Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Politics

  • Truth and Power…and Other Stuff

    On Dangerous Intersection, an article was posted recently about the problem of Power in relation to truth. I wrote a response and decided to post it here, as a short essay on the (occasionally etymological) problem of Truth.

    When people start talking about what is true or not, they tend to use the word like a Swiss Army knife. It means what they want it to mean when they point at something. Truth is a slippery term and has many facets. Usually, in casual conversation, when people say something is true, they’re usually talking about something being factual. Truth and fact are conjoined in many, possibly most, instances, but are not the same things. The “truth” of a “fact” can often be a matter of interpretation, making conversation occasionally problematic. The problem is in the variability of the term “truth”—like many such words, we stretch it to include things which are related but not the same. There is Truth and then there is Fact. 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact. It may, if analyzed sufficiently, yield a fundamental “truth” about the universe, but in an of itself it is only a fact.

    When someone comes along and insists, through power (an assertion of will), that 2 + 2 = 5, the “truth” being challenged is not in the addition but in the relation of the assertion to reality and the intent of the power in question. The arithmetic becomes irrelevant. Truth then is in the relationship being asserted and the response to it. The one doing the asserting and the one who must respond to the assertion.

    Similarly, in examples of law, we get into difficulty in discussions over morality. Take for instance civil rights era court decisions, where there is a conflation of ethics and morality. They are connected, certainly, but they are not the same thing. Ethics deal with the proper channels of response within a stated system—in which case, Plessy vs Fergusson could be seen as ethical given the criteria upon which it was based. But not moral, given a larger criteria based on valuations of human worth. To establish that larger criterion, overturning one system in favor of another, would require a redefintion of “ethical” into “unethical”, changing the norm, for instance in Brown vs The Board of Education. The “truth” of either decision is a moving target, albeit one based on a priori concepts of human value as applied through ethical systems that adapt.

    Bringing this into the realm of religion, it gets tricky. Because the concept “god” can be formulated according to personal criteria that have only desultory relations with what we might call Fact (for instance, “god” can be seen as purely a philosophical notion identifying certain characteristics of human response to the sublime as well as characterizations of personal assumptions about states of being which cannot be derived by deductive reasoning), to make the claim “there is no god” is functionally devoid of truth. The best you can say is “there is no god for me.” If I acknowledge, for example, that my “god” is purely a mental construct I carry around inside to allow me to function according to a set of precepts, your claim that there is no god is merely opinion, just as unverifiable or testable as my assertion that there is. The “truth” lies outside those opposing statements, which are really trying to establish fact in a realm of ideation. Conversely, to say “there is no god but god” can only ever be a personal statement of belief, unattached to any factual content. The truth is personal, disconnected from material fact.

    (Agnostics and atheists get into a lather over the validating quality of religious documents, and contest the “facts” stated in the Bible and other tomes, claiming that because these facts do not conform to reality, it invalidates the assertion that there is a deity behind them. All it really does is take away the material foundation of religious claims—belief remains a personal choice. This is no mere equivocation. Finding Truth in this quandary is difficult at best and finding proper expression for deeply held beliefs or disbeliefs drives political discourse.)
    Likewise, then, you get into the difficulty of determining moral behavior as opposed to the simply ethical based on these personal apprehensions.

    Power introduces a third element that distorts all sides of the Truth/Fact, Moral/Ethical discourse by rendering all elements subject to arbitrary force. The force is a fact and may well establish an ethical ground, but it will always have a tenuous (at best) relationship to Truth and Morality.

    Power should always be suspect and expressions of it always discounted in considerations of truth, even though expressions of power are difficult to ignore. For instance, the legal power of a religious state may well assert its right to put someone to death for a lapse in religious expression. This in no way establishes the truth of the verdict or the guilt of the victim in moral terms. This is no more than power asserting itself and demanding conformity. But the discourse becomes thoroughly distorted by the acknowledgment that certain expressions may not be uttered. While within the strict confines of the system in question, the death penalty may be construed as ethical, in a larger context (the innate value of individual thought and expression of conscience) it cannot be construed as moral, even though the state in question claims adherence to a moral dictum.

    Teasing these elements apart is essential in deriving a sane methodology of community.

  • It’s The Women, Stupid

    And now for a romantic interlude in the otherwise dangerous realm of Afghan social morays vis-a-vis the Taliban.  A young couple whose families disapproved of their union ran off to get married.  Married, mind.  Not live together outside wedlock or anything so dramatic, but married.  The result?  They were shot outside their mosque after a tribunal of mullahs condemned them.  Here is the story.

    It is difficult seeing this to remember that this sort of thing is really not consistent with mainstream Islam.  But, just as with certain splinter groups of so-called christian sects, the Qu’ran is continually used to justify the persecution of women.

