cheese it, the cops!

announcing a new taxonomy of political and economic systems

while we're on china, let me hit you with a bit of my amazing new take on political/economic taxonomy. i think we might say that the current chinese state combines the best features of maoism and corporate capitalism: it's all devoted to generating maximum cash and putting it on a barge. destination: the very top of the hierarchy. and yet it also attempts to bestride the earth, stomping that ass with the iron boot of collectivist totalitarianism. now, your basic taxonomy of political and economic systems or ideologies would regard this as an incoherent merger. your conventional political scientist is just going associate capitalism with john locke and adam smith and democracy: 'liberalism,' i suppose. (the political scientists on the far left do right at least to be seeing through this as partly a falsification.) on the other hand, if we socialists or whatever reject free enterprise and engage in grand redistribitivist schemes, then of course we're going to need a big, extremely powerful state. (then once you're done with the redistribution, the state either withers away, or deposits your entire country in theiir leaders' swiss accounts and absconds; i forget which.) so for a long time people (it even trickled down to bush etc) thought of the chinese system as combining opposed or contradictory elements. at a minimum, i'd say no one is so sure anymore.

we should think instead of the chinese state as a provisional culmination of both state socialism and corporate capitalism. in ideology, they are opposites. but we don't live in the textbook for your course on political ideologies. we live in a world where, from the outset, corporate capitalism completely depended on state power, and the basic practical thrust of left statism was annexation of the economy. the soviet union was a variety of monopoly capitalism. and the modern american state is a variety of state socialism. (but leftists are still trying to pit the state against the corporation, while rightists are still trying to pit the corporation against the state. this is all occurring only in their imaginations: pitting chase against the treasury department is a very odd concept and no you're not going to be pulling them apart later on, because resources always flow toward political power, and political power always flows toward resources (little crispy's big law).)

we're all headed in this direction together. it is the culmination/nadir of history! which isn't over, btw. but still i am its hegel, marx, and fukuyama. what gives me pause is how terribly mistaken they all were. and how laboriously they all wrote.

anyway, what went wrong in our thinking is that we believed the account these ideologies gave of themselves. but the scrim of philosophy, theory, ideology, the rhetorical flourishes that they laid on the reality were always thin on the ground. they were designed to rationalize or moralize what is really a single indefensible system, or to enhance the self-esteem of ideologues while pursuing the hard work of gathering up all the resources. the cold war disguised the fact that the systems were, in playing out their real essences, converging toward a situation in which state and economy are fully integrated and held in very few hands: a truly permanent, systemic, chronic, sclerotic hierarchy with the world's worst rhetoric. and then one of the meanings of 'globalization' and the various 'international mechanisms' that go with it, may be that it is a premonition of a world system of this variety, which is already emerging. (one name is 'technocracy.' i like to call it 'jurgen habermas'.) but there would be many barriers to overcome, from nationalism and tribalism to religious chauvinism and individualism/tribalism of the 'i/we dissent/withdraw/slack off/sabotage/hack' variety. (honestly i think history is, from our point of view, wildly contingent, and no one can know how such a thing comes out.)

this is also one of the reasons that the left/right spectrum is just not helping anyone toward understanding the phenomena, much less in deciding what positions to take. we should dissolve the left/right spectrum the way carnap dissolved metaphysics: it never meant anything; it was a kind of nonsense verse.

i don't know that squishy totalitarianism is really catching on as the name for the great synthesis at the end of history, or, as i like to think of it, the prelude to our richly-deserved extinction. but whatever you call it, i call it fun!

i see the whites of their eyes

as you have possibly noticed, i often rag on the new york times, roughly on the grounds of the boringness and extreme safety-consciousness of the opinion pages. however, i am often impressed by and grateful for the reporting, such as the stories last year that exposed the chinese state as a mega-scale kleptocracy. the idea that they're invading the times's computers is insufferable, and i wouldn't be waiting for the american gov to do anything about it. did i have any influence on the world's hackers, i'd recommend total invasion. wikileak anything that might be interesting and defoliate the rest with mutant stuxnet. leave nothing but a smoking crater. i want to hear wen jibao wimpering like a smacked dog. i very much hope google is working secretly on this. 

and of course wherever you live, remember to trust your government. chris matthews and paul krugman do! 

how in the world did you get that in there?

ellen bass's 'what did i love' in the feb 4 new yorker is the only interesting poem i've seen there in a decade. now, the yakker has a pay wall that, as far as i can tell, even subscribers can't get through. but i may just type the poem in and set it free, though it's longish. i sort of hate the mag, except the critics (i'm big on schjeldahl). the politics is just excruciatingly banal, without a shred of imagination or independent ratiocination: like hendrik hertzberg making obama into lincoln again this week. and the kind of cultural authority that the thing wields is really absurd. but however, that is a really good poem.

 

What Did I Love

 

What did I love about killing the chickens? Let me start

with the drive to the farm as darkness

was sinking back into the earth.

The road damp and shining like the snail's silver

ribbon and the orchard

with its bony branches. I loved the yellow rubber

aprons and the way Janet knotted my broken strap.

