Fascism Lite (Now With More Calories)

Jon Schwarz draws nearer to my heart by noting that fascism becomes largely impracticable in a nation where a normal diet is just an insulin shot a day away. And by normal diet, Jon means something like 4,000 daily calories from food and another 2K from the Big Gulps of sugar water that everyone totes around like supplemental oxygen:

You need lots of people in good shape for fascism. When you're chasing the Armenian/Jew/Commie/Tutsi/Kulak down the street, you can't be distracted by your pants chafing against your chubby thighs. That leaves the miscreant time to get away and continue their plotting to destroy humanity.

This, I think, is essentially true. Sure, Ersnt Rohm was a chubby bugger, but he was vigorous and maintained a range of motion. Your average Americano is not so inclined to hiking and marching. Americans do not march. Can you imagine the listenership of Sean Hannity goose-stepping down Main Street? I can. It looks like A Chorus Like recoreographed by the trainers at Sea World. Can you imagine yourself pursued by such creatures--say, down a dark alley? A gang of vicious manatees, almost incapable of moving on dry land. What have we ultimately to fear from people who must stop to catch their breath after a single flight of stairs?

I can't say I take much comfort, though. I mock American stupidity, but if ever Americans showed ingenuity it was in our startling conversion to a militarist, command-economy surveillance state without any of the traditional way-stations. No revolutions. No gangs. No brownshirts. No purges. No transports. It was done almost entirely through cooptation. Our government subsidized it. It borrowed in order that we spend, gave us low interest rates and easy credit. It's hard not to feel free when you have hundreds of channels to choose from on a 1'000" TV with no interest and no payments until 2012. Did our prisons expand, and do we incarcerate more people than any other nation? Sure, but it happened slowly.

Do you doubt this diagnosis? Consider the Times. It's the nation's preeminent daily newspaper. Here it is, solemnly editorializing in favor of more and better homeland security. "Galvanizing the department with effective leadership should be high on the national agenda for the roaming throng of presidential candidates." Fortunately for you, Reader, I work in management, and I'm able to translate this babble into plain English. The paper is trying to explain that we need a better state security apparatus, and instead of some nasal fag, we should properly get someone who looks better in a long leather coat and an airman's cap. To, you know, motivate "the department."

For crimes against language, I've rarely seen a purer specimen than this:

Homeland security is a vital but amorphous concept that demands dedicated experts, not patronage loyalists.

The Times editorial board doesn't know what Homeland security is, but they know they want more of it. It's vital before it's amorphous, after all. Then again, it's only a concept. Yet it's a concept that "demands dedicated experts." To what are they dedicated if Homeland Security is amporphous? Who knows? More power to the experts, though. Who can fail to respect men and women who've acquired expertise in the absence of a discipline of study or field of inquiry? It's like having a degree in just chillin'. Fuck fucking yeah, dude.

Everyone knows that the Department of Homeland Security was a boondoggle to begin with. Certainly the Times knows it. This vitally amporphous idea is so goddamn amorphous that it has no inherent attributes. It exists beyond the realm of pure ideas. It exists on an ethereal plane of post-liberal Western unthink. Tens of thousands of government employees go to work and disappear entirely from our universe except for the few who occasionally emerge into our dimension for a liesurely smoke in the Designated Non-Smoking Area that curiously enough has an ashtray, surely a sign that management really wants you to smoke there. This displeases the Times, media guardian of our freedoms and our discourses, which wants a more traditional organization for the defense of the fatherland. I, for one, think it's totally unnecessary when we have so far degenrated as a country that two ranch hands and a sheepdog could keep us all in line. Except, of course, for what we call "the troubled African-American youth," who to these tired eyes appear to be the only people in this bullshit country who aren't getting fooled, and for whom, therefore, all the jails were built.

Alexander Hamilton Wuz Jus Like U n Me!

You’d think that in this and every election, the Republicans would want to continue this tradition. You’d think that they’d start every election by putting themselves at the kitchen tables of middle-class families with ambitious kids. Their first questions would be: What are the barriers to their mobility? What concrete help do these people need to realize their dreams?

