Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1977–79. From a projection in Singapore. Photo by Darren Soh.
Sometimes I doubt the anger I feel toward Naomi Klein. Isn't this merely my way of throwing a progressive under the bus to burnish my centrist credentials? Except that no one cares about my centrist credentials, not even me. Didn't I read No Logo when I was a sophomore in college? Yes but I was a lot smarter when I was a sophomore at UT. Haven't her views and mine progressed since then? Maybe hers, but the last serious book I read was Green Lantern: Blackest Night.
Then I read an account like Natasha Chart's, describing an argument in passing she has with Klein at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. In which Klein argues with a straight face that U.S. President Barack Obama should throw his support fully behind climate "reparations" and that American progressive types should get over whatever queasiness this phrasing makes them feel. It's then I think: but damn does it suck that Big Monkey Comics closed.
Who loses on this trade? I'd be furious if I were a student at Texas Tech or Alberto Gonzales. So I heartily approve and hope that this hiring hastens Lubbock's sinking into the Earth. Plus, Yglesias has come to his senses and denounced the Red Raiders. Guns down! I suspect in practical terms that this will just mean I'll be able to recruit one fewer person to watch college football with me.
For the Guardian I wrote a story about efforts by U.S. terrorism victims to seize ancient Persian artifacts to satisfy default judgments for hundreds of millions of dollars against the government of Iran. Read that here.
While the judgments have been discussed in the news at length, they were brought to the fore again by reports in Iranian state media that Iran's Ministry of Culture refused a loan request from the National Gallery of Art for a Gauguin painting. The National Gallery of Art neither confirmed nor denied the story, expressing that the museum could not comment on future exhibition planning.
What is known is that a judgment to seize the Persepolis Fortification Archive—a collection of rote administrative clay tablets that provide an exceedingly rare glimpse into the daily goings-on in Persepolis under Darius, Xerxes, and their successive Achaemenid Empire rulers—can do disastrous harm to U.S.–Iranian relations. Which are, I'll grant you, not all that warm. But they show signs of improving, with President Obama's holiday message and President Ahmadinejad's motions on behalf of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi being examples of diplomatic overtures that would be unthinkable a year ago. Dividing and auctioning the Achaemenid tablets and other Persian artifacts would be a bad thing for improving relations, but also just a bad thing for world history.
It's tempting to pose that it's the judgments, not the fallout within the sphere of cultural lending, that pose the real block to relations. But the categorization of lending as a commercial transaction between sovereign nations is a new and mighty strained legal reading. Read on here.
Chris Cilizza gets the big scoop that Arlen Specter, well, (R D-PA). Specter's statement is here. The initial response from progressive corners seems to be a frustrated optimism: Speculation about the Democratic primary contender strong enough to take down Specter is already afoot, while others bemoan that even a Specter switch is a net loss for progressives, as he has said that he won't change his position on the Employee Free Choice Act. (Even though he's already switched sides once.)
I would go further than Scott Lemieux and say that not only should we expect a lot of wrangling to make the filibuster-proof Senate majority operate like a filibuster-proof Senate majority, it will be more difficult to arrive at 60 votes now that the Democrats ostensibly have them. The threat to take a vote away from an agenda is more palpable than the threat to refuse to support a piece of legislation. At 60 votes, the agenda is at hand. That means that Ben Nelson (D-CO) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) become less reliable votes, insofar as they can wrest more from the leadership for their compliance. And in the Democratic Senate, discipline seems to work bottom up, not top down.
But some votes are different than others. We have 60, let's pack some courts.
UPDATE: The Corner is mandatory reading today. Ramesh Ponnuru: "My initial reaction on hearing the news was that after generating a bunch of Democratic House seats, the Club for Growth has now produced its first Democratic senator." Mark Hemingway: "I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he's still a Democrat."
If not in handcuffs, at least place him in context.
Because I have missed you, and because this is context worth having (and information worth sharing), I am painstakingly retyping a section of the book for you here. (And painstaking it is! I spilled miso soup on my keyboard a couple weeks back. I now enjoy the luxury of the
" ' P - 0 p : ) ; [arrow]keys through the laborious combination of keyboard remapping and perpetual cut-and-pasting.)
Anyhow, this excerpt is long but worth the read. It comes from a passage on issues facing the returning New Orleans diaspora:
Although government officials insist that the dirt in residents' yards is safe, Churchill Downs, Inc., the owners of New Orleans Fair Grounds, felt it was not safe for its million-dollar thoroughbred horses to race on. The Fair Grounds is the nations third oldest track. Only Saratoga and Pimlico have been racing longer. The owners hauled off soil tainted by Katrina's floodwaters and rebuilt a grandstand roof ripped off by the storm's wind (Martell 2006). The Fair Grounds opened on Thanksgiving Day 2006. If tainted soil is not safe for horses, surely it is not safe for people--especially children who play and dig in the dirt.You have to feel sorry even for Governor Bobby Jindal, who faces the horrifying prospect of the government counting disaster aid against the state as income for the federal Medicaid calculator. But not that sorry, since by all accounts Jindal would cut assistance no matter what.Families who chose to return to rebuild their communities shouldn't have to worry about their children playing in yards, parks, and schoolyards contaminated with cancer causing chemicals left by Katrina floodwaters. In March 2006, seven months after the storm slammed ashore, organizers of A Safe Way Back Home initiative, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University (DSCEJ), and the United Steelworkers (USW) undertook a proactive pilot neighborhood clean-up project--the first of its kind in New Orleans (Deep South Center for Environmental Justice 2006). The clean-up project, located in the 8100 block of Aberdeen Road in New Orleans East, removed several inches of tainted soil from the front and back yards, replacing the soil with new sod, and safely disposed of the contaminated dirt.
But residents who choose to remove the topsoil from their yards--which contains sediments left by flooding--find themselves in a Catch-22 situation with the Louisiana Department of Economic Quality and EPA insisting that the soil in their yards is not contaminated and the local landfill operators refusing to dispose of the soil because they suspect it is contaminated. This bottleneck of what to do with the topsoil remains unresolved more than three years after the flood.
The Safe Way Back Home demonstration project serves as a catalyst for a series of activities that will attempt to reclaim New Orleans East after Katrina. It is the governments responsibility to provide the resources required to address areas of environmental concern and to ensure that the workforce is protected. However, residents are not waiting for the government to ride in on a white horse to rescue them and clean up their neighborhoods.
The DSCEJ/USW coalition received dozens of requests and inquiries from New Orleans East homeowners associations to help clean up their neighborhoods block by block. State and federal officials called these voluntary cleanup efforts "scaremongering " (Simmons 2006). EPA and LDEQ officials said that they tested soil samples from the neighborhood in December 2006 and that there was no immediate cause for concern.
According to Tom Harris, administrator of LDEQ's environmental technology division and the state toxicologist, the government originally sampled 800 locations in New Orleans and found cause for concern in only 46 samples. Generally, the soil in New Orleans is consistent with "what we saw before Katrina, " says Harris. He called the Safe Way Back Home program "completely unnecessary" (Williams 2006). A week after the voluntary cleanup project began, an LDEQ staffer ate a spoonful of dirt scraped from the Aberdeen Road pilot project. The dirt eating publicity stunt was clearly an attempt to disparage the proactive neighborhood cleanup initiative. LDEQ officials later apologized.
[ . . . ]
Although many government scientists insisted that the soil is safe, an April 2006 multiagency task force press release distributed by EPA raised some questions (U.S. EPA 2006). Though it claimed that the levels of lead and other contaminants in New Orleans soil were "similar " to soil contaminant levels in other cities, it also cautioned residents to "keep children from playing in bare dirt. Cover bare dirt with grass, bushes, or 4 to 6 inches of lead-free wood chips, mulch, soil, or sand."
[ . . . ]
Now, instead of cleaning up the mess that existed before the storm, government officials are allowing dirty neighborhoods to stay dirty forever. Just because lead and other heavy metals existed in some New Orleans neighborhoods before Katrina doesn't mean that there isn't a moral or legal obligation to remediate any contamination uncovered. Government scientists have assured New Orleanians, including gardeners, that they do not need to worry about soil salinity and heavy metal content. They also say residents need not worry about digging or planting in the soil. But given the uncertainties built into quantitative risk assessments, how certain are these government officials that all of New Orleans neighborhoods are safe?
In August 2006, nearly a year after Katrina struck, the EPA gave New Orleans and surrounding communities a clean bill of health, while pledging to monitor a handful of toxic hot spots (Brown 2006). EPA and LDEQ officials concluded that Katrina did not cause any appreciable contamination that was not already there. Although EPA tests confirmed widespread lead in the soil--a pre-storm problem in 40 percent of New Orleans--EPA dismissed residents calls to address this problem as outside the agency's mission.
And in June 2007, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report, Hurricane Katrina EPA's Current and Future Environmental protection Efforts Could Be Enhanced by Addressing Issues and Challenges Faced on the Gulf Coast, criticizing EPA's handling of contamination in post-Katrina New Orleans in the Gulf Coast (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2007). The GAO found inadequate monitoring for asbestos around demolition and renovation sites. Additionally, the GAO investigation revealed that "key information released to the public about environmental contamination was neither timely nor adequate, and in some cases, easily misinterpreted to the public's detriment."
The GAO also found that EPA did not make clear until eight months later, in August 2006, that a major finding in its 2005 report--that the great majority of the data showed that adverse health effects would not be expected from exposure to sediments from previously flooded areas--applied only to short-term visits, such as to view damage to homes (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2007).
The point being, if Chin can go to the Congress and find assistance—and in fact it seems that he actually expects more in the way of a response from the executive branch, from groups like EPA, CDC, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—the project will have a very significant impact on New Orleans.
Why is Baltimore Sun economics writer Jay Hancock misleading his readers?
On Friday, Hancock wrote, "Arts and culture are great, but they are products of prosperity and economic growth; they do not create them." This—and little else, certainly nothing in the way of figures to frame his argument—he writes in response to a post by USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development professor Elizabeth Currid for the school's Politics and Society blog.
In her post, Currid wrote about the "algebraic joke" that the arts industry received in the stimulus package, a mere $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. Currid adds up the numbers and finds:
When you do the calculations, the sum allocated to the arts through the stimulus package actually seems a bit stingy. Just to be clear: The financial industry posts losses of $763 billion and tens of thousands of jobs, and the government commits hundreds of billions of dollars to bailing the industry out. According to Americans for the Arts, for-profit arts industries contribute $166.2 billion, generate 5.7 million jobs and return nearly $30 billion in government revenue annually — and they get $50 million from the government.Currid isn't the first to take note of the economic benefit of the arts, which employs 5 percent of the workforces of New York City and Los Angeles. Ben Adler wrote a tidy summary for The Atlantic in February, and the people at the Institute for Policy Studies declared in December that fully 1 percent, or $7.8 billion*, from the stimulus should have been directed toward the arts and provided a lot of ideas for how to spend that money. But as much as the arts are worth to Americans, they are worth much, much more to Republicans, who demagogue on the subject every opportunity they get.
No telling what beef Hancock has with Currid's argument, because he doesn't say. Does he disagree that the arts generate tax revenue and jobs, or does he have a special idea in mind with "restoring aggregate demand," or, well, I don't know what? He should clarify, since he appears to be either ignorant or wrong.
* Here I am figuring on 1 percent of the total $787 billion stimulus package. The IPS gave this figure as $6 billion, working with a December vision of a $600 stimulus package, but the IPS declaration clearly means that 1 percent of whatever the total stimulus eventually winds up being should go to the arts. And this number could go up.
Here is that piece arguing for a Department of Culture that I mentioned. I outlined this case to Julian Sanchez last week at the Velvet Lounge and he scoffed mightily. (But of course he would.) Maybe you will find something to it.
Ed Ruscha, Public Stoning, 2007.
In the Guardian this week I'll be outlining my case for a U.S. Department of Culture, focusing on putting the purse for public arts funding in a place where conservatives can't get to it. You'd be much more likely to see Congress pass a cultural jobs bill, for example, if you had significant input on the the stimulative aspects of cultural spending from the Cabinet.
You might also find Sen. Tom Coburn, for example, less able to pass an amendment saying that stimulus funds should not go to any casino or "casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project." You see the trick: His amendment tacks a poison pill (gambling) onto positive targets for stimulus funds that bear no relation to casinos.
(How positive? Quite positive, says Ben Adler: "Every year nonprofit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government.")
Of course, you might also find Sen. Coburn less able to pass such an amendment if Congress understood how infrastructure spending works. Stimulus spending was hardly going to fund casinos in the first place. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman had suggested the possibility of using stimulus funds to build a $50 million museum on mobs and gangsters—which set off conservatives, although I don't understand why. Coburn conflates this suggestion—nevermind that mob-museum funds were never written into the stimulus bill—with funding a casino.
A representative in the office of Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) explained over the telephone that upstate New York state tribes, for example, would like to use stimulus funds to build a new casino. But because the stimulus bill is an appropriations bill, it can't authorize a casino, which requires approval from the Department of the Interior. In theory infrastructure spending might be used, say, to retrofit a casino—but in that case it is a different kind of infrastructure spending, isn't it?
And that is the sort of work that a Department of Culture could help: working, say, with the U.S. Green Building Council to advise the Department of Energy. Further I would like to know which of the notorious projects on Sen. Coburn's list—"aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project"—represents the best option in terms of (economic and cultural) stimulation.
Now, I suspect that this zero-gravity chair to which Sen. Coburn darkly alludes is some kind of nefarious imported Finnish construct. Again, you'd want to see a Department of Culture collaborating with the Department of Defense to stop this menace.
Further to what Ed Winkleman is saying here about Obama's plans for art and cultural advancement being too vague — and given that even arts supporters feel a need to play defense when it comes to institutions like the NEA — what about if President-elect Barack Obama were to scrap the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities altogether and start with something fresh? I like a U.S. Department of Culture for the branding exercise alone. Right now I feel that the best way to show more support for the arts is to find buyin from the arts world. The usefulness of the NEA as a wedge has waned with the Republican brand and culture wars more broadly speaking, but the scars are still fresh in the art world and cynicism dominates. There are other good reasons for doing this, but branding is the one I like best.
Edward Burtynsky, Bao Steel #8, 2005.
Speaking of the EPA, Brad Plumer passes along a Philly Inky profile of Stephen Johnson, the Gaius Baltar–esque head the EPA, appointed by President Bush in 2005. For more tales of incompetence that will astound and amaze you, read Plumer's survey of the scene at Interior and the job cut out for incoming Secretary Ken Salazar.
Bonus environment feature! Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" performed by Radiohead's Phil Selway and Ed O'Brian with up-and-comer Liam Finn and artists-who-need-no-introduction Johnny Marr and Jeff Tweedy. Sounds nice!
Over at Time, Richard Lacayo considers a Cabinet-level Department of Culture and decides against it:
[I]n the hope of getting federal dollars, would museums find themselves tempted to avoid mounting shows that might make the U.S. Department of Culture unhappy? In which case, what happens the next time a conservative Republican is in the White House?What happens under a Republican administration is the U.S. Department of Culture doesn't do anything at all because its budget is slashed to all hell. It's not like the Environmental Protection Agency became a toxic terror during the Bush administration—it was merely prevented from doing its job. You might find under the Grand Old Party's watch an increase in Shakespeare in the Park and jazz festivals along with a decline in fewer biennials and traveling midcareer exhibitions. I'd worry more about other powers that might wind up in a Department of Culture, like the copyright enforcement regimes you see in Departments of Culture elsewhere in the world.
Which is not to say that there is no reason to be concerned about art in the public sphere. I wrote a story along these lines for the Huffington Post after the death of Sen. Jesse Helms:
"More insidious" than conservative challenges to contemporary art "is the chilling effect Helms and his like have had on museums, universities, theaters, and other arts-presenters," writes Wendy Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, via e-mail. In The Scandal of Pleasure, Steiner provides the authoritative account of both the public-funding and obscenity-trial scandals associated with the NEA in 1989. "Right-wing politicians do not have as much offensive publicly-funded art to complain about these days, because publicly-funded institutions will not show it."And here is what this intimidation sounds like (and this ought to date the piece):
John McCain's rhetoric has even come to parallel the culture warriors in its reductive simplicity. Steiner explains in Scandal that Helms's counterpart in the House (Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)) once threatened his colleagues to support legislation penalizing the NEA with the statement, "Make no mistake about it, we will alert our members that you are on the record as supporting tax-sponsored pornography." John McCain registers a similar note when he goes on about his friends who author pork-barrel spending legislation: "I'll make them famous, and you'll know their names."But when elected Republican representatives huff and puff about art, the point isn't to actually dial back First Amendment protections. Rather the point is to throw some red meat to voters and win elections. Outrage itself is a constructed thing, cultivated by radical morals groups who benefit from certain structural features of the complaint process. See Ars Technica's Matthew Lasar break down the way that the FCC handles complaint statistics and you'll see that the nation is not so full of shrinking violets as their numbers might have you believe.
Culture wars haven't won conservatives anything recently. A failed culture-war campaign might ultimately cost Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper his job. (Another story I wrote up for HuffPo.) And while the GOP brand is failing, liberals are picking up executive and legislative branches. The opportunity just might be right to push more aggressively for public support for art, what with all this change in the air.
But only, of course, if there's a case to be made for public support. Lacayo's post highlights a concern with government arts administration but doesn't really address the status quo. To do that you'd need to change the question: What happens when museums that are overwhelmingly dependent on private support fail when the economy tanks? To my mind there are worse fates than the specter of censorship under an arts czar.
The Associated Press:
The dictionary defines "meh" as an expression of indifference or boredom, or an adjective meaning mediocre or boring. Examples given by the dictionary include "the Canadian election was so meh."That is just not so! Nearly a month ago I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about how arts funding cuts cost Stephen Harper a conservative majority government. That's not meh! Holy Fuck got involved, I'm telling you, it was a riot.
Four-thirty in the afternoon and I'm still too anxious to turn on the television and dive in to this election that, I think I can fairly say, I've been waiting for for a good part of my life now. I didn't expect to be so nervous, but I drank more than my usual amount of coffee and not much but bread in the way of food to, well, to exacerbate my nerves. Of course, I feel good about the likely outcome and I look forward to tonight. Expectations could not be higher, the day couldn't be more surreal, the election is simply so significant. My stomach is not an organ made to handle this election.
Gonna go run around in circle until the polls close. I hope everyone was able to vote today without incident!
Ambinder's got some plausible context for McCain's demeaning, seemingly out-of-nowhere "that one" jab at Obama last night:
McCain uses "that one" frequently in his stump speeches; the set-up is usually clearer, as McCain refers to Obama's being one of the senators who supported it, not McCain -- as in, if you had to guess who supported the Bush-Cheney '05 energy bill, it's that senator, not this senator. But it came off awkwardly on stage tonight.Reading that, I think I do remember hearing McCain use that parallel in a setpiece speech. And it wasn't even McCain's most awkward line of the evening. When asked whom he'd appoint as U.S. Treasury secretary, McCain sneered "Not you" at Tom Brokaw as if he were saying "Screw you."
But let's not overthink this! There's plenty of room for McCain to be both awkward and contemptible in the way he talks to and about his opponents. (And wife.) I know that if I were sitting down on a public stage and my colleague and rival were standing above me with a mic, condescending to me as an object, I might recognize this as a badly delivered line, but I would still want to kick him in the thorax. Beutler: "Somebody needs to mention that this is a singular rendering of the phrase 'Those people!'"
I asked Spencer what he thought about this speculative AP story regarding the oil war in Nigeria and whether it should serve as a harbinger of new violence in Iraq now that the government is doling out enormous oil contracts. Short answer: Go read Spencer.
While I've got this window open: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's world page is actually a handy source for AP headlines, often picking up interesting stories that other newspapers pass over. Now, doesn't it feel very 2004 to read a tip about a way to read the Internet that a blogger finds personally useful?
Ezra and Yglesias take exception to the "Main Street" metonym that's made its way through the media and campaigns. Of course, it should come as no surprise that high-profile Washington pundits from California and New York respectively should reject even the synecdoche of small-town America. On this, they are correct: Most Americans do not live in small towns. Nevertheless, most of America's geography is dotted by them, and all of those small towns have Main Streets—and all of those Main Streets need badly to be transformed, not into urban corridors but livable communities where citizens can prosper reasonably, contributing to states who contribute to the wealth of the nation rather than withdraw from it. And who is ready to talk about how? Not John McCain but Barack Obama, who is ready to have the debate about how to make that change, a debate that John McCain wants to avoid, and so on, and so on.
Rather than lend credence to an imagined bucolic America that exists only in Norman Rockwell's watercolors, this metaphor draws attention to the significant problems posed by sub/exurbanization, increased income disparity, and the displacement of small and local businesses by massive corporations and international firms. At least, there's an opportunity to redirect "Main Street" toward that discussion. What does John McCain mean by Main Street?, asks Barack Obama. It's not where you and I live.
It's also just not feasible to ignore all the Main Streets despite the fact that not many people live along them, because our government structure assigns disproportionate power to those states wherein Main Streets lay. Hence Barack Obama is chasing an EC vote in Nebraska, where one hopes he's able to sing a Main Street carol convincingly.
Beyond the fact that almost everyone will read "Main Street" with the most immediate, cliché meaning in mind, the bigger problem with the metaphor is in its application: Wall Street versus Main Street. I suspect that this negative construction is not a useful way to think about financial regulation in broad terms but clearly, but I can't say.
The presidential debate between McCain and Obama may not happen but you can rest assured that there is no force so powerful as to deter the panelists convening on Friday at the Arlington Arts Center: Arlington County public art curator Welmoed Laanstra, University of Maryland art history and theory professor Josh Shannon, and myself. Topics (from the press release):
What's the difference between political expression out in the world and inside the gallery environment? Is political speech in the gallery protected? Does it have teeth, or does it exist simply to be consumed or marginalized? How does contemporary art speak to pop culture and to the media—and vice-versa?The three of us will be joined by Rex Weil, curator of "Picturing Politics 2008", artists from the show, and moderator/Arlington Arts Center exhibitions director Jeffry Cudlin. But not John McCain.
Wasting time today, I stumbled across the Sarah Palin vlog, which is funny, but not nearly so funny as the Sarah Palin blog, which you want to be reading daily, since the band of friends behind it the future vice president works quite hard on it. From the vlog I skipped over to comedienne Sara Benincasa's MTV page, which isn't funny at all, and furthermore suffers from stilted, low production values that makes Slate video look like it was made at Skywalker Ranch. It did remind me, however, that MTV used to be cool—kind of unbelievably cool, impossibly archly cool, for a medium geared toward a mass audience. Defamer wrote a much-deserved eulogy for MTV that had me shaking my head, more in sadness than in anger. Rest in piece, Kabel font.
I'm not sure why tonight's speech by Palin is guaranteed to be the barn-burner that people like Marc Ambinder say it will be, because the speech needs to be a rousing dogwhistle duet that will appeal to both environment-friendly, pro-choice moderate women and the evangelical Christian, social conservative Republican base alike, and near as I can tell that's impossible.
Roberta Smith's Sunday NYT piece, arguing that public art is enjoying a renaissance, puzzled Artsjournal's Tyler Green: "[Jeff Koons's] Balloon Dog (Yellow) couldn't be any further from public: It's owned by hedge fund-enabled impresario Steven Cohen. It is on temporary loan to the Met, where it sits stands on the roof."
What's got me scratching my skin is that Smith never mentions development in her analysis of trends in public art. Public sculpture was as dead as a doornail in the 1960s and 70s—but so were the cities where public sculpture is commissioned and seen. Can Smith be so sure that formal developments best explain why artists are working with cities more often now than they were then? What about why cities are more open to working with artists?
Peter Fuss, Who Killed Barack Obama?, 2008.
As Sam Boyd notes, it is something that this news hasn't made bigger waves in print and cable media: It's responsible. Endless, recycled speculation about a thwarted, disorganized, improbable assassination attempt would change the tenor of the race. The media haven't ignored the story: It's below the fold on the NYT homepage, and that's where it belongs.
Never forget, would-be nutjobs.
