Soviets

If you cannot catch a bird of paradise, better take a wet hen.

-Nikita Khrushchev

Oh criminey. Your basic Donk is a bland enthusiast for a bland Utopia, but certain segments of the progglesphere, having made minor footholds in the traditional media and third-tier connections with a couple of campaigns, imagine themselves on the vanguard of a great revolution. One Chris Bowers is one of the worst of the lot. He has read one Richard Florida book and several articles in the Atlantic monthly, and now he makes Gladwellian pronouncements on the Zeitgiest which have the twined characteristics of bombastitude and wrongness. Clearly a bit of an egomaniac, he makes the error of any good Bolshevik foot soldier: he presumes that the revolution is designed to benefit people like him. He lists three ways in which Obama is going to change the Democratic Party, and unsurprisingly pride of place goes to the notion that "the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types." Smell you! The Creative Class is a term dreamed up by Richard Florida, a social-science huckster who peddles the notion that the "knowledge economy" is going to keep post-industrial urban America afloat on a sea of noncorporeal money dreamed up by lawyers and architects and programmers and the urban bohemians who are gentrifying your neighborhood even as we speak. This idea, quel suprise, appeals to lawyers and architects and programmers and the urban bohemians who, ah, hell. These folks are a small slice of the population, and characterized by numbing self-involvement. Hey, I'm a fag who works in the arts and gentrifying an urban neighborhood, and I'd love to think that this means that the country, world, and universe revolve around me, but since not, not. "It [the Democratic Party] will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class." Is it going to beam them into your fillings? Seriously, rich donors have more money and the white working class has got more bodies. What the fuck do you have, a laptop? The Revolution will not be Webcast, putz.

Item two predicts

a shift from the more corporate and triangulating policy focus of the Democratic Party in the 1990's, and see it replaced by whatever centrist, technocratic policies are the wonkish flavor of the month. It will all be very oriented toward think-tank and academic types, and be reminiscent of policy making in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. A sort of "technocratic liberalism" that will be less infuriating than DLC style governance, but still not overtly leftist.

You've got to love that "overtly leftist" part, as if the go-along netroots that Bowers is hep to is some kind of International front. "Yes, let me just put down my Althusser and make a paypal donation to the Obama campaign. All done!" Clintonian governance was, of course, decidedly "wonkish"--wherefore that word, wonk, anyway? It just produced results these fuckers disagreed with, although you don't hear fags like me getting too uppity about the fact that welfare reform and the hollowing-out of housing subsidies made it all that much easier to swoop into urban neighborhoods and fuck with cheap real estate, for example. DLC governance was corporatist in its outlook, sure, but what's Obama got beyond the same old schtick about ending "tax credits" to companies that "ship American jobs overseas." What and ever, my friends. Legislation will originate where legislation has originated for years: in the legal departments of affected industries and their respective lobbying arms.

Item 3:

A long-standing Democrats [sic] approach of transactional politics with different issue and demographic silos in the party shift toward an emphasis on good government (goo goo) approaches. We will see lots of emphasis on non-partisanship, ethics reform, election reform instead of on, say, placating labor unions, environment groups, and the LGBT community by throwing each of these groups a policy bone or two.

Personally I'm aiming for a demographic bathhouse. Gah. What does this even mean? Good government in the classic American-civics sense is representative of the desires of the voting population, passing laws vital to their interests and well-being. "Good government" as an abstract concept is just the sort of who-moved-my-cheese corporate-lingo hoodoo that the "creative class" spends its days benchmarking against industry-standard best practices in order to find new synergies and define markets for the coming challenges ahead. "Obama will encourage the party to twaddle its thumbs on transparently vacuous procedural reforms with a vaguely moral patina so that no one notices Rome burning." Awesome plan.

Finally, Bowers advises:

Overall, instead feeling like Blue Dogs, Joe Lieberman and media pundits are running the party, it should feel kind of like PIRG, but a bit more right-wing, academic and well-to-do. In other words, PIRG without seeming like DFHs run the show. That should be an upgrade from the 1990's, but expect quite a few times where progressives will need to take oppositional stances.

