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irrelevant stuff from 05

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Week of 01 09 - 13 06

Thursday, January 12 2006

(Note: it’s late, and I didn’t intend to go on and on about this in that bilious rambling form I seem to be perfecting here; you’re probably better off reading the source material and leaving it at that.) I hate to generalize, but only because it inevitably draws chiding letters from people who believe generalizations are worthless. (Although I suspect they would not protest if I described them, generally, as thoughtful and smart.) Were I to generalize about the twin trends that seem to animate those who peer into the near future, however, I’d sum it up thus. There are two types of people: those who think that the greatest threat to Western civilization and the values it holds consists of the possession of nuclear arms in the hands of a few Iranian nutters who believe that the destruction of a small democratic state hanging on the edge of the Levant will hasten the emergence of the Messiah from the well in which he currently hides, and B) those who think that the real threat is embodied in a fellow who sits supine in a barcalounger watching a TV that is too big in a house that it is too big with a garage that is too big that has a car that is too big. The first threat is abstract; the second is concrete; the first is merely the reflection of some fevered neocon fantasy anxious for fresh conquest, and the second is the reason median temperatures are up .0002 degrees in downtown Bangkok. The only way to pump up the perils of the second example is to point out how it will destroy the world, and the only way to sell books about the subject will be to provide the comfort some dearly seek: you’re right. It is all wrong. Rest assured, it will be over soon. Peak oil and bird flu, that’s the new toxic cocktail. When I was growing up I was told that oil was done and an ice age would begin around the same time we had a world-wide famine and overpopulation so great the people would be jammed in dying cities in sweaty writhing tubercular heaps. In these dystopian visions, however, the long grinding death of the earth was a consequence, not an act of volition. Not any more. In a review of James Howard Kunstler – he has three names, which makes him fifty percent more important than Jonathan Schell – we are informed that the planet has had enough of us: Kunstler's discussion of emerging diseases is headed 'Nature Bites Back'. Such a notion endows Nature with intentions, interests, and intrinsic moral value. Yet without pausing to defend such implausible assumptions, Kunstler ploughs straight on: in 'response to unprecedented habitat destruction by humans and invasion of the wilderness, the Earth itself seems to be sending forth new and much more lethal diseases, as though it has a kind of protective immune system with antibody-like agents aimed with remarkable precision at the source of the problem: Homo Sapiens.' Sounds like intelligent design, to me. It goes without saying that the fellow in the barcolounger is to blame: Apparently, those who will suffer most terribly in the long emergency are the US Republican states whose culture is built on violence and fundamentalist Christianity. Neighbourhoods with spacious housing ('McMansions') and 'poor street detailing', a particular insult to Kunstler, are singled out for destruction. Europeans, by contrast, may pull through in better shape. There is an uncanny alignment between the supposedly objective, inevitable laws of nature and Kunstler's prejudices. Perhaps the best summary of his views is found in the book's epigraph: 'I don't know if the Gods exist, but they sure act as if they do.' Because the Gods are most angered by carbon emissions and inefficient vehicles; a world in which barbarity reigned and life, like Sam Kennison, was nasty brutish and short, would be fine if we had the collective ecological footprint of a titmouse. If there’s anything that pisses the Gods off, it’s stabbing your neighbor with a sword carved from an old-growth tree. For Crom’s sake, use a rock! Why do you think we left them scattered all around? As I noted the other day in the Bleat, a local high-density project was knocked down because it was insufficiently respectful to the historical surroundings. Nevermind that the project rehabbed the historical buildings; the great sin was building something nearby that was taller than a 19th century flour mill. The neighborhood wants it, but what do they know? Stasis is good; the old model of the neighborhood, aligned along old streetcar lines, has the perfect density, and if the empty parking lots were replaced with block after block of low-rising small-unit housing, you suspect the solons would give it a thumbs up. Never mind that the very streetcars that made the neighborhood possible were powered by filthy coal plants whose emissions gave the city a horrid pall – old pictures of downtown Minneapolis show choking coal-clouds smearing the sun and staining the buildings sooty black. Never mind that the old trolleys had wood-burning stoves to keep people warm; it was dense, and dense is good. I agree: dense is good. For some. And for others it’s not. A generalization, yes, but I do not think this is an issue that makes the Gods send us AIDS and ebola. When I hear someone tie the End of Civilization to mediocre street detailing, I am reminded of every doomsaying voice I’ve heard since junior high school, and how a certain quantity of the West’s finest brains have devoted themselves to convincing us stupid merry idiots that everything will soon topple down on our heads. For them the Soviet threat was no more relevant than Martian cylinders landing in London; today it’s the same. Man is the problem, they insist, but it’s always the impact of general, abstract Man on the Flick-tailed Crested Owl they mean. You suspect they think it would have been better if we had never stood erect. Leave the planet to the monkeys. Or better yet, we all die out and leave behind typewriters so they can write Shakespeare by random action. So they’d never read it or understand. So what? Like the guy in the McMansion ever read Titus Andronicus. It’s amusing, in a grim way: optimism and confidence are, to some, reactionary ideas. The world didn’t end today, and it probably won’t end tomorrow. But they can always hope. (perm link)

