L'élite

Maybe we should start educating people to see politicians the way they see athletes. They certainly may have lots of opinions about what a team should do. But even the most egotistical drunk screaming obscenities from the stands doesn't truly believe that he's a better hitter than Manny Ramirez or that the team should hire a bunch of guys off the streets to play in the outfield. They have more respect for the game than that. It would be nice if citizenship required as much respect for the country.

-La Digz

Obviously not a Pirates fan.

But, you know, seriously, dubbleya tee eff? Politics is not a discipline of particulars. Parliamentary procedure isn't kinesthetic. Hiring a campaign team doesn't require hitting a thousand balls on the range every single day. Bussing from state to state and giving stump speeches isn't as hard and doesn't require an ounce of the discipline of training to the peak condition necessary to compete in the NFL. A political race isn't a marathon. Athletics at the highest levels encompasses some of the most singular human achievements. It requires a lifetime of work. The most bling-ed out, tabloid-splashed wide receiver lives a life of positively monastic discipline compared to a presidential candidate. The drunk screaming fan can't hit like Ramirez, but he can surely get himself elected to a county row office.

Technocratic liberalism leads so inevitably to the firm conviction that our governors are, or ought to be, our betters, that to properly function, government must be composed of those "best and brightest," as the damnation-by-praise goes, uniquely suited to make decisions in our stead, and in our best interest. The same paternalism embodied by the foreign adventures in "democratization" obtains at home. We need someone else to tell us what's good for us. We can't be trusted to determine our own course. To sound what might be a truly conservative note: the attendant infantalization of a people over the course of generations, their reduction to a state of dependency, makes them lazy, dumb, and manipulable. Whaddarewegonnado? And hopefully someone else will do it for us.

Race to the Bottom

John McCain has become the living, sneering avatar of white ressentiment in America. That is the sole tenet of his campaign, its entire reason for being. Do not elect the black guy. You watch all the innertubes videos of viciously angry white people calling Obama a terrorist and an alien and so forth, and you get a palpable sense of how popular fascism takes root--it makes you glad that McCain is so sorely lacking in charisma and oratorical skills.

I won't be the first to point out that the notional problem with Obama-as-terrorist is its dependence on his association with a failed radical bomb-thrower from the 60s, rather than his support for policies of state terror. Here's a guy who evinces a very convincing belligerence toward Iran and who openly calls for the escalation of aerial bombardment and ground operations in Afghanistan. (McCain, meanwhile, acquired his supposed honor by carpet-bombing civilians.)

Anyway, I still find myself astonished--and I shouldn't be--at the deep, deep animus engendered in whites by their perceived displacement from a position at the top of the tower of racial privilege in America. A huge portion of the black population in this country remains in the desperate underclass, and they in turn constitute a substantial percentage of that class, yet the specter of a black man ascending to high office is still somehow intolerably symbolic of a national socioeconomic preference for "minorities" over whites. Such an opinion is entirely fantastical, but among the slowly dwindling numbers of McCain supporters, it constitutes nearly the sum total of political belief.

Hanging on in quiet desperation

Okay. So. Watching Chucky Krauthammer try to rehabilitate guilt by association--literally!--is sort of the inverse of the old Marxian adage: farce devolving into tragedy. What it indicates is a total failure of McCain's research team to come up with anything real, which in itself is sort of remarkable: that in the whole of Obama's life, the best they could come up with is that he sat on some board one time with a 60s radical and attended a church wherein the minister was sometimes prone to making provocative statements. This is the best they could do? Not one firebrand speech from his youth? Consider this: John Kerry was more radical than Barack Obama.

Megatherium bailoutum

But it's certainly an education to watch a gigantic financial panic in real time. I look outside, and the sun is shining. The world still has all the same people and buildings and cars and factories—i.e., it's not like we've just suffered from a virulent plague or half the planet's been destroyed by bombs. And yet we really may all become much poorer for the next ten years.

-Jonathan Schwarz

The phrase to be chiseled on the grave of our current economic order is "too big to fail." Did it not strike you as odd, back when it was first being tossed around, that scale was taken as the analogue of necessity? There's a basic human bias that equates largeness with importance, and by extension with endurance. I see no reason at all to believe this is universally, or even generally, true. Wouldn't the better phrase be "too unwieldy to succeed"? We live in the Cenozoic era, after all, and the natural truth of our current world is that big, lumbering things tend toward extinction at the slightest change in the weather.