Oh, yeah, the famous progressive "oppositional stance." Sets my knees a-tremble. Jesus Hell Christ. The food in this restaurant is so bad, and the portions are so small!

Juvenal/ile

Jeff Goldstien, a sort of happy-hour Derrida who fancies himself a vulgar conservative, or a conservative vulgarian, has discovered a Denver Post columnist perseverating wildly about Barack Obama's "radical judicial philosophy." This in response to some standard proggie-woggie boilerplate about lookin' out for the little guy, a couched suggestion that equal protection requires "economic and social justice," etc. etc. blahgity blahg. I do not endorse this view, being of the opinion that the best policy for the Supreme Court would be self-abolition, but I can't get too worked up about it either. Anyway, Goldstein sez:

Of course, herein lies the problem: who is left to judge the judges, save for the documents that are supposed to constrain them in scope and power in the first place, and against which they pit themselves as active agents of change?

Oh, fuckin, yeah, dude, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, an shit. I do love it when this finally dawns on the dim and the slow, as what they take to be a novel idea has been the central question in the organization of societies since we started organizing socieites. It gets better:

When you have successfully turned all meaning into something that in in the abstract “context-specific” while simultaneously bracketing the intent that governed the original context through which interpretation must necessarily be filtered — what you have done is, in essence, turn interpretation into a game of pure semantic word play, one that allows the clever or the mischievous or the otherwise willfully motivated to forge just about any “meaning” that the intersection of context, signifier, and current connotation (as it relates to signifieds) allows.

The best rejoinder is probably a resounding, "SIC!" but I'm going to try to hack away at this Gordian knot as best I can. Jeff has never gained fluency in deconstructionist jargon; he speaks it the affect of schoolboy French. The conjugations are mostly corret, but the idiom is off. What's especially cute is that he wants to use the self-reflecting language of indeterminacy to make an argument for original intent. He wants to deploy an academic discourse dedicated to the proposition that all meaning is contingent, whose central epistemological premises all have to do with mutability, in order to make an argument about immutability. Really:

And to do that, under the false assertion of “interpretation,” is to render any kind of legal “constraint” obsolete — save for the wink and the nod given it by those who would rather not admit publicly that what they are doing, when they rewrite the law (and that is precisely what they’re doing if their interests go anything beyond sussing out original intent, though that intent itself be tied to ratification, oftentimes) is to create new texts out of the marks of extant texts whose actual meaning was, at the time these texts became law, fixed and (at least theoretically), immutable.

New texts out of the marks of extant texts. Eat your heart out, Gertrude Stein. I've always found it a charming characteristic of conservative thought, that they view judges as a class of priestly explicators leading a national course of bible study, only using our secular, civic texts in place of holy writ. I equally enjoy the notion, widely shared apparently, that until some dark day between Dred Scott and the nomination of Nino Scalia, the American judiciary and the Supreme Court in particular were minor, scholarly figures, monastic and slightly odd in their funny robes. The conservative complaint about "activism" in the judiciary is a poorly concealed rage at the Marshall doctrine of judicial review. Well, challenge it in court. You could easily assign five justices to every target and still have a very effective reserve force for any contingency, to paraphrase Buck Turgidson.

Anyway, the idea that Barack Obama has some sort of coherent--and radical!--philosophy to remake the judiciary as an instrument of social revolution would be silly were it not so sad. Conservative hoi polloi are as deluded in their estimation of Democratic leftism as the Democrats' own erstwhile netroots. Obama is an agent of "change" insofar as he repeats the word with fair frequency, but the notion that in four more years we're all going to be organic farming on kibbutzim and laboring mightily under a policy of--what did Bulworth call it?--a "free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction," is daffy as the Duck. In four more years, America will still have an unhealthy interest in "intervening" abroad, an overreliance on personal vehicular transportation and long-haul trucking, an immense foreign debt, and a rickety, speculation-based economy. If it doesn't, it'll be because the whole thing blew up on us, not because Barack Obama sparked a glorious cultural revolution. Here's a paper bag, Jeffy. Breathe deeply. It'll pass.