    Yes, women.  Even though the young man was also killed, it is fairly clear that the main issue the Taliban and other groups like it embrace is the control of women.  They bar them from school, they bar them from conversation, they bar them from public view, they bar them.  All, it seems, they want from women is to be sex slaves for the males selected to possess them and anything—anything—that threatens that is condemned and, as usual, the women pay the price overwhelmingly.  There are other issues covered by strict Sharia Law, but we hear little about that, probably because a lot of it is also covered by more tolerant, liberal interpretations of the law.  The dividing line is over the women.  It is over giving women a voice, a choice, any freedom at all to say no, and defenders of this who deny that it is a mysoginist pathology seem either to not Get It or are lacking any comprehension that women are people.

    To be clear, as I stated, christian groups do this, too.  Maybe they don’t kill them in the street, but that’s only because in the West, the police really will arrest them for that.

    To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s all about the women, stupid.”

    There is no compromising on this, as far as I’m concerned.  To allow this is to make all of us a little less human.

  • Look What Amazon.com Is Doing

    Amazon.com has just initiated a new marketing policy. They are stripping away the sales ranking of any book with so-called Adult Content. Here’s their little explanation:

    “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

    Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

    What this mean in effect, however, is that books primarily with gay and lesbian content are being singled out for exclusion from database searches. It is being applied in a bigoted and surprisingly hamfisted manner to conform to someone’s standard of what constitutes Offensive Material. Adult Content generally means anything with more than coyly suggested sex in it.

    However, as a sample of the books not having their sales ranking stripped away, consider these:

    –Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)

    –Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love” (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances

    –and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

    These book sell very well, generally, so it’s obvious that there’s a dollar connection to this new policy. Midlist—the vast majority of books—will be targeted. Why is this important? Because this will delete titles from amazon search engines. It will make a dent in writers’ incomes. It will render invisible Those Sorts of Books. This is 1950s Era censorship and it is a threat to livelihoods as well as the general public’s right to choose what to read.

    Here is a cogent article about this.

    What I want to say right here has to do with the whole notion of isolating Adult Content to appease the screeching of those who would defend us from our own choices. We see this time and again and it is always the same appeal to Family Values, often expanded with a plea to Protect the Children. I see billboards in certain parts of the country now that declare that Pornography Destroys Families. We are meant to hide that part of ourselves from any kind of public display in the name of some sort of imagined “purity” that must be preserved among children so that they aren’t “damaged” by early exposure to human sexuality.

    I’m tired of it. It’s absurd. Not that I think kids ought to be exposed to pornography—not at all—but the whole idea that adults do not have a right to indulge in adult things, without being ashamed of it, from fear that junior might see something he or she is too young to deal with. It does not proctect the children, it makes adults self-conscious, and it falsely assumes that Adult Content is about things none of us should indulge or admit to indulging. It is the age old game of trying to shame people into denying their own sexuality because some people can’t deal with their own.

    And in this instance it has serious consequences for writers and publishers. Amazon.com is an enormous source of income for the publishing industry. Along with the mega-chain booksellers, they have the power to influence the acquisition choices of publishers. Which means that something like this can have a direct impact on the kinds of books that get bought and published.

    This is an offensive against a wide range of subject matter, topics, authors, and sensibilities. Not to mention that it is hypocritically applied. There is a petition here.

    To be sure, we are not talking exclusively or even largely about pornography. We are talking about work that addresses topics that include matters of adult concern regarding sex. By rights, this kind of policy would once again cast Catcher In The Rye back into the shadows of censorship. Censorship.

    It is illegal when the government does it to an already published book. But this is private industry and they set policy any way they please.

    However the power of the purse ultimately is in the hands of the consumer. We have been in some ways tyrannized over the last three decades by the persistent sensitization of protecting children from adulthood. We have been inundated with the suggestion that the private proclivities of some adults are too odious to be revealed or publicly discussed. In the seventh grade I was caught in class reading Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers. The principle thought this was serious enough to call my mother in for a conference. He made it clear by his word choice and body language that he expected my mother to be appaled at my choice of reading material. Instead, she said that she never censored what I read and that if I couldn’t handle something I wouldn’t read it and she would appreciate it if in future he would not censor me.

    She was largely correct. Most of what I read in that novel then went right by me. I don’t advocate handing out Harold Robbins novels to 14-year-olds, but I believe our readiness to panic over such things is ill-advised. Better to discuss these things with kids rather than slap them down or, worse, pretend such books don’t exist. But most importantly, we have to stop behaving as if becoming and adult and embracing adult things is somehow a degradation. I have said before, quite simply certain things are just not for children.  Parents should deal with it.  I do not accept for an instant that the world ought to be ordered exclusively for their level.

    I will not say for their benefit, because people who engage in this kind of idiotic social engineering are not, by and large, doing it for the children—they’re doing for themselves, for what they think the world ought to be like. Using the children is just an excuse.

    I’m tired of it. I think we should all be tired of it.

  • The Irony of Conservatism

    Politics dictated FDA policy?  Say it isn’t so!

    According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda.

    What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call.

    The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue.  I mean, really—it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them.  You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one’s own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one’s life free from government meddling.  Handing both men and women the tools—provided by the free market, to boot—to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives.  They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger.

