The Most Important Birthday

I was reminded in comments downblog that today is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest mind in the short history of our little monkey species, which may not ultimately be saying much, but there it is. Here are Andrew Manze and Rachel Podger, two of the finest baroque instrumentalists currently playing, in a rendition of Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in d-minor. Anyone who ever suffered through the Suzuki method learned the 2nd violin part of the first movement and was forced to scratch it out with a slightly older student who was working through the 1st violin part, which turned out to be easier to count anyway. It's the middle movement that really gets me--one of the loveliest six minutes of music ever written.

Joy of Man's Desiring

Even [Amy Sullivan's] concept of "religion" is frustratingly nebulous; you get the sense that in her mind it kind of means something like "sincere" but doesn't have much meaning beyond that.

-Robert Farley

Robert and I hardly see eye to eye on . . . much of anything, but I share his frustration, to put it mildly, with one Amy Sullivan, a sort of Aimee Semple for the Pottery Barn set. It is Sullivan's persistent thesis that the key to electoral success is the equally persistent invocation of the inherent goodness of religion or "faith." Sullivan herself claims to be something called an Evangelical, one of those mostly American inventions that, like the automobile, impressed a lot of people and drew in a lot of customers, but which, also like the automobile, has mostly contributed to wrecking our civilization.

I'm not sure that bland "sincerety" is quite Sullivan's definition of acceptable public religiosity, however. I suspect--and Farley, despite the quotation above, seems to feel the same--that what Sullivan is actually seeking is precisely the sort of banal insincerity that already erupts whenever a politician walks past a church, but more of it. As for her own nebulousness, Sullivan's particular shibboleth, the "religious Left," is neither especially leftist nor particularly religious. It embraces Jesus as a sort of proto-FDR, which is moving in the right direction from the "religious Right," which prefers not to envision him at all, but as for this religious left giving up their worldly belongings and crafting a mystical, egalitarian, communitarian kingdom of the spirit . . . eh, not so much. They like to point out that Jesus would hardly have been at home in a Midtown board room, which is true, but he wouldn't have been a big fan of a comfortably liberal Upper West Side PTA meeting either.

Sullivan's religion is fundamentally non-dogmatic, and that's not a problem for me precisely. Hell, it works for the Hindus. But it is ultimately based on the kookiest notion of grace this side of Operating Thetan, a sort of dollar-store Calvinism, minus the possibility of damnation. Everyone's the Elect! Its absence of content enables its malleability, and thus is it ever hammered into a gossamer web that threatens to break up in the slightest breeze.

Les trois ours

The Post gives the two Donks too much credit, but whatever: Just what the hell is a responsible withdrawal from Iraq. The Post paints it à la three bears and asks for porridge neither too hot nor too cold, and that, in turn, paints to Post in fairytaleland. Since despite the best wishes of our humanitarian interventionists there is not yet any such thing as prophylaxis in war, I think an elementary fact bears repeating: withdrawal after insertion is precautionarily irrelevant, and your best bet, albeit still a lousy one, is haste.

ATM

Some counterterrorism officials say their agencies missed early opportunities to attack the network from within. Relying on Cold War tactics such as cash rewards for tips failed to take into account the religious motivations of Islamist radicals and produced few results.

-The Times

You know, what's hilarious about shit like this is that those Cold War tactics didn't actually work during the Cold War. The US never penetrated the Kremlin, and the dudes we gave the cash too took it and told us fairy tales which, of course, we believed.

Psalms

Slate is running an execrable, embarrassing series wherein notables, luminaries, and hangers-on regret their positions on invading Iraq, with the exception of Christopher Hitchens, who lives within the Pluroma and incarnates all possibility, by which we mean drinks stuporiously and doesn't give a fuck. Notable lacking: contrition. Perhaps this is the Jew in me: I distrust confession as a spiritual or moral virtue, especially as compared to repentence. Meanwhile, the spectacle of a lot of hand-wringers proofreading their prior committments to death and destruction on a massive scale as if retrospection were itself an act of valor is delightful to the little Satanist in me. "[P]ride compasseth them about as a chain; violence covereth them as a garment."

The Candidate

Wolcott says, "I question that a 'conversation' or dialogue on race is what the country wants or needs right now," his point being that people have some real concerns, it turns out, that get in the way of national edification. Now you could object that Obama sets up such a conversation as a kind of predicate for addressing the "real" problems: health care and "shuttered mills" and foreclosure and so on and so forth. There is not, however, any particular reason to believe that a transracial national coming-together is especially germane to achieving whatever it is we're supposed to achieve in this regard. I mean, there is already a broad, national, transracial consensus that the government ought to subsidize health care, that protectionist measures ought to be undertaken to keep companies from "shipping jobs overseas," and that the government ought to regulate the credit and mortgage industries more heavily and provide more money to more defaulting owners more immediately. A substantial majority holds these views. A transracial, bipartisan majority of voters. Of course, no one actually cares what voters want, only care how they vote, two entirely distinct and discrete categories.

OBAMAIPAC

Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

-The Saint

Change you can believe in. Double-yoy.