By Hook or By Crook

Somewhere, Patrick McGoohan is smiling:

Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners and the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent.

Seriously, dude, what are we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are if our mode of being is having the obligation to be what we are?

Hand Me the Ringer, Dude

The debate was interestingly uninteresting. All policy (or lack thereof) aside, John McCain's contempt for Barack Obama might as well be tattooed on his forehead. The inability to mask personal disdain and conduct oneself generously and decently in a public forum is the mark of a serious deficiency in self-control. I hardly think it necessary to waste effort on generic and false affability, but a modicum of grace, please? We all have to share conference rooms and offices and rostrums with people we privately despise, but good manners dictate keeping the sneers to yourself and looking the morons in the eye when you shake hands before the meeting. Obama and McCain are colleagues in the same institution. His behavior, along with the sheer volume of shit his campaign's thrown at an apparently unsticky wall, only reinforces the growing notion that this mean old bastard hasn't got the temperament or self-control to run the empire.

On Substance (or lack thereof), I agree with Prof. Crispy that the whole campaign has moved into a diaphanous universe beyond the slow, stolid workings of human understanding:

got to say the whole thing has grown incomprehensible. we'll buy all the bad mortgages. we'll provide massive incentives for alternative energy (that was barack's answer to 'what sacrifice will you ask of the american people?" courageously, he indicated that we will be called upon to accept tax incentives). and we'll...cut taxes, while we drop a trillion on a bailout. etc etc. neither of these people makes any kind of sense at all.

It was widely noted at the last vice-presidential debate that Sarah Palin repeatedly contended that "often government is the problem" even as she echoed the bipartisan consensus that we must fill every suitcase in the nation with cash and throw it blindly at whatever business cries Danger! at any given moment. The GOP has long been notably schizophrenic on this point, and dumb as I find The Voters and The American People in general, I think that the greater tonal and thematic coherence of the Democratic line confuses them less, generally--at least in this election season. John McCain was actually worse on these points than Obama, because his response to so many questions about the economy involves cutting discretionary government spending, which people seem to understand as not especially germane to the question of the fortunes of the markets. Of course, even as he promises to take the hatchet to the federal budget, he continues to promise that the federal government will swoop in and monetize mortgage obligations, as if that somehow doesn't constitute expenditure. Me, I can't wait to start carting my paper money around in a wheelbarrow.

On foreign policy, McCain continued to insist that he "knows how to get Osama bin Laden." (McCain foreign policy statements, like fortune cookies, usually benefit from the addition of "in bed", by the way.) This plan appears to consist of figuring out where Osama bin Laden lives and sending people there to capture or kill him, which seems more like the treatment than the screenplay, if you know what I mean. McCain's verbal pugnacity must work on someone, but to me the figure of a slightly hunched old man issuing dire warnings in a reedy, nasal voice while struggling mightily not to look his debate opponent in the eye is merely pathetic. Obama did himself no favors, though, by promising to crush enemy, see him driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of dee vimin. I understand that Democrats must avow blood sacrifice at the altar of Mammon or whatever to prove their Serious Foreign Policy credentials, but for a man whose principle selling point at present is relative sobriety and judiciousness, the shift from statesman to warlord and back again is jarring and embarrassing.

I'm voting for the Pittsburgh Pooping Polar Bear as a write-in:

The foot bone's connected to the . . . ankle bone

Matthew Yglesias points to a column in Newsweek in which Jon Meacham gives John McCain a very bizarre compliment:

John McCain is a man of accomplishment and curiosity, of wide and deep reading, travel and experience. He is smart without being a snob. He has authored legislation and books. He is a man of parts—the kind of figure whom one could effortlessly imagine being president.

A man of parts?

He's a Nihilist

I urge you to read this column by one Stanley Fish, in which our intrepid edumacator enters the ring, wrestles with ostrich, is distracted by passing bird, hums familiar tune, waves hello, pirhouettes, does double-take, bows, exits, pursued by bear. He's trying to talk about the proper spheres of church and state, but confounds himself by trying to "assimilate" everyone's argument without judgement or prejudice. Reading Fish as he reads public debate is a lot like watching a person try to jam a Betamax tape into a DVD player.

But the logic and force of Locke’s arguments depend upon his conceiving of religion as a private matter, as a relationship between one’s soul and one’s God, and therefore as a practice exercised in the church or synagogue or mosque rather than in the arena of political action. If, however, your religious beliefs take a more robust form than Locke’s and require that you labor to bring the world into conformity with God’s word and will, the Johnson amendment, or any other limitation on the free exercise of what you take to be your religious duty, will be seen as an unconstitutional interference by the state in the proper business of the church.

