slight departure from precedent.  but here all he does is attack the reasoning for every decision whose result he rejects: that is, every decision not in keeping with a left-liberal ideology, while describing the dissents as 'devastating' or whatever.

there would be a simple way for him - or for any of us - to establish a provisional credibility: show the fallacies or weaknesses in arguments for positions he agrees with, or the strengths of the arguments for positions he disagrees with, in a serious way. people need to understand this; it is so entirely clear. in its absence, just realize that there's no commitment to the truth. you know what ronald dworkin thinks about the quality of a judge's reasoning by knowing ronald dworkin's political orientation, but that political orientation is irrelevant to the question of the quality of the reasoning. the right response - obviously, i tell you - is just to dismiss the whole huge body of work on such matters.

on the other hand what the conservative justices are doing is exactly the same thing. in the context of american jurisprudence there is always a way to get wherever you want to go: there are thousands of precedents and a hundred different approaches to precedents; a thousand interpretations of the constitution, and a hundred different approaches to constitutional interpretation. 

so what you end up with is one of the most pathetic spectacles imaginable: all these apparently sort of intelligent people engaged in a series of arguments that are just at their heart virtually demonstrably either breathtakingly disingenuous or disturbingly self-deluded. in no area of human life does people's account of what they're doing have less to do with what they're actually doing. a waste of brain-power and paper: something amusing or disgusting, but with a palpably inverted relation to the truth.

yet more knowing what you don't know

eugene robinson has written many passionate, convincing anti-torture columns, and i agreed with all of them. but this one, flatly declaring that we didn't catch bin laden through 'enhanced interrogation,' is simply premature, or a priori. the facts can't be read off your moral principles. indeed, that they are your moral principles makes your factual conclusion suspect. it just can't turn out that way, for robinson. (alright, no facts can prove that they couldn't have gotten the info without the torture; but no facts can prove that they could have, if they actually did get it under torture.) but that doesn't mean it can't turn out that way. so: did they actually get information necessary to find bin laden through torture? i don't think we have enough information to make that assessment. the robinson a priori approach to empirical knowledge is also a way of failing to face up to the actual moral dilemma that might emerge: is torture wrong even if it works in some key or fundamental cases? well, robinson and many others don't want to square up on that, so they don't. 

knowing what you don't know, contd.

one thing i would take as an example of trying not to declare you know what you don't; it's going to take a lot more info to assess whether we found bin laden by 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' or what role torture actually played in the killing. i'm completely opposed to it; i think it's shameful. but whether it yielded key information is not a question to which my moral repugnance is relevant, and i'm going to try to admit that this is what happened if it looks like there's convincing info that it did.

we make truth

cnn right now - having the finalish account of what happened in osama's compound - presents as usual this account as fact; they stop at a certain point with the 'sources say,' and they deploy the new animatied reenactment based on the official account. now they ought to be thinking about this because the story has changed radically a number of times as they have gone along. and this does fuel your conspiracy theories or at any rate distrust for msm (which, yes, is my basic source of info). i heard a number of reporters express outrage on some npr show (white house and congressional correspondents, for god's sake) at the very idea that they represent the point of view of the political authorities. yet those authorities' point of view is constantly presented as fact in all these outlets. and then every time they have to backtrack, they evidently don't think again about this posture; they just go right on identifying what a pentagon spokesman says, e.g., as the truth.

representation, reality, and bullet wounds

obama on 60 minutes explaining why he's not going to release the bin laden-with-a-bullet pics: they're gruesome etc, and that's not the kind of people we are. so let me see: we're the kind of people who would shoot you in the face, but not the kind of people who would look at images of it. or: we're the kind of people for whom reality and representation have come apart entirely. i also must say that i'm tired of that habitual rhetorical twist; obama uses it in every speech in every context: the america we want to be etc.