Yet at the Republican economic debate in Michigan this week, there was no talk of that. The candidates declared their fealty to general principles: free trade, lower taxes and reduced spending. They talked a lot about the line-item veto and the Chinese currency. But there was almost nothing that touched concretely on the lives of the ambitious working-class parents who are the backbone of the G.O.P.

-David Brooks on a magical journey in the Night Kitchen

Dear David Brooks,

Nigga what? Nigga please.

Peace yo,
IOZ

Rendition

I awoke this morning to a pounding at the door. Well, this is it, I thought. They've come for me at last. The black bag over the head. The anal suppositories. The flights over European airspace. I don't think I'd hold up very well under torture, Mandrake . . .

Ah, no. Merely my neighbor and the driver of the concrete truck that just totaled my car. Oh '01 Stratus, I hated thee until thou wert gone.

Menteur

Everyone knows that the President is lying when he says that the United States doesn't torture its prisoners. Those who support the President understand that the United States tortures is prisoners, condone such actions, and know that the President is lying out of moral, legal, and political necessity. Those who don't support the President understand that the United States tortures its prisoners, condemn such actions, and know that the President is lying out of moral, legal, and political necessity. No American with the barest minimum of currency in current events thinks that the United States does not torture its prisoners. Every American with the slightest familiarity with local daily, an old copy of Time at the dentist's office, a car radio, or a dial-up internet connection knows that the United States tortures its prisoners, and that when the President says that it doesn't, he's lying. It isn't casuistry. It isn't misrepresentation. It isn't evasion. The United States tortures its prisoners. The President says that it doesn't. The President is lying.

Yet we're still treated to such pro forma exchanges as:

[WOLF] BLITZER: President Bush said as recently as this week the United States does not torture detainees.

[JIMMY] CARTER: That's not an accurate statement. If you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored, certainly in the last 60 years, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

But you can make your own definition of human rights and say, we don't violate them. And we can -- you can make your own definition of torture and say we don't violate it.

BLITZER: But by your definition, you believe the United States, under this administration, has used torture.

CARTER: I don't think it, I know it, certainly.

BLITZER: So is the president lying?

CARTER: The president is self-defining what we have done and authorized in the torture of prisoners, yes.

Wolf Blitzer knows that the President is lying. Jimmy Carter knows that the Presdient is lying. The question, "So is the President lying?" serves no probative purpose. A right angle is ninety degrees. Two and two is four. Objects in motion remain in motion unless acted upon. A premise, once established and verified, need not be endlessly reaffirmed.

Now Blitzer goes on to ask more pertinetly whether or not torture of prisoners is a violation of the law as established by treaty, and of course the answer is yes. That being the case, of course, those involved should theoretically be subject to prosecution. And, one could argue, that by the principles established at Nuremburg and reaffirmed through the European Court of Human Rights, the Internataionl Criminal Court, the prosecution of Milosevic at the Hague, and others, that should American toture be shown as systemic and a matter of official policy--and we all, supporters and opponents, know that it is--that those in the highest echelons of our government and military--legislators, high execuive officials, members of the judiciary--should themselves be brought before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.

But Jimminy Carter says:

Well, I think we -- the best way to hold people accountable in this country is through the election process.

There is probably no category of human being on this planet, including the torturers, who are so cowardly and so reprehensible as Democrats in the United States of America.

Clinton

Andrew Sullivan has never been one of the anglophone world's brighter bulbs. He's never been one of its brighter gas lamps. He's never been one of its brighter tallow candles. This has made him acceptable and that has made him successful. He's easily outraged and easily flattered. Whatever. My daddy done tole me never to begrudge a man for making more money than you in the same racket. At least not publicly.