So let's grant John McCain his premise in this most recent campaign ad and say that Barack Obama is, in fact, the Anti-Christ foretold by the New Testament. If Barack Obama truly is the Seducer,* then mustn't he win the election? Losing elections is no way to establish a transnationalist empire. We have already seen in the evangelical community the instinct to support counterintuitive means for millenarian goals—John Hagee's support for Israel and the Jewish community, for example. So when John McCains asks whether Barack Obama is ready to lead, why isn't the answer—according to the Book of Revelation—that he was born ready?
Scott McLemee has figured the way out of this problem. Barack Obama is not the Beast, but rather he is the other Beast from Revelation 13: The false prophet, the antipode to John the Baptist who will prophecy the coming of the Anti-Christ. And this second beast doesn't get so much as an ANC commissioner post, so McCain is in the eschatological clear. Whew! For a moment there, I thought his campaign had gone utterly crazy.
* Also the gist of his "celebrity" campaign ad, right?
Did the UK strike a pact with the Mahdi Army to sit out Basra? The American Prospect links to conflicting reports in the Times and Guardian, both citing British defence officials. The distinction hinges on whether the British had a "secret deal" to stay on the sidelines, which would (somehow?) thereby encourage the Shia militia to move toward the mainstream—as the Times has it—above and beyond the known "accommodation" between Moqtada al-Sadr and the UK, which the Guardian says had no bearing on their military (in)action during Basra. I have no instinct one way or the other—frankly, I am here merely to submit the hed above—but I will bet you that Spencer Ackerman will have something to say about these stories.
An unrelated but much, much better hed comes courtesy of one of my editors, who observes with respect to this NYT story: "Mladic Was a Hero to Most, but He Never Meant Shit to Me".
I'm reading this item from HealthDay about drastically upwardly revised Aids statistics in the U.S. when I receive a call from Washington General hospital, where I recently donated blood. "Your blood profile was returned to us," she tells me, causing my blood (which I suddenly believed to be totally skank) to run cold. A vast silence, and then the followup: "Could you confirm your mailing address?"
Physically returned—not rejected. Despite the heart attack–inducing head-fake phone call, I'm no worse for wear. Someone's even benefiting from some A+ blood. But it never matters how improbable the bad news might be—when hospitals call it just seems eminently reasonable, even obvious, that they're going to tell you that you have dengue fever. Not the call you want to receive, well, ever.
On the other hand, I would like to hear from Dan, author of Iconoduel, but the listed e-mail address seems to be out of commission. Dan, if you're reading, could you drop me a line? (Um, promise, totally not bad news or hospital related.)
Negislation (n): A legal act which, by design or accident, achieves the opposite effect to that which it purportedly intends. See also negulation.
Coined at Crooked Timber, which provides by way of example the Travel Promotion Act, which would levy a $25 fee against anyone visitor to the United States in order to subsidize the tourism industry's efforts to attract visitors to the United States.
An absolutely devastating article in the Washington Post about the lax standards for rape prosecution in the UK. Nineteen of twenty defendants walk free; police conduct investigations in a way that grossly benefits the accused. In those cases that lead to prosecution, justice officials and police express an attitude of tolerance and permissiveness. Even the verbiage of "murky sex," the UK equivalent of Laura Sessions Stepp's "gray rape" concept, shift the rhetorical case in favor of the men. (Not that Stepp's notion was born from an overabundance of kindness toward women.)
Mary Jordan (along with researchers Jill Colvin, Karla Adam, and Robert E. Thomason) writes up some recent cases that will turn your stomach. Excellent reporting, highly recommend you read it.
For the Guardian, Shane Danielson writes the proper defense for Australian photographer Bill Henson and a measured response to his harassers, chief among them prime minister Kevin Rudd. You already know the script: Photographer snaps non-sexual nude images of adolescents, finds admiration home and abroad, courts persecution from state prudes. The Sydney Morning Herald has the sordid particulars, including multiple gallery raids across the country.
Note that the police claim that they are acting on new complaints they have received about the photographs. It's actually rare that you will find any recorded complaint against an art work in culture-war cases alleging obscenity in art before the state interferes. After the fact, of course, the controversy alerts puritans who are plenty willing to speak up against art works they never knew were there. Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Nan Goldin all had successful runs in modest- to large-scale exhibitions that received no complaints (more likely, glowing reviews) before politicos seized on the works—after the fact of the exhibitions—in prurient appeals to prudishness. Henson, too: His retrospective drew 115,000 viewers three years ago to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Art Gallery of Victoria. With not one complaint generated over those runs, according to Alison Croggon's letter on behalf of Creative Australia 2020 Summit representatives.
Unfortunately, the preoccupation with child protection and photography has become something of a paranoid style in all the former elements of the British Empire. I know Austin Mitchell to be on UK politician who has opposed the official harassment of photographers (in Britain it's street photographers who must beware). In Australia, it's Cate Blanchett who's giving the state what-for.
I favor MSNBC coverage over all the other cable networks, but I mean it when I say it: Chris Matthews should be required to present three authorizing signatures each and every time he wants to use a sports metaphor.
Nevertheless, as Hillary Clinton so lawyerly put it, they broke the tie in Indiana tonight. She canceled her talk show appearances for the morning—indeed, all her public appearances for the day—and her campaign asks the commentariot to take a deep breath and not rush Sen. Clinton. I don't think there's any worry on that score. This week and next week promise a leisurely parade of superdelegates announcing for Obama to the drumbeat of media outlets recognizing Obama as the Democratic nominee.
Everyone who prognosticated that nothing changed tonight got the election basically right: Though it seems at this hour that Obama wins Indiana by a hair, it doesn't make for a substantial improvement in allocated delegates over the small number that Clinton was predicted to net. Obama won North Carolina like he was supposed to.
The thing that changed was that Clinton dropped the front-runner façade. She couldn't maintain it. She declared the victory she could, furiously backpedaling on the meaning of the contest and canceling her next steps. Oh, and it looks as though she loaned her campaign money to get to this point—and this performance isn't going to make the crowds throw money. She even said that she would work for the Democratic nominee, no matter the results.
What about this signal is going to convince a majority of undecided superdelegates who, for whatever reason, have all along abstained from pledging their support to the candidate?
She'll have the time she needs to tour West Virginia and Kentucky and work out the post-active phase of her campaign; no one will rush her through that. But Barack Obama will be named the Democratic nominee for President.
On Day One waded past the garbage out front to ask the Flophouse what we'd like to see the next President do on day one of his administration. Yglesias says the President should commit to global nuclear disarmament. Spencer says the President should withdraw from Iraq. (And on that note, read Spencer's interview with David Petraeus.)
I in fact believe that support for the Artist-Museum Partnership Act and tax-code revisions to bolster fractional giving can probably wait until day 90 or so. But those are concerns that I'd like to see the next President address.
Related info, in blessed non-vlog format: Obama on the arts.
So I'll see you all at Borders downtown tonight to see Yglesias give a talk on Heads in the Sand? Thought so.
So I've mounted a defense of Yale student Aliza Shvarts's controversial art project involving induced abortions over at the Guardian. Or rather, I'm criticizing Yale's response to the outrage that the project has predictably (and reasonably) provoked. The art, nothing doing: I haven't seen it, I don't know.
Suffice it to say, Guardian readers are not convinced.
For the Guardian, G.p friend and colleague Sasha Belenky has written a piece that touches on Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge's Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out in a larger examination of artists working today who romanticize radicalism. Belenksy takes the long view:
The consequences of race riots and the counterculture movement are still being felt, but these works don't focus on the present. Instead, they evoke nostalgia for a revolution that was never fully realised and disappointment at the feebleness of today's political activism. In the exhibition's catalogue, Rebecca Solnit argues that American youth have given up on the 60s-era dream of social revolution in favour of more personal steps like consuming local farm produce or purchasing hybrid cars - small decisions that will nevertheless change society gradually. Her optimism doesn't seem to be shared by the artists in the show.Often the talk about political art and its recent shortcomings, real and perceived, focuses on methods and aesthetics. What has been discussed less frequently (if at all) is the sort of grand tectonic shifts in the political/curtural landscape. Belensky is arguing in brief that today, political art comes up lacking because political protest takes other forms—namely, market decisions that emphasize personal virtue. One example that immediately comes to mind is this weekend's New York Times Magazine piece on reducing your personal carbon footprint.
Yglesias succinctly explains exactly why this kind of thinking is counterproductive:
Not only are these kind of "personal virtue" efforts insufficient to tackling the challenge of global warming, I think talking about them too much is actually counterproductive. The calculations involved in figuring out the aggregate carbon impact of this or that are just far too difficult for anyone to carry out. What's more, it's generally not going to be possible for a single person through his or her own exertions to really bring about dramatic cuts, and the last thing you need is people sitting around thinking "I drive a Prius, I've done my part" and then not voting the right way or otherwise being disengaged from the political process.Note, also, that Dick Cheney and like-minded conservatives have adopted the "personal virtue" language as a way of dismissing energy regulation, conservation, and so forth, since folks can just buy a Prius if they'd like to save the world.Beyond all that, the market in trendy "green" products has certain counterproductive effects -- it creates a profitable niche market in expensive green-branded goods that most people can't afford and lowers the price of carbon-intensive goods. But in a fundamental sense, the only way to make a green economy work is to make carbon-intensive goods expensive not render them stigmatized and uncool, which should, in tandem, help spur the development of more sustainable alternatives for a not-particularly-cool-or-trendy mass market.
Ross says that Chelsea doesn't need to answer questions about Monica but that Hillary does. In fact he says that Bill's prior infidelities are "remarkably pertinent" to her campaign. My immediate reaction is to dismiss this concern: The President's peccadilloes never amounted to an illegal activity, endangered national security, or slowed the markets. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can't think of one single question to ask about the Clintons' marital life that would inform my vote. Maybe Ross will offer three questions the answers to which ought to matter to Democratic voters in the primary or American voters in the general.
I'm perplexed by this line by Dana Goldstein: "Power's comments promoted an awful stereotype of a female leader as someone who is inhumanly calculating, with no core beliefs."
Whatever you think about Power or the brouhaha over her comments, "monster" isn't a gendered criticism, is it? I suppose that Power was trying to impress (albeit off the record) that Clinton is inhumanly calculating, with no core beliefs. But I don't think that has anything to do with Clinton being a woman.
Courtesy Ross Douthat, Noah Millman offers a fictional debate between the candidates characterizing their respective "moral claims" to the convention for those who haven't been playing extremely close attention to the contest between Clinton and Obama. Those who have, however, may find the let-the-best-candidate-win spirit ultimately lacking in verisimilitude. Clinton threatened to sue the Texas Democratic Party when it seemed that Obama would overtake her. The Clinton campaign even went so far as to float a trial balloon about appealing to pledged delegates.
Millman's exercise is more useful in explaining the cases put forward by the candidates' respective supporters. The candidates themselves have not made their cases so straightforwardly—actually, one of the candidates has not. Which is fine; in fact, one almost hears chagrin in Obama's voice when he says that he won't go negative, and while it isn't negative campaigning per se to call for Clinton to release her tax records it is certainly harder ball than he's played so far.
With luck the rest of the primary won't see the candidates straying much further from Millman playing-nice into accusations (and soundbytes) that will prove to haunt the candidate in the general. But that's just wishful thinking—of course Clinton will go harder and nastier, party be damned.
Barack Obama is the sole candidate to provide a white paper on the arts. His position proves lacking in specifics and overly focused on education. To this end, the paper recommends that once elected President, Obama will:
Obama's further positions more directly address the role of arts in his vision for the nation. Specifically, as President, Obama will:
The last item in the paper, however, gets specific:
Free of charge I'll list two more concrete goals that come to mind—one that might be achieved simply with the President's support and one that represents a more ambitious charge:
These changes have essentially put an end to partial giving over the last two years. As President, Obama should re-incentivize this important mechanism for placing private art in the public trust.
A Department of Culture would likely aggregate responsibilities now held by the Department of State and the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. It would be much more than the sum of its parts, a signal to the nation's citizens and peers. With the creation of a Department of Culture, the President could announce an ambitious plan to correct a serious oversight: the lack of Arabic speakers ready, able, or willing to work in government. A Department of Culture, created and endowed by a President with a serious approach to global conversation, could start to do the job that Karen Hughes by her lonesome couldn't do.
Fall in love with Ann Althouse all over again. Sheesh.
The Daily Texan, newspaper for my alma mater, endorses Hillary Clinton. Fair enough—but really?:
But during Thursday's debate, Obama made a major gaffe in incorrectly stating that he had received endorsements from every major newspaper in Texas. We may not be considered a "major" paper to many, but we represent a crucial constituency of close to 50,000 young and enthusiastic voters, and we've been scrutinizing every move of the candidates leading up to today's endorsement. Sure, Obama took many under his spell when he graced our city with his presence early in his campaign, but we think he prematurely considered his work in Austin done.Aw come on you whiners! Obama wouldn't give you tickets so you're going to prove him wrong after the fact about saying he'd snagged every major newspaper endorsement?We've taken into account our communication with each campaign as an indication of how each candidate's government would function. Upon finding out the debate would not be open to students, Obama's campaign told us there was nothing they could do to get more students into the debate, whereas the Clinton camp was sympathetic in offering assistance. This makes us wonder how far Obama would go for us as president.
That is a lyric in need of a good a home. Feel free to drop it into a caring and particular slow jam, one that captures the groovy kind of love between a presidential candidate and his lobbyist.
I for one think this story does John McCain no favors, even if the New York Times clearly didn't get the goods and is never able to follow through. The way the right deals with this, or any brewing scandal, is by decrying it immediately as another example of the perfidies of the liberal, mainstream, insider-obsessed media run amock. The right doesn't wait for the other shoe to drop—the right chops both feet off at the ankles.
Though the GOP and its sympathizers know when and how to deploy the conservative bluster machine, will they? In a post titled "A Lesson for John McCain," Michelle Malkin writes: "If you lie down with MSM dogs, you wake up with stories like this." I think that if the right doesn't form a unified defense for McCain there's a risk that McCain's straight-talk enchantment over the media will be broken. Therefore I think it's highly likely that McCain's straight-talk enchantment over the media will be broken.
UPDATE: Snark aside, I'm with Yglesias: This is a loathsome move on behalf of the Times. It's innuendo as reporting and I'd be outraged if McCain were my man. McCain has a substantive scandal on his hands related to Iseman and corruption, so the paper of record doesn't need to resort to wink-wink, nudge-nudge allegations in order to report a shady discovery.
UPDATE II: Spencer is calling (well, fictionalizing) Huckabee for McCain's Vice President. With those shadowy allegations of an affair sure to eat up headlines, McCain will need the light of Huckabee's virtue more than he will need a Wall Street–vetted veep.
Obama campaign poster for the March 4 Texas primary by the Date Farmers (Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma)
Just in time to remind us that the Texas primary is not over yet and Western-hemisphere Communist imagery hasn't fallen out of fashion just because Castro's left office. This nifty campaign poster comes courtesy of California's Upper Playground, who has made some limited-edition screenprints available for purchase, proceeds of which will benefit other artists who are creating materials to support Obama's campaign. Which is sort of like giving to the Obama campaign itself.
Sorry to be so short lately. Here's something I thought I'd pass along: More people have personally seen or felt the presence of a ghost than approve President Bush's job performance. Which is in the basement. Where the ghosts live.
National Journal contributing editor Chuck Todd is saying on MSNBC right now that that given the incredible margins of Obama's victories tonight, Clinton will need to take Texas and Ohio by 60 percent at least.
What an exciting night! For reasons not least of which being that my Air-O-Swiss Ultrasonic Humidifier 7135 arrived today.
Virginia exit polls show Obama leading among nearly every voter cohort. Seemingly the only thing Virginians like better than Barack Obama is personalizing plates.
Photo by Matt Wright
Read Marc Ambinder on the Texas primaucus. It warms my heart to see that in a primary system that's funky nationwide, Texas has nevertheless carved out an especially screwball way of doing things. Obama fans may take heart: All the talk of the race coming down to Texas and Ohio ignores the fact that they are different states with very different methods for choosing delegates. Ambinder (emphasis added):
[T]here aren't any delegates awarded to the winner of [Texas]—no statewide bonus delegates, nothing. For another, a third of the delegates will be chosen through a complicated caucus system.So the state senate districts are determined by some equation factoring the performances of John Kerry and Chris Bell. (This doesn't quite make sense, since Kerry ran in 2004 and the last gubernatorial contest was in 2006, but I guess that the math accounts for the disparity.) That "liberal third party challenger" is Kinky Friedman, bless his heart, that old hellraiser. Ambinder needs to know that in the primary, those voters who supported Friedman (and Nader before him in 2000) have all glommed onto the "Paulistinian" plight. The white vote will not split evenly: Ron Paul will siphon voters from Obama in the most liberal, delegate-rich districts.* And as Chris Hayes learned the hard way, it's unwise to forget about Mike Gravel.And instead of proportional allocation by congressional district, the rest of the delegates will be proportionally allocated by state senate districts. George W. Bush's '04 performance really changes the math. That's because the number of delegates allocated in those districts are based on how well (or poorly) John Kerry did, as well as the performance of the last Democratic gubernatorial candidate (who himself had votes taken away by a liberal third party challenger.)
The delegate-rich districts are the most heavily liberal state senate districts. According to this calculation, they're in Austin and in two of the most concentrated African American parts of the state. Advantage: Obama.
Clinton will get plenty of support from Latino voters, but they tend to be more spread out and thus will see their votes somewhat diluted in the 31 separate primaries. In order to "win"—both enough delegates and statewide, you need to organize what amounts to caucus-like campaigns in each of these districts.
The white vote in Texas will probably split, with Obama taking men and Clinton taking women. Though Latinos make up a slightly larger share of the electorate than African Americans, they tend to vote in lower proportions.
The process has two steps. First, folks vote. 126 delegates will be accorded proportionally via state senate district. Then, when polls close, they caucus in more than 1,000 precincts.
Be that as it may, the Lone Star Primaucus sounds to be better news for Obama than the Ohio primary. His campaign made the decision to send the South Carolina team there, and may their efforts not be wasted. The last poll, conducted in January, is not emboldening—with Clinton at 48% and Obama at 38%—but there have been momentum-shifting contests since then and polls don't necessarily tell the story in a primaucus contest.
Needless to say it will thrill me to no end to see this contest come down to Texas (and Ohio). If Obama shaves even a nominal victory from Clinton's delegate edge, there will be barbecue. I find the notion so distasteful that we might effectively emerge from the primary contest with a draw, with the candidate to be selected then by backroom bargaining, intra-party intrigue, and superdelegate shuffling, that I'm definitely holding out hope for that queer Texas orneriness to see this contest finished. Hook 'em hope! Remember the Alamo!
* Note that the Texas system is a semi-open primary. Paul supporters will need to declare before entering in the booth that they wish to vote on the Republican ballot (no matter how or whether they're registered with the parties). Two things could cost Paul votes: ignorance of Paul's party status (he's not the head of the Re-Love-Ution party or however you write that) or distaste for voting on the GOP ticket (after all, there are twenty other contests on the ballot, none of which offer an equivalent protest-option candidate for liberal dumbass college students).
UPDATE: Burnt Orange Report breaks down exactly how Texas delegates are awarded (in fewer than 5,000 words).
I don't see that Al Gore has to endorse one of the candidates merely because he is a superdelegate. He will cast his vote long after the point his endorsement would have any effect on the candidates' campaigns—all he needs to do is not call a press conference within the next few weeks. I would welcome Gore's endorsement, though, and Gore he does play kingmaker I hope he's selecting the candidate with the wisest plan on and most likely path to market caps on emissions and other reforms to curb global warming.
This is pretty funny:
though I think it misses the point. There is a massive population to whom this sort of language is fundamentally appealing. Many, many people respond to this category of talk about blood sacrifice, endless war, greatest generations, cultural decline, and neverending occupation. It's a weird marriage between American exceptionalism and conservative defeatism that causes some people to shake their heads, more in sadness than in anger (but also in anger) at the sorry state of America and these kids today, etc., while advocating for U.S. presences across the globe and planetary hegemony in general. Maybe that isn't exactly what McCain is selling—he seems to lack the religious component, although his candidacy will have that if he tacks on Mike Huckabee. What McCain is selling is very close to the cultural conservatism I'm thinking of. Relatedly, Yglesias: "[John McCain] appears to regard the self-sacrifice of the military man not as admirable because it helps protect and sustain a liberal society at home, but because it's actually preferable to have people's lives organized around regimentation, comformity, and sacrifice."
Tyler Green is right: A primer on the Democratic candidates' dedication to funding and supporting arts would be very useful. Naturally a prospective plan for fundings arts ranks some ways below foreign policy outlook and universal health coverage as a concern in a primary campaign. Even slim, marginal differences between the candidates on these crucial issues would outweigh in my estimation very great differences between the two vis-á-vis the arts.
Priorities noted. And that said, the political situation of the arts still matters greatly and there is an opportunity for a candidate to take a leadership role in communicating to the nation and to the Congress what those issues are. So I'll agree with Green's tentative proposition: It's both worthwhile and timely for the arts community to debate and identify three federal/national policy issues that we want to see a Democratic candidate embrace. Three that come to mind would be the estate tax, public art, and local access.
The first one I'll be discussing in a piece on a new exhibition at the Phillips Collection, "Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects". I don't want to scoop myself so some of those comments will have to wait for the time being. I've debated the value of publicly funding art at every libertarian happy hour I've ever attended, so I feel familiar with the for and against arguments on that score. Local access is a more loosey-goosey category but I think it's important to discuss art as it happens beyond the coasts—and pace the conventional wisdom it's in the flyover country where things like National Endowment of the Arts grants have their greatest impact.
More to come.
I've been too tied up on the phone today to do much writing, but I did manage a quick pun. Fierce head-nod to Spaq for the link.
I'm in over my head with work. Go read Marc Ambinder about how inside DNC baseball may wind up deciding the Clinton/Obama contest after all. It seems grossly unfair that Florida and Michigan delegates could be considered after the states moved ahead with early primaries under the full knowledge (assented by all the Democratic candidates) that delegates from those states would not be credentialed if they did so. Can't Howard Dean do something equally unfair to ensure an outcome that preserves DNC rules/the primary schedule as it stands?
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.
Nancy Holt, widow of Robert Smithson, has sent a note around alerting people to a proposal before the state of Utah that would permit oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake near the site of Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
Here's a map showing the proposed location for the drills:
And here's another map showing where the Spiral Jetty stands relative to the drills:
Gunnison Island is the mile-long float of land in Gunnison Bay, for reference. That puts the nearest drill easily within two to three miles of the Jetty and would mean for infrastructure, roads, construction, and noise within sight of the famous Earth artwork.
I'd draw in arrows to make the sites clearer, but the window for consideration on this contract is narrow and drawing to a quick close. Protest should be lodged with Jonathan Jemming at (801) 537-9023 or jjemming@utah.gov by close of business today (7 p.m. EST). If you call or write to complain, refer to application #8853.
Link, email, call, and write. Roads and industry threaten to undermine the work. The site for the Jetty was chosen for being remote, austere, inaccessible, and useless. Call or write now if you'd like to keep it that way.
Download the contract in PDF by clicking here.
CORRECTION: Gunnison, not Guttison.
I know that G.p isn't your first stop for political commentary, but I'm happy to refer you to sources that ought to be. For example: Dana Goldstein on Edwards's supporters in the wake of his campaign.
Color me surprised that Edwards isn't throwing his support behind Obama immediately. But by holding onto his margin of delegates for the time being, he can continue to impress upon Clinton and Obama the fact that they need to talk about issues Edwards cares about—if only to impress him.
I'll disagree with what Matthew Yglesias writes here and point to the post just below it. Politically there may not be a vast difference between Clinton and Obama, or at least, both candidates have given themselves sufficient wiggle room that whatever those differences are aren't likely to play out beyond the rather vague horserace indicators, like when one candidate stands and the other doesn't during the President's State of the Union.
Electorally, though, the candidates promise very different elections. If Obama wins the primary, breathless Obamafandom dies instantly among conservative pundits—but so does mouthbreathing Clintonhatred disappear among the base, the dragon having been vanquished. Rabid hatred isn't so transferable as the right might wish. There would be frightening room for unforced errors from the untested Obama campaign, but beyond the crass racist appeal (hints of which we've already seen) and I would even imagine in spite of the racist blunders from the Imuses and so on who won't be able to keep their mouths shut during a general election (which would affect the right's appeal to the middle), whatever conservative conventional wisdom emerges on Obama cannot hope to match in terms of temper or pervasiveness the right's standard lying line on the Clintons, built up from the hardened bilious secretions of a fevered conservative organ that has brooded in its indigestion for more than a decade.