    What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism.

    Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol’ fashion American Values!  It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and  true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children.

    How did this happen?

    Well, it has occurred to me that one of the singularly binding features of human political reality is the in-built hypocrisy of claiming that you (whoever you are and under whatever system you live) wish to be free.  When you look at that claim—and Americans are by no means exempt—what it means in practice is the freedom to be autocratic in your own way.  Even back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan you heard members of the Mujahadeen claiming thay they were fighting to be free.  But free to do what?  And for whom?  Certainly they didn’t mean freedom for their womenfolk.  No, they meant freedom to be oppressive in their own unique way, and apparently it’s not much different here.

    Freedom is a slippery term.  Anyone with half a brain realizes that absolute freedom is not viable.  Freedom must be tempered by responsibility.  The edges of what constitutes responsible use of form is fuzzy, of course, and so we have laws to constrain those whose situations or philosophies run counter to the common good.  The irony of the pioneer image, the Mountain Man who went west to escape the constraints of civilization is that they never did and for the most part really didn’t want to.  The first thing settlers wanted once they had established themselves was law and order.  The mountain men were by and large entrepreneurs who depended on the civilization they supposedly disdained in order to make a living.  And they had to perforce accept the local laws of the native populations with whom they trafficked.  Freedom does not mean lawless.

    What it means is living within a framework according to your own desires.  You accept the framework while making your own place within it through your own choices and actions.  How well this works out depends on many things.

    When conservatives claim to represent American values for freedom, the image they seem to have in mind is one locked in the amber of time that discludes equality for women.  It is freedom for men.  Not that they do anything and whatever they might wish to do.  No, it is that men determine the framework and then work according to their will to build something within it.  But the image tends to ignore the framework, seeming to take it as given that it exists as something out of nature, god-given, pre-extant.  It is an old, hoary, knotty kind of image that harkens back to notions of the frontier and the need for growing populations and the presumed biblical virtues that allowed us to dominate this continent (displacing, killing, and otherwise bilking the natives out of the land along the way).  What it did not include was the image of women running businesses, holding political office, and certainly not bedding down with anyone they liked any time they liked just to have fun.

    Basically, though, women as equals alters the framework, and everyone has to shuffle to find a new way to live within it.

    So much for the vaunted champions of American individualism.  But still, it is a profound irony that the rhetoric—so powerful, so eloquent, so persuasive—should represent the polar opposite of what it is intended to.

    But some of them, apparently, seem to get it. Good for you, Judge Korman.

  • No, um, well, You Know What Over 18!!

    I have said for years that the convulsions of the Religious Right over abortion has less to do with fetuses than with sex.  Now that we have proof over time that Abstinence Only education DOES NOT WORK, these folks have decided that rather than recant they will go on an even wilder offensive by attacking university level programs.

    All I can do anymore is shake my head and wonder  “Just what is it with these people?”

    But what really annoys me are the many politicoes who go along with this nonsense and can’t seem to muster the nerve to tell them to, well, fuck off.  I mean, really—they can’t honestly be that numerous.

    Or can they?

  • The Future On The Chopping Block…Again

    I should state up front here that I really don’t have a problem ideologically with Federal Spending.  That great boogieman of right vs. left.  I pay taxes, I want things for it.  And I frankly like most of what I end up paying for.  I’d like to see priorities shift, but I don’t believe cutting the budget will accomplish that.  I’d like to see an expand space program.  I would like to see an expanding educational budget.  I would love a sensible national health care program.  I would like to see less spending on weapons systems that never get out of planning or away from prototype and I would certainly like to see less government subsidy of pointless corporate programs that would best be served by shareholders telling their boards of directors what to do with company money.  I dislike intensely public funding of sports arenas, for instance, particular for corporations that could pay for them out of petty cash.

    It’s not that I desire a welfare state—I agree with many of the opponents of welfare that it tends to be destructive over time, but I disagree with them that it necessarily must be so, but we’re not going to settle that argument any time soon.  (The problems are in implementation and then a lack of any kind of support that would meaningfullly get people off the dole and self-sufficient—like child care, free health care, and jobs training.  We get those things here and there, occasionally, depending on the whims of the prevailing party, and when they are there they are shown to work, but we can’t quite get out of the mindset that tells us that these things are handouts to the undeserving, statistics to the contrary notwithstanding.)

    Just so we’re clear about how I stand on government spending. Now, then.

