Oni-goroshi's Bleeding Heart

Friedman Follies

2009-10-22T18:15:00.001-07:00

More bubble-headed nonsense from Thomas Friedman this week. Friedman suggests that poor public schooling is to blame for the Great Recession. Much as I would like to see public schools improved, I'm inclined to think the opposite; that rich, private schooling is far more to blame. I humbly submit that the evidence weighs rather heavily in my favor. No matter. Let's give Friedman the benefit of the doubt for a moment

What is his analysis?

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “

Yes, Friedman has really touched the salt of the earth here, hasn't he? The comedy continues:

When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

And there we have it, the mantra we've been hearing since the dawn of NAFTA - lacking the skills to compete globally.

First and foremost, witness the astonishing proliferation of educational resources already in existence, most notably vocational schools and certification programs. All of these, by most counts, are very well attended by eager and dedicated students - many of them taking night and weekend classes in the noble quest for self-improvement. Never has America produced more degree-earners and professional certifications.

Next consider the fact that those who have suffered the most from globalization are not the middle-class and educated, but rather factory workers and laborers. These are people whose union jobs went to Mexico and China, and who are left to make a living shelving the toxic output of Shenzhen factories at the local Wal-Mart. No amount of education is going to help them get their jobs back, because they cannot compete with workers in other countries who - having been raised in poverty and employed without any labor protections to speak of (much less health insurance plans or unions) - can be had for a mere fraction of the cost of their American counterparts.

But Friedman, one of globalization's greatest champions, does not inhabit this world. He is instead hopelessly smitten with the pseudo-liberal stance that we must all be diligently honing our skills for the global job market. His example:

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

In other words, lawyers who take initiative are more valued by their firms than those who don't. This is gripping stuff, folks. Absolutely shattering. And then:

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today.

What is astonishing about this is that Friedman thinks that the needs of the top 0.1% somehow parallel those of the other 99.9%, and that they must make use of the same solutions.

Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.

But while corporate lawyers might be able to improve their marketability with another degree or an extra language fluency, these things are not realistic options for the vast majority of workers, no matter how dedicated. There is only so much somebody can get done in one lifetime. And frankly, it is wrong and slightly evil to tell people that they have to hold themselves to such a standard in order to survive.

Ah, but Friedman reveals his true colors towards the end of the piece. Quoting from another member of the aggrieved underclass - a Harvard professor this time - he discloses that:

But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly.

and from this pearl of wisdom concludes, with cunning insight:

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be.

Hence:

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Terrific. Let's review here. Friedman, who deigns to address the causes of unemployment in the "global" marketplace, fails to speak to a single American worker of the sort known by you and me and other human beings. Instead, he saves his column-space for three elites from the Empyrean he happened to email on his Blackberry: an international investor, a Harvard professor, and a "Washington lawyer friend." And based on this Studs Terkel-esque survey of the suffering American public, he concludes, in essence, that their woes result from the crime of being average.

I really wish Friedman would just come out and say it - he hates most of humanity that lies outside his social clique, and can only contemplate their well-being when they try oh-so-hard to be more like him and his pals in D.C. and Harvard; whores, in other words, or as Friedman would have it, creative entrepreneurs. The kind of smiley-faced ass-kissers with which the world already teems to the point of breaking. No, thank you.

Oh, and in cases you missed it, Friedman and his Harvard labor guru have no illusions about what public education actually gets you. It's not an appreciation of the humanities, a sense of history and civic responsibility, nor even a love of books and libraries. No, sir. It's..

...the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills [of those] who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations.

Did you catch that? Deal with government regulations. Technocrats, in other words. Professional rule-followers who can "creatively" market for their employers whilst obeying orders.

This is a world that most of us want no part of. It is not the world that most voters of either political party have asked for. It is a world foisted upon us by people like Friedman's cohorts, who routinely speak of the "changing world" as if it is somebody other than they who is driving the change.

Friedman begins his column by observing that our economic boom was driven by Asian debt and financial trickery, and then spends the rest of it explaining why the perpetrators of this mess should be our role models.

Supreme Court Acts to Prevent Voting Terror

2008-05-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

On April 28, The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold Indiana's Republican-sponsored voter ID law (SEA 483). The law requires the presentation of a government-issued photo ID at the polling place before one can cast a vote. For those without a driver's licence, a state issued voter ID is available from the BMV if one can present the requisite materials, such as a birth certificate or a passport. Complaints were filed by Indiana Democrats who claimed that the law disenfranchises voters and discriminates against those with specific political inclinations.

The hysteria about voter fraud has reached a preposterous crescendo in recent years. In some vague, unspecified manner, the fight against voter-fraud is sometimes framed as a corollary effort in the "War on Terror." From the manner in which these concerned by pundits - Republicans, mostly - carry on, you'd think that voter fraud is the greatest threat to American democracy out there today.

While fraud has certainly occurred in the past, the number of votes known to be fraudulent in the modern era are dwarfed in number - we're talking many orders of magnitude here - by the number of votes lost due to ballots invalidated on technical grounds (dimpled chads and the like). Sadly, there is all too little discussion of this very serious problem in the mainstream media. The fact that significant portions of the population are denied the right to have their vote count due to inadequate polling conditions seems to be of little concern to either party. America is too busy shaking in its collective boots as Al-Qaida goes to the polls disguised as your deceased Uncle Jebediah to re-elect Ted Kennedy.

Given this hysteria, it is all the more curious that the Indiana law does not protect against most forms of voter fraud. It contains no provisions which would prevent fraud perpetrated via voter registration, nor does it affect mail-in/absentee ballots. It is only concerned with "in-person voter impersonation at polling places," about which even the Supreme Court majority decision admits, quoting directly, "The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history."

That's right. The law is designed with the exclusive intent of preventing the one form of voter fraud known not to be a threat to the State of Indiana.

The decision begins by explaining that, in determining the constitutionality of the law, the Court must weigh its inconvenience, i.e., the new burdens it places upon voters, against the necessity of preventing the criminality it seeks to eradicate. A direct application of this principle would yield this simple result: some, perhaps many, people will be inconvenienced by a law meant to solve a problem which is historically non-existent. Yet the authors of the majority decision avoid making this self-damning comparison by quickly moving on to discuss, in an obfuscatory manner, the numerous examples of voter-fraud perpetrated throughout American history. Reading the footnotes, however, shows that virtually all of these cases involve fraud through means other than in-person voter impersonation. To cite that specific tactic in any widespread scheme, the Court has to go back to 1868. In modern times, it mentions one - one - confirmed example of in-person fraud in the entire country, during a gubernatorial election in Washington in 2004. The rest of the whopping horde of 19 "ghost voters" in that election voted by mail-in ballot.

In essence, this law is correcting a problem that is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent, and which at any rate could be effectively prevented by asking a voter at the polling site to sign a log-book which matches their signature with the one in the voter registry (as is done every time I've voted here in New York, and as was done in Indiana before the introduction of the voter ID law).

Justice Scalia's own addendum to the decision, while citing a long parade of precedents, essentially makes the point that simply because a new voting regulation happens to inconvenience a certain portion of the populations - even if that is a "protected" population - it is not necessarily unconstitutional if the complaining voter cannot demonstrate discriminatory intent.

This seems like sound (if highly debatable) reasoning, so long as you overlook the clearly discriminatory nature of the law. And yet, what is the purpose of the law, if not to discriminate? It does not prevent any form of known fraud. It is universally favored by one party, and universally opposed by the other. Those most affected by it - the poor, aged, and those otherwise immobile - are those most likely to vote Democratic. It has no conceivable purpose aside from reducing the number of voting Democrats.

The motivations behind the bill become even more transparent when one considers the "remedies" offered to citizens of Indiana under the law's provisions to accommodate those for whom obtaining the free photo ID is either too burdensome, or who find having their image taken to be religiously objectionable. They may, it is stated, cast a mail-in ballot, or, if turned away at the polling site, apply for a provisional ballot. The obvious effect of this law will therefore be an increase in the use of such ballots. As journalist Greg Palast has noted in Armed Madhouse and elsewhere, these types of ballots are far more likely to be discounted as "invalid" due to pernicious technical quibbles (stray marks, and so forth) than ballots filled out on site at the polls. In some districts, they are many times more likely to be thrown out. And these ballots, especially provisional ballots, are cast overwhelmingly by minorities in poor neighborhoods.

This is all part, in other words, of a concerted effort on the part of Republican activists to push Democratic-leaning neighborhoods into less reliable and more frequently challenged (and defrauded) forms of voting to suppress their numbers.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Souter, joined by Justice Ginsberg, notes the following:

...a State may not burden the right to vote merely by invoking abstract interests, be they legitimate [...] or even compelling, but must make a particular, factual showing that threats to its interests outweigh the particular impediment it has imposed. The State has made no such attempt here, and as to some aspects of its law, it has hardly even tried.

Poor, old, and disabled voters may find the trip to the BMV prohibitive. Skeptics who argue that "if you can get out to vote, you can get to the BMV," might want to consider the following: there are far more polling places than there are BMV branches. In many counties, the ratio is 1 BMV for every 12 polling places. In Henry County, there is 1 BMV for 42 polling sites, in Lake County there is one for every 70, and in Marion County, the ratio is 1 for every 75. Many Indiana counties have only very limited forms of public transportation, with 10% of all Indiana voters living in counties that have no public transportation systems at all.

And what of the provisional ballots offered to registered voters who present themselves at the polls without a photo ID, or who object to being photographed on religious grounds? After casting their ballot, the voter must appear within 10 days before a circuit court clerk or a county election board, and sign an affidavit. This must done every time such a person wishes to vote. There is only one county seat in each county. Are those dedicated souls willing to make this journey rewarded by having their votes counted? The text of the dissenting opinion notes the following about the 2007 Marion country municipal elections, held under the new ID law:

Thirty-four provisional ballots were cast, but only two provisional voters made it to the county clerk's office within 10 days[...]All 34 of these voters appeared at the appropriate precinct. 33 of them provided a signature, and every signature matched the one on file; and 26 of the 32 voters whose ballots were not counted had a history of voting in Marion County elections.

This is not some aberration unique to Indiana. Across the country, provisional ballots cast by legitimately registered voters are thrown out by the bucketful. Ditto mail-ins. This is why you hear a lot about them, in glowing terms, from the political Right, and why you will not hear much about the need to increase voter-access to on-site polling sites, longer hours, or weekend polls. They, quite simply and blatantly, do not want certain people to have their votes counted.

This Supreme Court decision is not a matter of some hair-splitting quibble over arcane legal theories. Both the majority and the authors of the dissent invoke a very straightforward and well established principle of relative harms. The simple fact is that the authors of the majority opinion are only pretending to apply it, and the dissenters actually do.

I suppose we should not be surprised. The vast majority of discussions and political crusade that emanate from above in the name of "defending democracy" and "making every vote count" are put forth in the interest of subverting democracy. When, for instance, Hillary Clinton wants to "count the votes" in the Florida and Michigan primaries, which she initially agreed would not count (as did everyone else in the DNC), it's not "democracy" that motivates her, but rather opportunism at the cost of democratic fairness. In the disputed 2000 presidential election, both George W. Bush and Al Gore lobbied the Court, not for "democracy" or "making sure every vote counted, " though both disingenuously claimed that this was their goal, but for a standard of vote-counting that would supposedly work out in their favor (neither candidate actually proposed a state-wide recount of all votes - which not only would have been the most fair proposition, but which, we now know, would have resulted in a Gore victory).

In the case of "voter fraud" the non sequitur between illness and remedy is even more "non." More and more discrepancies between exit polls and outcomes, and reports of long lines, accessibility problems, and other forms of disenfranchisement abound on live television each and every election eve. Yet, where does the discussion always turn, within hours, just as the tension and frustration reaches a crescendo? It's that bogeyman du jour, voter fraud. It's almost as if they want us to believe that the reason the lines are so long, and that so many ballots are thrown out, is that there are so many impostors out there.

If the State of Indiana was truly interested in preventing voter fraud, it would have passed a law that actually addresses it. There are a few common-sense methods for doing this. If the state feels that it needs to lay down stricter requirements, these requirements should be applied to new registrants at the point of registration, not to previously registered, legitimate voters, and they should be phased in over a reasonable period of time. Furthermore, the burden is on the state to maintain the integrity of its own records by, for instance, updating the registry database to match it against a list of recent death certificates. Furthermore, any further legal restrictions on voter registration and identification should logically attempt to minimize reliance on those methods of voting most frequently defrauded, not encourage them, which is essentially what Indiana's law actually does. Even if one were to defend Indiana's Voter ID law as constitutional, one would still be faced with the fact that it is, in practice, counterproductive, since it discourages the use of the least-defrauded form of voting (in-person poll attendance) and encourages the use of methods known to be more easily and more commonly defrauded.

But such incompetence, it appears, is not unusual for the government of the State of Indiana, about which the National Government filed a complaint:

Indiana has failed to conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to identify and remove ineligible voters from the State's registration list; has failed to remove such ineligible voters; and has failed to engage in oversight actions sufficient to ensure that local election jurisdictions identify and remove such ineligible voters.

In other words, because Indiana has failed in its obligation to remove dead-people and non-residents from its voter rolls, it has decided to make voting more restrictive for legal, living residents. This is looking-glass legislation at its best.

Thanks to the Indiana government's laziness, incompetence, and disregard for the needs of its most vulnerable citizens, the most right-wing Supreme Court in memory has been handed the means render "constitutional" the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, a de facto poll tax, thus setting a precedent for the rest of the country to follow.

The Abuse of History

2007-09-20T00:02:00.000-07:00

Memory and identity are inextricably interdependent properties. One's memories form the narrative of the self, and one's sense of "self" is the primary means by which one's memories are given meaning in the present. Together, these two properties largely determine the choices we make. The primary complication, of course, is that memory is selective, especially when subjected to the biases of perceived needs. Inconvenient disjunctures in the narrative-of-self may be pruned away from consciousness, left to fall by the wayside. This unfortunate fact of human nature explains why we so often see even bright, well-intentioned individuals marching confidently into the viper's nest.

What is true for individuals is also true for nations when it comes to the question of national memory and national identity. A nation may collectively look to the established narrative of the past for guidance in the present, as well it should. But this only works when the past is correctly apprehended. If the historical narrative is false, decisions in the present will be based on false premises.

In seeking the ultimate narrative of American righteousness, and the requisite belief in the inherent tendency of all the world's cultures to naturally prefer American-style, American-friendly democracy, there is no offering that even comes close to the status of World War 2. Thanks to this particular mythos, conveniently unlike all subsequent narratives of military intervention in that it actually seems to have achieved its stated goals, neo-styled interventionists of all stripes have the ostensibly perfect counter-argument to the claims of American hubris and failure. In the abstract, the narrative includes all of the Axis powers, but inevitably the focus comes to one nation in particular: Japan. If Japan could be "democratized," so the narrative goes, so can the Middle East.

This, in fact, was the subject of a recent speech by President George W. Bush, on August 22 at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention. I will quote from the speech at length, as it is the best recent example of a common misapprehension:

Thank you all for letting me come by. I want to open today's speech with a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack -- and our nation was propelled into a conflict that would take us to every corner of the globe.

The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.

If this story sounds familiar, it is -- except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I've described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.

Ultimately, the United States prevailed in World War II, and we have fought two more land wars in Asia. And many in this hall were veterans of those campaigns. Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies, or that the South Koreans would recover from enemy invasion to raise up one of the world's most powerful economies, or that Asia would pull itself out of poverty and hopelessness as it embraced markets and freedom.

The lesson from Asia's development is that the heart's desire for liberty will not be denied. Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they're not going to rest until they're free. Today's dynamic and hopeful Asia -- a region that brings us countless benefits -- would not have been possible without America's presence and perseverance. It would not have been possible without the veterans in this hall today. And I thank you for your service. (Applause.)

What is remarkable here is that every parallel Bush is attempting to draw between imperial Japan and Al-Qaeda is based on a demonstrable fallacy.

Take first the issue of threat. Japan in 1941 was an advanced industrial nation which had already established extensive control throughout East Asia. Al Qaeda is a nation-less organization, with a small handful of members and no centralized organizing principle. While Japan, in fact, may have been capable of maintaining rule over a significant portion of East Asia, there is no chance - none - that Al Qaeda could ever establish a caliphate. Bush is essentially comparing one of the most powerful and organized military powers of the past century to a small handful of extremists, operating on a shoe-string budget. Currently, the cadre responsible for the attacks of September 11th has no representation among any of the numerous groups and factions in combat with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush's narrative is essentially assimilating unrelated parties with disparate aims into a single, fictional "enemy" which, even in its most extreme and encompassing aggregate, is not even remotely as powerful as was imperial Japan.

This brings us handily into the next disjuncture - the scale of American response. If Bush views "the terrorists" in Iraq and Afghanistan to be a threat comparable to imperial Japan, why is there as of yet no draft? No nationwide conversion of industry to the war effort? No war bond drives? Why are we "shopping as usual"?

And what, then, of the motivations of the "enemy", and their initial attack? The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was aimed at a military target, not civilians. The Kamikaze tactics which Bush disingenuously refers to, used later in the Pacific War, were also not "terror attacks" on American civilians, but rather a desperate use of planes-as-weapons against military targets, embarked upon after Japan had literally run out of ammo and had no means of producing more. These are not mere quibbles of fact, they describe an "enemy" whose tactics reveal a mindset utterly unlike that of Al-Qaeda. This is the first of many inconvenient facts which render Bush's narrative suspect.

But there is a much greater disunity looming on the horizon. It can be found here: "Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies."

Right. Who could have imagined that a former ally of the United States and Great Britain, which has fought on the side of the Allies in WW1, and which had been a functioning democracy up to the late 1920s, could possibly become a western ally...um, again?

Let's pause for a moment. Does this last historical tidbit surprise you? It shouldn't. And yet, it seems that the vast majority of Americans are utterly unaware of the few essential facts of Japanese history which would belie Bush's narrative of the "transformation" of a tribal, superstitious society into a modern democracy. Specifically, Japan actually began taking voluntary steps towards democracy as early as the late-19th century. Before the ascendancy of Hirohito, Taisho-era Japan was home to numerous liberal, democratic movements and a functioning parliamentary government. Japan was able to become a democracy again after WW2 because, since the birth of its modern era following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it had always wanted to be one. And not only had it wanted to be one, it had been one, and most living Japanese knew how democracy worked and what it meant. This is a little detail about the "transformation" of Japan by grace of America's help which seems to have been left out of mainstream America's amnesiac consciousness.

Japan's expansionist period began with the Meiji Restoration, and for the half-century that followed, its efforts were supported, both materially and ideologically, by western powers. During this period, the majority of Japan's naval fleet was constructed in British and French shipyards, with occasional contributions from the United States. Japan's ambitions in East Asia were, in fact, deemed beneficial for its Western allies, since they countered similar territorial ambitions by Germany, Russia, and China. This situation began to change in 1919 when Japan, then at a cultural apex of liberalism, tried to make use of its position as a permanent member in the League of Nations to propose a Racial Equality Clause to the League's charter. Unfortunately, this was not a time of progressivism in the United States, Britain, or Australia, all of whom rejected the clause, leading to its subsequent defeat. At this time, the U.S. had been barring Japanese immigrants for over a decade, and President Wilson feared repercussions at home - the clause, after all, could imply equality between whites and blacks. Likewise, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes feared for the future of his "White Australia."

The decade that followed was a complex one, and it is naturally impossible to make sweeping generalizations about the causes of the Pacific War. However, it is difficult to escape the recognition that a contributing factor was the Western attitude to Japan - it was no longer a useful subordinate in East Asia, but was proposing to stand among equals. It was the first non-white nation to do so - and this was deeply troubling to nations which openly professed an ideology of white supremacy.

Then, of course, there is the issue of the character of Japanese imperialism itself, of which the opportunity is never missed to remind us that it was brutal and barbaric in the extreme - in keeping, we are often meant to believe, with some bizarre and otherworldly defect in the Japanese character. Here, too, a little historical perspective can work wonders. Without soft-peddling the nature of imperialism and warfare, we can fairly and accurately point to a few revelatory facts in the historical record.

The fact is that when Japan began rapidly acquiring huge swaths of the Asian continent and the various Pacific Islands, it was not invading sovereign nations, but rather the long-held colonies Britain, France, The Netherlands, and (in the case of the Philippines) the United States. Even Korea had been a "protectorate" of China before Japan's occupation. And while the Western narrative of Japanese imperialism employs a well established litany of graphic atrocities (Nanjing, the Bataan Death March, etc.), all in keeping with the notion that no amount of outrage and disgust is enough when contemplating these horrors, a markedly different tone of cool humility is employed when describing exactly the same sort of atrocities which occurred over a period of centuries at the hands of Western colonialism in Asia and elsewhere. The "Nanjing Massacre," it seems, is to be explained by "barbarism", while untidy events at the hands of British rule like the trade in "coolie labor," or the tens of millions starved to death in India, are an example of why history is "complicated".

The fact is that the victors of World War 2 are sorely in need of an honest reckoning with their past, and that this reckoning has importance far beyond mere reflection and penitence. Without understanding that "enemies" do not arise out of nothingness, that they are, indeed, often former allies, we may come to understand that "we" are not as different from "they" as we like to think - as, in fact, our leaders demand that we believe when beating the drums of war. Such a reckoning might lead us to seek after the "lessons of history" at all times, especially in times of apparent peace. Instead, with our starkly-drawn narratives, in which history is conceived of as a series of unprovoked, unexpected crisis, we are taught to pay attention to the world outside only when there is a crisis - a crisis which is always unexpected, and which we assume to be unprovoked.

This misreading of history relative to WW2 extends far beyond the Pacific War, of course. It is surprising to me, for instance, that I occasionally meet fellow countrymen who are unaware that the Soviet Union, under Stalin, was an ally in WW2. Many more who are aware of this partnership in some academic sense manage to completely overlook the scale of Russian sacrifices in the war when compared to America's. This is not, in any way, to dismiss America's contribution, or to belittle its losses. But a sense of proportion is an extremely important thing for a nation that aims to be world-wide supercop in the present era.

America lost about 420,000 of its own in WW2, the great majority of them servicemen. The Soviets, on the other hand, lost nearly 11 million servicemen, and another 12 million citizens. This means nearly fifty dead Soviets for every one dead American. Nearly two-thirds of everyone who died as a result of WW2 was a Soviet, whereas American deaths count for less than 1% of all worldwide losses. The great majority of Soviet losses occurred in the Eastern front in its battle with Germany. Without the Soviet Union's relentless military onslaught - which dwarfed the combined efforts of the United Kingdom and United States - it is almost inconceivable that Germany's imperial ambitions could have been stopped.

And yet, tragically, this definitive and humbling historical truth remains more or less invisible in modern American narratives of unilateral nation-building and mass-produced democracy. Our leaders still exploit this fantastical picture of American influence in WW2, in which "we" did it largely by ourselves (and, oh, yeah, the British and a handful of reluctant European surrender-monkeys). Given the great unlikelihood that America or Britain would have accepted the massive compulsory conscription which made Stalin's successes possible, and the near-certainty of death that came with it, there is indeed something to be learned about the incompatibility of democracy with absolute military invincibility. To bring to the world a lasting peace, we as a nation must cease the cynical, immoral gamesmanship of Machiavellian power politics, assured of a ready and able default to brute force whenever one of our chess-pieces begins to move from square-to-square of its own accord.

The history that has been hidden from us has been hidden in plain view. It is not the absence of the true narrative, but rather the relentless repetition of the false one that has deceived us. If nothing else, the true history demonstrates the power of spin and propaganda. Japan, a former ally, once deemed inconvenient, become demonized on the home front with some of the most appallingly racist propaganda ever produced for any purpose. By these same methods, truly repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia can be turned into cozy neighbors. Likewise, mediocre crackpots such as Saddam Hussein can be "spun" from angel to demon with each passing decade, and relatively peaceful nations like Iran are portrayed as maniacal and warlike, as the needs and fortunes of American foreign policy change and evolve. We hide our complicity in creating the conditions that come back to haunt us. We continue to exploit a self-serving narrative of Western innocence and benevolence, in which barbarian hordes from faraway lands throw themselves against the walls of our world with malevolence and rancor, and we respond in kind by magically bettering them, by "liberating them." This, then is the alchemy of fictionalized history, the pixie-dust of national self-esteem and hubris. We seem to think it is our national burden to transform base water into blessed wine. We think we are Jesus.

Sicko 2: Moore vs. Gupta

2007-07-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore recently went head-to-head with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, over a short, pseudo-journalistic hit-piece crafted by the latter in which Moore is charged with "fudging the facts" in Sicko, his new film about the woeful inadequacy of American health care. Their heated debate on Larry King Live provided little illumination, as both quibbled over figures and source citations. Moore did his best, over the course of five minutes, to refute what amounted to a cheap, underhanded assault on his journalistic credibility, but viewers could easily have come away from the exchange with little appreciation for just how sleazy and manipulative Dr. Gupta's attack on Moore actually was.

What we never got to see was the much-needed debunking of Gupta's piece, which was essentially a series of astonishing non sequiturs unified only by an emotional arc of patronizing cautionary tones. Judging from the strategy taken in this piece - very much in line with what I've seen elsewhere this past week in The New York Times and other publications known for their elitist air of dignified skepticism - the corporate media's spin-strategy regarding Sicko is going to be to 1) admit that the most damning facts are true, and 2) convince the public that the price of correcting them is more than we as Americans would want to pay.

Let's observe how Gupta's short piece, which can be seen here along with the subsequent "debate", accomplishes this. The film begins with a straight-up admission that the U.S. does indeed rank a low #37 in the World Health Organization's world-wide survey for quality of health care. He then continues to show France as #1, Italy at #2, Spain at #7, and the U.K. at #18. But then he "reveals" that Cuba rates a #39, two points below the U.S., as if this fact was somehow concealed in Moore's film (it was, in fact, quite visible on screen). Moore never concealed this fact, nor did he claim that the United States should emulate Cuba except in one noteworthy respect - of "reaching out to our enemies." But right off the bat, we can see that Dr. Gupta is setting up Moore as someone whose sympathies have blinded his capacity for objectivity.

