cheese it, the cops!

intravenous cash

right so i understand that people are more worried about deflation than inflation, and among our current problems, inflation ranks low. but take things like printing half the total value of the american economy and sending it to banks, or today's massive 'injection of liquidity' (which has markets roaring back). even super-keynesians and people like that must wonder at a bad moment whether we are paving the way for a total collapse in which money ceases to have any value. this would not be localized, as all these currencies and central banks and private banks are so entirely interlocked. it might look, in retrospect, like a recession and austerity aren't the worst things in the world. also if it happens in the next few months, you might be dealing with president ron paul, ending the fed and returning us to the gold standard.

trillions and trillions

this is a mind-numbing story. the federal reserve, in bailing out the banking system, quietly made loans totaling 7.7 trillion dollars, in a matter of a few months. that's about half the annual gross domestic product. it's over twice total government spending for 2009.  

leaderless

go, david graeber, go.

quench me

folks say i'm bloodthirsty because i've argued that despots like assad or gaddafi should be visited by cruise missiles. but there's bloodthirsty and then there's bloodthirsty.

republican round-up

really i'm as surprised as anyone that gingrich is up to bat, though he's the only one who could possibly impress you in a debate. i would have thought santorum. ok he's a neo-con on foreign policy, a very bush-era conservative; deficit reduction might not be his thang. he's a catholic, i believe, but his religion seems very sincere (i wonder about anyone else in the group on that, with the possible exception of bachmann), and a lot of evangelical protestants would be comfortable with his positions on abortion, gay marriage, etc., though they'll sound crazy extreme to others among us. but there's no screeching drawback, no obvious defect of intelligence or informativedness, no rockin scandals. he looks ok in a suit and you could vaguely envision him in the role; i'm not sure i can squarely picture president gingrich, president cain, president perry, or president bachmann. compared to romney or gingrich, he's magnificently consistent. huntsman is an odd case; it isn't just his moderateness, such as it is, that's the problem. on the debate stage or on the stump he looks oddly lightweight; he doesn't come off with the gravitas his resume would lead you to expect, and i've never heard him get beyond his catchphrases, which could be stronger. pawlenty must be kicking himself, thinking he ought to have hovered, ghost-like (broke) for a few months. he might be the nominee by acclamation by now.

who is the guru maharaj ji?

i have to say that newt gingrich is one of most befuddling figures in american politics in my lifetime. sometimes he seems to switch positions for political convenience, and sometimes he does it literally overnight or in the course of a single discussion. on the other hand, sometimes he takes positions that are so counter to the consensus of his own cohort that he seems courageous. sometimes he presents creative ideas and programs that are compelling; he makes you go, wow i never thought of that. then again sometimes the stuff seems merely bizarre or it's hard to tell what he could possibly be talking about. sometimes he's immensely likable: fun, smart, more real than the romney-style androids. sometimes he seems almost unbelievably annoying and supercilious, the worst sort of self-important twit. sometimes he's the most conciliatory politician in america, trying to help everyone get along. and sometimes he rains bizarrely extreme insults on his opponents as though inhabited by the spirit of don rickles.

as you may have noticed, i tend to form snap judgments of everyone and everything: it took me less than ten seconds to emplace a lifetime of hate for sting or al gore. but newt just leaves me going: what the fuck?

i guess one thing is that there is a certain sort of intellectual who basically just likes to play, who just wants to throw out or grab some ideas and toss them around, then tires of them and goes on to something else. a lot of grad students are like that, and have to be broken of their unseriousness to go through the tenure process etc. newt strikes me like that.

rock on, emma sullivan

so emma sullivan, a high school student, is, against my advice, taking part in the 'youth in government' program in topeka. she's listening, against my advice, to sam brownback, her governor. and she's tweeting, in keeping with what i'd advise: 'he blows a lot,' a simple statement of the evident empirical facts. but brownback's staff is being paid with kansans' hard-earned tax dollars to monitor mentions of his name on social media (irrefutable evidence - as though more of that were needed - that he indeed blows a lot). pretty soon, emma's principal is demanding that she write a letter of apology, and is drafting it for her: a pure and classic forced confession, like the iranian state likes to put on tv. now, this is a beautiful refutation of public education and of governorships, of principals and brownbacks, of youth in government and government in youth. that she's resisting is a lovely little chunk of hope.

now i want to be your dog

the redoubtable douthat smacks jfk, the most overrated single individual in species history, with the possible exceptions of pablo picasso and james joyce. what people remember so intensely is the 'charisma.' whatever in the world that might be (perhaps a kind of supernatural sweat). i guess we just want someone sexy to tell us what to do: political leadership as s&m.

veto!