His "conceiving." How about: insistence. Locke aside, the framers of the American government were explicit in laying out proscriptions on religious interference in political life, and the notion that the American state as it is constituted can't inquire into explicitly political activity within chuches because such inquiry violates the right to free exercise is casuistry of the highest order. I admire its audacity.

Fish has some severely crackpot notions about the nature of academic investigation:

For a moment I thought I could get clarity on this puzzle by assimilating it to my argument (in previous columns) about what is and is not appropriate behavior for college and university teachers. My position follows from the notion of the distinctiveness of tasks. If the point of academic inquiry is to interrogate diverse bodies of material with a view toward understanding their structure, history, intellectual affinities, etc., taking classroom time to make your students into good citizens or to improve their character or to move them in some political direction is a departure from that point and a blurring of the task’s distinctiveness. There is no limit, I contend, on the topics instructors can take up, but there is a limit on where they can take them. Instruction must stop at the water’s edge of politics and action in the world. Teaching isn’t preaching; the lectern should not be used as a pulpit.

Fish's insistence on absolute and universal agnosticism toward all matters seems principally designed to forestall any possibility that he might have to offer a judgment and defend it on its merits. To his credit, he uses it successfully. The New York Times and Florida International University both pay him to hem and haw noncomittally on all manner of topics. The only principle he strenuously defends is his absolute right to say nothing at all. Must be exhausting.

I've often suggested that if American liberals were really serious about limiting the scope of private gun ownership, they'd try to amend the Constitution to clarify or alter the 2nd Amendment in that direction. Likewise, if the various and sundry faithful in America wish to blend religion and politics in order to "labor to bring the world into conformity with God’s word and will," then they could address the 1st Amendment. The sacrosanctity of the Constitution and Bill of Rights is an invention of the second half of the 20th Century. No document that so plainly lays out the proper procedure for its own alteration can be realistically construed as fixed. It's not the Torah.

Extra special bonus points to Fish, though, for avoiding a pebble on the road by driving off the cliff:

The bottom line is that there is no rational or principled or constitutional resolution to this conflict. The resolution, if there is one, will have to be political.

The insistence that rationality, principle, and the Constitution exist totally outside the realm of the political is tellingly absurd. Of course the resolution is political: it's a question about religion and politics. It's being adjudicated by the courts . . . unless Diamond J. himself descends again to rule on the matter by decree, and even then it would be a decree about politics. It's a purely political conflict within a purely political arena, and Fish's dogged insistence that this both is and is not so doesn't make him a dispassionate, objective scholar in a universe of pure form and reason, illuminating "structure, history, intellectual affinities, etc." It makes him a jackass.

KT Boundary

How kooky is it to watch people fret that the bailout represents "socialism" or "socialism for the rich" as if observing the advent of something new. Before the bailout you had massive state intervention and subsidization in the economy; after the bailout you have . . . the same. This is like Powerball economics: people only notice when the jackpot cracks a hundred million, but that doesn't mean the lotto's not rolling along every day.

So the bailout's got fuck-all to do with any of the actual problems with the American economy. So you expected otherwise? The problem with the American economy is that its only productive activity was building crappy houses a zillion miles away from economic centers and using the borrowed money that built them as an asset in order to borrow more money to build more crappy houses and then taking all of the bad borrowed money backed by all of the crappy worthless un-paid-for houses and using it as collateral for huge insane unsustainable investment schemes and then selling giant insurance policies on those investments that were backed by the very same bag of bad debt that funded the investments in the first place. I mean, the solution to it all is an asteroid or something.

Racists without Racism

Rather, most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objection to electing a black person as president — yet who discriminate unconsciously.

“When we fixate on the racist individual, we’re focused on the least interesting way that race works,” said Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at U.C.L.A. who focuses his research on “racism without racists.” “Most of the way race functions is without the need for racial animus.”

For decades, experiments have shown that even many whites who earnestly believe in equal rights will recommend hiring a white job candidate more often than a person with identical credentials who is black. In the experiments, the applicant’s folder sometimes presents the person as white, sometimes as black, but everything else is the same. The white person thinks that he or she is selecting on the basis of nonracial factors like experience.

-Nicholas Kristof

Dear Nick,

Maybe those whites don't believe quite so earnestly.

Caucasianally,
IOZ