Elegy for the Man Who Was Too Clever By Half

After the debate about MMF threesomes but before the mac & cheese, I discovered a “Poem a Day” book on the kitchen counter while spending some quality time with a few White Lights last night. While the bandmates bandmated I became completely absorbed, having once owned a similar poetry collection that now resides on some musty basement bookcase in the Bettinson family house, and having not written or read much poetry for its own sake since I left that home to forge my own.  But I’ll forgo more flowery prose; short and to the point, I’m compelled to compose.

Dropout

This deep breath & I

return to center.

Return to sender

the shallow air, where

over-dosed and slight light-headed

I misplaced my savoir faire.

Back to atmosphere I can drink in,

Comfortable in contradiction,

where when I will

I will will well,

and without thinking.

Razed Expectations: Inglourious Basterds Review

More than any of his work since Pulp Fiction, QT’s Inglourious Basterds is a magic-eye illusion — an honest-to-God film wrapped in a helluva movie.  So as not to ruin it (it’s a schooner), know now that this review contains SPOILERS throughout; read it AFTER the movie.

In the first place, Basterds is a blast, a popcorn-inhaling, hyperreal revenge flick, a multi-genre pastiche that ‘torture porn’ director Eli Roth called “Jewish porn”, in which the Nazis get a pharmacology lab’s worth of their own medicine.  Some critics see this movie and take issue with it. They feel it trivializes the Holocaust and/or offends moral reason with images of the Holocaust’s victims committing atrocities including mutilation and incineration.

These critics stare at the magic eye illusion and see Basterds as another in a long line of unserious, feel-good American action movies with troubling implications for The Youth of America. More Alfred Hitchcock than Michael Bay, perhaps. An exceptionally well-made and particularly audacious exercise, perhaps. But in the end just an exercise, tasteless exploitation.  They find no deeper thematic meaning — the 3-D layers do not pop out at them — and so the film’s most sensational imagery feels cheap and irresponsible.

But this jagged 2-D collage of a popcorn flick is distinctly, literally European in conception and execution. Structurally, it is five extended episodes, shot in Europe, in which an ensemble of authentic, engaging Europeans become trapped in treacherous dialogues, in constantly shifting languages, on themes of identity and communication. Occasionally, this reflective milieu is interrupted by a parading band of absurd American soldiers. In the end, nearly every character is dead in tragic circumstances, and the plot of both history and the movie is lost in a cathartic, horrifying binge of mindless Hollywood violence. This Frankenstein’s monster of spare cinematic parts has become self-aware. It’s alive!

In Pulp Fiction, Jules’ final monologue is the thematic rug that ties the movie’s room together, revealing a thematic cohesion and redemptive spirit that mark it as something more than “just” an endlessly clever and overwhelmingly entertaining crime picture.  The key to the magic-eye picture in Inglourious Basterds is also found in the final chapter, but not explicated verbally as in the director’s previous magnum opus.  Rather, the film dances merrily beyond “flashy WWII exploitation” with a two-step of clever juxtapositions.

1) Many critics have commented on the film’s final line, in which Lt. Aldo Raine, leader of the American characters, takes in his latest work of Nazi mutilation and declares “this just might be my masterpiece.” But I haven’t seen anybody point out that this not just Tarantino having fun: it directly echoes Hitler’s final line in the film, in which he takes in Goebbels’ latest work of cinematic propaganda and suggests it may be his best film yet.

2) Immediately before the massacre in the cinema, leading up to Hitler’s last words to Goebbels, we repeatedly see shots of the audience in the theater, cheering a parade of images of Allies being slaughtered (footage shot by Eli Roth). This directly foreshadows and satirizes the eruption of violent audience wish-fulfillment the audience watching the film is about to experience, and I haven’t yet found a critic to point out that this whole scenario is directly lifted from Joe Dante’s Gremlins, in which the villainous creatures go to the movies and watch Snow White in a grotesque reflection of the Gremlins theatrical audience. With the exception of the film’s primary antagonist, Spike (or, in IB, Hans Landa), all the villains burn to death in the exploding cinema, symbolically consumed by their own consumerism (or, in IB, their nationalistic fervor).

And so both the climax and the final line of Inglourious Basterds are foreshadowed by and juxtaposed with the German reaction to Nation’s Pride, the Nazi propaganda film within the Jewish vengeance film.  In celebrating film’s alchemy-like transformative powers, Tarantino also acknowledges its ephemeral and reductive nature.

Once the revenge element is understood as one thematic concern and not the film’s defining paradigm, it is easy enough to see that the senselessness of war and violence is conveyed quite thoroughly in every chapter of the movie. And while the Nazis provide classic villains as a group, many individual Germans are given humanizing characteristics. And to express the hollowness of victory in vengeance, the moral perversity of this reductio ad absurdum in which we celebrate Jews incinerating Germans, nearly every character has their illusory dreams crushed with bitter irony, deserved or not.