On the right, then, we have McCain—who remains on every issue (except neverending war) the least conservative candidate to vie for 2008—whose paradoxical strategy depends on appealing to independents who fundamentally disagree with what he's saying, that is, with the rhetoric he has tailored for a base that is turned off by him. He presumes quite rightly that the press will hide his seams, but I'd think that Obama would compete for some of those "maverick" votes that make up McCain's center/right compromise candidacy even as the base, with no Clinton candidacy to contemplate, wipes the foam from its mouth and stays home.
Clinton energizes McCain, whereas Obama draws from McCain—granted, for reasons that have no resemblance to the actual differences between Clinton and Obama, but nevertheless.
The inestimable Jason Linkins, advocate for freedom and keytars for all men, asked some writers (including your correspondent) to share their favorite State of the Union memories. The Huffington Post has compiled them for your approval.
Cloverfield is a good movie, y'all.
Spencer has a whopper of a summary piece in the newly launched Washington Independent on the state of U.S. interrogations. Here's a snippet:
[T]he program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.Read on about the Polygraph Unit, where "employees—who were not case officers or intelligence analysts—would perform the closest thing to interrogations as existed institutionally in CIA." Not exactly a professional Inquisition the Bush administration is running. The thing that the report makes clear is that there isn't any dominant philosophy about interrogation. You have on the one hand the Bush administration claiming that harsh interrogations produce results, committing to a sort of consequentialist defense of its policies. It's hardly clear whether CIA interrogators agree but it's also not clear that there is polarization on the issue. As Spencer writes, "The former senior CIA official rejected rejected the idea that behavioral scientists know more about interrogation than interrogators. 'Some of these people are like sex experts who know 80 ways to make love but don’t know any girls,' he said."In short, despite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA's interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark—in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.
Worse still, the interrogators can't seem to tell the girls from the terrorists, so you wind up with the CIA wasting time—and the Bush administration blowing political capital and international goodwill—on detainee interrogations that produce no valuable information. Meanwhile, the Bush administration doesn't identify this situation as a problem to fix—the only question they bother to address is the legality of torture (perfectly legal, they say). They're fixing the CYA, not the CIA.
At the risk of making a glib observation on an important holiday: The design of the forthcoming Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial leaves something to be desired. By emphasizing the accomplishments of the larger Civil Rights movement and that era's actors, the monument signals a confusion about its purpose. For example, the plaza's upper walkway is given over to 24 niches—"naves of reflection", each one commemorating the lives lost along the way to equality. Several are left blank, a poignant reminder that MLK's work remains undone—yet the implicit suggestion that others may give up their lives before King's dream is realized is macabre. The tragic losses in the struggle for freedom deserve commemoration, but losses don't tell the entire story of the Civil Rights movement. Nor should one memorial seek to tell the entire story of Civil Rights in the first place. Encapsulating King's singular achievements and great contributions is goal enough for one monument.
The design looks to be both broad and literal, offering a number of elements drafted from quotes from MLK's impressive oratorical record—including a "Mountain of Despair" and a "Stone of Hope". (Both of these famous metaphors King used are illustrated in literal terms, appearing as significant sculptural/architectural features.) Like the World War II Memorial, this design is all too aware of its audience and how it will be used. That a memorial should also be a sort of park might be justified, in this case, by its location along the tidal basin. For any other use, it should be obvious that the site should include places where tourists can get off their feat.
But a monument to King shouldn't be so practical. It should be iconic. It should strive to give some sense of the largeness of the man himself.
Today while I worked watched the Wizards hand it to the Mavs (where was that explosive bench, Dallas?), players and NBA associates spoke about King's legacy. Some players spoke about their parents making them watch King's speeches or listen to recordings of his homilies. That seems significant to me. Realizing King's metaphors in granite doesn't speak to his gravity as a speaker, and his memorial ought to pay homage to this particular gifts. He was the most gifted narrator in the history of this nation, a true uniter, and so on. This is a fussy memorial that encourages you to find your own solitary rapport with his message and that doesn't basically reflect the man.
Somewhat related: To celebrate MLK Day, TMC is showing Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep tonight at 8:00 p.m. and then again at 12:30 a.m. It is one of the most beautiful films you'll ever see and I'm ecstatic that it has been so rediscovered. Via Kottke, courtesy of le Cath.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is hosting a panel on Wednesday on how candidates for the 2008 U.S. presidential contest are ballooning Islamophobia in a crass appeal to voters. I couldn't think of a single example and couldn't make heads or tails of this, until I remembered that the presidential contest also includes the Republican primary. Right, those guys.
Juan Cole, a longtime favorite read, will be discussing the fear-for-votes issue; here's hoping that he's open to speaking off-message, too, and winds up lingering on Shiite and Sunni cultural and societal realignments in Iraq, which I believe is one of his special areas of study, concerning information that is a little harder to come by than fearmongering on Hannity & Colmes.
Fretting over Islamophobia. That's how I'll be spending my twenty-eighth birthday. Who says the late 20s aren't wild! I do worry that I'm getting this all wrong, though. Aren't I supposed to be developing irrational fears about the other as I age? Meta fears about their representation in public rhetoric doesn't seem to suffice.
Kieran Healy, commenting on the UK's national debate on informed versus presumed consent on organ donation proposed by Gordon Brown:
Cadaveric organ procurement is an intense, time-sensitive and very fluid process that requires a great deal of co-ordination and management. Countries that invest in that layer of the system do better than others, regardless of the rules about presumed and informed consent.Healy also writes, "I think that the main effect of a change in the law, if it happens, will be as a public signal to prospective donors (and their next of kin) that the socially accepted default option on donation has shifted from 'Ask permission' to 'You have to object.'" Moreover, it makes it easier for leaders to invest in coordination and management without seeking permission from or being stymied by opposed political interests. A law that makes it easier for hospitals to transfer organs without actively seeking consent signals permission for leaders to fund these programs without actively seeking consent (any more than is already vested in them). I wouldn't say rules "regardless"—the rules make rights.
I approve of presumed consent and hope that our society endorses that outlook, but as I grow older and superstition seeps into my mind, I find myself looking at that donor symbol on my driver's license warily. I do not believe in an afterlife, but I have some slippery notions about the aesthetics of death (which are mostly informed by a passage from the Aeneid). As wolf-faced crazy as that sounds, it's true, issues of propriety continue to have a strong hold over my beliefs about burial and death rights (such as they are) and I think a lot about taking myself off the organ donor's list.
I understand that when I buy things at the grocery store, graphs at universities in fifty states erupt in a fit of activity, as demand curves race to intersect with supply lines. But my knowledge of the hows and whys of this arcane phenomenon is extremely limited. My economist friends will tell you that they've enjoyed a meal ticket whenever I've needed to understand things like derivatives markets. Beyond the smattering of economic facts I've gleaned from these friends over dinner (for example, I know that this constitutes an exchange of goods for services), I'm the last person that any voter should consult when it comes to assessing a candidate's financial principles.
But when the voter's a member of the immediate family, it's a different matter. As the son who lives in the Nation's Capital, my parents depend on me to parse the debates that they see on the news. Well, that's not quite right—typically they depend on me to yell at them for being gullible when they read me slanderous news accounts from e-mail forwarded by my aunt. This week, though, I've played political consultant, fielding questions left and right (and about left and right) concerning the candidates and their positions as my parents' interest in the topic reaches its winter solstice.
For the most part I merely try not to raise my voice when I'm explaining that B. Hussein Obama isn't a Wahhabist terrorist. You'd think that Google would be able to answer all these questions, but the forwarded emails are smarter than that; one that I fielded recently suggested that the intel had been vetted via snopes.com—where you'll in fact learn that Obama was not sworn in on a "Kuran," should you bother to check after you've been assured you don't need to.
This isn't to say that my folks are rubes—just like everyone else, their understanding of the issues is predicated upon their media consumption habits. They just don't consume a whole lot of media about politics, and the information they do receive comes from unreliable sources.
Yesterday, though, I found myself debating a substantive issue with my mother, who (along with my dad) tends to vote on values issues. She approves Obama, for all the dirt she's received about him, but she thinks she should stick with the candidates she's more comfortable with: Mike Huckabee. Southerner, Republican, former governor, Baptist, rarely associated with Wahhabism. The issue that places her firmly in Huckabee's camps is his proposal to eradicate income tax and establish a (what is it? Thirty-odd percent?) national sales tax.
That strikes Mom as eminently fair, even though it's not in her best economic interests (folks are both retired). In response I decided to go for the nuclear option and explained, authoritatively, that Huckabee's plan amounted to regressive taxation. Far from impressed, however, my mother didn't know what I was talking about. Neither did I, I realized.
How do you explain, without using words like "Rawlsian" or reading aloud from Brad DeLong's archives, that flat tax plans that seem so simple and fair in fact shift the economic burden from rich to poor? Another word that isn't so self-evidently clear as I'd long believed: "burden". I stammered on for a spell about pies and proportions, arguing that in life, some people are delivered small personal pan pizzas whereas the lucky get the extra-large meat lover's. It went downhill from there:
Mom: But it's fair if everyone's giving up the same percentage of pizza!I passed the question along to my political-journalist betters, but I ask you: Is there an easier analogy I'm missing, some clearer and cleverer rhetorical path to progressive indoctrination?
Me: But then poor people don't have enough slices left to meet their basic pizza needs!
UPDATE: I don't know that Mom will thank me for it, but I am getting a lot of responses. A few heavyweight economists responded to a bleg on the cabalistic journalists' email network (no, really, it exists; I believe Ezra Klein is the admin), one saying that rich people don't spend, so under a fair tax unemployment rises. Julian Sanchez wrote me with a wealth of devil's advocacy. And Yglesias offers a good point and illustrates it with a detestable celebrity.
Things like this make me worry for the safety of the Democratic frontrunner.
(Via comments on Obama's facebook page)
Wars should be safe, legal, and rare. When the United States does go to war, it should be under the authority of Congress, with every care taken to protect our troops while they're gone and after they return, and war should only ever be the option of last resort. To my mind Barack Obama's greatest appeal is in his unqualified critique of imperial war powers. I believe that he offers a real promise to reclassify war as our nation's response to clear and present dangers, not vague and foreseeable conflicts of interests. And putting a candidate in the White House on that message is an opportunity to re-insert that message into the mainstream.
It's a little distressing then that, during his acceptance speech, Obama makes more than a few glancing references to the coalition of interests who granted his victory, including Republicans and Independents. It was as if he were speaking from a place beyond—larger than—the Democratic Party. Now, it's critical that Obama court self-proclaimed Independents, especially if he winds up facing self-styled "maverick" John McCain in the general, so I don't begrudge him this. But part of his great appeal to me is the unique opportunity he affords to reform the Democratic Party as its leader.
That's about what I can say in the way of critique of his victory speech last night. In any other respect, it was thrilling. You owe it to yourself to watch the speech if you missed it last night. What can I say? There was a part that gave me goosebumps. He seems like a leader from a different age. He absorbs interesting things that you might say about him before you can so that what you end up saying sounds wistful and cliche.
I can't help but think of this classic exchange:
Tyrone: [ . . . ] Speaking of Obama, I need to get t-shirts printed up to sell.Speaking of t-shirts, where's Mike Huckabee's?John: I can do that on the web. What do they say?
Tyrone: Don't You Dare Kill Obama
John: How about Don't You Dare Kill Obama (... and we know you're thinking about it)
Tyrone: Niiiiice.
John: Or You Kill Obama and WE WILL BURN SHIT DOWN
[Huckabee gag via the Associate.]
Dan Flavin, untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 2, 1972.
As a nation turns its lonely eyes to DiMaggio Des Moines, one can't help but consider how remarkable it is that so much change should be collapsed into a single time and place. A second- or third-place finish shouldn't spell doom for any of the Democratic candidates, but it will pave the likely way for the winner. Coming as this primary does now just days into the new year lends it a significance above and beyond that it gained in 2000, when John Kerry steamrolled his way to victory and never looked back after squashing Howard Dean in Iowa. It's hardly desirable to lend so much decisionmaking authority to some marginal fraction of a state whose population is already low. But you look forward to the light at the end of the tunnel that you have, not the one you want.
And now that that light's here, it's easy to forget that the last four years have felt so desperate and dark. Reading Yglesias's post on David Simon's The Wire and despair makes me that hope is a kind of hindsight. It's a mechanism, just a way to assess disappointments and frustrations and deal and continue. Simon might be the sort to say that one can't look back because the hits never stop coming. "The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment." That sounds like the conclusion that pere Roth's character draws in The Plot Against America, and which he holds to until the very end, despite the novel's tidy finish—which Roth writes with nearly comic ease, like tying a shoe's laces. It doesn't sound to me like a copout, either. Pere Roth got it right in that book. Things didn't work out fine in the end though it appeared that they did: those dark portents weren't false even if circumstances never conspired to raise a fascist flag over America. And the politicians and journalists and critics who have shown how the Bush administration has transformed the nation in dangerous ways are as right as Moishe the Beadle, even if that danger is never totally realized. Isn't hope the wrong response, isn't that tantamount to not quite admitting the nature of the threat? And yet of course it is impossible to go around feeling maximally despairing all the time, and if there's any truth circumscribed by the feelings that we have when we are not concentrating and the things we do when we are not provoked, it's not warranted to fret forever.
Far be it from me to defend the death penalty as it's practiced today, but I'm frustrated by today's New York Times article on capital punishment in the state of Texas. The Times reports:
This year's death penalty bombshells — a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.In fact nothing has changed about the rate or the application of the death penalty in Texas, except that they slowed somewhat. So what's the development? Nor is it honest or edifying to hang the whole article on that 60 percent figure—which is jarring, even blindly horrifying, but not meaningful without controlling for state population and murder statistics.
There are vastly many more people in Texas than in any of its peer states that assign capital punishment. There are vastly many more murders in Texas than in any of its peer states that assign capital punishment. Comparing the number of executions in Texas with the number in South Dakota dramatically understates the fact. Death penalty rates are better for comparison's sake.
A study performed by Cornell University in 2004 found that Texas assigns the death penalty at a rate lower than the national average (2 percent versus 2.5 percent). The most death penalty-prone states were not Texas or Florida, but rather Oklahoma (6 percent) and Nevada (5.1 percent). In part this rate disparity owes to Texas's sentencing standards. In order for the death penalty to be assigned, a crime must meet certain objective criteria (scroll down). For example, when a police officer or firefighter is murdered, when a child under age 6 is murdered, or in the case of multiple murders. Subjective criteria—the "heinousness" of a crime, for example—are not considered. Texas's sentencing standards are those that tend to find sympathy among even moderate opponents of the death penalty.
The speed with which the state carries out capital punishment, however, finds no quarter among sensible observers. Both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the Texas Fifth Circuit are prosecutorially oriented; a state prosecutor explained to me today that there are no is only one defense lawyer serving on the Court of Criminal Appeals. The speed of the system is aggressive, as critics point out, and is certainly out of step with the current national mood. (Indicators of which include the so-called national moratorium—although it is no such thing. The Supreme Court has merely stayed every execution by way of lethal injection that has come across its desk. A formal SCOTUS moratorium would have delayed the hasty execution of Michael Richard; the "de facto" moratorium did not.)
The Times: "The death penalty developments that have dominated the news in recent months are unlikely to have anything like the enduring consequences of Texas' vigorous commitment to capital punishment." True for the convicts put to death, of course; true for the families of their victims, I would imagine. In other respects, this is a dramatic statement. The state's execution of executions is impressive and awful, the product of a pervasive political problem that inflects the justice system. Its devotion to the death penalty, however, is truly average.
Ezra Klein on the sharp uptick in cloture votes under this Congress:
When minority Democrats sought to slow the Republican agenda by asserting filibuster power far more infrequently, Republicans convinced the media to tar them as "obstructionists" unwilling to permit "yes-or-no votes." Conversely, the Democrats, facing a much greater display of intransigence, have been deemed ineffectual by the media, and the situation has been represented as if they are inexplicably failing to pass their agenda, rather than watching the Republicans act to block it.Why on earth don't majority Democrats hand minority Republicans telephone books and tell them to start actually filibustering? It is only a gentleman's agreement that invests the threat of a filibuster with the full weight of an actual filibuster. So long as Republicans choose to turn every vote into a 60-vote cloture issue, Democrats might as well require them to own up to the mechanism that makes this obstructionism possible. At zero cost the Republicans can currently threaten filibuster on any legislation that comes down the pike; at the cost of reading from the encyclopedia all night long, some of these threats will surely be proven to be bluffs. Better yet, an intractable press will have to take notice when Republicans are forced to make a circus display of torpedoing popular legislation. Also, what the Democrats are doing now isn't working: Popular legislation is not passing and Democrats are being tagged "ineffective."
Jonah Goldberg: still a prat. Given my housemates' occupations I'd expected to see that book on the coffee table by now. What good are these guys?
Sadly, No! had better not be foolin' with these screenshots from Jonah Goldberg's oft re-titled book, Liberal Fascism, which apparently includes this line in the book jacket, authored in all sincerity, I kid you not: "The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore." (Via the entire Internet, just now.)
rj3 of Thrown for a Loop:
[I]t burns up a lot of carbon when world leaders travel to climate conferences like the one in Bali that just concluded. However, if by burning some jet fuel now they can reduce carbon emissions in the future, their greenhouse gas profligacy is worthwhile. If a person living in a big house can't comment on changing incentive systems, the only people who are left to do so will be dreadlocked college burnouts who you see trolling the streets for Greenpeace donations.Is that fair?[ . . . ]
Environmentalism is a classic collective action problem in which the actions of one have negligible impact, but the benefits of everyone acting the same way reap huge rewards for everyone. Acting green on your own may make you feel better, but you do nothing in the scheme of things. Policy solutions like a gas tax or increased CAFE standards, cap and trade emissions limits, the end of farm subsidies (including, counterintuitively ethanol subsidies) and perhaps more nuclear power generation will get things moving in the right direction. Best to take the money you spend on carbon offsets and send it to whomever is running against Sen. James Inhofe (R-1950).
rj3 describes recycling and other DIY environmental initiatives as politically counterproductive. But recycling is an example of one collective action that benefits everyone. When large urban centers adopt citywide recycling programs the benefits for the environment are appreciable; when suburban and less dense areas adopt those programs that benefit margin expands. Misguided or not, civic and environmental doers good had more hand in bringing these programs to bear than the collective action of the scientific policy establishment.
The dirty hippies complaining about delegates' jet fuel consumption on the way to Bali sure sound like strawmen to me, but maybe they are out there, outraging on their livejournals. Nevertheless rj3 has hit the nail on the head when he describes the dismissive Republican attitude toward green policy—an individual or ethical program that (liberals) can choose to opt into or not. Moralizing about consumption sticks in my craw, too—this NYT article on Etsy provides some frustrating examples—but it should not be oversold as a majority belief possessed among Americans or across the world.
In fact, the conference in Bali demonstrated that it isn't. Overcoming U.S. objections and deciding on a program that establishes that the whole world (!) will begin working now on a framework that the United States can then join in 2009—under new leadership—suggests a couple of truths about the planet's position on global warming. One, that the consensus on global warming among United States citizens is much closer to the world opinion than that of the obstructionist Bush administration; the world believes this to be the case, anyway (and it is), and the world believes that this truth will out come election time. Two, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the agreement in Bali shows that this truth really does have to out come election time. If Republicans win in 2008, the world has to kick the ball down the road until 2013. And who knows by then whether you still find India or China on board or, indeed, whether the science on global climate proffers the same solutions. Read John Quiggin on Bali, too.
To be sure, rj3's frustration with individual solutions like carbon offsets dovetails perfectly with the global position on the matter. Every dollar that you might spend saving the world over the next year should be funneled directly into Democratic coffers, because that's how we're gong to save the world.
Responding to Mitt Romney's statement that he would refuse to appoint a Muslim to his cabinet were he elected, Ezra Klein strikes a wrong note with me:
My outrage on the subject isn't different or more enlightening than anyone else's outrage on the subject, but Mitt Romney's admission that he wouldn't consider any Muslims for high level cabinet appointments is shocking, even anti-American, stuff. Romney, of course, is a Mormon, and has spent much of this campaign begging the electorate not to allow his membership in a cult harm his presidential campaign. For Romney to now turn on Muslims is like the fifth least popular kid on the playground trying to help his status by stealing the lunch money of the few losers beneath even him.Granted, Ezra might be speaking tongue in cheek here to make a point about what American perceptions of Mormonism and what an incredible hypocrite Romney is given his circumstances. But what Ezra is actually arguing by extension and analogy is that Romney has ludicrous beliefs, and therefore Romney should support others who have ludicrous beliefs. That's not very generous to Mormons or Muslims—and it's not far from the soft prejudice that (say) Catholics have faced in political contests (and may continue to, I don't know). Of course it's only American that any damn magical thing a politician wants to believe about Abraham and his descendants, on this continent or others, should have no real bearing on his fitness for office.
Jerry Salts Saltz says that time is up for the MoMA to deliver on promises to display "multiple narratives" in its permanent installation—that is, work by women. New York Magazine follows up with a run-down on gender dynamics at other art institutions:
THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ARTBringing women into the conversation is the biggest problem facing the art world.
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
That's for the permanent-collection items on view; Kara Walker's show is downstairs.MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
Men: 85%
Women: 15%
Four women on an otherwise male roster.THE 2007 VENICE BIENNALE
Men: 76%
Women: 24%
As recently as 1995, the lineup was just 9 percent female.ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2007
Men: 73%
Women: 27%
The upcoming fair will be enormous: 2,859 artists, about 715 of them women.MARIANNE BOESKY
Men: 75%
Women: 25%
But it's 50-50 in the gallery right now, with work by Liz Craft and a two-man show.THE FRICK COLLECTION
Men: 99%
Women: 1%
There are two sculptures and one print by female artists in the collection, plus some anonymous work.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that CBS News is inching closer toward joining the Writers' Guild strike. The AFP headline is misleading; they're not striking yet, they've just voted to authorize striking.
Meanwhile, in the LAT, Daniel Blau, a former writer for America's Next Top Model, opines that this strike would be going better for the writers had the WGA been better prepared before the short-lived ANTM strike of 2006. Blau suggests that the WGA bungled their strategy. On the one hand, they organized a Reality Organizing Committee tasked with investigating industrywide solutions. On the other hand, the WGA approached asked 12 writers from one television show (ANTM) to testcase a reality programming strike. It didn't work out: All 12 writers were fired, and ANTM eventually organized with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (video editors). (Inadvertently sad: "They bought us lunch.")
Blau insinuates that there was some consciousness among the organized writers about admitting reality writers into their ranks. Studios pump out shows like Who Has Got a Stapler? for pennies on the dollar, meaning that (from the WGA writers' perspective) reality television is a scab genre. Meanwhile, writers on reality shows aren't doing better by organizing with smaller unions whose needs don't fit their own even if some aspects of the job descriptions do. A writer on Project Runway has the same interest in residuals from an online broadcast as a writer for Friday Night Lights. Probably any reality writer is also a video editor of sorts, and, in fact, a Project Runway writer's work might be closer to that of an FNL editor. It's still shortsighted for the WGA to stiff-arm reality programming when the organization of reality writers is so critical to their own. Clearly the place to settle these sorts of professional/artistic debates is on the company softball field.
It will be a reversal of 2006 fortunes, then, if nonfiction news writers do join the WGA strike. Presumably the WGA will not turn them down for their heterodox work. I don't see what CBS News writers stand to gain in a strike over online residuals; maybe they are simply joining in solidarity.
UPDATE: A CBS insider passes along this company kthxgiving joke:
A turkey farmer was always experimenting with breeding to perfect a better turkey.That person also says that CBS news writers have been without a contract for nearly three years and their strike is independent from the WGA strike. Last week's NYT on the subject is clearer than some of today's accounts.