L'esprit de soixante-huit

Man, Richard Cohen is like, fuck, I don't even know:

But had you heard about them? Did your crack campaign staff alert you? And what about Wright's honoring Farrakhan? Had you heard about that? Did you feel any obligation to denounce those remarks -- not Farrakhan's, as you had done, but those of Wright himself? Don't you consider yourself a public figure whom others look to for leadership? Do you think you failed them here?

Unhitch those britches, prosecutor!

Like Dennis Perrin says, Black America is having a very different conversation than White America right now. And with reason. This morning I read Anne Applebaum, the Virgin Martyr of Found Causes, on China:

Though we don't usually think of it that way, China is in fact a vast, anachronistic, territorial empire, within which one dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, rules a host of reluctant "captive nations." To keep the peace, the Chinese use methods not so different from those once used by Austria-Hungary or czarist Russia: political manipulation, repression by secret police and military force.

Now that has got to be one of the most un-self-conscious extrusions I've heard in a long time. "A vast, anachronistic, territorial empire." "One dominant ethnic group." "Political manipulation, repression by secret police, and military forces." If Anne Applebaum read her own goddamn paper, she might have discovered that 1 of every 9 black men is in jail, and that our own vast, anachronistic, territorial empire appears to our non-dominant ethnic groups to be quite up on its political manipulation and repression. These crackers look to Tibet and see a long-suffering, noble people, and cheer them on for their molotovs. Meanwhile the problem with black americans is, what, they're not listening to Cosby?

The Pathless Path

My Brother AXE finds the Dalai Lama joining the Defeatist ranks, honorarily at least, temporarily at worst. Interestingly, to me anyway, the Dalai's comments are awfully dao ke dao, ironically since that sort of, uh, mindful acceptance, AKA defeatism, is rather more Zen than Tibetan.

Of course, I am drawn to this philosophy as espoused. My interest in the transcendent value of abstention stems from a deeply held disinclination to trying to impose my will, so to speak, on others. Curiously enough, this appears to be a more controversial personal affect than its opposite: the constant need to tell people what to do.

CONfidence

Maybe you're thinking to yourself, "Why is this IOZ fellow, who says he's all for the free movement of labor and capital across borders and over oceans and to distant stars and foreward and backward in time, why is this guy so down and dismissive of capitalism?" Well, this is why: because capitalism is a scam, a condfidence game, fooling you easy marks into supposing that you live in something other than a confiscatory command economy. And as surely as the symbolic vestiges of the old, aristocratic republic have proven more effective means of popular control than any outright tyranny ever has--a gaudy quadrennial spectacle more effective at keeping the discontented off the streets than all the tanks in Tiananmen--so to does ritual genuflection at The Wisdom of Markets camouflage the plain fact that the invisible hand is not actually invisible if you just open your eyes.

Consider Bear Stearns, who was once as handsome and tall as . . . Well, consider anyway this throwaway line and quite common sentiment these days:

“The problem is bigger than the Fed,” said Meredith A. Whitney, an Oppenheimer financial services analyst. "Trillions of dollars of securities were underwritten on the false assumption house prices could never go down on a national basis. That falsehood has put the entire financial system in a tailspin."

Right. And we all believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and he kicked out the inspectors, and oil would pay for the war, and there will be no permanent military bases. Ladies and gents, boobs and rubes, the falsehood Ms. Whitney--and plenty of others--identifies is a fine tall tale for house-flippers and the jerks who think they're going to hit it Buffet style on eTrade, but the people who run all those "financial services" know that there's no such thing as economic escape velocity. That which goes up must come down. Anyone who knew anything, admittedly a vanishing category these days, knew not only that housing prices could go down on a national basis, but banked on the fact that they would. The run-up was all smoke, mirrors and profit-taking, and the downturn, even in these early stages, will be all about the massive transference of wealth from the public coffers into the so-called private sector.

It was plain from the outset that the massive inflation in the housing market was an artificial phenomenon. Material costs had not increased. Building methods weren't more complex. Labor rates in the trades were high, but stable. Fuel costs were rising, but contained until much more recently. Hell, houses were built cheaper and cheaper all the time. There was not one material reason why a houses sale price should jump 50, 60, 100% in a year. Plenty of building was going on. Stock was on the increase, not the decrease. There were hundreds of home builders and dozens of major Realtors operating nationally. Shouldn't all that competition have exerted downward pressure on prices?

Well, what drove it all up was the easy-credit ponzi scheme, and with the phony, assetized debts of all those paper-and-pony mortgages, the same folks doing the dodgy lending reaped a second windfall in financing huge institutional sales of equally phony investments, and they all bought each other's crap and made a ton of money and now, taxpayers, you poor suckers, you're going to bail them out. But don't worry, because Barack Obama is going to fix Social Security.

Bref

A busy weekend has kept me blissfully free of political news for the last couple of days. Good thing nothing ever changes!

Over at Digby's place, coblogger dday unintentionally illuminates one of the starkest failures of the liberal intellect as regards Occupied Iraq:

The various parties in Iraq aren't even speaking to one another, let alone producing legislation aimed at reconciliation

Oh. Legislation. Where do they find these people?