To wit:  Archie Hicox, upright soldier and film critic, dead because passing for German is harder than it looks in the movies.  The glamorous Bridget Von Hammersmark, death sentence by Cinderella fairy tale. Hans Landa, amoral genius detective, on the verge of his greatest triumph and about to transform identities, branded forever with evidence of his old identity and his complicity with evil.

Au revoir, Shosanna

Finally, Shosanna Dreyfus, trapped in a false identity, sacrifices her life, transcends herself through cinema to become the ghostly spirit of Jewish vengeance, last seen in the film’s most haunting and meaningful image, as a phantasmagoria of light and laughter, slowly losing definition, projected against smoke from a terrible cleansing fire.

There is a Jean-Luc Godard quote that is, I think, relevant to this film beyond the general fact that Tarantino is largely influenced by the French auteur.

“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”

Tarantino earns his self-congratulatory final line, because Inglourious Basterds does in fact render this concept. Its detractors may dislike those things which it takes from life, but in its overabundance of character, incident, image, word, mood, and theme, it is easily one of the most generous films I have seen in years.

WTF The Police

If President Barry thought Sgt. Crowley handled Prof. Gates stupidly, I wonder what he thinks about the cop who stuck his taser up a guy’s butt and pulled the trigger. To protect and serve indeed.

Maybe it’s just a passing ripple in the new media waters but I’ve seen a lot of stories lately about police using excessive force in outrageous or perverse circumstances.  Prof. Gates’ groundless arrest dominated a week of TV “news” cycles; The Colbert Report the other night featured a segment about a 72-year old great-grandmother being zapped for disputing a ticket; and, well, I already mentioned the 50,000 volt enema. Troubling though it may be, it seems law enforcement around the country is embracing the Western District Way.

Now the notoriety of Gates-gate first grew from the racial implications, and then because PrezBo stirred the pot with his “Cambridge police acted stupidly” comment.  That was pretty dumb to say, but obviously this story struck a nerve for our first black president, and you can certainly see the racial angle in the discrepancy between the 9-1-1 call and Crowley’s police report.

But at root this incident is more about the trumped-up charge than racial profiling.  Though PrezBo should never have said it, and certainly not in a manner so raw, the behavior of Sgt. Crowley — though he is no doubt career police who acts in good faith — reflects an arbitrary abuse of authority by local law enforcement, such as one might see in a corrupt police state.

Andrew Sullivan, back from sabbatical and fired up, has been exploring the idea of rising statism in America this week. Von at Obsidian Wings has a great post about viewing policework with clear eyes. But the best post I’ve seen on the subject was a TPM reader e-mail, the heart of which I have copied over:

Police work is not that dangerous compared to, say, driving a cab. Firefighters have a far more physically dangerous job. However, cops have a heroic job: much harder in so many ways than firefighting. Firefighters are almost never in a morally ambiguous zone and almost always are in the business of making people feel good. Cops handle humans at their worst.

This distinction matters. When cops stress the (low) physical danger of their job, they’re setting themselves up to be military. That’s no good for the country. Large cities probably need a SWAT team, but that is not the model for most police work. Collateral damage is simply not acceptable for police. It also leads to police cowardice. A lot of civilian damage is justified by the military concept: “force protection.” Highly-armed and highly-trained cops use a lot more violence against citizens than a court would deem acceptable if one citizen used it against another.

Cops do not stress the (high) psychological danger of their job, because that makes them social workers with guns, able to handle difficult people with aplomb and an absolute minimum of violence, either threatened or applied. And that’s what they should be.

I think that really cuts to the core of the issue, but how does one avoid the militarization and statification of the police when law enforcement priorities are dictated by federal Wars on Drugs and Terror?  Not to sing David Simon’s tune, but hasn’t the culture and politics of crime in the past 30 years contributed greatly to institutional dysfunctionality?

Of course our country is full of good and heroic police officers, and I have no doubt that even among officers whose ethos I would find dubious, the vast majority still act in good faith. But when you have large numbers of good-faith actors behaving in ways that are corrosive to the long-term interests of the community, the time for cultural reformation is very seriously nigh.

I leave you today with some more clips from The Wire. First, Bunny Colvin laments the militarization of policework:

And second, a resident of West Baltimore discusses the virtues of community policing:

I Got My Philosophy: Final Thoughts on Atlas Shrugged

Back when this blog was blogged on the regular, I wrote a series of posts grappling with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, digesting the ideas in the book and finding voice for my response. This epic post definitively concludes that process.