His family was fond of the leg portion for dinner and there were never enough legs for everyone. After many frustrating attempts, the farmer was relating the results of his efforts to his friends at the general store get together. "Well I finally did it! I bred a turkey that has 6 legs!"They all asked the farmer how it tasted.
"I don't know," said the farmer. "I never could catch the darn thing!"
She's got two contracts: One with the Writer's Guild of America, which requires her to strike, and one with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which prevents her from striking. So, after publicly expressing her solidarity with the writers on strike, she's decided to go back to New York to tape her show. Now all of New York hates her guts, even more so than before, when she was just patently unfunny.
Does DeGeneres actually have a contractual predicament? AFTRA has signaled that their members should support the writers. From the Web site's page titled, cleverly enough, "Here's How AFTRA Members Can Support Writers":
As an AFTRA member, you are reminded that you are required by the no-strike clauses of your AFTRA contract to report to work and complete your contractual commitments. However, you are also instructed that during the pendency of this strike, you may not perform duties covered by a WGA contract that have been performed by members of the WGA.Seems clear that the strike interest overrules the no-strike clause. So given that DeGeneres is a WGA member and her show is written by WGA members, she's performing struck work—which AFTRA, or at least its Web site, suggests she should not do.
Just consider the letter of appreciation she received from Kim Hedgpeth, National Executive Director of AFTRA and a person with a signature even crazier than mine. (Courtesy Nikke Finke.) Now, there's been some back and forth between the WGA East and AFTRA over the nature of DeGeneres's obligations, which are legitimately confusing; she's bound by a no-strike clause, but she's obligated not to perform struck work. In an AFTRA memo to WGAE that expresses outrage over WGAE's condemnation of DeGeneres, AFTRA admits that they don't really know: "Whether the services Ms. DeGeneres performed constitute struck work is something we should determine." Someone ought to let Ms. Hedgpeth know, before she savages any more letters of support with her pen.
The Hollywood Reporter reports on DeGeneres's motivations:
A spokesperson for the show's producer, Telepictures Prods., said there's a difference between "Ellen," which is carried by local TV stations, and such late-night talk shows as "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" and "Late Show With David Letterman," which are owned and controlled by networks.Put another way, she is worried about her job. So she's jeopardizing the negotiating position of some 12,000 striking writers. Granted, if she were to strike, America might wake up and realize that she's just not funny. She has her reasons, but she's still a scab. Boo hiss, scabs go home!The rep noted that Telepictures and the show's distributor, Warner Bros. Domestic TV Distribution, are under contract to continue delivering original episodes to the stations that carry the talker.
"We have asked Ellen to come back to work to fulfill her contractual obligation as host of the show because without original programs the stations can move the show out of its time periods or ultimately hold the company in breach of contract," the rep said. "The company in turn expects Ellen not to breach her contract to host the show. We also wish to preserve the 135 jobs of the staff and the crew whose livelihoods depend on the show continuing."
Two Sunday articles worth reading:
First, for the Washington Post David Greenberg writes about Rudy Giuliani and the misleading meme that mainstream press have built around him: Namely, that Giuliani is liberal on various social issues. He's not. I think the case is even worse than Greenberg writes: If an authoritarian like Giuliani is treated so gingerly by even ostensibly nonpartisan media outlets (e.g., ABC News) then it's quite possible that none of the media flaws that Republicans have been able to game since at least 2000 have been corrected.
It's been my experience growing up in the South that conservatives who do not know anything about politics and do not want to be tainted by negative associations with movement conservatism but who nevertheless reliably vote for Republicans will declare themselves "fiscally conservative, socially liberal," and seek politicians who project a similar image. I fear that a quote-unquote fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican would be a considerable draw for voters who have voiced frustration with the Bush administration.
Of course, no such candidate exists among the standing GOP field, leaving traditionally conservative to moderate voters with the option of staying home, endorsing a Democrat, or holding their noses while they vote Republican. Any media that can polish a turd like Giuliani can sustain the longstanding image of Hillary Clinton as a cackling bitch—leaving Giuliani as the least-bad option for a lot of Americans who are uncomfortable with but not offended by the state of the republic.
Everyone will be familiar by now with Tyler Cowan's Angry Ape theory of electoral politics: "Most swing voters perceive America as being at war and so they demand toughness. They demand An Angry Ape, if not at every moment in time, at least in principle." Giuliani is an angry ape all the time but he has been cast by the media as a fiscally conservative, socially liberal candidate who can play the angry ape when need be. From this point looking forward, 2008 looks like a contest for which candidate the Christian right finds less objectionable. Do they splinter, giving the race to Clinton, or stay quiet about their objections?
And in Salon, Glenn Greenwald writes about an exchange with Col. Steven Boylan, spokesperson for General David Petraeus. It's really amazing that a PR person would lie to a reporter, get caught lying, then be smug about it be so smug when the available evidence strongly suggests he has been caught lying to a reporter. But Greenwald's right: Worse is that Boylan seems to think that journalists must seek permission before they report things. "As we quickly found out, you published our email conversation without asking, without permission—just another case in point to illustrate your lack of standards and ethics," says Boylan, in response to . . . an e-mail from a journalist asking for information. That's funny! Boylan forgot that not all journalists are shills!
UPDATE: I won't call Boylan a liar before Greenwald does.
Mitt Romney's "Reagan Zone of Economic Freedom"—pictured somewhat differently than it is on Romney's site:
Compare. Choice of graphs really do make a difference!
UPDATE: As I look at it now, I realize: It's an excellent starting hand in RISK! The Game of World Domination. You can't beat that +2 power battery from Oceania. Maybe the Mitt is onto something. . . .
The other day I was quoted a fare by a cabbie that was so grossly out of step with the actual cost by zone that I nearly refused to pay him anything at all. I was wearing a suit, I was visibly harried, and I was traveling from one part of downtown to another—I didn't look much like a tourist. But why not lie to me or the next guy on K Street about the division of zones or the taxi fuel surcharge? The worst that happens, he's challenged by a grumpy passenger.
No, I'm not sympathetic to the complaint that cab drivers in the District can only make it as independent contractors under the zone system when, as everyone who lives here has experienced (as well as everyone who has visited, whether they know it or not), cab drivers thrive by exploiting information asymmetries built into the zone system. So a big hand to Mayor Fenty for ordering the District to fall in line with every other major city in the nation by adopting the meter, thereby ensuring his hold on the office of the mayor—and our hearts—for as long as he shall live.
Total insanity indicator of the day courtesy of the Washington Post: President Bush has appointed Susan Orr, who is opposed to contraception, to be the chief of family planning programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Orr has worked at the James Dobson–funded Family Research Council and didn't drop dead from shame after letting the phrase "Fertility is not a disease" pass her lips in public.
The birth czar does not approve contraception. How does that even work? She's going to tell the whole nation . . . to use the rhythm method? Hunt stork? Her predecessor, Eric Keroack, also came to his anti-woman positions during a long career working in religious practices more in sadness than in anger after reviewing the science. At least Keroack's sharing his conclusions with the rest of us. Amanda Schaffer writes in Slate that Keroack holds to the belief (which he might have lifted from Alexyss Tylor) that "premarital sex disrupts brain chemistry so as to create a physiological barrier to happy marriage." Now there's a disease.
"Bush Leaving Some Problems to Successors." Courtesy of Spencer. Who is most assuredly not wearing a freedom lapel pin.
Those of you interested in the protests in Myanmar may want to keep an eye out for Kerry Howley's coverage on Reason's Hit & Run blog. She's one of exceedingly few people you'll meet who has visited Myanmar and can claim any degree of expertise on the political lanscape therein. Unfortunately, it appears that police have begun violently suppressing the protests.
Predictably, the boys at Armavirumque are flustered by Columbia University's decision to host Iranian premier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday. James Panero objects that the Secret Service should provide security for Ahmadinejad, despite the fact that this is entirely routine for any visiting dignitary of his stature. Roger Kimball gets down to brass tacks:
What can one say? That [Columbia University] President Bollinger traduces the idea of "a community dedicated to learning and scholarship"? Yes. That he elides the notion of free speech and the more limited privilege of academic freedom? Yes again. That his incontinent demand that his university provide a forum for all ideas, no matter how toxic, erodes freedom by making it vulnerable to fanaticism? A third time Yes.Frankly, Ahmadinejad's visit strikes me as an embarrassment for everyone involved. War hawks like Kimball would have us believe that Ahmadinejad's mere presence before a podium would transmit ethnosectarian conflict throughout a pliant audience, or something, but in fact Ahmadinejad was ably laughed down by a lecture hall's worth of college students in response to his claim that there are no homosexual people in Iran. Is Ahmadinejad ridiculous? A resounding Yes. Is Roger Kimball ridiculous? Why, Yes, him too.
On the other hand, Columbia University had no compelling reason to invite Ahmadinejad to speak in the first place. Because Ahmadinejad is ridiculous—he is not a significant political actor within Iran. Perhaps Bollinger et al. realized the utility of giving Ahmadinejad a major stage, i.e., that he'd say something foolish, as he is prone to do, and that might diminish political pressure at home that we face an imminent threat in Iran. That's a very instrumental view of the academy and one I doubt that Bollinger et al. endorses, but I'm having a hard time understanding why Columbia would make a fuss over Ahmadinejad given the sheer number of people in the world who are more important. And even that liberal-instrumental view makes little sense, as Ahmadinejad no more runs his country than George W. Bush runs ours, so whether he looks fierce or foolish in the eyes of Americans has little bearing on whether Dick Cheney gets his war.
At the very least, yesterday's debate wasn't a stunt compounded by a stunt. Had Ahmadinejad visited Ground Zero and laid his wreath, or whatever, I'm sure I would have vomited. Whatever Ahmadinejad is, he is not our ally, and he does not mourn our losses. I disagree with the decision to prevent Ahmadinejad to visit the site, and it makes me feel like a hypocrite to say that I'm nevertheless pleased that he didn't. I'm surprised that he wasn't allowed to, in fact, since scarce little else would provoke war hawks so much as a photograph of the great enemy "desecrating" the site of September 11; and the Bush administration has never proven squeamish about using September 11 for political ends when the opportunity arises.
For The American Prospect I wrote a piece about Jonathan Yeo's pornographic portrait of President Bush, with a focus on artists' treatment of administrations past and present. That's up now. As for the portrait, you need to see the print for the full effect, but images and details are here.
On Campus Progress: Reviews of new stuff from Travis Morrison Hellfighters, Montag, and Stars—a veritable cornucopia of indie blather. Later today or this weekend, I'll put up a link to a piece on The American Prospect on presidential portraiture and the controversy surrounding an (un)official portrait of President Bush.
Most intense child evar. That kid is the offspring of Ed Norton and Destro. Terrorfying. Via Ygglz.
Jessica Valenti writes about "gray rape," a topic that Laura Session Stepp discusses in the latest Cosmo. Stepp reported on gray rape in her book, Unhinged (which took a drubbing in these pages a few months ago). The first excerpt of Stepp's essay strikes me as straightforward, fair reporting:
Oh, the gray area—that insidious "if I hadn't gone to that party" place, that "if I had only stopped after one beer" place, that "if I hadn't worn such a revealing top and come on to that hot guy" place where young women go when someone they probably know lays siege to their most private parts and everyone assumes it was at least partly their fault. More than half the time, they're drunk and can't remember details, and most of the time they don't press charges. [ . . . ] some defense lawyers and even some students have taken to calling such episodes "gray rape" out of a mistaken belief that when both parties have been drinking heavily, responsibility for what happened falls into a gray area.Only, this trend is redundant, isn't it? This isn't a new "gray rape" category, it's the familiar "date rape" crime that we've had on the books for at least a decade. The difference, it seems—based solely on excerpts here—may be an agenda. Stepp continues:
This is one of the most egregious, and least talked-about, implications of hookup culture. In gray rape, the girl who may have come on like the hunter becomes the hunted. Whose fault is that? For older generations, it seems clear that it's the guy's if she resists in any way or is drunk. Girls [ . . . ] aren't quick to say that, so reluctant are they to see themselves as powerless.She's not squarely blaming the victims, but she is saying that when women drink alcohol, pursue sex, and seek social status, they contribute to an atmosphere in which date rape is tolerated. Pursuant, if women behaved by the more traditional gender strictures Stepp advocates, you would not find feminist writers like Moe Zkicak asking, "It's not rape unless I say it was, right?"
Maybe that's too much to draw from a handful of excerpts (I haven't seen the Cosmo article—that's one magazine Catherine doesn't bring home). However, the magazine's online bleg for gray-rape stories from readers makes the connection clearer:
We live in a hookup culture, where people rarely "date" traditionally, and women often wind up going home with a male acquaintance they were hanging out with at a party or bar. Usually, there is some drinking involved, possibly a few crossed signals. As a result, many women have experienced what is known as "gray rape," a situation in which they never intended to have sex, but wound up forced into it because until that point, they'd been a willing participant."As a result", says Cosmo—but it's not clear that hooking up has led to a scary rise in date rape. According to RAINN, the majority (59 percent) of sexual assaults still go unreported, but rape and sexual assault crimes have fallen by 69 percent since 1993.As a result, the woman involved is left feeling violated and confused and angry. Has something like this happened to you? If so, Cosmo wants to hear about it. Your story may help and give comfort to other women who are still confused and shaken by their own "gray rape" experience.
I don't believe that the way to continue this downward trend is to retrovise women's social roles; some other folks have some ideas that sound better to me. Courtney Martin in the American Prospect says: more better sex education, please. DCeiver suggests turning the problematic "no means no" prohibition into an "only yes means yes" prescription and has a message for men ("You see that gray area? DON'T PUT YOUR COCK IN IT") that should be written into high-school sex-ed curricula everywhere. And so long as we're talking about high school ed, dropping our minimum age restriction on drinking is worth thinking about. Students aren't any better prepared for drinking than they are for sex by the time they enter college.
Megan McArdle asks whether Chinese art sweatshops resemble Renaissance art apprenticeships. I say nope. Apprenticeships are one stage along a professional track, whereas sweatshop labor is not. Sure, as far as income goes, apprentices don't make anything—that's a full two or three cents less than what these Chinese copycats are paid. But of course the opportunity cost that an intern pays is an investment in big bucks down the road.
Now, I get the sense that McArdle is baiting her readers (and this writer) to deliver forth an encomium to Art and Apollo and to denounce the Chinese for this cheapest debasement of the canon. And, because I know McMegan socially, I know that she wants to stake out the counterintuitive ground here and defend these reproductions as desirable against real and perceived critics who abhor them. But the art reproductions aren't the real issue (and not just because they aren't the real deal, though I am tempted to launch into a tangent on the problem of authenticity). The fact is, insofar as the global art market is concerned, a Dafen Holbein doesn't account for any more than a Soundgarden poster—they're both examples of cheap decor you can buy at Wal-Mart.
Which is not to say that China won't or has not already had a massive impact on the market. But with regard to this story, the significant point is that economic conditions in China are such that highly skilled labor can be organized (or exploited, if you prefer) as if it were the most basic unskilled labor. I'm not the professional economist, though, so I don't know whether this collapse of categories is an unprecedented or even significant aspect of the global market. Ryan? Felix? Tyler?
(Confidential to Sadly, No!: I was so thrilled to get a link from your page—S,N! is one of very few sites that I will read before I have even put on pants— so I was saddened when it turned out to be merely part of a slam on Megan McArdle. Which is fine, whatever, she's my friend who says crazy things about torture. But I'm confused by this specific issue, which is, what, again? Megan threw up some bat-signals and asked for expert opinion from bloggers she knows personally (to whatever extent). Are we not doing that any more? Really, that's deprecated?)
Kay Steiger points to a piece by Ari Spool in The Stranger that asks why women are never depicted smoking marijuana. Marijuana = mandom, apparently. This doesn't track whatsoever with my own observations (or Steiger's). I've never witnessed any sort of gender divide in practice when it comes to any sort of drug use, except, maybe, with regard to very coded legal drugs (cosmos, Virginia Slims, the red Mountain Dew).
Spool then interviews some real live female pot smokers, who turn out to be normal people just like you and me, but female, and high. That part of the piece is unfortunate, since I already know plenty of women who have smoked pot. I'm curious about the chicken/egg argument here: Does the media gender the drug? Or does the media depict a drug that is gendered?
Feministing asks whether smoking pot is a feminist act. Maybe so, but I think we need to know more about the women who toke to say for sure. My instinct is that we're not all wrong and that higher up along the SES ladder, similar proportions of men and women smoke pot.
In any case, I'm ready to give up forever Half Baked and that towel from South Park, out of solidarity with The sisterhood. I can think of exactly one movie scene in which a woman gets high (Nicole Kidman's character in Eyes Wide Shut). I'm sure there are more instances in film history, and I imagine I've seen them and simply forgotten.
The WaPo writeup of the Iowa GOP primary debate quotes Mitt Romney's diss on Barack Obama and the Obama campaign's response:
"I mean, in one week [Barack Obama] went from saying he's going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he's going to bomb our allies," [Mitt] Romney said. "He's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week."It might have been a timely response, but it certainly doesn't read quickly. Romney's reasoning is bogus, but his parting shot was a good quip. Democrats can do shorter and sharper without going shallow, I'm sure of it.Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, quickly responded that "the fact that the same Republican candidates who want to keep 160,000 American troops in the middle of a civil war couldn't agree that we should take out Osama bin Laden if we had him in our sights, proves why Americans want to turn the page on the last seven years of Bush-Cheney foreign policy."
That's the only substantive jab that came out of the debate, and it's weak sauce—the rest of the articles notes one astonishing GOP quote after another, in which candidates vacillate between wholly empty rhetoric and frighteningly authoritarian policy prescriptions. A special nod to Tom Tancredo, who (as Timothy Noah notes) says—out loud and while other people are present—that given the opportunity, he would protect the United States by bombing Mecca and Medina. This is all to say that you really ought to be setting your TiVo for this stuff.
So, I think that Congress should impeach President Bush. Sober, more in anger than in sadness, etc., etc., I do declare that I believe so, and strongly.
Not that my voice carries very far on political issues—I only say so here, declaring it on my modest public forum, because I have no congressional representatives to lobby.
Among other misdemeanors, President Bush has wasted American blood and treasure and expanded dangerously executive authority through signing statements, broad executive orders, and other innovative measures. Nevertheless, up to this point, the political cost of impeachment struck me as too high a price for the Democrats to pay to address Bush administration abuses. And I can't say I see a whole lot of upshot to installing Vice President Cheney in the Oval Office.
But today, the Bush administration asserted that "the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege." A breathtaking claim—my heart actually raced when I read it. It's too much to take. President Bush has attempted to nullify an important check of the legislature; if the Congress takes no action, he has succeeded. I'm not certain how Congress can resist this claim—through a show of force? by deploying the Capitol Police to arrest Harriet Miers et al.? What then? If it's a game of chicken between the executive and legislative branches, impeachment is way preferable to force.
It's crucial that the power of the executive branch be curtailed before another president takes office. Even if President Bush is only slapping the Congress in order to ensure that no one in the administration pays any penalty for its crimes—that's what I believe—limitless executive authority, or a "term-limited monarchy" as I've seen it phrased elsewhere, is not power that should be entertained. And it's not one that the next President will give up willingly.
Impeachment is bound to provoke a national crisis, but the fact of the matter is, the crisis is already there. I say, impeach them!
On a lighter note: Scroll down to 86 for a message of hope. (Via A White Bear.)
This is a half full, half empty question. As you read that headline ad nauseum over the next two years, are you 1) comforted that the executive branch is still subject to oversight or 2) appalled that we live in a banana republic? In any case, today the name in the blank (and off the docket) is I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
1. Sarah Hromack explains that Serpentine Gallery pulled the plug on a light projection piece by Paul Chan about life in Baghdad before the Iraq War. Why? Because Fox News was hosting a party at the gallery. Serpentine, your new name is Sniveling.
2. Not only does Antonin Scalia defend Jack Bauer at an international justice conference, he also—no, let's take a moment to consider that. Whew, that's sorry to read. I understand that it's only a conference, and the attendees are like people at any other conference—they hope the hotel has HBO, they'd like to catch up on real work between sessions, they hope not to run into exes, whatever. But Scalia isn't a middle manager or a lowly graduate student, he's a Justice of the Supreme Court, and there is a dignity to that office that flows with its holder wherever he goes. Scalia should bear his office much better than he does. Watch all the 24 you like, sir, but remember that you have one of the highest duties in the entire world.
Anyway, the Globe and Mail:
"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.The correct answer is, yes, Jack Bauer has the right to a jury trial, and if reasonable evidence is put forth saying he broke U.S. laws or U.S.–signed treaties, then yes, a jury will convict him, but nevertheless, yes, sometimes doing the right thing involves breaking rules, however, the only world in which doing the right thing necessitates lifting the ban on torture is the world of fiction. In the real world, there is never perfect knowledge of ticking time-bombs, and anyway, torture is not a useful way to interrogate people if it's reliable intelligence (instead of cheers from the audience) that you're hoping to gather. (Yep, we're fucked.)
Alexander Chancellor passes on this item about David Hockney and the UK smoking ban:
The imminence of the smoking ban, which starts on July 1, has goaded David Hockney to speak out once more against what he sees as this gross infringement of our civil liberties. His main point, of course, is that we should not have "dreary people" telling us what to do, but he also plays down the dangers of smoking. Many great artists smoked, including JMW Turner, he said at the opening of Tate Britain's Turner exhibition this week; and some of them, such as Monet and Picasso, lived to a ripe old age. He didn't go as far as to say that smoking could be good for you, but he sort of implied it.Huh, I would've guessed that living in LA would have cured Hockney of this particular prejudice. Or at least inured him to busybodies.
Elsewhere in the UK: Did Damien Hirst's For the Love of God find a buyer? In the Guardian, I comment on what Hirst's piece is not.
Newsweek's Cathleen McGuigan phones in a report on Crystal Bridges, asking why art critics and patrons are so unnerved by Alice Walton's art-world maneuvering. Why does Walton's money scare people? Why not ask Laura Katzman—the director of museum studies at the Randolph-Macon Woman's College's Maier Museum, who resigned in protest from her tenured position after Walton's shopping-trip visit to the museum?
McGuigan writes that "locals can get jumpy", citing local news reports issued "supposedly because [Walton] was checking out the fine collection at Randolph-Macon College's Maier Museum of Art". (The story's significance expands beyond the purview of the art world. Here's the short version: Recognizing that single-sex schools don't compete in higher education today, Randolph-Macon Woman's College decides—rather quietly—to admit men. The school promises angry students and alumni that the university won't be forced to sell assets or its character with the transition. However, in the wake of an alumni backlash over the sex change and the school's secretiveness—a backlash that cost the school big time—the university starts to look to its assets for sources of income. It badly needs to replenish endowment spending, which has gotten so out of hand the school's accreditation is at risk, without alarming alumni even more. Hence, an audit recommending that the university sell its art collection; hence, a visit from Walton.)
It's not wrong that the lion prowls the savannah after the wounded antelope (as a friend likens Walton), but it's not better for these institutions—the Maier, the whole city of Philadelphia—that Walton arrives to buy art but not to support art institutions. Notes the Richmond Times Dispatch:
"One of the things that's frustrating is the continual talk of it as an asset," said junior Emily Knoble, a studio art major from Tucson, Ariz. "They're talking dollars and cents instead of creativity and inspiration and culture."Right: Critics like me and educators like Katzman get nervous because institutions start talking very institutionally when a baroness like Walton on hand, as if their decisions affected Excel spreadsheets more than their communities and constituencies.
Finally—and this gets ignored in favor of deliberations about aesthetics and acquisitions—but it should be said every time Walton makes any purchase that she benefits from a ludicrous tax giveaway written for Crystal Bridges by the Arkansas state legislature.
Check out your buddy and mine, Ezra Klein, on Hardball.
More fun than listening to Yglesias and Ezra squabble over the immigration bill at the dinner table is watching Michelle Malkin go at it with the Wall Street Journal editorial board. The whole board! When they assemble, they are known as The Man! The Man supports the guest-worker program. Malkin says that by supporting a contract-laborer program with Mexico, these Rockefeller Republicans fail to consider and even invite across our borders
the al-Qaeda operatives who plotted not only 9/11 but also plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the LAX millenium plot, the New York City subway plot, and the New York City landmark bomb plot.Though not all of those attacks were designed by al-Qaeda, fundamentally, I have to agree with Malkin here: We must not hire al-Qaeda operatives as temporary workers. They are shifty and don't assimilate well. Violence, not the national English, is the only language they understand. No to al-Qaeda—not even for the jobs Americans don't want.
