Magnificent speechification: Grayson does it with style.

The bill calling for the much-needed extension of unemployment benefits has finally been passed by both houses of the federal legislature—the Senate passed it on Wednesday and the House got around to doing so yesterday. So I realize that, with respect to the political issue, this post is not exactly timely.

I wish, nevertheless, to share with my enlightened readers this absolute triumph of rhetoric/oratory that was delivered by Rep. Alan Grayson, Democrat of Orlando, Florida during the House 'debate' that preceded the bill's passage. Now, we've seen previous examples of Grayson's deadpan wit, his knack for using invective to tasteful and brilliant effect, and his panache and cogency as a debater on substantive issues.

And herewith, the House doth Grayson rock.

But so rousing is the perfect little specimen of succinct speechifying that Grayson brought to the floor last Wednesday that I went and transcribed the whole damn two-minute speech for you. Now you, my readers, can never credibly question my love and devotion to you. Enjoy:

My grandfather, in the 1930s, spent several years of his life, every single day, at the dump, looking for things there that he could sell. Looking for things that he could take to the market and sell, because there was no other way for him to survive the 1930s and the Great Depression.

There was no unemployment insurance back then. There was no state benefits back then. There was no help for the people who had [no] jobs. All they could do, like my grandfather—supporting a family of seven—was to go to the dump and desperately try to find something he could sell.

And that, my friends, is the America that the Republicans are trying to revive. The America of desperate straits and, for them, cheap labor. The America where people have nothing, hope for nothing and are desperate to live for the next day. That is what the Republicans are trying to resurrect—day after day, week after week, and now month after month.

I've got news for my Republican friends: every single person who's going to receive unemployment insurance under this bill is unemployed. Every single one of them doesn't have a job. And that's why they need this money.

Now, I know what the Republicans are thinking:

"Why don't they just sell some stock? If they're in really dire straits, maybe they could take some of their art collection and send it off to the auctioneer. And if they're in deep, deep trouble, maybe these unemployed could sell one of their yachts."

That's what the Republicans are thinking right now.

But that's not the life of ordinary people—the 99 percent of America that actually has to work for a living, that doesn't just clip coupons and live off of interest and dividends, like my Republican friends do.

That's why we need this bill to pass: because of the 99 percent of America that deals with reality everyday. The people who will lose their homes if this doesn't pass. The people who will be living in their cars if this doesn't pass. That's why we need this to pass.

And I will say this to Republicans who have blocked this bill now for months and kept food out of the mouths of children. I say to them now:

May God have mercy on your souls.

I yield back.

Thanks to PhuckPolitics.com for bringing this to my attention. That blog contains a link to a video of the speech, along with its blogger's exuberant commentary.

Lookin' for a hero...

Tom "The Fourth Doctor" Baker

Maybe if the United States of America had cooler superheroes, we'd lose our appetite for demagogues in media and politics.

Consider the following remarks of Tom Baker, who was—to my mind—the greatest Doctor Who of all time, in an interview broadcast on Australian television in the mid-1970s:

ABC Television Australia: Now, with the advent of Superman coming back to the big screen, do you think there’s ever a chance that Doctor Who and Superman may run into each other?

Tom Baker: Well that’s a nice idea, but what would be the point? I mean, Superman wouldn’t be any opposition, would he, because… well…

ABC Television Australia: You both have a sort of similarity with phone boxes, though, don’t you?

Tom Baker: Ah, yes, but that’s the only way. I suppose Superman only uses a phone box because, you know, he’s rather prudish and modest, isn't he, and doesn’t want to take his knickers off in public. But I think compared to the character of Doctor Who, he’s a bit of a bonehead, Superman? I mean, he punches things out, doesn't he?

ABC Television Australia: He certainly does.

Tom Baker: Whereas the character I’m involved with tries to think it out.

Music to my ears. It's high time that someone came up with an American superhero of the caliber of Doctor Who. We ain't got nuthin'.

Let's stop acting surprised.

We're not really shocked, are we?, by instances of deceit, incompetence, greed and arrogance in the corridors of power?

Those of us who are convinced that civil liberties, free expression, free inquiry and democratic deliberation are the cornerstones of American society know quite well that lots of things are not as they should be. We know that, somehow, these essential principles and practices must be preserved, repaired and/or improved. We realize that we must continue to take these things seriously, remind one another of their importance and significance, and teach subsequent generations to preserve all that is best about the American project in republican self-governance.

We were, all of us, horrified by the self-righteous barbarity and callous disregard for the rule of law promoted, clandestinely (and then not-so-clandestinely), by former Vice President Cheney. We were dismayed to learn that various United States agencies had spied on American citizens, tortured prisoners of war (using methods borrowed from 1950s Communist China) and fabricated intelligence as a pretext for waging war. We thought the eleventh-hour first Bank Bailout, under Bush, was a bald-faced exercise in theft—that it revealed, to our dismay, the extent to which the American political system has become a fully owned subsidiary of powerful financial interests and an elite stratum of wealthy investors. And we thought that the second Bank Bailout, under Obama's watch, confirmed our suspicions about the current impotence of American democracy. To be sure, I'm not referring to its impotence in practice: we already knew all about that. No, what was confirmed was the impotence of American democracy as an idea.

So why do we act shocked when we encounter leaked footage of American soldiers in Afghanistan firing missiles at unarmed civilians? Why so surprised when Obama sells off—faster than Bush would even have dared—the American education system to a bunch of glorified loan sharks? Why are we taken off-guard when the Supreme Court overturns hundreds of centuries-old laws regulating the political spending of multinational corporations, on the basis of the notion—so argues the Court—that such laws restrict the (previously non-existent) Constitutional right of corporations to free speech?

I don't think that we are surprised by these things. I think that we are pretending to be surprised. I'm guessing that there are two (2) ways in which we pretend to be surprised, which coexist in varying degrees in any particular instance:

i. The first way in which we act surprised.
We want to be surprised by these things. Therefore, we either convince ourselves that we are surprised, or we act surprised in a semi-conscious attempt to simulate, for our own comfort, the feeling of being surprised. Or we act surprised out of sheer habit. In any of these cases—whatever our level of consciousness of our actions—we are motivated by a desire for comfort.

Why is the feeling of surprise comforting to us? Because surprise registers the phenomenon to which we are responding as something that is—as it were—beyond the pale. It's a psychological defense mechanism. We want so desperately to believe that everyone else values our Constitutional protections and civil liberties as much as we do. To us, this stuff is basic common sense, and it shatters our faith in humanity to recognize the truth: there are a substantial numbers of American citizens who would gladly give away their liberties in exchange for an illusory feeling of safety or security.

This brings us to:

ii. The second way in which we act surprised.
We hope that by expressing our outrage and shock in the face of the erosion of American civil liberties, we might be able to shock the aforementioned cadre of American citizens—a cadre that is in most other respects as heterogeneous as can be—out of its complacency and docility.

In other words, we like to believe that we are walking, talking George Orwells. That, if we talk frequently and loudly enough about how disgusted we are with our country's seemingly inexorable drift toward fear-mongering, surveillance state, that we will manage eventually to make them see the light!

The mistake we're making in this second instance is about as obvious as can be: do we really think that we can out-fear-monger the professional political-corporate-media fear-mongers?? I think this is a difficulty that faces those of us in the post-Baby Boom generations who believe that the only way in which our democracy can be repaired is through a reinvigorated civil discourse. At present, American political rhetoric is—like American political thought—beyond its moment of crisis. It is in a state of extreme fragmentation.