    The rhetoric that accompanied Obama’s election included much from the downsized Republicans about looking forward to working with the new president and coming to grips with national problems in the spirit of a fresh start.  However, the stimulus package—which may well be too big—has forced the Republicans to declare themselves.  We’re hearing a lot about wanting more tax cuts—almost exclusively tax cuts—in lieu of spending in the form of direct aid.  This is a Republican mantra now.  Tax cuts.  The question, of course, is really this:  what good are tax cuts when you’re already buried in debt?  Granted, it frees up (theoretically) money for critical and immediate payments, but if the idea is to put people back to work tax cuts are not the solution.  Because corporate America is mired in over-leveraged debt burdens that must be paid down before something mundane like hiring can happen.  Tax cuts, therefore, won’t have any kind of immediate impact on the jobless rate.  In time it might, depending on several other factors, the most significant of which would be a newfound corporate sense of ethics which would prevent them from continuing the pillage of their own capital for all the things that have gotten us into this mess in the first place.  Labor is at the bottom of the ladder of what they see as important—hence the tongue lashing Obama gave them for paying out bonuses while asking for federal aid.  As for working people?  What good does a tax cut do someone who isn’t paying taxes because he or she has no income?

    But this was to be expected.  It is an attitude born out of the mixed priorities of what has become the Right, one of which is fiscal responsibility (I used to support Republicans on this count) the other of which is the more Libertarian view (borne of the Grover Norquist faction) that government is always the problem and must be pruned back radically.  Hence tax cuts, in order to curtail revenues in order to force the government to reduce its size and, one must realize, its influence.

    This was to be expected, though.  They have to stick by their perceived brief in the hope that not all of their program of the last eight (or twenty-eight) years was rejected by the part of their constituency who switched parties to vote in Obama and Democratic majorities in both Houses.

    But now we have a fairly clear statement that these folks are a new form of Ostrich.  Obama made it clear during the campaign and since taking office that he intends to put science back in the forefront of our national life.  The steady erosion of science by continual right wing gnawing since Reagan took office has left us in a bad state in relation to the rest of the world in terms even hard core Republicans must grasp—competitiveness.  The canceling of the Super Colider in Texas was bad enough, but we’ve seen all manner of sidelining of science, most especially during the Bush years, most prominently (but not exclusively) with regards to environmental science.  Basic research is down, exploratory science is struggling.  While the late and (by many) unlamented Senator Proxmire did inestimable damage to science by making it the object of ridicule and derision, the fact is that during the Fifties, Sixties, and good part of the Seventies it had been because of our national investment in Pure Research that America ended up at the vanguard of science.  The payback from NASA’s Apollo program alone in areas as disparate as meteorology and medical technology is almost incalculable.

    What characterized this was the willingness to take risks.  Let scientists research what they would on the assumption that somewhere along the line something would emerge that would benefit everyone.  It was a gamble, but of a win-win vareity.  Things did result, technologies and fundamental insights that propelled our education, our understanding and, yes, our economy in ways that could not have been predicted.

    The unpredictable nature of it drives certain types of people insane.

    Reagan’s assumption when he took office was that if we cut out the government involvement in—well, in anything—then the private sector would move in and take up the slack.  Nice idea and on paper there was nothing wrong with it, except it didn’t happen.  (Personally, I think Reagan was one of our most gullible presidents—big business told him “Ronny, take the restraints off and we will make this country great, we will be responsible corporate citizens, we’ll do great things for America” and he believed them.  (Top be fair, in some cases those corporate entities probably did do their best, but most just entered upon the feeding frenzy deregulation permitted and we’re paying for it now.)  Reagan believed them and they took what he gave them and screwed the country.  In terms of fundamental scientific research, corporate spending on it declined fairly steadily since them.  (One of the most productive research facilities in history, Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic research (an announcement made in August 2008) after years of declining funding which left only four scientists in the institution doing any kind of pure science.)  Corporate America cannot stand paying for gambles, even when historically this gamble pays off magnificently.  (The shareholders would rather have the money in their dividend checks.)

    So when Obama declared a recommitment to science, given his otherwise pragmatic vision, it was clear that he understood that in order for there to be a future, we have to look for one.  And to look for it in such a way that it will benefit us as we go.

    The stimulus package included a great deal of money—minuscule compared to the overall amount—for the various science departments which have been all but strangled over the last decade.  According to this link through Panda’s Thumb, Republicans want to cut deeply into science.

    The most egregious cut in this list in the excision a billion dollars—the whole stimulus allocation—for the Nation Science Foundation.  But nothing is left untouched.

    The most obvious conclusion to draw, as if that had not already become clear from all the other wrangling over this, is that the Republican leadership simply doesn’t get it, that they don’t see the connection between the free and subsidized exploration of all those things coming under the heading “Science” and the growth of both economic prosperity and the human spirit.

    A less obvious conclusion, and perhaps a bit on the fringe of reasonable, is that Republicans, conjoined as they are to elements in our society which have for lo these many years done everything possible to destroy our confidence in science and our attachment to its products, both intellectual and material, cannot countenance increased support of the very institutions whose pronouncements they have denied and thwarted at every turn.  It is disconcerting to see such a thorough-going denial of investment in the very fields that might—will probably, in fact almost certainly given its track record—do the most to improve our future.

    But it is the future that is the enemy.  It is the certainty that it will be different and that we must change in order to live in it that disturbs what has become a large segment of the Republican Party’s natural constituency.  It is a denial of all that we must face and, more importantly, all that we must embrace in order to become what we’ve been declaring since WWII that we are—the bright beacon of freedom in the world.