The debate over dollar expenditures on health care in Cuba and the U.S., in which Dr. Gupta calls Moore to task for being "slightly off" in his numbers, is a remarkably disingenuous tactic. Dr. Gupta, a journalist as well as a doctor, must be fully aware of the fact that side-by-side comparisons of per capita expenditures in dollar amounts between vastly different economies are inadequate measures of the actual cost of health care relative to the country in question. In Cuba, one dollar is many magnitudes more valuable to the individual citizen than it is in the United States. I suspect that Moore only brought up the $251 figure (initially quoted erroneously as $25 in Dr. Gupta's piece - probably the work of an inexperienced CNN intern) for Cuba's per capita spending in his film only to illustrate how disparate the two economies are. The point remains completely unchanged if the amount for Cuba is "actually" $229 as Dr. Gupta claimed. The only purpose in bringing these figures up is to attack Moore's credibility - this, even though there is absolutely no substantive difference relative to the argument at hand. At any rate, Moore's charge that Dr. Gupta is using "old data" turns out to be entirely correct - the figures of $6096 per year and $229 per year for the U.S. and Cuba respectively are clearly from the WHO website, which gives 2005 as the date. However, Dr. Gupta's charge is also correct - Moore uses different sources for the U.S. and Cuba figures, and Moore's figures for Cuba are even older, dating from 2003, while his figure for the U.S. is a recent projection of expenditures in 2007. It is possible that Moore considered the 2003 data on Cuba to be "more recent", since it was actually used in the UN's Human Development Report 2006. Moore also explains on his website that "if the Cuban government gave a figure on 2007 projected health spending, we'd have used it" (It is worth pointing out that, in fact, the two Cuba figures appear to show Cuba's health-care expenses trending downwards - either that, or Cuba's economy lost some ground relative to the world economy between 2003 and 2005). But what's truly revealing about Dr. Gupta's "correction" of Moore's figures on Cuba is that they are obviously no more accurate than Moore's, and his attempt to use them as an example of "fudging" on Moore's part is nothing short of low-down character assassination.

The only thing more remarkable about the $229 figure is that, being $22 lower, it makes the U.S.'s performance that much more embarrassing. Moore's recent data on the U.S. demonstrates what has been asserted by policy analysts for some time now; namely, that the cost of health care in the U.S. is growing rapidly ahead of inflation and personal income. Meanwhile, Cuba - a country of comparative poverty and a hobbled industrial base, is able to more or less match the U.S. health-wise. This fact alone should be scandalous - so Gupta's only option in spinning it is to ignore it completely, and distract the viewers (and Moore) with insubstantial quibbles. (In case I hadn't made it clear, this is like weighing an elephant and a hamster, and arguing about whether their weights have been offset by the presence of a flea or two).

But Dr. Gupta's piece only goes from bad to worse on the subject of patient wait- times. Dr. Gupta mentions "non-emergency elective surgery," in which "a study" reveals that Americans have the next-to-least wait time after Germany. He gives no comparative figures (i.e. what is the difference between best and worst - a wide spread or a marginal one?) and also fails to explain why Germany's universal coverage bests the U.S. "That's not something you'll see in Sicko," Dr. Gupta admonishes, referring America's alleged wait-time superiority, "as Americans talk about their lack of coverage, and suffocating red tape." This is truly a dirty tactic. The phrase "non-emergency elective surgery" goes by in a rush, and, juxtaposed as it is against the phrase "That's not something you'll see..." it implies again that Moore has left a crucial flaw in the universal health care systems of other countries out of the picture altogether.

But who did this study, and which countries were involved? The study was done by Commonwealth Fund in 2005, and only six countries were involved. This is exactly the same study Dr. Gupta references a few moments later on, only he doesn't mention until that point that only six countries were involved. In fact, he leaves the viewer with the impression that he's referencing the study for the first time at that later moment - most likely because he wants to imply that the U.S. is second best in the world on non-emergency elective wait-times, not just second best out of the six countries surveyed (here, incidentally, are the six countries involved in the study: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and Germany).

There are some other interesting facts mentioned in the study, which can be found here, that somehow didn't make it into Dr. Gupta's noble fact-finding mission (all text in italics that follows is directly copied from the study):

It singles out the United States for having problems significantly in excess of any of the other five countries.

-"While sicker patients in all countries reported safety risks, poor care coordination, and inadequate chronic care treatment, with no country deemed best or worst overall, the United States stood out for high error rates, inefficient coordination of care, and high out-of-pocket costs resulting in forgone care."

Patients in the United States report the highest number of medical errors.

One-third (34%) of U.S. respondents reported at least one of four types of errors: they believed they experienced a medical mistake in treatment or care, were given the wrong medication or dose, were given incorrect test results, or experienced delays in receiving abnormal test results. Three of 10 (30%) Canadian respondents reported at least one of these errors, as did one-fifth or more of patients in Australia (27%), New Zealand (25%), Germany (23%), and the U.K. (22%).

Patients in the United States spend the most, and get the least access for their money.

As was found in past surveys, the U.S. is an outlier in terms of financial burdens placed on patients. One–half of adults with health problems in the U.S. said they did not see a doctor when sick, did not get recommended treatment, or did not fill a prescription because of cost. Despite these high rates of forgone care, one-third of U.S. patients spent more than $1,000 out-of-pocket in the past year. In contrast, just 13 percent of U.K. adults reported not getting needed care because of costs, and two-thirds had no out-of-pocket costs.

But here comes the ultimate humdinger; a trick of editing that is downright diabolical. Dr. Gupta intones: "But in Canada, you can be waiting for a long time. A survey of six industrialized nations found that only Canada was worse than the U.S. when it came to waiting for a doctors appointment for a medical problem."

Let's hit the pause button..the big, evil edit is only seconds away. What has Dr. Gupta just said? Let's paraphrase (and remember also that Dr. Gupta has only just now explained that the study only covered six countries, and creates the false impression that this moment is the first time in his report in which the study is cited). Out of 6 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks number five for waiting periods, and Canada ranks 6th. In other words, the other four countries (Dr. Gupta, incidentally, never tells us who those four contries are, lest we learn that it's those crazy socialists somehow besting us again) have less of a waiting time than the U.S.

A perusal of the PDF file available for download at the link above - remember, this is the same study Dr. Gupta used - reveals the following:

-Roughly one-half of patients in the top four countries featured in the study are able to get same-day appointments when sick, compared to only 30% of U.S. patients and 23% of Canadian patients. In other words, the degree by which the U.S. bests Canada in this figure is much smaller than the degree by which it falls behind any of the other four.

-U.S. patients had the highest rate of difficulty in getting care on holidays and weekends without going to an emergency room. Not surprisingly, the U.S. also had the highest rate of emergency-room use for conditions that could have been treated by a regular doctor.

-While the U.S. and Germany were the only two countries in which more than half of all patients could see a specialist within one month, Australia was a close 3rd at 48%. In four of the six countries, 80% or more of all patients were able to see a specialist within 4 months.

-The U.S has the largest percentage of people (16%) without a regular doctor. The next-highest percentage was only 8%, shared by Canada and Australia.

-The U.S. had the highest number of "coordination problems" with doctors - including duplicate tests and test data unavailable at the time it was needed.

None of this makes in into Dr. Gupta's fair and balanced "fact-check", of course - only the victory-dance about being number two to Germany, and the out-of-context comparison to Canadian wait-times (which, while it may speak ill of Canada's system, clearly does not refute the success of socialized medicine in general).

Now cut to the whopper - testimony from pro-Bush minion Dr. Paul Keckley to the following effect. This is truly mind-blowing:

"That's the reality of those systems. There are quotas, there are planned wait times, the concept is that care is free in France and Canada and Cuba, and it's not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes, and as a proportion of their household income, it's a significant number."

Let's review and reflect. Even though Dr. Gupta is fully aware - because he read the report - that the U.S. lags behind the other five countries in this study in just about every conceivable aspect of patient access, and even though he came right out and said himself that the U.S. is behind these other four countries which have universal coverage (though, importantly, he doesn't say just how far behind), he still puts up this stink pile of a quote from a Bush-ite corporate lackey, for his "expert" testimony that patients in these other countries suffer under the unpleasant burdens of quotas and planned wait times. Dr. Gupta has performed the ultimate spin trick - one that is used in the mainstream media every day, so we should know how to spot it - of telling a little piece of the truth and then deliberately negating it from the viewers' memory by following it with a contradictory statement that appears to not contradict it. It's a kind of sequential elision. This trick been studied by psychologists and practiced by propagandists for decades, and it exploits a well-known weakness in human short-term memory. Observe this sequence:

Canada has a longer wait-time than the U.S...Canada has socialized medicine...socialized medicine involves quotas and wait-periods...obvious implication: socialized medicine will increase your wait-time. The fact that four other countries with socialized medicine bested the U.S. - which Dr. Gupta deliberately refrains from stating to make this tactic more effective (the viewer must infer it on the spot from the statement "only Canada was worse than the U.S.") is now completely erased from the narrative.

And now onto the dreaded high taxes.

Immediately following Dr. Keckley's testimony, we resume with Dr. Gupta's narration:

"It's true that the French pay higher taxes, and so does nearly every country ahead of the U.S. on that list. But even higher taxes don't give all the coverage everyone wants."

And return to Keckley:

"15 to 20% of the population will purchase services outside of the system of care run by the government."

Here is where the rising arc of bullshit reaches its third-act denouement. You can't begin a report with this magnitude of obfuscation, you have to build up to it, by winning the viewer's trust and hypnotizing him with statistical half-truths. TV journalists know very well that the human brain, when presented with a mixture of information and image, will naturally default to the image for the narrative string, rather than the information. They will follow an easy linear progression as opposed to a non-linear inference. And these journalists also know that there is no better way to lie than by telling a half-truth.

Yes, they pay higher taxes overall, but they spend less money on health care, which means that there the cost to the individual of staying healthy is less, not more, regardless of whether or not they are paying higher taxes for free university education, cleaner air and so on.

The frightening beauty of the half-truth, the reason it is such an effective tool for propagating falsehoods, is that it allows the viewer to make - on their own, thereby implicating them in the thought-process and creating the much-needed illusion that they have come to their own conclusion - an incorrect inference based on an established truth. The viewer is shown something he knows to be true (those countries pay higher taxes), and then reaches "his own" unsubstantiated judgment (I will have less money if the United States adopts a system of universal, free health care). What better subterfuge for the conveyance of falsehood is there?

And, finally, we have these words of wisdom from Dr. Gupta.

"So, there's no perfect system anywhere. But no matter how much Moore fudged facts - and he did fudge some facts - there's one everyone agree on: the system here should be far better."

So, Dr. Gupta tells us he is on our side after all. He sympathizes. Only he wants us to give up on the only solution to our problem that has been demonstrably effective. Bereft of any other expert suggestions, the viewer is once again implicitly re-directed (as always) to some mythical "third way" of health-care which never seems to arrive.

"And he did fudge some facts...." Indeed.

(I must correct a statement made in my previous essay on Sicko, in which I claimed that Moore "appears to be wrong" that Cubans live longer, on average, than Americans. The WHO data which I used gave Americans an average life-span of about six months longer than Cubans, as of 2005. Moore's website, however, references data which puts Cubans ever-so-slightly ahead of American - 77.6 vs. 77.5 years respectively. What this tells me is that, in the aggregate, the U.S. and Cuba are in a statistical dead head for longevity, with minor variations each year in which one country moves just slightly ahead of the other. For all intents and purposes, they can be considered equals.)

Sicko: Framing the debate

2007-07-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

The primary means by which any governing power structure controls its populace is by exerting influence over the individual thought-process, influencing how the populace perceives reality. The main channels of control are therefore systems of education and public discourse (i.e., the media), and the primary methods are censorship of ideas, and censorship of facts. If one can accomplish the latter sufficiently, there is little need for the former. Discourse can proceed in the form of ostensibly oppositional debate, while the most crucial questions and realities are hidden in plain view.

Control over what the public knows can be enough to prevent certain ideas from taking root. This method has two advantages. The first is that it provides the illusion, on the part of those controlled, that they have arrived at "their own conclusions" on a particular matter, since they have been presented with two seemingly opposed viewpoints and have been freely allowed to evaluate both critically. The second advantage is a direct consequence of the first - because the audience has inadvertently engaged in what may be a false premise underlying both propositions, they have also internalized and taken as implicit fact a concept which, if stated directly and in the plain light of day, might have been open to question. It naturally follows that such a method of control is wielded most effectively when the visibly state-fashioned controls are at a minimum, and the "voluntary" controls of social self-censorship are at a maximum. This provides in one fell swoop the greatest amount of passively-generated social control with the least-penetrable subterfuge. The greater the number of individuals who unknowingly participate in and propagate the false premise, the more effective the control. As for those who do see past the subterfuge - as long as they are either the direct and guiltless beneficiaries thereof, or are unable, due to social standing or problems of credibility, to effectively alter the overwhelming public bias, the power structure is safe and control is maintained.

As noted by Herbert Marcuse and others, advanced industrial capitalism provides a highly effective vehicle for such a system of control. Its ever-heightening pyramid of merged corporate and government entities, its ever-thinning and increasingly osmotic membrane of separation between "public" and "private" (both as a point of social conduct, and as a point of fiscal practice and law), and its uncanny ability to rapidly adapt to potentially threatening expressions of social rebellion by absorbing them into the mainstream in the form of a sterilized phenotype, result in an environment of discourse that is openly hostile to the unpleasant and discomforting work of rational thought.

This is something to keep in mind, in the weeks and months to come, as we witness what will inevitably be a full-frontal assault on Michael Moore's new film, Sicko. It is especially important, because many of the attacks will come not only from industry giants and political operatives whose biases and motivations are transparently obvious (though of course such quarters have already attacked, and will continue to do so), but from well-meaning, intelligent, literate, and dedicated citizens who genuinely (and correctly) fear a government whose "helping hand" so often wears a poison glove. We must not forget that when we speak of an ideal government, or an improved government, that we mean something radically different from the government we actually have - a government that both red-state and blue-state despises with equal fervor, and for largely similar reasons (though this may not at first be apparent).

That being said, there is no greater public service than the destruction of a widely-held myth. This form of pointed demolition transcends any specific ideology, amounting as it does to a fundamental assertion of the right of all individuals to think and know. Moore's latest film is just such a salvo. Its purpose is to nullify oft-repeated American popular myths about health care as it is practiced in other countries, by providing vivid counter-examples.

What his film does not do, which we should acknowledge up front (because these straw men will surely appear, and Moore will be unfairly blamed for being "deceptive"), is to argue that socialized medicine is a panacea, in which our current problems are magically solved, or that Western Europe enjoys hassle-free health care. Sicko is a demonstration of what is possible, not a comprehensive portrait of what is.

This then is as good a place as any to look at the facts as they stand. We have often heard, from critics and pundits of all stripes, that it is very easy to "lie with statistics." This point is made so often, that we are sometimes loath to admit that we can also tell the truth with them. It is a question of making reasonable comparisons, falsifiable statements, using consistent standards, and then placing them in their proper context.

I refer you now, and hasten anyone who wishes to make an informed commentary on this debate, to visit the official website of the World Health Organization, and click on the tab for "countries." Here is where any admirer or skeptic of Moore's essential thesis - that the American Health Care Industry is a sham deal and that other countries of comparable wealth are able to provide more effective coverage at a lower cost - can put his claims to the test. This should be the starting point for any debate on the subject: pro and con should first generally agree upon the facts as they stand, and only then proceed to debate an effective strategy for dealing with them. It must also be understood that the truth of Moore's thesis depends upon the aggregate of the evidence, and is not disproved by a small minority of exceptional examples.

It will be interesting to see how often this data is mentioned in mainstream debates about Sicko. I seriously doubt that any reputable scientist would actually refute all or most of the WHO data. However, it is quite likely that few major outlets will engage with it directly at all - they will instead complain that Moore's examples of abused and neglected patients in the Unites States are not "representative." This is the most common of straw men - Moore does not in fact claim that they are representative, but rather bemoans the fact that they could happen at all - especially as a natural outcome of the system as it operates normally, as opposed to an aberration in a system that is operating abnormally. They are included here not as representative examples but inevitable examples. He is demonstrating that the system, when operating normally, produces a significant minority of such cases. (This is a very important distinction to remember, whenever someone throws up a catastrophic example of health-care negligence from, say, Canada, in an effort to degrade the debate so that it appears to amount to little more than mutual "cherry-picking").

Such strategies of attack against Moore are also in keeping with the almost surreal stubbornness of American mainstream media in its imposition of a kind of statistical isolationism upon policy discussions of any kind (in essence, a pathological unwillingness to measure our prospects for social problem-solving against similar problems faced in other countries, as well as the possible merits of the solutions proposed for them). This is a dangerously disingenuous tactic for a society so firmly committed to imposing its own social models upon the world beyond its borders. While it occasionally leaks through that European and Asian countries far surpass America in terms of the quality of public education and environmental policy (and now, thanks to Moore, in health care), it is apparently still impermissible to ask, in any public forum, "how do they do it?". And any suggestion through mainstream channels that we might try to emulate them amounts to public political suicide. It seems that the illusion of American superiority in all things is an illusion still too cherished to be widely challenged. This is perhaps Sicko's most valuable contribution: it dares to suggest that we, as a society, might benefit from a little more humility.

But let's return to that WHO data. If you have IE7, you can easily use the "tabs" feature to do side-by-side comparisons of the United States to any other country listed on the WHO website. Let's look at Moore's most impressive claims. Do Canadians live 3 years longer? Click along with me...yes, they do. Is their child mortality rate lower? It is. Do they spend less on health care - hold on, we must be careful with this question. We cannot necessarily use dollars, even with the "international $" which lists the per-capita expenditures of each country on health care, because it will not actually provide us the answer to what we are looking for. We want to know how much it costs one country relative to itself to pay for their health-care system. The better figure to use is "% of GDP". So...do Canadians pay less? Hell yes.

Do the French live longer? Less child mortality? Less a % of GDP? Yes, yes, and yes. The British? Yes, cubed. We are not talking about statistically negligible differences, either, but about longer lives of two or three years. We are taking about 10 to 30% reductions in child mortality (given in numbers-per-thousand). We are noting that while the U.S. spends %15.4 of its GDP on health care, the next-highest expenditure is around 10%, and it goes down from there. At this point it seems as though, since we're willing to spend so much on health-care, we could easily blast the rest of the world out of the water by spending it correctly, should we chose to do so.

But, does it hold true elsewhere? Indulge me as I do some more tab-clicking. Here goes the backwards-alphabet challenge: Switzerland? Yes. Sweden? Yes. Spain? Yes. Switzerland spends 11.5% of its GDP - quite a bit above the others but still well below the U.S. In all three countries, I'm seeing life-span gains of 3 or 4 years, and child mortality rates that nearly halve the U.S.'s. Sweden does halve them, while spending only 9.1% of its GDP.

Perhaps the S's are lucky. I continue. Poland? Worse, at a third of the cost. Norway? Yes - better and cheaper. Ditto Netherlands. And Luxembourg. Italy, too, similarly leaves us in the dust. Also Ireland. Iceland, as well, kicks our ass. Hungary, however, does worse, if that makes anyone feel better. Greece - much poorer than the U.S. - does better. Germany does better. This is getting a bit boring....but I press on. Finland is better. Denmark has the same life-expectancy, but far fewer dead children and half the cost. Czech Republic does worse than the U.S. Belgium is better and cheaper.

In almost every case since the S's, we are looking at drastically reduced rates of child mortality(30-60% lower), longer life-spans by at least 2 years (and more often 3 or 4 years, with the difference especially noteworthy among women), and GDP figures that almost never peak 10%, and are usually about half of what we spend in the United States.

Now, of course, there is much more to Europe than the countries listed above. And, indeed, as we continue East, into regions of significantly less wealth, we do find numerous countries where the public health statistics are quite a bit worse than in the United States. But the fact remains that, not only are we surpassed by every comparable Western economy, we are matched by several poorer countries.

Well, what about our dreaded enemy, Cuba? Surely Mr. Moore was fibbing when he said Cuba has bested us? Let's look:

CUBA:

Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 75/79

Healthy life expectancy at birth m/f (years, 2002): 67/70

Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 7

Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 128/83

Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2004): 229

Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2004): 6.3

UNITED STATES

Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 75/80

Healthy life expectancy at birth m/f (years, 2002): 67/71

Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 8

Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 137/81

Total expenditure on health per capita (Intl $, 2004): 6,096

Total expenditure on health as % of GDP (2004): 15.4

Moore appears to be wrong that Cubans live longer. We live longer, by about six months. But, alas, our child mortality rate is still higher. And we find that, by spending only 6.3% of its GDP, Cuba essentially matches the U.S. in terms of the basic health indicators of it citizens.

These, then, are the facts as they stand. Our health care system is appallingly expensive, and it returns meager results. Any honest debate on the topic must address this data. If it does not, it is not an honest debate, and facts are being withheld for the purpose of controlling the debate. If we hear the charge that socialized medicine is associated with higher taxes, we can now rightly rebut that this is "guilt by association." Whatever other expenditures exist in these countries, the cost of health care is less.

We must also be on guard against the charge that single-payer health care reduces "choice." While I have no doubt that this could be the case in some countries, the only relevant question is whether it is necessarily so. There is clearly no reason why it must be so, especially when so many other countries accomplish such remarkable results while spending so much less than we do. We should be able to provide exemplary universal health care to every single American, and make private, "luxury" services available to those wealthier individuals who simply "must have it."

Take, for example, the French system, as recently lauded in a radically left-wing publication called Business Week:

France relies on a mixture of public and private funding, as does the U.S. But unlike Americans, every French citizen has access to basic health-care coverage through national insurance funds, to which both employers and employees contribute. Some 90% of the population also buys supplementary private insurance to provide benefits that aren't covered, and the government picks up the tab for those out of work who cannot gain coverage through a family member. "We pay higher taxes in France, but at least we get something for our money," says Leslie Charbonnel, an American who has lived in Paris for two decades.

The key to France's success is that its system, like the U.S.'s, values patient choice and physician control over medical decision-making. But France does it for far less, with per capita health-care spending in 2004 at just $3,500, compared with $6,100 in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. All told, France spends 10.7% of gross domestic product on health care, vs. 16.5% in the U.S.

Keeping Rates Low
"The French model suggests that you can have universal coverage without relying totally on the state, without restricting patient choice, and without abolishing private medical practice and the insurance industry," says Victor G. Rodwin, a professor of health policy and management at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

(The article also notes that the UK's health care system is problematic mess, a perception which I'm sure many of Moore's critics will be quick to assert. So be it - at least it is a mess which provides longer lives and healthier children than our mess currently does).

Here is another charge which we must be on guard for - that the higher cost of health care in the U.S. is somehow related to our being on the "forefront" of medical research from which the entire world benefits. That we are at the forefront is an arguable point and worth considering, but, unfortunately for those professional obfuscators wishing to scare the public away from demanding socialized medicine, medical research accounts for only 5.5 cents out of every health care dollar. (Source). Forefront or not, research cannot account for our bloated expenditures on health-care.

Ultimately, the debate about U.S. health-care will bump up against a greater, uncomfortable truth, one which - unless meticulously handled by corporate spin doctors, employing endless smoke and many well-placed mirrors - threatens to undermine edifices aside from those erected by the health care industry. Namely, that even our most basic assumptions about our rights and privileges as Americans in a free society have been bought up and cashed in by a corporate class whose greed is unbounded, whose reach of power has penetrated and assimilated every public institution we deem essential to the democratic process, and which continues to manipulate the very means by which we perceive reality itself. We, as a nation, may soon be approaching a "blue pill vs. red pill" moment of public consciousness.

Outing the L-Word, Part 3 - What is Money?

2007-06-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

We wish to live in a world where our wages have some objective meaning, and are not simply reflections of unthinking market relativism. But we live in an age of post-modern money, in which our currency - be it paper, plastic, or figures recorded in computer memory - serves as a re-writable "open text" for those to whom the world's treasuries are entrusted. Its value can be altered by decree, trimmed and nudged with exacting precision in studied correlation to events throughout the world marketplace. As international banking is now completely reliant on electronic credit, we find that money is only sustained as a fact of reality by our own collective belief in it.

And yet, the bills and coins in our pockets feel so damn real. They work flawlessly for their intended purpose in our daily lives, and in these functions they are irreplaceable. Who has not at some point lost a $20 bill to a wayward breeze, and experienced that unique form of despair as it flutters away? In the backs of our minds, we know that the paper itself is worth next to nothing, but that what it represents is something intimately connected to our lives as individuals. It is for this reason that tax-time is such an emotionally difficult period for us - we feel (correctly) that something essential to our livelihoods is being forcibly extracted from us.

We console ourselves with the belief that the government need to take "our" money to pay for the many social services that keep society going. But, how much must it take, and what stops it, in principle, from taking much more than it currently does? In these moments, we might be inclined to sympathize with the Libertarian position that, in essence, all taxation is theft, and that as long as we as a people submit to compulsory taxes, we have engaged in a Faustian deal whereby no moral imperative exists to prevent our total exploitation by the IRS - that only their scruples stand between us and forced poverty.

The Libertarian argument with regards to taxation and money is attractive because, in its talk of gold-standards and de-regulation, it seeks in principle to restore objectivity - a very important word here - to the currency we use. Surely, they say, the dollar must reflect something beyond the mere whims and machinations of social engineering. It must measure some aspect of reality that exists outside of government designs. This would then provide an epistemological basis by which the concept of currency could be once again directly wedded to the notion of rights.

Let us examine the word "objectivity," and then, in seeing how it applies to money, determine if the Libertarian arguments regarding currency (and our right to possess it in any amount, no matter how extremely huge) do in fact lead to greater objectivity. Specifically, is the money we earn a true and accurate measure of our rights to procure goods and services from society, in all cases? The crucial thing to keep in mind here is this: for the Libertarian argument to be epistemologically and ethically correct (ethically, because money is a direct expression of the fact that we participate in a social contract), the absolute value of a dollar at any moment would have to be more than an emergent fact of "the marketplace." It would need to be an objectively accurate measure of the means by which the dollar was earned. If a dollar does not accurately represent, for any holder of that dollar, a reasonably precise measure of the work that went into procuring it, then the dollar is not an objective measurement, but rather a structurally mutable fiction that changes its meaning with every human palm it graces. This latter scenario might benefit certain individuals and harm others, but, most importantly, it robs money of any possible ethical meaning.

What would make currency a socially objective measurement of work? And what exactly do we mean by "objective"? When we say that something is "objectively" true - we do not necessarily mean "true" with a capital "T." What the term literally means is this: that there exists an external referent, some standardized unit of measurement, by which the properties of different objects or situations can be compared to one another. "I am tall" is a subjective truth - it is true when I compare myself to other people, but not true when I compare myself to buildings. "I am taller than most children" is objectively true, because I can in principle use a ruler (external referent) to prove it. Likewise, "I am rich" is a subjective statement - it's true if I compare myself to a citizen of Cambodia, and untrue if I compare myself to Bill Gates. It is objectively true that Bill Gates has more money than I do.

BUT...

While it is objectively true relative to monetary currency, the standard of measurement, is it objectively true relative to what money measures, i.e., the extent of one's social entitlements in exchange for the work one has performed? Specifically, do our differences in wealth accurately correlate, with unitary consistency, to what we actually deserve to procure from society with our wealth? This is what we need to remind the Libertarian: if it is not accurate relative to the x property that money measures, then the statement that "Bill Gates is richer than me" approaches tautology. (Imagine that I measured my height with a ruler whose inches changed length every day according to perturbations in the metric system overseas, and that someone who was only a head taller than me found that his "inches" were one-tenth as long as mine - meaning he is more than 10 times as tall!). Sure, he has more money, but does this money accurately represent his entitlements from society? Likewise, does poverty accurately reflect the social entitlements of the impoverished?