All I'm saying is, let's start admitting that we all know this. Let's stop acting surprised.

How does Google mean?...or: "Everything and More"

No, I'm not going to weigh in on Google's (lack of) aesthetic sense, as demonstrated by the search engine's widely panned and short-lived experiment on Thursday during which a large photograph took the place of the usual plain, white background. Because who cares, really.

No, I'm much more interested in pointing out something that I've noticed over the past month or so that appears to the left of the results of an ordinary Google search. Here's a photo I snapped of it:

Anyone?

What immediately comes to my mind, whenever I glance at this side-bar (which I've done many times) is the title of the only published piece of writing by the late David Foster Wallace that I was never able to make it all the way to the end of. I refer to 2003's Everything and More, subtitled: A Compact History of Infinity. This book-length essay, intended (naively) for the general reading public, was Wallace's audacious, gimmicky and controversial attempt to explain set theory ("multiple infinities")—created (or maybe 'discovered'?) by the 19th century German mathematician Georg Cantor—without really using any actual math.

But, more than Wallace's book, it just strikes me that the words and hyperlinks featured in the above snapshot amount to a kind of smart-ass collage or accidental poem. In other words, with your initial search, Google is providing you with "everything." Should "everything" fail to sate your appetite for page upon page of relevant* material, follow the hyperlink, for Google offers you still "more" than mere infinity.

I guess I'm really just thinking about a constellation of things. First, the fact that we don't often talk about Web pages in ways that take account of how arrangements of words, images and—for example—navigational functions impact conveyed meaning. This can encompass both "intentional" and "unintentional" meanings; it can refer to the ways in which words, images and hyperlinks function as collages of juxtapositions, oppositions and organizational schemes. Furthermore, meaning is impacted not only by what exists on the Web page but by what is left out. Finally, meaning is shaped by the sets of expectations that users bring to bear when using a Web page. This is particularly interesting in reference to search engines, in the case of which the user's attention is almost always focused upon the expectation that he or she will encounter immediately thereafter a spectrum of (categories of?) content.

And, of course, there's the Marshall McLuhan-esque question: what, after all, do I mean when I refer to the "content" with which we expect a search engine to "connect" us?

All right. Hope that makes some kind of sense. Time for bed.

ADDENDUM:
It occurs to me that there's significance as regards user-expectations to be attached to the basic function of a search engine: (i) the sheer act of typing words into Google's interface signifies the expectation/intention of obtaining information, data or some other kind of non-tangible artifact, whose 'form' and to some extent, 'content', must be fixed or predictable to you—otherwise (i.e., were results to provide inscrutable artifacts or incomprehensible information), how could you anticipate that the results might have any value to you?; and (ii) usually, the object or objects of a search are characterized simultaneously and to an equal degree by a basic lack of familiarity—otherwise, why would you need to "search" for it in the first place?

In both i and ii are to be found the complicated interplay of contradictions between 'form' and 'content', as well as between anticipated familiarity and anticipated unfamiliarity. In an Internet search, one's capacity to comprehend and derive use from unfamiliar content is conditioned by one's reasonable expectation of familiarity of form.

(Here are some more quotations and aphorisms from the late, great Marshall McLuhan, some of which deal with the form/content dyad.)

_________________
* In the sense of popular and of containing such keywords as are to be found on a given Web location, irrespective of things like context and other 'meaning'-derived metrics.

A lion in lion's clothing: Why Rand Paul's primary victory is a good thing.

I shall attempt to elucidate my view of the results of the recent Republican primary in Kentucky. It's a view that apparently is deemed to be heterodox—if not heretical—among chatterers in progressive-left circles. Specifically, I think that—despite increasingly ugly, politically motivated deviations—Rand Paul is as close to a principled libertarian as we're likely to see as a contender for national office, and that his victory in Kentucky’s May 19 Republican primary for the US Senate is a good thing.

I don't hold this view for political/strategic/operational reasons—i.e.: because Paul's ascendancy might make it easier for some Democratic Party hack to win in the general, or something like that (partly because, in fact, I'm sick of all the DP hacks)—but, rather, because Rand Paul seems for the most part to be an actual libertarian in the mold of his father, Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas. I mean the dude's named after Ayn Rand, for god's sake.

Rand Paul is a lion in lion's clothing, and that's a good thing. What do I mean by this? Well, let me explain. Remember George W. Bush's pre-2000 promises to the effect that he embodied something called "compassionate conservatism"? That's an example of being a lion in lamb's clothing.

See the difference? (And here's an interesting bit of reporting on the unrelated question of where the phrase "compassionate conservatism" comes from.)

Now, before we get into all sorts of metaphysical stuff about lions lying down with lambs, let me just admit up front that my metaphor/comparison doesn't really make sense, once you start thinking about it. So heed this warning and...well, don't. But, anyway.

Give me the Pauls any day. For one thing, it will make for a much better debate. I believe that the US could only benefit from an increased focus upon the tenets of libertarianism. Beyond even its potential impact upon the framing of political discussion, there is a side to libertarianism that should by no means seem to liberals to be entirely unpalatable. For example: what’s wrong with cutting back on the functions of government that exist in practice exclusively to serve the interests of big corporations? While Paul's textbook libertarianism generally causes him to oppose the placing of limitations upon the expenditures of private corporations, his consistent and clearly voiced opposition to our country's reigning, incestuous public-private oligarchy is right on.

From yesterday's Huffington Post:

For all the blaring headlines that Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has attracted for his remarks on the Civil Rights Act and his views on government interference in private enterprise, there is a strand of his libertarianism that -- on occasion -- can be alluring to progressives.

Mainly this is when the discussion turns to foreign policy matters and the Kentucky GOP candidate's skepticism with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his opposition to the Patriot Act.

Occasionally, however, Paul's domestic politics have a bit of post-ideological resonance. And during a Monday appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, that element of his candidacy was briefly on display. Asked a question about campaign finance reform, Paul offered the traditionally conservative denouncement of laws that curb the amount of money spent during an election. But from there he offered a proposal that would be of similar (if not greater) scope and reach.

"What I would do is that for every federal contract, if you sign a federal contract and we pay you, the taxpayer pays you a million dollars, I would put a clause in the contract that you voluntarily accept that you won't lobby or give contributions," he said, "because I think it galls the American people that taxpayer money is paid to contractors who take that taxpayer money and immediately lobby for more money."

This type of proposal would seemingly leave good government officials smiling. That it came from the belle of the Tea Party ball makes it all the more powerful -- not because of its unexpectedness (the Tea Party movement is quite clearly wary of the influence of lobbyists), but because Paul is symbolic for many of the future of the GOP.

Now, the question of whether and to whom Paul symbolizes the future of the GOP is open to debate, to say the least. But, isn't his stance on lobbying and government contracts absolutely correct?

Certainly it would be better if such a challenge came from populist progressives of the left, in the Bernie Sanders mold, but this is Kentucky we’re talking about. And I believe that the anti-oligarchic, anti-Fed, pro-personal privacy, anti-torture/surveillance and pro-transparency aspects of the philosophies of Father and Son Paul should be commended by left-progressives. We can still criticize the Pauls for their stances on many other subjects about which we disagree.