Tuesday, January 10 2006

The story made every Blue Stater sit up straight and hiss: the mask has dropped. It’s begun. A college student at the U of Mass. requested a copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book” from the library, and was subsequently visited by Federal agents. A professor vouched for his tale. The news wires picked up the story. Blogs frothed. Columnists great and small rent their garments. Finally, the true face of Chimpy W. Pretzelchoker’s Amerikkka had shown itself. Today, goon-squads bracing innocent Mao scholars; tomorrow, the Reichstag burns. No, that was 9/11. Tomorrow, Kristallnacht! The worst has come true, and things are looking up! The story turned out to be nonsense, of course. As if federal agents slide down poles, pile into Crown Victorias and hit the sirens because a kid checks out Marxist bromides. “Faster, Agent Smith! If he gets to the part about a single oxen having more power than a thousand flowers, the terrorists have won!” For heaven’s sake, you could teach a comp-lit course on the writings of Osama, and the only repercussion would be fast-track tenure. So why did anyone believe the student? Two reasons. One: It was fake but accurate. That’s what they said about the Bush TANG memos, you may recall. Granted, the papers were forged, the dates wrong, the authors dead or retired, and the memos called Bush “Mr. 666 Helliburton Dry-Drunk Oil Shill Poopy Head,” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious questions about whether he was ten minutes late for his physical exam. Likewise the Little Red Book affair: okay, it didn’t happen. Granted. But if Bush eavesdrops on people calling Al Qaeda cells in Pakistan, you know he has plans to deport the Nation magazine’s subscriber base to labor camps in Kansas and make them sew covers for Gideon Bibles. Sometimes a lie reveals a greater truth. Just because “King Kong” is a movie doesn’t mean there aren’t monkeys, somewhere. The lunatic right went through this in the 90s. Bill Clinton, as it turned out, did not tie small children to railroad tracks in Mena, Arkansas to cover up his world-wide cocaine-distribution syndicate. To the Clinton foes, however, it was true in the macro sense. Somehow. It had to be. In the 90s these people were marginal cranks, and no one listened to them. Today they’re on Air America. So nothing’s changed, in other words. Two: the climate of despair. The longer one side is out of power, the more it takes solace in the gathering darkness. Again, the far right went through this in the 90s. Ruby Ridge, Waco, Elian Gonzalez, programs to soak up all electronic communication and sift for security threats – each was proof that Y2K would be the excuse for herding everyone into FEMA-operated cattle pens and tattooing barcodes on the back of their necks. But that was the nutwad ham-radio right, the guys who believed Art Bell was a disinformation plant. This muttering bug-eyed despondency now grips great swaths of the left. Polls show liberals are far less optimistic about the future than merry red-staters, as if hope was some devious neocon concept. To the left, the booming economy is a slug on a hot tar roof. Iraqi is another Vietnam – 48,000 casualties to go, God willing. Half the welfare budget has been diverted to subsidize solid-gold walking sticks for the rich, secret agencies are planting cookies in your web browser, and somewhere in Texas a theater owner is intentionally understating the opening night grosses for “Brokeback Mountain.” Bad news is good news. Everything’s going to hell, but at least they’re smart enough to catch the whiff of brimstone. (Second-hand brimstone. There ought to be a law.) But what if the worst doesn’t happen? That would be worse than bad. That would mean all those bumperstickers they put on their cars had no effect whatsoever. What if people don’t Question Authority, visualize World Peace, speak truth to power, or rotate during cooking? What if letters to the editor don’t end up in CIA files? What if subversive college students are ignored? What if the dark night isn’t descending after all? However will they go on? (perm link)

