Rearranging lawn chairs for the apocalypse

(The only pic of a lawn/deck/porch chair.)

Or something like that. Listening to Brian Lehrer's fill-in today, and was struck by just how ridiculous budgetary/austerity/taxes (no, I mean, revenue)/default discussion has become. Actually, they were talking about the potential effects of the recent EPA-empowerment by the Supreme Court. (Yes, that SCOTUS, the conservative one; still, Kennedy, the swing vote, seems to "go both ways" almost equally, and here's an example of his liberal-lean.)

(Detroit)

Offering up the conservative viewpoint, as WNYC/NPR hosts are wont to do in the name of balance, but also to be batted down by the usual left-leaning guest, Andrea Bernstein conflated two common refrains from the right (talk about taxes/regulation "hurting job creators" and "killing jobs") into one delicious, if not menacing, concern: government intervention is "killing job creators."

(That's what happened at Coney Island, right? Nah...)

Now, I'm pretty sure she didn't actually mean to say conservatives think the government will start executing small business owners (funny how the right usually only mentions them...) or CEO behemoths (no, that's only Obamacare and senior citizens... but they're not "producers," so who cares?). But she can be forgiven given the ferocity of conservative objections to any austerity decisions based on reasonable economics (spending cuts AND tax--uh, I mean, revenue--increases) that make it seem like anything but cutting the size and scope of the government will destroy the economy--or at least the part of it who are still doing extremely well.

(Chernobyl apparently didn't have enough regulation...)

Perhaps this was too cynical (and/or petty) a thing to bring me out of my blogging-hibernation, but these days, on the brink of--again, already?--Armageddon or at least the end of America as we know it, we could all use a good laugh.

(Creepy abandoned island)

Good news for now, not so much for later (or: The blame game)

November's elections showed that the country is getting increasingly politically divided. Unlike the big GOP win in 1994, Republicans this time around won back the House without any real help from metropolitan areas, which remained largely Democratic. The GOP gains came mostly in districts "that were older, less diverse and less educated than the nation as a whole," notes the Washington Post. The good news for Democrats is that they continue to win among minorities and whites with more education, but they are increasingly losing working-class voters. While that's good news for Republicans it's also a shrinking percentage of the electorate. "Republicans do the best in areas that are typically not growing very fast and don't look like the present, or certainly the future, of the country," one Democratic strategist said.

--from Slatest.

Can you blame those enraptured in the Beck-ian fears that have taken hold of "white" (whatever that means) America (or Europe for that matter)? Yes. Is it understandable? Yes as well.


Fear is often the result of ignorance; however, this is not the case here. Whether by first-hand experience of whites who have indeed seen the number of non-whites increasing in their lifetime or who, living in less "progressive" areas, get it indirectly from the assertions by the Right (see Beck/Limbaugh/McCain even) or the Left (see above and social science), they are aware of the demographic changes going on around them. So they aren't unaware, ignorant; they just aren't smart enough to use that knowledge to be unafraid of its consequences.


To be sure, as the the percentage of non-whites increases, so will their share of the economic--and political--pie. But that's as it should be, logically if not ethically. Only, if one conflates the natural evolution of society's statistical balance, a process that takes time and shifts only gradually, with their own immediate circumstance--the non-smart part--than we can understand how they arrive at fear; they become reactionary.

Certainly there is a part of "middle"/"white" America who are looking at the long-game and don't like what they see--again, not ignorance but stupidity. Stupid because they are fearing the loss of something that never existed--surely not in any of our lifetimes--of a "white" culture, of the "real" America for which the pine for so dearly. (Even if true, no love-loss here.) It's simple prejudice; once again, a mere manifestation of stupidity.


But here's the thing: despite the slight tilt in electoral politics this fall--slight in what it says about the psychology of the country despite the exaggerated affect on our somewhat antiquated political system and the horse-race media mentality that spins its coverage--doesn't mean we're mostly stupid. It doesn't even mean that most who voted Republican are dumb. There's plenty of reasons to vote the bums (whoever they happen to be at time) out besides straight race-based fear. Mostly just that: whatever their persuasion, there are a whole lot of bums. Most of the old blood was blue and the new blood is red.