There is one other aspect of objectivity which is crucial, but which is often overlooked - the properties being measured and the external referent itself must exist within the same frame of reference. Let’s take brief diversion into physics to illustrate this point. In physics, we say that d=rt (distance equals rate times time). Most of us experience a world easily described by Newtonian mechanics because we co-exist in the same frame of reference. Moving at essentially the same rate relative to one another, standing as we do on the same earth, we avoid any of the "relativistic distortions" predicted by Einstein and can proceed through our entire lives without ever realizing or caring that Newtonian mechanics do not, in fact, describe the world as it is, but rather only as it seems to be within our own frame of reference. Does that mean that it is not objectively correct? No - not if we take "objective" to mean what it should mean; that there may be posited a standardized frame of reference by which differing individual traits may be measured. As long as the frame of reference remains consistent, then the standardized measurement will measure accurately.

Many physicists, however, have bemoaned that the Theory of Relativity is improperly named, because what it in fact reveals about the nature of the cosmos is that there are limits not predicted by Newton's physics. Specifically, that the speed of light is the ultimate standard of measurement. It is not just a "speed limit" - it is the point at which matter and the energy used to move reveal themselves as different aspects of the same property (which is why nothing other than light can move that fast). As we approach light speed, vast amounts of energy are required to produce exponentially smaller increments of increased velocity. Likewise, as objects become more massive and dense, they exert a greater gravitational pull, and the rulers with which we measure our ledgers bend along the contorted contours of space itself. At some point, Professor Hawking intones that we are "crushed to spaghetti."

We can, of course, pretend that Newton's d=rt applies everywhere at all times, and that we can move many times faster than light-speed if only we apply enough force to our chosen vehicle. We can decide to be ignorant, and calculate how much energy is required to reach Sirius B (8.6 light years away) in just under an hour. We could run the numbers - the math works just fine! And we could even chose to believe it. But it would be wrong. The math may work, but the numbers do not describe reality, because the extremes of speed and energy have changed the frame of reference, rendering the traditional means of measurement objectively useless.

How is this dealt with? The only way that it can be - "relativistic" equations are integrated into the Newtonian calculations, to accurately compare one frame of reference to another. Hence, we can calculate that greater and greater expenditures of energy are needed to produce ever smaller increases in speed, and no amount of energy will push a physical object up to the speed of light. These distortions are exponential in nature - the faster you go, the more the traditional measures of time and distance lose accuracy.

Might not something similar apply to monetary currency as an ethically viable measure of social entitlement? While the mathematical possibilities provided by capitalism, and its ability to produce exponentially greater gains upon larger amounts of wealth - to literally use money to buy more money - are technically limitless, does this mean that they are ethically limitless? If money, an immediate expression of our participation in a social contract, is premised on a limited frame of reference, might there not be, in principle, an objective limit to how much money one can ethically retain? Say, even, a maximum wage?

This of course depends entirely on what the x property is that money is truly intended to measure. If we accept the principle of the social contract - of which we give implicit approval by virtue of our participation in society - and we accept as well that the purpose of this contract is to establish and defend those qualities we deem to be intrinsic and inalienable by virtue of our being human (For what other purpose would the social contract exist except to say "We hold these truths to be self-evident"), then the x property must be an essential property, i.e., something accounted for by money but not created by it. The x property must then be a thing which predates all organized economies, all currencies and indeed all technology, and strikes down to the fundamental, raw core of the human condition, to the fact that we are thinking animals for whom food and shelter is not God-given. It speaks to the expenditure of a resource that, as individuals, is for us always limited: the strength of our mortal bodies, the attention and focus of our mortal minds, and the limited time on this earth we have to make our best use of them. It is that very thing every human does, as a fundamental assertion our right to be alive - our labor.

Labor, it bears repeating, and not work. Work is simply a term from physics which refers to anything that results from a productive expenditure of energy. There is no human referent in work. Labor is work performed by a human being. Social value is predicated upon human value, because society is predicated upon the human individual ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"). The social contract establishes itself as a frame of reference, and the human being is the standard of measurement. If monetary currency is to accurately measure the social value of labor, then it must do according to a human scale. A necessary corollary of this is that an individual human life is a thing of fixed value in any social frame of reference. This is what is meant by the term "inalienable." Our labor is therefore also of fixed value in any frame of reference with reference to the individual performing it, since his mortality - the principle and defining fact that his time and energy is limited - is an unalterable and essential feature of being human. Clearly, not every human being is capable of performing the same amount of labor, same quality of labor, or living the same life-span. Abilities and constitutions vary, but the degree of variability is limited. The essential biological differences between the wealthy and the average are marginal (in that there is more overlap than difference - a defining necessity for any single species). It is social circumstance which varies the most.

If the Libertarian argues that, in a free-market capitalist economy, earnings reflect literally and absolutely the actual value of one's labor, then he has walked into a tremendous self-contradiction, because the every defense made of "the market" and its invisible hand, the very "trick" that makes the capitalist mechanism function, is premised on the observation that wages and prices fluctuate according to circumstance. There is, in fact, no objective correlation of wages to labor per se - wages and prices are defined relative only to other prices and wages. They are the products of the economic system and its collective activity. And yet the social contract requires that we participate in this scheme of floating relative values, even though we know ourselves as men and women to be of fixed inherent worth, and the expenditure of our mortal energy to be of fixed and inherent worth to us.

Monetary currency and the values it measures are defined are purely relational properties, but the social contract that makes the economy possible is premised on a constant value - the fixed x property that defines the relationship between our labor and ourselves. How do we account for it in monetary terms? And how does this lead to a measurement of the social value of labor? Values, unlike dollars, are not simply things which exist to describe relationships between human beings - as if human beings exist in a bubble utterly separated and alienated from the natural world as a whole (though in fact the Bible does imply this). They do more than merely describe the opinions and feelings of people relative to one another. But what is the “external referent” by which society establishes a set of objective values? Theologians would like to suggest that it is God, perhaps because a fictional being (and He is fictional, even if real, as we can only know him through our imaginations) may be invented to suit the fancies of an elite, and hence "objective" facts may also be shaped to suit that elite. But in fact, values are inescapably predicated upon the world in which we must live, and the labor which must be exerted to survive it. Values are about the status of the human relative to other humans and the earth. As society alters through history, and the earth changes, the base-line by which we provide the standard of measurement of the social needs of a human life changes relative to history - but the fact that we are locked, as an objective fact of reality, into this earth-society relationship persists. It is our "relativistic equation" whose variable terms may change with time, but whose essential statement about our relationship to reality is fixed.

An individual's value to society is predicated upon the value of the human to himself. It is the relationship of the individual to the earth which renders one's value to oneself absolute. In a "Newtonian" moral world, an individual whose "value" is measured relative to society - as distance, rate and time are measured solely in relation to Cartesian space - would logically and necessarily become less valuable in direct proportion to the extent to which the world population grows. But let us accept, instead, the following - that a human life, like the weightless energy that hurtles through time and space, is a constant property of constant value in any frame of reference, that a human life is worth a human life, and that this is the case irrespective of how many human lives there are.

What this implies is not that we should enjoy a "common wage" of utterly flat redistribution. What it does mean is that the fundamental Enlightenment values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution provide, epistemologically and morally, a defensible social imperative to limit the extremes of wealth and poverty(It is no coincidence that, for the first 100 years following the creation of these documents, corporations were viewed as a social resource which had to be created by public charter, and whose activities were heavily regulated).

And here is the ultimate Libertarian trap. If monetary earnings are purely a relational, emergent phenomenon of market circumstance, without absolute value, then there is no morally absolute imperative protecting them from taxation. But, if monetary earnings do reflect an absolute property, that property can only derived relative to a concept of rights, which are premised on the indivisible self-worth of the individual and his inalienable traits as acknowledged under the social contract, and this necessarily extends to that individual's right participate in society's collective responsibility to set laws and limits. Hence, there is still no absolute moral imperative protecting the individual from taxation. Furthermore, it naturally follows than, human life and being of fixed value, and the social contract requiring equitable recognition of this fixed value, the extremes of wealth and poverty - because they distort the frame of reference upon which all rights relative to society depends - results in the exponentially increasing divergence from ethical accuracy of the monetary unit. Which means that the very notions of rights which make money ethically viable in the first place also require that society make "relativistic adjustments" to correct for the extremes of wealth and poverty, in the form of welfare and progressive taxation.

If a human being's ability to eat, drink, clothe, and shelter himself (all of which do not require participation in an economy in any "natural" state) have been taken from him, because he cannot afford to do these things in the society in which he lives, then society has stolen from him his means to a livelihood, and owes him something in return as a matter of contractual reciprocity. The money in his pocket (if any) is no longer an objective account of his worth as a human being, because his worth as a human being, the fact of his being as a biological entity, requires that he have the means to procure these survival necessities.

At the extremes of mass and energy, space itself literally changes shape. Time passes more slowly for the affected observer relative to the cosmos as a whole. The extremes of wealth and poverty produce similar distortions, rendering the otherwise-trustworthy standard of currency - objective enough a measurement of our social entitlements and expenditures of labor in a middling frame-of-reference, bereft of the severe suffering or decadent luxury - an ineffectual measure of that property it is meant to account for. I can rightly say that no one owes me food, because I can buy food whenever I need it. I cannot say the same of someone who is starving in a Libertarian utopia; they did not choose this society, therefore society owes them the means to their humanity. This should not be a matter of "charity," which is freely given, non-binding, and a matter of personal preference for the giver. It is a matter of necessary social compulsion. A social contract is meaningless if individual members of society may choose, for themselves, whom they wish to recognize as human and who they do not - and the allowance of human starvation is nothing if not a failure to recognize the victim as a human being on a fundamental, biological level.

There is a point at which personal wealth exceeds, far exceeds, any viable mortal index. When a human is as wealthy and powerful Olympian diety, or as impoverished as a captive zoo creature, they have fallen off the scale, out of the frame of reference upon which money depends to be a viably objective measurement of social entitlement.

This principle can be demonstrated empirically, with real world examples. If the Libertarian thesis were correct, then the wealth of any individual, no matter how great, is justified if that individual earned it legally, in the pursuit of free-enterprise. The assertion suggests, for instance, that the highest-paid CEOs in the world deserve what they were paid on the simple basis that, were their services not "worth" that amount, they would not be paid that amount. The allowances of the marketplace are thereby justified, and any taxation or regulation of this personal income amount to theft. But keep in mind that the Libertarian defends this position not solely on the grounds of non-interference in a private contract. The Libertarian is no mere anarchist. No, the Libertarian asserts that society's "most productive" individuals deserve their wealth - and the tacit approval thereof in the eyes of society. The obvious implication is that there is a social value to individual productivity (which is surely true), and that the monetary reciprocity provided by the social contract in the form of standardized currency guarantees that the individual is receiving his proper due, that he has already "done right" by society by accomplishing whatever it is that earned him the wealth in the first place. The extent of his wealth is therefore a prima facie demonstration of social equity.

If this were true, of course, then the higher CEO payments would result in a corporate culture which produces results, i.e., the best products. And yet any glance at the world market today demonstrates that this is not the case. In Sweden, the typical CEO earns about one-third of what an American CEO earns. In Japan, it is closer to one-fifth. And yet, Japan and Sweden produce some of the most successful and innovative companies in the world (Saab, Volvo, Pfizer, IKEA, Honda, Toyota, Sony, and so on). Japanese cars now outsell American cars in California. Japanese companies have provided innovation and quality, whereas their higher-paid CEO counterparts, despite all the "incentives" they recieve from their higher pay, are mired in backwards thinking. What should be obvious is this - CEO pay in America bears at best marginal, and at worst no relationship to what that individual has produced for society, and is entirely a product of the closed system - the isolated corporate culture - which determines it of its own volition. If the individual does not "deserve" his vast piles of wealth in the eyes of society, why should be entitled to spend it freely in society?

The contradictory philosophical groundings of modern Libertarianism will be the subject of “Outing the L-Word Part 4: Objectivism.”

For some illuminating information CEO salaries in the U.S., in comparison to the world at large, I recommend the following paper. I do not endorse of all the views expressed herein, and find fault with some of the analysis provided in the second half. Nonetheless, the first half of the paper provides a concise store of data tables, and correctly grounds discussion of the issue in the concepts of social reciprocity and fairness.

Outing the L-Word, Part 2: Nature, Power, and Hierarchy

2007-05-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

While there are many strains and sub-categories of Libertarianism, each with their own distinct epistemology and nuances, there is one common argument that is shared by all: that laissez-faire capitalism is the most "natural" of all economic systems and that, by extension, systems of redistribution such as communism and socialism are the most "artificial." This argument is sometimes implicit, and sometimes it is quite overt. The purpose of this essay will be to discuss why it is wrong, and to further explain why the way in which it is wrong can lead us to a better, more consistent philosophical construct in defense of social democracy.

It should be clear that, at this point in the game, such a construct is sorely needed. While pundits both left and right are able to appear in various public forums, armed with reams of data and legions of pie-charts in defense of their various positions on pragmatic or empirical terms, only the free-market Right seems able to speak confidently from principle. The mainstream Left, if it is to be truly progressive (which I mean in its most literal sense of aiding human progress), must have a platform and strategy more imaginative than simply waiting for the Right to fail, pointing out the failure, and then "solving" the problem by being slightly less vicious. In the present era, the mainstream Left acquires power when the outrages of the Right leave voters no other choice, and they never retain the confidence of the public for very long because, intellectually, they have become fundamentally vacant. The Left (or those politicians who claim to speak for it) no longer knows why it believes what it believes. The Right does "know," which is why they, even when in the minority, will retain a hold on the American imagination that the Left has long relinquished.

This question is deeply relevant now. We have long lived with the notion - undertaken and popularized in earnest from the outset of the cold war and peaking during the Reagan era - that the American economic system is the most natural and God-given, and that the more taxes are cut, public utilities privatized, and business de-regulated, the more closely we approach some state of grace and harmony with the natural order of things. The rising and falling of the stock-market - is this not like the ebb and flow of the tides? The cycles of the moon? Do not the patterns of the market resemble the gentle respiration, the self-correcting perturbations of the natural world? In this context, we are meant to see the planned economy as something of a straight-jacket, a cage, a crude and mindless apparatus whose purpose is to prevent the growth of life in all its glorious chaos and serendipity. This transfixing vision has a hold on the discourse and platforms of both our major political parties.

But let us blink away the pixie-dust for a moment, and consider an alternate possibility: that capitalism, even in its most laissez-faire and "de-regulated" form, is every bit as much "artificial" as Stalinist communism. I am not making an argument about moral equivalence here, nor am I using the term "artificial" in some pejorative sense. I mean, quite literally, that both economic systems are invented, planned, regulated, and can only function by means of an imposed consensus, i.e., by force. Neither represents an integration of the "natural order" into the lives of humans, though the idea that capitalism does is extremely powerful. This explains why, in America, we are loath to challenge it directly. (If it seems that, on this last point, I am smearing the mainstream with a rightward brush, consider Clinton's widespread popularity with the mainstream Left not in spite of, but rather because of an economic policy more rightward than that of any other post-war president).

It makes sense, of course, that proponents of any economic ideology would want to propose that their system is the most "natural." The west, even at its most modern and secular, is still a culture whose psychology is deeply embedded in Christian mythos, and so our notion of "progress" is often inextricable from the pursuit of Eden on Earth. The struggle towards the ideal economic system, in some sense, registers in the American psyche as a struggle to overcome our spiritually fallen human reality. The old-guard Left is equally guilty of this fallacy, from Rousseau onwards.

The problem for both wings is that no economic system is "natural" because money is not natural. Any economic system is an artificial system, because it must be established and maintained by some degree of force, and relies on a dominant cultural ideology in order to function. Nor can there be any delusion of being able to approach "naturalness" in a structured economy, as if it were some untouchable but virtuously compelling asymptote towards which we might nobly bend. It makes no more sense to talk of degrees of "naturalism" than it does to parse the distinctions between degrees of death. Once you are no longer alive, the possibility of nuance goes right out the window. By the same token, no human societal invention can properly claim greater "naturalness" over any other.

The question in fact is not one of naturalism versus artificiality, but rather one of scale and structure. The moment we begin to organize society according to standardized concepts and abstractions - of which money is one, and the means of distributing and routing it another - we are dealing in artifice. The difference between a capitalist economy (whether ideal, as in the Libertarian model, or actual, as in the American model) and communism as it has been practiced in its many forms, is to be found primarily in the nature of consolidated power, i.e, where and to what extent it is consolidated. Giant corporations and powerful, authoritarian governments internally function according to similar principles of hierarchy. Office politics and government politics use the same social skills and delegation of power through a chain of command. The difference is this - in a capitalist economy, several powerful corporate bodies are rivals, and in statist-communism, one supreme governing body retains an unrivalled monopoly over all resources.

In the modern era, the perceived differences in social permissiveness (free-speech, etc.) between American and Soviet (or Cuban, or even North Korean) society are as attributable to such differences in scale as they are to any supposed cultural tradition of free expression (for, in fact, Americans seem to have internalized so much of the corporate/managerial mindset that self-censorship is possibly the greatest threat to free expression in America today, even and especially among journalists and other framers of public opinion). Much of what remains of our "social freedom" lives between the gaps, narrowing though they are, not currently covered by the numerous corporate and state entities vying competitively for domination. To wit, we might most accurately view American capitalism at the turn of this century as a rivalry between a modest handful of competing totalitarians, whose only check against complete domination over civic life is to be found in the energy they must exert in warfare against one another, and with what remains of our ever-diminishing legal protection against them in the form of government - itself an increasingly corporate entity. The skeptic who doubts this proposition need only consider the almost incomprehensible vastness of energy, resources, intellectual talent, and sheer time and space expended in the realm of pubic discourse by corporations to get every living citizen to think like they do. He or she need only observe how much of this discourse is about the orchestration of dreams, desires, and other preternatural murmurs as opposed to the discussion of empirical fact. And then the skeptic must finally observe that the remaining 1% of this discourse which happens to be somewhat factual is there only because extensive legal regulations still exist which prevent - sometimes - the most harmful and egregious confabulations from passing muster. For now. Even if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are willing to say "when," can anyone rationally doubt that there now exist many corporate overlords willing to seize and exploit any opportunity for greater power over society that presents itself? To whom citizenship and fairness are pitiable abstractions for the feeble-minded and weak? Or are we to assume that, Enron and Halliburton aside, megalomania is a true rarity even among billionaires capable of buying influence in the world's most powerful governments? Of taking over the role of government itself? Considering these question in the light of the evidence presented by our daily lives, by the billboards and commercials and endless parade of banners, by the outsourced "reconstruction" of obliterated societies, does it not seem that corporate propaganda is every bit as concerned with controlling our thoughts as any other totalitarian propaganda? Indeed, is there any other defining characteristic of the totalitarian state than its constitutional tendency, its inherent desire, to be the exclusive colonizer of the human mind?

It seems we can attribute what remains of our freedom to the fact that there is multitude of totalitarianisms currently vying for control. If America were ruled by a single, all-powerful corporation, it would hardly appear different from Soviet Russia. The corporation would have to own everything - housing, the media, all of industry and all intellectual property. It would have crushed its competition from existence. It would exist as a totalitarian state. As the tip of the corporate pyramid sharpens and grows more distant from the base of society, as merger after merger puts a dwindling handful of executives in control, we continue to approach that dreaded singularity known as Big Brother (and take note that the hyper-capitalist society that Russia has transformed into with devastating rapidity is not one iota freer from authoritarianism than it was before).

The peacetime-warfare (i.e. warfare through economy and the control of public opinion) of competing interests is what defines a mixed economy. But, in order to secure a free society, it is not enough that the interests merely compete; they must also be fundamentally different externally from one another in form and function if they are to provide checks and balances against each other. This must also be true internally, between their constituent parts. The human animal being what it is (a beast with a recently developed, intelligent fore brain encasing an ancient, hungry reptilian one), the tendency of human groups to organize into leaders and followers must be channeled into institutional structures of highly limited and uniquely defined power, appropriate to their assigned social function. The business model must be different from the government model, and the government model must be different from the military model. The more that the business, government, and military models begin to resemble one another in function and form - whether through cross-pollination (large numbers of individuals moving from one sector to another via professional connections) or through the sheer domination of one model over all others (via a military coup, a repressive political regime, or a robber baron-style wholesale buyout of government), the more a society veers towards totalitarianism, for the obvious reason that "competitors" whose interests are similar or identical are not capable of providing a system of long-term checks and balances. Put another way, powerful institutions are defined by their socially-enforced limitations above all else, by those rights and responsibilities which they are expressly and constitutionally denied. The lack of such clearly-defined boundaries between power-wielding bodies is what leads to totalitarianism. This is what Eisenhower warned us about is his famous speech, referring to the "military-industrial" complex, and it is why more than a few fascist despots have defined their own polity of choice as "the melding of industry and government" or "capitalism run amok."

The danger, then, is not that corporations exist, or that the government and its laws exist, or that the military exists. The danger is that each of these bodies, all of which are hierarchical and which wield great power over society as a whole, have a dependably human tendency to seek more power and control over the material conditions of reality than is healthy for society as a whole. It is therefore crucial that society must ever be on guard against the over-indulgence of any one "model" or the liberal intermixture of interests between industry, government, and the military. Each of these elements of society perform crucial functions, but their different external fucntions increasingly hide internal similarities, and these similarities are the reason that corruption and collusion of power interests across the line of public and private are coming to define our civic life. And, in the era of globalization, it is the business model that it is rapid ascent, with the military model not far behind as the government model recedes back into the pre-dawn horizon.

We must make the following observation of the business model: while businesses may thrive or perish of their own accord in a free society, and the health of business can (though not necessarily) indicate the health of society as whole, the traditional business infrastructure itself is not in any way dependant on social freedom. Instead, the business model is based on rigidly defined hierarchies, much like a comparatively low-stakes military, in which there is a chain of command based on rank, and a pyramid of downwardly cascading delegation of authority. The clerks and low-level managers - the privates and sergeants of the business world - are at best devoted only to the functions of their immediate department, more likely than not existing in a state of rivalry or bitterness regarding the strangers on the upstairs floor. Even fairly small businesses routinely disperse information downwards on a "need to know" basis, keeping the nature of their most important decisions under wraps until the last possible moment - especially those most likely to directly affect their employees, . It is no mystery as to why military training is often regarded as the best preparation in the business world, since the same competence in obeying authority from above and executing it downwards is required in both milieus. The "triumph" of the mixed economy, to the extent that it is a triumph (it is also many other things) is that it keeps its numerous would-be despots and tyrants contained to comparatively small regions of influence, even as within those regions there are endless battles for control of the fiefdom.

This leads us to observe the most important similarity between the military and the business model: it is designed for optimum function in a state of warfare. In other words, it is meant to operate on the assumption that its mortality is daily imminent, that it will be attacked by the enemy/competition at any given moment. It is designed to function efficiently in a permanent mode of perceived existential crisis. Reflection upon the greater meaning of the task is at best useless, and in fact is likely to be counter-productive and inhibit judgment in combat. This psychological stance of fierce "adherence to the task" is necessarily a feature of any social hierarchy. It is, indeed, the whole point of having a hierarchy, which maximizes the number of individuals devoted to the What and How, and minimizes to a tiny, extremely powerful minority those who determine the Why. It is bracingly, awe-inspiringly successful, but it is not democratic, nor is it reflective.

Like the military model, the business model is an effective and powerful tool which in many cases can be wielded to produce, distribute, procure, etc. But you would no more want a government run on a business model than you would want it run on military model, and for precisely the same reason - it is a model which only knows the particulars of the crisis, i.e., the immediate present and the near-term future. It is not a democratic structure, and it does not act with reference to objective social values except to the extent that those values are imposed from without. Both the business and the military exist to perform tasks, and they are designed to do so brilliantly. They were not devised with the intention of defining the public good.

The great problem with the "crisis mode" is that even brute reality has its limits, and if society does not legally intervene, it will be the limits of crisis-mode mentality that will define corporate behavior. Whatever walls are erected to regulate corporate power, the corporation will push against them with all its might, hoping for a crack in the facade. Without laws limiting working hours, setting minimum wage, safety and privacy standards and so on, there will always be someone willing to work for longer and for less, i.e., someone in a greater state of individual crisis. Labor laws, if not set by the state, will instead be set by the limits of desperation. The Libertarian will argue that this is precisely what makes the laissez-faire system "natural," and this of course is hokum of the highest order, because it completely overlooks the fact that the modern industrial corporation, the technology that fuels it, and even the various forms of monetary currency which fund it are not products of the natural world but of human invention. The modern arrangement between employer and employee does not exist in nature. It is a creation of industry. They are human concepts, a product of our modern and artificial social arrangements.

The Libertarian who argues that laissez-faire capitalism is an expression of natural law does so through Darwinian metaphors. They posit the free economy as a wilderness, in which the most "productive" individuals achieve order and through their own egoistic pursuits raise the standard of living for everyone. For instance: without Thomas Edison, no light bulbs. Edison is likened to the alpha wolf most equipped to thrive in the wilderness. The irony here is that the Darwinian metaphor relies on a non-intentional, pre-conscious system - nature - for its referent. The more accurate metaphor is the exact opposite of Darwinism, i.e., agriculture. By means of a systematized, highly refined, and wholly artificial infrastructure of social institutions based on notions of common citizenship, equity, plurality, and commonwealth, people like Edison, and the many thousands who were talented and industrious enough to work for him (and often be exploited by him), were nurtured into being by society's careful ministrations. Schools, educators, keepers of the peace and justice, this is why we have the light bulb. We can credit Edison for being the first without worshipping him for it. Another would soon have followed. One thing Darwin was clear on; wheat and corn do not naturally arrange themselves into tidy, efficient rows for hundreds of square miles as a result of natural selection.

Libertarians argue that the government which governs best, governs least. Yet, having read all-too-many Libertarian essays, discourses, rants, and tracts, I never cease to be confounded by the astonishing rarity with which Libertarians question whether, once government has been drowned in its proverbial bathtub, no other system of repression might arise to replace it, despite the overwhelming historical evidence that this is precisely what happens.

Human society requires structure, and where the structure is not defined by some semblance of consensus before-hand, it is defaulted upon, often with dire consequences. It is true that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in America, "big" government interfered little in the affairs of business. However, businesses were small because corporations were strictly limited in size and scope by the exigencies of public charter, hence there was little to interfere with. When granted their own "personhood" at the end of the nineteenth century, all checks on their growth were undone. Unfettered capitalism, as practiced by the British Empire and later by the United States following Reconstruction, was "tempered" only by a rigidly defined and merciless fatalism regarding the prospects for human happiness on Earth. The Enlightenment-era Aristotelian Deism and the philosophically nuanced Christianity of the founders gave way to those chapters of the Good Book found on either side of the savior, those passages in which plagues of locusts and running sores were either reported or predicted. Christ became the sugar-pill by which Social Darwinism, itself a bleakly Old Testament revelation, was swallowed.