In The Romantic Manifesto, Rand defines art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments” but qualifies that an artist need not have a wholly conscious and articulate grasp of what those judgments are, nor a deliberate intent to explain them by means of the artwork, for a work to qualify as art under this definition.

Likewise, I felt my reaction to the book was informed by a difference in metaphysical value-judgments between myself and the author, though I was not entirely conscious of, nor able to articulate, the root of our divergence.

Unable to speak philosophically about this disagreement with Objectivism, having been formally schooled in the field only by a 7th grade advanced reading class that spent the term reading Sophie’s World and a freshman honors seminar on epistemology at NYU, I found my misgivings best expressed self-evidently in the book’s shortcomings as literature. Provocative story and ideas? Chock full.  Evocative characters sketched in three dimensions? Lacking.  Indeed, the characters of Atlas Shrugged suffer for being molded too strictly into allegorical roles that are oddly Manichean for an author so radically anti-mystic. As the launch of a holistic philosophic project, it lacks a certain human touch.

In Rand’s defense, some of her characterizations are stronger than others. Dagny Taggart is a good but not great protagonist — I found James Taggart, Hank Rearden, and Lilian Rearden to be the novel’s most psychologically fascinating and compelling characters, and at least in the case of the two men the characters I understand to be most directly derived from the central protagonist and antagonist in The Fountainhead, which I have not yet read but suspect I will find far more satisfying as literature when I do.

That said, I was not content with this inductive, literary rationale for a philosophical critique, and I sought a deductive answer to the question of my reaction.  Properly, I would have begun by reading Aristotle, Rand’s primary influence and a fundamental Western philosopher with whom I am notably less familiar than with Plato. But in the more casual and leisurely approach I took,  I first reviewed Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and ethics, and read up on Rand’s vociferous condemnation thereof.

I re-read Alan Moore’s Watchmen based on the strong plot resonances between it and Atlas, and then dug up the following philosophy paper analyzing Watchmen, Deconstructing the Hero, which touches repeatedly on Nietzsche, whom I have read in part and who is a clear influence on Rand.

I read several excerpts from Rand’s later non-fiction work, mostly The Romantic Manifesto, as well as this fantastic blog essay by Richard Posner tracking Alan Greenspan’s analysis of the economy over the last five years up through last fall’s collapse (because Greenspan, of course, is the best  objective exemplar since Rand of a lived Objectivism with wildly successful results in fulfilling personal ambitions).

Of course this was all very satisfying for my intellectual appetite, but too general and tangential to my core question to coalesce into the specific critique of Rand’s philosophic thought that seemed so vitally necessary to me to explain my reaction to the book with intellectual integrity.  I knew, for example, that the root of my disagreement with Rand was epistemic and ontological, but lacked the vocabulary and intertextual depth to be more precise.

Well, last night the subject of Rand came up while I was at a bar downtown with my housemate Nabeel, enjoying some live jazz. When I got home I took the least scholastic route possible and Googled “Ayn Rand ontology” only to discover EXACTLY the explication I had sought.

Chapter 3 of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion is written by Douglas B. Rasmussen, professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, and is titled “The Aristotelian Significance of the Section Titles of Atlas Shrugged: A Brief Consideration of Rand’s View of Logic and Reality”.  To quote his core insight and conclusion,

Reality is intelligible, and Rand understands this perhaps better than any other philosopher. Yet, she does not fully appreciate the difference between logic and reality and as a result becomes entangled in some serious conceptual knots.  It is in avoiding these confusions that the wisdom of Aristotelian tradition’s account of logic remains vitally significant.

From this elision of ontological measurement grows the glaring oversights in Rand’s ethics and politics, which Rasmussen once again articulates so beautifully:

[T]he failure to make this distinction clear leads Rand to make a serious error regarding the basis of moral values[,] … to appreciate insufficiently not only the difficulties people face in knowing reality and living a worthwhile human life but also the myriad complexities and details that are required for radical political change. More directly stated, she sometimes fails to appreciate the role of the contingent and the particular in human knowledge, human flourishing, and human liberty. [Emphasis mine]

The vital importance of recognizing contingency is a thematic element of Oakeshottian conservatism, with which I am superficially familiar thanks to the cheerleading performed on its behalf by Andrew Sullivan, of whom I am a big fan. Oakeshott, in fact, defines freedom as ‘recognized contingency,’ and I believe that recognizing one’s contingent nature and successfully synthesizing it with the (individual, not universal) concept of idealized self that we each strive to attain, is a necessary prerequisite for the responsible adult exercise of free will.

Rand’s lack of attention to the ongoing process of human individuation is why the characters in Atlas Shrugged are only one- or two-dimensional: men and women of immense integrity who already know exactly who they are, or cowardly moral perverts deathly afraid of self-knowledge. Hank Rearden is of the first type and made more compelling for the backstory that his uncompromising devotion to his life’s work has led him to neglect his wife, Lilian, whose once-genuine love has since curdled into a resentment that leads her to moral perversion.  This at least implicitly acknowledges the moral pratfalls and emotional blind spots of Rand’s ideal, even if Lilian is portrayed flatly within the action of the novel as utterly villainous with no hope for redemption.