And the stainless-steel altars

we bleached, Brian sharpening

the knives, testing the edge with his thumbnail. All eighty-eight Cornish

hens huddled in their crates. Wrapping my palms around

their white wings, lowering them into a tapered urn.

Some seemed unwitting as the world narrowed;

some cackled and fluttered; some struggled.

I gathered each one, tucked her bright feet,

drew her head through the kill cone's sharp collar,

her keratin beak and the rumpled red vascular comb

that once kept her cool as she pecked in her mansion of grass.

I didn't look into those stone eyes. I didn't ask forgiveness.

I slid the blade between the feathers,

and made quick crescent cuts, severing

the arteries just under the jaw. Blood like liquor

pouring out of the bottle. When I see the nub of heart later,

it's hard to believe such a small star could flare

like that. I lifted each body, bathing it in heated water

until the scaly membrane of the shanks

sloughed off under my thumb.

And after they were tossed in the large plucking drum

I loved the newly naked birds. Sundering

the heads and feet neatly at the joints, a poor

man's riches for golden stock. Slitting a fissure

reaching into the chamber,

freeing the organs, the spill of intestines, blue-tinged gizzard,

the small purses of lungs, the royal hearts,

easing the floppy liver, carefully, from the green gall bladder,

its bitter bile. And the fascia unfurling

like a transparent fan. When I tug the esophagus

down through the neck, I love the suck and release

as it lets go. Then slicing off the anus with its grey pearl

of shit. Over and over, my hands explore

each cave, learning to see with my fingertips. Like a traveller

in a foreign country, entering church after church.

In every one the same figures of the Madonna, Christ on the Cross,

which I'd always thought was gore

until Marie said to her it was tender,

the most tender image, every saint and political prisoner,

every jailed poet and burning monk.

But though I have all the time in the world

to think thoughts like this, I don't.

I'm empty as I rinse each carcass,

and this is what I love most.

It's like when the refrigerator turns off and you hear

the silence. As the sun rose higher

we shed our sweatshirts and moved the coolers into the shade,

but, other than that, no time passed.

I didn't get hungry. I didn't want to stop.

I was breathing from some bright reserve.

We twisted each pullet into plastic, iced and loaded them in the cars.

I loved the truth. Even in just this one thing:

looking straight at the terrible,

one-sided accord we make with the living of this world.

At the end, we scoured the tables, hosed the dried blood,

the stain blossoming through the water.

 

--Ellen Bass

if i've been, as it were, kind of pissy lately, it might have something to do with the kidney stones, which i wouldn't wish on tom friedman or zach goldfarb. i'm gonna to find something i love and write about it!

The Mediocre Inflection

god after all these years i hope that it's finally dawning on people that tom friedman is a mere mannerism: a quasi-master of the technocratic catch-phrase that i guess gives some people the sensation that they understand something. i have a feeling that The Great Inflection isn't going to take off, and i'm dqing 'pq.' so you just write the same column and you say: wow the world is really connecting through the internet. right then it strikes you that this isn't anything anyone ever doubted, also that it's something you more than fully exploited a decade ago etc. so you start trying to re-name your insights, to kind of disguise the fact that you're just trafficking in commonplaces. what underlies the whole vision, of course, is precisely what i've been calling squishy totalitarianism: or as he puts it, 'the public-private partnership that makes America great.' i wonder if he still thinks they're rioting in egypt for more standardized testing. "The old average is over," writes friedman. "Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives." it's gotten to where we can read sentences like this smoothly even though they're not in english. but it hasn't gotten to the point where they mean anything. he needs to go beyond 'hyper-connected,' which he's been using to denote this period for, say, 8 years, and dramatically unveil a new era of connectivity well beyond that. he may need to start inventing his own prefixes, because i'm not sure where you go from 'hyper'. possibly to sleep.

what it's for

so, most op-ed columnists, radio hosts, and so on (start, say, with charles blow or gene robinson, either of whom could and sometimes does do much better), have moved off any attempt, say, to defend their policy positions, and on to sheer attempts to manipulate people, by calling other people, even the milquetoastiest, such as obama and romney, extreme or weird. the op-ed column, for example, has fully merged with the advertising industry, via political parties and campaigns and consultants; op-ed writers are more like political consultants every day; opinion journalism is now a wing of 'strategic' 'communications'. (an egregious example is the frank rich columns from 2008; week by week they mirrored the obama campaign's talking points, very often word for word.) it has repudiated truth or sincerity as anachronistic or impossible. one pitiful feature of this approach is that it cannot persuade anyone who doesn't already agree; it is explicitly designed to alienate and irritate anyone who doesn't agree. so the only idea is to manipulate people who already agree with you to agree with you.

seriously, you know 90% of the nyt's opinion readers or so are left of center, and yet it's written as though projected at their opponents; it's apparently intended to devastate them and make them feel bad for being on the wrong side. but of course everyone knows they're not there. they're insulting or in the best case arguing against them to each other, for their own edification. well, obviously let's say right-wing radio or sectors of fox and msnbc are the same. that is a very useless exercise. or what i'd say is that every column or rant is devoted to enhancing the self-esteem of the columnist or host and his audience: you're so great, so normal, so reasonable, because you're not like them. that this embroils the whole country in an ever-growing partisan divide that is ever-more contentless is neither here nor there i guess, compared to how rational and righteous you can persuade yourself you are, even by means that with complete clarity demonstrate the opposite.