This happened, because laissez faire capitalism places severe demands upon its practitioners. A laissez-faire society cannot and would not "liberate" us to live our lives as we see fit, with no one else legally obliged or permitted to account for us but our own conscience. It is not a free-love, chain-smoking, pot-growing, SUV-driving free-for all. Instead, it would create a series of drastic circumstances to which we would have no choice but to submit. A society with no minimum wage, no mandated health-coverage, no restrictions on the work-week, no checks on the predatory practices of credit-card companies, no required labels on food containers and no FDA at all, is a society in which even the most mundane acts of buying food and finding a job become a constant struggle against the wiles of unscrupulous salesmen.

It is worth considering what businesses already have done in the past few decades. They have demanded that their employees submit to drug tests, they have monitored their private emails and internet usage (a courtesy now recently extended to every American citizen), and they have sold personal information (credit ratings, social security numbers, etc.). Furthermore, they have created an economic situation in which one must be a debtor in order to receive an education and housing, and in which supposedly private matters regarding one's spending habits, previous addresses, and money problems are de facto public knowledge, available for purchase by other creditors. There is little evidence - no evidence - that the major corporations of today have any interest whatsoever in viewing their employees and customers as private citizens with rights. They routinely employ vast armies of lawyers to find loopholes in laws to protect consumers, and employ other, equally vast armies whose sole purpose is to lobby to have those loopholes widened to the point that they swallow all regulation completely. There are no company ethicists on the payroll. Shall we consider a world run entirely by private police forces, private schools, private roads and private prisons, all of whom are free to exclude membership and employment for whatever reason they like? These are all violations of our personal liberty by corporate powers which only a strong democratic government can prevent.

An “excess of government” in a democracy is a logical impossibility, since a democratic government is defined by two essential characteristics: 1) It values the egalitarian over the hierarchical, and 2) its purpose is to enact the will of the people, i.e., to subjugate the hierarchical institutions of business and the military to humanistic value systems and democratic will. A government that has come to insinuate a pernicious level of control over the lives of the citizens it is meant to represent is not an excessively democratic government at all. History will show that such tyrannies are either excessively militarized or excessively corporate. Such governments have retreated from the enlightenment values which seek to free the individual from the strictures of merciless hierarchies. A government that becomes incorporated or militarized, or which succumbs or defers to the corporation or the militant, is a government rapidly regressing into the social psychology of feudalism. The government that refuses to subjugate and regulate corporate power is the government which kicks open the door, welcoming into the corridors of power the divine right of numerous child-kings, despotic accountants, and cool-headed tabulators of human labor.

There is a reason why our society, a century ago, was so fiercely rigid and conservative, and this is it precisely. We were at the mercy of the giants of capitalism. Only God was more powerful, hence He was our only recourse for injustices suffered. This is likely the same reason for the growth of evangelical fundamentalism today. And yet it ultimately matters little whether the worker at the bottom believes in the Supreme Being or not. He should be concerned, gravely concerned, that his masters on Earth, having long lost a fear of the people and their means of representation, know no fear of Him either.

A close examination of the relationship between money and labor will be discussed in part 3.

Terrorists hate Saudis for their freedoms.

2007-04-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

The following appears in the New York Times today:

Saudi police arrested 172 Islamic militants today who they said were planning attacks that involved flying airplanes into oil fields.

The Saudi state TV channel Al-Ekhbariah broadcast footage of large weapons cache discovered buried in the desert.
The Saudi Interior Ministry said the militants were planning suicide attacks against public figures, refineries and other oil facilities, and military installations, some of them outside the kingdom; no specific locations were mentioned.

“They had reached an advanced stage of readiness, and what remained only was to set the zero hour for their attacks,” a spokesman for the ministry, Brig. Mansour al-Turki, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview. “They had the personnel, the money, the arms. Almost all the elements for terror attacks were complete except for setting the zero hour for the attacks.”

The ministry statement said that some of the people detained today had traveled to other countries to learn how to fly airplanes, so that they could carry out attacks in Saudi Arabia. There were also plans to storm a Saudi prison and free inmates, the ministry statement said.

More than $32.4 million in cash was seized by police, along with weapons and other items, the ministry said.

If these numbers are correct, this plot was even more ambitious and elaborate than 9/11. Knowing how much terrorist organizations are opposed to the freedoms enjoyed by Americans, Saudi Arabia must be a veritable Amsterdam of hedonism! Yes, nothing evokes free-lovin' feminism like Saudi Arabia. How could we not have seen this coming?

The Guardian Article on the same story adds the following observations.

The ministry did not name the terrorist organisation the suspects allegedly belonged to, referring to it only as a "deviant group", the usual term the Saudi government uses for Islamic terrorists such as al-Qaida.

Saudi state television showed rifles, handguns, magazines and explosives it said had been found buried in the desert. Other footage had investigators breaking tiled floors to uncover more weapons and digging up plastic sacks from the sand.

Saudi Arabia has been battling al-Qaida since the group launched a wave of bombings and shootings in the country in May 2003, including a suicide attack at a housing compound for foreigners in Riyadh that killed 35 people.

Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida's leader, is a Saudi national. He has previously called for attacks on the kingdom's oil facilities.

Watch out, Sweden!

On hiatus

2007-04-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

Oni-Goroshi's Bleeding Heart is on hiatus while I work on my fiction and various other projects. I hope to finish the several essays-in-progress I have drafted, though it could easily be a number of months before I can attend to them again.

Thank you for reading!

Outing the L-word, Part 1

2007-02-21T00:57:00.000-08:00

There are few "third party" philosophies at the edges of America's visible political spectrum that have a greater philosophical influence than Libertarianism, and by "few" I do, in fact, mean "none." To my knowledge, the Libertarians have yet to send a single offspring from their brood into Congress. Perhaps they do not need to, since their intellectual masterminds are in the payroll of the three of the most prominent conservative think-tanks in the nation (AEI, Heritage, and Cato Institute), their philosophy has infiltrated both the mainstream of the Republican and Democratic parties alike, and they have seen former Ayn Rand disciple and rockin' clarinetist Alan Greenspan run the U.S. Treasury for nearly two decades, through the terms of four U.S. presidents. While one might quibble that neither the red nor the blue of the political mainstream are actually proposing the radical near-elimination of government and unfettered free-market capitalism as would befit the Libertarian platform, there is no lack of competition between the parties to appear the more capitalistic and business-friendly. Nor can we overlook that both parties have shifted so far to the right on fiscal matters in the past three decades that the Republicanism of Eisenhower and Nixon seem to us now more like some Swedish daydream than an actual historical reality.

Libertarianism and its requisite conceits - the inherent rationality of the business model, the metaphysical gropings of Smith's "invisible hand," and other popular Zen tautologies - is not going away any time soon. As Republicans and Democrats continue to actively prove by example that the government can do no right, and Americans become increasingly fed up with bipartisan failure, this philosophy is only going to seem more appealing. And here is why we must be careful. For while "big L" Libertarianism seems to present a benevolent "live and let live" philosophy, what it serves is a desire to preserve an aristocratic power structure and a ruling elite. (Let me note here that, when I speak of "big L" Libertarians, I am referring specifically to the radical anti-government, laissez-faire capitalist libertarians who first made the little "l" big and turned "libertarian" from an adjective into a noun. I am not referring civil libertarians, left libertarians, anarchists, or what have you.)

There are essentially two main strands of Libertarian thought, which I will hereby characterize as the Deistic and the Atheistic. These appear more often in combination than they do alone, but they are distinct and their differences are important. The former and the earlier form, the Deistic, is the Libertarianism of old, the kind of free-market Panglossian positivism that long preceded the Libertarian party proper. This is the intellectual strain that gave us Adam Smith's aforementioned "invisible hand", as well as the Protestant work ethic and subsequent elevation of capitalists into a culture of capitalism. It is in some sense a mystical belief system, in that its primary conceit, the very bedrock upon which is all its philosophical tenets rest, is the premise that capitalism is actually an extension of natural law. It is no wonder that Social Darwinism so greatly appealed to those thinkers at the end of the 19th century, for here we witness the Enlightenment-lite on steroids. It is science and philosophy in action, and its truths were deemed unassailable and self-evident. It was true because what it claimed to be true was ever revealed to be true, endlessly. The rich deserved to be rich because they were rich, and the poor deserved to be poor because they were poor. Anyone poor who didn't deserve to be poor could become rich, and if they didn't succeed they can't have really deserved it. It never seemed to occur to anyone that this is precisely what the word "tautology" was invented for.

The latter, the Atheistic, is the modern Libertarian response to Marxism and Existentialism. This is the Libertarianism that was built anew after God died. For the cutting-edge Libertarian of the twentieth century, it was not enough to rely on psuedo-religious allegories and outmoded mystical beliefs. In an age that had given us Marx, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, etc., Smith and Mill were not only un-sexy - they were epsitemologically outdated. All of these brilliant questioners and doubters had to be answered. Thus, we have von Mises, Friedman, Hayeck, and, most audaciously, Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. While these thinkers varied from one another in a number of significant ways, one common factor, particularly among the latter two, was to wed their economic philosophers to detailed theories of knowledge. In other words, while the Deistic Libertarians of yore posited Capitalism as an extension of the natural world, the Atheistic Libs see it as an extension of the essential human impulse to survive and progress on one's own terms, and according to one's own means.

None of this, of course, changes the fact that the latter form of Libertarian thought - pants-down and pagan-friendly - is still essentially a rationalization of a fundamentally mystical psychological stance. The original capitalists were the early Protestants, for whom the accumulation of wealth was actually taken as a sign of divine grace. In this scheme it was natural and expected that all men and women were damned and that only a chosen few could escape perdition. Accumulated wealth was a sign that you might be off the hook. It is my proposition that, in America, this fundamental psychological relationship to money has not changed. We Americans merely have new names, hip and pseudo-scientific, for the old angels and demons that haunt us still.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, this view of money as a god-fetish persisted. The robber-barons of the post-Reconstruction era were not necessarily sadistic people. Some of them were, no doubt, but then there are sadists everywhere. However, most of them believed in a moral universe as well-defined and unassailable as the Ptolemaic star system and Aristotle's physics. The poor masses that manned their factories and writhed at their feet could not be helped. It was a perversion of God and nature to think otherwise. Such men believed themselves to be the most moral of all men, because only moral rectitude can lead to the accumulation of wealth. They were wealthy, so they believed, because God smiled upon them with the blessed face of Archangel Mammon.

(Permit me this digression. It seems to me that our Christian culture has managed to glorify - not simply permit, but actually actively promote via Biblical language and fable - every single human vanity and weakness that Christ expressly condemned. There is not a single one of his teachings that we do not proudly trample into the dirt by way of a longstanding tradition of anti-Christianity in Christ's name. Pride, murder, nationalism, money lending, even family values - every pillar of American culture and economics is anathema to Christ's teachings. And now, with all of this sinning, it makes sense that there are so many Christians here. Feeling guilty, folks? In need of forgiveness? The irony is that a truly Christ-like society would never know His name. They would have no need of Him.)

Many have observed that Soviet Russia was an "atheistic" society in name only. With its own party mythology, sacrificial Judas-Trosky, closed priesthood of unassailable intelligentsia, paranoia of unbelieving infidels, etc., it took the form of a theocratic state in every important manner. That it called itself an atheist/materialist state is something of a sick joke, for it is the emotional relationship of the individual to society that counts, and in the Soviet Union, that relationship was clearly mystical in the extreme.

The modern American Libertarian who fancies himself a creature of Reason and Science is in much the same ill-trimmed boat as the Soviet "materialist." He pays lip-service to science and modernity, but in his heart, he yearns for the spiritual grace of that uniquely American inner-glow that makes even the most petty of windfalls invigorating. There is furthermore, in all of us, that innate emotional stance - unbidden, unasked for - which fills us with a sense of "rightness" when our wallets are full and brings us shame when the bank book is empty. This is not a product of inherent human nature; for most of the eons in which humans walked this earth, such a fiercely emotional relationship to tiny man-made tools of convenience would have been impossible to conceive, except perhaps as evidence of insanity. However, in the present day, we Americans have not reached the stage of cultural introspection whereat we recognize money as the convenient fiction that it is - we still think it is as real and natural as the flesh on our bones. We think that it is "ours" in the same way that our limbs are ours. It is the Libertarian for whom this stance remains not just an unexamined artifact of historical psychology, but an explicit tenet, and it is the Libertarian who perpetuates this most harmful aspect of the American mythos and impedes our progress (The Fruit of our labor is ours, and many rights follow naturally from that - I will explain this proposition more thoroughly in part 2).

In any form, Libertarianism is nothing if it does not argue on behalf of the inherent rationality of the marketplace. The Deistic thesis is this: people who are free to use their god-given reason free of state coercion will make rational self-interested decisions, with their own human drives as their primary moral guideposts and social reciprocity their primary inhibitor against unethical behavior. The tautology that “product x has a value of y because someone paid y for it,” or that “executive q deserves salary z because someone was willing to pay them that”is a common theme even among conservatives who make no claim to be Libertarians. Even our Democrats now publicly treat taxation as a dangerous-but-necessary evil, the language that describes it as a moral imperative for a society based on reason is long lost to them.

In the Deistic Libertarian stance this argument at least has the benefit of being internally consistent. And, so long as one accepts certain precepts - that God exists, that he operates invisibly but perceptibly through natural law, that morality and wealth balance out a single equation much like energy and mass, and so forth - the argument has a genuine logical tightness. Certainly, it is tight enough that it is more easily refuted by assaulting one of its pillars than by demolishing it from within on its own terms (and this has been borne out by history, as it was in fact the erosion of strong Deism and the rise of skeptical empiricism that led to the old Libertarians' demise as intellectual heavyweights).

The atheistic Libertarian thesis has a more difficult time, because it must reconcile the unbridgeable gap between its rationalist propositions and its hungry heart by more duplicitous means. I'm not saying here that the Big Names in 20th century libertarianism were bad philosophers. I will say on record that they were brilliant. But even the most audaciously "rational" of them, Ayn Rand, could not relinquish the hold of money-worship (which in Rand's case was quite literal - a large dollar-sign was displayed over her funeral casket). The problem with believing that money and labor are metaphysically indivisible entities is that there are certain implications which cannot be avoided; for instance, that any taxation of the individual must be seen as outright theft, and any business venture that thrives as a result of government privileges or infrastructure (roads, bridges, government-funded research, government funded public education, government-funded law enforcement, little things like that) is a beneficiary of this theft, and that any profit earned by said venture is at least in part stolen property, and that therefore the profits of any business in a mixed economy are therefore owed in part to the public (preferably in the form of corporate taxes). Of course, you could save time and witness that money and labor are perfectly divisible at the outset, but that would undermine the money-mystique and might allow too much rational conversation to occur in public, where it might be accidentally overheard by children.

There is another problem with this inextricable money-labor meld, one of much greater philosophical import. And that is that it overlooks the totally artificial nature of money. Standardized currency does not exist in nature, and has no natural value in the same way that food, water, and shelter do. There are many social conditions, particularly among smaller populations, in which money has no meaningful value or purpose. Money, in fact, is a proxy for other things, a socially agreed-upon means of keeping track of who has done how much of what. In a very simple and small economy, currency might be rightly understood to closely parallel the objective value of the goods it purchases. This might even allow those who spend the ability to entertain the temporary fiction that the money has objective itself. But even here, it must be remembered that the money in one's pocket represents the following statement: "I performed the following measure of work-value, as calculated by the wage-value of the work multiplied by the time spent doing it." Money is a record of work that will be accepted by people who don't necessarily have reason to know you and trust you, and therefore do not know that what you plan to take from society is of equal value to what you have given. If nobody lied, we would probably not need money. The dollar is essentially a standardized narrative unit, a record of something that occurred (work you did) that most people in society have not directly witnessed.

But our economy does not run on simple currency, which directly parallels objective value. It runs on interest, speculation, and credit, all of which are open to severe manipulation and distortion of actual "value." It is not my contention that, in a mixed economy, there is no relationship between money and objective value. But I do claim that the more "fictional" money becomes - the more severely displaced from its immediate relationship to a closed economic system in which the social pyramid has a modest peak - the less it is a direct analogue of objective value. The $5,000 in interest that Bill Gates earns on one of his investments in the time it takes me to inhale surely has some meaningful relationship to his labors, but it is just as surely not the same relationship to the $5,000 it once took me three months to earn lifting boxes and sweeping floors. Put simply, the ability of money to buy more money radically alters the objective meaning of money. The labor-value relationship distorts like the passage of time at near-light speed. (Or think of it in other cosmological terms. A red dwarf and a black hole both begin life as stars. The historical difference that turns a star into a black hole is merely its greater mass - a simple abundance of quantity that leads to a completely different physical outcome, with its own physical laws). Surely, the money that one earns on interest, or by running a corporation, is not detached from labor altogether. But how much of it can fairly be called an analogue proxy of your labor?

But the Libertarian will have none of this. Money is money, even if you can earn gobs of it by pushing buttons for fifteen minutes a day.

How does this play out? Witness the debates commonly seen on TV between Republicans and Democrats when debating what they each plan to do with "your money." There are no Libertarians present here, but because their egg-heads are working Oz-like behind the scenes to fashion the next revolution(and because they love money, the boffins at Cato or Heritage have no problem with distributing a few of their more fashionable memes to the mainstream pundits). This is why the Republican will tell you that he or she believes that you should be able to keep your money, rather than giving it to the government, which is only going to spend it putting homosexual cartoon bears on public television. "Keep your money," says Lord Redstate, "and by 'keep your money,' I mean invest it in my frat brother's brokerage firm." This politician is peddling, not actual freedom, but the illusion of control, an emotional stance that make you feel enraptured in the divine promise of monetary grace, with interest. He does not, of course, believe that your money is yours. Should you decide that you do not want your money to pay for daisy cutters or prisons, and stop doing so, you will very quickly discover how little of what you thought to be yours is actually yours. I hope your prison-cell suits you. But notion that the government respects "your" money is popular enough that Democrats are loath to challenge it, and at best will only speak of alternate, perhaps more egalitarian investment plans. This is social pragmatism disguised as ideology at work, though it is pragmatism that benefits the aristocracy - the libertarian sugar-coating is what helps us swallow the false-freedom drug.

Please remember this: the only reason they don't take more of your money is that they are afraid of pissing you off. That's it.

Next witness, if you're feeling classy, the Catos and the Brookings have it out on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Here, the opposite occurs. The appeal to populism is dropped. You watch News Hour because you are a rational person, right? The drug of the intelligentsia is ideology disguised as pragmatism. The libertarian engages the Social Democrat on pragmatic terms. Here, the Libertarian is already an abject hypocrite, because he is pretending to defend a principle which his core philosophy requires him to reject with every fiber of his being (social pragmatism). But this does not stop him from arguing every Libertarian policy on pragmatic grounds. Look how our data shows that decreased taxes actually increase revenue! Observe, how cutting welfare benefits actually helps the poor! Caution, friends - that proposal on corporate ethics may create joblessness and actually make environmental regulations too difficult to manage! And so on. This is just a guesstimate, but I'd wager that when even the most ardent Libertarian appears on television, he spends about 80% or 90% of his airtime pretending to be an arch-pragmatist, rather than the anti-pragmatist, money-worshipping, moral absolutist that he actually is. He defends his policies on grounds (environmentalism, narrowing the race-class gap) that in fact are most likely of no concern to him, but which are most certainly of concern to those whose sympathies he wishes to arouse - i.e., the viewer, and his center-left opponent across the table, next to Gwen Iffil. In many cases, he may never say a word about his actual political agenda at all. This is because, exposed to the light of day, the actual Libertarian agenda is most likely unpalatable to most viewers.

I've experienced this duplicitous tactic first hand. A writer who shall remain nameless penned an article about budget cuts in higher education loans on a popular pro-Libertarian website. He works for the Cato institute. His thesis in a nutshell was that college kids should quit complaining about their losses - they are small after all, and since so many kids seem to be able to own personal stereos and laptops, and have 50 bucks a week on average to spend freely, they must be doing okay. He had some data to back this up. I emailed him, and challenged him with some other data. To his credit, he responded quickly, and addressed my points respectfully and thoroughly. We traded a few emails, looking at our respective data. We discussed means versus medians. This was all fine and dandy, but just when I thought I was really working up to a devastating analysis of the lowest income-quartile of the college-going population that would finally rip his mathematics to shreds, he jumped track, and showed his true colors. "Ultimately, what right do we have to ask that someone subsidize the education of someone else's children?" Oh...is that what we were talking about? Because that was not the subject of his essay, or so I thought. I thought the thesis of the essay was that "the cuts will not adversely affect the college population." In fact, the argument was, "they shouldn't get a bloody penny - let them pay their own way." Silly me.

But the Think Tank libertarian without reams of data and the semblance of benevolent pragmatism will never get a shot on News Hour, will never be able to peddle pieces of the Libertarian whole to professional politicians.

To fully grasp the hypocrisy at hand here, it should be understood that "pragmatic Libertarianism" is an oxymoron. Pragmatism is, by definition, a violation of the Libertarian definition of freedom and ethics. A true Libertarian would reject any social spending projects that relied on involuntary taxation even if it were proven that such projects were beneficial. This is because he believes in the primacy of the individual and, by extension, said individual's accumulated wealth, above any consideration of social benefit. This does not stop ideological Libertarians from pretending to speak "our" language of pragmatism in public debates, nor does it prevent conservatives or "small government" policy-makers from appropriating Libertarian arguments and language (i.e., "your money" arguments) when it suits them, even though they would never follow the implications of a particular argument all the way to embrace true Libertarianism. This makes strange bedfellows of two radically divergent (and clearly hypocritical) pundits. And it is mutually beneficial arrangement. Conservatives and Republicans get the benefit of the Libertarian's intellectual heavy-lifting, along with its requisite lexicon (Virtually every Republican heavyweight from Reagan onward has cited a Libertarian economist or philosopher as a fundamental influence), whose employment in public debate allows them to seem like a pro-freedom party while they pursue fundamentally regressive policies of wealth re-distibution and radical social engineering. Libertarians benefit because they have mainstream pundits recklessly tossing about their favored memes, which slowly-but-surely become embedded in the public consciousness, where they eventually take root. As long as Republicans succeed with Libertarian-sounding soundbites on economic policy, the more Democrats must respond on like terms - and hence the more the mainstream in general debates politics around a central axis whose position is ever-drifting in the Libertarian direction on economic matters. This benefits Republican and Democratic politicians in the short term, and the Libertarian agenda in the long-term. If you doubt this, consider how many decades have passed since a discussion of raising federal taxes - payroll or corporate - has not died and disintegrated upon the grace of the first beam of daylight.

Let's step back and summarize. The Diestic Libertarian had a divine mandate. The Athiestic libertarian must replace metaphysics with scientism, but supply "proof" in the form of data where once faith sufficed. The latter chips away at the managed economy by bits and pieces, methodically assaulting its intellectual infractructure with little calculated bombs of doubt. He does not reveal that his true agenda is the collapse of the building entire (flash quiz - what do Osama Bin Laden and Fountainhead hero Howard Roark have in common?) But neither renounces the fallacy of money worship.

What, then, is money? And what is its true relationship to labor in a complex economy? How do we achieve a codified means of reconginizing individual rights, while resorting an objective understand of money and social value?

This will be discussed in Part 2

9/11 and conspiracy

2007-02-20T23:17:00.000-08:00

I consider myself a skeptic, before all else. "Left-wing", yes, and a pagan-atheist and a "progressive" and "humanist" and so forth, but before all else, I am a skeptic. It is my skepticism that has led me to my political beliefs - which I hold by default, the alternatives being worse - rather than the other way around.

I am especially skeptical of people who cobble together extraordinary narratives together out of suspect evidence, particularly when such narratives are glued together by a kind of nudging innuendo. This is why I found the "case against Saddam" suspect from the get-go, and why Colin Powell's WMD speech at the U.N. prior to the invasion of Iraq seemed to me so transparently desperate and baseless that I am amazed to this day it actually worked on anyone. It is also why I find myself growing queasy in response to some of the 9/11 conspiracy theories circulating through the blogosphere.

Before I get accused of being a plant for the Bush administration, let me first explain the following: I am willing to entertain the possibility that our government might have turned a blind eye - either deliberately or out of hubris or incompetence - thus allowing the machinations behind 9/11 to occur unimpeded. There is certainly a historical precedent for it. I am even willing to consider that a very small number of operatives within the administration may have provided, in some small way, a window of opportunity for the attacks to occur. Maybe. I call this the "weak conspiracy theory," and I consider it at least worthy of debate.

But many conspiracy theorists want me to swallow so much more. I am being asked to believe that an administration, whose operational incompetence demonstrates their consistent inability to organize even a decent clam-bake, somehow orchestrated a vast and complex conspiracy of evidence-planting and controlled demolitions to bring about the events of 9/11, and did so with the assured result that it would get the public behind a premeditated plan to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

No.

Let me first clarify something. I live in NYC. I saw the towers burn with my own eyes. I know someone who lost a friend on one of the aircraft, and another who lost their beloved in the WTC itself. I have friends who saw the planes go into the building. That part happened. There were planes, and those planes hit the towers.

I was not present at the Pentagon, but I've read a number of accounts by folks that the security camera does not show a plane hitting the pentagon. This was news to me. I recall very clearly watching the security cam video (the real one, not that piece of quackery from the parking lot that some bozo put up on You Tube) in slow mo. I saw something very interesting: a big jet plane going into the Pentagon.

I have also been told that United 93 must have been shot down, rather than having crashed. This I can believe, though I don't see why it points to a grand conspiracy. The plane was thought to be heading for the White House, hence the motivation for shooting it down. That the administration would not want to cop to this should hardly be shocking - the public prefers a tale of heroic sacrifice (again, I'm not making a claim for either scenario).

Let's go back to the World Trade Center. Here's what is always claimed - it was a "controlled demolition."

The World Trade Center Towers were not felled by a "controlled demolition". This is very easy to surmise by watching their collapse, side by side with a film of an actual controlled demolition. In a controlled demolition, explosives are placed at key points throughout the structure of a building. They are detonated in a carefully timed but very rapid sequence, allowing the building to fall straight downwards in a harmless cascade of liquid rubble. You can see, in such videos, little jets of debris shooting out along the edge of the building as these timed explosives detonate.

In the collapse of the WTC - which I had the misfortune of viewing roughly 30 or 40 times from as many angles as I was stuck in my Jersey City apartment the entire day of September 11 (I had made it outside that morning, and was able to see Tower One's fiery crown from the window of a commuter bus on Kennedy Blvd.) - this is not what happens. What you see is this: the building buckles at its weakest point, and collapses in an uncontrolled mess. The fact that the debris takes a more or less vertical trajectory (as they would in a controlled demolition) is not incriminating, since this was a modern skyscraper, and as such was designed to collapse in this fashion. The physical principles which make this possible are hardly a state secret.