Likewise, James Taggart’s reflexive loathing of those who make his life possible — really a projection of his own self-loathing — is highly compelling. As a cautionary tale, as an example of a person who chooses fear, stagnation, and death over courage, growth, and life, and would never admit this to himself out of fear of facing the nihilistic abyss within, it is the most important and relevant statement Rand makes about achieving self-hood in the entire novel. As Rasmussen writes, Rand is not one to “ignore what is essential,” and I consider James Taggart her most effective characterization for a fantastic portrait of existential horror, a life lived in willful, fearful ignorance of essential personal truths.

Nickel-store Psychology

But despite the extreme existential horror of James Taggart’s complete self-avoidance, a full appreciation of our contingent nature demands an epistemic modesty and ontological humility that Rand lacks — we can’t, individually, know everything, even if we write a complete and self-contained philosophical system. In a word, Rand’s flaw is hubris, of the sort that allows certain atheists (of which Rand is one) to make a metaphysical claim with unjustified certainty, while accusing religious devotees of the same fault.

Undermining the atheist’s vast repertoire of valid and important criticisms of religion is this central hypocrisy. It explains why, despite the fact I am not religious and would admit to the label atheist if the concept of God under discussion is the personalized character of monotheistic tradition, I find myself on the side of religious persons defending a faith buttressed by necessary doubt in any debate with an atheist who evangelizes the obsolescence of faith with unwarranted certainty.

That last link brings you to a very lengthy but must-read example of such a debate, conducted in 2007 between Catholic Andrew Sullivan and atheist Sam Harris. I think both parties illustrate well the room for faith made possible by that vital epistemic humility  — Sam Harris, despite being an atheist secular rationalist, actively seeks deeper knowledge about potential spirituality through studies of Buddhism, meditation, etc.

But the Sullivan/Harris debate also illustrates the double-edged danger of our contingent nature: Disregard it, naively believe you can erase it or nullify it,rather than embrace it and synthesize it, and you create a shadow self to outrun (a la James Taggart). But rely too much on contingency, fail to question your circumstances, or expect the world to work for you (also a la James Taggart), and you adopt a cautious status quo bias that is in its own way just as perilous. The former extreme is an attempt to escape growth and individuation, while the latter is an attempt to avoid it.

It is in reaction to the latter threat, the threat of status quo bias and indolent passivity, the modern existential threat of the mindless consumer, that Ayn Rand champions rationality and will power, self-actualization, action, and progress. For these reasons Atlas Shrugged is vital and inspiring, despite its major flaws.  In embracing radicalism and rejecting the conventional wisdom of status quo bias, Rand tickles my idealistic desire for political reform — though not her political reform — and inspires me to achieve and live my life more passionately.

And yet in her treatment of logic as an ontological absolute, she pays not enough credit to her own contingent nature in shaping her philosophy: her metaphysics and ethics so reactionary against Kant, and her politics especially reactionary against her experiences in the Soviet Union, all extend too far into the other extreme to oppose those extremes against which she rails.

Still, I thank her. Obviously her work has provided me with much to consider, and helped me better articulate my own beliefs (naturally, in contrasting reaction to hers).  I’ve spent the last three years in general gaining deeper knowledge of my own contingent self and the necessary appreciation of my limitations. These are lessons I will no doubt have to learn again in the future, but I feel like I’ve reaped some benefits for now, was overdue for a shift in gears, and I do believe that reading Rand was an important reorientation of my growth: a necessary move away from introspective cultivation and towards fertilization, development, and a stronger — yet more graceful and efficient — mode of exercising my will in the world. I definitely plan to read The Fountainhead, and probably some Aristotle, in the near future.

Atlas Shrugged is certainly art, but then again we’re going by the author’s own definition.  And the final irony of it is this: Rand’s fundamental belief is in the existential value of this life, and the book works for me because I felt that, uplifting and radiant, despite the ethical and political elements of her strict philosophical allegory working against it. The ridiculous corporate/luxury entitlement streak she expressed naively, hubristically, in 1957, stems from a survivor of the Soviet Union’s love of liberty, and a socioeconomically misplaced but prophetic frustration with the violent lethargy of Western civilization that has come to dominate the last 40 years.