cretins in heat

as i have been saying (and saying, etc), this kind of jive is a tribute to the industriousness of cretins. i gave you a chance to reform; now i'm launchin. zachary goldfarb argues that obama's inaugural wasn't liberal, on the grounds that most people agree with it. one entailment, of course, is that no view that most people agree with is liberal. now to determine whether zachary goldfarb is himself the sort of person who might consider himself a liberal, or that other people might consider a liberal, would require reading more zachary goldfarb, which would be indefensible. but if zachary goldfarb is a liberal, then on his own account he ought to oppose regulating greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, support cutting spending on medicaid, oppose a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, support cuts in education and transportation funding, and oppose same-sex marriage. for the contradictory positions, goldfarb flatly asserts, are not liberal. or another obvious implication: it is conceptually impossible to have a liberal majority, you doink.

but really, you see this everywhere every day: these are examples of the fact that our political discourse is dominated by meta-level 'analysis' that has no connection to any sorts of policy, or any practical matters of any sort, whatsoever. even the mere labeling (of a policy as 'liberal' or 'conservative, much less 'extreme'), even if someone were doing it coherently, is without any practical weight in the sense of reasons to do or believe anything about the issues of the sort goldfarb suspends in it, like mini-marshmallows in a bowl of turd-flavored jello. what turns on whether more education funding is a liberal policy or not? does that help you figure out whether it's a good idea? aw just spitballing here but you might want to look at the effects and costs of the policy and stuff like that. but at any rate, it cannot possibly be a liberal policy, according to zachary goldfarb. so, if you you are, sadly, the sort of person who evaluates policies according to whether they are or are not liberal, and tends to endorse those that are, you should oppose increased education funding with every piece of your big liberal heart. and you should not engage your mind at all.  

but really, merely giving ideological labels to particular policies etc is the least of it, though zachary goldfarb cannot manage to do even that with even superficial coherence. the meta-discourse consists entirely of deciding who counts and who doesn't, who's extreme and who's not, according to who is doing well in the polling this week. same sex maririage, goldfarb points out, is polling at a bare majority. the moment it got to 50.1 was the moment it ceased to be a liberal policy. should that poll have a margin of error, or oscillate slightly, then it will, day by day and hour by hour, cease to be and then become again a liberal policy. so another lovely entailment here is that you are a liberal only if you are constantly changing your mind about this. the polling isn't used to lend weight to the actual positions, as 'ultra-brite is the best-selling toothpaste in toronto' might be held vaguely to provide some reason to buy it. all it says is: most people agree with me, hence, my opponents are wrong. ponder that inference. the polling is used to develop the ridicule, and none of it has a damned thing to do with anything even in competent versions. 

just an absolutely minimal standard of consistency: if polling shifts, you've got to own your own crazy, anti-american, evil extremism. when jim crow segregation or anti-communist witch hunts or screeching homophobia were polling well, then of course all of your basic ideals were the views of extremists. that, by your own account, is what you yourself were the day before yesterday, and what you'll be again the day after tomorrow, and it is on your account a fundamentally important way to evaluate how plausible or morally good an opinion is. a decent person would just say 'so what?', which is precisely what martin luther king or harvey milk did say when people said (which they did) that they were extremists.

however, zachary goldfarb does provide a stunning argument that educational funding ought to be cut, or perhaps elminated entirely. the people who are basting the world with irreason on this scale are people who emerge from our educational system with advanced degrees. (right i am speculating that zachary goldfarb has undergone this sort of training; finding out for sure would require googling 'zachary goldfarb,' which would be wrong.) we like to think of education as imparting knowledge or something, but we probably ought to regard it as a systematic, intentional corruption of possibly-promising minds. evidently, the better your training in statistics or whatever it may be, the more ignorant you become, or the more boldly you endorse glaring fallacies or contradictions. it appears that whatever institutions zachary goldfarb emerged from pursued a policy of systematic neurological damage, which is a liberal policy, because it is not polling well. certainly it suggests that the whole educational structure from which goldfarbs emerge is entirely counter-productive. folks like this would be better and wiser people, they would have more reasoned positions - or at least they might have positions - if they were, for example, illiterate.

as on all such occasions, i feel that the best revenge against zachary goldfarb would be to take his 'arguments' at face value. don't assume that he is deploying them as clever manipulative strategies. that is particularly plausible in this case because goldfarb so signally fails to be clever in any dimension. if you take goldfarb to be sincere, or to mean what he says, the piece provides a devastating reflection on himself and his like. (on the other hand, if you assume that he is not sincere - and also on the plausible assumption that he is not some sort of master of irony - that is also a devastating reflection.) we should assume until shown otherwise that folks who put these sort of items forth are sincere, or would be sincere if they had said something. treat them as being precisely (as roget, consulting his excellent thesaurus, would put it) the sort of blockheads, dimwits, dolts, dullards, dunces, ignoramuses, imbeciles, and morons who would believe that they just made a good and important argument. assume that they believe that they are saying something and assume that this is the best they can do, until they actually display competence. then see that what they're saying is both completely empty and obviously incoherent, a stunning combination.