i don't think that obama is credible when he says that he'll veto extension of the bush tax cuts, no matter how flatly and with how much oomph he says so. he always backs off on that sort of thing, which is one reason he is descending into being dismissed or even despised. i would think, indeed, that he'll take it all back well before the election, or else 'raising taxes on middle-class families' will be the stick with which the rep nominee will drive him back to chicago. if we're in recession or stagnation, increasing taxes will appear irresponsible. if the economy is expanding, it will threaten to screw up the progress. it seems likely that, say, david axelrod actually already knows this; if so, then the threats are strategic suicide. all the reps in the debate last night are singing the same song: no leadership. they've got a point.

i have a rule of parenting, which i have unsuccessfully tried to convey to the mothers of my children: no empty threats. you have two choices: don't say 'one more time, and we're just going to turn this car around and go home'; or, after one more time, turn the car around and go home. it's mere manipulation, but the emptiness of the threat will make it ineffective even as manipulation. the problem is that you work yourself up into a tizzy in which you believe you believe it, even though it's obvious to everyone else that you don't, and if you remembered the last 26 times, you'd know you don't too.

less and less lifelike

yes, they fell over each other (obviously, except for paul) in their competition to expunge civil liberties in order to perform the first and most important responsibility of any american president: rolling each of us in bubble wrap and then carefully crating each of us up, nestled in packing peanuts. and then they're going to go to new hampshire and say, 'live free or die, how cool is that?' also it's hard not to see that the neocon wing of the party is going strong; again only paul from one end and perhaps huntsman from the other are dissenters. really it's very much cheney-admin redux, and it's hard to imagine people wanting to go there, though obama might make you yearn for richard perle or whatever.

amazingly, bachmann is helping herself tonight. relatively knowedgable and thoughtful on pakistan and a number of other items. as often you just sit there wondering how paul is in this party. he disagrees with them on everything.

in tonight's debate, rick perry's face looks like it's actually melting. i knew he was made of wax.

i don't think, therefore i'm not

watching various cnn hawking teds describing people's motivations on the super-committee deadlock. david frum said that both parties win; now they can bash the other with this through the 2012 election cycle. he seemed to think that that made the whole thing perfectly sensible. jessica yellin said that obama 'didn't get his hands dirty,' because his poll numbers go down when he's grappling with congress and go up when he's out 'taking his case to the american people.' meanwhile, the committee issued a contentless statement of failure via twitter or whatever it may be; they don't even have the guts to face the cameras as a group, and you won't have to listen to what any of them say about what went wrong when they eventually do face the cameras: you can do their scripts word-for-word if you know their party affiliation. now, i could say that this is all a refutation of the existence of all these people; they are redundant. they do not speak as people: they speak as machines. and obviously they are not leaders in any sense; this thing shows if nothing else their groveling servility and their actual motivation for doing what they do: preservation of their contentless but ego-and wallet-gratifying political self-interest as that is measured this evening in polling. really, y'all, go away. 

destroy

the two-party system. nothing is more obviously called for. these are some silly people. all of them on each side just yap the same empty phrases and hope they can successfully blame the other, the super-committee debacle being the latest example. anything that preserves the two-party system is a mistake, and even with approval ratings in single digits, the two parties have a hundred ways to keep anything from outside from coming in. people just have to hop off. i hope ron paul launches. elizabeth warren is a plausible outside force. folks like that must see that they can't actually accomplish anything important inside these empty-yet-oligarchic organizations. just to say the obvious, nothing in the constitution enshrines the two-party system. i'm not sure how, in a world of extreme fund-raising, in a media environment that just keeps running in the same loop of talking heads, in a world of gerrymandered districts, you can break these wretched, useless country clubs. but they make a joke of the idea of democracy. plus if you could break the two-party system, you might get john kerry off television.

what i like about the current moment is how close the visions of government really are, how everyone sops up wall street money, how around-the-edges the debates are in relation to the parties' extreme opposition to each other. it's a devastating combination: they can't even rescue the state capitalism they all embody. it's comical.

resistol

on the uc-davis pepperspraying and the concerted removal of occupiers: mao - both a successful revolutionary and a monstrous oppressor - famously said that 'repression breeds resistance.' but also, resistance breeds repression. you don't actually know what society you live in until you express opposition to it. that video is chilling and funny, with that slob in body armor casually coating people with chemical agents. i'd sleep in kevlar pajamas, you pussy.

cain on libya redux

update:

just watched a cain news conference, where he wound round to libya today. i believe he just said that the government of libya now is infested by the taliban. that would be news. if i can post the video in a bit i will. [hangin with my ma down in va.]