I feel the need to point all of this out because of the somewhat hysterical responses of some purportedly left-progressive-types to the Rand Paul phenomenon. I mean, sure, his performance on the Rachel Maddow show was ham-fisted, but, the idea that his take on the Civil Rights Act makes him a racist is really just too much. Those of us who are serious about wanting to improve political discourse should not be demonizing someone for showing intellectual honesty, however impolitic it might be for him to do so. In fact, the more straightforward and lacking in spin his stance, the greater the duty of the left opposition to express its disagreement straightforwardly.

Rand Paul's views on the Civil Rights Act can be—and are—wrong without being racist. This is the kind of debate we should be taking seriously. It's the mainstream Republicans who aren't worth the time and effort, who will misrepresent themselves to get elected and hold onto power. The notion that Rand Paul is somehow worse than the average "machine"-Republican candidate is absolute balderdash.

To the extent to which the likes of middle-aged pseudo-leftists like The Nation's obnoxious Katha Pollitt (May 22) continue to set the terms of what counts as political debate in progressive circles, we'll never get beyond the intellectual bankruptcy and gridlock of the Culture Wars and the 1960s. I'm sorry, but Baby Boomers like Pollitt just get fatter and more full of shit with each passing day.

By contrast, Robert Scheer's May 19 take on the Pauls and libertarianism I find to be coherent and useful. It is, in fact, the article to which—in the wake of Paul's stumble on the Maddow show—Pollitt's shrill statement is apparently aiming to respond. Still better is Scheer's May 26 follow-up, in which he gets down to what should be the business at hand for those of us on the progressive/left:

Where I agree with [Rand Paul] is that with freedom comes responsibility, and when the financial conglomerates abused their freedom, they, and not the victims they swindled, should have borne the consequences. Instead, they were saved by the taxpayers from their near-death experience, reaping enormous profits and bonuses while the fundamentals of the world economy they almost destroyed remain rotten, as attested by the high rates of housing foreclosures and unemployment and the tens of millions of newly poor dependent on government food handouts.

But the poor will not find much more than food crumbs from a federal government that, thanks to another one of [President Bill] Clinton’s “reforms,” ended the federal obligation to deal with the welfare of the impoverished. Yes, Clinton, not either Paul, father Ron or son. It was Clinton who campaigned to “end welfare as we know it,” and as a result the federal obligation to end poverty, once fervently embraced by even Richard Nixon, was abandoned.

Concern for the poor was devolved to the state governments, and they in turn are in no mood to honor the injunction of all of the world’s great religions that we be judged by how we treat the least among us. That would be poor children, and it is unconscionable that state governments across the nation are cutting programs as elemental as the child care required when you force single mothers to work.

“Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers” ran the headline in the New York Times on Sunday over a story detailing how in a dozen states there are now sharp cuts in child care for the poor who find jobs, and how there are now long lists of kids needing child care while their mothers work at low-paying jobs at places like Wal-Mart. In Arizona, there is a waiting list of 11,000 kids eligible for child care. That is what passes for success in the welfare reform saga, with mothers forced off the rolls into a workplace bereft of promised child care that the cash-strapped states no longer wish to supply.

Hear, hear. For those of us who believe that what this country desperately needs is a genuine left-populism, shouldn't we be asking: Why don't we hear Democrats articulating a similarly robust critique of ongoing—and grotesquely antidemocratic—lobbying practices?

And, more to the point: instead of playing the politics of personality (and...even ickier..."character"), let's respond to Paul's views on the evils of the welfare state with real arguments. All around us, on the local, national and international levels, we can point to massive, moral, social and practical crises directly attributable to laissez faire economics and neoliberal governance. As Scheer argues, the hullabaloo about Rand Paul is nothing but a cheap distraction from the real questions:

How in the hell can humankind be expected to survive and prosper without a social safety net to protect them against the vicissitudes of a globalized and unregulated market economy? Without such a safety net, how can Western societies ever hope to fulfill their constitutional (little c and big) aspirations of freedom, justice and equality?

And, finally: If the Democratic Party can't be counted upon to take these questions at all seriously, who can?

Poetic truth in political advertising.

Thanks to a longtime friend, a certain GSR, for sharing the link to this video. Very funny stuff from the 1990s—in many respects, a halcyon period for comedy in our beloved United States.

News fatigue?

Your humble blogger has been asked if he's suffering from "news fatigue" as an explanation for the infrequent posting that's been occurring lately on Crib From This.

The answer is: no. We've simply been attending to other things and have had limited access to our computer.

Fear not! We'll be back soon, and better.

The Charter-Schooling Racket.

There are some charter schools that are doing good work, but these are the exception, not the rule. The fact of the matter is that the charter schools movement serves first and foremost as a front for the privitization of education—the placement of educational infrastructure into the hands of profiteers, industrialists, finance capitalists and loan sharks.

This article, which appeared recently in the New York Times, describes a case in point:

When the energy executive Dennis Bakke retired with a fortune from the AES Corporation, [get a load of the AES Corporation's Web site!—cft] the company he co-founded, he and his wife, Eileen, decided to direct their attention and money to education. [E]ager to experiment with applying business strategies and discipline to public schools[, t]he Bakkes became part of the nation’s new crop of education entrepreneurs, founding a commercial charter school company called Imagine Schools[,] now the largest commercial manager of charter schools in the country.

Here's a(n ineffective) public relationsy photograph of the Bakkes 'interacting' with the low-income students in one of the schools 'managed' by Imagine Schools:

As education expert Patricia Burch states in an article on the dark and clandestine market forces that are unleashing the worldwide privatization of education and that are misleadingly portraying this widespread, government-coordinated profiteering racket in terms of the benefits of parental "consumer choice" or of the putative benefits of "market competition" upon educational quality, among the reasons that this cynical ploy works is because

we tend to equate the public sector with large bureaucracy and the private sector with more efficient, flexible and network-oriented forms of organization. In fact, the providers now “trading” in the new education market place are situated squarely in the same institutional environment as schools. In broad strokes, this institutional frame reflects embedded routines and rituals for the organization of schooling.

This institutional template for schooling can have a conservative influence on schools and keep reform ideas from becoming or achieving anything new. In this context, rather than breaking the mold, private firms in the education market can end up reproducing the worst practices of public schooling, offering low-income students “more of the same” and at significant cost.  [Access article here.]

Returning to the Times article, we see that the Bakkes epitomize the ways in which the puppet-masters of the charter-schooling racket uses this notion of 'marketization' as a means by which to justify enriching themselves—tax free—to the detriment and even ruin of the urban children they are supposed to be helping:

Because public money is used, most states grant charters to run such schools only to nonprofit groups with the expectation that they will exercise the same independent oversight that public school boards do. Some are run locally. Some bring in nonprofit management chains. And a number use commercial management companies like Imagine.

But regulators in some states have found that Imagine has elbowed the charter holders out of virtually all school decision making — hiring and firing principals and staff members, controlling and profiting from school real estate, and retaining fees under contracts that often guarantee Imagine’s management in perpetuity.

The arrangements, they say, allow Imagine to use public money with little oversight. “Under either charter law or traditional nonprofit law, there really is no way an entity should end up on both sides of business transactions,” said Marc Dean Millot, publisher of the report K-12 Leads and a former president of the National Charter Schools Alliance, a trade association, now defunct, for the charter school movement.

“Imagine works to dominate the board of the charter holder, and then it does a deal with the board it dominates — and that cannot be an arm’s length transaction,” he said.

Such concerns have thwarted efforts by Imagine to open a school in Florida, threaten to stall its push into Texas, and have ended its business with a school in Georgia and another in New York, as well as other states.