but i'm not at all angry! like jesus, i love your stupid ass.

abe, abe, go away.

this lincoln crap has just got to end. that piece refers to it as a 'cult of leadership,' and enthusiastically embraces it on that basis. really everybody wants to be lincoln's paula broadwell. and in all seriousness, everybody really is looking for their petraeus: the man we can worship. were there a god, he would be growing angry that we are giving what is due to him to each other. these various cults of leadership, of course, mean nothing except that you are desperate to be subordinated; it really is, i believe, fundamentally erotic: one should look on lincoln as a super-boring fifty shades of gray. or maybe it's a bit more pitiful than that. i'll just lay here while you do me. please please move on to something or someone else. i'm kind of pissed off at john wilkes booth: that lincoln is dead makes him impossible to kill.

Some mens' temper on fire, some mens' temper would freeze

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the size of protons, John Boehner's caucus and women in combat looking for something significant and...not so much.  

institutional suicide: it's only right

the discussion this morning on up with chris hayes of the aaron swartz situation (featuring his fiercely articulate gf, lawrence lessig, and (sadly) a former administration official with her perfect hair and little canned speeches) was exemplary and clarifying. i will say this: i so wish this person was not dead. but also this: m.i.t. should commit suicide. they prosecuted swartz as an enactment of the fact that they hate and want to destroy every value they claim to represent; they are dedicated to the repression or the exclusive ownership by some elite of truth, or indeed to exempting certain kinds of academic research from the sort of free examination that is the essence of the scientific ideal of how alleged truths can be tested or established. it's...salafism. it's as though we found out that mlk was riding with the klan in the evenings, or that the pope was in fact a committed worshiper of beelzebub, or that the dalai lama was a school shooter. you have humiliated yourselves profoundly; show some pride and fall on your sword. it's not too late to make a significant contribution to human knowledge: put your campus to the wrecking ball.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

oops we kicked your ass

i have been doing research and working on the wikipedia entry for my great-grandfather, herman bernstein (he's my mother's mother's father). what an unbelievable life! i thought i wrote fast. for one thing, the dude was super-jew. for example, henry ford, with whom he locked horns for a decade, called him 'the messenger boy of international jewry.' he was rolling across russia during the revolution, interviewing john reed and leon trotsky.

even a superficial skim of the list of his correspondence (housed at the yivo center for jewish research at the center for jewish history) reveals letters to and from Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Sholem Aleichem,Andrew Carnegie, Leo Tolstoy, William Howard Taft, George Bernard Shaw, Max Nordau, Louis Brandeis, John D. Rockefeller, Louis Marshall, Israel Zangwill, Henri Bergson, Arthur Brisbane, Mordecai Kaplan, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franz Oppenheimer, Felix Frankfurter, Warren G. Harding, William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Constantin Stanislavski, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Balfour,Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Arthur Goldberg, Adolph Ochs, Romain Rolland, Julius Rosenwald, Benjamin Cardozo, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, and Franklin Roosevelt.

as herman might have put it: jesus a vehicular christ.

herman bernstein as a sensitive young poet

 and as a mature ass-kicker

 

when my mother (joyce abell, b. 1925) was 5, she was sent by her parents, alone, on a ship to albania, where herman was the ambassador. she still remembers the spectacle, the dresses etc., at the court of the magnificently attired zog, king of albania. 

here are a few of the other writers in my lineage, on both or all sides, whether they arrived with the puritans in 1637 or came to ellis island from the russo-german border in 1893. some were protestants, some were catholics, some were jews (100% on my mom's side). most were atheists, though, whatever their heritage. some were communists and some were republicans and some (well...) were anarchists. novelist and short story writer grace sartwell mason (my great great grandfather's sister; one of her books is women are queer); herman's brother hillel bernstein, novelist and new yorker contributor; novelist etc murray gitlin (my grandfather and herman's son-in-law); my grandfather franklin sartwell, columnist for and editor for the washington times-herald and the washington post; my father franklin sartwell, jr., reporter and editor at the washington star, national geographic, science news, and defenders magazine; herman's son david, writer and editor for, and owner of, the binghampton sun. there are others!