Washington Watchman Mike Licht passes on an item in the Examiner on the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The article reports that the Commission botched a deal to put art—craft, sculpture, site-specific yadda yadda—in the new baseball stadium. Here's the long and short of it: The Commission couldn't fit $850,000 under the stadium construction cap, so the item for the 2008 city budget was billed to general obligation bonds—the idea being that the Commission would then own the art and lend it to the Nationals at no cost. Councilor Kwame Brown, who has "oversight of the arts commission as chairman of the economic development committee", oversaw right through this clever ruse. Now, the stadium has no art and the Commission is out $850,000. Whoops!
Licht is quoted in the article as saying that the Commission's play was an "absurd attempt to get around the spending cap." Or, in site-specific terms, an error. In brighter news, the 2007 Nationals may not turn out to be "historically bad" in the final analysis. I'm sure Charles is thrilled.
Le Monde reports that Sarközy is readying to eliminate or roll up several Ministries—potentially including the Ministry of Culture—in a quick-strike effort to shrink government. Mssr. Reagan? Oui, il l'aime.
In which Townhall columnist Mary Grabar quotes from a 1966 Thomas Pynchon essay after the Watts race riots:
Thomas Pynchon . . . observed "white culture," a "creepy world of precardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order." We white people are so darn repressed . . . so unlike those authentic black folks who are much closer to nature and their primal, savage selves.What Pynchon in fact observes about Whitey in his original essay: "[A]mong so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence." A slightly more nuanced reflection than had he slurred black people as savages in a defense of savagery, or, wait, what is it that Grabar's going on about?
Her essay is standard Townhall fare: racial misdirection, quotes lifted from context, singularly personal anecdotes, metaphorical strawmen. (Observe when she compares Pynchon to a lazy grad student, then realizes that grad student by inhabiting the role with an anecdote, then extends the range of her target from one writer to include the entire liberal elite, past and present. Standard—but balletic.) And the pretext of Grabar's column is surely mandatory: the latest perfidy published on the New York Times editorial page. But the context of the essay—a spirited defense of French president Nikolas Sarközy? "Sarközy and Me"‽ It's just embarrassing. A conservative movement that boasts about drinking French wine has lost its True North. What would Mssr. Reagan say?
Some form of these remarks has been posted all over the political interwebs, but Mark Kleiman has my favorite take: What can Congress do to compel computers computers and servers from the White House over their objections? The executive branch claims, or so it seems, that the White House is imbued with executive privilege, that a penumbra of protection assures all their activities. To complaints that the use of RNC e-mail is a transparent ploy to evade the document preservation standards of the Presidential Records Act, Karl Rove has said (I paraphrase) that he is the Dungeonmaster; Jedi Majority Leader mind-tricks don't work on him; and when Congress is ready and able to tap four blue mana and roll a 2d12, they can put in a request to the Justice Department to execute Contempts of Congress and wait for the matter to reach the Supreme Court. Kleiman's answer to the White House is not my favorite because it's the most accurate—I don't know how this works—but it is the most delicious. Deploy the Sargent at Arms!
Jonah Goldberg blasts Francis Fukuyama for advocating (in Goldberg's words) a "post-sovereign European system". Goldberg alleges specifically that Fukuyama contradicts positions he's taken previously; however, once Goldberg bothers to read the column, he retracts his objection. Good times.
In his Guardian piece, Fukuyama writes, "The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a 'post-historical' world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military." Sure, you may be asking yourself, his analysis is intriguing—but where is the art that comments on transition, from the perspective of a citizen entering into the post-historical state?
Glad you asked. In fact, artists from Balkan and former Yugoslav Federation nations have touched on the subject through performative artworks, providing a distinctly liminal perspective. In nations such as Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia, debate about the prospect (or specter) of European integration is pitched. (Each of these nations is expected to join the EU by 2012–2015.)
The rapid, even cataclysmic political and economic transformation of the region informs the work of the Croatian artist Andreja Kuluncic and Serbian artists Marina Abramovic, Tanja Ostojic, and Milica Tomic. All of these artists are women, all performance or performative artists, and all artists who examine transition through the lens of feminist critique. (They are not the only artists who are working on these themes or in this metier.)
Of these artists, Ostojic deals with the political transition most explicitly. L'Origine du monde is, unambiguously, a rephrasing of the 1866 Courbet painting by the same name. In her photograph, Ostojic has hidden her sex behind panties imprinted with the EU's gold star halo emblem. With this intervention (and in other, subtler ways), the artist subdues the eroticism of the original painting: Her body lay prone vis-à-vis the viewer but neither wholly exposed nor aroused.
Ostojic's sex is a crucial aspect of her identity as an artist. So are her panties. In this photograph, they are Ostojic's intervention, the tweak in her appropriation of Courbet's image.* The panties are a surrogate for the EU flag (itself a symbol of the European Union), and as such, they provide the context for understanding Ostojic's sex. Her sex is a surrogate as well, suggesting her Serbian identity.
The relationship between the EU and Serbia in this context is arguably uneasy. Her identity, though obscured, is visceral and indelible—but the EU is abstract, a product, something to be worn or discarded. Are the panties censorious? What does membership to the EU cost? Pace Fukuyama, who views the EU as the end of the world, does the EU brand itself as the origin of the world?
Fukuyama identifies the EU effort to "transcend sovereignty". By casting herself in the context of a notorious, scrutinized image, subject to an intense gaze, Ostojic acknowledges the tumultuous nature of Serbian sovereignty. By placing herself literally within the broader narrative of European art history, she casts some doubt that the EU is in fact post historical. To Ostojic, admission means submission.
* I'm taking for granted here the transformation of painting into photograph. Walter Benjamin would find it irresistible. Maybe there is an inversion at work between capitalist and communist values, but I'm focusing on the panties. I do think, though, that the substitution of artist for model is not arbitrary, but it's also not radical. Perhaps a post for another day.
One Volokh conspirator writes about the community morals that he thinks are most subject to change in coming years—animal rights, capital punishment, and forced labor—and includes oddly quantitative measures for the likelihood of change. ("I suspect that the chance of major movement in this direction is at least 50%.") I'm agnostic about animal rights, though insofar as regulations that "humanize" animal slaughter and farming support better ecological and labor practices, I'm all for them (so long as I can continue eating delicious, delicious meat.) I'm opposed to the death penalty and am delighted to read that "continued substantial increase in moral stigmatization of the death penalty" is predicted at 60 percent. ("[A]nd 70-80% if there is no major crime wave.")
I don't cotton to mandatory national service, though I wasn't always so opposed to the notion. In fact I don't remember developing a grudge agaisnt "giving back"—only when that post and thought, "No fucking way am I serving this country on the executive say-so," did it occur to me. My family has a long history with the military, stretching back to every war the nation's ever been in; I have great respect for military service. Much less for the United States as a nation, though. I'm not sure I would go so far as to help my child to shirk national service (I'm too old to be any use to my country, of course), but it would be a major deterrent to having a family in the States. Who knew? I'm radicalized.
Germaine Greer for the Guardian: "Surrealism's women thought they were celebrating sexual emancipation. But were they just fulfilling men's erotic fantasies?"
God, it's just in the air, isn't it?
Holy crow is Belle on point.
Eugene Volokh takes me to task for ellipsizing in a post about "hook upping". He writes that I excluded some critical nuance in LSS's metaphor. Maybe so: I didn't want to get tied down in the mechanics of the thing, and gave it short shrift to dispatch it in short order. Look, here it is, simply put. It is wrong to analogize women's bodies to property to make any sort of point. It's unfeeling to write something so historically insensitive. It's nonsensical because women are not extricable from their bodies the way a real-estate agent is from a home—this denies women agency, desires, &c., the motivations that things do not have. It's also hurtful to men—who, in LSS's metaphor, lurk unseen as sinister prowlers and cat burglars (ahem). Here it is, also simply put: I don't want to rape women. I don't think of consent as the down payment I reluctantly make in exchange for sex. Finally, the entire metaphor is simply a rehash of "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free"—the operation between the source and target domains is congruent. Only, LSS's update is a little longer and more confused and registers a salacious hint of violence.
None of this clarifies "hook-ups"—it's only a more urgent plea for the chastity belt.
Give your best to Spencer, who leaves on Saturday to embed in Baghdad for a month. He tells me that he should have fairly regular Internet access for some Iraq'd-esque escalation of his regular blog content—but I know I'll be worried when I don't see a daily update. He's taking my camera with him; I look forward to the pictures of all the painted schools. Go get that story, and come home safe.
Drum and Yglesias on media "silly seasons." More here, here, and here.
Not silly season: the NYT reporting on the bloggers whom John Edwards hired and offering that it's much ado over "doing what bloggers do — expressing their opinions in provocative and often crude language."
This is irresponsible journalism.
The conservative press and blogosphere gin up these pseudocontroversies because they know what they can expect from a pliant mainstream media: reporting on the controversy that escalates the controversy itself. Legitimate media outlets examine these stories (e.g., SBVT, Obama's education) that are evidently bogus; in the process of examination, they provide equal consideration to conservative pundits who don't care whether the stories are bogus, so long as they further the conservative agenda. By the time the press comes around to the obvious conclusion—that the stories that Obama received Islamic fundamentalist instruction and that Kerry shot himself in Viet Nam in order to receive medals to further his latent political ambitions are bogus—the public has lost interest and the damage has been done.
The biggest media bogosity of our times? Intelligent design. Intelligent design wouldn't be a meme if the media had not treated the testimony of the overwhelming majority of all scientists and as equivalent to the testimony of the fringe flatworlders that make up the Discovery Institute. Professional ID supporters are inevitably associated with DI. By treating the controversy as a divide within the scientific community and inviting scientists to discuss it—one representing science, the other representing the Discovery Institute—the media puts this creationist wedge on par with science, lending a massive, massive subsidy to the Discovery Institute.
But Michelle Malkin is worse than a wedge—she's, well, she's a corniceps fungus, in fact, and I can't understand why more journalists don't do the responsible thing and innoculate against her spores, namely by steering clear of her stories, lest they find themselves climbing whatever tree she commands them to climb.
Definitely silly season: Heatherette.
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, from time to time I would check in on the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, since I had been fond of the place and always tried to visit when I was in the city. Shortly after the devastation, some people who worked there set up a blogspot site in hopes of finding out where everyone was. It led to some tearful reunions (and reading).
No surprise that Cacno is up and running, but there's still a great deal of cultural rebuilding going on—or so I learn from Cynthia Joyce's Culture Gulf. She writes here about 1 dead in attic, a collection of distressing New Orleans Times-Picayune columns by Chris Rose (who, avant le deluge, wrote the celebrity gossip beat). I recommend it for your bookshelf, to fit that empty slot beside Robert Polidori's inescapable and haunting book of photography, After the Flood.
Jackie Trescott writes that confusion reigns over Smithsonian on Demand, the joint project by which Showtime pays the Smithsonian for rights of refusal to archival materials. Curiously, the her editors gave her story the headline, "Smithsonian Deal With Showtime Passes Muster." But as far as I can tell, "The Smithsonian Institution's controversial partnership with Showtime Networks has not hampered researchers' access to Smithsonian materials" so far.
Here's the kicker:
[T]he GAO found the Smithsonian received 117 requests for filming after the contract was in place and rejected only two.That doesn't sound like a clear bill of health to me, but it's all hard to say, since details of the contract haven't been made public. We're able to gloss some details from Trescott's report:GAO said its evaluation of the contract's impact was hampered by the "incomplete data and oversimplified criteria" provided by the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian says its paperwork was created for a different purpose.
Some details of the contract were made public by Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small at a congressional oversight hearing in May. Small said the Smithsonian signed a rare 30-year contract with Showtime and that it would receive $500,000 a year if the deal is successful. The contract allowed the Smithsonian to create six shows a year with non-Showtime filmmakers.What are the metrics of success for subscription-cable documentaries? What are the implications of success on documentaries? The fact that the infant agreement has not yet hampered a non-Showtime documentarian does not seem like much of a recommendation for the program. Especially since greater visibility to Smithsonian documentaries will mean more requests, and if I understand correctly, more rejections.
I'm considering several degrees of outrage. I don't yet understand the commitment that the Smithsonian has to Showtime, so I don't know what's appropriate. The documentary on the cloudy leopard sounds cool, so I'm slightly outraged about not having Showtime.
In brightest day, in blackest night, no straight thing was ever made: John Quiggin considers Yglesias's Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, that is, the notion that the U.S. military "can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force," so long as there is the willpower to do so.
The theory explains how we find ourselves presently in Iraq, where U.S. officials are considering
one last push. (Ostensibly to secure Baghdad—though who knows? One U.S. official says, "There has not been a full articulation of what we would want the surge to accomplish." Just something to try, the ramifications or troops themselves be damned in the eyes of the Bush administration.) Quiggin writes that, not only is today's war party pretty much the Green Lantern Corps, but we can expect GL supporters to retcon any American retreat from Iraq as the result of liberal posturing. It's the Green Lantern Provisio for Revision and Rehabilitation—goes hand in hand with the Theory for Geopolitics (and the Parallax Fear Anomaly).
Kevin Drum figures that One Last Push is the only way by which liberals will be able to resist the eventual, inevitable charge that liberal footdragging is the reason America lost Iraq. But this assumes some rational limit to the GL theory—that, given their "surge" (even put in terms of a "last push," if that stands), war lanterns will accept whatever happens as the final say on Iraq. But the last push will never be enough, and liberals will always have lacked the resolve to see Baghdad through. The best liberals can do, in the political arena, is hope that war lanterns discredit themselves so thoroughly that the public in revulsion turns a deaf ear to the revisionist take on Iraq, Viet Nam, and the Cold War.
Quiggin goes over the archives and finds other examples (beyond Viet Nam) to illustrate an empirical Green Lantern effect: the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, and the Korean War—in addition to Viet Nam—with Iraq embodying the lessons we failed to learn from all of them. Yet he still finds in America's might justification for its global police work: "[T]he US has a unique capacity to enforce the global law that makes wars of aggression a crime against humanity."
Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer proves himself to be the Hal Jordan-drunk-with-Parallax-power of the Green Lantern set (which will mean something to the geeks in the audience). Krauthammer says we should stop short of dominating the world in, say, the Winter Olympics—lest we be perceived as arrogant. Take that, Sinestro!
Brad Plumer reads boring reports so you don't have to, filling you on new data that show that suburban poverty rates are rising faster than urban poverty rates and, furthermore, suburban poor now outnumber urban poor. Poverty rates rose in the Midwest and the South but held steady in the West and Northeast. After reading today's WaPo notes on regional population shifts—people are leaving the Northeast and the Midwest by the millions and moving into the South by even more—I'm interested in what sorts of people and jobs the Midwest is hemorrhaging.
Give a read, but if you'd rather, you can, in fact, watch the paint peel.
If there's justice in taste, this photograph will be recorded and remembered in perpetuity.
By Christopher Morris. (Courtesy of Paul Schmelzer.)
. . . Iran and Syria are standing, coyly, at the border of Iraq—heads down, nervously running foot over foot—just waiting for the Bush administration to ask them to dance?
No?
But that's my impression, given the way the issue has been framed: So staunchly opposed is Bush to changing his policy toward Iraq, questions about seeking assistance from Iraq's neighbors are posed as should we or could we, never how will we or is it even possible. Since it's taken as granted that Bush won't pursue this policy, not much time is dedicated to examining its features (what shape will this assistance take? what will Iran and Syria ask for in return? and so on).
The media is doing the public a disservice: There won't be a moment, even if Bush does go to Iran and Syria for help, in which Bush Goes to Iran and Syria for Help (a change in course you recognize from the major headline font). Any diplomatic overtures would be called that after the fact—surely negotiation between America and Iran is something neither country is going to crow about—so it would be a great boon to understand what options are or are not being explored today, and what the advantages, costs, and drawbacks of these options are.
I understand that we aren't talking to Iran and Syria because Cheney would rather expand the war to include those nations. But surely Baker, Hamilton, et al. have considered them, and I would like to read informed commentary about these options. Of course, it's possible that it's out there and I'm just not reading closely enough. (Hell, I could just go to the living room and ask Spencer.) But I'm concerned about the sense of the public, y'all. Then again, maybe it's just the case that our diplomacy apparatus is dead, and there's nothing to report—that's a depressing, but plausible, thought.
From National Review's The Corner:
There the kids are, nestling snuggly, coaxed into Dreamland by mom or dad or grammie or grandpa reading some delightful selections from The National Review Treasury of Classic Bedtime Stories. The 360-page original 2003 hardcover volume . . . is now available.This handsome tome contains every cherished tale that National Review's conservative pundits have been telling themselves about Iraq for the last 4 years.
Elsewhere on the Corner today: Rich Lowry cherrypicks favorite paragraphs (mocking those he disfavors) from the Iraq Study Group report—arguably earning his keep. Meanwhile,
* Santa Claus will visit children, but not the British children.
Excerpted from the Iraq Study Group's highly anticipated exercise in prognostication:
If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe. Neighboring countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia clashes could spread. Al-Qaida could win a propaganda victory and expand its base of operations. The global standing of the United States could be diminished. Americans could become more polarized.If the Bush administration doesn't change course, this could be the state of affairs in as few as two years. The view from 2003 looks grim, indeed.
When your angle, your take, your thing is killing your ex-wife and her boyfriend, you need to constantly remind the public about your double-murdering tendencies, lest it be that you did the deed in vain. But you can't just kill a new ex-wife and boyfriend—either getting away with murder is more often beginner's luck than practiced talent; or it's too much bother to search out that special person who will later seem a lot less special and, ultimately, deserving of a ghastly death; or you're afraid you can't carry it off with the same pluck now that you're older. Yet the problem remains: How to cement your legacy? You—because you know that society reviles a biscuit conditional as totally as it does the evidence of its own failures—you give them both. I think it's safe to say that the people will never mistake your talent.
Oh! Oh! I know this one. It's called affirming the consequent, right? What little I know about propositional logic, I learned over the Internet, so there's no excuse for The Insta-Pundit.* †
* unless the Iranian death unicorns OWN UR TUBES
† I accept responsibility for all 12 logic errors in this claim
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954.
It's Morning in AmeriKKKa!
Here's a Senate update: According to MSNBC (as of noon), the vote margin in Montana isn't close enough to trigger a recount (the contest has to be within a quarter of 1 percent, which is something like 4 Montanans). It looks as if Jon Tester will take that race.
In Virginia the vote is close enough for Allen to request a recount, but the recount process in Virginia isn't a complete recount. Allen can't challenge every vote, and it's unlikely that he can make up the 8,000 or so votes he would need to beat Webb through the challenge process. He's not expected to concede—but he's not expected to win.
I'm happy to hear that political independents favor Democrats 2 to 1 going into November, but you know what? Independents are irritating. "Independent voters may strongly favor Democrats, but their vote appears motivated more by dissatisfaction with Republicans than by enthusiasm for the opposition party." This is irritating, since independents who abstain from primaries promote the radical elements they then later vote against (or for, mouth-breathing GOP candidates since 1994 are any indication). A while back Kevin Drum linked to a Johnson County Sun editorial about how this trend plays out in Peoria:
You almost cannot be a victorious traditional Republican candidate with mainstream values in Johnson County or in Kansas anymore, because these candidates never get on the ballot in the general election. They lose in low turnout primaries, where the far right shows up to vote in disproportionate numbers.Independents also irritate me with their stubborn refusal to exist as a normative bloc. Thomas Edsall wrote last month for The New Republic:
In late 2000, even as the result of the presidential election was still being contested in court, George W. Bush's chief pollster Matt Dowd was writing a memo for [Karl] Rove that would reach a surprising conclusion. Based on a detailed examination of poll data from the previous two decades, Dowd's memo argued that the percentage of swing voters had shrunk to a tiny fraction of the electorate. Most self-described "independent" voters "are independent in name only," Dowd told me in an interview describing his memo. "Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket" for one party or the other.Political independence is as convincing a bloc as a faux hawk is a haircut—neither is any way to organize your head. Yet the indies will be on hand again in 2008, fresh to irritate me anew with their shock, shock!, at the nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries (in which they will not have participated).Once such independents are reclassified as Democrats or Republicans, a key trend emerges: Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of true swing voters fell from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent.
Ian Welsh writes more in The Agonist. He describes the pressure that will be brought to bear on the Democratic Party, should it regain one or both majorities, by conservative pundits speaking on behalf of independents everywhere to "let bygones be bygones" in the name of progress—which would be one hell of an amnesty. Again, so irritating, because the revenge is the part I'm looking forward to, along with a robust war against Christmas and the mandatory abortions. In all seriousness, what else is the Democratic Party supposed to do with a majority, if not investigate and correct the mistakes of the previous Congress—which is less popular than scary ghosts?
President Bush has abandoned his "stay the course" locution. Some light still does reach the inner sanctum of the White House, and the dim awareness that the campaign in the Middle Eastern provinces is not going well has intensified into a burst of administrative action and resolve. Over the radio, I just heard White House Press Secretary Tony Snow refer to Iraq as "a study in constant motion"—the President's most thrilling public pirouette yet. We've reached the second act in the war, in which we no long dither about why we're there but instead over what to call what we're going. The Bush administration will hone this Iraq message in perpetuity without ever again steering the course of American action there—and, tragically, considering the national treasure we continue to spend there, victory in Iraq will mean nothing short of handing this problem to the next President.
Tangentially related: More Americans believe that they have personally seen or felt the presence of a ghost (22%) than approve of the job Congress is doing (16%).
Senate Democrats apparently compromised on Bush's prisoner legislation, promising not to filibuster the legislation in hopes of consideration for amendments. The compromise does not guarantee any habeas-protecting amendments. Nor would any amendment have a binding effect on the final bill that leaves committee.
Today the NYT issues in a strong opinion a bulleted outline of exactly what rights are at stake, and how new presidential powers coconspire to fundamentally undermine our freedom:
Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant†in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.Finally, I'm with LB: The 34 House Democrats who voted "aye" on this bill can walk off a cliff.The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret—there’s no requirement that this list be published.
Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.
Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.
Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable —already a contradiction in terms—and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.
Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.
Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.
Susan told me that she's lost sleep over the detainee legislation. It was strangely comforting to hear: I say "strangely" because I'm an informed citizen living in the nation's capital, and furthermore one surrounded socially and professionally (hell, even domestically) by writers and pundits, so a sharp opinion about the news shouldn't come as a surprise—strong opinions are never in short supply. And yet, our civic identities never really surface when we relate to one another. There's a shame to shrillness, and if there's only one redeeming quality to writing a blog, it's that they allow for imagined interchanges that are too embarrassing to contemplate in real life:
Q: How are you?A little precious, yeah.
A: Really? I feel paralyzed by uncertainty about our nation. I feel stimulated by fear and intrigue nearly to the point of numbness. Did you read the piece in the WaPo about the expanded definition of "unlawful combatant" from an individual who "has engaged in hostilities against the United States" to one who "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" [emphasis mine]? Follow the hyperlink, but here's the relevant excerpt:
[H]uman rights experts expressed concern yesterday that the language in the new provision would be a precedent-setting congressional endorsement for the indefinite detention of anyone who, as the bill states, "has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States" or its military allies.And it's the executive branch's final decision that determines how these features of the legislation are ultimately decided, given the jurisdiction- and habeas-stripping provisions of the bill. The Congress has granted the White House has the power to torture and disappear people.The definition applies to foreigners living inside or outside the United States and does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant.
I'm entertaining suggestions about what more I can do than call Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, representatives who don't, in fact, represent me. I'm not much of a mobilizer; I did dream about camping out on the steps of the Capitol with a "SAVE HABEAS" sign, even that's also not characteristic of me. As a freelancer, my taxes aren't automatically deducted from my paychecks, so I could pretty easily refuse to support the regime financially.