Imagine is not shy about the way it wields its power, which it calls essential to its governing philosophy. “Imagine Schools operates the entire school, and is not a consultant or management company,” its Web site says. “All principals, teachers, and staff are Imagine Schools people. The Imagine Schools culture is meant to permeate every aspect of the school’s life.”

Mrs. Bakke, who is paid $100,000 as vice president of education at Imagine, says it works in “close partnership” with the boards of the schools it manages. “The governing boards are definitely in charge, but they look to us, frankly, because as you know, nonprofit boards are well meaning but don’t always have the experience and expertise running the schools,” she said in an interview.

She said that she and her husband, who is paid $200,000 as the company’s chief executive, sank $155 million into Imagine and that they were able to run schools efficiently. “We offer a great deal for communities and for taxpayers,” Mrs. Bakke said, “because we’re providing education at less than what a traditional school is spending.”

She says the company should be judged by its educational results, not its business and financial arrangements. 

 And if that doesn't sound sketchy enough for you, read on:

Mrs. Bakke said her company “is operated as a not-for-profit.” But Imagine is not a nonprofit group, and it has so far failed to gain status as a charity from the I.R.S.

Imagine applied for federal tax exemption in 2005 and has repeatedly said approval is imminent. It typically takes four to six months for such approvals. “We’re not sure why it’s taking so long,” said Mrs. Bakke, who is 56. “We suspect it’s because we’re trailblazers in a sense, and they haven’t had an application quite like this.”

The I.R.S., as is its policy, declined to comment. 

And how about the relationship of Imagine Schools to individual schools and their boards of directors? Read on:

In Texas, parents trying to open a charter school for elementary school students thought that Imagine was going too far.

“Imagine did a few things that indicated they thought the charter belonged to them, which was not our understanding at all,” said Karelei Munn, who is part of a group working to establish a charter school in Georgetown, Tex., near Austin. “We were looking to control our board, and they were looking to control our board.”

Ms. Munn and other members of the group holding the charter broke their ties with Imagine and are trying to form a school on their own.

Regulators in Texas have been slow to approve a second Imagine school, citing concerns that include an e-mail message from Mr. Bakke to the company’s senior staff members that was reported on by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch last fall. In the message, dated Sept. 4, 2008, Mr. Bakke cautioned his executives against giving boards of schools the “misconception” that they “are responsible for making big decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal and dozens of other matters.”

Instead, he wrote, “It is our school, our money and our risk, not theirs.”

Mr. Bakke, who is 64, suggested requiring board members to sign undated letters of resignation or limiting board terms to a single year.

In a statement after the e-mail message was disclosed, Mr. Bakke apologized to board members “who felt offended or maligned,” saying he had “overstated my personal frustration in ensuring that the dedicated, caring people who hold the seats of charter governing boards at Imagine Schools understand and support our mission and operating philosophy.”

As Texas continues its consideration, the e-mail message helped upend Imagine’s plans to open a school in the Hillsborough County School District in Florida, which encompasses Tampa.

“That e-mail was very, very bad for them,” said Jenna Hodgens, the local supervisor of charter schools. “All the things we had been questioning, things about control of the school, he answered in his own words.”

The Hillsborough school board rejected the application in December. “Charter schools are not private schools, they are public schools and are governed as such,” said Susan Valdes, who heads the board. “Some, though, are starting to forget that — and they’re getting away with it. But not here.”

And that's only the beginning. I highly recommend reading the entire article, in order to learn about the nature of the Bakkes' company and its shady investment and governance practices. Imagine Schools is basically a giant loan shark.

Let's get these sleaze-balls and hucksters away from our schools already.

Harper's piece on "The Vanishing Liberal."

Frequent Harper's contributor Kevin Baker—who, according to his byline, is actually a novelist—has a couple of great things to say in an essay in the magazine's April issue (which non-subscribers like Your Humble Blogger will simply have to go out and buy in order to read). The essay's subtitle—"How the left learned to be helpless."—is somewhat misleading, or in any event insufficiently specific. Let's face it, the contention that the left is helpless can in and of itself be said to be controversial only in the sense that it assumes that the left exists. 

What's important about Baker's argument as regards this helplessness is the comparison he posits between today's thoroughgoingly lost and disillusioned left—a group among which I suppose most normal (or even semi-normal) people under the age of 40 must by definition count ourselves—and its intellectual and spiritual forbears in American history: the Populist and and the Progressive movements. Those movements, for all of their flaws, had gravitas. Vitality. Rocks. You get the picture.

It should not be surprising that contemporary left/liberalism/whatever pales in comparison to those often quite radical historical movements. But what's nice is that Baker's piece offers more than the usual woe-is-us routine.

(Not that it's bad to say "woe is us." It's actually necessary for us to say it. However, the usual plodding, overlong and doom-and-gloom-laden fare does tend to get annoying. For example, see the final rant that now-former Harper's Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge contributed to the magazine before he was—shockingly, and in an ominous sign for the mag's future, as Hodge was an intelligent and ballsy editor—sacked.)

Instead of simply throwing up his hands in despair (although he does do that), Baker threads together a political-historical narrative that serves as a call for genuine grassroots action of an order that we've not seen in this country in generations. He sets the scene by lamenting the fact that President Barack Obama,

[o]ne of the most charismatic politicians of his time, a man who was able to raise the most money and draw the biggest crowds in American political history has apparently decided that his new job is to fluff up the generals and bankers and politicians who not very long ago were in panicked disarray. Armchair psychologists from the Maureen Dowd school of political commentary like to analyze this conversion in terms of the elusive personality of Obama himself. Others prefer to dwell on the surprising ineptitude of his administration. And some simply accept his about-face in terms of the political exigencies of an essentially conservative nation, concluding wistfully that Obama is confronted by so many barriers to change—Republican obstructionism, the treachery of this or that Democratic senator, the nature of the Constitution itself—that the country is now ungovernable.

All of which may be true. But it only skims the surface of a greater tidal shift, one that has little to do with Obama himself and in fact has inundated the whole of our democratic process. This shift, which is subtle and has been many years in the making, might best be understood by considering a design underlying many of the interrogation techniques we employ at the (still-unclosed) prison at Guantánamo or at the black sites we still maintain, wherever they are. That is, bringing about the state known as learned helplessness.

The expression dates from a famous set of experiments by Martin Seligman some forty years ago, in which he found that dogs exposed to repeated and seemingly random electric shocks eventually stopped trying to escape those shocks, even when they could very easily do so. This insight gave rise to “no touch” torture, pioneered in large part by the CIA, whose efforts to “break” prisoners involved all manner of techniques, from the unsavory to the absurd, such as depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, bombarding them with ear-splitting noises, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, shackling them in “stress positions,” tying bras to their heads, making them bark like dogs, and waterboarding them. There is no evidence that such practices enhance the odds that prisoners will provide more useful information to interrogators. It is well established, though, that they will make prisoners docile, and so the techniques remain popular.

For decades now, as our public discourse in general has become more scattered, random, and irrational, Republicans—funded by corporate and other elites in the private sector—have stunned Democrats with absurdist attacks that have proved to be effective at garnering votes and, more important in the long term, at hampering Democrats even when they hold the majority. Democrats have been reduced to a state of psychological helplessness, one in which any political obstacles—ranging from the prevarications of stalking horses like Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, to the plaintive cries of the tea-baggers out in the streets, to the sterner demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Big Pharma—are transformed into insurmountable organic obstacles.