Update: You can just call me Philosophy Expert!

Golden Streams

But [General Hood] also had to deal with the fallout of a report in Newsweek asserting that a military inquiry was expected to find that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the detention center. The magazine later retracted the article, but the military inquiry concluded that a soldier had inadvertently splashed urine on a Koran.

Reported in the Times

So, uh, yeah, uh, hm. I must not have been following this story very closely when it hit, because I cannot seem to recall previously seeing that last detail. Lemme aks you: How do you "inadvertently" splash urine on a Koran? Was that soldier catching up on his comparative religion in the john? I've got to tell you that--and maybe I'm unusual here--if I am reading on the can, then I am on the can, i.e. taking a shit, sitting down, and unlikely to splash urine even if I try. Is this really how America sought to ameliorate the cultural fallout from the original accusation? Oh, don't worry Muslims, they didn't flush it, they just pissed on it.

Der Untergang

Dennis got there first, but this is the best thing ever:

Procurement

What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it.

-Madeline Albright

Tim L. asks and Jim H. echoes the question: Why shoot million-dollar missiles at shacks? Hey, State Capital!

It goes a little something like this. Hum along if you like. Most of the combat in the world today, and most of the death in warfare, comes in the form of small arms. There is plenty of money to be made in selling guns, of course, but much of it by the middlemen. On the manufacturing side, small arms are easy to manufacture, simple and stable in design, almost infinitely replicable, and at this point in their development very, very, very reliable. No government is spending billions of dollars on semi-automatic rifle R&D. Billion-dollar maintenance contracts aren't required. Distributed revenues across component manufacturers and systems designers and computer programmers, und und und, are nowhere to be found. Guns are a fine business, but, like, totally mom-n-pop.

Million-dollar missiles are another thing entirely. Million-dollar missiles pad the pockets of everyone from research universities to advanced technology companies to Congressmen and their congressional districts. Now naturally Congresscreatures want this money and their constituents want this money and the companies and research universities surely want this money and the US military works for the same government as all those Congresscreatures who give the military money to give to the companies to give to the districts to give to the congresscreatures and back again. How much of our military policy is driven by the ouroboran economics of Procurement? Quite a fucking lot. The machinery of death is an investment vehicle. The reason we blow up huts with million-dollar smart bombs is so that we can buy more million-dollar smart bombs, and not one tear is going to be shed if another shanty-town traning camp pops up another mile down the road and "costs" another missile.

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

-Smedley D. Butler

Because Not Everything Is Bad

In the first few years of the 20th Century, Ralph Vaughn Williams composed a song cycle for baritone voice and piano, taking as his text Robert Louis Stevenson's sequence of poems, Songs of Travel. It was later orchestrated. Here is Sir John Tomlinson, better known, perhaps, for playing Wotan at Bayreuth for many years, singing three selections from the cycle for a final night of The Proms (a summer concert series at the Royal Albert Hall; try to ignore the "fancy dress" audience) in the early nineties.

"The Vagabond"


"Whither Must I Wander"


"Bright Is the Ring of Words"

Breakfast

So David Ignatius' column is pretty standard chin-scratchery, full of official-line half-truths about Iranian involvement in Iraq, which would of course be otherwise free of foreign influence, along the standard American op-ed line that views killing thousands of people in military action as a domestic political issue along the lines of a gas-tax holiday or a crazy negro preacher, as you can see here:

How would a U.S.-Iran confrontation play out in the campaign? Obviously, that depends on how you read the American political mood. Usually, we assume that the nation rallies around the party of war, but that's less certain in this case. America is war-weary, and it mistrusts President Bush. So a military skirmish with Iran might backfire, adding to public dissent -- much as happened with the Nixon administration's attack on Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1970.

How would it play out in the campaign? How about how would it play out in Iran? The problem with Nixon's "attack on Viet Cong sanctuaries"--and, really? is that still the line in Washington?--wasn't that it "backfired" politically for the Trickster; the problem with Nixon's bombing campaign in Cambodia was that we carpet-bombed a half-million peasants into flaming oblivion. But look, a nigger said America engages in terrorism! Get him!