If anything, it says more about our increasing impatience, perhaps due in part to our decreasing attention span, and lack of faith in politicians to get anything done. I say perhaps about the attention span thing because at this point there isn't the data to back it up. But also because, in all the blame the 24hr news cycle has been receiving for this apparent circumscribed mental faculty, maybe something has been missed. Has the exponential media coverage of the politics so revealed the inherent inertia and seediness of the process that our reaction--abhorrence, frustration, and, yes, fear; from the Right and Left (see displeasure (ha!) with Obama)--is justified? Perhaps even a good thing? Perhaps.


Can anyone say WikiLeaks? For whatever diplomatic muck has been stirred up so far, can anyone say that, in the end, it isn't a public good? Not me. In the face of almost a million released documents, the best a tow-the-line general on The Daily Show this week could muster was that it might cause a national security problem--might?--while at the same time saying Assange is a bigger--not just as big, but bigger--threat to America than Al Qaeda. Sorry cool-general-that-is-fairly-progressive-on-other-issues-of-foreign-policy--though not on DADT, which Stewart gave him a good drumming for--but I call bullshit.


I'm sticking with my homeboy Robert Gates on this one:

Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases. And this is a quote from John Adams: “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel." …

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think -- I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.

Many governments -- some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

Keep speaking power to truth, brother!

Just because you're critical of a country doesn't mean you're an anarchist.
--Paraphrase of Daniel Ellsberg on WNYC talking about WikiLeaks

I heart Carl Paladino (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hot Carl)

OK, not really. But I love that we finally have a tea-patsy (I'll get to that later*) who makes no bones (he probably uses this phrase, because, you know, he "works in construction") about his flagrant prejudices--against everyone who’s not male, white and right--and total lack of governing skills. This tells us two things, at least, about the people who support him: they are equally prejudiced and have no interest in making government any better, only negating its existence.

It also wakes us (or maybe just me) from the somnambulism that this is New York City and "it can't happen here," in such a progressive northern metropolis. (Well, actually it can't, but, for better or worse, we're not just us. We’re a big-ass state full of rural and suburban upstate communities where this guy has all his support. It was Rick Lazio that took the Republican vote in the downstate counties.) We can't be blamed for this indulgence, after the usually status quo-loving Mike Bloomberg recently came to the defense of the downtown Islamic center (and Constitution and reason), and lulled all of us (or just me) into thinking the divisive moment had passed--north of the Mason-Dixon, anyway. But apparently it hasn't, at least until November 2nd.

But is he really a racist/sexist/general scumbag? The jokes, the comments, the idiotic ideas. But let's focus, as most are, on the jokes, emails actually, that he "forwarded" to a "select group of friends.” (Must not have been too select if they got out, huh Carl?) Defenders, calling into Brian Lehrer on WNYC (two out of three, aggravatingly and surprisingly, were women), claimed they don't make him anything, except maybe someone with a sense of humor. I'd agree, only, for one of the cartoons mentioned, it's a racist sense of humor, thus making him a racist.

Why not “call a spade a spade,” as one caller offered what she thought was one of Paladino’s attractive qualities? She suggested this right after denouncing the specific charge of racism from the email; Lehrer commented on her choice of words. Was she so oblivious to the fact that that expression shares a very common racial epithet for blacks, making her an idiot, or was she purposefully using thinly veiled language to tout his, and her, racist leanings?

All of which is a good distillation of the conundrum we find ourselves in, gazing into the psyche of these tea-freaks: either they really are that clueless, and that’s what passes for being anti-establishment these days—in part, now that The Man es moreno—or they’re not as dumb as we’d be comfortable believing. Paladino knows his audience; hell, he might’ve leaked the damn emails himself.

Hot Carl, by M. (thanks!)

“I’ll take you out!”