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Such hapless fatalism is, of course, in direct opposition to every tenet of American liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human agency is still possible in the modern world—that democratic action can make a difference when ranged against vast, impersonal forces and supposedly immutable “laws” of human society. Liberalism’s antecedents lie in one nineteenth-century rebellion after another—against laissez-faire capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, Social Darwinism, and other efforts to transmute political dispositions into irrefutable “social science.” American voters of the time were regularly assured by authoritative voices that “hard money” was an indispensable economic principle; that women, people of color, and many varieties of European immigrant were inherently inferior; that any attempts to regulate the “natural” workings of the economy, even private charity, would thwart human progress because they interfered with the culling of those who, in Herbert Spencer’s description, were not “sufficiently complete to live.

[...]

And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so.

[...]

Now, to be sure, there are problems with Baker's narrative—especially as regards sympathies within some manifestations of historical Progressivism itself toward Social Darwinism and other 'social scientistic' gobbledygook that he ignores completely—but no matter. It's worth a read. And one of its themes—the notion that human beings can and/or should always work to improve the world in which we live, to make it more fair and just, etc.—is a very interesting one about which I intend to say more in the near future. Specifically, I think there are some important details of this Enlightenment spirit that a rejuvenated left-populism needs to get right intellectually and rhetorically.

Welcome to the New Wedge Politics: A political calculus.

Well, it's here. (Or, rather, it's back.) White, Christianist * Terrorism (yes, terrorism, since the Right has decided to use this term when it's convenient to its purposes). Charged with plotting to kill police officers and civilians and to set in motion a new American Civil War, the aims of these armed Christianist militiamen were entirely politico-religionist and ideological: they have committed treason against the United States government and its people and engaged in seditious activities. In yearning to start the next Civil War, these militiamen stand alongside the tea-bagger rank and file.

 This is a moment in which the bogusness of the Fox News Right's sham claims to consistency, moral authority and—most deliciously ironic of all—patriotism is exposed for all to see. And I mean exposed in a way that forces the old-fashioned Republican base—the suburban, upper-middle class—to confront the chaos, ugliness and violence in which all supporters of the current Republican Party have been complicit.

The wealthier households of the American suburban bourgeoisie, who have long served as the real political base of the Republican Party—and whose defection to Obama in 2008 helped cost McCain the presidency—basically only care about two things:

1. physical security for themselves and their families at all costs, and
   
   
2. low taxes (i.e.: financial security for themselves and their families at all costs).

Whichever party can scare this still-very-powerful echelon of the American citizenry into perceiving** that either (1) or (2)—in that order—or both cannot be trusted in the hands of the other party, wins.

[***]

Consider, for example, Joe Briefcase. Joe is a medium-level Big Shot in the [whatever] business and is a case study in the mentality of this socioeconomic stratum of American society. He typically—before the Iraq War, anyway—falls for, I'd say, at least 75% of neoconservative scare-mongering lies (i.e.: 'An attack on the USA is imminent if we don't do a, b, and c to stop it...') and is also especially easily flattered by Republican laissez-faire & square charm tactics (i.e.: 'You've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and deserve to hold onto every precious penny you've earned...')... and has voted Republican ever since he graduated from [whatever] school and entered what is known colloquially as "The Real World."

Joe Briefcase doesn't give two shits about the "restoration of American values" or the "maligned legacy of state's rights" that the brainless, fat, racist, uneducated, neo-secessionist, Fox News-watching hordes seem to care so much about. The fact is that Joe Briefcase doesn't want trouble, and trouble is exactly what he has begun to see that he will get if the Republican Party manages to regain control of the country.

Three additional factors shall flesh out my hypothesis of a new electoral alignment that I believe may be a component of the Democratic Party's (and especially Obama's) electoral strategy, which I shall call the New Wedge Politics:

• All of the "tea party" shenanigans during the health care debate managed to poison the well of public discourse to such an extent that most Americans stopped caring about the content of the health care bill a long time ago and simply grew increasingly irritated by the shrill health care bill debate. And it was the Republicans who, after all, vowed over and over and over and over and over again to obstruct the passage of the bill. Thus—irrespective of most people's inclinations as regards the content of the bill (and irrespective of the likelihood that the Obama Administration shrewdly planned to allow the Republican demagogy to meander until it reached the pinnacle of outrageousness)—Obama gets all of the credit for putting the whole miserable display out of its misery with a stroke of his pen. Meet Obama, the restorer of 'law and order' from the clutches of tea-bagger-fueled chaos and anarchy.
  
  
• The Civil War. Don't forget the Civil War. It's very much on the minds—or in the hearts—of many among the tea-bagger faithful, whether they realize it or not. From incumbent Governor Rick Perry's Texas Secession Rallies to the new revelations of Far-Right paramilitary activities to the ugly racism of so much of the redneck sloganeering, the ghost of the Civil War has returned to the national subconscious in a big way. And it just so happens that Joe Briefcase's great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War. And guess whose side Great Great Grandpa Briefcase fought for? That's right, it wasn't for the Confederacy. Joe Briefcase has always taken pride in the fact that he belongs to the Party of Abraham Lincoln. He has no sympathy for protesters of any kind. He wants the secessionist rednecks to get off his TV already. He most certainly does not recognize the current Dixiecrat Shambles as His Republican Party. This 'Party of No' is not the Republican Party as he has known it.
  
  
• The Iraq War. Don't forget the impact of that war either. The minutia of the USA's continued presence in Iraq under the Obama Administration, of course, fail to capture anyone's interest. But the people of the United States have not forgotten the Iraq War, nor its costliness in lives and dollars, nor the sleazy lies that the Bush Administration told in order to sell it. This still stands as a significant betrayal of trust between the Republican Party and its erstwhile supporters.

To close, some caveats: my analysis here is intended to be hypothetical. Furthermore, it's a hypothesis about long-term political and/or electoral strategy—not a prediction of whether or not such a strategy would work. And when I say long-term, I mean that it's not about the vicissitudes of 'cable news' cycles, which Obama has made it his habit to ignore (or at least to appear to ignore)—a way of doing things that has worked well for him in the past and which furthers the impression of his being 'above the fray' of the bullshit.

Lastly, although I dislike the Republican Party something fierce, and although I'm not as critical of Obama as many others on the Left have been (not having expected him to act as a genuinely progressive president in the midst of our current political/economic conditions and ideological alignments), I'm not saying that it is necessarily a good thing that the Democratic Party might be preserving its spot at the Center by pushing the Republican Party ever-farther to the Right. I'd have much preferred it if the health care bill had been more aggressive and radical, etc., etc. And I'd certainly have preferred to see Obama actually take a firm legal position against torturers, liars and manipulators like Dick Cheney, et al.

Anyway, there you have it. If anyone's actually read this far down, I'd love for you to prove it to me by leaving a comment. Heh.

[N.B.: I updated this post (mostly grammar and formatting edits) on the morning of 3/31/10).]

* Note the distinction here, between Christians and Christianists, Christianity and Christianism, religion and Religionism. Each of these dyads comprises:

1. first, a phenomenon that is so heterogeneous and multifarious, and rooted so deeply in our history and society as to resist evaluation in one direction or another, in and of itself, and
   
   
2. second, an extreme politics that enshrouds itself in a rhetoric that has been appropriated from the first, and then manhandled and distorted to accord with tactical or strategic ends.

I am an atheist, but I consider the notion of the 'inherent evil of religion' to be both inherently childish and itself always a cloaked political gesture, every bit as much as Religionism. I suppose I could distinguish my brand of atheism from that of Sam Harris by calling him an 'atheismist,' but I won't. You get my point. (Up.)