If I understand what Marty Lederman is saying about the compromise language in the bill to authorize the President to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, the revisited language 1) outlaws "grave breaches" of Common Article 3, including such horrors as rape and murder, 2) renders the President, however, wide leeway in determining which, if any, acts not proscribed by the bill constitute violations of Common Article 3, and 3) suggests that such acts that the President does not determine to be ipso facto violations but nevertheless lead to "grave breaches," such as death, will not be considered violations—that is, war crimes—unless they are intended as such.
This is a Game, the point of which is to replace the ladders of the law with chutes. Intent now matters, and murder is not murder unless it is "murder." In the eyes of the United States, Manadel al-Jamadi could not have been crucified ("His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated") unless the CIA intended to crucify him to death. My God, my country's reclaiming the right to commit war crimes based on authorial intent!
There's no uncertainty about the habeas rights—they do not apply under the new reading. Roland Barthes and Thomas Jefferson are spinning in their graves.
I know too many cogs in the Chris Bell machine back home, and many more tinkerers here who are monitoring Bell's progress, to not feel guilty about the yelp of satisfaction I gave when I heard Kinky made the gubernatorial ballot. Give 'em hell, Kinky! But then loose narrowly to the Democratic candidate!
Marc Fisher brings the latest on 84-y-o Maryland comptroller Schaefer. You remember him, right? He told an assistant that her milkshake brought all the elderly to the supervised play area? Even asked her to turn around and "walk again"? Now he's back to business: he's giving it to North Korea by needling Marylander Korean Americans taking ESL courses.
It is appalling that the NSA has granted itself the authority to monitor Americans' nutritional data. Surely we may have security and also enjoy international cuisines without the NSA monitoring every international restaurant we citizens choose to frequent. This is a blatant power grab on the part of the Bush administration, and the Congress must quash it immediately. Dinner without datamining! Tyler Cowan is not a terrorist!
Is there really no other hotel available for this sort of thing? If you're a politician, why would you go there? This is a profession in serious need of superstitions. (And, apparently, a new scandal-naming convention.)
Not only did the U.S. Bureau of Education translate the Star-Spangled Banner into Spanish in 1919, but El Presidente himself has on occassion sang nuestro himno. Gently nudging a stupid argument toward mental gridlock is the fact that we're only having this specific debate because "British music rebel" Adam Kidron recorded the Spanish-language version and released it online a few days ago.
This is so stupid. It's not stupid because mouthbreathing muckrakers like Michelle Malkin—who, by the way, baffles me with a line complaining about liberals' "selective advocacy of force"; it should be what sort of advocacy, exactly? Indiscriminate? Gleeful?—would have us believe that a Spanish translation of the National Anthem, emceed by Wyclef and set to a Casio-issued samba beat, represents an authentic front in the Reconquista effort. No, on this point, conservatives are on to something: they're right to want to protect the anthem from performance. The anthem changes by mediation, whether it's belched or wailed on a guitar or sung by orphans, so if you have a real stake in ensuring that all things patriotic are all things melee to be used to club political adversaries, you must keep the anthem (flag, purple ink-stained finger) far from the hands of a politically inexpedient minority group.
What's so wrong is that the right has so woefully misidentified the enemy. A British person recorded the National Anthem, and the right's fed up because immigrants living in America are listening to it? We have seen the enemy, and the enemy isn't getting off the hook just because he produced The Slits. What a carpetbagger—a carpetdouchebagger. I can't put my finger on why, precisely, but I find it meddlesome and opportunistic and every bit as irritating as the xenophobes complaining about it. Why not put "La Marseillaise" in Arabic next? Kidron could be Sufjan Stevens, replacing states with nations and their distinctive boring intercultural policy disputes that don't involve him. It reminds me of that great Eddie Izzard routine, that one where the Corinthians respond to Paul's letters: "Dear Paul, Fuck off. Where do you get off, writing to an entire city? Hugs and kisses, the Corinthians."
Ultimately, it's a weak thread in the immigration debate, but one Republicans promise to pluck for some time to come. Then again, "immigration debate" itself is such a fruitless phrase for what's in fact happening in the Americas. It was a rather small detail in the article, but in a books review for the Atlantic Monthly Marc Cooper notes that the Mexico-U.S. border is witnessing the greatest human migration in recorded history. There's just nothing to be "done" about it, and all the handwringing—the President interceding in a debate about how people sing songs; the weekend warriors in the Arizona sun, with guns and koozied beer—represents a stark failure of imagination. We're talking about an epochal movement of people. Even amnesty and boycotts and other policies I nominally support fail to appreciate how vast this migration is—as if it is a trend we may somehow permit or not. It's like saying, I support tidal waves.. It's nonsense! Though the followup (My political opponent's anti-moon position is sheer lunacy!) is better.
It's of course important that we ensure fair treatment for all residents, maintain a standard of living that doesn't come at the expense of the lower class, and prevent British people from acting out at all costs. No use kidding ourselves that we can tweak the tides of history—these are things we just ought to do as citizens.
Charles Kuffner has the rundown on seemingly limitless line of politicians vying for DeLay's seat. But according to TPM Muckraker, Tom DeLay can't quit the election without effectively forfeiting his seat for the GOP. He's already won the primary for his district in Texas, and it would take disqualification to start another primary. In order to be disqualified, "he must die, be convicted of a felony, or move out of the state." Great that the DQ mechanism is organized by order of preference.
But DeLay wants to beat the clock. He's moving! Throw them horns up, Texas! Of course, he's moving to Virginia—setting up shop with The Family, I presume—which brings the darkness that much closer to home. But I don't care if he camps out at in the Nats dugout, so long as he's not working in Texas.
You know why Tom DeLay (R-Hell) is resigning now? Besides the fact that he's looking at some F2F with a federal prosecutor, and the GOP needs that photo-op like Scalia needs to be more assertive about his feelings? Because campaign funds DeLay doesn't spend on his campaign can (in fact, must) be spent on his legal fees. Which will probably amout to some hefty coin.
UPDATE: Wait, I'm not making sense. If DeLay can convert his campaign funds into legal defense, he'd want to keep campaigning—with a shoestring operation—right? Just on a shoestring operation. After all, his continued arrogance inspires a stiffer upper lip among the true believers than his resigning. Maybe his resignation allows DeLay to give up the pretense and focus full-time on playing the martyr (i.e., pushing the defense fund that has been operating parallel to his campaign purse). I think the prevailing theory holds: DeLay sees the writing on the wall. And it reads like hashmarks, scores and scores of 'em.
Pictured from left: Pat Thetic (drums), Chris #2 (bass & vocals), and Justin Sane (vocals & guitar) of Anti-Flag. McDermott (D-WA) appears at right ( in scarf) with three staffers.
If I were a Republican operative tasked with satisfying the grassroots depleted uranium lobby in my community, I'd push this meeting of the minds between Anti-Flag and the Democratic House Representative from Washington for all it's worth. The Hill reports that Jim "I've Got the Straight Edge" McDermott attracted a fan-following among the members of Anti-Flag with H.R. 2410, legislation proposed to study the long-term effects of exposure to depleted uranium (used in a variety of munitions and military-grade materials) on American soldiers. (The military assures that depleted uranium supports our troops.) Rep. McDermott even went so far as to lend some guest vox (I'm not kidding) to "Depleted Uranium Is a War Crime"—the last track on Anti-Flag's latest, For Blood and Empire, an album that calls attention to the central importance of family and faith in the American heartland.
Man, remember Anti-Flag? I used to be young and fuckin punk. Like Big McD.
Speaking of misrepresenting Muslim people and nations, DCeiver tells us about Howard Kaloogian, a GOP Congressional hopeful in California who posted a lovely image of downtown Baghdad and wagged his shaming finger at the U.S. media for painting a grim portrait of a region where peace still obtains. Of course, by "Baghdad," Kaloogian meant "Bakırköy," a suburban area of Istanbul located 1,000 miles northwest of Iraq. 'S where the airport is. Nice sea coast, giant nightclubs, huge Western shopping mall. Not so much with the GWOT.
Needless to say it was a courageous citizen journalist who fingered Kaloogian, deftly recognizing the Turkish script plastered all over the ads in the picture. (Note to the 'loogian: "edo" is a popular ice-cream franchise. You can't swing your fez in Istanbul without landing your tassle in their dondurma.) So bloggers strike again, and that may very well be the point to take away: in the wake of Ben Domenech, America's enemies are back to doing what they do best.
As you've read, I'm sure, in the New York Times:
The [Bush–Blair] memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.
If Feingold's censure isn't greeted by Congress like the circus come to town, I'm heading down to Capitol Hill and throwing rocks at anyone wearing a suit. You're all on notice.
Just read that—what kind of Soviet shit is that, who is this sputnik in the White House, where is our city on a hill?
To quote Instapundit, "Disturbing, if true." Lenny Campello comments on a case involving the suspension of high-school fine arts teacher Peter Panse, allegedly for recommending that his students take live nude figure–drawing classes in order to bolster their portfolios for college applications (according to Diana Cahn's account in the Times Herald-Record).
But according to a report Cahn filed several weeks later in the Times Herald-Record, Panse was suspended "on charges [that] he was recruiting his high school students to take his proposed nude figure-drawing class outside of school." Further complicating the story are revelations in the report that Panse was reprimanded in 1997 over 12 incidents in which he made "sexually imbued comments" to female students in his classes.
Taking these facts into consideration, as well as a recent psychological scar on the Catskills-area, New York school district—then-superintendent Robert Sigler was arrested and imprisoned in 2003 for molesting a minor [ed. 3/9]—it seems reasonable that the school board would aggressively monitor interactions between students and teachers.
Was it prudent to take disciplinary action against Panse, given the facts and context of the case? No transgression (or class, for that matter) took place, it appears from the reports; several students report having merely taken his advice to pursue outside classes and benefitted from them. But surely after the 2003 incident, all teacher-student interactions would be strictly codified by the school board; at the very least, parents would certainly expect that to be the case. By offering to conduct a high school class outside the purview of Middletown High School, Panse does not appear to have acted with sensitivity to the rules, the feelings of some of his students' parents, or his own marked record.
A January 17 editorial in the T H-R drives at a crucial distinction in the case:
[Panse] faces two disciplinary hearings, one for recruiting, soliciting or encouraging students to take his private lessons and another for doing so after he had been warned to avoid any comments that students could construe as . . . sexual.
Clearly, there's nothing sexual about a live nude figure–drawing class in the minds of adults. It is these adults on the campus who must instruct young students that the nude figure has artistic applications that are free of and distinct from the body's sexual connotations. Students do not instinctively know this.
Young people arrive to the classroom from different walks in life; it's only appropriate to consider the whole needs of the student body, and this decision-making process ought to be the joint effort of students, teachers, parents, and school administrators. Panse forgot that he is not just teaching nude figure drawing but working in concert with other adults to provide a learning environment that students will recognize as safe; by excluding other adults from the decision-making process (i.e., by appealing to students, not admistrators or parents, to start an extracurricular course), Panse opens himself to suspicion.
UPDATE: An online petition to reinstate Panse reads as follows:
This petition calls on the Middletown School District Board of Education to reverse the suspension of high school art teacher Pete Panse. It demands specifically the immediate reinstatement of Mr. Panse to his position as art teacher at Middletown High Scool, NY, and public acknowledgement from the Board of Education that the practice of teaching figure drawing including nude models by advanced art students does not constitute any kind of sexual impropriety, nor does recommending such practice to students.
To my eye, this oversimplifies the case against Panse.
UPDATE II: More at Unfogged, where LizardBreath and I are tentatively towing the administration line but others have taken up Panse's cause.
The heart is the lonely hunted.
UPDATE: From Nedra Pickler (remember her?) in the AP:
President Bush's spokesman quipped Tuesday that the burnt orange school colors of the University of Texas championship football team that was visiting the White House shouldn't be confused for hunter's safety wear.I've been e-mailed this a few times today, and no! I'm not there, I couldn't get into the party that started an hour ago, I won't get to hang out with the 'Horns except in spirit. But that White House: a laugh a minute!"The orange that they're wearing is not because they're concerned that the vice president may be there," joked White House press secretary Scott McClellan, following the lead of late-night television comedians. "That's why I'm wearing it."
"What if it's not really a picture of Mohammed," says me, "just a picture of a picture of Mohammed?"I wasted my day, didn't I?
"Metablasphemy!" says Giblets. "It is sacrilegious and pretentious!"
Okay, so the post below is more baby's bum than smooth. Ultimately, I think that the gist of the Danish editor's was: Are artists being censored—are artists censoring themselves—for fear of touching on religious sensitivities that largely fall outside Western culture (but to varying degrees affect it)? The same question Edward_ asked the other day, except that the editor went so far as to provide artists access to his paper to work it all out. That makes it a leading question vis-à-vis journalism, and a dangerous question once Saudi Arabia or Hamas gets ahold of it, but sure, it falls under the purview of art.
I think there are two comparisons that drive at why the Danes did a defensible thing, one easy and one more problematic. One: Christian doctrine absolutely prohibits the use of the Lord's name in vain, but this stricture is ignored regularly, daily even, by artists. Either Christians take their commitment to liberal democracy seriously or they don't take their commitment to this Commandment seriously or whatever, but Christians more or less tolerate constant exposure in the public square to all sorts of taking the Lord's name in vain. But if the Christian temperament or balance or what have you changed tomorrow and "goddamnit" was an unthinkably insensitive thing to say, even demonstrably inflammatory, you'd hardly want artists to stop saying it, would you? No, tenets of liberal democracy, etc.
More problematically, there are elements of Muslim practice that seem fundamentally irreconcilable with Western liberal Democratic values—how women fit into society, for example. Insofar as art is about anything more than image and form, etc., it's about problems, and that one is a pressing one for Christians in the West, Muslims in the Middle East, and secularists everywhere. (Also, women, if you want to count them.) The answer's bound to offend. What makes the Danish maneuver so stupid is its comparative irrelevance—the Muslim prohibition against idolatry and certain other depictions isn't new, isn't fractious, and isn't provocative. Maybe it's the right topic but the wrong question, or maybe it's rightwing nativist propaganda and I'm stupid. But if you want to go out on a limb, it ought to be a fruitful one.
Cousin to the Danish dustup that you might have read about here or there comes this item from the BBC:
A town in Belgium has banned an artwork of Saddam Hussein for fear that it will put off tourists and offend Muslims.Heh, indeed, whatever, sigh. (Courtesy of pal R™.) Warning: last stop for good humor; funny pics of Saddam. Okay, maybe just one more. Really, I'm done.The piece, called Saddam Hussein Shark, shows the handcuffed ex-Iraqi ruler suspended in liquid and wearing nothing more than underpants.
The mayor of Middelkerke, Michel Landuyt, said the work could "shock people", including Muslims.
He said he decided to ban Czech artist David Cerny's sculpture before the row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
The Saddam piece, which echoes British artist Damien Hirst's famous shark [link] suspended in formaldehyde, was first shown in Prague last September.
A few items might make the terms of this debate clearer. First off, following the September 30, 2005, publication of the cartoons in question, the responsible Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten issued an official apology, in which they disclaimed any "nativist" intent to marginialize Muslims and reaffirmed their commitment to liberal democratic values of free speech.
Why issue an apology on January 30, 2006, for an item published 4 months earlier? Clearly, because there was no grassroots violence before now. According to this Daily Kos item—which I think draws ultimately incorrect conclusions, so caveat emptor—Saudi Arabia developed this crisis:
. . . Saudi newspapers (which are all controlled by the state) began running up to 4 articles per day condemning the Danish cartoons. The Saudi government asked for a formal apology from Denmark. When that was not forthcoming, they began calling for world-wide protests. After two weeks of this, the Libyans decided to close their embassy in Denmark. Then there was an attack on the Danish embassy in Indonesia. And that was followed by attacks on the embassies in Syria and then Lebanon.This is precisely the mechanism by which conservative congressmen manufactured the outrage that culminated in the NEA theatre of the culture wars, the revealing history of which Wendy Steiner reports in The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism and about which I've written more than a few thousand words. Worse still, according to the editor-in-chief of Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, many if not most of the cartoons being circulated by the Saudi press were never published and would not be deemed publishable if submitted.
The content of the cartoons seems not to matter much in this debate, as David Velleman points out, since the American press won't reprint the cartoons for readers to investigate for themselves. (The exception being the Philly Inquirer, whose coverage has been fantastic. Naturally, the images can be seen online (click here), which I suppose obviates the need for newspapers to run that risk—but then newspapers are ceding the point, aren't they?)
But the content! and the context! are crucial. In Robert Mapplethorpe's obscenity trial, for example, an (expertless) jury was shown the relevant controversial works. These works were even presented outside the context of the other works in the show: elegant still-lifes and what have you. Figuring this was slam-dunk evidence, the prosecution showed these works and rested its case. Mapplethorpe's defense included a bachelor's degree's worth of art history experts, who convinced the jury of the merits of his photography.
I'm not looking for a principled defense of these doodles so much as I am not looking for another Johnny-come-lately expert on Muslim iconography to explain why Muslim outrage over images of Mohammed is hypocritical, citing some link whose ultimate source is michellemalkin.com. But too offensive to publish = a non-starter. Too bad to publish, on the other hand, almost universally applies with respect to very political art.
And WTF: Saudi Arabia?
I worked myself up into a minor fury yesterday over the fact that so many friends were skipping our regular Tuesday night happy hour in order to catch President Bush's umpteenth same-old SOTU. Apparently I really missed out: the President declared war on manimals. Chimeras, bitches!
As someone who for several years dealt with epilepsy and the medication (and side effects) attendant to that condition, I'm appalled to read that coverage under the new Medicare prescription drug dispensation restricts and excludes whole classes of antiepileptic drugs. Barbiturates, for example, are not covered at all, for seemingly arbitrary reasons—though I agree with one TPM reader that there's surely a Republican shibboleth at the root of that objection.
Perhaps some congressmen vaguely recalled "barbiturates" from the Just Say No! educational pamphlets that his children probably accepted as to-do lists for the weekend. Maybe, just as with the ink and the pork and the coveting the neighbor's ass, benzodiazepenes are namechecked in the Book of Leviticus; where there's legislation authored by the Republican leadership, there's fire—and brimstone. Or more insidiously, as the above-linked reader puts it, "maybe the competing drug classes are much more profitable for someone's campaign contributors (as both benzodiazepines and barbiturates are cheap and produced as generics, unlike their likely treatment alternatives)."
Whatever the reasoning and whatever your philosophical inclinations toward state health care, it must be acknowledged that there simply is no second-best alternative to some of these drugs. My experience was instructive. I experienced seizures belonging to a variety called tonic clonic, which sounds like a long-last Pavement album. After my first seizures, many of the antiepileptics I tried caused extremely severe side effects: in the worst cases, seizures, but also profuse nosebleeds and profound visual chromatic defects (dramatic "red-shifting" in everything I saw, as it were). Tonic-clonic seizures: not as fun as they sound. Tonic-clonic side effects: nearly as disappointing as the seizures.
My antiepileptic wasn't a barbiturate, but I was prescribed many before I found a medication with a profile of side effects I could live with. (I eventually weaned myself off antiepileptics and have lived fun and fancy free for two or three years now—although another seizure would mean that I'd have to return to the pills for good.)
But my profile did change over time, and it's conceivable that at some point I might have had to (and may still yet) need to explore other options or even take a cocktail of medications. Given that under the new dispensation, anticonvulsants old (mysoline) and new (lyrica)—along with whole categories of drugs (benzodiazepines, barbiturates)—are not covered by Medicare, appropriate prescriptions will only be an affordable option for those not well off if dual eligibility (state and federal aid) allows for the right intersection of drug coverages. Which is to say nothing about the process for determining the right intersection of drug coverages.
State Medicaid, federal Medicare, and temporary emergency relief, that is—of the likes declared by several states already in the wake of institutional confusion and exceptional incompetence seen in the rollout. The Citizen reports on just one of the many cases of the new January blues, in which an epileptic was greeted by the pharmacist with hundreds of dollars in copayments, no clear avenue for redressing her situation, and limited time to resolve the problem.
Again, the tragedy with specific respect to epilepsy is that there is no second-best alternative for many of the available drugs—but these are predictable problems that probably apply to a range of chronic conditions. I haven't followed the prescription drug benefit fallout as closely as your Ezra or your Lindsay; the most insightful thing I could say about the issue is that it's one helluva sedative. Feel free to take me to task for the angles I haven't appreciated here—I'm sure I'm just repeating the basic orthodox liberal points on the subject. But the complaints raised by the Epilepsy Foundation strike me as very obvious, the sort of broad, foundational considerations raised by the very prospect of revising state health care standards. How was Congress able to so deliberately fail to address these concerns?
It happens that I'm young, educated, not dependent on state aid, not infirm or unaware of events, and probably not even likely to have a seizure any time in the near future. But, of course, you don't write Medicare legislation with people like me in mind. Congress deliberately ignored and excluded those for whom the legislation matters most.
UPDATE: I forgot the scariest detail, which is what everyone wants to hear about, right? Skipping epilepsy medication not only exposes one to potential seizures, it can provoke a condition called status epilepticus: prolonged, clustered seizures that are not interrupted by periods of consciousness. High mortality rate and ominous as all hell. It's not untreatable, but one of the primary treatments is a procedure called rectal diazepam, which, if possible, involves an administration even less appealing than the name suggests. Status epilepticus, brrr.
Not innocent after all, says Upton Sinclair (by way of the LAT):
The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.America's first muckraker: still at it! But he held his tongue in Boston, citing among other worries a concern about the precedent the S&V case would set and the many legitimately unfair aspects of the trial—but also fear of retribution from his readership:Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.
Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.
"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. ". . . He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."
Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.Can't help but think of the Hitch, who revels in thorny ethical grey areas like a pig in mud, to the point at which his love for the counterintuitive stake clouds his judgment. But he really has risked his readership, and while I think history will judge him harshly for going down with the U.S.S. Ahmed Chalabi, it's better to be wrong than to be low."My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.
"Of course," he added, "the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims."
He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.
Labeled as "credible threats" of terrorism by the Pentagon: gay student groups who have demonstrated against the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In order to stop al Qaeda, the government spied on and infiltrated a protest (classified as "potentially violent") held by NYU Law's gay advocacy group and also a kiss-in held at the University of California-Santa Cruz. But don't ask the brass about what went down, cuz they're not tellin'!
That's nearly hilarious. Also, I'm weeping. Courtesy of Blah, Blah, Black Sheep in comments.
From the NYT:
One internal F.B.I. message, sent in October 2003, criticized the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Justice Department, which reviews and approves terrorist warrants, as regularly blocking requests from the F.B.I. to use a section of the antiterrorism law that gave the bureau broader authority to demand records from institutions like banks, Internet providers and libraries.Radical militant librarians!!! In our communities, OMG!!! Well, frankly, if the FBI can't take them, I'm not sure OIPR is going to have any better luck. Sounds like the RML have already won. († Joy Garnett)"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from OIPR's failure to let us use the tools given to us," read the e-mail message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official. "This should be an OIPR priority!!!" [emphasis added]
And from yesterday's WaPo:
FBI counterterrorism investigators are monitoring domestic U.S. advocacy groups engaged in antiwar, environmental, civil rights and other causes, the American Civil Liberties Union charged yesterday as it released new FBI records that it said detail the extent of the activity.The FBI now knows the precise location of every patchouli vendor on campus—and hardly coincidentally, there have been zero terrorist attacks since 9/11. The consequences for the nation's civil rights and grilled-cheese sandwich consumption may be grave indeed, but Americans must make sacrifices for the global war on terror—especially dirty lefties and "readers."[. . .]
The papers offer no proof of PETA's involvement in illegal activity. But more than 100 pages of heavily censored FBI files show the agency used secret informants and tracked the group's events for years, including an animal rights conference in Washington in July 2000, a community meeting at an Indiana college in spring 2003 and a planned August 2004 protest of a celebrity fur endorser.
[. . .]
John Lewis, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, told a Senate panel in May that environmental and animal rights militants posed the biggest terrorist threats in the United States, citing more than 150 pending investigations.
I've read in a couple places today that the big story behind the Bush administration's authorization of the use of NSA wiretaps to monitor the international communications of American citizens is that the New York Times has been sitting on the story for a year. That begs for an explanation . . . but the big story behind the secret authorization really is that the Bush administration has put aside the rule of law.