A Stand-Up Guy Who Will Fight His Heart Out the Only Way He Knows How When the Chips Are Down

Somehow back in aught-three I ended up on John Kerry's e-blast list, and the Reanimator still sends me progglegrams from time to time. Here's the latest:

Hello XXXX,

One of my oldest friends in the progressive movement always had a saying to describe how he took stock of people: he said it wasn't whether you were liberal or conservative, it's whether you were a "stand-up person." He meant that it mattered what you did when the chips were down, the positions you took not when it was easy, but when it was really hard.

Now, a true stand-up guy -- my colleague Senator Frank Lautenberg -- is facing a primary challenge for re-election. Let me tell you -- I'll do everything in my power to help re-elect Frank Lautenberg because he's a true progressive who has been with us when the chips were down.

Frank Lautenberg always shows up for the fight and he speaks his mind. In 2004, when a lot of people were having a hard time separating fact from fiction about the military service of politicians, Frank stood on the floor of the Senate and said, "We know who the chicken hawks are. They talk tough on national defense and military issues and cast aspersions on others. When it was their turn to serve where were they? AWOL, that's where they were."

Well, when it's been Frank's turn to show up and fight, he's always been there -- and I mean he's been there in difficult times. Back in June of 2006, it seemed like no one wanted to come within a mile of legislation Russ Feingold and I introduced to set a deadline to bring our combat troops home from Iraq. Only eleven brave Democrats stood with us and voted for an end to the Bush Iraq policy.

Frank Lautenberg was one of them.

It's not the only time. When I led that filibuster against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Frank signed on -- and spoke out on the Senate floor.

When Ted Kennedy and I filibustered Judge Alito's nomination for the Supreme Court, Frank didn't take a pass just because Alito was from New Jersey -- he stood up to that pressure to stick with a home state nominee -- and he did what was right -- filibustering Alito.

Frank Lautenberg is, in short, one of the very best progressive Senators we have. And he needs our help. Please donate what you can to his campaign:

http://www.actblue.com/page/jkforlautenberg

Frank is locked in a primary battle and he's fighting his heart out -- fighting the only way he knows how.

Born in Paterson, NJ to parents who immigrated through Ellis Island, Frank has had to fight every step of the way -- working nights and weekends in high school to help his family make ends meet, serving our country in World War II, building a business, and coming to the Senate to be a voice for people, not the big powerful interests that already have plenty of "representation."

The Senate needs progressive warriors like Frank Lautenberg. People who show up when it counts and fight 'til the bell rings.

So please do what you can to keep him in the Senate:

http://www.actblue.com/page/jkforlautenberg

If we work hard, we can build a real working progressive majority in the Senate for 2009. But we need to keep our great progressive Senators in there in order to bring the real change we need to our country.

Thanks,
John Kerry

This is is ground-zero progressive detonation point, where mixed-metaphor shot-and-a-beer rhetoric meets poll-tested netrootsian "real working progressive majority" lingo, and what's both hilarious and sad--sadly hilarious, hilariously sad--is that so many of those battles that they were eating their fighting hearts on the gambling floor to win, well, they lost. Alito? Deadlines to bring the troops home? Beaten like a rented mule, in the words of the late great Mike Lange. Whupped like a redheaded stepchild.

I admit that I'm tone-deaf to what sort of talk actually appeals to Americani voterus, but can anyone really be swayed by the bombastic pronouncement that their catastrophic defeats were preceded by the right intentions? You're too small to play football, Rudy.

On The Outside Looking In

One of the peculiarities géniales of Jean-Pierre Melville's extraordinary Army of Shadows, which chronicles a brief period in the life of a cell of the French Résistance in 1942, is this: no one gives a particular damn about France. They aren't nationalists. There's no talk of la gloire. When the cell's leader is smuggled into England and recieves a decoration from General de Gaulle, it's as a sort of absurdity. His companion wanders London, ducks almost accidentally into a nightclub where baby-faced British troops swing with pretty, uniformed girls while the bombs of the Blitz fall outside. The cell conducts two assassinations. Both of them are against traitors within their own organization. The action is almost devoid of politics. No liberté, égalité, fraternité. Struggle, secrecy, a meal here and there, hiding, killing, and ultimately being killed.