---

** This is a not-insignificant component of the process to bear in mind. Perception, that is. Kind of a slippery concept, I know, but sometimes we forget that we're not talking about the unmediated, abstract truth of these things, but rather, the truth of people's perceptions, which—in addition to being very difficult to determine—is frequently unconscious (that is, people don't always perceive the content of their own perceptions). That's one of the reasons why polls are frequently pure garbage. (Up.)

---

*** Notice that the trick that the Republicans have pulled off over the decades—in concert with the enormous interest group it serves, namely the military-industrial complex—is to eliminate any and all cognitive dissonance between (1) and (2), despite the fact that the 'bloated government' and 'proliferating, unaccountable government bureaucracy' that the GOP claims to so oppose are nowhere more strongly in evidence than in unfunded military spending. Remember that the Bush Administration deliberately left the deficit-spending on the Iraq War off of the books! (Up.)

Knowledge is authoritarian, even in a democracy.

No one, not even the opportunist hacks of the Texas State Board of Education, can fiat this fact away.

Previously, here at Crib From This, I argued that the so-called "Believers" sitting on the Texas State Board of Education are actually nihilists. This time, I wish to demonstrate that the Texas State Board of Education curriculum overhaul reveals the inherent limits to the habitual over-inflated conservative indictment of 'big government'.

A friend of mine, whose politics are a good deal more conservative than mine, nevertheless is in complete agreement with me that the decision recently handed down by the Texas State Board of Education is embarrassing, wrong, bad for education, bad for the study of history, and bad for the students in Texas—and potentially elsewhere—who are finding themselves shat upon by a gang of anti-intellectual, self-centered and neo-secessionist spoiled brats.

Forget the Gospel of Low Taxes. The conservatives of the Texas Board subscribe to a hyper-culturally conservative brand of Dixiecrat Republicanism that has been forcing increasing numbers of middle class Republicans to look askance at the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln that they thought they had known so well.

Interestingly, as one of those old-fashioned Libertarian-types—whose critique of federal government-overreach has to do with fairly subtle questions of commerce and jurisprudence, and not so much with a plot to take away his guns (especially because he doesn't have any guns)—my friend chalks the Texas folly up to of the the perils of centralized, majoritarian decree. In other words, he sees the disaster as issuing not so much from the fanaticism and ignorance of a gang of inbred would-be messiahs, but, rather, from the fact that Texas operates under a system in which a single school board has the power to make a mockery of an entire state's social studies curriculum with a snap of its Born-Again Christianist, Ayn Rand-praising fingers.* The old-fashioned GOP anti-'big government' critique.

I do have to give him credit for creativity. It is interesting to examine the connections between what Libertarians and old-fashioned economic conservatives of his type call 'Federalism' and what Alexis de Tocqueville described as the "tyranny of the majority." Tocqueville argued that, in order for the great American experiment of republican governance to be successful, the right of the minority to dissent must be protected at all costs:

Several particular circumstances combine to render the power of the majority in America not only preponderant, but irresistible. The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality. The theory of equality is thus applied to the intellects of men; and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and to which they will but slowly assent. [...]

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny. an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority and serves as a passive tool in its hands. The public force consists of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as well as you can. [...]

I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny in America at the present day; but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than in its laws. (Democracy In America, Book I, Chapter 15)

And, come to think of it, has it not been along this general line of thinking that the premise of "state's rights" has been defended?—from John Calhoun's championing of "nullification," to the South's moral justifications for Secession, to present-day slogans about the "tyranny of big government" among the Republican rank-and-file?

It would seem that the actions of the Texas Board would support this sort of critique of centralized authority, albeit viewing Texas as a microcosm of the federal government. In a way, it does. However, in another sense, it serves to undermine this very critique—or at least it points to spheres of human activity to which this critique cannot be said to apply.

The problem, as I have found myself saying recently, is that knowledge is not democratically constituted. Knowledge is, in a sense (and shall ever be), authoritarian. And, whatever it is that the Texas School Board might want the world to be, there's simply not much that can be done about that.

We cannot approach knowledge itself, for example, in the same way in which we approach law. For example, even Justice Antonin Scalia knows that you can't be a "strict interpretationist" of history. (It's ephemeral enough as a legal philosophy...)

This is not to suggest that knowledge can be linked definitively, directly or uncritically to specific human beings or organizations, or even to any specific source. The academic disciplines, for instance, are not and don't pretend to be that kind of authority. Quite to the contrary, disciplines are themselves sites of contestation and debate.

When 'experts'—whether they work for an academic institution or for the WMD Committee of the Project For A New American Century—misrepresent themselves, or misrepresent the knowledge in their field, or provide insincere, incomplete or tendentious interpretations of this knowledge, they are—to precisely the extent to which they engage in this behavior—not experts, but merely posing as experts.

In effect, in having pushed the politicization of the curriculum this far, the majority of Texas Board of Education members have exposed themselves not as pie-in-the-sky Fundamentalist Christian-idealists, nor even as Fundamentalist Christian-ideologues. They are simply hacks—up to their earlobes in the toilsome wretchedness of aimless resentment.

We bemused onlookers witness the superficiality of their understanding not only of history but of the political or ideological battles in which they believe themselves to be mired (to say nothing of the empty opportunism of their feigned interest n these subjects). They have taken caricatures of their 'opposition' with total earnestness. Moreover—and even more embarrassing than their threadbare understanding of history—is the sheer self-centeredness and self-entitlement with which they have seen fit to (mis-)interpret any and all 'inconvenient' political and educational tendencies that differ from their own.

Consider the following metaphor. In war, all factions of your opposition are united in at least one significant respect: they are all out to kill you and your fellow soldiers. For purposes of political propaganda and mobilization—the domain in which GOP-hireling Svengalis like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove so excelled—this war-style-worldview can yield some limited successes by fostering solidarity among differing factions within an alliance: the 'enemy' represents a hybrid of characteristics. It's a lowest-common-denominator enemy.

The effectiveness of this approach no longer holds, however, when you are making education policy, nor policy in any domain that deals with disciplines of knowledge and expertise. In this context, undertaking to right all the wrongs of your caricature/hybrid foe leads to disastrous consequences.

Foremost among them is that this foe does not exist.

In my next post, I shall conclude my discussion of the Texas State Board of Education's curriculum guidelines by taking up the questions: (i) Why should we even consider the board's bizarre actions to be "conservative"?, and (ii) When we tacitly accept the self-categorizations of these confused, theocratic would-be secessionists, aren't we letting them frame the debate?



___________
* The utter incompatibility of the pimple-faced-high-schooler's-simpleminded-version-of-Nietzsche pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand (who had zero use for god, religion and the like and said so frequently) with the tenets of Fundamentalist Christianity is an example of a phenomenon to which this post turns shortly: the caricatured/hybridized opponents that so often become invented in the course of forging such unlikely political alliances as the GOP cobbled together in the '80s, '90s and '00s. That is, before the GOP emerged, with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, as the party of Southern Secession. Ye Olde Abe Lincoln is a-spinnin'-in-his grave. Probably Ye Olde John Brown is, too. (Return to the main text.)

Why the so-called "Believers" on the Texas State Board of Education are actually Nihilists.