And if to prove my point, Paladino is now on video threatening, goomba-style, a journalist who had the gall to challenge him about unsubstantiated attack on his opponent, Cuomo, concerning something he himself is admittedly guilty—out of wedlock fatherhood. And, more tellingly, the reporter was from The New York Post, the super-conservative, Rupert Murdoch-owned city’s daily. Paladino doesn’t have a problem with just the left-wing media conspiracy, but with ANY media.

Both of these, the threat and that it was against an ostensible ally, bring out the larger point—it’s not so much the obvious hypocrisy involved, but that it reveals what people who like him don’t care about. This isn’t about politics or, what conservatives might usually call, morals; it’s about tearing down the system, which to them represents, and is represented by, progress of any kind. This is the extreme-libertarian ideology.

However, despite the tea-partisan antipathy toward their institutional brethren, Republicans, as Paul Krugman points out in The New York Times, the latter shares their anarchic lack of policy or any real agenda, at least when it comes to fiscal policy. I would argue that the tea-partiers have necessitated the Republican’s shift rightward into pure platitude, devoid of the desire to help the country or even “make sense.”

“So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?

The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.”

I got your cartoon right here, Carl.

(A still from a cartoon remake of Night of the Living Dead.)

Callers also said that everyone gets these kinds of emails "nowadays." That's not the case for me. The few times I have, I either spammed the sender, or, if I knew them and didn't just want to just dismiss them (family or friends), I would tell them to "cut the shit;" perhaps not always in those words. Of course, nowadays prejudice (except for Muslims, at the moment) isn't as overtly bandied about in mainstream speech; it's coded in more appropriate ways, though sometimes not very much, as with this guy.

For one thing, humor, as it is for many touchy subjects, can be a chief mode by which extreme speech, whether you agree with it or not, can gain social acceptance. Where I grew up just below the M&D line, in a MD suburb, one of a few Jews until high school, I was hardly ever called a kike or Christ-killer (thought it happened), but I did hear a whole hell of a lot of Jew jokes. Both made my heart flush and my throat swell just the same, and yet I knew, even at the time, that there was a difference between the two.

Was one preferable to the other? Sure. I’d go so far as to say that the relegation of racism to jokes told on playgrounds and at water-coolers (do offices still have those?) is in itself a sign of progress. But was it ever cool? Hell no. Did I let it slide? Not if I thought I had a chance to get a few punches in, or more, before I got my ass kicked or it was broken up. And this was a fairly progressive era, the 80s, and area of the country.

Satire, especially, for good reason and effect, can engender discussion about uncomfortable topics that can easily get mired in undemanding silence--or it can be a, sometimes not so subtle, cover for hate. Not to realize the difference is either ignorance or wink-and-a-smile acceptance tantamount to collusion.

I just had to.

*Finally, why would I call Paladino a patsy, or any of these folks who are running for office or voting for them, for that matter? Because, as the Right have been doing for years, by appealing to the concomitants of fear and anger, thereby obfuscating any talk of substantive issues, they have managed to get people to vote against their own interests. But so too the politicians, using the term broadly here—and I’m no politico lover—are for the most part dupes for bigger interests of deregulation and privatization (see the Koch brothers, et al.).

Carl, himself has made his fortune in large part by state and local government largess up in Albany, as reported by The Village Voice—and he wants to “throw the bums out”? He was one of the bums, from the other side of it. Maybe he’s thinking of expanding into defense department contracting or “clean” coal. Maybe he’s so stupid he doesn’t understand the ramifications of his own rhetoric. Or maybe he knows, like the rest of us, probably nothing much will no matter who’s in office. In that way, then, he’d windup gaming the system form both sides. Yeah, he’s racist—like a fox.

[My apologies to all non-racist foxes, such as the enjoyable Fleet Foxes.]

I'm proud of my country.

According to Brian Lehrer, on WNYC, President Obama's address/news conference the other night was viewed by more people than "American Idol"--if that's not Change We Can Believe In, I don't know what is. Way to go America.