Sullivan, as you're probably aware, has got a serious problem with Hillary Clinton. Fuck it, dudes, so do I. But Sullivan's problem seems largely confined to his conviction that Bill was "a perjurer and an abuser of women; she was deeply complicit in all of it, and ultimately used it for her own political advantage." You read it there first, friends. Perjury and abuse as political advantage. True, hardly a day goes by when Hillary fails to remind cheering crowds of the many ladies ravished by her husband, but . . .

Parenthetically, Sullivan says in that same article, "Watching the Clintons pivot off homophobia--while pretending to be civil rights pioneers--really sickened me (although not as much as the gay establishment symps who rolled over and begged for more. They're still at it, of course)." This from a man who, you'll pardon the expression, got behind Bush.

The flaw in Sullivan's argument is evident in this post rightly excoriating Clinton's position on torture, which is that she has no position on torture. Sullivan:

Before she'll promise anything, she wants the power.

I don't quibble with this statement of fact, but look at the implication. Sullivan couches his unique persistence in critizing Clinton in opposition to power hunger. But who runs for the Presidency without it? Mike Gravel, perhaps.

Now I am willing to sound a little bit like It's-Not-Pronounced-Ann Rand, here. The myth of altruistic intent is irrepressible but false. The President of the United States is the most powerful man in the world. The Office of the Presidency is the single most powerful human institution in the entire history of mankind. Fuck the "Iraqi Quagmire" and the limits of American power. No king, no emperorr, no potentate, no general, no premier, no commissar, no pope, and no messiah during his lifetime has ever wielded more power over more people over a wider geography than the President of the United States. To pursue that office is to pursue that power. That is true of Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, and the rest of that passel of madmen and lunatics. Why slice it, dice it, or mince it? Of course she fucking wants the power, Andy.

It's tortorous to me to hear this or that candidate singled out as uniquely venal or corrupt in this regard. With the exception of folks like Paul and Gravel, who are simply using momentary laxness in the electoral system to gain a platform for the airing of quixotic views (and more power to them, by the way), the campaign for the presidency is a campaign to rule the world as nearly as any one person ever has. The aspiration to rule over other human beings is at the heart of every potential president. To believe that Hillary is unique in this regard is pure fatuity. If she evinces more hunger, that only means she's more likely to win the race.

Onan

To paraphrase Ridley Scott: When you're alone, no one can hear your safety word.

Fowlair

My jaw is dropping:

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

Have people not read this book?

-Matthew Yglesias on Tom Friedman's . . . oh, just fuck it.

Dear Matt,

No.

Your friend,
IOZ

(I am of course indebted to my buddy Ultima for setting me straight on this matter.)

Watch Me Unravel, I'll Soon Be Naked

Michael Gerson was once a speechwriter for President Bush, and now he's a sinecured columnist at the Post, where he continues to rewrite the speech that he continuously rewrote as a speechwriter for President Bush. In its present incarnation, it's become an unsubtle response to the equally silly David Brooks, who after five years of arguing that conservativism necessitates radical Leninism, has now discovered Tradition and the global applicability of that Hayekian insight best expressed by the mediocre pop band, Weezer: "If you want to destroy my sweater, pull this string as I walk away." Its central thesis is worth poking:

At the most basic level, the democracy agenda is not abstract at all. It is a determination to defend dissidents rotting in airless prisons, and people awaiting execution for adultery or homosexuality, and religious prisoners kept in shipping containers in the desert, and men and women abused and tortured in reeducation camps. It demands activism against sexual slavery, against honor killings, against genital mutilation and against the execution of children, out of the admittedly philosophic conviction that human beings are created in God's image and should not be oppressed or mutilated.

And the democracy agenda goes a step further. It argues that the most basic human rights will remain insecure as long as they are a gift or concession of the state -- that natural rights must ultimately be protected by self-government. And this ideology asserts that most people in all places, even the poor and oppressed, are capable of controlling their own affairs and determining their own rulers. If this abstract argument seems familiar, it should, because it is the argument of the American founding.