So then, are we to believe that the explosives were placed only at those key joints, in the vicinity of the plane crash? That whoever planted the bombs knew roughly which floors would be impacted, that the pilots could be counted on to aim their altitude so precisely (for if one failed in this respect, the gig is up, big time)? Are we to believe that said explosives could be expected to remain in place following the impact, and that they would not be detonated before the "right time" by the heat of burning jet fuel? That the detonators, wires, and other requisite electronics would also survive impact and fire? That waiting 90 minutes so that everyone on the lower floors could escape would generate the greatest amount of "terror"?

Let's begin with a few observations, which, with a moment's reflection, should seem self-evident. First, if there was a conspiracy in which certain members of the Bush administration, Bush himself was not aware of it. At the very least, he had no foreknowledge. To believe otherwise would be to believe the following: that Bush felt the best way to rally the terrified public behind him would be to give a reading of "My Pet Goat" during the attacks, and then spend seven minutes frozen in indecision before rolling cameras, until prompted to action by his secret service men. This, he thought, will really get the People Behind Their Leader.

Even the best politicians cannot predict the future. Unprecedented acts (like massive terrorist attacks on American soil) cannot provide guaranteed outcomes. How could the administration have known what the effect on the public would be? It is easy enough for us to know what the effect was, but in the planning stages, does it seem likely that the conspirators would be certain that 9/11 style attacks would have the desired effect? Might they not just as easily turn the public against the administration that failed to prevent it? In fact, after the short-term gain in support for Bush, is this not what has actually happened?

Conspiracy theorists like to cite historical precedent, in which evidence exists that certain higher-ups may have had foreknowledge and/or involvement in an attack on American targets. They cite Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the sinking of the USS Maine. What is often overlooked is that every one of these incidents involved a country with which the United States has been in a publicly known state of heightened tension for an extended period of months or years previous to and leading up to the incident, and the pressures to go to war had been long mounting. To place the straw that breaks the camel's back, you must first have already placed a half-million previous straws (incidents of perceived belligerence), and you must also have a camel (public animosity and fear). Neither existed with Afghanistan, nor did it then exist in the public mind with Iraq. No one was going to rally the nation to war to prevent the imposition of strict Sharia, or the destruction of Buddha statues, or the old-hat reality of Saddam having used WMDs in the past.

We would therefore have to believe that the White House conspirators were going to bank this enormously risky and (compared to the aforementioned "conspiracies") complicated venture on a total non sequitur. If invading Iraq was the ultimate goal, might not our conspirators, in their great omniscience, have managed to find some willing Iraqi terrorists? Or Iranians? Would they really have willingly chosen as their ideal terrorist Osama Bin Laden, whose family ties to certain Texas oilmen would (and did) become all too unpleasant rather quickly? Try putting yourself in their place - it does not make much sense. In fact, it seems like the worst of all possible conspiracy plans.

And then you have the problem of scale. If we are going to assume a "strong" conspiracy, with all the requisite intricate planning implied by Loose Change et al, couldn't they have cut a much wider swath of destruction, and created a more fearful attack? People capable of sabotaging the WTC ahead of time could have just as easily smuggled a nuclear warhead onto one of those planes. They could've taken out major bridges. Why the cumbersome operation of substituting a plane for a missile at the last minute? Even assuming a missile was required to damage the Pentagon, would not the plane have done the trick? The theorists complain that the damage to the Pentagon was not severe enough to have come from a jet airliner. What, then, is the logic of hijacking a plane, and then substituting it for a missile at the last moment to minimize damage in a conspiracy whose goal is to terrify the public?

Why do I harp on about this?

Conspiracy theories about 9/11 are becoming increasingly popular with the public. As someone who is allied with "The Left" - though I myself would prefer a world where I'm not consigned by default to either "wing" - I don't want to see the case against Bush weakened by giving the Left a bad name. Our best defense against Bush or any president like him in the future is our capacity to reason, to demand a rational presentation of the facts. This requires a fundamental understanding of what separates theory from fact, and evidence from a conclusion.

But, unfortunately, the strong-conspiracy theorists on the Left are almost identical in their emotional stance and methodology to the creationists and the "Intelligent Design" crowd on the right. They require that all epochal events are the work of a master planner. They mistake gaps and incongruities in the chain of evidence - which is a fact of life in any complex historical event - for affirmation of a forgone conclusion. Even worse, they accuse anyone unwilling to follow them into the heart of their theoretical labyrinth of being close-minded, obstructionist, or even complicit.

The belief in a tidy universe is common fallacy of the Left and Right alike. Bush's Fundies and the conspiracy-theory segment of the Left are, it seems to me, different sides of the same coin. They both believe that The Leader is Powerful, and that his Influence is Vast. They both believe that Everything Happens for a Reason, and the search for Signs and Premonitions occupies their every effort. They both believe in a forgone conclusion about the material facts of reality, and no rationalization is too hyperbolic for them - bombs were planted, invisible missiles launched, and God placed the dinosaur fossils in the rocks to test our faith in his creation. I also wonder if there is not some old-fashioned American hubris amongst the conspiracy-mad Left - just as many Fox News viewers cannot conceive of the 9/11 attacks coming from anyone other than the world's most deadly enemy (rather than a few third-rate terrorists with a shoe-string budget), it seems certain that others cannot conceive of an event so significant as the 9/11 attacks that it is not invested with some other "higher" meaning. We have all been living in a bubble, and for many of us, it is inconceivable that such extraordinary things happened as a result of such mundane realities as incompetence and failure.

The danger here is manifold. The first and most immediate problem is that, if we are to accept that the strong conspiracy is true, we are obviously quite helpless. A government which can pull off such a complex hoax is not only diabolical beyond measure, it as also of virtually unlimited power. We would have to assume that many other aspects of our daily lives are, in fact, orchestrated by the OverBush, and that we may never know the depth of his power. Scary stuff. I'm sure Bush and Cheney would love to hear that we fear them so.

The other very significant problem is that the strong conspiracy theory blinds us to the crimes we know to be true - crimes we actually have a chance of doing something about if we keep or heads on and our senses intact. I am satisfied, for instance, that burning jet fuel is hot enough to weaken (not melt) steel girders to the point where they would buckle. It may be the case that, for many metallurgists and chemists and physicists, this explanation is not entirely satisfactory (though I doubt it). So what? I'm saving my skeptical powers for where they are needed right now - as the Bush administration wags its saber at Iran, as our media continue to distort and misrepresent virtually everything that happens in the Middle East, and as right-wing lawyers undermine our Constitution. In light of these pressing issue, is not the question of bending metals little more than a scientific curiosity?

Priorities, people. Priorities.

Marriage and Civilization

2007-01-18T19:52:00.000-08:00

Seven states have just voted to "ban" something which does not yet exist in any of them, fixing an imaginary problem: gay marriage. You hear a lot, from "defenders" of marriage, that we are meddling with an institution which, in what they astonishingly refer to as its "traditional" form, is the "basis of civilization." If we "redefine" marriage, we are undermining civilized society.

As this public debate continues through the coming year, you will hear a lot about "tradition." Dark humorist that I am, I find that there is something deeply comedic about defending a "tradition" that is hardly 100 years old.

Say again?

What is "marriage" then, as you and I understand it? Let's try this on for size: Man loves woman, woman loves man. Man proposes to woman, woman gives her consent. Man and woman marry, and begin a family. They are partners, complimentary halves, with equality under the law. This is just as true in the reddest, red heart of Wyoming as it is in Massachusetts. It is also, please note, a complete aberration from the institution of marriage as it has been practiced for thousands of years the world over.

"Traditional" marriage - the basis of civilization, remember - works on one very simple, and, until quite recently (historically speaking), unshakable premise: woman is property. The traditional marriage does not ask the woman's consent in marriage, but rather the consent of the woman's father. It does not grant the woman a right to divorce an abusive husband, nor does it consider the woman's happiness or personal fulfillment a pertinent issue at all. Any "civilization" before the 20th century would have laughed in the face of any woman who spoke of such concepts - for this reason, suffragettes and proto-feminists were relegated to the lunatic fringe of political discourse for centuries. And then, when they finally gained real political traction at the beginning of the previous century, they were considered a threat to civilization.

We often overlook just how many features of our present-day marriage rites are artifacts of this older mindset - we follow them out of a kind of cozy sentimentality without contemplating their meaning very much. Nonetheless, the facts are what they are: the marriage rite originated as a religious ceremony to commemorate the transfer of property (woman) from one family to another - this is why her family name changes and the man's does not; she in the hands of new stewards. She wears white to symbolize that she is not "used goods" - that her purity is in tact (and recall that in a number of societies it is still "traditional" for virginity to be proven before marriage by forced examination, and to display, on the wedding night, the bloody aftermath of the broken hymen on the bedsheets by hanging them from the window for everyone to see. Ahh, tradition). In the eyes of modern society, even the most conservative among us would properly view this process as enslavement.

Enslavement though it is - it was the basis of what was then charitably called "civilization". Every aspect of society - economy, politics, and culture - was organized according to this fundamentally propertarian view of gender relations. An especially important consequence of this, for purposes of the argument I'm making here, is that homosexual marriage before the 20th century would've been inconceivable, though the sameness of gender would've been only one of many complications. How, for instance, could one free man become the property of another? How could a woman become a property-holder? Marriages, after all, were inevitably accompanied by dowries, land titles, etc. Who gives the dowry to whom, and in what name? Whatever moral issues may have been at stake in a homosexual union, they would have also been accompanied by insurmountable economic and legal complications.

Yet another thing that should be remembered about traditional society - "homosexuality", while readily observed and often feared, was not then viewed as a rival to or alternative deviation from heterosexuality - it was a different thing entirely. When it came to relations between women, it was rarely even viewed as a form of sexual behavior at all - at least not until Freud came on the scene. It was most likely seen as a form of (perhaps underdeveloped or perverted) love, but this would've occurred in a climate wherein "love" as we know it today (as an expression of personal values) wasn't given much importance in one's choice of marriage partner, where economics ruled above all - in every social class - and "marrying for love" was itself considered a potential danger to civilized society.

Changing this balance of power, was, without question, an attempt to change the course of civilization as a whole - and so it has. The ascension of women to a state of legal equality with men is more than a correction of some historical mistake, a "righting of past wrongs" as is usually portrayed in keeping with the enforced blandness and soporific simplicity of our history textbooks. It occurred as part of a fundamental revolution in society that was engendered - was, in fact, required and made inevitable - by Enlightenment thinking. The revolutionary idea was this: that rights belong to individuals, rather than groups. Unless we are prepared to advance the implausible, largely indefensible thesis that the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, and the gay rights movement all came to fruition within a few decades of one another after millennia in the darkness purely by coincidence, we are stuck with the inevitable conclusion that they are branches which share the common root of individualism.

Individualism is, indeed, a threat to the old order. It was called out as such from the very beginning, and the prognostications regarding its impact have been largely correct - Western civilization has changed, completely and irrevocably. We are now born into a world in which more of us than ever before can expect to live a life of our choosing, pursuing our own interests, and finding our own loves, regardless of what others have to say about it.

We have seen the statistics, and we know that fundie Christians get divorced just as often as us pagans, and for more or less the same reasons. It is time that these defenders-of-tradition take a close, informed look at their own lives and understand that they enjoy something that is not traditional at all, but rather new and wonderful and more truly human than anything that has ever gone before - the pursuit of love according to one's own values and desires above all else. For this happiness, this new-found freedom which is barely four generations old, and which upturns, eviscerates, and consigns to the dust-heap six-thousand years of "tradition", they have the fringe activists the past to thank; the feminists and civil libertarians who internalized Enlightenment ideals and saw their implications while most of the world was still relinquishing control of their lives to the commandments of long-dead ancestors.

Any constitutional amendment that "protects" marriage from being practiced by homosexuals would do more than just legally entrench a form of homophobic discrimination - it would also require the entrenchment of a legal distinction between "male" and "female". This is not something that people seem think about when they discuss the issue of banning gay marriage. Such an amendment would have to explain why individuals who are recognized as having equal status relative to the state - which, we must recall, is expressly forbidden from discriminating on the basis of gender - are nonetheless distinct entities when entering into this one particular social contract, and no others. There is immediately a glaring legal inconsistency: if my rights are equally protected, and my partner's as well, how do they become unequal in combination?

At this point we need to make a very important distinction - that currently there are two distinct aspects of marriage; the religious and the civil. This is not just some academic exercise. For the religious and the secular alike, the distinction is crucial and immediate.

The marriage ceremony, as already stated, has its origins in religion, and hearkens back to a time when church and state were not separate entities. The stated purpose of the marriage ceremony is to perform a ritual, declaring and binding one's responsibilities to church and community before one's own God. It is a spiritual exercise, the specifics of which vary greatly from one religion to another.

The modern "civil" marriage - the kind performed at City Hall, for instance - is also a declaration of commitment before representatives of one's community, but it is done before the eyes of the State, rather than God. The procedure results in numerous binding legal and ethical obligations, but it is, for all intents and purposes, bereft of formalized spiritual meaning. It is binding in that specific ethical privileges and responsibilities are declared, though this is done without reference to theology or metaphysics. In other words, the moral dimension, which speaks to one's relationship with one's own God or conscience, is not spoken for in this affair of the State. This is by design, and is a direct and necessary consequence of the separation of Church and State.

When one is married in an American church, one is married before the Church and the State more or less simultaneously, since for convenience's sake the State allows for the certification of religious functionaries as civil functionaries as well for purposes of the ceremony. But make no mistake - these are two separate contracts. It is entirely possible, for instance, to be married in the eyes of the State only (as in the City Hall marriage). As far as the State is concerned, and as the secular couple is concerned, the City Hall man and woman are every bit as much married as a devout Baptist couple, though the latter would no doubt see it differently since the former made no pledge of marriage before God, and in fact may not even believe in God. I'll furthermore wager that for the devout Baptist couple being married before God is of far greater importance, with the marriage before the State being only a distant second, necessary as it is for purely pragmatic reasons. In fact, one could easily be married before one's own God without being married before the State, if one's religion or one's priest is not recognized by the State as having such civic authority. Such marriages occur every day.

The question, then, is not who gets to "define" marriage. Every faith defines marriage differently. There are already a number of Christian churches, for instance, which are willing to recognize and perform homosexual marriages this very moment, even though the State, in what can now only be called an act of religious discrimination, refuses to recognize them. There are other churches which do not recognize such marriages. It is the business of each individual faith to define marriage on its own terms, just as it defines God, family, life and death on its own terms, even though all of these terms have specific and universal meanings in relation to the State. The State, a separate entity as mandated by our Constitution, must not seek to prefer one religion's views over another.

Some of those who oppose gay marriage express fears that their own church will be forced to recognize marriages which they find morally objectionable. This is a free country, after all, and does freedom of religion not also include the right to uphold religious views that consider homosexuality to be a sin? This is a fair question, and if we are honest with ourselves, there is only one fair answer to it: no one's church should be forced to make such a recognition. Just as many Christian churches might consider a Buddhist wedding - or a City Hall wedding for that matter - to be spiritually meaningless (as it is absolutely their right to do so), there can be no ethical requirement for them to recognize a gay marriage within the confines of their own religious community. Their recognition of a gay marriage need only go so far as their relationship to the State; to wit, in the buying of houses, allocation of insurance benefits, etc., just as it does for my City Hall wedding. I would never seek to force a devout Christian to recognize my marriage in any religious sense - it is his right to object to my lifestyle in the most vehement sense, as long as he does not interfere with it. This, in essence, is the classic distinction between morals (measuring one's behavior according to God, personal conscience, or other metaphysical criteria) and ethics (measuring one's behavior in light of social obligation, civic duty, and the notion of one's rights within society as protected and codified, in this case, by the State).

There inevitably arrives, at some point in the conversation, the objection that gay marriage is a "slippery slope", leading to three-way and four-way marriages, and perhaps to bestiality (it is interesting how the Christian Right seems to live in a cosmos of slippery slopes - gay sex that leads to screwing chickens, joint-smoking that leads to mainlining heroin and prostitution, rock music that leads to suicide, and video games that lead to Columbine...it must be hard work, stepping so carefully all the time, never being able to run and frolic). Leaving aside the goat-fuckers for a moment, let's address the question of multiplicity. A three-way marriage is objectionable...why exactly? Because a child might have too big a family? Too much security and love? Because it sounds like too much fun? Certainly, such an arrangement may not be for everyone. Nonetheless, there may be certain individuals for whom a three-way marriage might provide a kind of perfect balance and stability that they could not otherwise have. Just think of how those lover's spats would play out, when there is always a third party observing from the sidelines! Or when one can always resort, thanks to the numerical situation, to democratic resolutions. The potential for self-knowledge in a relationship wherein one has two distinct mirrors is potentially greater than in traditional coupling (in Berkeley, I knew such a threesome - three women who had been committed to the triad for fifteen years. One of them confessed to me, one afternoon, that "none of us would have made it as a couple - in any combination."). Anyone concerned that the availability of state-sanctioned threesomes might lead to abuse need only consider the following - the legal and economic obligations of a two-way marriage are already more than enough to dissuade any but the most serious applicants. A three-way would necessarily double those responsibilities for each individual involved. It is therefore likely that only those most ardently committed to their triad would dare undertake it. As for the bestiality-types, it should be clear that this question answers itself - no meaningful contract can exist on equal terms between man and beast, so the point is moot. The specter of cross-species pollination it is not a rational objection, but rather a form of bigoted fear-mongering.

Western society is a work-in-progress, still struggling to escape its adolescence, and no doubt will be for centuries to come. Our culture is still "growing up" to the true implications and responsibilities of a free society. Properly viewed, we are a young species, which spent 99% of its time on this Earth hiding in caves and throwing spears at wildebeest. Recorded history is a very recent invention. We are now undergoing a vast transformation as a newly-technological, science-wielding species, for whom many of the old superstitions are still alive and kicking, and informing - unknown to our conscious minds - the subtext of our fears and assumptions about other people, and the natural world in general.

The free society, as conceived by the Founders, was intended to be a laboratory, a place of national self-discovery. They said so, quite explicitly. This, in fact, is the ultimate benefit of liberal freedom. It is not that we would produce wealth and comfort - these were happy by-products, a means to an end, a sign that things are running as they should. The purpose of freedom is the betterment of man. It is crucial to add that this can only occur, as again explained by the FF's and their fellow philosophers-of-the-day, that he only freedom worth the name can occur in a society that worships reason. Superstition - the systematic entrenchment of false ideas and methods of knowing - is the modus opperandi of kings and tyrants - infants on thrones claiming divine mandate. Freedom is meant to be the centrifuge in which minds are enriched, where reason can be purified and shed of historical detritus. And, so, we have ended the subjugation of women, because we understand, on the basis of science and reason, that their subjugation was wrong. We have ended slavery and legal segregation because reason demanded what superstition forbade. All those dire predictions about the end of civilization occurring when men and women of all colors could stand on equal footing turned out to be completely wrong. And yet, now, we are to believe that those who claim, without a shred of evidence, that homosexuals are a threat to civilization, are now predicting the future correctly?

To be fair, there are many among the anti-gay marriage crowd who take a more moderate position. They are not claiming to object to homosexuality in general, nor do they equate same-sex love with animalism. Some may even favor the creation of "same sex unions," but wish to retain the term "marriage" solely for heterosexual relationships. They no longer view homosexuals with fear or repulsion, and genuinely wish to extend to them a certain amount of socially normalizing tolerance. It is important that we address this position as well, since it is well-entrenched in the American political center.

Here is the central tenet of this position:

By changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex relationships, this will change marriage into something which emphasizes sexual love over child-rearing. This will have a negative effect on heterosexual marriages and families, by making the welfare of children less important to society.

I think the above is a fair representation of the views held by many moderate (and perhaps moderately religious) Americans on this topic. This view ties into a concern that virtually every American can sympathize with or relate to - the secularization of mainstream culture. There exists the popular social narrative that our society is becoming too selfish, that we commodify every aspect of our lives, and that the urban elite and the dream makers of film and fashion have to come to view child-rearing as an impediment to lifestyle.

There are two important objections to this. The first and simpler is again historical: compare the welfare of children in our modern secular culture to the same at any previous era in our history. Never has child-rearing been taken more seriously. If anything, middle-class secular urban culture smothers its children with excessive concern over their self-esteem and emotional health. Where these sentiments do not occur, where sex is engaged in recklessly, without regards to its consequences, is not amongst secular communities devoid of religion, but rather in populations where the only choice presented is ascetic self-denial or hellfire (and this stark absolutism is there, in only slightly altered forms, in mainstream hip-hop or suburban grunge-metal - the fiery preacher is not the only proselytizer, nor the pop icon the only painter of the apocalypse). For the young and confused, such dark fatalism is unbearable, and hellfire seems the preferable choice if the path to it provides momentary release. Look at our secular culture directly, and what is its essential characteristic? It is choice and deliberation - that one's life, including one's children, occurs as a serious of planned events. Secularism is the enshrinement of human intentionality, whereas traditional western religion seeks the glorification of human helplessness and fallibility. Which of these tenets is the most pro-child?

But perhaps I have deviated too far from the claims of the moderate, who wish to find a happy medium between the spiritual and the secular world. They might state that their concern is rather more simple - that choice and personal responsibility are all well and good, but that society must have some standard, that it must hold something specific as an ideal, rather than idealizing personal choice above all else. They will argue that difference can be tolerated, that there can be a place for everyone, but that heterosexual marriage must be the highest ideal in our society, and that child-rearing must be marriage's ultimate raison d'etre. After all, without procreation, society ceases to exist. Ergo, the health of our civilization requires that marriage must continue to represent what is always has, even before the emancipation of women, i.e., the investment in the generations to come. Therefore, the State has a vested interest in defining marriage in its ideal (heterosexual) form.

Here, I wholeheartedly agree with the intention, but not the conclusion. Love and commitment should be a legal and social prerequisite to having children. For most of history, when birth control was both unavailable and/or inadequate, mutual love and attraction as a prerequisite for marriage was seen by most as a foolish, pie-in-the-sky luxury, and marriage had to be enforced to make sure that children had parents. Once a woman become pregnant (whether as an outcome of genuine sexual love, or simple recklessness, or rape) a man had to be made to stay and take care of wife and child. This was when society afforded only men a "self" - women were seen as inherently self-less( i.e., both docile and naturally altruistic). The male ego had to be restrained and made responsible. This social coercion did not necessarily lead to happiness, nor was it meant to. It was simply in place to make people take responsibility for their actions, to face consequences whether it made them happy or not.

However, one of the great outcomes of the sexual revolution is the now widespread acceptance that happier parents have healthier children. As such, our modern culture recognizes that women experience desire (i.e. have an ego) just as men do, and encourages planned parenthood rather than accidental parenthood. Our modern view of marriage posits that one should be in love first, and have a secure relationship, before attempting to reproduce. This means that we lead happier lives, and do not have to foist our bitterness about being trapped in an unwanted marriage on our kids. So it seems to me that defining marriage as being about love first and foremost, would actually benefit children rather than hurt them. In other words, marriage would be defined as "mutual love and lifelong commitment." That would be our social ideal. It may lead to children or it may not. But at least by putting sexual love first, you create a cultural climate in which people learn to take love and sexual happiness seriously, as something socially important. When marriage is no longer a thing which can be acceptably resorted to once one has failed all other tests of personal responsibility and foresight, when marriage is elevated to a question of love and choice, and not as a coercive means to mend human accident, when people are expected to be in control of their lives (and the pursuit of personal happiness is the greatest incentive to self-control), marriage is elevated, not denigrated, and children will benefit.

Children with single parents are not the victims of re-defined marriage. Unplanned children come about when two people took risks that were not appropriate for their lack of commitment to one another. If we want to foster a healthy society, the last thing we should encourage is the idea that marriage is an alter upon which adults sacrifice their happiness to live for their offspring. We should encourage gay marriage, and use the word "marriage," for all the reasons the conservatives and moderates have us deny it to gays; because it would promote the belief that mutual love and happiness must come before any attempt to have children.

There are many who decry the sexual revolution for what they claim to be its negative effects on children and families. I, on the other hand, applaud the sexual revolution for what I claim to be its positive effects on children and families. I'm thereby suggesting that personal responsibility and personal happiness, far from being at odds with each other, are in fact inextricably related; you can't have one without the other. The sexual abandon that many associate with the detritus of the sixties is, in fact, a product of great social unhappiness and a lack of self-knowledge, and the best corrective to this is the intellectual and emotional elevation of sex and love - in all its forms - to something more than a means (and duty) to procreate. Moderation must be learned though the responsible pursuit of personal experience. There is no room for young individuals to learn the habits of self-discipline and happiness when all experience is forbidden to them by society's moralists. I'll leave it to the reader to say if this makes me a classic Aristotelian or a radical leftist.

Neo-cons and the "Nanny State"

2006-12-16T22:25:00.000-08:00

Now that the neo-Conservative philosophy is experiencing its first full-year of genuine crisis, it is not surprising that we find its most ardent purveyors offering up some ever more desperate and audacious claims. I have read many neo-rants in my time, but never have I seen so many of their pseudo-Nietzschean fallacies compressed into so small a space as can be found here, in this book review by Daniel Pipes. This weighty nugget, in which he summarizes the views expressed in Mark Steyn's latest book (with which Pipes more or less agrees), might very well be the dwarf-star alloy of neo-con thought-baubles:

He begins with the legacy of two totalitarianisms. Traumatized by the electoral appeal of fascism, post-World War II European states were constructed in a top-down manner,"so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures." As a result, the establishment has "come to regard the electorate as children."

Second, the Soviet menace during the Cold War prompted American leaders, impatient with Europe's (and Canada's) weak responses, effectively to take over their defense. This benign and far-sighted policy led to victory by 1991, but it also had the unintended and less salutary side effect of freeing up Europe's funds to build a welfare state. This welfare state had several malign implications.

The nanny state infantilized Europeans, making them worry about such pseudo-issues as climate change while feminizing the males.
It also neutered them, annexing "most of the core functions of adulthood," starting with the instinct to breed. From about 1980, birth rates plummeted, leaving an inadequate base for today's workers to receive their pensions.
Structured on a pay-as-you-go basis, it amounted to an intergenerational Ponzi scheme under which today's workers depend on their children for their pensions.
The demographic collapse meant that the indigenous peoples of countries like Russia, Italy, and Spain are at the start of a population death spiral.
It led to a collapse of confidence that in turn bred "civilizational exhaustion," leaving Europeans unprepared to fight for their ways.
To keep the economic machine running meant accepting foreign workers. Rather than execute a long-term plan to prepare for the many millions of immigrants needed, Europe's elites punted, welcoming almost anyone who turned up. By virtue of geographic proximity, demographic overdrive, and a crisis-prone environment, "Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans," Mr. Steyn writes.

