Hammer and Needle

Yummy. My first bowl of shit.

-Baltimore Mayor Carcetti, The Wire

For those of us who like Barack Obama on some level think single-payer health care would be best but impractical, then hoped for a system with a public option, but who are still enthusiastic about health reform that doesn’t include it, I think we’ve really reached a moment when it would be good to have Ted Kennedy around.

-Yglesias

Yggie really ought to go into politics fer rizzle, because he seems to have distinct coprophiliac tendencies. "Health reform." What is that? To this imponderable the Donk answer is: anything and everything. Quite literally. So long as it comes out of a Donk congress. Now Yglesias is the sort of blurgher who's fond of hectoring far lefties and libertarianische types for their habit of speaking in generalities and idealities, ignoring the ol' salt-mine of practical politics. So one wonders how he can persist in being so blithely unconcerned with the actual content of the bill before him. Is it a cake, or is it a turd? Well, it's on a plate, isn't it? Are we gonna split hairs?

Universal, tax-funded health coverage has been transmogrified through the usual Washingtonian alchemy into an insane mandate that uninsured individuals purchase, at great personal expense, extremely shitty insurance plans. There you have it. The federal government is going to force poor, underemployed people to spend thousands of dollars that they can ill afford to spend on consumer products offered by private corporations. I am sure that Yglesias et al. will have some very clever arguments about how this is ultimately good policy because it forces the irrational lower orders to invest in plans that will at least hedge against future catastrophe, you know, the sort of rational future-planning that poor morons don't usually make because fortuity failed to commend a Harvard education upon their beer-drinking souls. So it is worth reiterating: poor wage-earners cannot afford health insurance. That's why they don't buy it! Although it seems to us comfortable salarymen far more rational to pay a couple hundred bucks a month for minimal coverage just in case we get Ted Kennedy's brain cancer, it isn't an option for some people.

Point being, what you have here is a partisan hack endorsing a plan that does nearly the exact opposite of that which he claims to preferentially support, because his party, sort of, produced it. Instead of using public funds to provide direct subsidies of medical treatment, you have private wealth confiscated through the threat of legal sanction for the purpose of increasing the market penetration of private companies. You've replaced a program of individual welfare with a system of corporate welfare paid for by the very individuals whose economic status would make them the recipients of the individual welfare you claim to seek. Fuck the poor, so long as it reflects well on Barack Obama, his coattails, and our chances in 2010.

Meanwhile, all these kiddos flipped their buzzed heads when John Mackey wrote a one-off op-ed suggesting some half-assed private solutions to the lack of broad, national health coverage, even as they came to support not merely a privatized insurance provision, but a system of obligatory national consumption.

The Part about the Book

As a reflexive reactionary, I did not want to like Roberto Bolaño. It seemed too much like jumping onto a bandwagon. But The Savage Detectives was such dark fun, and By Night in Chile has to rank as one of the great monologues in prose fiction (not to mention that it accomplishes, if glancingly, an effect that it took Proust himself ten jillion pages to create), and before I knew it I was sold.

I mention this because I hope that my reluctance will lend some greater sense of sincerity to my critical judgment. Of all the novels I've read that were published within the last fifty years, 2666 is the finest and greatest of them. Every page is an astonishment.

And the Winner Is . . .

The Sickness unto Death

Just because we're bereaved, that doesn't make us saps!

So I guess village blurgher Ezra Klein called Joe Lieberman a senatorial version of Dan Burros and then some other dude at The New Republic suggested that Lieberman was a bad Jew because he couldn't do arithematic, or something. Blog! Well, the occasion sent me skimming through Mr. Klein's recent output, and it is striking how it tells the famous tale of stone soup in reverse . . . except somehow the moral remains the same. Basically, everyone starts out with a big pot of delicious hearty soup, and then all the residents of the village stop by and scoop out all the good stuff, and what's left is a half-full pot of rancid water and a hunk of rock. Delicious! Or, at least, better than nothing.

Well this is the partisan rearguard's answer to everything, isn't it. Better than nothing! They don't seem to be doing very well shoring up the flabby flank of Donk voters. Poor Matthew Yglesias is practically beside himself as he sees the motivated hope-n-change groundswell realizing that they might as well fuck it and go bowling for all the change they've seen. "Nobody ever accomplished anything in politics by not participating." Fuck you, buddy. I'll see your Mondale campaign and raise you a Gandhi. Consider youth absenteeism in the 2010 advertising cycle an act of civil fucking disobedience. The kids might not be right, but at least they're not idiots. Look, despite all the high moral hoo-haw that American civic philosophy has long stuffed into our politics like apples into a Christmas goose (or, you know, think of your own goddamn metaphor, you dirty fucks), non-transactional voting is just conscription. Why should anyone be obligated to fight for someone else's cause? Just for the record: I do vote in municipal elections, but when I vote for the guy who says he's going to address my pothole problems . . . I presume he is going to address my pothole problems, not make a big show of carting in a tracked excavator to tear up all the asphalt and then stick me with a bill for getting rid of the potholes.

A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory

The Post-Gazette reports on the devil weed. For a little pull-quote scaremongering, they go to the local color:

"I'm not surprised that the use has stopped declining," said Holly Martin, chief operating officer at Greenbriar Treatment Center, an adult rehabilitation center in Washington, Pa., with facilities throughout the Pittsburgh area.

"We're seeing more and more younger folks who are admitting to using" marijuana, she said. These younger adults usually range in age from 18 to 25, and many behave as though using marijuana is not that serious.