a lifetime of achievement

john ashbery has finally been recognized for a lifetime of sheer gobbledygook by the national book awards. if no one understands it, it must be important: the slogan of intellectual poseurs everywhere. when i'm searching for something to pretend that i've read, i look for that perfect combination of emptiness and pretension.

solar scandal

actually, i think the solyndra scandal is kind of serious, and getting moreso with each revelation. i don't think you can argue that half a billion dollars funneled to one company is not a...substantial expenditure. the technical term might be 'huge-ass.' it kind of takes shape as a beautiful argument that you don't actually want economic decisions made by political people, or as an illustration of one thing that's wrong with a 'planned' or 'socialist' economy, or at any rate with 'public/private partnership': could you please delay your total collapse until the day after the election?

occupy

it seems obvious that it's not a coincidence that they cleared the protesters from nyc, oakland, and other cities simultaneously. you have to wonder who's coordinating the response and how, exactly.

nothing

i guess i don't understand how people who don't even read the paper or watch the news could be serious candidates for president. really, the average actual subscriber to the podunk herald or someone who puts on wolf blitzer during dinner for twenty minutes knows more about the world than does cain or perry or bachmann. i figure if you're not even interested in the world, you can basically only be running for vanity or self-esteem enhancement. it might be a psycho-drama or a personal quest to be admired and have power over people, but it doesn't mean anything more than that.

a new form of pop music

i'm gonna instigate a new genre of anti-party pop music. no we're not goin to the club tonight. we're not gonna drink that bubbly or throw our hands up. let's stay home and watch tv or read a book. maybe if we're not in recovery from the music or the substances or the activities, we'll put on some hip hop or debussy, have a glass of wine, and screw our longtime romantic partners or something. then we won't get in trouble. what are we, idjits? we're not that desperate to get pukingly drunk and randomly laid tonight. someday it will sink in; tonight's party is just like last night's. it's boring, repetitive, pointless, with a little touch of desperation and slavish groupthink, which is roughly why all the songs sound the same and all the lyrics are meaningless, and tonight's no different. whatever it is you're looking for, it's not there. we're going to do our little rap verse about dignity and self-possession. we'll sell several!

popes and paternos

douthat argues today that there are parallels between catholic priests' sexual abuse of boys and the cover-ups of it and the penn state case. and folks on espn have been describing it as "the worst scandal in the history of college athletics." now let me say why i don't think these things are right, exactly. now, almost any institution - in particular any institution that deals with children - might harbor a pedophile; i guess there's a little segment of the population that is sexually configured this way; lord knows why. but the catholic church, i believe, more or less actively encouraged homosexual pedophilia for centuries. really 'celibacy' amounted to misogyny: the basic idea was not to touch women. and the idea of celibacy attracted many people who were disgusted - often for extremely good reasons - by their own sexuality. i actually think the altar boy was conceived to be a way to keep priests celibate: which is absurd, but there it is. you had thousands of abusers, layers and layers of concealment, and i think actual institutional encouragement. i don't know much about big-time college football, and it has its amazing corruptions, but it would surprise me if it had anything like that going on. what you have is one predator, and one extremely disturbing cover-up.

the worst scandals in college football are scandals that infect the whole thing routinely: those are the scandals that are peculiar to, characteristic of, the institution: scandals involving, say, cash or sex used to lure high school players to commit to a school: the way usc has conducted its program for decades, e.g. or academic scandals that amount to relieving players of their status as students. or judicial-type scandals where player misbehavior is forgiven or concealed over and over. these are the corruptions that are characteristic of the institution, as homosexual pederasty is characteristic of the catholic church. now it's probably true that sandusky was protected by a kind of culture of impunity around big-time college athletics. but it's not, i think, true that child sexual abuse is any more rampant in this environment than in any other. you'd be likelier to find that in children's charities, like sandusky's foundation, and maybe that's a place where we might focus more attention.

[let me acknowledge a little streak of homophobia in what i just wrote. and let me say that i also think that the extreme repugnance with which many people have greeted the sandusky revelations also has such a streak. 'anally raping a ten-year-old boy' causes about as severe a disgust reaction as i am capable of. and let me say: i was sexually abused by one of my step-brothers, and as an adolescent i was incessantly chicken-hawked by men: the guy on the bus who just puts his hand on your crotch; the guy who picks you up hitch-hiking and asks whether you like to masturbate etc etc. i kind of had to fight for a heterosexual identity. well obviously girls have to put up with shit like that from heterosexual men. but if that turned them against heterosexuality, you might understand it. but the homosexual element is intrinsic to the catholic situation (though of course there might be an occasional girl abused by a priest). reason tells me it's just as bad either way. nausea tries to tell me something else. no doubt further therapy is recommended.]