my life is a country...show

nashville is roughly my favorite tv show ever (well also i'm into justified right now). one of the many great aspects: the attempt really is to make a television equivalent of a country song, or country music in general. this gives the thing a kind of postmodern hyper-self-awareness even as it also works as a sheer soap. now this may surprise you a bit coming from a philosophy professor, but my own life has been filled with many of these themes, as well as basted in country music. i am a devotee of rural america. one character's brother just did 8 for armed robbery; my bro jim only pulled 5, though. the depiction of addiction and recovery (12-step variety) is the best and most real i've seen on television; it's a constant theme. in many ways, addiction has been the theme of my life: my father's, my brothers', my ex-wife marion's, my own. i sobered up (the first time, which lasted for 13 years) in nashville, as it happens, among many musicians, songwriters, and country stars. the more-or-less main male character deacon is right now on a 'dry-drunk', sell-the-house-and-go-live-in-the-cabin moment after 12 years sober. his real problem: he's spent much of his life helplessly loving a terribly wrong person, who's also 'the queen of country music.' i am going to speculate that such a thing is...possible. the relationships are absurdly rocky: the lies, the betrayals, the crazy fights, the d-i-v-o-r-c-e. um, yeah.

i wonder if all this happened to me because i love tammy wynette. well, no. but it has all made me love tammy wynette even more. everyone thinks that the hayden panetierre character is a 'pre-fab pop princess.' but they depict her as being, sort of secretly, an overwhelming songwriting talent. she bought some land out along the cumberland that used to belong to tammy; that's where she wants to build her house. meanwhile she's dealing - again i would say quite realistically - with her mother's meth addiction. (my ma is a non-addict, though. mama tried.) now, the palatial homes in belle meade, the rival divas, etc: that's a bit more outside my experience, but i dig it anyway. and it's a show where people really care about music and are really good at it: that's what actually matters most to these characters. i remember robert altman's unforgivable nashville: a completely ignorant hatchet job in which country musicians and others in the industry are pictured as talentless hicks, buffoons, and con men. perhaps that was the autobiographical element in altman's film, but it had nothing to do with nashville, which has its problems, but where the real talent and commitment are overwhelming. you might just stroll into a bar and hear someone singing like an angel, perhaps someone like the astounding clare bowen, who plays a nashville type: you know, just down from the hills: even she has no idea that she's a transcendent country singer, which is slowly dawning on the cast and the nation. this nashville is a very loving depiction, even as it also explores in its soapy way many problematic dimensions of the entertainment industry.

collectividualism

honestly, i have no idea what's supposed to be at stake in the currently raging individualism/collectivism debate. it's not like i can choose not to be an individual, and it's not like i can cease to be in relation/connection to other people. i can't become everybody, but on the other hand i can't cease to be part of everybody or indeed everything. maybe we basically mean selfishness vs. generosity? oh i am for generosity. or maybe we mean liberty against coercion? i am for liberty. anyway, i actually don't think that practical politics can turn on these gigantic woolly abstractions, and if you make, say, your position on 34.6% or 39% in the marginal tax rate turn on your view about fundamental ontology or the locus of human consciousness, you are being very silly. but it does make a seemingly relatively minor debate like that insanely fraught, so that corporate and personal identities are apparently at stake in every little adjustment. that's one reason you have so much trouble compromising.

but really, we're chumps to be throwing around these categories without trying to get clear on what they could possibly mean. they have the typical qualities that gigantic abstractions display when they enter the discourse of politicians and pundits: neither has any clear or non-contradictory content, and if you'll excuse my saying so, you need philosophers (specialists in big woolly abstractions) to try to set up an actual taxonomy or at least provide some clarifying definitional/historical work that would lend the debate some meaning aside from the evident power of these terms as manipulative tropes.

it's not like you could achieve the collective good without doing good for any particular person, and it's not like you could do good for each particular person and not help everybody. there just cannot be this opposition as it's being framed right now. any position that tempts you to deny the existence of individuals or the existence of groups is obviously ridiculous, and then the work is to try to figure out the relations in some realer or thicker way that doesn't expunge either of these realities.

if you removed the individuals there would be no connections, and if you removed the connections there would be no individuals. for that matter, individuals are not atoms; each of us is a complicated web of relations as well. indeed, each of us is individuated precisely by our connections: no one else has the same relations to the same people and other things in the world as i do, and when you do this over time, each of us is massively unique precisely by the history of our relations. well that's the metaphysics of my big next book entanglements.

photo credit: jane sartwell

the nola fatses

i'm not feeling pelicans for the nola basketball team. don't know how they couldn't get 'jazz' back (not that jazz didn't come from salt lake city). how about the satchmos? ok maybe not. yo here it is: the dominoes, after fats (fats domino was great and took a whole style of nola music to the world). scads of cool domino-themed merchandise beckon. too late to win the contest, though. it has that little flavor of vice that says 'new orleans' while still being also a kids' game. also of course fats is a katrina survivor, bringing it all together.

spanking thomas hardy

in this week's new york review of books, tim parks compares the works of e.l. james unfavorably to those of nicholson baker and thomas hardy (or, as i prefer to think of him, hummus tardy). apparently she doesn't write as well as they do (sorry about pay wall). next ish: parks will shock the world with his argument that one direction isn't as good as mahler. but, on the other hand, neither e.l. james nor one direction is as pretentious, confused, or boring as tim parks. whatever millions of women have felt reading fifty shades of grey, parks felt reading jude the obscure, the dreariest and most didactic novel ever written.