Substantively and stylistically, the first paragraph would benefit greatly from the addition in several places of hedged phrases containing the word "some." We are to stand with dissdents unless they live in Egypt. We are to stand with men and women abused and tortured "in reeducation camps," but not in the secret prisons where "the United States does not torture." We are to condemn Africans for mutilating female genetalia but not to condemn Jews and American pediatricians for mutilating male genetalia. We are to stand against the execution of children. And what's interesting about that is:

The country which has carried out more documented executions of child offenders than any other since 1990 is the USA.

And the democracy agenda goes a step further!

The democracy agenda says that "most people in all places, even the poor and oppressed, are capable of controlling their own affairs and determining their own rulers." The "most" is one fuck of a caveat, isn't it? Into that crack, whole colonies of rats can crawl. From the "most" proceeds legions of CIA coups, elections undermined, polls rigged, and nations invaded.

Say what you will about a madman like Bill Kristol. He is, at least, admirably forthright about his martial dreams. People like Gerson, meanwhile, are paid to elide the instrumental necessities of their agenda. What does it mean to stand by all these poor and oppressed and dissident and hungry and weak and wannabe-self-governing, if not invading their countries, killing their leaders, and converting them to Christianity--in the memorable phrasing of another crazy but admirably forthright member of the Killing-Field Caucus? The milquetoast defenders of interventionism, from those who speak euphemistically about "responding to contingencies in the region" to those who speak euphemistically about "stopping genocide in Darfur" to those who speak euphemistically about "tough diplomacy"--these people, meanwhile, liberal and conservative entirely alike, admit neither to the public nor to themselves what their exceptionalist dreams lead to inexorably: invading and killing.

Secure in His Person

The inquiry is a difficult one, for it pits the judiciary’s search for truth against the executive’s duty to maintain the nation’s security.

-Judge Robert B. King of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals

Section. 2.

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States [...] and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties [...] shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States [....]

Section. 3.

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

-The powers of the Presidency as outline in Article II, sections 2 and 3 of the Constitution of the United States of America

There remains a contingent of fantasists in this country whom I'll call Restorationists. Unlike past Restorations, which sought, usually successfully, to retake government from usurpers and reinstate dynastic monarchies, our Restorationists believe that through the concerted efforts of concerned citizens, electoral politicking, a sound legal strategy, and good public relations, the United States can be restored to its semi-mythical existence as a Republic. Some of these people are deeply intelligent and command my highest respect. Ron Paul. Chalmers Johnson. Others are morons and think that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will have something to do with the restorative transformation. All of them are wrong.

The case of Khaled al-Masri is indicative of this point. An innocent man was kidnapped, spirited away to a secret American prison in Afghanistan, degraded, abused, tortured, and then dumped in the middle of another foreign country. The executive condones it. The Congress accedes to it. The courts ignore it out of deference to the executive. Through what mechanism will a free Republic be restored? Through the courts? The Congress? The Presidency?

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.
Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις.

What will become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

Pedagogy

"Democrats Seem Ready to Extend Wiretap Powers." You needn't read beyond the headline. It isn't inaccurate. It doesn't fail to convey some nuance of the reportage. The only question is which version of the bill will prevail: the venal House version, or the more venal Senate version. Probably these will be negotiated to a venal mean.

I don't need to tell you how DailyKos, Atrios/Eschaton, FireDogLake, Digby and Co., and the rest of the Democratic subalterns will interpret the news, but the Times reporters helpfully include this predictable excuse:

“Many members continue to fear that if they don’t support whatever the president asks for, they’ll be perceived as soft on terrorism,” said William Banks, a professor who specializes in terrorism and national security law at Syracuse University and who has written extensively on federal wiretapping laws.

Everyone will blame the dread emmessemm; everyone will lament the fact that Democrats do not read polls; everyone will rend their garments and wonder extravagantly how a party in the majority, a party clearly likely to win the presidency in 2008, a party more trusted on every measure by the American people, can contort itself into this untenable, immoral, totalitarian position just because they fear a nasty word from some buffoon like Chris Matthews.

