Tiger Should

Robert Wright is a Gladwellian subspecies of scientific popularizers, the author of books like Non-Zero, in which he expostulates tediously on what he sincerely believes to be a lesson from the faddish discipline of game theory, all the while making the head-strikingly obvious, commonsensical point that not all propositions are either/or, not all circumstances are win/lose. One hardly needs a doctorate in mathematics, nor even a 400-page popsci tome, to understand this concept. Anyway, he's also blogging for the Times, and has lately been on about Tiger, the golfer, not the cat, and is today at his laborious worst as he pins the future of monogamous human pair-bonding on the athlete's promiscuous, uh, shoulders. I have mocked and derided marriage enough already and won't bore you by repeating myself. As a universal institution, it is plainly a catastrophic failure, and as a moral aspiration (I am talking to you, gays), it smells to me like self-loathing, even as I do admit that the attendent legal benefits make it somewhat worth pursuing so long as such benefits exist. But the lesson of the failure of lifelong monogamous marriage is not that we ought to harangue famous celebrities into making earnest testimonials on behalf of an institution that has either failed or been failed by them, nor yet that we need to construct an even more favorable legal regime in order to create incentives for people to enter into committments that they likely will not and cannot keep, but that marriage, while it is fine for some people, ought not to be a univeral institution or aspiration. Perhaps for some people serial monogamy works better, or promiscuity, or polyandry, or polygamy, or any of the many other variants of human sexual and procreative activity. Perhaps these things are simply not appropriate matters for public purview, less yet legal statute, and should be left to the fuckers and fuckees, as the case may be.

Department of It Writes Itself

I’m no expert on American politics, but I do know something about holes.

Thomas Friedman, female impersonators and gentlemen.

The Western Cannons

Bob Herbert produces more pablum than Mead Johnson, but this is especially squishy. While it is surely tragic that poor young people devoid of other opportunities for economic self-sufficiency are press-ganged by circumstance into the service of America's death factories, please, save me the histrionic lionization. The tragedy is not that their heroism is underappreciated but rather that their sacrifices are vain and futile at best, evil at worst, since they are in the service of an evil enterprise, even if they, themselves, are fine and upstanding men and women. Their sacrifices are devoid of honor. Honor has been denied to them. They have been dishonored by the project in which they participated. That is what we ought to be lamenting--that thousands of our poor are being sullied forever by their participation in these vicious and aggressive wars.

Legit

I have a huge boner for this Charlie Davis post, but of course, I rise for just about anything that pisses and coughs in the direction of: "The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force and coercion." Goodness! I think of the State's soi-disant legitimacy monopoly as vaguely Microsoftische, with your various Talibans &c. playing iPad to the clunky desktop OS. There is no control panel, man. Like, it's totally user interface. Violence unmediated by pulldown menus. You get the picture. The State's claims to the legitimate use of violence and coercion are all enforced by violence and coercion anyway. Ask a dead Pashtun tribesman if he thinks the American bomb that killed him was any more legitimate than the misfired bullet in a Homewood carjacking and see what he's got to say. Anyway, lots of violence and coercion have arguments for their own legitimacy. Getting your kneecaps broken because you're shorting on payments to your bookie is just as legit as wage garnishment for failure to pay back taxes. Right? Wrong? Why?

Like Charlie and Jon, I find myself flapping between a grin and a frown when considering the amount of ink and air good liberals spend justifying their little death machine on the grounds that, though it is a shame to kill all those foreigners, some little old lady's SSI check makes it all worthwhile. Here we have Barack Obama arguing that we have to keep killing people in order that we soemday reach a point when we can stop killing them responsibly, and I'm supposed to believe that the great threat to my own democracy whiskey sexy is a gang of underemployed flyover yahoos who want to yell slogans at the government and unwittingly hitch themselves to a domestic false flag operation? Girl, please.

Shit in the Woods

Now on the one hand, I think that our culture's pathological insistence that sex is morally, ethically, and practically unacceptable prior to an arbitrary age of majority is completely nuts. I think that our concurrent ability to sexualize youth while claiming to be scandalized by the sexualization of youth is worse than hypocrisy; it's stupidity. I think that our odd attempts to shield children from the realities, from the existence, of human sexuality are insane, that there is something fundamentally wrong with a culture in which boys and girls must be defended, somehow, from a basic knowledge of their own origin and, worse yet, their own current and future bodily functions. I think that legal constructs like statutory rape are problematic, while at the same time, I think we take a shockingly callous and indifferent attitude toward real rape, which is to say, we construct all sorts of contingent circumstances through which we can dismiss the absence of consent. In general, I think that we are quite insane when it comes to fucking, and that we have somehow turned one of our most fundamental activities as a species into a fraught moral hedgerow maze in which we subsequently got lost ourselves.

But, you know, on the other hand, I am totally tickled by apologia such as:

The church is not a democracy. Bishops (and popes) are not answerable to polls; they're supposed to be dismissive of popular trends in search of a higher truth.

Oh. Okay. So, like, don't rape children, that's, what? A popular trend? Um.

Pallitics

Historians have said many of McLeroy's assertions are dubious and have worried about politicization of such classroom staples as the Revolutionary War and the civil rights movement.

-WaPo

By all means, disagree with his assertions, but, um, "such classroom staples as the Revolutionary War and the civil rights movement" were explicitly political events. Oh, I suppose it is easier to consign them to "history," to denude them of context and controversy, to elide all disagreement on their meaning and ramifications, to pin their pretty wings to the velvet and cover them in glass, but it is also false. Look, I do not think that the United States was founded on "biblical principles," just one of the above-mentioned dubious assertions--I think "biblical principles" is an almost entirely hollow phrase, signifying very little. At the same time, yahoos like McLeroy do us a favor if they at least force us to look backwards with a moderately critical eye, to consider that wars, revolutions, and social movements aren't the passage of a breeze over grass, but are real, palpable, and catastrophic, even if we ultimately deem the end results to be salutory.

I too find it offensive to listen to white people making barely cryptoracist arguments about the Great Society causing the "destruction of the black family", but at the same time, the civil rights movement did not consist solely of a few marches and sit-ins culminating in a big speech at the Lincoln Memorial. That's a false telling. The civil rights era was a wrenching, traumatic time, full of death and conflict, and although I do not think that the disintegration of Jim Crow in the south is the proximate cause of epidemic black single parenthood, I do think that the question of how urban industrialization provided an economic foundation and context for civic struggle and understanding how subsequent de-industrialization has undercut some of those earlier gains is not only a legitimate topic of inquiry, but a necessary one.

See, shit is fucked, and although it sort of sucks that some kids are being taught incorrect reasons for shit being fucked, having their minds exposed to the fact of the shit-fuckery makes them a lot more open to unofficial counternarratives than panegyrical tales of the American Cincinnatus and Honest Abe and a sanctified and deracinated MLK.