"People don't see it as a big deal," she said. "That's the thing that's the scariest."

Now I bear a bit of a personal grudge against the Greenbriar and its patent-medicine peddlers. My late brother spent some time in a Greenbriar residential facility before he died. He might as well have gone to a chiropractor for a broken spine. A hotbed of disgrace and recidivism, organizations like the Greenbriar are wormy parasites on the prison and insurance industries, catering to down-and-outs on early release, spouse-abusers on strict probation, and kids like my brother, whose family-funded insurance provides a nice incremental revenue stream. As a model of healing, these centers are quakery in its purest form, combining fast detox with bowdlerized twelve-step-ism, the former presuming that temporary abstinence is an act of willful change rather than mere time-biding, the latter turning the rigor of self-directed recovery into hortatory group-meeting feel-goodism.

While I personally find the sometimes strident book-thumping of the more vocal twelve-step proponents off-putting and think that Crispin's insights (which I've linked before) into both the strengths and the contradictions of AA ands its brethren are fairly spot on, I want to emphasize a separate praisworthy point about these programs, aside from Crispin's very true note about their admirably anarchist organization: they are not advocates. In part, this is a necessary function (lack of function?) of their innate anarchy. Without leaders and spokespeople, without a capital-O Organization, without a governing body or a system of overall consensus, the program can generate no positions. But I think it worth mentioning nonetheless that AA and NA and al-Anon and others are not prohibitionist. They assume the existence of drugs and alcohol. They do not presume that anyone who drinks is an alcoholic or that anyone who uses drugs is an addict; they do not lament the existence of drugs and alcohol anymore than overeaters anonymous laments the existence of food or gravity.

That isn't to say that twelve-steppers aren't a bit judgemental outside of the rooms. Believe me. I live with one. They are fond of idetifying alcoholics, and almost any character flaw or habit of bad behavior becomes "acting like an addict." But even in judgment I have never, to my recollection, heard a twelve-stepper announce that the problem is that our society doesn't take alcohol, marijuan, heroin, ad inf. seriously enough.

Treatment facilities, on the other hand, are business ventures, and prohibitionary public policy is good for business, not only because the courts and prisons funnel thousands of people into treatment every day, but also because addicts like my brother who are insincere in their desire for recovery use treatment facilities as means of escaping and preempting social, financial, and legal problems. I mean, my brother didn't go into the Greenbriar because he truly believed himself to be an addict and sincerely wanted to stop using opiates; he went in because he had been passing bad checks and wanted to prove to friends, family, and employers that he was willing to change, either to avoid legal action or to get our financial support should some store or bank decide to take him to court.

Thus do you find these scammers and snake-oil salesment forever decrying the perfidious influence of drugs, as if drugs were animate agents, capable of evil intent. And you will also note that even the softer-seeming confidence men of the treatment industry, those who loudly regret draconian sentencing rules, push for a system of "decriminalization" that ultimately maintains prohibition but replaces jail terms with court-adjudicated probationary treatment programs.

The Name of the Hose

Matt Taibbi's bruited exposé of Obama's you'll-pardon-the-expression backdoor dealings has set the usual twits a-twittering. Taibbi responds convincingly and then pulls the punch in a post script. More in a moment. I would first like to engage in a little cathartic ad hominem. Below you will find pics of Tim Fernholz and Matt Yglesias, the nuns whose critiques are linked above. I cannot for the life of me remember which is which.



This back-alley cub look seems to be the mode de rue of many you'll-pardon-the-expression up-and-coming Donk intellecshuls these days, and for a time I couldn't figure out why it was that a youth desperate to be taken seriously by his wise party-hack elders would so blatantly signal a barely-repressed desire to be taken into the barrel room of the local Eagle to be repeatedly fisted and peed on by a gang of bear leather daddies, but then I was like, Oooohhhh, that's why. Someone should explain to these boys that no good comes to a party bottom. A few years into it and you've got nothing left but a loose asshole, some nasty infections, a drug habit, and a face aged beyond its years.

I mean, honestly. Yglesias is a bit of a dweeb, certainly a careerist, and his idea of iconoclasm is penning a defense of Howard Dean, but even so I cringe to see him bend over in stirring defense of Obama against Mount Olymia Snowe's impenetrable hairline. It's plain undignified.

Well, anyway, Taibbi clocks plenty of body shots, but I've got to disagree when he ends with this:

The Prospect writer argues that “the problems Taibbi tries to describe aren’t some ridiculous cabal” but instead “come from group-think and structural influences.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this was exactly the point of the article. The issue with the modern Democratic party is that its leaders all share a world view that’s extremely narrow. They genuinely believe in Rubinite ideas, have grown accustomed to an incestuous relationship with Wall Street, and they probably think that the right people were put in charge. Their failure to look beyond their own “group-think” for solutions to economic problems is exactly the issue.

Strictly speaking, it's true, and yet I note that you could likewise say that the issue with the National Socialist party was that its leaders all shared a world view that was extremely . . . narrow. And that is not to say that the Democrats are Nazis, Dude, far from it. It is merely to point out that the problem with our ruling junta isn't their unwillingness to "look beyond" their pernicious crocodilian cannibalistic blood-worship, but rather the fact that they are, in fact, flesh-eating, blood-drinking, reptilian man-crunchers. Suggesting that they have somehow failed to look beyond the received wisdom of their class presumes mere intellectual failure and thus undercredits their vicious intelligence. The problem is not that they are idiots, although idiots are certainly well-represented in the upper echelons of our lategreat empire, but that they're bastards.