I might even have shared the passion of Dagny Taggart in her last futile, quixotic quest to escape the grim fatalism of John Galt’s Objectivist economic apocalypse, if only it hadn’t been so clear that she was just going through the motions by leaving the utopic Galt’s Gulch and returning to the crumbling outside world. Alas, Dagny was allegorically destined to relinquish her redemptive spirit, to turn a blind eye to the feeling — the reason she valued making the trains run on time — that the weight of this world on Atlas’ shoulders is, in its own way, a pleasure to bear.

In the Shadow of the Statue

THEORIES FOR THE LOST FINALE: the Shadow of the Statue group and its ominous metal box are re-staging the Incident, the way Flight 316 re-staged Flight 815. They probably work for Eloise, who as a former leader of the Others might be in a position to know what lies in the shadow of the statue. Just as the Eloise-arranged Flight 316 unstuck Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid in time, the Incident (which Eloise witnessed 30 years ago) will unstick all the time-travelers from 1977, and the Statue group in 2007 provides them with a place to land. Locke doesn’t seem to care about reuniting the castaways, because it isn’t his job. The Statue people are going to do it. And when they do, it will spark this mysterious apocalyptic ‘war’ we’ve heard so much about, because when the time-travelers come back to the future, they bring a paradox with them.

There have been a number of Season 2 parallels in Season 5, and at this point I’m pretty sure that both seasons end with an explosion at the Swan Station that affects the nature of time.  Remember, the destruction of the Swan first introduced time travel to the Lost universe. Detonating the failsafe is what unstuck Desmond in time. It also neutralized the electromagnetism at the Swan, which is what Faraday thinks can be done with Jughead.  When Jughead was introduced, there was lots of speculation that it was buried under the Swan, and I was partial to the idea that when Desmond turned the failsafe at the end of Season 2, he was detonating the bomb. If you buy that we already saw Desmond detonate Jughead at the Swan, then another way to think of Faraday’s plan to change things is that he wanted to execute the Swan’s failsafe mechanism 27 years earlier than established history.

What that presents is a very weird situation where Desmond initiates time travel by detonating Jughead at the Swan in 2004, resulting in a time warp that ends with Jack detonating Jughead at the Swan in 1977. Paradox much?

My theory is that The Incident, from the perspective of the time-travelers, DOES involve blowing up Jughead and neutralizing the electromagnetic energy, erasing the future that sends the time-travelers to 1977, and thus creating a paradox. The time-travelers flash out of the DHARMA era and wormhole through time to 2007. But from the perspective of those who belong in 1977, the moment of paradox disappears along with the time-travelers, so that Jughead and the electromagnetism remain intact, but there is still a cataclysmic Incident: the time-travelers have punctured spacetime to create this wormhole. So the time-travelers appear to die in a terrible Incident, a la Alpert’s comment to Sun, but from the 1977 perspective, no time paradox occured.  The Hatch gets built as fated, using the electromagnetic energy to plug the wormhole (aka “contain the Incident”).  Pressing the button and venting the energy keeps the wormhole stable but closed, so that building pressure doesn’t suck the entire universe into it (as we saw it start to do in the Season 2 finale). However, Jughead is installed as a failsafe, and by detonating it, Desmond removed the energy plug, making it possible for the paradox (and the time-travelers) to leak out of the wormhole and back into our universe, negating reality and causing the apocalypse (as I predict we will see happen in the 2007 half of the Season 5 finale).

In this theory, the Incident falls under the category of “Whatever Happened, Happened,” but at the same time, it is the one event that violates the rule. It is the exception that proves the rule (an exception proving a rule is, naturally, a paradox).  Thus, a paradox was created in 1977 and always was, but it doesn’t appear in the timeline until 2007, on the other end of a time-flash, when the fact of it pops out the other end of the wormhole in spacetime with the time-travelers.

With all future interlopers gone from 1977, Eloise Hawking can use the future knowledge provided by Faraday’s journal to make sure that Faraday becomes a quantum physicist and Desmond Hume winds up in the Hatch, so that the events of 1977 will come to pass as they already have.  This is why Eloise tells Penny that it is Daniel’s fault Desmond got caught up in this mess: she forced Des not to marry Penny in the ’90s (in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”) because Faraday’s journal demanded she do it.

Also based on what she learns from the journal, Eloise might realize that the time-travelers didn’t die, but actually created an opening through which the timeline can be changed and fates re-written, as Faraday believed.  As such, she fulfills her own tragic destiny and sends Daniel and the O6 to the Island in the belief that whenever the time-travelers are released from the wormhole, the timeline will be up for grabs, and Faraday’s death might be changed.

And she’s not wrong: although many events between 1977 and 2007 are very strictly fated, the timeline is still somewhat fluid, or at the very least becomes fluid after Desmond detonates the failsafe and becomes uniquely unstuck in time. Throughout Season 3, Des keeps seeing visions of the future, with circumstances changing depending on how Charlie Pace meets his inevitable end. Desmond tells Charlie a noble death will result in Claire & Aaron leaving safely on a helicopter. Charlie dies so that this prophecy might come true, but it doesn’t– unless the timeline we’ve seen gets changed, a la Jack & Faraday’s plan.