    The spending on infrastructure, on schools, on basic support mechanisms is being condemned by Republicans as unnecessary spending, because it is not stimulatory.  But everyone will use those things and because they won’t have to rely on some private entity to do or not do them depending on the whims of the shareholders they will be there for everyone to take advantage of.  (The interstate highway system enabled a huge spurt of economic growth once it was constructed.  The benefits to transportation allowed business to increase profits.  True, it also enabled White Flight and has created the problem of Suburban and Exurban sprawl, but that too was a spur to economic growth.  Yet critics at the time saw it as “wasteful” spending.)

    There is a link in the article to the legislators who are part of this demand to shut down a potential road to a better future.  Perhaps we should gear up now to see that they are ousted in the next election cycle.

    But then, maybe you think all this money for basic science is a bad idea, too.  After all, science is all about the future and the world and the universe and tells us things that make us different.  Scary.

    And exciting.

  • New Sheriff In Town

    It’s like Clint Eastwood has come to town and all the bad guys are hiding under the tables or in closets. President Obama is striking down one stupid rule after another his predecessor left behind.  It’s a martial arts level kung fu pen-fest, signing (or consigning) the detritus of ignorance from the last eight years into the dustbin of…

    Well, his overturned the international gag rule concerning abortion information.  He’s undoing the restrictions on stem cell research.  He has ordered Gitmo shut down within a year and a panel to look into what to do with the detainees.

    Before the vacillations of moral outrage erupt over the gag rule overturn, it should be considered how absurd and cowardly a ban on talking about something actually is.  And I don’t mean from a national security perspective.  Clearly, some information is sensitive in that sense and should not be publicly disseminated.  But in the case of the gag rule, we’re talking about something that is, for all intents and purposes, Public Knowledge.  If you know what to look for, anyone can find this information and not be arrested for having it.  Yet grown men and women have been constrained from talking about it in the performance of their duties as doctors and nurses.

    What part of “choice” do the enemies of choice not understand?

    Anyway, not to beat a dead horse, but for the moment those days are over.  What needs to happen now is for a sensible policy concerning reproductive rights to come to the fore as quickly as possible.  Obama declared that his philosophy is to reduce the need for abortion.  I’m with that.  But that means offering people options.  Abstinence Only is one option out of many, and certainly not for everyone.

    Things will only get harder now.  He’s declared himself willing and able to follow through on campaign promises.  His enemies will begin to retrench and we had all better be prepared for the circus when all this hits the courts.

    Obama won by eight million votes.  Granted, he had a major victory electorally, but demographics shift tectonically, and that eight million vote majorty—twice the size of Bush’s last (presumed) victory—is not that big a buffer.  If Obama’s programs for the economy move forward in a clear and convincing manner and things improve there, he may well get to do the rest of his agenda without a lot of fuss.  But we can’t bank on that.  The economy is a mess for two reasons—it was heading for a crash anyway because it’s been running on ether for a long time and Bush policies exaccerbated the results of the crumble.  Even is Bush had run a fiscally decent administration, the downturn was looming.  Consumerism is not a sensible engine for economy stability because it suffers from cyclic and inevitable exhaustian: people can’t buy that much all the time, forever and ever.  Sometimes you need a break.  And that doesn’t even start on the problems with resource and energy costs.

    I’m keeping my opinion on the optimistic side for now.  I think there’s an iron will in the man which will bowl over all but the most entrenched and insidious opposition.  Ignorance alone may not do it.  So we have to watch out for the really smart ones who know enough about their subject to throw the kinds of roadblocks in his path that seem to make sense.

    Keep an eye on John Boehner, House minority leader.  He’s laying the groundwork for a nasty trap Obama could walk into.  He’s coming across all reasonable at the moment. He has a knee-jerk Republican stance on tax increases and he supported No Child Left Behind.  He also supports school vouchers, but calls them “opportunity scholarships.”  I believe he is also opposed to stem cell research and, being an Ohio Republican, is doubtless a pro-lifer.  I could be wrong about him, but…

    In any event, kudos to Mr. Obama.  He seems aware that he has to beat the ravening mob to the table with better information in order to get a jump on the Ignorance Posse.  Let’s hope he can keep up the pace.  I’ll give it six months before the Republicans start trying to filibuster his proposals.

    It’s not over yet.

  • One Last Absurd Act…

    The obsession the Right has had for lo these many years with people’s sexuality has received a final “gift” from the Bush Administration.

    This is like grade school stuff.  It’s classic “If we don’t tell them about it, they won’t want it” thinking.

    Many on the Right feel everyone should have the freedom to own weapons.  They think, implicitly, everyone is capable of proper usage of guns and that just because a certain number of individuals clearly intend to use them to the detriment of others, that that is no excuse to keep them out of the hands of everyone else.  They are supportive of education in proper use of firearms.

    So why the different attitude toward sex?