Monday, January 09 2006

From the Sunday Strib editorial page (not on the web, alas) a little mini-demi edit: Does religion make you happy and successful? Or are happy, successful people more likely to attend church? Economist Jonathan Gruber recently studied the question – measuring religious observance while controlling for socioeconomic factors such as income. He found that regular formal worship really does seem to improve a family’s economic outcomes, increased children’s chances of graduating from high school and reduce the likelihood of getting divorced or going on welfare. Bully for them. Now here’s where it gets good. And remember, I do not come at this from a Ned Flanders perspective. I am not Ned Flanders. But I would rather have him as a neighbor than anyone else in Simpsonland. Gruber’s findings, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, can’t quite explain the link between faith and happiness. Understand that to some people, this is like saying they can’t quite explain the link between water and wet. But he has four theories about regular worship: it increases the number of positive social interactions; religious institutions provide a form of emotional and financial insurance against crises; children who attend religious schools might have an advantage in life (how? –ed.) and regular churchgoers might simply be less stressed-out than other people. (why? –ed.) I don’t mean to pick on the author, who might have just decided to summarize without speculating beyond the conclusions offered in the report. But it does have that tell-tale tone of someone reporting on a strange mysterious tribe discovered in deepest Ecuador. The natives seem to derive happiness from their six-day orgies of feasting, games, and sex; why is this? Look, there’s another possibility that people who attend church regularly are happier: they believe in a benevolent God who governs the world and will grant them life after death, and hence they feel as though they belong to something larger and more timeless than the petty world of meat, sweat and strife. Just maybe. The other joy comes from the letters to the editors, which are a daily source of insight into the things that make people shout into the great dark barn that is the editorial page. You learn things. From a fellow in Moorhead: Those Bush apologists who have been filling your pages with the claim that the president as commander-in-chief in the war against terrorism has the right to investigate without restraint or external oversight ought to consider this thought experiment. Rest assured that the author believes that his ideas have never been considered by the other side, and will come as a crippling blow to their self-regard. (The letter was given the title “See the Problem?” Yes! The goggles, they do nothing!) Assume that violent Islamic fundamentalism, like Nazism and communism before it, is completely marginalized. And confined only to China? Great. Further assume an American president as far to the left as George W. Bush is to the right. That would be Joe Lieberman, right? No? Ah – forgot. Bush is waaaay out there to the Right, which is why he dissolved the departments of Education, HHS, HUD, ended federal ag subsidies, withdrew from the UN, ended affirmative action, and all those other things the far right wants. But of course the fringe right thought Clinton sacrificed babies to a shrine of Lenin and slept lashed to an inverted cross, so it works both ways. This president decides to go after the second most successful terrorist movement in the country – the ultraconservative, antigovernment movement as represented by Timothy McVeigh – Sigh. . . . and allies like the anti-abortion bombers, arsonists and assassins as well as the violently racist Christian Identity movement. Which do you think troubles the author more – the Islamists, whose patron nation is about to get a nuke, or 40 frothy-mouthed nutwads in an Idaho compound convinced, there will be a race war when the 15th anniversary of the O.J. Simpson case wakes up the nation to the perils of race-mixing? How much latitude would Bush defenders allow such a president in investigating conservatives, abortion foes, and fundamentalist Christians? This analogy is so spectacularly incoherent you don’t know where to begin; it’s like trying to eat moving spaghetti with a feather. The answer to the amount of latitude granted would be “not much,” inasmuch as it would