Das Krapital

Tony Judt is supposed to be some kind of revered historian, yet he writes things like:

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears "natural" today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

By using contemporary buzzwords and neologisms like "wealth creation" and "privatization," he may be trying to immunize himself from any asshole's easy conclusion that he is more full of shit than a bull with a sutured asshole. Replace "wealth creation" with "getting rich." I dare you to tell me with a straight face that that ain't a venerable American tradition. (Sidney Lumet wrote this screenplay in the seventies, so plainly we're off by a decade at least.) Global capital was not invented in the Savings and Loan days. Marx gets a mention--"Marxism was attractive to generations of young people if only because it offered a way to take one's distance from the status quo"--as if Kapital were The Yes Album. (Marx was writing about Judt's 1980s inventions more than a century prior, and he wasn't the only one.) The "growing disparities of rich and poor," another lousy stock phrase, is more like a reversion to mean, after an unusually egalitarian (for white people) post-war era.

Social democracy is all fine and well as a lefty touchstone, but someone might remind Judt that opposition to the American state includes not only those who suspect the supposed social safety net and think state-funded railroads are one step down from collectivized agriculture but also those of us who think that the United States government is a raging Satanic war-guzzling death machine whose principle export is the horrific maiming and murder of foreigners for no good reason at all. And how am I supposed to reconcile that with my tax bracket? America is a garish, prison-pocked blood-drinker, but Judt's critique of the contemporary political economy is that The Youth don't want to get involved? Ask a dead Afghan poppy farmer trying to scratch a subsistence existence between our global dominion and the violent rebellions it engenders what he thinks about the problem of political apathy in the first world and see what he says. Oh, nothing? Yeah. He's dead, you see.

Judt counsels cowardice and collaboration:

If it is to be taken seriously again, the left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy. But it will no longer suffice to identify the shortcomings of "the system" and then retreat, Pilate-like, indifferent to consequences. The irresponsible rhetorical grandstanding of decades past did not serve the left well.

We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.

All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for "security." The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state. It is thus incumbent upon us to reconceive the role of government. If we do not, others will.

"But it will no longer suffice to identify the shortcomings of 'the system' and then retreat, Pilate-like, indifferent to consequences. The irresponsible rhetorical grandstanding of decades past did not serve the left well." Fuck you, too, man. Like, like . . . what? Like: "War isn't healthy for children and other living things?" How about: "All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization." How about: "In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society - the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

Pull-quote mush about ages of insecurity and the necessity of tethering our puny individual lives to the leviathan lest we be drowned in the deep isn't only bullshit and isn't just fearmongering (Ah! Uncertainty! Unpredictable futures!); it's bad analysis. The apparatus of the state has not withered, not shrunk one iota since whatever Golden Age Judt implicitly casts back to. The state has grown inexorable and implacably. It is more powerful and more omnipresent than ever. Its coercive powers are subtler and more pervasive. Its capacity for surveillance is increased a millionfold. Its confiscatory powers are ever greater. The fact that Bill Clinton loosened some financial regulations does not indicate an atrophying of the state.

A critique that begins with the presumption that the American government is in some kind of danger of dissilution due to . . . well, no one can say precisely what it might be due to, but due to something . . . is palpably, viscerally, obviously untrue. And a critique that presumes inequality as some kind of insidious symptom of this bullshit decline of authority rather than a necessary component of the maintenance of authority is toadyism.

Are They Going to Hurt Us, Walter

Sooooo. CNN posted a pretty dopey item about the dude who may or may not have made some kind of threat in the general direction of Nancy Lugosi, as America's greatest vaudevillian, Michael Savage-Weiner has taken to calling her. Take it away, Sister Shakes:

In all seriousness, I point out that this terrorist's weeping has been turned into an important news item for a reason: It further serves the narrative that each of these Totally-Not-Terrorists of the American Rightwing are independent actors, whose motivations formed in solitude, their actions exclusively attributable to lunacy. Men who cry, of course, are axiomatically unstable, each tear a wet little drip of evidence of the mental illness that is the exclusive source of their behavior.

It's a cunning little potion of sexism and disablism, delivered stealthily in an unmarked package, designed to assure you don't worry; it's only a few bad apples; pay no attention to the swelling indication that there's a dark ideology on the rise, fueling hatred and justifying extremism and tacitly encouraging violence…

Man, we're really lowering the bar on terrorism these days. I mean, hey, did you just, did you just look at me wrong? Terrorist! Did I just pay you with a twenty and you made change as if I paid with a ten? Terrorist!

Meanwhile, in, uh, all seriousness . . . a dark ideology . . . on the rise . . . fueling hatred . . . justifying extremism. Jesus, Moe, and Curly, that shit is totes 2001. Deliver it with hunched shoulders, a misplaced grin, and a phoned-in scrubbrush twang and you're straight-up Bushin' it.

So, you know, the left, whatever that is, is ascendent, and in its dreams fifth columns march like Pink Floyd hammers. At the risk of engaging in a bit of, yuh, disabilism, I'm just going to out and say it: this gang is proving to be even weaker in the knees than the other terror brigade.

Worthy Fucking Adversary

Oh, psychologists explain. Oh, all right. Why not alchemists? Why not chiropractors? Why not animist shamans? How about Miss Cleo, is she still around? Dionne Warwick? How about my crazy aunt Alice? How about some homeless guy? Psychology is total bunk, absolute rubbish, a total non-discipline. I mean, in other diagnostic, medical fields, you have disagreement, sure, but you do not have two doctors who look at the same symptoms with the one saying, yeah, it's a myocardial infarction, and the other saying, uh, no, it's a broken toe. Psychology is worse than the chiropractic; it's phrenology; it's eugenics.

I do not mean to get too essentialistic here, but those dudes in the chopper, they killed a bunch of people because they are murderers. Whatever their training, whatever they may believe about the evitability of future ninelevensies via the unprovoked invasions of foreign countries, however they or their superiors rationalize, justify, and explain their presence and purpose in Iraq, the fact remains: they are killers for hire. They aren't defending anyone from anything. They are being paid to kill innocent people, which, let us not forget, they and their flying robot pals are doing all the time. This is not whatchacall an isolated incident. Shooting the fuck out of civilians is a daily fucking occurence. So, fuck you, New York Times. Analyze this.

A Fucking Park Ranger

And let's also not forget--let's not forget, Dude--that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city--that isn't legal either. I am at a total loss. What is Thomas Boswell saying? Tiger Woods shouldn't win the Masters because he is a pussy hound? No, well, no . . . he shouldn't not win because he's a pussy hound, but he shouldn't not not win because . . . He shouldn't throw the tournament, but he should be careful not to win it . . . but not throw it . . . just don't win it.

Because if he wins, people might forgive his pussyhounding.

Yo. If Tiger Woods is guilty of anything, it's not promiscuity; it's marriage, the one bad contract that his agents should definitely have advised against. "Uh, so, look, Tiger, buddy, we read this thing, and we gotta be honest with you, bro, this isn't for you. I mean, we can see why you'd want it, and you know, brother, yo da man, whatever you decide, and we're cool with it, and we've totally got your back, man, no matter what, but this just, this just isn't Tiger, you know what I mean, this just doesn't say Tiger to me. This says Phil Mickelson. And you ain't Phil Mickelson, buddy. You know what I mean?"

Anyway, if you're going to make the case that perhaps the single most dominant professional athlete in any sport anywhere in the world anytime in the last century or so should not win tournaments, you really need to make the case that he shouldn't enter them in the first place.

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.