    I expect this question never to be answered in such a way as to be persuasive to those who think sex is something that ought to be left in the gutter and in the closet, who think that teenagers ought not be told about it in the vain hope that they won’t use it, but I am so utterly and profoundly tired of this infantile crap.

    So you’re squeamish and you react negatively to words like “penis” and “vagina” and the idea of the one sliding into the other sends shivers of revulsion down your spine.  But oddly enough you probably don’t have a problem with images of gunshot wounds or swords cleaving limbs from torsos.  You have no problem with the idea of strapping someone to a chair or table and applying pain in order to extract information.  You’ve got no problem with dumping toxic waste into rivers or landfills as long as you can live apart from it in the style and manner to which you’d like to be accustomed.  You have no problem prosecuting a president for a blow job but one who has ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands based on twisted and erroneous information is okay.

    Here’s the trade off—I won’t call you a sociopath and try to enact legislation to require you to seek psychological counseling if you would just get out of people’s sex lives!

    Do you have any idea how much misery, suffering, and pain the ignorance of matters sexual causes, globally, every day because you, whoever you are who thinks this kind of repression is somehow moral, can’t stand the idea of people making love outside the bounds of your narrow moral vision?

    In certain countries, where marriage is the norm for 11, 12, or 13 year old girls, there is an unfortunate and horrible physiological syndrome these girls suffer if they become pregnant.  Because their bodies are capable of intercourse and they’re dropping eggs, pregnancy is not uncommon, but because their bodies are not fully mature, it can cause a tear between the uterus and the bowel, which results in a constant leakage of waste fluid out of the bowel.  Over time, the condition festers, can often lead to plasmotoxosis and septisemia, probably an early death, but before that it cause these girls to begin to smell horribly.  They are then ostracized and cast out of their communities.  Before the absurdity of Abstinence Only informed our policies, American sponsored health organizations, like Planned Parenthood, were addressing that problem.  They couldn’t change the custom of early marriage but they could provide contraception and reliable education, and for a time they were making inroads in stopping this.  Bush’s people cut all that funding and now the problem is back in full.

    Point  being, not all the services provided by these “evil advocates of irresponsible carnality” are for the purpose of allowing people to screw recreationally whenever they want—there are serious, serious health issues involved.

    There are many such instances of unfortunate side-effects of sex which these policies have exaccerbated and I am fucking sick and tired of it!

    So along with Bush and his cronies, I would like all you sex-aversive morons to kindly leave as well.  Many of us do not share your revulsion.

    Enjoy your parting shot while you can.

    End of rant.

  • Legacy

    I watched a good portion of Bush’s last press conference and couldn’t help thinking it was an audition for the part of a recovering junkie recently fallen off the wagon.  It wasn’t the words so much as the body language and facial expressions that held my attention.  Surreal?  Hasn’t the whole sad thing been surreal?

    The question is, does any of it make sense?  You can disagree with presidents all through history, but in the end almost all of them served their presumed constituency.  Even Reagan.  Which is one reason so few of them end up with terrible legacies.  It was those who could not seem to define either their constituency or how to serve that constituency who have been relegated to the sidelines with bad notices.  Buchanan, who could seem to do nothing constructive even when faced with clear choices, and ended up leaving office with a divided nation on the brink of civil war, serving no one.  Millard Fillmore, who set the stage for Buchanan’s disastrous fence-sitting with the Compromise of 1850, a package of slave state laws that, rather than smoothing out sectional differences, exaccerbated them by not taking a uniform stand.  Hayes, whose entire administration was haunted by the finagling by which he gained the White House.  Nixon, who, although doing many positive things during his tenure, ended by nearly destroying the very democracy he had sworn to serve.

    Many of these presidents could be said to have ruled by the maxim of “It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.”  But surely, one could say, they had to have some idea that they weren’t doing a particularly good job.   Watching Bush defend himself in his last press conference sort of denies that.  He doesn’t seem to get it.

    In response to a question about his actions with Katrina, he wondered aloud if he could have done something different, like maybe land Air Force One in New Orleans or Baton Rouge.  Does he really not understand that his appointment of a subpar administrator to FEMA and the gutting of FEMA’s budget over the previous several years led to the Federal Government’s inability to effectively respond?  Once the levies broke, what could he have done differently?

    He brags about his AIDS effort, but said nothing about his continual subversion of anykind of sensible prophylaxis policy regarding either Africa or the United States—where the distribution, education of use, and implimentation of rational clinical practices might have gone toward stemming the spread of AIDS (condoms among other things) he boasts that he has helped close the barn door after the horses have fled.

    (I don’t want to minimize the benefit of his increased funding for drug programs in Africa—it is a very big deal.  An especially big deal for a president whose base oncludes people who exhibit retrogade thinking about matters of sexuality, some of whom see AIDS as divine punishment.  But it’s still after the fact.)

    His eyes drifted around the room as if searching for something.  Then abruptly he would focus on a reporter and get aggressive about “What would you have done?”