 

thank you

katie roiphe.

a new theory of leadership

the history of political leadership is by and large idiotic and destructive, an arena of utter narcissism and greed. it's psychopathic clowns, asserting that they're your servants as they transform you into theirs. you'd think we'd get on to another phase. but really, i think the whole thing is a millennia-long sit-com. truly, berlusconi or mugabe or perry or whatever might be horrendous people operating under the absolutely absurd notion that they have more right to tell you what to do than you them. and they operate in systems designed around justifying that. (i predict that this little howler will extinguish our species.) but, if you can avert your gaze from the suffering, the whole thing is hilarious in a charlie-sheen-in-no-exit sort of way.

salute

sometimes we take for granted all that the members of the miltary do for us, all the sacrifices they make for our freedom. that's really unaccountable, because the media bludgeons us with it absolutely incessantly.

moore on truth

for philosophy-heads out there (and students in my truth class), i have typed in and posted on googledocs g.e. moore's classic (yet unfortunately obscure) statement of the identity theory of truth. 

abscess nancy

i think herman cain has got to go, and that really he has no serious position on anything, though he does have a certain insouciant charm. but the pc bullshit needs to be packed up into a capsule and launched off-planet. everyone seems upset by the extreme sexism of calling pelosi 'princess nancy.' please. since when is 'princess' a sexist slur? it does seem to acknowledge that nancy is a woman, and i suppose that even that is too much for the people who want remote control of everyone's tongue. on behalf of their demographic segment people are in a position of continual simulated outrage about absolutely anything. they hope to control the way we all talk, and they hope that that will actually be the end of oppression. their position is that words make the world, so liberation from oppression can be achieved by editing. it's a version of what we philheads might call postmodern linguistic idealism: the position of richard rorty but without the actual intellection.

ai

iverson rocked, brian. electrifying. representing the little guy everywhere. that crossover! the speed, the intensity, the skill. 

speaking the language of stupid

ok so perry flubbed one of his main positions. i can muster some sympathy. i remember when brian lamb asked me on c-span where the word 'anarchism' came from, and i just, like, froze and didn't say anything worthwhile and looked like a chump. but i say that virtually every sentence out of his mouth is a mess. so he got into it like this: 'And I will tell you. It's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education and the, um...I would do away with the education, the...[someone supplies 'commerce'], the commerce, um and let's see. I can't." anyway, even aside from the gaffe, this is perry's syntax; it just consistently doesn't make any sense. he's going to do away with the commerce and the education? (before he masters any matter of policy, he's going to have to master the definite article.) he can't? take any slice, more or less, and it sounds like it's been incompetently translated from swahili. he looks handsome in a suit though.

reps

glancing at the debate: newt is consistently the most articulate and creative. he's kind of sinking in, because it's got to be occurring to republicans that this is not exactly a distinguished group of statemen or intellects. rick perry is just a buffoon, a grotesque parody of the politician: 'sentence' by 'sentence,' moment by moment, the stuff is irrelevant, incoherent, consisting of stray phrases under which there is no clue, or perhaps no mind. 

jopa

i have to say i hope that the penn state board of trustees allows joe paterno to retire with some dignity at the end of the season, and doesn't fire him tonight. i think he didn't do nearly enough when a graduate student came to him and told him (apparently) that he saw jerry sandusky anally raping a 10-year-old boy in the penn state football showers. but on the other hand, he has done inestimable good for that school. one time the chair of the philosophy department at the main campus told me that various of his programs were secretly funded by paterno. and i don't think you will be harming anyone by allowing him to persist a few more weeks. he was not the perp. and his statement of regret was about as deep and sincere as anyone could hope for,

i'm even a bit sad to see the pres, graham spanier, go. when i was teaching at penn state harrisburg, i did an op-ed for the philly inquirer defending alan iverson (my fave b-ball player ever) after he was arrested for driving a hundred miles an hour through virginia with a gun on his passenger seat. i said: yesterday i got saved from a ticket when a guy coming the other way flashed his lights at me. so i flashed on the other side. we commonly help each other evade the law, a beautiful sign of human unity. well, spanier apparently got barraged with demands to fire me etc. but he didn't, though he did draft a reply, which he asked me to approve, saying 'crispin sartwell does not endorse breaking any law.' i made him re-cast that sentence, as i recall. but he was good about the whole thing.

creative naming strategies

again this season, i'll be collecting names of college basketball players. just to say it: black folks are applying ever-more creative naming strategies (it's not like, looking at these names, you're wondering about the players' race). so how about these freshmen from st. john's: God'sgift Achiuwa and Sir'dominic Pointer. also i feel that the apostrophe is only the beginning of the incorporation of punctuation marks into the human name. i'm thinking of throwing a few question marks into mine.