extremism in defense of emptiness

so republicans today are talking about the 'far-left agenda' promulgated by obama yesterday. it's extreme, they say. it's out of the mainstream. (i leave aside that i myself regard 'extreme' and 'out of the mainstream' as compliments.) to which all sorts of people on the left, many of whom are well west of obama, are going, 'what?!' or maybe they'll say, with an amazing failure of basic reflection, that that's just factually false. well, you know i heard many people describing mitt romney as a radical right-winger with an extreme agenda. mitt fucking romney, who had absolutely no actual positions on anything. 

now i have often argued that the left-right political spectrum is a ridiculously bad way to think about politics, though one i guess we're stuck with. but a good thing about it: obviously whether something is to your left or right, or way far away or very close, depends on where you are and which way you're facing.  it's like you're asserting china is way far away, but you don't mean from here; 'from where' doesn't matter: china has, you assert, the intrinsic property of wayfarawayness. it's just an objective fact, even to the folks in beijing, that china is wayfaraway. sadly for this magnificent idea, 'wayfaraway' or 'extreme' pick out relations (really, more or less the same relation), and they are symmetrical relations. x is exactly as far from y as y is from x. if you are saying that someone is wayfaraway or extreme (from where you are), you are also saying equally that you are yourself extreme (from where she is). so you are, as a matter of strict logical entailment, always accusing yourself.

the overall effect of each side of our stupefyingly banal mainstream politics calling the other extreme, and (what seems impossible for quasi-rational creatures) their followers buying it or at least repeating it, is to whittle the political spectrum down to nothing. if obama and romney are extremists, then no creative or interesting ideas are possible, because any sentence that you haven't already heard 2k times is just too freaking weird. this is one reason that american political discourse is so unbelievably repetitive, and one reason neither the dems nor the reps has had a new idea in decades. obviously, the politicians and their followers don't want any. the obama and romney campaigns consisted largely of empty catch-phrases: often exactly the same ones ('balanced plan,' e.g.). anything that is not a mere cliche is dangerous and radical and weird.

this whole thing is just silly name-calling, and all it means is: he's not like us. it's like your little clique of cheerleaders or whatever, who all agree, you know, that shelley is just so weird. they experience shelley's weirdness as an objective fact. well, cheerleaders are not cheerleaders in virtue of their reasoning abilities. shelley and her goths, of course think the same about the cheerleaders, though thinking has nothing to do with either attitude. so i'd recommend that both sides just shut up with this 'extremist' crap. if you want to see actual extremist positions, read my books. this will of course entail that the democrats and republicans are extreme from my point of view (admittedly in tension with their milquetoastiness), and indeed that they are all together at the far-extreme edge of the spectrum. there i overcame your supposedly partisan divide.

barack and martin: opposites

we're right back to 'barack obama/martin luther king'. he took the oath with king's bible. so i'll do this one more time. to what extent is it a realization of king's dream that a black man now controls 'the mightiest military in the history of the world'? or a sprawling system of federal detention for immigrants? or unprecedented surveillance powers? to what extent was king dreaming of a time when a black man could rain death on you anywhere in the world with robots? see, whether king quite got this completely or not, his ethical and spiritual vision was not compatible with exercising political power, which rests on violence. many non-resistants and pacifists, for example leo tolstoy and william lloyd garrison, have seen that. now, on the other hand, maybe king's non-violence was a strategy: just a strategy: a mere strategy. i don't think you could support that out of king's writings and speeches, however.

on the other hand, it's pretty amazing how far he and we have come on gay rights. he got up there and said 'stonewall.' i was telling my twelve-year-old daughter jane that not that long ago, when ellen degeneres came out as a lesbian, they canceled her sitcom. it's like i was talking about jim crow segregation or something: she couldn't actually believe it. (sitcoms ain't selma, but ellen is someone jane knows about.)

but king would have been foursquare on gay rights as soon as the movement really emerged, i believe. obama presented gay rights as an obvious corollary to civil rights for black folks, which they are. but i remind you that he was not there, oh, you know, eighteen months ago. i don't think that he didn't know that this followed directly from like everything he ever said; i think he didn't endorse it - really, the most obvious demand of equality and  justice on his own account today - because he thought it would damage him politically. this is why, if you want someone who can endorse even his own supposedly deepest principles, you must look for leaders who are outside the political system. there are no, and there can be no, leaders within it.

with extremely mediocre gods

doris kerns-goodwin on morning joe, about the inauguration: "this is our secular religion." or the news hour: 'this is a holy day in our civic religion.' it's a coronation, once again affirming the civic divine right of kings. anyway, like does the first amendment mean i can jump ship on our civic religion? people - people who worship people - are the skankiest people of all. doris and richard norton smith are taking the monica lewinsky approach to presidential power. well, who, given the chance, wouldn't blow god?

you have nothing to lose but your brains

it surprises the nyt, but it doesn't surprise me, that marxist publishing is in revival. for one thing, there's really nowhere else to go: the last time anyone in the world left had an idea was 1848. i mean go read hardt and negri or zizek and realize it's exactly the same thing, only with a slightly different jargon-cloud. really the idea is just to keep pouring out words until the totalitarianism is slightly obscured.  or, you know, you can just buy a hyper-dilute solution from the dems or whatever. if marxism is revived in areas other than publishing, we'lll be shooting back.

biden and nickel mines

even i like joe biden, and i sort of regret very strong words i've used, such as 'buffoon' and 'charlatan.' that was too much i think. and i think he makes a good contrasting pair with obama, as in eddie murphy and nick nolte in 48 hours, although here the white guy carries the burden of the comedy. however, this is completely typical. on a generous reading he's just so exhuberant and enthusiastic that he loses track of the truth part. well, that could be pretty organically connected to the what's good. only i would definitely fact-check every claim.

clash of the cretins

i do love a donnybrook between pretentious, tasteless assholes of the sort who dictate the pecking order at the idiot upper end of the artworld.