Jonathan Schwarz and James Wolcott both note the depressing, ritualistic demonization of "pacifism" from both of our political factions, noting likewise that those casting the anathemas rarely seem to grasp what pacifism actually is. Some time ago in comments here, a commenter of a lawyerly mindset tried to pin us all down, Perry Mason style, with the question of whether or not Monsieur IOZ believed that use of the American military was ever justified. The idea of asking such a question is to catch your humble blogauthor in a sort of contradiction, and to show that he is either a "blanket pacifist," to use Matthew Yglesias' bumbletongued term, or else has equally arbitrary, albeit different, standards and thresholds for killing people and blowing shit up.

The standard response among non-interventionists is that the only proper use of the military is to defend the nation against invation, that if Mexico decides to launch a war, or whatever, we are justified in responding with force. In fact, I would not go that far. The United States of America as an entity is to me not worth one drop of human blood. The notion that we represent some bulwark against the descent of darkness in this world, lonely Gondor against the hordes of the east (or, lordy, whatever) is self-satiated nonsense. I cannot imagine that I would take up arms to defend America. I might even join the other side, depending on the physical quality of the boyz in the barracks, if you know what I'm saying.

On the other hand, if some army of Albanians actually did overrun the country and I found myself in an occupied Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania, I cannot imagine not grabbing the rifle and bombing the bridges. This is something that we largely fail to understand about the resistance in Iraq: that it operates on two interrelated but nevertheless distinguisahable levels; that the desire to eject the Americans from "Iraq" is actuated by the desire to eject them from Sadr City; that the lived experience of our occupation is not on a national scale but rather on a local one, and therefore resistance likewise operates locally. A militiaman may know some nationalistic rhetoric, may employ it, and may even believe it to a degree, but ultimately "Iraq" is merely a political abstraction, whereas his neighborhood is physical and real.

By and large, I reject the use of state militaries entirely. I am not a fan of nation-states. That is necessarily a position deep in hypothetical space, given the world we live in, but nevertheless forms a baseline principle. On the other hand, I support the prerogative of people to resist their masters, whether foreign or domestic, by means up to and including violent resistance. This does not make me a pacifist, and yet in the eyes of the loons at the National Review and the more sober eyes of Brother Yglesias, it obviates my analyses of American warmaking. Fortunately I don't care. The reason to complain about exemption from mainstream dialogue is desire to participate, which for me is like getting pissed that a priest will deny me communion even though I'm not a Catholic.

Life of the Mind

Globalization is just one of those . . . words. It makes me reach for my packets of oy. David Brooks:

The globalization paradigm has led, in the political arena, to a certain historical narrative: There were once nation-states like the U.S. and the European powers, whose economies could be secured within borders. But now capital flows freely. Technology has leveled the playing field. Competition is global and fierce.

New dynamos like India and China threaten American dominance thanks to their cheap labor and manipulated currencies. Now, everything is made abroad. American manufacturing is in decline. The rest of the economy is threatened.

So, you know, on one hand "there were once nation-states," but now there are "dynamos like India and China," which are, what, anarchoprimitive agricollectives? The idea that some sort of stateless transnational borderless economic singularity is swiftly ripping away borders like stagehands rip up gaff tape on load-out is plain kooky. I am of course for the free movement of labor and capital. Call me the next time you hit Charles de Gaulle, or Beijing Capital International Airport for that fucking matter, without a passport. I'm just saying.

But the incapacity of goofball suburbanite opeditorialists to make shit stick to the wall when they try to define their own empty-set vocabulary that I want to throw shit at myself, but rather the common contention, here dressed up as if it hasn't been uttered a baker's-dozen times a day since 1971 or so, that the problem is "skills" and the solution is "education."