Also not the big story but really quite significant is the fact that, given a year to put together so much as a press release, the Bush administration did not have a pat answer ready in the wake of this story. Now, Bush's answer ("There is a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring") comes close to a reading of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that says that Bush didn't order subordinates to break the law. (Close, if you grant President Bush a command over the English language language that he notably lacks. The distinction between "detecting to prevent" and "monitoring" amounts to different flavors of administration Kool-Aid. But in form, at least, the President is saying that the law concerns a but he's doing b.)
Jacob Sollum links to an NRO piece that provides exactly the sort of explanation I would have expected: that FISA grants an exception to the prohibition against eavesdropping on Americans' phone calls if some bad shit is going down. Also senseless—is the NSA going to put out a wiretap when bad shit is obviously not going down?—but still an argument that the war on terror falls in line with other longtime American favorites like the separation of powers and U.S. Constitution.
[UPDATE: "[I]s the NSA going to put out a wiretap when bad shit is obviously not going down?" I asked; the FBI answers.]
But that's simply not what other Bush administration officials are saying, Kevin Drum outlines. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's answer really does amount to: We wanted to change the law to keep this domestic espionage program in the mix, but we got the impression that the assembled representatives of the United States' citizenry wouldn't go for it . . . so we usurped that power from the legislative and judicial branches.
Like so many things about the war on terror, it's not unreasonable for the government to want to listen in on conversations between citizens at home and potential agents abroad, and the laws should reflect those new powers enough American citizens are willing to grant them. But when the Bush administration forthrightly admits that they're not doing the following-the-laws song and dance any longer, but then lacks the courtesy to lie outrageously about their secret espionage programs, I wind up feeling like I must be wearing a stovepipe hat's worth of tinfoil. And worse still—sympathizing with proponents of small government!
But it's nice to have that Harriet Miers mystery sewn up, anyway. That call makes perfect sense now.
James Panero of New Criterion skewers the Whitney for the political art content in its upcoming biennial. A few things.
First, OK, he's right. Politically oriented art—the political art I've seen over the last few years, almost without exception—has been snide, sneering, didactic, transparent, self congratulatory, self satisfied, at times bathetic, more often punny, almost always formulaic. Political art has never really shaken the design roots of its cast and bears, if not a similar appearance to propaganda, at least the same byte-sized message format. Consider.*
But consider also how Panero is right. The substance of his complaint isn't with the impoverishment of political art but, naturally, with the politics itself. His complaint that the left does not make creative work like the right does—referring specifically to a 1986 Dartmouth University incident, sometimes called the "Shanty Wars," in which writers of the conservative Dartmouth Review vandalized a student "shanty" demonstration for divestment in South African companies. Panero doesn't contend that, say, sculptors or postmodernists are not as adept as the "guerilla theatre" artists (his term for the apartheiders, or anti-anti-apartheiders) at making insightful work, but that the left-slash-artworld, as if sitting en banc, is ruling against conservative artists.
So Panero calls out the art world's signature smugness but hoists himself by his own petard, I think, by playing the martyr. The whininess of the right about the representation of liberal values in the culture misses the point of why political art is bad.
(And is simply tough to stomach. Take for example the working title of New Critters Panero and Stefan Beck's upcoming publication: The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League's Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper. Groan. Only a title in jest—um, I think—but the whine seems heartfelt. (But in all honesty, congrats to the two of them on the project.))
So why does political art fall short of the times? Edward Winkleman says it's because artists don't consider opposing viewpoints—in effect, that they lack a nuanced view of the political reality. Sure, I bet that's true for the most egregious examples—the awful flag straightjacket Winkleman posts certianly confirms his point—but there are plenty-thoughtful artists for whom this explanation shouldn't apply.
The trouble is the times. Take the right's lysenkoism vis-à-vis evolution: a "debate" grips the nation despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of scientists operate on one side of it and one tiny flat-earth society makes up nearly the whole oppostion. Yet, somehow, it's the totality of factual support for evolution works against evolution. (Why, I don't know, but it has something to do with what building have you been in that didn't have a designer? Etc.)
Maybe you want to call it "postmodern corruption", or as Chris Cagle puts it, a "politics of second order" ("'the people' instead of the people, 'history' instead of history, 'protest' instead of protest"), but whatever it is that has recently thwarted social liberalism has also stymyied political art. There's an exasperation that comes from facts with no authority. The political art that I see doesn't seem to encapsulate the new political reality, but is instead about how right the art is. Democrats will tell you: That mentality's a handy way to lose elections.
If anything, the substance of political art has sharply declined. I was really feeling Panero while reading about Hans Haacke's exhibit at Paula Cooper. When I was in college and first discovered Haacke's information art, especially his push-polling exercises, something clicked for me. But a one-person gallery show is a retreat from the interventional role he staked out for the artist. High-fives and clinked wine glasses, in these sorry times?
* Hans Haacke, Star Gazing, 2004
UPDATE: Samantha Wolov responds.
More Americans will tell you that they have personally seen a ghost (22%) than will tell you that they approve of Vice President Dick Cheney (19%). Take from this information what you will.
"And I would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you darn Senators!"
Raphael, Pope Leo X With Two Cardinals, 1518. Oil on wood.
(times)
From left: Ursa, General Zod, Non
(equals)
From left: Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Harry Reid (D-NV), Dick Durbin (D-IL). [Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is not pictured.]
(Doff of the mitre to Pandagon for the image.)
Nothing surpising about grassroots bigotry in Texas, I'm sorry to say—not even this particularly egregious Prop 2 flyer that Pam Spaulding found and posted.
Typical homophobic invective (and typically poorly formatted—what's the deal with bigots and unruly formatting palettes?) about which nothing need be said that a slow, sorry shake of the head doesn't capture. But one detail will not stand:
I went to the recent Texas/Texas Tech game. 80,000 people were in the stands. Heterosexuals, with God's blessing, made every single person there!!The author's astounding logic notwithstanding, she or he is barking up the wrong tree in Austin. If there's any place more tolerant in Texas than an Austinite-packed Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium on game day, I haven't been there. Austinites are surely lining up in droves to vote against Prop 2. Take this schtick to, I don't know, Lubbock*—Austinites know that Virginia Tech is the only true threat to our families today.
* I'm not saying that Matt Weiner necessarily wrote and distributed this flyer
Much too busy to comment on anything, but Will Baude's post on Sam Alito is an intriguing look at the post-Roe landscape:
Anti-abortion states will have several possible legal tools. First, they could criminalize travelling across state lines with the purpose of aborting one's fetus. Second, they could exercise state long-arm jurisdiction to make it a crime under, say, Kansas law to abort a fetus conceived in Kansas, or belonging to a Kansas citizen, etc., no matter what state one is in.But in a civil state with anything short of digital passports, it's difficult to imagine how even the most crimson red states could enforce a ban on abortion demand. Minutemen on every state border?Both of these tactics face some constitutional challenges, but not necessarily insurmountable ones. State long-arm jurisdiction is restricted by the due process clause, and there appears to be some sort of federal constitutional right to travel, but nobody is quite sure what it means. Federal law makes it a crime to transport certain people across state lines for immoral purposes, and a state would be forbidden from enacting similar legislation only if it violates commerce-clause or related principles (since the right to travel presumably extends against the federal government just as much as the state).
Won't the more likely endgame involve abortion supply? Criminalizing, for once and for all, this dangerous, divisive, back-alley procedure being practiced by rogue doctors [so they will say]? Though I'm not sure what avenues overturning Roe will open legally in this regard that aren't being pursued now—I assume that some state laws will go back into effect and change the whole atmosphere surrounding women's health and privacy.
Not a pleasant to think about, our new Court.
Over at the deli, I saw that G. Gordon Liddy is providing color commentary on FOX News. G. Gordon Liddy! As if to signal that Scooter's taken his first steps toward his own comic book series.
So we're supposed to hear about ongoing criminal investigations at 2 p.m.? That's different. Time to run and grab a sandwich so I can actually savor the moment.
Full disclosure to Congress in 2004 about WMD intelligence? Bah, humbug!
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.What the hell is going on? Who's writing this stuff, Democratic Underground?
Almost—but definitely not quite—over the cute little "Fitzmas" angle. Also: It should be noted that Murray Waas bears a passing resemblance to the Dude.
On the first day of Fitzmas, my Preznit said to me
I withdraw my Supreme Court nominee.
The White House is restoring Davis-Bacon labor protections for Gulf Coast reconstruction projects. If anything ought to spur redevelopment in the area, it's putting money in the pockets of local workers enough to feed their families and restore their homes. Representative George Miller (D-CA) writes about how Congress made it happen in this TPMCafe post.
Representatives talking to constituents, laborers getting paid fair wages for dangerous and difficult work . . . it brings a tear to my eye.
The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.The New York Times:This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.
[. . .]
Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, nor for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.
I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.Laura Rozen:Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.
In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.We know that the Vice President's office was so deeply opposed to the CIA that it practically set up its own intelligence agency to sell the Iraq war to the people. It was not Joe Wilson's statement (in a New York Times op-ed) that Iraq did not acquire nuclear materiel from Niger that caused the Office of the VP to flip out; it was Nick Kristoff and Walter Pincus's reports that Wilson confided anonymously he had told the CIA that the Niger docs were forgeries that really irked the administration. It turns out that Kristoff and Pincus were wrong, likely because Wilson misrepresented his involvement with exposing the forgeries, but that's immaterial to the question of the administration's retaliation.Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.
Now, previously we might have understood the retaliation against Plame/Wilson to be a sign of the Veep's bizarre perspective about American intelligence: that Wilson would be discredited for the fact alone of his being linked to the CIA. But now we understand that the Niger dossier was known by the State Department to be fake before the President cited its findings in the 2003 SOTU Address. And what we're finding out from the Italian press is the degree to which the Pentagon, in 2002—just 1 year after the September 11 attacks, almost to the day—collaborated with Italian intelligence (SISMI) to push bogus Niger documents after the CIA wouldn't bite. The reason the administration pounced on Wilson in the first place? Something about those secret meetings in Rome would have been devastating to the White House Iraq Group, had that revelation become public knowledge in 2003.
One of those Pentagon officials who met with SISMI leaders in secret Rome meetings is Larry Franklin, who has been arrested and charged with acting as an Israeli spy. Stephen Hadley, another Pentagon figure present for the meetings, is currently the National Security Advisor. Stateside figures Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby are likely looking at perjury and obstruction of justice charges; Vice President Cheney may or may not be indicted. He may be labelled an unindicted co-conspirator, based on what reports are saying today.
Steve Clemons reports that indictment letters were received today, will be filed officially tomorrow, and will be acknowledged publicly on Thursday.
Mars, bitches.
Jury duty today! I do believe I detect a "guilty" conviction on the early October morning air, with autumnal undertones of corporal punishment. I assume they explain out alll the buying-off details when you arrive at the courthouse—nevertheless, I'm looking forward to hanging 'em high while waxing The Firm for millions of crooked bucks. All that and a $7 lunch stipend? Quite a little country we've got on our hands.
UPDATE: I kid, I kid. Obviously I'm going to do whatever the trial lawyer lobby asks me to. Let me tell you, jury duty doesn't disappoint. Ken Burns's Jazz is playing and I've got WiFi. I only get $4, though, which means that I'm subtracting $3 worth of mercy.
Frantically trying to finish things up here so I can skip out on a plane to Dallas tomorrow—and I know you're all hitting up the dedicated poliblogs, anyhow. I think it should be said that if all the Republicans go to jail, the Democrats have a much better shot in 2006/8. Prediction: By the time I'm in the air, everyone in America will know who Ronnie Earle is, as Republicans will have declared him Public Enemy #1.
Another never-aired satellite feed for Harry Shearer. That's a clip of the leader of the free world, a man with access to the world's largest nuclear cache, flicking off the camera like a 6th grader. I'm looking for your one-word response.
That's the preface, written by one "Consituent from New Mexico," to the Republican Study Committee's report (PDF) for "Operation Offset," the program through which the GOP is slashing spending in order to facilitate the reconstruction costs in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (and likely, as becomes more menacingly clear by the minute, Hurricane Rita). The list of targets for trimming include all the traditional GOP bêtes noires, including the arts, which are afforded special hostility:
Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment of the ArtsApproval or disapproval of government spending on art should be immaterial here: Gulf Coast arts institutions have been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. A major cultural capital was virtually destroyed—its restoration will require real spending on art sites, art institutions, and artists, no?
The NEA funds art programs and initiatives through grants to various entities. In 2001, America spent $27 billion on non-profit arts funding: $11.5 billion from the private sector; $14 billion in earned income (ticket sales, etc.); and $1.3 billion in combined federal, state, and local public support (of which $105 million was from the NEA (0.39% of total non-profit arts funding)). The funding could easily be funded by private donations. Savings: $1.8 billion over ten years ($678 million over five years)Eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities [sic]
The NEH funds humanities programs and initiatives through grants to various entities. As with the NEA, the general public benefits very little from NEA [sic], and it could easily be funded by private donations. Savings: $2 billion over ten years ($769 million over five years) [bold emphasis mine]
Why not mandate that federal dollars dog-eared for NEA and NEH be redirected toward Gulf Coast arts restoration projects for the next few years? If the idea is to rebuild New Orleans, this work must be done anyway, insofar as you want a N'awleans and not a Shreveport. If the idea is to rebuild New Orleans as a much better city, greater effort should be made to bring some equity to the quality of life of the artists who add so much value to the city. A federal priority to restore New Oreans must include spending on culture.
Does anyone doubt that by "the general public benefits very little" the RSC means "Piss Christ, Piss Christ, Piss Christ"? You can review recent NEA grants by three categories (excellence fellowships [1], infrastructure partnerships [2], and Challenge America grants [3]) by state, and I think you'd be hard pressed to say that Texans and Louisianans aren't benefitting from NEA projects in their respective states. Take a look: Texas (1, 2, 3); Louisiana (1, 2, 3). The irritating myth that the NEA funds decadence and deviance really must be stopped before conservatives muck up the very programs that their own constituents highly value but cannot realistically subsidize.
We can go line by line through those items: It won't be the NYC gallery crowd who suffers when Brownfield, TX, loses the Rialto Brownfield Bluegrass Festival. At the same time, the whole nation benefits from San Antonio's ArtPace artist residency program. I don't see so much fat to trim here, and I'm sure I'll be far less convinced once the damage from Katrina and Rita has been tallied.
MORE: I don't think that the art funding cuts represent the most egregious elements of the RSC's plan. The fact that these cuts 1) affect local institutions that will need more money, not no money, from government cultural funding organizations, 2) seemingly aim to eliminate the cultural arm of the federal government, and 3) were written with real venom strike me as deserving attention. The Medicare/Medicaid cuts—amounting to half a trillion dollars—is more or less an act of class warfare, and probably ought to come first on the list of things that make you go hmmm.
Frequent poli-blog commenter and Lindsay Beyerstein-affiliate Thad is doing a great job holding down the fort at Majikthise while Beyerstein's trooping through New Orleans. (This post is a good example.) Thad really ought to consider starting his own blog (or ask for his very own set of keys to Beyerstein's place?). Anyway, catch him while you can.
Howard Kurtz notes the bizarre blogmospheric activity that occurred after President Bush nominated that guy from Seventh Heaven to the Supreme Court:
The lightning-quick attacks came after 50 top liberal bloggers held a 45-minute conference call Tuesday night. . . . The conference call was arranged by BlogPAC, a political action committee that got some of its members on the phone with Sen. Ted Kennedy on the day that Sandra Day O'Connor announced she was leaving the court. The group has also held calls with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and the liberal organizations involved in the nomination battle, including MoveOn, Alliance for Justice, NARAL and People for the American Way.No kidding, conference calls? I'm sure that my roommate qualifies as one of the top 50 liberal bloggers and I don't seem to recall him muttering passwords into the phone that night. And shouldn't it be an A/V conference conducted via AIM or holograms or the Matrix?
Anyway, can we please swarm about/at something? Is there outrage to be mustered over this? The Getty, Boston MFA? The people must be made to feel the displeasure of the art blogging community.
RELATED: Todd Gibson notes the much-discussed, extraordinarily convenient timing of the SCOTUS nod in light of recent revelations in l'affaire Plame. (At the other blog I likened the intervention to el Matador staging a bullfight so that the rodeo clown can escape.) And clever bastard that he is, Gibson applies the Bush touch to the art world to distract us from the summer doldrums.
With the rumors mills abuzz with the pre-story that Chief Justice William Rehnquist will retire before lunch, the science of SCOTUS analysis has broadened to a full-bore multivariable calculus. Josh Marshall sees an advantage for Democrats: In short, insofar as the Democrats leveraged the staging of the nuclear filibuster battle for the SCOTUS, concurrent objectionable nominees is that much more evidence the court of public opinion that President Bush is trying to stack the Court with ideologues—should it come to that. The converse is that two distinct nomination battles are easier victories for the right than one nomination war.
Ezra Klein shows a different sort of guarded pessimism: Concurrent nominations will fall in such a way that Democrats can't win but won't lose too badly. Citing Loyola law prof Richard Hasen in The New Republic, Klein explains that President Bush owes socons too much to not nominate a socon Justice, which, under a single-nominee scenario, would set the stage for nuclear war in the Senate. Concurrent nominations, on the other hand, offer a better view of the complete Court—President Bush nominates a radically conservative Justice (thereby replacing Rehnquist) and a Gonzales-type moderate (thereby replacing SDO'C). The net Court transformation is minimal and Senate Democrats preserve the filibuster.
I'm thinking that with two seats up for the taking, the far right will become that much more insistent about nominating ideological candidates. Given concurrent nominations, I expect the center in the conversation to slide to the point that Gonzales becomes the unconscionable liberal activist's pick. Neither Klein nor Marshall mentions that upping the ante by a Justice will have the religious right revaluing its hand, too, but I don't think that will significantly affect the way the cards fall.
Now—it's been voiced elsewhere, so I'm not saying anything new—but I'm still unclear by what mechanism Gonzales became a lib-friendly nominee. Perhaps because he never ardently spurned precedent or penned comparisons between liberalism and slavery (the notorious examples of Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, respectively). But I do know that he drafted the torture memos, which not only served to excuse detainee abuse but also advocated the opinion that the Commander-in-Chief should circumnavigate rather than challenge inconvenient laws signed by . . . the Office of the President. Whether Gonzales is a loss for socons (and who knows?), he's a loss for jurisprudence.
(Crossposted at BTD.)
It certainly sounds as if the rooster is running the henhouse at American Apparel. CEO Dov Charney has been frank (even illustrative!) in interviews about his sexual relationships with his employee-slash-models—who are, in turn, the stars of another controversy regarding the company’s low-fi bedroom aesthetic.
So it’s reasonable that conscientious, crafty types like Jessica Gary and Valerie Soles are asking themselves whether they ought to continue patronizing AA, despite the company’s mostly progressive labor practices. (For some people the ramifications extend beyond the closet; a lot of independent designers buy their canvases wholesale from AA.) I may be oversimplifying the issue, but I don't see that Charney's behavior should prevent those who support AA's mission from buying the company's products. If, say, between now and Friday AA's marketshare were to increase one thousandfold, you'd have a ringing endorsement of AA's fair labor practices or its pared-down design or whatever—but not sexual harassment. No amount of market confirmation can change the fact that sexual harassment is illegal, and insofar as that's what's happening at AA (and women are willing to sue), then the correction is forthcoming.
I'm not oblivious to the creep factor—if the marketing vibe is a bit vintage Calvin Klein for your tastes, there's at least one alternative (which uses sex in an unremarkable way to push its nonremarkable clothing). What's incredible to me that Charney and AA chiefs are so oblivious to the fact that his behavior bothers the company's base. Even if there's nothing illegal about it, Charney's behavior wouldn't be tolerated by a board of shareholders for one minute. (Neither, of course, would a board stand for a seamstress making $13+ an hour.)
NB: I don't follow consumer politics very closely and only practice consumer politics in a superficial way—please, correct me where I'm wrong. I understand that NLRB has come down on AA over its resistance to an employee union, so my understanding of the company's priorities may be inaccurate.
I had some interesting items for the page today, but I need to make some time for much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
UPDATE: Jeralynn Merritt links to a list compiled by People for the American Way of significant cases in which Sandra Day O'Connor proved to be the swing vote:
Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) affirmed the right of state colleges and universities to use affirmative action in their admissions policies to increase educational opportunities for minorities and promote racial diversity on campus.Grutter and Stenberg are the cases that stick in conservative craws, and how long these will stand as precedent without SDO'C is difficult to say. Though it's a less inflammatory topic, our decades' long understanding of the Voting Rights Act is an area of the law that the Bush administration has signaled for significant reinterpretation, and I think the Morse (or Chishom) precedents would be ones this administration would seek to revise. (Also, women's rights.)Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation v. EPA (2004) said the Environmental Protection Agency could step in and take action to reduce air pollution under the Clean Air Act when a state conservation agency fails to act.
Rush Prudential HMO, Inc. v. Moran (2002) upheld state laws giving people the right to a second doctor’s opinion if their HMOs tried to deny them treatment.
Hunt v. Cromartie (2001) affirmed the right of state legislators to take race into account to secure minority voting rights in redistricting.
Tennessee v. Lane (2004) upheld the constitutionality of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and required that courtrooms be physically accessible to the disabled.
Hibbs v. Winn (2004) subjected discriminatory and unconstitutional state tax laws to review by the federal judiciary.
Zadvydas v. Davis (2001) told the government it could not indefinitely detain an immigrant who was under final order of removal even if no other country would accept that person.
Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (2001) affirmed that civil rights laws apply to associations regulating interscholastic sports.
Lee v. Weisman (1992) continued the tradition of government neutrality toward religion, finding that government-sponsored prayer is unacceptable at graduations and other public school events.
Brown v. Legal Foundation of Washington (2003) maintained a key source of funding for legal assistance for the poor.
Morse v. Republican Party of Virginia (1996) said key anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act apply to political conventions that choose party candidates.
Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (2001) upheld laws that limit political party expenditures that are coordinated with a candidate and seek to evade campaign contribution limits.
McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003) upheld most of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, including its ban on political parties’ use of unlimited soft money contributions.
Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) overturned a state ban on so-called partial birth abortion.
McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky (2005) upheld the principle of government neutrality towards religion and ruled unconstitutional Ten Commandments displays in several courthouses.
As Jesse Taylor puts it, these recently released Mexican stamps definitely look like some "racist-ass stamps." However—at the risk of sounding annoyingly counterintuitive—read in context, I don't quite see how these stamps could be anywhere near .
Now I think these stamps are tasteless, but that's because I am an American, and Americans have every reason to regret blackface comedy for what it represents, and so on. Memin Penguin, the character featured in the stamp, is unambiguously a "pickaninny" caricature, and buying this stamp would be a slap in the face of any African American. Blackface today operates as a cultural signifier for the entire Jim Crow era, and an inappropriate citation of blackface—say, when white fraternities throw blackface parties—is inexcusably offensive.
But it doesn't necessarily follow that Mexico should share this collective shame related to blackface comedy. When complex cultural symbols are imported from one society to another their component antecedents are often lost in translation. (Think of, say, the Christmas tree.) I don't know when blackface comedy arrived in Mexico or how the symbol operates there, honestly, but I imagine it has been stripped it of its original context, which wouldn't have had much meaning for a nation that has a very marginal and localized population of people of African descent and never experienced the tragedies of African American history.
Is there some more basic level at which blackface, with its crude stereotypical lampoon, offends? Again, clearly—to me there is. Mexican humor, however, is far more forgiving of stereotypes. From an article filed after Vincente Fox generated a public outcry with his comments on race in America:
While Mexico has a few, isolated black communities, the population is dominated by descendants of the country’s Spanish colonizers and its native Indians. Comments that would generally be considered openly racist in the United States generate little attention here.While I'm no more comfortable with those examples than I am with the stamps, they demonstrate, at least to me, that . . . well, that I clearly don't appreciate Mexico's sensibilities about race. I would certainly be curious to know how it is that Memin Penguin came to be so beloved, but I'm not convinced that it's because the nation of Mexico hates black people, and I also don't see the rationale that says that Mexico ought to know better.One afternoon television program regularly features a comedian in blackface chasing actresses in skimpy outfits, while an advertisement for a small, chocolate pastry called the negrito — the little black man — shows a white boy sprouting an afro as he eats the sweet. Many people hand out nicknames based on skin color.