Which brings us back to the mysterious climactic “war.”  The final piece of this theory is that Faraday’s vision of changing the timeline and the ominous Ben/Widmore war are the same thing.  Jack & Faraday’s pet paradox manifests on the 2007 end of the ‘back to the future’ time-flash, and this negates the timeline. But the universe doesn’t ‘course-correct’ itself this time: the “real world,” as Sawyer referred to it in “Follow the Leader,” ceases to exist, Marty McFly-style, fading away into a chaotic void. Only the victor in the war for control of the Island will have the power to heal the timeline and course-correct the universe, essentially ressurecting reality in their preferred image, Biff Tannen-style. This is why the war is constantly ‘coming,’ and has never arrived: it is a war to change the past as well as the future, and it can only take place outside of time.

Since the Island is some sort of Underworld that exists within its own time bubble, it and everybody on it still exists even when the outside universe collapses.  The Island actually has a role in creating and maintaining the outside world, like a dreaming God, and so when somebody wins the war, they gain the power to course-correct the universe, resurrecting it in their preferred image.  The destiny that everybody is fulfilling is actually bringing about the end of the world, so that Good and Evil can fight a war over the nature of its rebirth.  In Season Six, the answers to the Island’s deepest mysteries will be uncovered by the warring sides as a consequence of the race to wield the Island’s power for good or ill.

Long Ball

Today’s Day 100, so here’s lots of words and links for you political junkies.  Today I touch on the GOP’s collapse, but focus on the  administration’s banking strategy. Still to come: torture, foreign policy, energy, climate change, and some more party politics.

In his ‘100 Days‘ column, Andrew Sullivan notes:

We have an adult in charge. … Because Obama’s game is always a long one, a hundred days seems too soon to judge. But the ground has been laid. For what? We’ll find out.

Obama’s maturity is an important reason to be optimistic in obviously troubled times. His steady demeanor stands in particularly stark contrast to the incoherent mass that calls itself the Republican Party today — if you can call 21% of the population a ‘party’ in a two-party system. Only 1 in 5 Americans will associate their name with the Republican brand. Where is an enterprising cabal of  intelligent conservative moderates with an incisive and reasoned political platform to found a Grand New Party when you need one?

Alas, a new party would be far too radical for a moderate conservative temperament, so the demented elephant will keep stirring up trouble, probably for years. Meanwhile, back in reality (with its well-known liberal bias), the NYT released this graph in a batch of poll results.

"Probably not, but we're cool with it."

Combine these numbers with Obama’s 60% and above approval ratings, and as Matt Yglesias remarks:

…[I]t suggests that Obama can take advantage of a period of low expectations for his actual performance. And that might be all for the best, since I’m frankly not that optimistic that the banking strategy they’re pursuing is going to bring about good results.

Yes, the banking strategy is by far the weakest link in the administration’s coat of policy arms. I refer you to Paul Krugman’s column of a month ago. Money quote:

The underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules. … As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

This cuts to the core problem that the administration’s cautious approach fails to address: banks that are “too big to fail” are too big to exist! The handful of mega-banks that hold two-thirds of the assets are the ‘patients zero’ of this credit pandemic, insolvent and overleveraged and in some cases guilty of fraud (AIGFP, I’m looking at you). They are, in effect, tumors that have metastasized on the American body politic, malignantly weighing down our economy and our legislative process.

Now, financial elites are rabid fans of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, in which noble, hardworking captains of industry are the engines of prosperity and progress on which everybody else relies. This mindset is integral to understanding Wall Street’s attitude towards government intervention in its bonus pay and operations, and its apparent willful ignorance of the fact that the Street’s institutions only remain standing thanks to taxpayer money and in spite of the crisis-causing lack of merit to financial business practices.

Current Events in <100 Characters

More in-depth political analysis is coming this week, but for today, I’m just going to reproduce some twitter poetry like a lazy bastard:

Obama’s 1st 100 Days in <100 Characters

Like watching The Wire, seems slow

to start, but given time you realize

its much smarter than you.

The Republican Party in <100 Characters

Like watching 24, seems like an over the top parody of real life,

and given time,

turns out it is.

Bank bailouts in <100 Characters

Just like Star Wars prequels,

we’re paying shitty rich guys to ruin

all of our childhood dreams.

U.S. Torture in <100 Characters

Like The Hills, suggests world

without justice, as morally bankrupt acts

erode Western civilization.

And a fifth blog-only bonus:

Human Impact on the Earth, in <100 Characters

Like LOST, explosive success

had unexpected effect on future plotlines,

and we’re all in suspense.