The neo-secessionist, racist and neo-McCarthyist antics of Texans have become so commonplace, that it's hard to muster up the energy to be outraged by anything them folk down there get up to. Nevertheless, I wish to argue that the recent actions of the Texas Board of Education, radically revising the state's prescribed curriculum for history and social studies textbooks, is a turn of events that we should find especially shocking.

Why is it such a big deal? First of all, there is the matter of the scale of the the decision's impact. Few of us know anything at all about the political economy of textbooks, and we are thus oblivious to the textbook publishing industry's vertical consolidation, which has ascended to heights that would have Gilded Age industrialists calling on the White House to 'Bust the damn trusts!', its systematic price-gouging of captive consumers, and its many other anti-competitive and crony-capitalistic practices.

The impact of the Board's action upon public school systems extends beyond the boarders of Texas itself, already containing a huge population, and into several other states. The reason for this is that Texas's particular system of centralized textbook-standardization (which in itself is more than a little reminiscent of Bolshevism) means that the state exercises tremendous influence over textbook content in many other states. The reason for this is that it's expedient economically for the textbook publishing oligopoly simply to produce a single, one-size-fits-all textbook for distribution to many states, as opposed to creating specific editions for specific localities. The only way in which publishers can accomplish this is by producing a single textbook that is written such that it happens to fulfill the guidelines of the Texas Board of Education. The state of California has a similar set-up and therefore exercises similar control.

So, that addresses the scale of the impact of this decision. Now, onto substantive reasons we should be shocked and outraged: for one, the shamelessness and hypocrisy of the alliance of Born-Again Christians, libertarians and "state's rights" types that assumed majority control of the Board. These right-wing ideologues got themselves elected to the Board with the explicit intention of appropriating the school history textbook as the terrain upon which they would declare 'cultural warfare'. The entire project was undertaken in nakedly ideological terms, and in a way that does not even pretend to comprehend the study of history and other social sciences. In fact, as Thomas Frank mentions in his excellent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, the members of the Board are openly resentful of historical expertise itself. (And any kind of expertise, for that matter!) As Frank points out, whatever the real or perceived 'ideological excesses' of past academic historians and textbook authors, nobody could reasonably doubt that those people were undertaking sincerely to produce curricula that did the best possible job of teaching social studies to public school students.

The Far-Right alliance's putative 'revision' has no rationale that has anything at all to do with history, education or students. The 'revision' reflects no coherent understanding of how textbooks work, how historical representations relate to historical facts. It takes textbooks to be nothing more than ideologically grounded statements and interpretations, strung together in a chronological sequence. Of course, its notions of what constitutes 'chronology' is skewed, in that its ideological preoccupations are entirely presentist, which is to say that even its political readings of what various narrative interpretations "mean" are based entirely in the politics of the present day, as opposed to the political frameworks as they were known and understood by historical agents at specific times.

It's funny that some of these Culture Warriors style themselves as "Believers", because their actions bespeak a worldview that is fundamentally nihilistic. The simple equation of curriculum with site of ideological struggle could not be less concerned with educating students -- the function that schools are supposed to perform. For members of the Board to act in the interest of carrying out their ideological struggle alone, means that the are literally not performing their prescribed duty in good faith: they are not fulfilling the only responsibilities that membership on the Board entails. Moreover, they can hardly be said to be acting in accord with their own ideological convictions, because their actions and rationale are motivated by a lack of belief, a lack of faith in public education.

How can you honestly claim to be acting honestly and in accord with your faith and convictions if you are sitting on a board overseeing an institution that you either

1. don't believe is equipped to serve its mission of educating children, but rather, is merely a platform for ideological struggle? or
   
   
2. -- as some members of the Board explicitly state -- wish to destroy the institution of public education?

Is this really a way of behaving that evinces faith in your beliefs and convictions? If you want to get rid of public education, is sitting on the Board of Education really the place in which to carry out this political mission with the honor and dignity that befits your cause and your supposed faith? Can you literally act in bad faith as a way of demonstrating your faith??

In response to the frequent, self-righteous accusations that the Fundamentalist Religionists are in the habit of flinging at we so-called "secularists," I ask:

Who the hyper-relativists now? Who are the nihilists now?

As our accidental poet used to say, make no mistake: the nihilists are on the Right.

To my #1 favorite political Web site: thanks for the (unrequited) love!

The time has come for me to address the small matter of the unheralded hiatus of Crib From This from its former pattern of experiencing updates on a somewhat frequent basis. Which specifically was...uh... at-least-bi-weekly (and five times a day during the months leading up to the presidential election!).

I shall shortly unleash upon an unsuspecting world a statement, of sorts, expounding the new and -- I hope -- more narrowly focused mission (intellectually, rhetorically, aesthetically, whateverly) to be pursued in the future incarnation of this blog.

And speaking of how out of touch I have been with this blogging crap, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my all-time, number-one (#1) favorite political Web site and blog PhuckPolitics.com -- formerly the one significant connection between this blog and the outside (cyber-) world -- for dropping Crib From This -- without ceremony and without fanfare -- from its list of links to featured blogs.

Were I in PhP's position, I would surely have done the same thing, probably....***adopts 'wounded-dog' facial expression***...

Let's face it. Given the rocky road that the present blog has traversed -- its fickle, fluctuating and comment-averse readership; its restiveness as regards politics and the sordidness of saying things within political frameworks; its contempt for the concept of typing one's opinions on the Internet generally; its frequently overlong sentences, paragraphs and articles; its pretentious, plodding and sententious syntax, betraying all of the vanity and narrowness of a petit bourgeois sensibility; its tendency to discuss contemporary political questions using the metaphors and wisdom lifted carelessly and out of context from whatever book the blogger happens to be reading at the time, like William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music or some half-comprehended essay by Friedrich Schiller -- it's a minor miracle that Crib From This survived as long as it did in its coveted position in PhuckPolitics.com's Hall of Credibility.

So, anyway, umm. In sum, this blog has been silent for a few months principally because I have been:

1. re-conceptualizing this blog's mission, to be explained in the aforementioned soon-to-be posted ...uh..post,
   
2. helping a friend with the writing, editing and designing of his interesting new Web site,
   
3. doing lots of stuff unrelated to blogging.

Crib From This will be back soon. And how, might you ask? With a vengeance, Good Sir.

(And -- we can only dream tearfully as of yet -- with enough élan to merit the blog's eventual re-inclusion -- parable-of-the-Prodigal-Son-like -- in the PhuckPolitics.com universe.)

Stay tuned, Gentlemen and Ladies, for the new Crib From This mission statement.

The Baffler is Back!

Being as completely distracted and off the ball as I have been lately as regards politics & journalism & news & culture & whatever, it has only just now come to my attention through a couple of different sources that The Baffler is back!!!

If you've never heard of this kick-ass, unpretentious political/cultural journal thingie and want to know why its revival is a really great thing, read here and especially here. In The Baffler's glory days, during the Clinton era, its editor Thomas Frank and his coterie of South Side Chicago smart-asses provided a sustained critique of a Democratic Party that had transformed itself into a fanatically pro-laissez faire force, a party that turned its back on economic populism, but nevertheless continued -- pathetically -- to compensate for completely selling out its base by signaling its supposed 'leftism' by adopting ludicrously 'tough' postures, which naturally fed right into  the hysterical"Culture Wars"-style paranoia propagated by the A.M. radio demagogues and Think-Tank-Neo-McCarthyists of the Far Right. Furthermore, Frank and Company poked fun at the appropriation by multi-national marketeers of 'oppositional' pop culture tropes and 'attitudes', from the Nirvana-like guitar-crunch sounded by ads selling luxury cars, to Burger King's strategy of hawking burgers and fries with the apothegm: "Sometimes You've Gotta Break the Rules."