Arriving at a time of demographic, political, and cultural weakness, Muslims are profoundly changing Europe: "Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare." Put differently, "Premodern Islam beats post-modern Christianity." Much of the Western world, Mr. Steyn flat-out predicts, "will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries." With even more drama, he adds, "It's the end of the world as we know it."

Let's begin at the beginning, with the word "infantalize." I have used this word on more than one occasion myself, in describing the effects of modern consumerism on Western popular culture. This is hardly an original observation - observers left, right, and center have been pointing this out for most of the post-war era (One of the more powerful arguments in which this plays a role - though not a central one - occurs in Herbert Marcuse's later works. In fact, it seems that the most interesting of Steyn's ideas via Pipes, i.e., those pertaining to the relationship of Fascism to post-war socialism in the West, and the tendency of both to "infantalize", are lifted wholly from Marcuse and other New Left philosophers, sans the critique of paternalism, sans the critique of capitalism, sans the pro-liberation agenda, sans the intricate examination of the relationship between industrialism and social conformity, in short, sans everything that would put these potent notions in their proper context. But this would be far from the first time the chosen philosophy of the Right has been little more than a sophomoric appropriation of choice tidbits from the Left. Many of the godfather neo-cons were Trotskyites back in the day.) However, only from the modern American Right will you find this variant; that European culture has suffered from this trait far more greatly than have we Americans, and that the European Welfare State is wholly to blame.

That the European is more spoiled, less self-sufficient, less personally responsible, more reckless, more promiscuous, and less an adult than the American is a very popular part of the American mythology - it is one of the ways we are meant to feel better about ourselves. That the European comes by these weaknesses though the smothering security of their "Nanny State" is considered a matter of settled science in the American Right and Center - the notion perpetually infects all of our pubic discussions on how to deal with our own issues of poverty, welfare, health care, education, and pretty much any other public expenditure you could care to name. And yet it is, in a way that is almost painfully obvious to any American who has even been to Europe, the exact opposite of the truth.

Take the most obvious surface detail of the European welfare state, namely, the fact that it provides welfare. Europeans can usually count on being housed and provided an indefinite, liveable income while unemployed, can receive a quality university education for a minimal charge, and make use of low-cost or free health care when needed. This safety-net, so the argument goes, leads to weakness of character, fraught with lazy and over-consumptive habits, selfishness, and infertility.

This is not a totally irrational argument. In the abstract, at least, one may reasonably engage it. When used in comparison to American habits, however, it crumbles to dust. Those who bemoan the European welfare-dependant sucking at the national teat conveniently forget that State-side, we have our own, much larger and more infantilizing boob-rack. It's called the credit-card. Oh, yes - funny how we overlook that, isn't it? While the average European owes about $3,000 in credit card debt, the average American owes over $9,000. (This is also more than triple the amount for Americans in the early 1990's. Surprise! It looks like Newt Gingrich's Contract with America merely played a zero-sum game of shifting dependency to the private sector, where the lending-class can make a good buck off of it). Even in the best of times, Americans have been notorious debtors when compared to their European counterparts - many of whom use their credit cards for the sole purpose of making automatic payment on utility bills. And this nasty (but apparently very adult) habit of ours extends beyond the simple credit card, and into our mortgages and car loans. In fact, you may recall that within the past year or so, we Americans passed a certain milestone when the amount of our collective personal debt actually exceeded our collective personal savings. Whoa.

Consider, now the European - who may live their entire life without owning a car (being able to travel extensively without one) even if they earn a very tidy middle-class income and can afford one, who will likely buy something small and efficient if they do, who uses only a fraction of the oil in the form of transport, plastic packaging, and home heating and lighting when compared to the American, who more often than not lives at home, with family, throughout college and grad school, and even until marriage (which usually occurs earlier than in the U.S.), who spends a full year or so in military or community service in their youth, who while young is many multitudes less likely to become pregnant out of wedlock, or have an abortion, or spread an STD, who in every conceivable, quantifiable measure (economic, environmental, social) is less of a burden to his neighbors, his country, and the world than is the American, and ask again: what, pray tell, is the problem with the welfare state?

Do you know what American credit card companies, in their private lingo, call people who pay their monthly bills on time? Deadbeats.

Who's infantalizing whom here?

It is in America, not Europe, where the goal of every industry - including the U.S govt. - is to have legions of debtors at their ankles. It is in America where one is constantly badgered about one's smoking and eating habits (and yet to no avail!). It is in American where we must be warned with giant plastic signs and hazard cones every time someone mops the tiles at the local mall, because every time we slip or stub a toe, someone else is to blame and lawyers must be consulted. It is in America, not Europe, that we so crave the cleanliness of the hospital in all aspects of our lives that we can't bear the sight of fish-heads, must irradiate every food product until it looses all traces of living matter, where adults are taught to live in fear of daily, mundane risks with a constant barrage of television undercover-scoops (send more lawyers please!), where every headache and bodily irregularity is a thing to be medicated, where a child may no longer ride a bicycle without a helmet without his parents getting arrested for criminal neglect, where sexuality is feared and obsessed over like a form of insidious witchcraft, where we maintain an antiquated system of measuring length and distance long unused by the rest of the world because the effort of conversion proved too taxing for us, where we can't be bothered to understand the affairs of other countries until Our Leader orders us to invade one, where college students know less history and hold their liquor more poorly than European counterparts five years their junior, where popular entertainments only a few scintilla less barbaric than some post-apocalyptic Thunderdome tournament flourish as multi-million dollar industries, where one can shoot live, caged animals over the internet and where police entrapment of would-be sex offenders makes for suitable prime-time programming, where teenagers are either terrified of having any sex or terrified of not having it (for no moderation is possible in the face of mortal fear), where presidential blow-jobs - a staple of men in power since the dawn of man and present in every high office in western history - is regarded by the public as a fatal rift in the heavens though which slag and locusts come pouring, where the momentary appearance of a black woman's tit during halftime provokes another national crisis (Children should not see breasts, you see, because breasts are actually for...oh, wait, that's ironic, isn't it?), where we eat ourselves into a diabetic stupor, driving up the cost of health care and blaming everyone but ourselves.

And yet it's those Europeans - who spend cautiously, who eat better without being hounded to do so, who mind their own business (to their neighbors both local and international), who grow up and learn moderate habits at an earlier age, who feel a responsibility to know other languages, who don't produce more children than they can support and raise in stability, who learn to be happy with less luxury and comfort when the circumstances of the world require it of them and don't complain...those Europeans are the real infants, aren't they?

Good. I'm glad you have it straight. Because, iffin' I didn't know better, it seems to me that becoming "infantilized" is more the result of rampant American capitalism than socialism.

Along those same lines, let's consider how, as Pipes puts it via Steyn, European males have been "feminized." It's a little difficult for me to imagine what he (or anyone else) means by this, though I hear it rather often. I suspect that such men (and it is always men and the occasional Ann Coulter) have never walked as or with a women through the streets of Italy - where testosterone speaks freely, unimpeded by speech centers or mental restraint, every moment a woman passes by. They have never encountered the machismo of the Germans, the French, the bullfighting Spanish. Because, frankly we American males are far, far more girly than European males.

Perhaps there's some connection in the neo-con mind to "feminization" and "letting the Muslims in." That does, indeed, seem to be the argument at hand. These neutered, girly European males suffer from a special kind of impotence called "civilization exhaustion," in which they fail to plough enough furrows for White Christian babies, meaning that Muslim immigrants will overpopulate and outnumber the Europeans and give rise to the culture of "Eurabia." To wit:

Arriving at a time of demographic, political, and cultural weakness, Muslims are profoundly changing Europe. "Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare." Put differently, "Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity." Much of the Western world, Mr. Steyn flat-out predicts, "will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries." With even more drama, he adds that "it's the end of the world as we know it."

How can America avoid their fate?

First, avoid the "bloated European welfare systems," declare them no less than a national security threat, shrink the state, and emphasize the virtues of self-reliance and individual innovation. Second, avoid "imperial understretch," don't "hunker down in Fortress America" but destroy the ideology of radical Islam, help reform Islam, and expand Western civilization to new places. Only if Americans "can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging world" will they have enough company to soldier on. Failing that, expect a "new Dark Ages … a planet on which much of the map is re-primitivized."

Here's my question...are these guys trying to be funny? Given that the rise in the European Muslim population has more or less coincided with the Neo-conlib wet dream known as the European Union, in which all the plebes were duly informed that this change is inevitable, inescapable, and will require the "sacrifice" of many long-cherished aspects of the welfare state, it hardly seems to follow that the solution to a supposed cultural crisis which is directly caused by market liberalization is...more market liberalization.

Let's reflect, for a moment, on the welfare state, and consider why it might be popular with the modern European. For the neo-con, democratic socialism is a kind of middle-class collectivism, or communism-lite, originally proffered as a form of appeasement to keep the restless natives from succumbing to full-blown Stalinism. It stifles innovation, individualism, the ethics of self-reliance, and leads to cultural stagnation and unemployment.

Virtually all of these claims, however, are easily falsified. Innovation? Many of the most successful companies(Nokia, Volvo, Saab, Toyota, Lego, Honda, Sony...need I go on?) in the world are based in Scandanavia and Japan, whose wealthiest CEO's earn only a small fraction of their American counterparts. Yes, their "most productive" members are paid less and often taxed to the hilt, yet they often still design and build far better products than the filthy-rich folks in charge here in the U.S. Technologically, these countries exist several years ahead of the U.S. - their most advanced products are commonplace in their homelands before even being introduced here. Self-reliance? As already noted, it is the American who is most likely to seek redress for perceived wrongs through frivolous lawsuits and the public, talk-show-psycho-drama of "vicitmization", who is more likely (whether wealthy or poor) to recklessly spend beyond his means. Unemployment? Neo-cons love to cite such examples as France (currently 8.8%) and Germany (8.2%), and then proudly point to the U.S (4.5%), declaring our system vindicated. Those critics are notably silent on such countries as Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Austria, all of which have unemployment figures equal to or less than the U.S. Denmark and The Netherlands are both below 4%. (The overall average for the European Union is, indeed, around 8%, but this is largely to due to economically depressed areas in the East still recovering from the birth-pangs of the post-Soviet era).

As to the question of individualism, we need to take a slightly more philosophical approach. Are we to define a free, individualistic society as one in which every member can make their own choices, and are limited only by their willingness to strive and their natural predispositions? Is it a society free of coercion? In purely economic terms, American society lags behind the welfare state on both counts. We have less social mobility than the welfare states, not more. Our Golden Age of cultural and technological advancement - the 1940's thru the 1960's - occurred during the post-war ww2 era, in which wealth was heavily re-distributed (income taxes reaching as high as 90%). Removing this anomaly from the debate because it was a "post-wartime" economy misses the point - a wartime or post-wartime economy succeeds in those respects precisly because it is managed, and wealth is re-distributed according to need above all else.

Okay, my point here is not to condemn America and write a love-letter to European socialism. At best, our question here is: which is the lesser of two evils? Or, more accurately, given the premisis set forth by those who bemoan the status of the modern West in the light of perceived threat of incursions by a non-democratic East (itself a set of assumptions requiring another essay), which of the two cultures - American or European - is most willing to stand "against" Islam and defend its own cultural values? The neo-con line (not just in the above quotes, but elsewhere) is that America is the nation most willing to combat "pre-modern Islam." Again, for better or for worse, they are exactly wrong.

As to how Europe should best deal with its influx of Muslims, that is a topic for yet another essay. But as far as for standing for its own values (which the neo-cons accuse it of failing to do), let us note that it is Europe, not America, which has put its foot down and said: "those who come here to live and work must accept our values. We are a secular society, we believe in sexual equality - not the veil. Your sacred cows are not ours. We do not wish to tiptoe around your sensibilities when it comes to the cartoons in our papers, our films, and our institutions of public education." We might argue, perhaps correctly, that America is more tolerant of Muslims than Europe (as least urban American), or more likely to worry about offending them. But the neo-cons (who are the ones on trial in this essay) charge that Europe cares less about preserving their culture - whatever they correctly or incorrectly perceive that to be - is clearly wrong. They have a firm sense of who they are, while we do not.

To conclude, the extent to which Europe feels "exhausted" and apprehensive in the midst of their growing Muslim population, it is not the welfare state that is to blame. Quite the contrary, it is the very attempt to systematically dismantle it that is causing the crisis. As neo-con-lib reforms cut deeply into the way of life that Europeans have cherished for more than six decades, and which, for those who lived through the war, speaks to a realization of the dream of a peaceful and equitable - yet also culturally diverse - European society, those elements still tainted by racism have made note of the wound, and perceive that the Middle East is bleeding through it. I humbly submit that they have not "managed" this influx properly because the market liberalization responsible for it was crammed down their throats - by the international corporate class which has peddled these reforms as "inevitable".

Islam is not a thing to be feared. In this respect, the neo-cons and the European Right share the same incorrect conclusion (though they come at it from different directions). Both groups need to realize that the cause of their social disquietude is the selling out of the social contract between European citizens and their political representatives. It is in the interest of the business class to foment social conflict, cleaved according to race and religion, for that will take the heat off their own accountability to the people. Thus has it been done for centuries; the "other" supplies an all-too-effective boogeyman. If the neo-cons were truly consistent in their beliefs about self-reliance and individualism, they would cast aside their fears of Islamic integration and welcome those immigrants with "the youth and the will" into the West. By evoking the dreaded clash of civilizations, the neos are creating the pseudo-philosophical underpinnings for reactionary statism of the worst kind. As to whether this last effect is by accident or design, I leave to the reader to decide.

Education and power

2006-11-11T23:49:00.000-08:00

It is a fine thing indeed, to awaken each morning knowing that Democrats will soon control Congress and put the brakes on some of Bush's worst violations of constitutional law and human decency. But we cannot grow complacent - the hardest work is yet to come. The changed Congress still represents the same old country. Politicians get elected the same way they always have - by telling the public what they want to hear. Changing what the public wants to hear is the real trick, and in this respect, the Democrats are every bit as much an enemy of a free society as the Republicans.

What can can we expect from our new congress? Unfortunately, not a lot - their platform is almost embarrassingly tepid. Raising the federal minimum wage to $7.50 is, of course, a much-needed measure, but it is long overdue and is a political no-brainer. It is also, after a full decade, too damn small.

Cutting rates on student loans is a friendly gesture that will - maybe - make things a tad easier for certain middle-class families, for a limited period of time. But it is nonetheless a glaring example of the Democrats' complete lack of vision. Several decades ago, it was possible to expect an exemplary education at a minimal cost at a state or local university. Making education readily available for any and all willing to pursue it was considered a fundamental civic duty of our government - now it is a means by which fatten the creditor's purse. Making it easier to pay for private education is a worthy goal. But why is there no talk of direct subsidies to the public education? Our political culture has developed an obsessive mania for applying the business model to every aspect of our private lives, to the point where no currency can change hands for any reason without first earning some amount of compound interest for an otherwise disinterested third party.

The Democrats are "concerned" about education, but for one reason only: the continued economic dominance of the United States. From their own website:

The talent, intellect, and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people have made this nation the leader in economic and technological advancements. House Democrats believe American leadership is fueled by national investments in an educated and skilled workforce, groundbreaking federal research and development by public and private sectors, and a steadfast commitment to being the most competitive and innovative nation in the world.

America's global leadership in technological advancement and innovation is being seriously challenged by other countries. The warning signs could not be clearer. The rest of the world is increasing its capacity, its investments, and its will to catch up with us. We cannot ignore this challenge.

And their remedy:

Create an educated, skilled workforce in the vital areas of science, math, engineering, and information technology;

Invest in a sustained federal research and development initiative that promotes public-private partnerships;

Guarantee affordable access to broadband technology for all Americans;

Achieve energy independence in 10 years by developing emerging technologies for clean and sustainable alternatives that will strengthen national security and protect the environment; and,

Provide small businesses with the tools to encourage entrepreneurial innovation and job creation.

I would like to point out that these policy points are listed in the Democrats' official New Direction For America, a publication in which I can find no mention of the appalling educational end economic ghettoization which we have imposed on vast segments of urban and rural society. Nor can I find any indication that the Democrats believe in the intrinsic value of a well-rounded education - they do not suggest that, along with all the talented science and math teachers we are supposedly going to blessed with, we might also do well to have equally qualified teachers of English, History, Art, or Music for those intellectually curious students who don't want to pursue a career building ipods or missile guidance systems. The humanities - for centuries recognized as essential to human happiness, and, in fact, crucial to innovation (modern science was created by a reinvigoration of the humanities) - are not mentioned in their educational plan. Instead, the Democrats see only one purpose in education - have a head for numbers and wigits, and maintain the U.S. economic hegemony...or else. We have been "warned."

There is a serious cultural problem here that neither party is willing to address. Any forthcoming solution to the problem will have to be birthed and nurtured, first, at the grassroots level, and it may be decades before either party is willing to pay it any heed. The problem is this: we have trivialized education. It is a grave threat to our society.

This might seem, at first, like a strange charge to make against a society that habitually obsesses over education. It is an issue in every election year, and every off-election year. This has been the case for decades. We need therefore ask why, after so many initiatives and efforts, so little progress seem to have been made.

Americans have deeply contradictory attitudes regarding the education of their children. There is almost universal acceptance that an education, pursued as far as one's abilities allow, is in every way essential to economic security and happiness. And yet the very same people - both parents and students - profess nothing short of contempt for the entire teaching profession. They want their children to go to the best elementary and high schools, but would regard their children as failures if, in their adulthood, they pursued a career teaching in any of those schools. They want to send their kids to the most prestigious colleges - witness the vast college-prep industry - and yet they are in perpetual suspicion of the political motives of the men and women who will instruct them. The Holy Grail of education is the ivy-league college, and yet those very same schools are thought by a great many of their customers to be Orwellian concentration camps for churning out post-modern leftists. They want their children to be "exposed to new ideas", but are often horrified when any new ideas come home for Thanksgiving break.

As concerns the education of the "proles", as it were, there is, once again, widespread acknowledgment of an ongoing crisis, and yet an astonishing passivity at all levels to do anything decisive about it. The most common plea is that the situation is "very complicated," and that we shouldn't just "throw money" at them.

This is an astonishing statement, especially since it betrays how easily even the most "educated" among us fall victim to the spell-casting wiles of professional spin-doctors and obfuscators. In every other profession on Earth, from prostitution, to law, to engineering, acting, or dentistry, there is a common-sense understanding that "you get what you pay for." If your company is not attracting enough qualified applicants for a particular position, then you must consider raising the salary for the position. This usually does the trick.

Apparently, public school teachers live in a parallel universe, where the laws of supply and demand do not apply. We have spent untold billions over the decades developing new teaching methods, philosophies, national testing, and classroom technology - and yet we are loathe to spend the money required to hire more qualified teachers. Never mind that these grand schemes are next to useless if the teacher's knowledge of their subject does not extend past the textbook they use (as is the case for many), or that a qualified teacher will have no need of some overarching teaching-philosophy to which they must adhere.

There are several reasons why this problem perpetuates. The first is that the politicians of all stripes can always benefit from an ongoing crisis that threatens "our children." Knowing that any initiative will take about a decade to have any discernable effect (if any), they can rest assured that even if their political careers hold them in the same office at that point, they will most likely no longer be serving the same generation of parents (whose kids will have graduated and moved on).

The second, greater problem is that we mistake this as a political, rather than a cultural, problem in the first place. No progress will be made by any politician or citizen, so long as we regard education as a matter of social status above all else. Listen to the language that is employed - that we need to be educated in order to get ahead. We have no problem stating this with the utmost sincerity, but shall we consider the corollary - that we need to leave others behind to make it happen?

The time has come to speak honestly. "We" don't actually give a rat's ass about "the children." We only care about "our" children, and we desperately want them to leave everybody else's children in the dust. This blatantly prideful elitism - which would have been shunned from polite society a few decades ago, is so commonplace that we have ceased to analyse its meaning. From honor-roll bumper stickers to college merchandise, our society wants to boast. It does not, in fact, seem to matter whether or not "the children" are actually educated, since we have lost the notion that being educated has any objective meaning at all. We only care that they are doing better than most everyone else. Why else would parents mortgage their homes for the exorbitant fees charged by the "best" schools, when those very same parents are convinced that most of the liberal arts teachers at that school are little more than doctrinaire Maoists and "PC" feminists? Why pay for education that is deemed largely worthless? Status, of course, and "connections." And this need persists, even though many recent studies have shown that, when all other factors are controlled for, choice of school has a negligible effect on one's ultimate success.

One might now object that I have strayed far from the original topic of this essay - the Democrats' agenda - and taken on a subject only of concern to an elite few. Fair enough, but let's now close the ellipse.

The relegation of education to status-making has had an effect, not just at the top, but throughout the hierarchy of achievement. If "getting ahead" is the goal of education, then anything short of being on top essentially becomes a failure. Notice, now, that we do not simply ask whether our public or private schools have met a certain base-line requirement - we rank them, well into the thousands. We use "metrics" to quantify the unquantifiable, creating a false objectivity at the cost of the real one (A momentary digression on the definition of "objectivity". An objective measurement is made by means of a stable, external referent, like a ruler used to measure human height. You may arrange a thousand people in a row from tallest to shortest without a ruler, and the tallest among them might still be a dwarf). Public schools must make gains in this competitive environment before they receive funding, and in this environment there are great rewards to the school that can get away with "inflating" their grades.

How is this done? You'll probably remember from your own education. If you were an "honor" student, and most likely as well if you weren't, you'll recall all the times your teacher graded a test to "scale" when everyone did badly on it, when "make-up" work was offered to the student who botched something earlier on, when a teacher who liked you happily fudged the numbers here and there to get you across the line from C+ to B-, and so on. And you'll remember all the times you were told that the SAT was a crucial test, but also essentially meaningless because the proper test-prep course could boost your score mightily. Or the college elective classes where "passing" on a multiple-choice test required scoring better than, as one astronomy professor of mine put it, a "monkey score" - i.e., choosing answers randomly.

At what point, as you moved along this conveyer belt, did you realize the total irrelevance of actually understanding things to your success in school? How long thereafter did you realize that the entire professional world now operates on this principle? Was it your first office job, when it seemed that every smiling co-worker had nothing but contempt for the company they worked for, and that their every waking moment on the job was spent towards a goal of personal aggrandizement? Was it when you realized people less qualified than you were able to advance ahead of you because they padded their resumes, "faked it 'till they made it," and you, in your foolishly sentimental attachment to honesty, did not? Was it when you realized that half of your classmates cribbed notes and cheated on tests, read the Cliff's notes rather than the Dickens novel itself, and were perfectly content to score an "A" on a test with 42% of the answers incorrect? Welcome to the post-modern age. You are what you pretend to be. You learned it in school.

It is difficult to grasp the extent to which a vast cynicism now underlies the assumptions we have about the world. Our achievements are a palimpsest of our (re)devising. In what state do we find ourselves when a world-class university only asks its student to be better at astronomy than monkeys? We, in fact, have incredibly low expectations for students - bottom to top. Consider now that, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was entirely normal and common for the poorest children in England - those whose parents were coal miners for instance - to read a Shakespeare play at least once a month at the age of thirteen? And their reading was not limited to Shakespeare, but also included Milton, Coleridge, Homer, etc. When one school in a troubled section of Los Angeles pulls this off now, by getting a group of ten-year-olds to read and perform Hamlet, we consider it an awe-inspiring miracle. Our great grandparents would've considered the same achievement common.

Did you ever feel that life was somehow...empty? Was it after that latest episode of Survivor?

Our children are not stupid. They are bored out of their minds from the first day of school, insulted by our patronizingly low expectations of them, made cynical by the time of adolescence when they realize that the whole system is fixed and not interested in their actual achievements in the first place, rebellious when they realize their teachers are not knowledgeable of the subjects they teach, bored again by the shallowness of their badly-written textbooks, and bitter when they realize that being "on top" is not in the cards for them, and that society therefore has no use for them aside from grilling cow meat.

There are very few of us - from top to bottom - who can remember as more than a rarity the moments when learning something made us happy.

There is no mystery regarding the problem of education. Pick up any science or math book written more than 50 years ago, and you will encounter what seems to be a masterpiece of literary elegance and clarity of thought. We could use these books now, and pay our high school teachers what we presently pay our tenured college professors, and in a decade you would have the beginnings of a revolution in American education (obviously it would take much more than that to be fully realized, but with an influx of qualified teachers and quality texts, a serious improvement is all but guaranteed. European schools pay their teachers more - is this a coincidence?)

Not going to happen, is it?

Why?

A few years of no progress - that might be someone's mistake. Four decades of backwards progress? That is by design. The design is called the "corporate model."

American society has become so commodified that every aspect of our lives is now comparative and relativistic. Remember what I said about objectivity? In the corporate/consumer model, there is no external referent. Values are one-dimensional (in both the literal and Marcusian sense). We have no sense of the "well-rounded" education, of learning as a spiritual pursuit. These are luxuries that can no longer enjoyed - not with an industrialized China, no sir. We must compete.

Let's summarize, and reflect. We are given a fake education, where we are passed up the ladder whether we understand things or not. We soon lose any attachment to the notion that we should understand things. We stop asking questions out of curiosity, and focus, instead on what helps us move "up." Somewhere around this time, we may start to feel unmoored, lost, unhappy that the world appears to be getting darker, more complicated and vicious, and less comprehensible. But since it benefits us materially to not be bothered by this, we choose not to let it bother us. Before long, the only way any of us achieve any stable view of our place is by direct comparison to the progress of other people. Those elements of a greater culture - the great authors and the great books and the culture of skepticism and reason they engender, most of which we've never read, but which were once called "pillars" for a reason (because they always stood firm, were always there as guideposts outside of ourselves and our specific point in history) - no longer guide us. We can't latch onto them. So instead we retreat into ourselves, live for ourselves, and accept that the world "outside" will always be vicious and incomprehensible.

We accept powerlessness, mitigated by our fantasies of power. My kid's on the honor roll. My kid beat up your honor student. I'm a multi-tasker, a team player, a self-starter, a personal manager. Quoth Thom Yorke: "A pig, in a cage, on antibiotics."

Who benefits from our powerlessness? Those with power. As of next January, many of those in power - or some semblance thereof - will be Democrats. Let's close the ellipse: Democrats want you to feel helpless. Doubt me? How were you feeling when you and your neighbors voted for them? Thank you. Your sense of helplessness put them in power. Will they solve your problems for you? They will not. They will perpetuate them, but mitigate them just enough so that you get burned a little bit less for a certain period of time. They, like you, have learned that reality is written in the act of pretense, not discovered by looking with an unbiased eye at the world at large. If the Republicans say that there is a "War of Terror," and the Democrats say it too, well, that's everybody, ain't it? There must be a War on Terror, because Republicans and Democrats are arguing about it.