Dear Donkle, the answer is evident. The Democrats do read the polls. They read more and better polls than you do. They have a more sophisticated understanding of public opinion. They have closer ties to the media, and are better aware of how their actions will "play." They know that the "soft on terrorism" label is a useless canard, long-since used up as a public manipulation. In 2006 they took Congress. Soon, they expect to have the executive branch as well. The Republican field is exceptionally weak. The Republican party is in tatters. It's scandal-ridden and ineffectual. Its candidates are morons to the man. Its television interlocuters are certifiable, and people know it.

Why, then, do Democrats, in perhaps their most enviable electoral position since the end of the Vietnam war, persist in expanding the secret powers of government over the lives of citizens? Because they want that power.

We Ain't Got the Money for the Mortgage on the Cow

Via Yglesias, I see that Friedman has got a song and dance in which he excoriates Republicans for not levying a war tax. Yglesias notes that Friedman appropriately mocks the GOP for failing to do what every warmaking nation has done previously: levy taxes to raise revenue to pay for war. And one is tempted to agree with him, until one thinks. This is often the case in dealing with American liberalism. Their solutions are sound, but their premises are fucked. In the narrow realm of problems-as-politics, their prescriptions often make a world of sense. Going to invade a country, depose its leaders, and remake its society into a sort of Periclean Athens with a soupçon of Dune and an abiding affection for invading Big Macistan? Better raise taxes to pay for it!

Yet on consideration you cannot help but note that the underlying issue is not that the war is expensive, but that it is doomed, murderous, and wholly wrong. The fault isn't fiscal, but moral and human. The central failure of the war is not that it will be passed as debt to future generations, but that it was fought in the first place. The continuing failure of the war is not in the particulars of its funding or lack thereof, but in continuation itself. Would the Democrats, given their way, impose some surtax to subsidize the occupation of Iraq? Probably. Why? Because we would still be occupying Iraq under the Democrats. And thus to Tehran, for a mere $4/gallon.

I Wish for Fish

I'm rather swamped with a convention-center-ful of city administrators this morning. They have descended upon fair Pittsburgh like locusts, and we must sate them on tours, long speeches, power-point, and stale danish lest we all perish.

While I'm away, go read the inimitable--and not in a good way--Stanley Fish dilating on democracy. In the whole constellation of human endeavors, is there any that gives less and takes more from life on this planet than the public intellectual? I would rub Castro's liver-spotted feet for days before spending five minutes with a man whose selection for a hypothetical President of the World would be "a fictional character, Atticus Finch, at least as he was played by Gregory Peck. (Morgan Freeman in any number of roles is another possibility.)" Morgan Freeman! In any number of roles? Is that to say one selection from among them, or some sort of syncretic, synthetic Freeman. I imagine that world would not be lacking in nasally voice-over narration, but seriously, if the best answer you can dredge up to such a question is a man with a life dedicated to portraying the Magic Negro, then perhaps you, sir, are precisely the fundament of democratic failure.

Terra Nostrum

Roy at Alicublog has some notes on the recent eruptions of patriotic recrimination in This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is Our Land, and notes not for the first time that the red, white, and blue bullies "seem to have a depressingly low opinion of America." What he means is that they appear unable to eruct a single scrap-book image of main street--kids with flags, grannies holding babes, fire trucks, dalmations, marching bands, what have you--and their only model of national, martial glory is a world war now six decades past. But for a series of increasingly flimsy visual cues--the flag lapel pip at the forefront thereof--we should all find ourselves in a dusty land, bowing to the strange gods of Islamofascism.

I confess to a low opinion of America. There was a time when that wasn't exactly the case. Even now I hold a sentimental affection for our founders and for the Constitution that they cobbled together so ingeniously. But all nostalgia is tinged with blindness. The myth of the radical democratic experiment is only a myth. Have we not done exactly as the Romans did? Kick out the natives. Kill off the rivals. Acquire a lot of slaves and a lot of land. Construct an occasionally representative oligarchy that lasted for a few centuries. Divest ourselves of all but the ceremonial vestiges of representation when the business of rule demanded it?