The list of contributors to the first issue of The Baffler's "Volume 2" appears to be a bit heavy on academicians. It was not uncommon for the 90s version of the journal to include the occasional professor or Ivory Tower-type -- after all, Frank himself earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. But in those days, the the lion's share of spineless bimbos putatively positioned on the 'Left', inside and outside of academe, were united -- for either ideological or pragmatic reasons -- in their support for the new and improved neoliberal, "Third Way"-style Democratic Party. Some of the most forceful opposition to Frank's brand of left-populism -- and especially the way in which Frank framed the "Culture Wars" issue -- issued from politically engaged academic-types who really should have known better. Among them, and someone who in most respects I quite like, is the literature and cultural-studies professor Michael Bérubé.

But anyway, I gather that The Baffler has returned in part because the arguments to which it has given voice regarding market fundamentalism -- and the political toxicity of the Democratic Party's continuing institutional (read: $) and ideological allegiance with it -- are now impossible for an intellectually honest person to ignore. The impotence of the Democratic Party, despite enjoying an unprecedented congressional majority, the incoherence of the party's ideological stance as regards big business interests, health care, social justice, and any number of issues, and the Obama Administration's inability and unwillingness to pursue real reforms against an appallingly oligarchic financial sector are the inevitable consequences of thirty-or-more years of cynical market fundamentalism. A fundamentalism against which there is no bulwark in this country -- no checks, no balances. Pretty grim. But at least somebody's pointing it out now.

See also Thomas Frank's great new piece in The Wall Street Journal about the Right-wing Christian Fundamentalists who have hijacked -- with SERIOUSLY SHOCKING results (NY Times) -- the content of the social studies textbooks to be manufactured and distributed throughout Texas and probably throughout many other states.

Succinct, thorough explanation of economic crisis & why Obama can't & won't reform the system.

If you want a succinct explanation of why the economy went south and why Obama's hands are tied to do anything about the outrageous unemployment levels in this country, I encourage you to watch this interview with Yves Smith, who is the brilliant, no-bullshit brains behind the blog Naked Capitalism.

The interview, which appeared on the Canada-based Business News Network, and which begins at about the 5:00 minute mark of the linked segment, also provides insight into the facilitating role performed by mainstream economists since as early as 1980, in inventing, espousing and legitimating the phony, casuistic, and rhetorically scientistic rationale for pursuing economic policies that precipitated the crisis.

She furthermore comes right out and says it: the Obama Administration can't and won't reform our broken financial system because it is beholden to Wall Street. According to Ms. Smith, Obama received more campaign funding from the financial services industry than any previous presidential candidate (adjusted for inflation, etc., presumably).

Obama's financial advisers are, as we all know, the same dudes who escalated the crisis in the first place. They also were among the 'experts' to give the guilty policies their gloss of scientism. But it doesn't really matter who they are, because no 'expert' -- no matter how glossy his gloss, no matter how dizzyingly rational-seeming and science-evoking his numbers and graphs -- can match the heft and gravitas of the thunderous basso profundo of the Almighty American Dollar.

Ms. Smith has written a book that looks interesting -- I mean, considering that it's economics and everything -- called, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Damaged Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. She's smart, and we like her here at Crib From This.

Politics = boring.

That is, when it's not being depressing [PhuckPolitics.com].

Oh, and this picture of the Boredoms is in honor of politics being boring.

They (the Boredoms) are not boring, though; they're great (or at least they were last time I checked, which was not recently). Here's their myspace page.

Racist Tea Bagger issues domestic terrorist threat.

Terrorism is unacceptable, whatever the color of the terrorist's skin.

It's an important point for those of us who oppose violent extremism to make. Stand up for education, freedom of expression, civil liberties and civil discourse and denounce violence, chauvinism, willful ignorance and hate.

Happy New Year's. Or: in the words of the late John Lennon, "Just give me some truth."

We live in a time marked by corruption, double-speak, injustice, violence, superstition and the creeping specter of right-wing totalitarianism. None of this is anything that the human race hasn't faced or endured before. Still, several generations of middle- and working-class people in the United States have enjoyed comfortable existences. We have relied upon -- and participated wittingly or not in the production and reification of -- febrile illusions and convenient myths that blocked from our view various of the certitudes of human history, including: inequality, oppression, exploitation, and financial and militaristic power-jockeying.

But just because we've awoken to find the world around us -- internationally and domestically -- in tatters doesn't mean we have to stop enjoying life. Quite the opposite.

I see the project of political self-education as continuous with the project of being a human being. It's not easy, sometimes, to be a human being, and the very notion that it has ever been easy is a seductive (perhaps irresistibly so) fiction. Whatever our political orientations -- left or right -- each of us has an idealized notion of human life that necessarily draws its raw materials from the past. That this idealized picture never actually existed as such often gets lost somewhere in the course of our endless discussions about the meaning of life, liberty and property as the Founding Fathers meant it. We want to believe that their interpretations of these things were more-or-less like the ones we espouse today.

An obvious example of this phenomenon is Thomas Jefferson. Both the left and the right in this country are fond of claiming him as their own. After all, he was among the most eloquent architects of the United States as an Enlightenment project, poised precariously (if that's possible...) between the polarities of violent revolution and orderly, reasoned deliberation. To the far right, Jefferson was and remains the prophet of the Confederacy -- the defender of States' Rights and of Southern self-determination (read: slavery). To the far left, Jefferson is our founding Civil Libertarian, opponent of slavery (in theory...) and the instrumental force in banishing governmental intervention into our personal, intellectual, moral and religious lives.

The truth, of course, is that Jefferson -- especially taken over the course of his lifetime -- was a walking contradiction. For all of his brilliance, wisdom and passion, he was often inconsistent, self-contradictory, stubborn, tone deaf and even dumb.

I think I lost track of where I was going with all of this... Oh well. I guess I really just wanted to say that these ambiguities and contradictions are part of what make us human beings, and the better we become at understanding this about ourselves and one another, the more adept we will be at being and living amongst human beings. We live in a deeply conservative age in which power is horded by a very small number of people whose conceptions of political and economic justice, reason and freedom center upon one thing: the necessity of maintaining the status quo. In one sense, it has never been an easier time to articulate a critique of the status quo. The injustices perpetrated by crony-capitalist oligarchies -- and the degree to which our elected representatives are in the employ of these oligarchies -- has never been clearer for all to see. It's as though all one needs to do is point one's finger, like identifying a leak in one's bathroom plumbing.

Of course, the trouble is that pointing this out doesn't seem to accomplish all that much. Describing the problems fails to alert our fellow democratic citizens to the necessity of taking political action in order to redress these injustices. But we should take this not as a defeat but as a challenge. We're simply not articulating ourselves clearly enough. Or we're not talking to the right people. Or we're being arrogant, lazy and self-righteous (guilty as charged...). I guess what I'm trying to suggest here is not just that the pen is mightier than the sword, but also that the truth is more durable, valuable, penetrating and infectious than lies.

Sure, the far right (both the radical-laissez faire right and its cousin, the let's bomb everything all the time right) has got legions of oil-company-funded "think tanks" to come up with strategies and propaganda for various right-wing pet-projects, like wars, the privatization of public infrastructure and lowering taxes. They've got the guns, the money and the numbers.

The only thing that stands so much as a chance against so menacing a phalanx is the truth.