Somewhere, inside of us, there may be a voice that was not entirely quashed when we attended high school or college that asks: why do we support dictatorships if we claim to support democracy? Why isn't Suadi Arabia in the "axis of evil?" Why is Venezuela? If the rights of men and women are inalienable, or "God-given" as the president states, why do we treat the lives of Iraqis as if they are so much more expendable than our own? From somewhere in the shadows, a voice replies with, perhaps, the reptilian croak of Henry Kissinger; that the games of power are complicated and nuanced beyond all measure, that the world is dark and incomprehensible, and that you, citizen, are at a loss to change it. And most of us will turn inward.

The Democrats have learned the same lesson that the rest of us have, "fake it 'till you make it."

If we want real change, we will have to demand access to reality - to knowledge, culture, and direct power over our own lives. The political effect must be instigated by a cultural cause - bringing knowledge to the people.

We have the tools - but how will it be done?

The meaning of the election.

2006-11-09T20:39:00.000-08:00

I'm still trying to absorb the events of the past few days. For all of my cynicism about the Democratic party - the cumulative result of 12 years of Clintonian triangulation, spineless appeasement, and outright prostitution to corporate interests - I must confess to being more than a little delighted with the outcome of last Tuesday's election. Even the most optimistic leftist had no reason to predict that the Bush administration would receive such a through, comprehensive trouncing.

What can we make of this? As has already been observed by others, this was not a typical mid-term election. While Bush still has a significant minority of the country behind him, it seems that the 60% or so who disapprove of him did so with enough animosity to trump many other local concerns. Add up all the small-government conservatives, the anti-Bush liberals, and those "centrists" who want their leaders to exhibit some sort of rational flexibility in the face of material reality (i.e. facts), and you have a fairly comprehensive bloc of voters willing to pull the "D" switch.

The first thing we need to realize now is that the Democrats had to make some tremendous compromises in order to pull this off - and this from a party that had already long since sold most of its values down the river. Many of the Democrats who won Senate seats or governorships are, in fact, quite conservative. There are pro-lifers, pro-war democrats, and far too many of the Clintonian corporate appeasers in the mix here - although there is some consolation in the fact we have also acquired progressive voices like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. The party succeeded by opening a very wide umbrella, focusing on those very few topics upon which they could agree (our failure in Iraq, along with health care, minimum wage, and a few other populist concerns), and essentially ignoring those points where there is bound to be substantial disagreement. They didn't talk about divisive social issues, they professed tolerance of differing views, and they stayed on message.

We must not, therefore, misconstrue the Democratic victory as being a victory for secular liberalism. Many of the very same voting districts which bolted from the Republicans also voted, with equal fervor, to ban gay marriage. And the widespread support for raising the minimum wage is a consequence of it having been left untouched for a full decade - let it go long enough, and even conservative Republicans will have had enough. The country is not, in any sense, moving to the left.

The mainstream revolt against Bush was not, sadly, a protest of his political ideals, but rather an expression of disappointment at his not having lived up to them. The Democrats won this election because small-government conservatives resent Bush's big-government spending, because pro-war centrists have finally come to accept his colossal incompetence, and because the evangelicals have come to see the Republican party as rife with corruption and scandal. Like Jesus to the moneylenders, they want to cast the thieves from the temple.

This last point is crucial; were it not for the perfect storm of scandals of almost every conceivable variety in the months leading up to Election Tuesday, the Democrats would have been toast. Abramoff, Iraq, and few homo-erotic instant messages did more to propel them to victory in 2006 than two years of George Soros, Daily Kos, and Move On combined (this is not to discount the efforts of those groups, and the valuable work they did to bring cleaner elections and "outside the box" candidates to the fore across the country). The Democrats must also thank, with no small irony, the Bush administration's own hubris, the vastness of which never fails to astonish. The very same over-confidence that led them to believe the Iraq invasion would be a "cakewalk" left them feeling secure in the outcome of the election. This is amply demonstrated by the comically atrocious timing of Rumsfeld's resignation - had it occurred one week earlier, things may have gone quite differently.

The Democrats, to put it bluntly, got lucky. They had it handed to them. This is, I suppose, a karmic return for Bush's victory in 2000, in which a perfect storm of righteous Naderites, racist voter-roll purges, crappy ballots that were not elderly-proof, and an inept challenge by Gore (which I blame for having forced the Supreme Court's decision) which made the boy-blunderer with less popular support than his opponent become King of the World. (I've always seen a certain dark poetry in this - that the "butterfly effect" of world history should be instigated by "butterfly ballots"; a few hundred misread slips of paper, and world history is changed). We must keep this in mind - it is still a conservative country, and the Democrats will only survive in power by embracing the Right. They are not going to go to bat for civil liberties, for a less murderous foreign policy, a saner drug policy, corporate accountability...name any liberal cause you like, and watch them steer clear of it like radioactive slag. Instead, they will claim to be better fighters of the War on Terror, more fiscally responsible, more committed to preserving the "best" of those halcyon robber-baron days, the 1990's. In short, they will try to out-Republican the Republicans. If you don't believe me, just read their official platform. It reads like classic Gingrich, with a few isolationist pipe-dreams thrown into the mix.

The United States can no longer lay claim to a liberal political party. We have a Fascist party, in which a few genuine conservatives can still be found, and a Centrist party, in which a smattering of genuine liberals can be found.

We need much more than a new party in Congress. We need a new dialogue, and a whole new set of premises. I will explain exactly what I mean by this, and how it might be brought about, in the coming days.

Murdoch the uber-pimp

2006-10-30T22:19:00.000-08:00

The New York Post has endorsed Hillary Clinton. I'm leaving. Earth.

For anyone reading OgBH who is not familiar with The New York Post, it is the most flagrantly, bombastically, propagandistic piece of right-wing filth to ever be called a newspaper (thought it has a decent sports section, which is why it survives). Lest you think I am exaggerating, take a look at this classic gem of journalistic integrity. This is real. Trees were felled, and ink spilled.

This seemingly improbable turn of events should not, in fact, come as a surprise to anyone - myself included - who has been paying attention. Clinton has been in bed with Murdoch for much of 2006. Folks, if there's anyone reading this who still harbors any illusions about the political virtues of Hillary Clinton, please let this be the day when you wrap those illusions in a towel, hit them in the head with a ball-peen hammer, and bury them in the back yard next to Speckles the Barn Cat. Clinton will move as far to the right as she needs to get elected, and she does not mind the stench of the devil himself.

Rupert Murdoch - the owner of the Post, as well as half the solar-system - is not just some rich guy expressing his free-speech rights. He is arguably more influential in world-politics than any professional politician on Earth. He creates the memes, and buys the officials to carry them to fruition. He incubates the neo-cons and the neo-libs from the same cell batch.

People like Murdoch do not have "political values" in any traditional sense - their wealth and influence puts them too far above the polis for that. He is just as happy to use his vast media empire to secure the top-office for a "liberal" like Tony Blair as a "conservative" like Bush. His strategy is simple - find out where the popular wind is blowing, and infiltrate the ranks. This triangulation is best performed by finding figures like Bush, Blair, and Clinton who, as "neos", are demonstrably open to the corporate agenda on fiscal policy - i.e. trade liberalization, tax breaks, and the evisceration of anti-monopoly laws, along with a hawkish foreign policy.

In the United States, Murdoch is most closely identified with Fox Television, which - thanks to Fox News - is thought to correspond to the "conservative" Bush agenda. This is a dangerous misapprehension. Let's remember that, when the Fox network first hit the airwaves in the 80's, it was known for being hip, "edgy", and left-of-center, thanks to shows like the The Simpsons, Married With Children, and a host of others. It was even criticized at the time corrupting the youth of America with ultra-liberal (i.e. hedonistic) values. Its entertainment programming still attempts to follow this model today. When Fox commentators like O'Reilly and Hannity rail against the values of the "left-wing" entertainment media, they are complaining about trends that were and are spearheaded by their own network.

Though the individual players (Matt Groening vs. Bill O'Reilly, for instance) may not see it, this conflict is the product of deliberate design. We must not underestimate the degree to which media moguls have employed psychologists and social scientists to their cause, or the fact that they have had decades of group-testing to know how viewers emotionally respond to their products. If watching Fox makes you feel angry, anxious, or powerless, that is because they want you to feel that way. Their entertainment is sexually permissive, irreverent, and fantastical - in other words, escapist. Their news programming, with its blood-red set design and militaristic severity, comes back at you like a cold dose of unfriendly reality - a slap in the face. It's a kind of good-cop/bad-cop maneuver, softening you up for the kill.

What is the "kill"? Obedience, and through this, addiction to the teat of consumerism. The overarching message is that society is fraying, is becoming surreal and immoral, and that only strong leadership can bring order. The myth of "social decline" is an ancient trope, and here it is revived in a post-modern form - create outrage, and then protest it. The beauty of this set-up is that it works equally well regardless of the fortunes of whomever is office - for they can be portrayed as either the cause or the savior in accordance with the tides of public perception. The key here is to keep the programming - both news and entertainment - focused on issues of domestic life, especially divisive social issues which produce quick and emotional responses, and away from international economic realities, where multi-national corporations operate unobserved and unchecked.

What kind of politicians survive best in this climate? Keep in mind that politicians are consumers of the media just like you and I, and their power to frame the debate is limited by the corporate agenda. When domestic church-talk is all we think about, this is all our politicians debate. The result is the same for conservative and liberal politicians alike: to the whores, go the spoils.

Bill Clinton was our great proto-pomo-politician. Handed the 1992 election by Perot's leeching-off of the Bush vote, Clinton was a champion of NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO long before Gingrich led the takeover of Congress. The corporate assault on the middle class began with Reagan and Bush sr., was kicked into overdrive by Clinton, and continued with Bush. Arguments about gays and fetuses kept us distracted as this trend continued, though the encroaching sense of doom we've been feeling is quite real - we've been getting poorer and more powerless.

The Bush-Clinton dynasties survive by selling us false hope, offering band-aid solutions to real economic problems that are never properly described or articulated in public discourse. This allows them to protect their corporate clients from any genuine populist uprising, and also maintains the popular unrest, cynicism, and despair over politics which sustains the corporate juggernaut. We are, in effect, like burn victims, wrapped in gauze and hooked to a morphine drip...forever.

Hillary Clinton, then, is the new Bush. And the new Clinton. We should take note of the recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, which notes that she's become such a clever "player" that she has ceased to stand for anything. The very same month, Harper's warns that the same political lobotomy is befalling Barack Obama. The two most popular Democrats - already bought and spoken for. We can look forward to slightly cheaper healthcare, and moderately increased help on loans and credit-card debt. Maybe.

The cycle of giddiness and despair is, indeed, an addict's manic journey. And we can see it across the ocean as well, in the U.K., where Murdoch has signalled support...for the Conservatives.

Iran...and panic ensues

2006-10-27T16:24:00.000-07:00

Never let it be said that I don't read across the aisle, as it were. Loathsome though the task may be, I make a point of engaging with conservative political commentary as much as my constitution will allow. And while I still maintain that the vast majority of mainstream conservative writing is pathologically dishonest and childish, there is one magazine, American Conservative, that I respect and check in on with some regularity.

Now, let me put this disclaimer right out there from the beginning: I am no more a conservative than is the moon a fire-breathing watermelon. It should not be construed that I endorse any of the views expressed in this magazine unless I specifically state otherwise, citing examples (as I do below). What I do admire about AC is that it is intellectually honest, it does not toe any party lines, and it is unabashedly (are you sitting down?) opposed to the Iraq war and the Bush Administration. Sure, there have been a recent rash of conservatives who've finally realized that Bush has betrayed their principles, along with everyone else's, but AC was there years ago. This is a magazine truly committed to the idea of limited government and limited power overseas, and as such it has made some very astute critiques of the Bush admin from the beginning - in many cases hitting the same targets as commentators on the Left.

I bring this up today, because of a recent article in AC by physicist and biologist Gregory Cochran in response to all the recent saber-rattling hype over Iran's alleged "nuclear threat." It is astonishing, isn't it, that after erecting so may straw men, and getting found out for it, that our government still thinks we're going to buy it? Already, the leaders of Israel and the U.S. are declaring President Ahmadinejad the latest "Hitler". There sure seem to be a lot of Hitlers lately.

Cochran is one conservative who doesn't buy it. Regarding the Bush regime, he and I share the same mantra: "Watch what they do, not what they say."

They’re primarily concerned with countries that produced none of the 9/11 hijackers, had nothing to do with the attack, and had been hostile to the kind of fanatic Sunni fundamentalism that drove those attacks—countries like Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Administration policy—in particular the invasion of Iraq—has obviously exacerbated the threat of Islamic terrorism, for example radicalizing the bombers in London and Madrid[...]The usual suspects say that some state may eventually give terrorists an atomic bomb. That is, give the crown jewels of its national power into hands it doesn’t control, in much the same way that the great powers at the end of the 19th century were always handing out battleships to anarchists.

Anyone looking for evidence that present-day Iran parallels Germany circa 1936 need only look at the numbers:

Iran’s GNP is 20 to 40 times smaller than that of the U.S., and the Iranians are hardly sophisticated technologists. If they tried hard, if they spent a huge fraction of their GNP on weapons, they might be able to spend 1/30th as much on arms as we do. But they’re not trying hard.

In truth, Iran hasn't embarked upon any military adventures in years: there is no pattern of aggression and conquest, no frantic military buildup.

And to conclude:

The simplest explanation for the current Iranian nuclear program is that it is an attempt at deterring the U.S. from invading. It is not part of an offensive strategy. Any kind of force projection strategy would require a general conventional military buildup, and no such buildup is underway.

This is the sort of picture of reality that our mainstream politicians are making every effort to obfuscate - I say "mainstream politicians," and not simply "The Bush Administration," because I've seen little evidence that those in our government who oppose Bush are making any effort to correct our distorted perspective on Iran. This is something we need to keep in mind - and why even a total Democratic takeover of congress next week would still a be a long way away from where we need to be in our foreign policy.

There is a historically demonstrable rule-of-thumb that should always be kept in mind when parsing through the rhetoric of our Janus-faced party system - both parties will always name the same foreign enemies. They intrinsically share the same world-view. Rather than engage in serious discussion as to who is or is not a genuine threat, they prefer instead to engage in public pissing contests about who will deal with the alleged threat better. They are committed to winning your votes, not to discovering the truth. This is why there was so much cross-party support for the invasion of Iraq. Bush did not "deceive" anyone with faulty intelligence - Democrats saw a political opportunity and they ran with it, intelligence be damned. Like Bush, they believed that victory in Iraq would be a cakewalk. Their hubris is as vast and tragic as the president's. Today, stoking fears of a nuclear Iran is a great way to make Bush seem weak - and for Bush to suggest that the Democrats are weak. Since it benefits both parties to portray Iran as a threat...Iran becomes a threat.

I do not wish to suggest that we should be complacent about Iran and President Ahmadinejad, who has made some very hostile and ignorant comments. Nor do I wish to imply that he is a mindless blowhard - at times, he can be quite eloquent. Instead, I humbly submit that there are far better ways of judging the intentions of the leader of any country than by taking literally the political rhetoric he employs in the course of his job (which is, after all, the manipulation and superficial appeasement of the public that elected him). Actions speak louder than words. This is the same standard I apply to leaders in my own country. Our presidents routinely make use of convenient boogey-men to rally domestic support. So do all presidents, everywhere.

Unfortunately - as my wife recently pointed out to me - the mainstream media in the U.S. has been happy to cherry-pick Ahmadinejad's speeches for those few gems of outrage most likely to offend, to the exclusion of all else, and has fabricated all kinds of extreme interpretations of his words that are insupportable in their true context.

So that you can judge for yourself, here are the full texts of his UN speeches in 2005 and 2006.

Lest we think that this is all academic, let's recall what's truly at stake - our ability to recognize and be prepared for genuine threats to ourselves and others. Aside from the obvious danger of a "cry-wolf" syndrome both domestically and abroad, there is the risk that energy and resources will be expended on opposing a regime that does not merit the attention - with all the broken lives, wasted resources, and ill-will that it generates - leaving us spent and bereft of allies when a true catastrophe arises (as in Darfur).

If we prefer to see our globe as a hive of lunatics in which we are the only oasis, if we paint "here be dragons" on all of our maps, we may very well end up fulfilling our own dark prophecies.

A sense of proportion, part 2

2006-10-25T16:55:00.000-07:00

Fortunately, I am not the only one out here banging a can over the media's silence on the 655,000 estimated dead in Iraq. I came across two such articles today.

Tom Engelhardt writes in his blog at The Nation:

Last week, the President was challenged again at his news conference because of a study in the respected British medical journal The Lancet that offered up a staggering set of figures on Iraqi deaths. Based on a door-to-door survey of Iraqi households among a countrywide cohort of almost 13,000 people, the rigorous study estimated that perhaps 655,000 "excess deaths" had occurred since the invasion, mainly due to violence. (Its lowest estimate of excess deaths came in just under 400,000; its highest above 900,000, a figure no one in the U.S. cared to deal with at all.)

When asked if, given the Lancet study, he stood by the number 30,000 Iraqi deaths, the President responded, "You know, I stand by the figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their life--600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just--it's not credible." The reporter's response: "Thank you, Mr. President," and all and sundry turned to other matters.

He also notes the following:

Early on, in a study completely ignored in the U.S. press, a group of Iraqi academics and political activists tried to research the question of civilian casualties, consulting with hospitals, gravediggers, and morgues, and came up with the figure of 37,000 deaths just between March 2003 and October 2003.

Even better - and quite a bit more thorough in terms of both data and the implications thereof - is this article at Media Lens. It gives numerous citations from reputable sources to show that Bush's claim that the number is "not credible" is a total fabrication, and notes:

George Bush's comment on the report, "The methodology is pretty well discredited", was widely broadcast and printed. A great moment in TV history was missed when journalists failed to seek clarification on the exact nature of the president's problem with the methodology.

I hadn't thought about it, but this truly would've been great television. Imagine a reporter asking the Prez, "Could you explain, Mr. President, what aspects of the methodology you take issue with?" Or, even better, "what methodology did you use to arrive at your number?" This would've been one for the archives, filed next to Armstrong on the Moon and Janet Jackson's exploding boob - see President Bush attempt math.

More importantly, however, it would have kept the number alive in the media, rather than leaving it a settled question. As noted in the article:

We have been monitoring and reporting media performance for five years, since July 2001. The current media response to a credible report that our government is responsible for the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis is the most shocking and outrageous example of media conformity to power we have yet seen.

We need more than a Democratic congress to save us, folks.

Moral Mathematics in the Post-Enlightenment Era

2006-10-24T20:28:00.000-07:00

Today, on the television in my kitchen, my wife and I saw the image of a small child, a toddler, wrapped in a colorfully-woven blanket – the kind that wealthy New Yorkers might pay hundreds of dollars for in a specialty import shop – dying. The child had clearly not eaten anything of substance in weeks. Its stomach had sunken and its ribcage breached against parchment-thin skin, half its face and neck was turning blue, and the impossibly large eyes bulged and stared in perpetual astonishment and saw nothing. Flies swarmed, and fed on the encrustations around the child’s lips and eyelids. This occurred in what is only with extreme charity called a “hospital” set up for refugees in Darfur.

At some time, it behooves us to realize that the image on our screen is a shadow cast by something real. These are more than just phosphorescent patterns on a cave-wall. Behind the screen, behind the cathode-ray cannon, behind the flow of electrons though a coaxial cable, behind the hard drive at the tv station, before the camera’s eye…a real event occurred. The child was there, in that condition, at that moment.

This is not something we would tolerate for our own children, or our neighbors'. We would recoil with horror to see dogs, cats, houseplants, even the dead meat in our fridge consigned to such a fate. If our children scrape their knees, cry at a Disney film, lose a goldfish, we are devastated. In our culture childhood is worshipped, not by children, perish the thought, but by adults for whom the childhood of others – especially their own children - is a vicarious path to manufactured sentimentality and innocence regained. Childhood and childish emotions are, increasingly, at the core of many of our adult entertainments and social experiences– it is the natural end result of cultural neoteny. It is there in how we dramatize the mundane, prance about in epiphany, hugging the city-scape after a eating a cookie. It is there in the new car, won on television, producing screams of orgasm. This is no doubt by design. Our masters would prefer that we expend ourselves entirely on the products of their output, before our feelings catch hold of anything real. But in the end, it is our own boundless self-indulgence that allows us to celebrate material surplus like the grace of the divine, and weep over trivialities. Children do this because their world is small, and they don't know any better. As adults, we realize that the world is larger, but here, in America, we have chosen to make it small again.

So then, what is our response to such real suffering? Shut down. Blank out. I’m just trying to survive, and live my own life. Put it out of your head. These images remind us of the world outside – a brutal, Darwinian world whose rules are inconceivably different from our own. They spoil the illusion which we struggle to sustain – that life is free of suffering.

And yet, the images persist. They do not disappear completely, and at the odd moment that some politician or celebrity pays the inevitable lip-service, delivers a bland and uninspiring “something must be done” sermon, we solemnly nod, happy to know that someone is working on it. Is there, perhaps, something in us, that needs to see these images, just once in a while, just enough to remind ourselves that we are not they? Does it help us to be happy and grateful? Because it does seem, with each passing decade, we must work harder to be happy. With our vast array of options for diversion and amusement, we plunge deeper and deeper into a cavern of illusions. The pillows in our ears grow thicker and softer, and still we wonder why we’re not happy, why we need pills and therapists and new religions, why none of it ever seems real.

It is because we cannot engage the real. If it takes hold of us, the actual reality of that child, if we tell our own children that “that, little Jimmy, is one of your playmates, slowly turning into compost,” it is simply too much for us to bear. We cannot begin to allow ourselves to feel it, because, somewhere in our subconscious, there is the voice of a craven coward that tells us we will never see the other end of it - that the pain will be of a magnitude too great to bear. The pain, we think, will change us, and we don’t yet know in what way.

The voice is right. It will change us. It will remind us of our helplessness, of the indifference of the world and its natural laws to our lives and happiness. No deity, neither angry nor loving nor even moderately competent, intervenes to prevent this suffering. It will remind us how much energy we expend on trivial matters. It removes us from the artificial dramas of our professional lives, from our sexual conquests and social intrigues - all modeled on the tv shows we’ve seen – and puts us in an emotional place where we are utterly lost and confused.

The time to go there is now. It must be done. Too much to bear? No one has asked that child’s mother what she could bear and what she couldn’t. Her own personal limitations were not included in anyone’s equation. Her village was burned, its women raped, its men slaughtered. Her child decays into a small bundle of tinder in her arms. She bears it.

But, how do we do it? How do we go there? With what courage do we make the journey? In fact, the first step is to realize that we need not travel at all – that we are already there, it that lightless space, without a guide or a compass, twisting in the wind.

Allow me a digression. It is not, in fact, a departure from the topic at hand, though it may seem so at first.

It begins with the word Enlightenment - one of my favorite words. Let’s add on another word: “values.” Enlightenment values. Now, a complete phrase: “A political culture based on Enlightenment values.”

The United States constitution is a product of Enlightenment philosophy. It was written in a time when, much like the present, political power followed primarily feudal patterns. Let us remind ourselves what is meant by “feudal” – it is the belief that there exists in humanity a limited and privileged class of individuals who are naturally endowed with the right and capacity to rule the majority of other men and women. These aristocrats are the central nodes through which power and wealth are administered. If you think we are free of this illusion today, consider what it takes to succeed as a politician now, and how readily we declare those not indoctrinated into the insider culture, and well-versed in the bland rhetoric of political speechmaking, to be unfit for rule. Consider also that the vast majority of voters prefer candidates based on entirely personal and emotional constructs, on who seems sincere, who seems honest, who has “character.” When we watch political debates between candidates, we are rarely analyzing their arguments. We look, instead, to see how they handle the camera, how well they perform. In short, we are not thinking critically about how their specific intention, we are looking for parent or a hero – whom we may trust implicitly, whom we may trust to “save us” without our having to keep an eye on them. We are, once again, children.

The notion that “all men are created equal” is a sword driven right into our child’s heart. It is not meant to be a comforting phrase. Rightly perceived, it is in fact a terrifying truth, a command that rips us from the womb. You have responsibilities, you rule your own circumstance, you determine your own fate. Furthermore, it asks us to embrace a notion utterly at odds with the preferences of culture and individuals throughout history, because it states that the magnitudes of my own emotions – my loves, my fears, my laughter and my sorrow – are not measurably distinct or, in fact, any more important than anyone else’s. Anyone else’s in the world.

It is not now meaningful to object that the authors of those words were hypocrites in their own lives, or that they only intended to include among “men” certain men of privilege, and not men and women the world over. We are in no position to make this objection, for we are even worse hypocrites than they. Unlike them, we no longer even make the effort to apply these principles to our political lives. We do not profess that it is possible, we do not care to do it, and we scoff at those few who do. It does not enter our minds, much less into any discussion of policy domestic or foreign, that the rights of Iraqis, Afghanis, or the Sudanese are inalienable by virtue of their being human – and that their plight is therefore of utmost urgency to us. We have not made a single decision based on the principle that rights can only be protected by governments or violated by them – a government cannot logically do both simultaneously, and it cannot “create” rights any more than it can create human beings out of thin air. We are no longer trying to improve our lot; with ourselves, we are all too satisfied.

It is very easy to demonstrate this last point. We claim to recognize property rights, and democracy. Yet when the vast majority of Iraqis express the fervent wish that we depart their property immediately, it falls on deaf ears, it not absorbed, does not sit on the table for our consideration. And we continue to debate the pros and cons of Murtha vs. Bush as if this democratic expression by men and women with rights did not occur.

Or consider the actions of our government immediately following the attacks of September 11, when the walls of the modern American womb were violently pierced. We did not simply seek to bring the perpetrators – a small group of fourth-rate fanatics whose aspirations to the Kilimanjaro of all terror-attacks succeeded only through the mind-numbing incompetence of our own intelligence agencies – to justice as individuals. They did not act on behalf of any nation. And yet we stated, without any sense of irony, that we would “make no distinction between the terrorists, and those who harbor them.” Really? No account made of why they were harbored? Whether those who harbored were coerced to do so? Whether they were aware of what was planned? Whether they were able to stop them? Justice is blindfolded, and holds a scale. Justice makes quantitative distinctions. Bush’s “justice” overseas would not pass muster in the tiniest town-court on our shores, yet we have lost no sleep when reigning death over untold thousands whose only crime is a certain physical vicinity to the accused.

Fear, of course, is what makes this possible. Fear allows us to turn off our rational minds, become reptiles, serpents, creates for us an axial cortex of fear and aggression, a nation of towering hierarchies. Let us revisit then the Enlightenment, and its purpose.