    It is clear that he can’t wait to go home.  He’s all but moved out of the White House and Obama is all but actually running the country.

    I did not feel pleased that Bush is leaving.  Relieved, maybe.  But basically I feel sad.  About the whole thing.  That he’s out of office is all to the good at this point—he’s made himself effectively useless—but I can find no space to gloat.  In my opinion he ought not to have been re-elected in ’04.   I am sad for the country.  And by extension for the world.  Bush has left a huge mess.  No matter how hard Obama works, we ought not to expect more from him than that he stop the plummet.  Recovery is another matter.

    Bush’s presidency is marked by bully politicking.  He badgered people, bullied them, threatened them, fired them when they got in his way (if he could), allowed his subordinates to practice the most vicious form of “not invented here, it’s not welcome” ideological triage I have ever seen.  Many of the people who stood up to him over 8 years are finding places in the Obama administration (the former general who told them all that they were underestimating the troop levels that Iraq would require is about to be head of the Veteran’s Administration—he was forced to resign after Rumsfeld complained about him and his “defeatism”) and these are quite a roster of competent men and women.  It was as if Bush couldn’t stand anyone in his administration who could do their job better than he could.  The Valarie Plame affair, which has yet to be satisfactorily resolved in my mind, was the most blatant form of this mindset in recent memory.

    And we have on record his vice president declaring that he approved water boarding as an interrogating method, claiming that they had a memo from the OLA that it was not a violation of international law.

    Bullies.  Small minded people.  Narrow in scope, broad in prejudice, with a notion about what the world ought to be like and be damned what it actually is.

    And George stands before all, vacillating, uncertain, at times clearly wishing he was somewhere else, other times on the offensive, beligerant, cracking bad jokes, and making excuses for policy decisions the problems with which he seems not to grasp.

    I cannot imagine the dinner table conversation in the Bush household once he’s home.

    And there are Republicans out there who believe he has done well, that they can regain their dominance (not Newt Gingrich—for all that I find his politics the polar opposite of mine, I do not underestimate his intelligence or perception—who says the Republicans threw their success away with both hands), that they are simply misunderstood and this current rise in Democratic fortunes is an abberation.

    They must believe that Americans like war, like tax system that favors the wealthy and provides no services or relief for the poor, that an educational system that basically discounts schools and children who don’t come up to their standards and then refuses to acknowledge that they exist is a good system, that people who know how to increase a bottomline by shipping jobs and money offshore are somehow patriotic, that….

    And that health care is only for those who can afford it directly out of their own pocket.

    We should ask if we are collectively that stupid.

    The Bush Administration played a shell game over 8 years, one that played on the public fear of labels (it’s Socialism!) and class resentments, that played on an inability to separate truth from facade, that banked on the general lack of understanding about the difference between morality and ideology, that frightened us into turning blind eyes to the most basic abuses of our national values (torture is torture, I don’t care how many towers They knock down),  that relied on our inability to count.  At the end, what did they leave us with?

    A trillion dollar deficit (the Iraq War was supposed to be over in a few months and cost around 50 billion dollars, after which the Iraqis would pay for their own security); a collapsed financial system (the plunder was abetted by lack of oversight, a further underfunding of the SEC, and a Free Market trade policy that saw foreign pillage of American industry); an educational system that teaches less and tests more, leaving many kids out in the cold in terms of what they actually know (those states or districts which have turned this around, many of them have dropped out of No Child Left Behind); and an energy policy that is playing catch-up, spurred not by governmental leadership but by those entrepreneurs who, here and there, actually have a conscience; the United States of America’s lowest moral standing in global politics since Vietnam.

    It may be that Bush wanted to be president to show Daddy that he was all growed up, but that only explains so much.  It may well be that his only mission was to reseal the archives that might have told us Bush Senior’s role in Iran Contra, which W did almost immediately after his first inauguration.  But then what?

    I think Bush found a love of campaigning.  That’s what his tenure has been marked by.  Constant campaigning.  Adminstrating, not so much.  Bush loved winning and to win you have to campaign.  Actually running things, he’s never been very good at.  But making the touchdown…he could do that.  And he gloried in it.  Better than anything else, and he fell into doing it naturally.  He was a better campaigner than Kerry.  Better than McCain.  Better than anybody.

    But the campaign is over now and he has to explain the trail of destruction he’s left behind.

    One last note about voters.  We have suffered enough from a misplaced Common Man syndrome.  Americans seem to disdain intellectuals, especially politicians who display some sophistication.  George W. Bush possessed all the common touch one could hope for.  Obama is clearly an intellectual.  Bush read 40 books last year.  Obama has written two of his own, and everywhere he goes a book is not far away.  I’m not sure if the signifcance can be measured, but I for one am weary of ignorance in power.  I hope we never get seduced by the image of being able to have a beer and brat with a presidential hopeful again.