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

A more demanding cognitive age, seriously? Isn't it lovely how white-collar desk jockeys flatter themselves into believing that they know more than Gus in maintenance because they've figured out the IF function on Excel? Gus in maintenance actually knows the difference between a reheat and a sewage expeller, say. Last winter I rebuilt a part of the motor for my washing machine. That shit was hard, yo. Took me days. Boggled my mind. Fuck it, let's see David Brooks try his hand at farming. "A more demanding cognitive age." What the fuck ever, man.

You will not hear any scratchy-throated defenses of blue-collar saintliness from me. I'm not trying to defeat Barack Obama except in the, uh, existential sense. I grew up in blue-collar (ex-blue-collar more accurately) Western PA, and that demographic is as rife with assholes as any other. And it is certainly true that among the bitter-boys of PA, there exists a certain cultural predilection toward know-nothingism, which might be remarkable were it not for the fact that the managerial class, the board-room, and the halls of Congress possess marked dedications to dumbassery as well. I have heard the vice-president of my board of trustees utter things so preposterous and uninformed that I've nearly spit out my coffee, and watched the rest of the captains of the local economy nod sagely as if witnessing the words of the Nazarene. The President of the United States is an incarnate Ionesco script. Human stupidity and a few lower bodily functions are the great collective traits of humankind.

Yet what people like Brooks are actually saying when they say that people need to become "better at absorbing, processing and combining information" is that you motherfuckers better learn to land on your feet the next time the pink slip comes down the line. The neofeudal State Capital economy has found it useful to turn you loose in a sea of data entry clerks who imagine themselves to be engaged in some kind of excercise of intellect, scriveners who think that they're kings. Human resources, dudes and dudettes. You bitches is fungible as fuck. All this "skills" and "job training" bullshit that pumps through the airwaves via the loud mouths of your betters is pure propoganda aimed at convincing you that you're raising yourself up rather than accepting quickly diminishing returns for pseudo-work whose "productivity" is measured in the number of hours you sit on your fat ass multiplied by the pages of senseless data you type and generate and iterate and Excelate and masticate and excrete in the service of the international financialized ouroboros.

Do as little as you can, and do it on company time.


UPDATE: As an addendum to the post above, it's worth considering how David Brooks constructs his argument.

The globalization paradigm has led, in the political arena, to a certain historical narrative: There were once nation-states like the U.S. and the European powers, whose economies could be secured within borders. But now capital flows freely. Technology has leveled the playing field. Competition is global and fierce.

Now. Paradigms don't lead. A paradigm is a model. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is an abstraction of an actuality, as all models are.

Except. The globalization paradigm turns out not to be leading to anything or anyplace, but to "a certain historical narrative." A certain political narrative "in the political arena." Politics, in other words, is a realm of pure symbol in which models of a political economy are mediated into narratives. (Actually, this is true, but not in the way that Davey thinks it's true.) Or, if you wish to explain this without sound like yah got one ah dem fancy degrees: politics dyes bullshit red and applies it like lipstick to a pig. What's interesting, in any case, on a rhetorical level, is that there is no claim that an actual economy produced observable material circumstances, but rather that an ideation produced a fairy tale, which, as observed above, is a self-refuting one at that.

The material claims, meanwhile, are ticklingly absurd. Global capital doesn't flow freely, and the only technology that's ever leveled a playing field is the sort that moves earth and levels field. The metaphor of the dog won't hunt. Technology is a slippery term, but presumably it means something like tools, machines, and 'lectronics. Well, friends, the replacement of muscle power with motive machines and the replacement of human intellect with electronic calculation have not functioned to equalize any forces in this world so far as I can tell.

Surviving the American Empire: A How-To Guide

1. Examine for damage.

2. Discard any excess packaging.

3. Be an American.

4. Yes, you agree.

5. Blame Iran.

6. Forget.

7. Connect the portion marked A with the red receptacle using the bold marked 3 and the washer marked X.

8. Remove the clamp.

9. Regret the lack of security in tribal regions.

10. Test the current by pressing and releasing the red switch labelled TEST.

11. Watch for the light.

12. Preheat to 450.

13. Run.

14. Duck.