There is, say the framers, and those that preceded them, no “higher power” determining our fate. The existence of a higher power - that is a different question. But its effect upon our lives is essentially nil. God’s only influence on our lives is in how we choose to conceive of Him. Our ideas, not God’s, shape the world we have inherited. Our own earthly happiness is our greatest moral calling, and our intellects are the best means to this noble end. Here an important distinction is made – our responsibilities and lives are individual, but they are not isolated. Implicit in our participation in the society of free men and women is a social contract, that the protection of our mutual rights must be mutually recognized, and that therefore our individual moral choices have a distinct social meaning. Since, as beings, we are constituted of the same physical and mental parts, we are morally compelled to understand the human animal completely, unflinchingly. We are not permitted endless illusions or fictions about ourselves, no matter how pleasing. In order to be rational, just, in order to perceive truth clearly, we must empathize.

Empathy is one of the fundaments of democracy - its basic ethical structure cannot exist without it. Empathy is the anodyne of solitude, an expansion of consciousness that is both eminently rational, and fundamentally spiritual. It allows us to make of our emotions more than mere mythological phantoms – rather, our feelings become a means by which to measure, to understand, to comprehend. Empathy is imagination put to practical and moral use. In the Enlightened society, community and love are essential fuels for the intellect.

For the first century of its post-revolutionary existence, America was not a “capitalist” society. The word “capitalism” did not yet exist, and capitalists were a small and largely suspect group of individuals for whom the acquisition of wealth was of far greater interest than mastering a craft. At the end of the 19th century, when America had finally embraced the “ism,” there blossomed forth a new master-class of wealthy titans, and a vast underclass of industrial wage-slaves. It is no coincidence that, at this time, our society moved away from Enlightenment values, and embraced Christian sentimentality. The ennoblement of suffering and a fatalism regarding the poor became ingrained in American popular culture. The rich equated moral greatness with wealth, while the poor and those who helped them equated moral greatness with poverty.

For roughly half a century, this is what prevailed. Then, following the horrors of World War II, we began a slow-but-steady slide even further back in time. Our politics have devolved into an Old Testament mentality. Forget Christ – we now take our cues from the Book of Job: suffering is irrelevant to us. We may coddle ourselves, but the true implications of our Constitutional values elude us. Let us then hunker down, and horde our resources. Let us punish with a wrathful fist those who strike at us and their neighbors. Let us know that our anger is always righteous. Our artificial pseudo-heaven has been infiltrated, and an example must me made.

We are like the child-god of the Old Testament. Having now a political culture which appeals to childish emotions, we assume only the same of those from abroad who criticize us. They attack us because they hate us, we say. They do it out of envy. They’re jealous.

But look, now at our priorities, the mathematics of our twisted value-system.

In 2003:

The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in its latest budget.

In 2005:

Four years after American forces invaded Afghanistan to purge the Taliban, the United States has spent more than $1.62 billion to reconstruct this war-ravaged Central Asian country...

In the effort to deliver roads, schools, clinics, irrigation canals and other public works, U.S. agencies fell short of most of their own targets and misrepresented their progress to decision makers in Washington, according to the GAO, an investigative arm of Congress whose July report covered reconstruction results through May 2005.

As of October 22, 2006 the total cost of the Iraq war is $336 billion.

Let’s do the math. Four years after Afghanistan, we had spent $1.62 billion helping the citizens of that nation to rebuild their infrastructure and secure their “freedom.” Less than four years after invading Iraq, we have spent 207 times that amount to violate the rights of a society that wants us gone from their home.

Here's more:

To date in FY 2006, the United States has committed more than $175 million for immediate life-saving interventions, targeting the most affected areas in the Horn of Africa with water and sanitation, health, nutrition, and food assistance.

And:

Congress has already appropriated about $850 million for aid to all of Sudan in 2005 and 2006, and the White House has requested another $880 million.

Well goodness, that’s almost more than we’ve given Afghanistan! It is almost 0.5% of the yearly budget in Iraq, where it seems we may have killed more than the 400,000 than have already starved to death in Darfur, and no doubt displaced a number comparable to the 2 million displaced there.

Nowhere in our public forums was there a debate over the limits of our resources (We’re Child-God-America! We have no limits!). Nowhere did we compare, weigh, evaluate the risks posed by Iraq to risks posed by other entities, or whether those risks outweighed to possible needs of other nations in a humanitarian crisis. Nowhere did we question the justice of killing hundreds of thousands for 3,000 Americans. Not enough hands were raised in protest when Bush cut the Death Tax in this time of endless need and suffering - giving market-leeway, it would seem, for more death. These numbers do appear in the mainstream media, occasionally, but they are never compared. Because we have abandoned some of the basic tenets of our founding Enlightenment culture, we have forsaken reason and rational evaluation of the facts at hand – in conjunction with our own human empathy – and embraced the narrative of Wild West adventurism.

Indeed, the choice we’ve made reflect the morals of a death-culture. Our administration maintains a certain coziness with the Sudanese government, which is at least in part responsible for the genocide in Darfur…why? Because they have worked with the CIA to help find Osama Bin Laden. That is the moral choice we have made – hanging a small handful of outlaws is of greater urgency than taking the appropriate measures to prevent an unfolding genocide. This is not a choice we could have made, if we believed that the lives of human beings in Darfur were as valuable as our own. No, we cannot expect our government, and its limited resources, to save everyone, everywhere. But we must demand that it takes stock its own abilities overseas, and it limitations, and use this information responsibly, to the end of promoting the greatest good. Can any rational analysis of the situation conclude that the value of the Sudanese government’s info on Bin Laden is of greater importance than the lives of millions in Darfur? Could Bin Laden ever perpetrate a genocide on that order?

This, ultimately, is a failure of our imagination. Our surreal moral compass – which now distorts and bends across our HDTV landscape like one of Dali’s melting timepieces, allows us to embrace one absurdity after another. We have mobilized the technology of death behind nothing more than a loose haystack of rationalizations – ideas glued together without common structure or phenotype. Sound bites, with guns and ammo.

If we choose, as a culture, to be indifferent to the world, then so be it. It is easily accomplished. We close our borders, use only those resources available to us on our own land, and defend ourselves when attacked. Let the rest of the world rot. We could do it quite easily – we would be safe. But we are not that; we are everywhere. Our military is stationed around the globe, and we involve ourselves with the affairs of every economic power that can be named. We claim a desire to spread democracy and peace. If we use our power, we are morally compelled to follow those morals we seek to defend – and we must act on them.

A sense of proportion

2006-10-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I will write formal essays, and sometimes I will post links to articles and interviews I consider noteworthy. Since my intention here at OBH is to take a more philosophical look at the underpinnings of our various national dialogues, rather than provide the usual daily news-blog commentary, you will hopefully see more of the former here. Nonetheless, there will be times - this past week, for instance - when the sheer onslaught of information far outpaces my ability to comment on it. Today, I glanced at my notes and made a quick count of essays-in-progress since this time, last week. There are ten. Clearly, I have my work cut out for me. For the moment, I offer a brief foray into something I cannot let slip into silence.

The biggest story for me this week is the study published in The Lancet which estimates over 650, 000 excess Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. It goes without saying that this is a staggering number. Staggering but, it seems, based on sound and commonly used methodology. This is not the first time the Lancet has drawn controversey - a study reporting 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq in 2004 received a similarly skeptical reception (from politicians and media pundits, that is - to my knowledge, that report has never been scientificially falsified).
That the Bush Administration dismisses these figures is not surprising. What is eerie is that that the report has already, after the passage of mere days, receded into the background. The public, it seems, has only so much energy for outrage on reserve, and that fuel is being spent to make sure that, at all costs, congressmen are prevented from flirting with teenagers.

Don't get me wrong, I think Foley's conduct was inexcuseable. And yes, this revelation of his misconduct is nothing short of gin-soaked, sweat-stained manna from heaven for us liberals and lefties wishing to see the Republican juggernaut implode in time for November 7. But as we stand, licking our lips and sharpening our steak-knives, ready to carve into this Republican corpse, we need to maintain a sense of perspective and recognize that this is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory for us. Let us look (if we dare) at what we've become - depraved panty-sniffers and mud-slingers, feeding the public apetite for an entertaining scandal.

Our national dialogue - the dialogue responsible for fertilizing consent for our domestic and foreign policy - is defined by a lack of perspective of genuinely sociopathic proportions. Most of our political debates occur based on premesis only meaningful if one has completely failed to apprehend reality. No one even considers it a debatable point, for instance, that a congressman's sexual conduct has any demonstrable correlation to his performance on the job. Yet this is precisely what is taken for granted. Also taken for granted (on both sides of the aisle) - that Foley's indescretions are of far greater importance to us than any discussion of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in Iraq. Like the product of some post-modern nightmare, the number 650,000 appears for one day, in close proximity to the word "death", and then recedes back into the subconscious, giving our super-egos their proper space to contemplate the clandestine diddling of page boys.

This imbalance is precisely why any political victory in November will be only, at best, the very beginning of a long, difficult path to recovery. The poison of cultural narcissism flows through the veins of every American, myself included. Democrats are not our saviors. We are voting for Pepsi instead of Coke - one of them is over-sweetened, the other gassier. Our darkest battles are fought on the knife-edge of the world's horizon, too far away for us to count. 30,000? 300,000? Do we have the numeric literacy to perceive meaningful differences in these numbers, to understand what happens to a nation when so many lives are lost? The news says "650,000 deaths" and our president claims it is only 30,000 - and no one sees the fundamental absurdity of this public conversation, in which we might just as well be discussing the latest economic growth figures.

I often ask myself if my fellow countrymen truly realize that these numbers refer to people. Specifically, that they refer to beings every bit as human and complex as you and I and everyone else we know who enjoys sex, food, and television. These were people with memories of childhood (if not, in fact, children), with emotions and desires, people who cooked and sewed and sang, who had troubling dreams, and happy ones, who were tired after a day's work and who felt fear and loss and joy just as we do.

They are gone. They are dead, and the perpetrators of the act seem to believe that the scales of morality weigh human souls like beans - that there is number which is reasonable, and another which is not. In believing this, we have abandoned the very concept of justice. Justice is not a utilitarian idea - it does not place discrete values on human lives. In a just society, we assume the right of the living to life to be inviolable - because one is human, not because one is American. We take life only when attacked, when no alternative for self-preservation exists. The dire need of self-defense is the only justifiable circumstance, for then we can truly say that our hand was forced, that the attacker threw himself upon our sword. In no other condition is the taking of life just.

But invading Iraq had nothing to do with justice. It was about utility, and virtually every mainstream discussion since the invasion, either pro or con, has been argued on utilitarian grouns. Did we use enough troops? Was the time right? Was it too soon after Afghanistan? And so on. Far more critics are willing to attack the incompetence of the operation than its fundamental moral wrongness. Even now, more than three years later, have any politicians spoken up for principles? Or do they say simply that they could've done a better job?

This is what we need to watch for. Democrats are not speaking up for human rights. Perhaps they feel safer attacking Bush's competence, rather than his morals. This, for them, is a wiser target if they wish to reserve for themselves the possibility of pre-emptive strikes in the future, or if they wish to make their own special use of the Consitutional wiggle-room recently leveraged into our torture and surveillance policies. The morality of the Iraq war has yet to appear on the table for discussion. Indeed, if it did, if we assumed that Iraqis had the same human rights as Americans, we would be out of options. The vast majority of them want us to leave now - that is their will, and the right of the people to be heard by definition supercedes any argument we might have for staying, even for a limited period of time.

We must be a nation of principles, or we are nothing more than our armaments.

An Orwellian Interlude

2006-10-08T21:39:00.000-07:00

I originally posted this a few days ago on "Fables and Riddles." Since the topic is a crossover of both political and literary concerns, I'm putting it up here as well:

I recently happened across this classic (but, up until now, unread by me) 1946 essay by George Orwell, called "Politics and the English Language." I loved it so much, that I thought I'd
pass it along.

This essay embodies everything I find wonderful and heroic in Orwell's philosophy of writing. Like the modernists who preceded him by one generation, he seeks clarity and freshness of expression. Unlike the post-modernists who followed him, he believes that there is a demonstrably correct solution to the muddle of meaning(s), and is able to lay it out convincingly.

The crux of this essay, and, indeed, of all of Orwell's best writing, is that there is a direct connection between using language well and thinking well. And by "well," I do not mean something comparative, as in "better than the average person," but rather as in "well enough to arrive at the truth." For him, having the facility to systematically arrive at and know the truth is crucial for a participant in a democracy. When language degrades, whether due to neglect or deliberate abuse, we lose the tool with which we accurately distinguish true arguments from false ones. Imprecise language leads to a lazy thought-process, becoming a bromide of sorts. Overused cliches, mixed metaphors, and arch-sounding double negatives act as soporifics for writer and reader alike. They allow us to pretend we're paying attention when in fact we are not.

It is easy to see in this essay a precursor to 1984, which was published just a couple of years later. Here, Orwell documents the danger of language in decline - in 1984 he describes its fall. In light of his observations , we can understand better what made such phrases as "War is Peace," and "Freedom is Slavery" so terrifying. It is not just that they negate themselves. It is that, while knowing their obvious logical fallacies, there is a part of them that seems true anyway. We think we can imagine a definition of "freedom" that feels like "slavery" - perhaps a freedom that came with great risks and insecurities. We can imagine a "war" that provides security and purpose, and, perhaps as a result, "peace" - at least for some. We realize that we have already internalized some of the linguistic mirror-tricks that can one day produce visions of Big Brother.

Orwell's ideas are much needed today. There is a great, sad irony in the fact that numerous political commentators have drawn hasty (but apt) comparisons between the Bush Administration's relentless abuse of language and Orwellian "double-speak". I say it is a "sad irony" because the comparison is frequently made but never explored. As a result, we have already become bored with the comparison - it is such a cliche, after all! - without ever grasping just how frighteningly apt it is. Whether it is the ever-shifting definitions of "war" and "security", or our increasingly vague understanding of what Bush means when he refers to "the people," "victory," and most especially "freedom," it is clear that we have ceased to analyze the meanings of these words and phrases in the contexts in which they are used. (Or take one of Rumsfeld's most famous Zen Koans: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." As a matter of fact, it is. One need only revisit the definition of the word "evidence" for about thirty seconds to see why this is the case. In doing so, one will already be miles above the level of discourse in mainstream politics.)

The thing is, in the case of our present-day leaders, nothing is careless when it comes to word-choice. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, et al - these folks know what they are doing. Our media analysts don’t take them to task for it; they are either directly complicit in the dumbing down of discourse, or they lack the imagination to see how language may be carefully obfuscated. Common words like "freedom" and "security" have meanings that differ, but overlap, depending on context. One way to blur these distinctions is to use different definitions of the same word repeatedly in the same speech - with repetition, it becomes more difficult to keep track of the exact argument. This leaves it to the audience who, with the "good faith" assumption that speaker means what they want him to mean, subconsciously fills in the gaps.

Let's take words like "victory," or "winning," as in "winning the War on Terror." Its meaning is clear enough, is it not? We have a "know it when I see it" feel about these words. And yet, as recently as last year, the Bush Administration was able to fuzz-ify them enough to make it appear that their Iraq policy was different in principle from those Democrats who asked for a "timetable" for pulling out of Iraq. Bush's stay-the-course "winning" strategy was contrasted against the Democrats' "cut-and-run" defeatism. In fact, an analysis of Bush's own statements elsewhere reveals this contrast to be meaningless - the difference between the Democratic strategy and the Republican one amounted to logistics. For all his rhetoric about "defeating the terrorists," Bush and his cabinet had long ago stated, repeatedly, that the goal in Iraq was to train the Iraqi security forces to "take over" for the Coalition in the fight against the "insurgency." In other words, both parties foresaw leaving Iraq with the insurgency intact. In fact, they simply disagreed as to when they might best discuss cutting and running. By carefully picking his words and playing with context (I'm sure he had help), he was able to make totally contradictory statements that only conjoin at the obfuscated definition of the word "winning." His "winning" - i.e., not discussing the inevitable cut-and-run just yet, was made to seem like "winning" - defeating (read: "suppressing" or "killing") the "terrorists" (not "insurgents" in this case...always go more general when you want to inspire!). Examined logically, Bush's "victory" is defined only in comparison to itself. It is "victorious" to leave a country at war with the "enemy" still at large and fighting - as long as we don't set a timetable for it just yet because, well, that's what the President says victory is.

I feel like I could write a book on this topic...certainly, I will be expanding upon this idea in the future months. The control over our political lives is largely brought about by controlling political ideas, and complex ideas are at the mercy of the language used to express or obfuscate them. In the meantime, we have Orwell here to remind us that language is not some happenstance occurrence which we may safely leave to its own devices, but rather “an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.”

So much for keeping literature separate from politics...

At war with an abstract concept

2006-09-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Whether they wanted to be or not, every nation on the planet is now in some way subject to the U.S.’s latest and purportedly most urgent endeavor – the “War on Terror.” Although this is the uber-context in which virtually everything that occurs today is analyzed in the mainstream media, the term itself has gone largely unexamined. It has been used with equal frequency to refer to both literal combat, and the figurative struggle against fear, radicalism, “Islamo-fascism” and a minor cosmos of other threats both real and imagined. However, this important distinction between the figurative and the literal is rarely made in public discourse, and our ability to offer a clear anaylsis of policy decisions made in the name of the “War on Terror” has suffered as a result.

Let us then embark on just such an analysis, beginning with the first word, “war.” I don’t think I need to whip out the dictionary on this one. We all know a war when we see one. A war is a conflict between states, usually over territory or resources. Often there are ideological differences as well, and sometimes these differences alone are enough to set off a conflict. More often than not, however, ideologies arise out of material conditions, and become the means by which “hearts and minds” are mobilized in service of the Cause.

Some wars are begun by official declaration – this, I suppose, is the preferred and more sporting method. At other times, when two or more states or “states-within-states” have been in a condition of conflict or elevated alert for an extended period of time, wherein skirmishes may break out at the slightest provocation, it will eventually occur to all parties involved that they are “at war.”

Wars usually have specific goals. These goals may shift over time, but at any given moment it is usually the case that combatants on either side of the conflict can fit the essence of their goals on a single postcard, as in: “We seek the withdrawal of country X from our land, the control of ports Y and resources Z, and the release of all prisoners from enemy jails.” The specifics of implementation may be vastly more complicated, and the historical precedent long and torturously complex, but the essential goal of any war is something easily imagined and embraced – a simple pseudo-utopia that awaits once the material fact of victory has been accomplished. However long the war may in actuality last, its conclusion must at least be possible and to some degree imminent in theory.

There is, of course, another kind of war not touched upon in the above description – the metaphorical war. An evangelist may be at “war with Satan,” a welfare activist can wage a “war on poverty,” and a recovering alcoholic may declare “war on alcohol.” Many people are even admittedly “at war” with themselves. This is a different kind of war. It is not a military confrontation, but a struggle of social and spiritual dimensions. It refers, not to violent conflict per se, but to a struggle or project upon which great amounts of energy must be expended. Sometimes, the goals of the metaphorical war fall, as they do in actual wars, within the limits of material reality and towards specific goals with a visible endpoint. More often, however, they take on the character of the transcendent, the eternal. One wins simply by fighting the war, not by concluding it.

There is nothing wrong with either definition of “war,” so long as you know the difference. Into which category does the “War on Terror” fall? One might be inclined to say “both,” but before we accept this ready-made answer we must overcome one minor hurdle – it is logically impossible. “Reality” and “metaphor” are discrete entities, wholly unlike one another. There is no region in which the two overlap. One is either describing a phenomenon of reality, or a phenomenon of the imagination. A “war on homelessness” may describe a real struggle, but it is not a real war. To describe it as a “war” is an appeal to an imaginary representation of the struggle – it ennobles the material project with epic grandeur and importance.

Accepting, then, that a thing is either real or imaginary, but never both, let us revisit the question: into which category may we place the War on Terror? In light of the above limitation, the question becomes a bit more uncomfortable. We shall proceed with greater caution. We certainly cannot claim that the War of Terror is imaginary, can we? We have spent billions of dollars, mobilized multi-national infrastructures, and sacrificed thousands of lives in this “war.” And yet...what are its goals? Where might it meet its end? Have its perpetrators – our leaders – come forward at any point to give us some easily comprehended description, some specific, empirically meaningful picture of reality as it would appear at the moment of victory? In fact, they all-too-readily admit that the War on Terror is likely to last decades - that, in fact, it has no visible end-point at all. Whereas in the days following the attacks of 9/11 it became clear that we would soon be at war with the Taliban, the years that have followed have seen our state of “war” pushed to ever-greater levels of abstraction. War with any country that allegedly threatens us is now part of the War on Terror, as is every questionable act perpetrated in its conduct, and every subsequent alteration and imposition on our domestic life. Even long-standing conflicts which pre-date the War on Terror by decades, such as the that between Israel and Palestine, are now covered by this planet-sized umbrella called the War on Terror.

In fact, taken at its surface meaning, the War on Terror must be imaginary – as it is a war waged upon an abstract concept; terror. Like a War on Sin, or a War on Hate, a literal “War on Terror” is a war waged upon an aspect of the human condition with which humanity has never been wholly without. And do we not in fact find that, amongst those leaders most enamored of the term, the language tends to the metaphorical? This, we are told, is war fought to ennoble ourselves, and we win by fighting it, not by ending it.

Now we have a real conundrum. The War on Terror cannot be both real and metaphorical – and yet it is. But this state of quantum uncertainty need not endure long. There is a resolution. It is this: there is more than one war going on. We have the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and who knows what other wars yet to come. Connected to and yet above all these specified conflicts is the uber-war, the war-in-conception, our oft-mentioned War on Terror. This need not trouble us in principle (however much we may rightly object to the reality of it), again, as long as we can tell the difference.

Can we?

We must consider the following; that legislation has been drafted and enacted granting extraordinary executive powers to our president, and assuming extreme unilateral privilege for the United States, not on the basis of the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq (both real), but for the War on Terror (imaginary). Let’s be as clear about this as possible. Real powers and real privileges, of at least debatable necessity in times of real wars (which, along with said powers and privileges, are of limited duration, and end at the completion of specified material goals) are being granted in the name of an imaginary, metaphorical concept (which is, for all intents and purposes, without an end). We do not yet know how many more countries must be invaded, and how much “blowback” defended against, before the possibility of terrorist activity – and all activities we call “terrorist” - is permanently removed from the world. It has not even been argued, much less demonstrated, that such a thing is possible. Nonetheless, that this endeavor will occupy us for a length of time beyond any empirical calculation or informed guesswork is without question. Even the most ardent defenders of the War on Terror shy away from prophecy, such as that “The War on Terror will end when X, Y, and Z occur.”

What, exactly, is happening here? There can be only one answer, that “war” (literal) and “War” (metaphorical) are used interchangeably by our leaders. This is not sloppiness on their part. It is quite deliberate. To be fair, there need be nothing dishonest in finding a metaphorical dimension in a real war. If we describe the war in Afghanistan as, for instance, a “War for Democracy”, we are (leaving aside the question of the actual veracity of that claim) engaging in a kind of wartime rhetoric, an appeal to idealism, that necessarily colors all wars. In a certain sense, we are projecting our real struggles into the metaphorical realm of values and ideals. But what if we were to practice the reverse? A president might declare War on Sin or War on Violence, and then claim all sorts of special wartime powers in order that the war be waged. “This,” says the president, “is the nature of War,” as his minions listen silently to your phone conversations, in search of sinful utterances. This, then, would be a reverse-projection into material reality of an abstract notion, a literal imposition upon the world of a figurative struggle. It is this latter phenomenon that has occurred in the name of the War on Terror.

In his essay, aptly titled “The War on Words,” the British author Philip Pullman has written convincingly that conflation of metaphor with reality is trait of religious totalitarianism. In the act of this conflation, it is not the metaphor whose integrity survives the conflation. Instead, all becomes literal. The political effect of this is to entrench concrete executive authority for potentially epochal stretches of history.

Perhaps this is why, in our mainstream discourse, the enemy is ascribed motives for their attacks based only on ideology and emotion. That “they hate us for our freedom” speaks to immortal greivances, wholly divorced from any material considerations. If it is the goal of the Administration to fight the War on Terror indefinitely, then it is to their advantage to portray “the enemy” in this manner. The moment that it is acknowledged that “they” have material grievances and goals, and hence that some basis for rational engagement may exist, the war waged against them seems more conventional and less permanent. By extension, the executive powers used to wage the war also become less easily justified.

We have seen this before in America, most notably and alarmingly in our decades-long “War on Drugs.” Here too, we spend tens of billions of dollars annually, sacrifice thousands of lives to death or incarceration, re-interpret or circumvent the Constitution as befits the needs of enforcement, all in the name of a war which has no visible end. Just as our War on Terror has increased the number of terrorists by both literally promoting the rise of political radicals willing to commit acts of terror, while drastically broadening the definition of terrorism to include what where previously considered normal combat tactics (such as fighting and soldiering on the side of the enemy), the War on Drugs has overseen a substaintial rise in the number of states – both official and “rogue” – which produce and export drugs with ever more expansive, technological, and logistically expert infrastructure. Entire countries such as, interestingly enough, Afghanistan (responsible now for 90% of the world’s opium), base their entire farming economies on huge drug profits which would be impossible in a decriminalized market. And, it seems, we all know this, and go along for the ride anyway. When a politician speaks of “winning the War on Drugs” we know, on some level, that this is a War without end. What he in fact intends, so we believe, is to support policies that maintain a discrete and inviolable boundary between “us” and “them” – those who use drugs and those who do not. It is the “integrity of our communities” and the “innocence of our children” with which we are concerned, not all drugs and drug users everywhere. The goal of the “War on Drugs” is to keep these social imbalances intact and inviolable. The fact that “our communities” are not at all kept clean by these policies, that children may still acquire hard drugs with greater ease than they do booze, and that the incarceration of nonviolent criminals domestically and the support of authoritarian regimes abroad which inevitably result from the War on Drugs have ruined millions of lives matters little to us. We prefer the ennoblement of a metaphorical war above all else – even if it is waged with vast material costs.

Finally, then, we can look at the War on Terror as it will truly exist. The year is 2031, and our campaigning politicians on both sides of an ever-narrowing aisle are paying lip-service to the War on Terror, which is now an entrenched policy of endless conflict with a wide array of ever-shifting states and groups. The cost of waging the war still numbers hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Our military and intelligence services are permanently stationed around the globe. Tens of thousands of lives are lost in combat each year. Our phones and emails are still monitored, and trangressors in Word are punished before Word becomes Deed – we have gotten used to it, because we are “at War,” and sacrifices must be made. And we will not actually be any safer – with our ever-growing list of “enemies”, the rise of Terror becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The attacks continue, in greater scale and with greater technological (possibly nuclear) proficiency, and with each attack we state again to one another the need for ever more vigilance. Because the fight ennobles us. Because “giving up” is not an option.

This is what happens when you go to war with an abstract concept. Abstractions, emotions, fears - these things are part of our internal lives, our mythologies about ourselves. A war waged against a state or organization – whether just or unjust – will one day end. A war against an idea will not.

The Beginning.

2006-09-28T20:42:00.000-07:00

Today, I was born. Tomorrow, I write.

Until then, I wish you peace.