Frankenpenis

(Originally posted at CHUD.com)

It has come to my attention that Lorena Bobbitt, infamous ’90s dick dicer, is on today’s Oprah.  I get that this is a “Where Are They Now?” segment, but would we revel in superficial pop nostalgia over a wacky rape? Would a man famous for beating his wife during a fit of mental illness get a guest spot on the #1 talk show in the country? I missed that episode Oprah did about Chris Brown and Rihanna, how did that go? She was chillin’ with Chris, laughin’ about how sometimes bitches need sense knocked into ‘em, right?  Oh no wait, that’s fucked up.

Look, I’m not suggesting Lorena Bobbitt is unrepentant or a bad person or anything (the opposite is true, actually), or that Oprah condones cock chopping (she might though. Hard to say).  All I’m saying is, I don’t see Oprah chit-chatting with Roman Polanski, do you?  Dude had just as fucked up a life as Lorena Bobbitt, also made a mistake in the category of ’sexual assault,’ but he can’t set foot in the US or he’ll get arrested. Lorena Bobbitt is doing guest-spots on Oprah.  Sexism! Or something.  Let’s do a quick “Where Are They Now” comparison right here, with an assist by Wikipedia:

Roman Polanski: Internationally-recognized cinema auteur, he survived the Holocaust in Poland, his pregnant wife was murdered by the Manson family in 1969, and then in 1977 Polanski pulled some “casting couch” sleaze on a 13-year old model. For thirty years, Polanski has lived and worked in Europe to avoid jail for underage sex with a minor. His victim, Samantha Geimer, now in her 40s, has requested the charges against him be dropped so he can legally return to the US and she can stop being asked, “Hey, aren’t you the girl who got molested by Roman Polanski?”

Lorena Bobbitt: A victim of domestic abuse and marital rape who went nuts. More specifically, went just above the nuts. John Bobbitt’s nuts.  Now she’s a hairdresser working toward her BA, and founder of an anti-domestic violence program that promotes family activities.  She has a fiance and young daughter and cares for her mother, who lives with them.  John Bobbitt was an abusive douche, and continued to be an abusive douche even after it resulted in his dick being cut off, racking up multiple arrests over the years. He also starred in two porn films, John Bobbitt: Uncut and — I cannot stress this enough — Frankenpenis.

Okay fine, so upon closer inspection, Lorena Bobbitt’s a really positive example as far as “Where Are They Now” segments, and John Bobbitt was stocking up on “dick-related violence” karma anyway, and none of it has anything to do with Roman Polanski, even if he did take a switchblade to Jack Nicholson’s face in that scene in Chinatown in one of the best director cameos ever. But I refuse to admit this post is pointless.  For one thing, turns out Oprah is good at her job.  Who knew?

In the end though, the real lesson is: don’t be a dick. Don’t take a knife to a dick. And don’t take a dick to a 13-year old. Engage in any of these, and you too will be forever haunted by the misdeeds of your frankenpenis.  Life lessons.

About a Blog

This blog recently turned one year old, and despite a couple of month-long “vacations,” I’ve written here pretty consistently in that year, penned a few posts even worth reading, maybe. It feels pretty damn good.  So here’s a couple paragraphs about blogging, in the vein of Andrew Sullivan’s great article “Why I Blog” or Arianna Huffington v. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show from December.

WHY BLOG AT ALL?  Aside from a few posts like this one, there’s nothing overtly diarist about this site, nary a trace of the Livejournals and Xanga pages of old.   Nonetheless, I think blogging is about personal process as much or more as it is about making your voice heard publicly. I find it very therapeutic.  Because it is public, it pushes me to be more articulate and succinct, to rethink and refine my opinions, to stay engaged, and generally be less self-conscious and more self-aware.  It’s a double-edged sword of course: many, many blogs are inarticulate, unfocused, dogmatic, or deluded, and often in a proudly extroverted way. Hell I can think of lots of posts of mine that fit that description easy. For all of professional journalism’s neuroses, as an institution I understand why it has these quality concerns regarding the blogosphere.

And that, ultimately, is why this site is called Know Better, to keep me focused on the aspirational side of blogging.  After all, I started doing this as an opportunity to better myself, to stop just floating around in my own head and actually mature in the way I handle knowledge.  I don’t actually think I know better than you (although I do know better than YOU, specifically); Know Better is an ongoing mission statement, not a description.

WHAT NEXT?  In the interest of living up to that mission statement, this latest hiatus of mine will come to a close on Sunday, when I’ll be posting my take on President Obama’s 1st 100 days in office, possibly as a series lasting til Wednesday (the 100th day).  Over time this blog has bounced from politics to pop culture and back.  I’m not suddenly going to be pop culture illiterate, but from here out, Know Better will focus more on politics, science, and technology.  I’ll still be writing pop cultural posts, but those will usually go up at CHUD.com with some cross-posting. I’ll be bringing in new design elements as my web skills develop too. Onward and upward.