The legal complaints center on the worth of an unfinished Jeff Koons sculpture, “Popeye,” that Mr. Perelman bought from Mr. Gagosian for $4 million, as well as the value of eight other works that Mr. Perelman used as partial payment for a $10.5 million Cy Twomblypainting and a $12.6 million Richard Serra sculpture he bought from the dealer.

now, i propose that an unfinished sculpture by jeff koons has no value other than what people like larry gagosian pluck out of thin air. how did he pluck it out of thin air? he figured out what you just might pay, so it's too late now to whine because you paid it. the idea that a judge is going to be able to determine what such a thing is really worth presupposes that there is some sort of answer to that question. my view is that it is worth what its component materials are worth, and if called i will testify to that effect. no one can buy something like that because they actually want to look at it or live with it or think about it, right? volcanic tempers and diva egomania are one thing; tastes that are at once bad, pretentious, insincere, and backed by infinite cash are another. how do you persuade yourself that that is a good use of anyone's money? the whole idea of art collecting in this vein is extreme self-deception: i like it. i see what it means. it's deep. it's important. i want to be taken to understand. that's why i buy unfinished popeyes at the price of diamonds. perelman is trying to establish that he's not extremely gauche and tasteless, which is certainly one of the most conspicuous features of...people like himself. but his only way to establish his transcendence is to measure it in dollars: that is, all he knows how to do is crank the gaucherie to excruciating levels.

anyway, if the new york/international art market collapsed utterly, to the point where you couldn't give your twombly scribbles away, the whole culture would be better off. 

 

myself, i'd replace art with craft and suggest that people like perelman do something non-meaningless with their millions. i'm more interested in the iowa or gabon artworld than the new york artworld. or: the original popeye cartoons are art. ok roy lichtenstein's appropriations of such things are art. jeff koons' appropriatons of pop art's appropriations of cartoons are at best momentarily amusing old jokes. they might be sort of funny, or rather they might remind you that lichtenstein really was funny, but that's the best one can say. i'll say to all of us what i said the perelman: if we let people like larry gagosian tell us what art is or why it is important or whether it's good or not, we deserve the art we get and the price we pay.

or here's some more advice while i'm fixing art. don't pretend. if you really like it and understand it, say you do no matter what the status or supposed valuation of it is. if you don't like it or understand it, say you don't like it or understand it. now, you can definitely learn to like and understand something, and you know there might be reasons in some particular case why you should try. but just start with this: i'm as trustworthy on this as anyone else, and at any rate i sort of have to listen to myself or i will be surrounded by things i hate. really, just say it: endorse yourself. nothing goes wrong if you have your own bad taste, but you're just torturing yourself and all of us if you try to have larry gagosian's bad taste. and even larry gagosian can't give you what you want if you don't know what you want, or are just pretending. 

te'o and media

i can be pretty hard on reporters who get stories wrong. like i was ragging on all the misinformation they were purveying on newtown. but i'm going to forgive them on the te'o story. it's just not the sort of thing you'd think someone would make up. it spoke well for us that we wouldn't require verification on something like that, just believe the raw emotion he was...expressing. well, i suppose even things like that have to dissolve in our current context, including social media. but that's sad, see? do i resent the fact that i was laboring under a misapprehension? well yeah a bit. how much of a burden was it to continue to labor under that misapprehension for a few extra weeks? indetectible in the face of the actual burdens that confront me on any given day. this crap ain't exactly watergate. believing a college kid about his tragedy is not like believing what some politician or military spokesman or corporate flak is saying, which are real and constant problems in american journalism. so i just don't feel that there is a big media problem here, except maybe that te'o was tailoring the story to fit into espn's formulae. the formulae should be reflected on not least because the narrative forms they deploy are getting awfully old, and have the sort of falsifying imperatives that alway arise when you try to read actual life as though it were a novel.

or: how could notre dame not release this information as soon as they had it? well, this is the kind of story that there just is no urgency in reporting to anyone. now, maybe it's disturbing that they waited til after the championship game, but really we don't know how the deliberation went at all. it's sad, stupid, and fucked up no matter how it happened, but nothing turns on getting it out immediately at all: it has no, like, policy implications. no one has to make up their mind about anything on its basis, at least until the draft. 