  • Rio Bravo

    I had to go to Wal-Mart this past weekend.  I know, I know, big box store, destructive of small town America, yadda-yadda.  I hate them, but once a year we do a Wal-Mart run for all kinds of stuff that, frankly, just ain’t as cheap anywhere else—toilet paper, vitamins, tissue paper, day-to-day Stuff.

    Usually I go with Donna.  This time she was in Iowa and I did it solo.

    Since I was there anyway, I browsed the big stack of remainder DVDs they always have and I went a little bonkers.  I bought the first season of the original Robin Hood with Richard Greene.  I remember the show as a kid and loved it, so for $5.00, why not?  (A real stitch, too, to see all these young actors who later did so much better—a skinny Leo McKern was a real hoot!)

    Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Shane, The Mask of Zorro… I’m filling gaps sort of.  But I came home and immediately watched Rio Bravo.  You know, the movie got made over at least twice, maybe three times.  The best remake was El Dorado, but the original has something about it that the rest lack.  I loved the soundtrack, the overamplified gunshots, the seriously deficient acting of Rickie Nelson.  It’s a real jumbled mess, you know.  Dean Martin’s performance was the best thing in the film and it’s actually really damn good.  Wayne was, well, John Wayne.

    There are two John Wayne movies from back then that I think showcased what the man could actually do.  I think he was such an icon that he really couldn’t be seen as anything else, so some of his performances were seriously underappreciated.  Anyone who thinks the man couldn’t act hasn’t seen The Searchers, which is a very disturbing movie and Wayne played a very disturbed character.  The other one was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Wayne isn’t the main character.  Not quite a supporting role, but definitely part of an ensemble, and it really is a rather convincing, sometimes moving performance.  It’s very much about the waining (pardon the pun) of the macho guy of the West.  His character is tough, independent, building his life competently, laying plans, and being, in the larger scheme of things, a Good Man.  But he loses it all to the educated Easterner who shows up in the guise of Jimmy Stewart carrying a stack of law books.  Both men get a lesson in realities, but where the lesson destroys one, it makes the other, and it is anything but a simple formula western.

    (I suppose you could throw Red River in there as well, but then we could go down the list of great Wayne westerns that were just…well, pretty fine, actually.)
    Rio Bravo, though, is the pure stuff of early western myth.  It’s formula to the core, but Howard Hawks made it work like a well-tuned V-8.  The photography was terrific and this DVD had restored Technicolor print.  When Technicolor was good it was the best.  There were times, though, when it didn’t work very well, but that was the cinematographers’ fault.  Here it works.

    One thing, though—Angie Dickinson.  She got better, but she really wasn’t a very good actress.  Nice to look at though, and she actually held her own against Wayne, but…well, she got better.

    Wayne became a target in the Sixties and Seventies for people who were intolerant of any kind of unapologetic patriotism, and he did overdo the flagwaving.  It’s a shame, but it was a war of symbols.  When you talk to people who knew him, the public image was somewhat at odds with the man himself.  I spoke once with George Takei about him.  Takei was in The Green Berets with Wayne and, despite their differences politically, he had nothing but nice things to say about Wayne, who labeled him Captain Sulu from day one.  Takei said the rule on the set was No Politics.  It was a smooth, cordial set, and Wayne was responsible for keeping the latent heat at a manageable level, an impressive feat given the subject of the film and time it was being made.

    Wayne avoided military service in WWII because he had a family.  I don’t know exactly how that worked—lots of men with families went—but he somehow made the argument that his presence in films would be more beneficial than his presence on a battlefield.  Depending on how you look at it, he was right.  It raises the question of how authentic one needs to be to espouse patriotic feeling.  Did Waynes later flagwaving require that he make the ultimate sacrifice, or could he be a patriot without needing to wear a uniform?  He put on a television special in the late Sixties about America.  It was a bombastic jeremiad about how wonderful the country is.  He did, however, get a lot of interesting people on it, like Robert Culp, who was very much an anti-war protestor at the time.  Thinking back on it now, I realize that at no point in it did he advocate going to Vietnam.  He never said that to be a Good American one had to put on a uniform and pick up a gun.  He just pushed the idea that the country was worth loving.

    His last film, The Shootist, was a sad one.  He went out in a blaze of gunfire, taking out a number of old enemies in one last shoot-out.  It can be read as an unapologetic, last hurrah for the way of the gun.  But it was also an admission that times had changed and he was dying, and the fitting end to his life would be to die as he lived.  A little over the top, that, but in its way bravely tragic.  After seeing it, one could go back over a long body of work to see elements of that tragic admission that this was all over.  And probably just as well.  Nathan rescued Lucy from the Indians, brought her home, and then had to leave.  He didn’t belong anymore.

    Wayne was one of the first and for a long time the only Big Name Star who allowed himself to be killed on screen.  I don’t know if that was his idea or if he just accepted it as a necessary part of good storytelling.  But there are many Wayne movies wherein the “hero” must leave, because the violence necessary to resolve the conflict makes him unsuitable for the world he has just made safe.  I think that gets overlooked a lot.  Too much.