THANK YOU.  I’d be kinda shocked if anybody is still reading this far into what is a pretty self-indulgent post, but here’s where I say thank you to everybody who actually does read this blog on a semi-regular or even occasional basis, and especially anybody who has commented.  Whatever other idealistic rationales I’ve devised for doing this, there’s nothing nearly as terrifying and rewarding as finding out somebody has actually read what you wrote and has thoughts about it.   On that note, I’ll see y’all Sunday.

Weak Tea

The Americans were boiling, reported the French press.

Now that tax day is past and our national teabagging is naught but a memory, I’d like to make a few shout-outs and observations to put the spectacle in perspective.

1) Andy “on the Road” Sellars citizenjournophotoblogged (portmanteau fail!) his impressions of the D.C. Tea Party, noting well the frustrating obliviousness of a vague and unfocused tax-related protest in the one District in the U.S. that actually lives under taxation without representation.   To my mind, for protests ostensibly orchestrated to revive the spirit of the American Revolution, the level of ignorance regarding any civic or historic context is pretty damning.

2) Contrariwise, Ross Douthat, one of those reassuringly sane conservatives and soon-to-be NYT columnist, has a great post up this morning comparing the Tea Parties to the antiwar protests of Bush’s first term. Conclusion Quote:

[H]ere we are in the sixth year of the Iraq War, and all those anti-war protests, their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on. So if you’re inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong to be alarmed.

Legitimate point.  And this whole Tea Party hubbub has, if nothing else, given me new perspective on how the anti-war movement of 2002 and 2003, which seemed vital and obvious to me at the time, appeared batty and paranoid to the majority of Americans who still trusted their president.

Of course, people were wrong to trust George W. Bush then, and I think that was a judgment call you could reasonably make by 2003, what with the transparently manufactured campaign to invade a country for ideological shits and giggles, and certainly by 2004, what with the subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law, and, uh, reports of fucking TORTURE.

Frankly, I’m kind of pissed that the powerless conservatives of 2009 are co-opting this Remember the Revolution theme, when the powerless liberals of 2002-2004 had actual, real, important grounds for suggesting the government had betrayed the nation’s deepest founding values, and really dropped the ball.  It’s mind-boggling how, for people living in the scary conservative mirror world, everything that was terrifying and disturbing about the Bush presidency is magically transferred and projected onto the Obama presidency.  The Tea Party types are the same sort who labeled Iraq War critics and protesters the “Blame America First” crowd, suggested criticism of Bush meant we didn’t support the troops and wanted America to fail, and raised the spectre of McCarthy with suspicions of a terrorist-loving fifth column.

That last strain of paranoia eventually found Barack Obama to be an enormous boon to its survival as a meme, spawning the Birther movement, for example. And now without a hint of irony, conservative spokespersons explicitly desire that our president fail and fan rebellious rhetoric, as the detritus of the GOP spews more and more bile at its own shadow. Tea without sympathy. Which brings us to:

3) Matt Yglesias riffs on the problem with conservative paranoia, making the vital point that a lot of the most virulent rhetoric “isn’t burbling from the grassroots up, it’s being driven [by] the very most prominent figures in conservative media and … a large number of members of congress.” He ends by saying this is incredibly irresponsible behavior, and he’s right. The governor of Texas, lobbing red meat at teabaggers yesterday, took an antebellum policy position regarding a state’s right to secede from the Union.  Sure that’s not gonna happen, although the South is always threatening to rise again, and if it did, considering the circumstances of the first Civil War, it would definitely happen during the term of the first black President, wouldn’t it?

My point is, while I appreciate Ross’ words of wisdom, the excesses and extremes of the conservative movement today are more dangerous and malignant than those of the Bush-era liberal movement, a judgment I make largely based on the sadistic policies, pathological denial, and general disregard for responsible governance embraced by the modern right-wing– the same traits that spurred liberal protest under Bush and offend the sensibilities of our New Democratic Majority today.  In the quote above, Ross describes the teabaggers as “naive,” which suggests a state of innocence and potential growth. But one cannot mature from a state of naivete by embracing ignorance.

There are important debates to be had about tax reform (I’m for a major simplification of the tax code), the government’s fiscal health, and our economic strategy.  I think the insights of conservative minds like Ross Douthat are vital to those debates.  There are great protests to be thrown using the trappings of the American Revolution to illumine how we have drifted from core principles, too. But the sights and sounds yesterday evoked no civic respect from me.  It was like watching a tectonic vent of cultural resentment, propelled proudly by its own irrationality. I wouldn’t validate that for all the tea in China.