linebackers and negative existentials

sometimes real life tumbles into the rathole of philosophy. this sentence has been produced by all media: manti te'o's dead girlfriend never existed. maybe my ex-wife never existed too! that would piss her off though. yo the present king of france is bald, bitch: check the online pics. but i sympathize with te'o. it's hard to lose somebody you love so much to leukemia, even sadder to lose someone you love so much to the sheer implacable fact that she never existed at all: the loss is retroactive and total. indeed, it would be hard to die of leukemia; but it would very, very difficult never to have existed. it makes death look like a picnic. worst of all would be never to have existed at all and to die anyway. that surely is the worst of all impossible worlds, and it is being reported as a fact this morning on cnn. anyway, please give me a russellian analysis of these propositions?

if we can save one life

one line that obama was pushing again today was 'if we can save one life...' now, that registers something people believe: our lives and the lives of people we love are of more or less infinite value to us: transcendent value. it gets a little less compelling when it's somebody's life somewhere sometime in the future, but even there we want to express that lives are more important than, say, tax expenditures, or a hassle. but however you just cannot use this as a reasonable principle. there are a million ways you could save a life, especially if you were permitted to achieve them through repression or to undertake any degree of expense. (repression is, in fact, always precisely the proposal.) at any rate, ban the automobile. require each person to wear kevlar. completely isolate people when they have communicable diseases. intern males universally between the ages of 15 and 35. make living wills illegal. ban farming, one of the more dangerous professions. lace the drinking water with ssri's. etc etc.

universal repression is a small price to pay

i wish there was some response to newtown that wasn't merely: suspend the constitution. repress. censor. intern. blame quentin tarantino. indeed, in our current cultural/political climate, no one has any ideas about methods for accomplishing anything at all except to make people less free. this is why, just as progressives believe, the future is unimaginable except as ever-more extreme state domination of every aspect of everyone's life. that's all y'all really want out of life, i see. and i agree, you're gonna get it. you really do understand history.

just a note: were i quentin tarantino, and my name was connected to the mass murder of schoolchildren by hundreds of commentators, for weeks on end, in virtue of the fact that i just made an excellent work of art, i would, as he is, be gettin kind of pissy.

one gambit i love about the anti-free-expression approach: 'by the time a kid turns 18, he's witnessed thousands of murders.' or: 'in these games, a kid marches through a landscape, murdering dozens of people.' well now this seems a bit confused, unless actual people are made of pixels. or: studies show that these games have an 'arousing' effect. gee really? if not, nobody would play. that's the 'entertainment' effect. i'd like to see a careful account of what 'desensitization' is or what effects it might have. now, i don't think kids playing video games are confused as between real persons and pictures of persons, but obviously the experts and commentators are. perhaps they can't imagine that everyone isn't as confused - or perhaps the word i'm looking for is 'delusional' - as they are.

still making out with bashar?

so, everyone got all huffy a year or two ago when i was recommending a cruise missile through bashar al-assad's window. now, 60,000 dead and millions displaced later, i wonder whether you'd still reject that on the grounds that assad is, after all, an opponent of the united states, or on the grounds that his dad mouthed his enthusiasm for world proletarian revolution soviet-style while pursuing the liberation of thousands of souls onto the ethereal plain, or on whatever other grounds you might have been advancing at the time.

the american people always agree with me

perhaps the most popular rhetorical ploy in politics today is 'the american people want x,' 'the american people think y,' etc. remarkably we the people always agree with whomever's yapping that crap. really obama is particularly incessant with this: he walks this rutted path many times a day. it really is a relief to be told continuously what i really want and believe, though of course what i want or believe changes moment by moment depending on who's holding forth. i really had no idea that i wanted the highest tax rate to go from 34 to 39%, for example. really i didn't think that much about it until they told me i had an opinion. it beats being psychologically or epistemically directed by someone i actually know, or by myself. now 'the american people' is, obviously, not the sort of thing that can want or believe anything, which is why it's both necessary and impossible to appoint someone to tell us what we think. anyway, i appreciate the way all politicians know me so much better than i know myself. in all senses, they've made up our mind.

livewrong

a few lance armstrong observations: possibly testicular cancer is a side effect of steroid abuse. and now i guess he's reached the stage of redemptive snitching. i'm not sure there's ultimately any treatment for the tendency of people to try to find one of their number to elevate into a little god, or the disease of hero-worship, but certainly no number of empirical refutations appears adequate.

Acknowledging his doping past has cleared the way for Armstrong to take the next step in trying to mitigate his lifetime ban from Olympic sports. He is planning to testify against several powerful people in the sport of cycling who knew about his doping and possibly facilitated it, said several people with knowledge of the situation.

mit blasphemes against science

guardian on aaron swartz:

The trial was due to begin next month. He faced 13 felony charges including computer and wire fraud. Prosecutors accused him of stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the intent of making them freely available.

honestly, whatever the fam might think, i don't believe you can blame mit for his suicide. but the actions of mit could not possibly be more antithetical to the supposed purposes and values of mit: mit taking heroic measures to restrict access to scientific research is like the lutheran church taking extraordinary measures to repress the scriptures. right, mit hates the whole idea of science insofar as it is incompatible with $$$ for the corporate interests of which they are a client.