be wrong to investigate a devout Lutheran in Nebraska who believes in a flat-rate tax and a partial-birth abortion ban simply because he holds those beliefs. These beliefs are perfectly legal, just like it’s legal to believe that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger. The latter remains insufficient as “probable cause.” It would be different if the Nebraskan was part of a cell devoted to blowing up abortion clinics, in which case “Bush defenders” would be perfectly happy to have the fellow tapped and taped. Law and order party, and all that. Likewise, if President Clinton had used the same tools as President Bush, intercepted communications between McVeigh’s associate and, say, Philippine Islamist cells, and this nifty intel operation thwarted the OKC bombing, most Americans of all political stripes would have nodded approval, turned the page and forgotten about it. (Just as most forgot about the 1993 WTC attack.) That’s what we pay you guys for! Nice job. Some on the right would have shrieked about Big Brotherism; some of the left would have insisted the ACLU challenge the wiretaps. Most Republicans and Democrats – i.e., middle-of-the-road folks who share a desire for the continuation of this fragile American Experiment – would not be unduly troubled. Good faith would go a long way, and as long as the government hadn’t picked up on the bad actors as a result of the Total Human Observation Project, slack would be cut. (Assuming we would have heard about the intelligence coup, that is. Sometimes you keep quiet about your successes, lest you tip your hand. Some things are more important than glowing atta-boy editorials in the Times. Not to say the NSA programs have stopped anything. Oh, perish the thought. Perish the possibility.) I understand what the letter-writer is suggesting. But the analogy works only if you assume that the government has decided to waste its time “investigating” everyone opposed to the US on general principle, instead of targeting real threats. (Like a subliterate skinhead striking a blow for racial purity by slipping “88” thongs past the Café Press censors.) Not to put words in the fellow’s mouth, but you suspect he regards the Christian Identity Movement - a group that probably has more letters in its name than members - as a threat not only equal to the Islamicists, but one that somehow betrays a greater truth about the true nature of the right. And he seems to suggest that the hard left would decide to “investigate” everyone to the right of Noam Chomsky if they got in power. Thanks for the heads up! But that’s not really what tickled me about the letter. It’s a fairly concise summation of a particular mindset that does not, to put it lightly, share the same peril-set I do. The arguments about the legality of the intercept programs are complex and fascinating, but – if I can overgeneralize – seem to trouble most those who are convinced that the entire point of the intelligence operation is to bring about some Panopticon nightmare with no rationale for its existence other than some nebulous, undefined notion of “security.” Those who are less troubled see the core problem as the threat to which these intelligence efforts are responding. And that’s why the letter amused. He said: Assume that violent Islamic fundamentalism, like Nazism and communism before it, is completely marginalized. Right. The Iranian sponsors, with their nuclear ambitions and support of international terror, are off the stage; the Saudi paymasters are likewise cowed or replaced with a government that seeks coexistence with Israel; Syria has had a revolution, Iraq makes the Swiss look like South Bronx (or a Paris Suburb), the Chechen rebels have disbanded in shame, the store-front sheiks of London have decided to join in the experiment of 21st century post-national continental identity, the various rag-tag bombers and separatists and fundamentalists from Indonesia to India to Pakistan have likewise stood down, and the most primitive, unreconstructed, antagonistic threat to modernity, liberalism, gender equity, religious tolerance, pluralism, and all the other right bonny boons of the Western Civ have been defeated, thwarted, or persuaded to change their ways. Assume that, and we can get on to the issues the apologists never consider. Give me a call when it happens. We’ll sit down and have a nice hot cup of worry. Some scones, too. If they’re fresh. (perm link)