You'll want to read Julian Sanchez's clever taxonomy of smoking ban supporters: the "High-Banners" (antismoking fundamentalists), the Grassroots (those who assertively prefer nonsmoking establishments), and the Friends of the Worker (among whom I suppose I'm forced to classify myself). But among the bon mots, Sanchez buries this dud:
It's not obvious why choosing to accept whatever risk is entailed in being around second-hand smoke is inherently different from accepting any other unattractive feature of a job—late hours, frequent travel, the physical risks of working in jobs like construction, emotional and mental stress, or even simple tedium.Sanchez takes up the task of hunting out the canards among the smoking ban supporters' argument but can't resist employing one himself. Sure, if the drycleaning bills are the worst inconvenience to a job that exposes you to a lot of secondhand smoke, the Friends of the Worker come off looking very stupid indeed. Stink is a reasonably sufferable occupational hazard, especially when offset by the perks of entertainment employment. But we know better: worse than leaving work in smelly clothes is the full shift spent working in the presence of a carcinogenic environmental constant.
Now, I'll admit: Nonsmoking bartenders haven't exactly been beating down a path to my door asking me to pledge solidarity to their cause. But neither are they hypothetical, and I'm sympathetic to that minority of nonsmoking workers, few though they may be, who complain that their jobs require them to endure exposure to an entirely preventable environmental carcinogen. Smoking ban supporters do better by arguing that the market provides sufficiently for this minority. The ban opponents lose points (with me, for whatever that's worth) by acting dodgy with the science. (Speaking of specious, Smokefree DC, an organization that supports the smoking ban, claims (oddly enough) that there are hundreds of smokefree bars and restaurants in the area—which would seem to strongly contradict their argument that entertainment staff aren't able to choose smokefree employers. Yet they provide a list that contains extremely few actual bars, nearly a dozen bakeries, and, audaciously, Max's Best—an adorable ice cream parlor.)
Nevertheless, Sanchez's exercise looks like fun and begs for reciprocation. My not off-the-cuff whatsoever empirical research of the ways of smoking ban opponents has uncovered three phyla:
(I single out Sanchez here but I wouldn't necessarily call him an Ostrich. I admire all the Ban the Ban bloggers, and though I think they're cavalier with the science at times, others who have argued the case in town have pretty brutally misrepresented the facts.)
An image of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ I posted a while back has been linked by a few bloggers who put Serrano's artwork in the same ballpark as recent revelations about U.S. military abuse of the Qu'ran. The left, the argument goes, is hypocritical for expressing outrage that American troops would urinate on the Qu'ran but not over Serrano's 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. Glenn Reynolds, who was never quite so motivated about the photodocumentation of torture at the Abu Ghraib facility, is spearheading the charge, naturally enough. (Inspired, I suppose, by the Monolithic Left's recent nationwide Serrano appreciation marches.)
So Jim Henley steps up for art's defense by arguing that Piss Christ should not, in fact, be read as blasphemous, therefore there's no case. That's a weak counter to the argument at hand, though. Henley's take acknowledges equal footing between two blasphemy cases but then acquits Serrano on the charge—yet whether the piece expresses some beef with Christianity misses the point. The fact that, ultimately, Piss Christ is subject to interpretation—that it has a virtual significance qua photograph distinct from the significance of the depicted action—distinguishes it from unmediated acts of violation committed against the Qu'ran. Aesthetically, we're talking about apples and oranges . . . but that's very much beside the point.
Another angle offers that, according to some orthodox, urinating on a crucifix is a lesser offense than urinating an a Qu'ran. Huh. Well, I think we could possibly stray further afield by analyzing the chemical urine content of the respective incidents, but the comparative theology misses the much more relevant elementary American principle: my right to desecrate a religious artifact is protected alongside my right to adore it; my right to desecrate your religious artifact and force you to participate in its desecration is not. Terrorizing and humiliating prisoners of war by violating their religious sensibilities is not exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. (But precisely what the framers of the Geneva Conventions anticipated.) And these violations the military perpetrates in all our names. It's entirely inappropriate to put Serrano and Guantanamo on the same page.
That revelations of these crimes are being answered by a pervasive, spittle-fueled meme about a photograph taken nearly 20 years ago—one which exemplifies the breadth and depth of American freedoms as much as the detainee violations epitomize the inverse—is perhaps typical misdirection from Bush administration apologists. But it's still stunning: the gall, and so casual.
I'm hoping that you read the letter on the U.K. elections that guest blogger JL commissioned from Bunny Smedley the first time it appeared, but if you missed it, take a look. This sentiment in particular struck a chord:
I don’t believe that there is any mileage in the Conservatives trying to pretend they are just like Labour when it comes to such issues. If nothing else, surely Labour are better at being Labour than the Tories ever could be, whereas the Tories might possibly have some success at being Tory, if they could ever just remember what that was like?Sound familiar? How about this:
So it is that the present-day Conservative line on the war is . . . akin to conciliar debate amongst the 5th century fathers of the Church in the richness of its apparent paradoxes: for although, according to Mr Howard, it is terrible that the Prime Minister lied about the reasons for going to war, Mr Howard himself voted for the war, and indeed still thinks the decision to go to war was correct. And somehow, as a rallying-cry, I don’t think that’s going to send the nation galloping off towards the polling-stations, desperate to spill their ink and cast their votes in the Conservative, rather than fringe party, interest.OK, well, that part about debate in the Church notwithstanding—"Adam & Eve, Not Adam & Steve" is about as advanced as topical, public ecclesiastical debate seems to get this side of the pond—I know how that tune goes. The Democrats send the Tories their condolences; that feeling actually gets worse after the election.
UPDATE: MT seems to have chewed up the paragraph related to the post's title, but it had to do with Tory castigation of Prime Minister Blair for hewing to closely to President Bush's agenda. Key point: This line of criticism always makes me laugh—there are so many leaders in the world vying to be President Bush's lapdog.
I'd accept Tom Davis's (R-VA) D.C. Fairness in Representation Act of 2005 if it granted the District one voting House Representative and reduced Utah's entire congressional delegation to a single House Representative. Otherwise I see no principled justification for giving Utah citizens greater representation than they are entitled to in order for District citizens to receive less representation than they deserve. Parity isn't at principle here, fairness is.
While the history that landed District citizens in the state they find themselves in—stateless by constitutional design but disfranchised by congressional machinations—what is relatively clear is that the applicable answers to the question of whether District should be refranchised are "Yes, the District should" or "No, the District should not" and that Utah does not enter into the equation at any point whatsoever.
Probably moderate heads will prevail among franchise supporters on the hypothesis that it would be asinine for Congress to cede the District a House Representative but refuse a Senator—a slippery slope to full citizenship. That underemphasizes the outrageous asininity of giving Utah so much as an extra day of sunshine in exchange for rights that are owed tax-paying, conscription-fulfilling citizens.
I also definitely understand that many District citizens are facing problems that need immediate solutions, but this fact also discourages allowing the debate to settle to a state of comfort in having less than full rights. A token acknowledgment of the disparity between Districters and American citizens will only make it more difficult to realize statehood or some situation in which District citizens determine for themselves, elect a congressional delegation, and are not answerable to other states.
Complacency affects more than our likelihood of arriving at congressional representation. The District needs representatives and public figures who will take the fight against outside interference to the public. Consider the most recent butthead:
That announcement [that gay couples could file District taxes jointly] kicked up warnings from Congress about the financial consequences for the city if it used the tax code to grant rights to same-sex couples.That's a Kansas senator threatening to send the District to bed with no supper if it won't design local tax policy to his fitting. Fuck yourself, Senator Brownback. And what the hell is the matter with Kansas that they don't see through this? I assume the state has real problems that could be dealt with. His behavior should provoke as much outrage in Topeka as it has here.Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), head of an appropriations subcommittee that has oversight of the city's budget, issued a warning to Mayor Anthony A. Williams and [District chief financial officer Natwar M.] Gandhi at a recent committee hearing.
"I was hopeful we weren't going to be confronting this issue. But it appears there will need to be a review and a discussion," Brownback said, prompting speculation that he intended to scrutinize Washington's budget should the tax office accept the joint filing.
No crumbs, thanks, we'll have the cookie. If only the District had a mayor with a public sensibility like Gavin Newsome, we could capture and reframe the debate in terms of justice. You don't live in the District long before you hear a Marylander or Virginian explain that the District could make its case more palatable if it showed better management skills, a theme manifest with racist undertones that has endured since 1874, when Congress revoked home rule (for fear of the black vote during Reconstruction, though the move was dressed up as a reprimand for the District's financial difficulties). (For an example of the mismanagement line of apology, see comments here.) It seems to me that a District government looking to respond to Brownback et al. should tell the Capitol to collect and dispose of its own trash, police its own grounds, and prevent its own fires. I'd run to the Hill to see Burberry-clad Washingtoniennes staffing a garbage truck, but I think the image would be as short-lived as it would be delightful.
The larger point being: Reject the D.C. Fairness in Representation Act of 2005. Get the cookie. Support instead the untiring efforts of Delegate Eleanor Holmes-Norton in the form of the No Taxation Without Representation Act of 2005, concurrent House and Senate legislation which would restore District citizens' full represenation. The act has garnered 27 co-sponsors in the House and 12 co-sponsors in the Senate but ought to have kitchen-table recognition throughout the nation.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
Political posts don't happen often at Modern Kicks, and so I haven't brought any to Grammar.police. I am very happy, however, to offer Bunny Smedley's 'Letter from London' on the upcoming British elections. Readers of Modern Kicks may recognize Dr. Smedley's name, as I am honored that she occasionally posts comments there. But she has many accomplishments to her name. A co-founder of now-dormant Electric Review, Bunny now writes art criticism for the Social Affairs Unit, a broadly right-of-center British think-tank with an emphasis on cultural affairs.
I realize that many readers of MK and Grammar.police do not adhere to viewpoints that, like Bunny's, may be generally described as High Tory. But it's always important to hear from other perspectives and in this case, doing so gains one a masterful view of Britian on the verge of an election. It may as well be instructive for American readers to consider a foreign example of how an opposition party (presumably) loses a contest to a relatively unpopular incumbent. Bunny's remarks here are offered as very much her own observations and not those of the SAU; as an admirer of her writing, I am very pleased to bring them to you. The SAU has also been running posts by an "Anonymous Commentator" on the imminent elections. For those interested in reading more detailed remarks on current British politics from an idiosyncratic viewpoint, do take a look.
Bunny Smedley holds a doctorate in history from Cambridge University. She lives in London with her husband and baby son.
‘Dull’, ‘predictable’, ‘ugly’, ‘a bit pointless’ …. no, the general election that takes place here on Thursday doesn’t really require much in the way of specialist language. Even an art writer can easily find the words to sum up this tiresome, pedestrian, please-God-can’t-it-just-be-over-now affair.
Part of the problem, of course, is the slight unreality of the whole enterprise, the phoney-war aspect of it all, since the generously-proportioned New Labour victory that will take place on 5 May is just a prelude to the really interesting conflicts. When, for instance, will chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown and his legions manage to wrest power away from prime minister Tony Blair, and how much blood will be left on the tiled floors of Westminster? Once the sheer magnitude of the Conservative Party’s electoral collapse sinks in and the ritual defenestration of party leader Michael Howard has taken place, who will win the inevitably quite nasty fight to succeed him? Presumably, if against all early expectations, Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy will be able to enjoy a period of security based on the ten or twenty seats that his party will have hoovered up, so there won’t be anything very exciting to watch there. North of the border, on the other hand, the Scottish Nationalist Party may want to reflect on missed opportunities. Over the water in Northern Ireland the historically formidable Ulster Unionist Party may find itself with only one MP, as party leader David Trimble and others lose seats to the Rev. Ian Paisley’s reinvigorated Democratic Unionist Party. Or to put it another way, while Thursday won’t, in itself, do anything very exciting to the political landscape of the United Kingdom, it’s a necessary, scene-setting first act in a drama that may well heat up considerably over the summer.
Yet at the same time, there’s a slightly strange mood in the air. For one thing, I can’t remember an election so completely negative in character. And by ‘negative’, I don’t mean purely in terms of the campaigning strategy of the protagonists, although quite possibly that, too, is true. Rather, I mean ‘negative’ in terms of the motivations of the electorate. Let’s get anecdotal: I know life-long Labour supporters who are voting Lib Dem to teach Tony Blair a lesson about being too arrogant; quite a few Tories I know are voting for the UK Independence Party to teach Michael Howard a lesson about having led one of the most shambolic and ineffectual campaigns in recent history; most of my ‘normal’ (i.e. apolitical) friends are exploring the wilder fringes of the ballot-papers, with recourse to the Green Party or the Save Our Local Something-or-other Party, to teach the mainstream parties a lesson about being so unappealing. And then, lurking somewhere out of sight, there are the legions who’ll simply stay home on Thursday, feeling too negative about the whole political process to do anything else. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met who claim to be voting out of positive enthusiasm for a particular party or individual — and since all of those are either actual candidates or party employees, I’m not sure I believe them anyway.
The Labour Party — or New Labour, as it calls itself, the ‘washes whiter and brighter’ rhetoric of which rebranding exercise probably tells you all you need to know about its recent history — has been in power here since 1997. Tony Blair’s period of leadership has seen the final stages of Labour’s transformation from a self-consciously socialist party to something apparently much more liberal (in the British sense) and less scary. Even the party’s many and various detractors can’t really deny that the past three parliaments have seen the sort of economic stability that reassures businesses and individuals alike. Meanwhile the Tories — although the party now rejects that label, an abnegation of centuries of history that is, again, almost aching with symbolic significance — have seen their epochal success under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher vanish away into a slurry of self-doubt and self-loathing. Hence recent attempts to recoup their position by borrowing New Labour’s policies, rather as New Labour borrowed from the Conservatives in the 1990s. And few people really know much about what the Liberals stand for, which is perhaps just as well. The result? An election where the field of political contention is both narrow and featureless. The parties can argue about who’ll do the best job trying to sort out the demoralised and defective spheres of state-funded education, the National Health Service and so forth. In terms of their broader attitudes towards the relationship between the state and the private sector, however, there’s not much to choose between them, with the Conservatives promising to match Labour’s spending targets, and with Labour’s tax pledges pretty much identical to their Conservative equivalents.
All of which is pretty dull, isn’t it? That, I suppose, is why it has also been a rather personality-led campaign. And by ‘personality’, I mean only one personality — that of the present prime minister. Did Tony Blair lie to parliament about the reasons for going to war in Iraq? Has he lied about other policy commitments? Is the electorate — Labour voters in particular — well, just a bit sick of him after so many years, just as they became a bit sick of Mrs Thatcher after her own three glorious parliaments?
This, anyway — boredom with Mr Blair and his increasingly presidential style and tone, in the face of what appears to be a reasonable degree of policy success — has to be the best hope for the other main parties, at least when it comes to chipping away at the Labour vote. (Getting out their own vote is another problem, especially where the Tories are concerned.) The Tories have gone so far as to accuse the Prime Minister of lying over Iraq. From an American point of view, accusing the nation’s political leader of lying may not sound very remarkable, but in Britain it’s still sufficiently unusual to attract attention. What Tory polling failed to work out until the damage had been done, however, was the sort of attention it attracted. For while Mr Blair’s record in office suggests he has no more of a veracity-fetish than anyone else involved in his dubious line of work, at the same time, the spectacle of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in effect pointing at the Prime Minister and shouting ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ has decreased Mr Howard’s own ratings, both in terms of his popularity and his perceived trustworthiness, while boosting the Prime Minister’s ratings. Remarkable, isn’t it? But then that’s just another miscalculation in a remarkably awful Tory campaign.
First, they came for the gypsies. How on earth Tory high command should have got it into their collective heads that land-hungry gypsies and travelling folk pose a clear and present threat to contemporary Britain is perhaps best left to certified psychopathologists. But then came a strident emphasis on what is politely called ‘immigration and asylum issues’, but what turns out to look very much like deep-seated unease at the fact that so much of Britain, especially our urban areas, is increasingly diverse in ethnic, religious and linguistic terms. A certain sort of Tory, sufficiently in touch with the real world to see how bad this case sounds, claims these policies aren’t racist, that they are simply about protecting our borders and our own national security. That sort of Tory points, trying his damnedest not to look tokenistic, to the number of brown faces and foreign-sounding names in the Tory candidates’ list. All of which is convincing, if you’re the sort of person who believes that immigrants and their children can’t be just as racist as native-born Britons, or that the huge emphasis on this whole issue isn’t cheap pandering to the send-them-back vote.
There’s not space here to get into discussing the rights and wrongs of immigration. As a life-long Tory, I am personally in favour of more or less free migration, which admittedly puts me in a minority not only within my party, but every other party in this country as well. Suffice to say, whatever advantage the Conservatives may have picked up from their rabble-rousing on this issue comes less from those seriously concerned with economic and social issues, and more from those who just basically don’t want more foreign people coming here. Mr Howard, for what it’s worth, is the son of a Romanian Jew who came to Britain as an economic migrant in 1937. As I said earlier, though, this is a remarkable election, isn’t it? It would be wrong to say that most Conservatives are racists or xenophobes, but at the same time, it would also be wrong to say that the current Conservative preoccupation with immigration is anything other than irresponsible, repugnant and short-sighted. Having campaigned for the party for decades now, this year I won’t be voting for them, simply on the basis of disgust at the direction the 2005 campaign has taken. Actually, I doubt I’ll be voting for anyone at all.
Still, having outed myself as a sort of once-and-future Conservative in that last paragraph, it’s probably worth sketching out an alternative direction in which the party might have taken its campaign. There were, first and foremost, doubtless some easy hits to be scored by making strong promises to cut tax, cut government spending and carve away at the enormous superstructure of government regulation. There was also something to be gained, as well as something to be lost, by articulating a strong line against further integration into the structures of the European Union. (Although UKIP have run a relatively low-key campaign this time, notable mostly for a party election broadcast featuring a huge green octopus devouring the Palace of Westminster which was a at some level the visual high-point of the present conflict, Conservatives forget at their peril how well UKIP did in the most recent round of European and local government elections.) But then, I don’t believe that there is any mileage in the Conservatives trying to pretend they are just like Labour when it comes to such issues. If nothing else, surely Labour are better at being Labour than the Tories ever could be, whereas the Tories might possibly have some success at being Tory, if they could ever just remember what that was like?
Secondly, any emphasis on the Iraq War was doomed from the start. The strangely cheery anti-war protests of last year notwithstanding, Iraq doesn’t really send pulses racing here. Although, sadly, Britain is still losing men there, the casualty rate is fairly low and intermittent — a world away from the genuinely terrible losses being suffered by US troops, and hence far fainter a presence on the domestic radar. But most of all, the war was never going to work as a partisan issue from the Tory point of view. For while the Liberal Democrats were always against military action, the Conservative message, in the run-up to war, was basically ‘more, harder, faster’. So it is that the present-day Conservative line on the war is, as my colleague, the oddly-labelled yet admirably sharp-eyed Anonymous Commentator at the Social Affairs Unit blog put it, akin to conciliar debate amongst the 5th century fathers of the Church in the richness of its apparent paradoxes: for although, according to Mr Howard, it is terrible that the Prime Minister lied about the reasons for going to war, Mr Howard himself voted for the war, and indeed still thinks the decision to go to war was correct. And somehow, as a rallying-cry, I don’t think that’s going to send the nation galloping off towards the polling-stations, desperate to spill their ink and cast their votes in the Conservative, rather than fringe party, interest.
And yet it’s not as if there isn’t a bit of passion about, or as if the Tories might not, in some parallel universe, to have seized electoral advantage from it. For while in many ways New Labour looks, as I mentioned earlier, like a mainstream sort of liberal-type party, there are moments when its history and instincts catch up with it, with results that are anything but liberal in anyone’s language. The urge to ‘modernise’ — ‘wreck’ might be another way to put it — traditional institutions and practices is still strong. Thus it was that the office of the Lord Chancellor, having existed for over a thousand years, was abolished, for little other reason than to give the executive branch of government more control over the judiciary. Similarly, the House of Lords was stripped of its age-old hereditary element — something which, if you’re into utilitarian arguments, probably gave more normal, non-political types a say in government than any other structure could have done — and will replace it with a hand-picked set of political cronies, slavishly compliant to the executive. The right to trial by jury — again, dating back to Magna Carta — is under threat, while the concept of habeas corpus does not seem to have survived the so-called anti-terror legislation. Labour are also in the midst of introducing a compulsory ID card scheme, the justifications for which change almost with the hour. And one could continue this discouraging list at some length, but the general point is clear enough.
Hunting with dogs was also abolished during the course of the last parliament. Whatever one feels about the rights or wrongs about hunting — and no one who knows much about large-scale commercial abattoirs and what goes on there is likely to speak up very loudly about the ‘cruelty’ of hunting — this, too, was an ancient activity in these islands, very tied up with issues of liberty, which is now no more. There was no massive pressure to ban hunting with dogs, and much pressure to allow at least a more highly-regulated version of it to survive. In the end, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the reasons for the ban came less from animal welfare concerns than from the twin misconceptions that hunting was simply a rich man’s pastime, and that what the rich do inevitably hurts the poor. In fact, however, it turns out, amazingly enough, that hunting contributed a lot to the economies of many rural communities, hard-hit in recent years by various livestock diseases. And although the central London bias to the media here makes it easy to miss, many people in the countryside, rich and poor and in between, are ferociously angry at Labour — just as many of Britain’s immigrant population and their recent descendants feel that Labour’s anti-terror laws amount to licensed persecution of ethnic minority groups.
There was, then, a missed opportunity to tackle Labour on exactly the territory where High Tory ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ respect for tradition dovetails with the laissez faire suspicion of authoritarian government that has also sometimes been an instinct of the Conservative Party. By building a campaign round the image of an arrogant, over-powerful, intrusive Labour government — contrasted with a Tory party promising less state intervention and a principled return to the rights and liberties of the very recent past — the Conservatives might properly have attracted to themselves both a traditional Conservative following (many of whom will simply fail to vote this year) and a variegated protest vote against Labour’s crimes of hubris. Sure, some of the protest votes would have gone to other parties — the Liberals, the Greens, UKIP, talk-show host Robert Kilroy-Silk’s Veritas, George Galloway’s Respect, what have you — but the strong argument could have been made that for all the Conservative Party’s faults, out of all these parties, only the Conservatives had any hope of forming a government. To do so, however, would have required a Conservative leader who respected the sensibilities of his own party’s grassroots membership, who preferred principle over short-term expediency, and who had both the self-confidence and the charisma to make the Conservatives a plausible party of government again, rather than the sad, self-doubting, desperate, panicky lot they presently appear. But this isn’t what happened, and by Friday morning the fruits of Mr Howard’s meanness of vision will be all too clear. Populism that gains votes is bad enough, but populism that is, well, unpopular is simply unforgivable. In short, we’ll all be glad when this election is over, putting the present Tory leadership out of its misery and leaving it a chance to engage in the one great tradition it still retains: savage yet sophisticated internecine warfare.
Still, since I’m really an art writer, rather than a political commentator, I’ll close by leaving you with the three images that sum up this wretched election campaign.
For Charles Kennedy, the memorable moment came during an early-morning press conference when he was asked an almost inexpressibly dreary question about his party’s tax policy. The bags under Mr Kennedy’s eyes were impressive. Stupefied and disoriented, he struggled to put together an answer. He failed. Nothing surprising in that, UK political observers might suggest: Mr Kennedy is, after all, a famously convivial soul, grand company at the bar in the wee small hours of the morning yet not necessarily at his best at 7.30 am press events. Yet in this case, Mr Kennedy had an excuse — his wife had recently given birth to the couple’s first child. And indeed, it is somehow emblematic of this campaign and the general of interest in policy that the Liberal Democrat leader’s most recent attack of early morning inarticulacy left him looking ‘human’ and ‘approachable’, actually boosted the party’s fortunes as well as Mr Kennedy’s own.
Michael Howard’s moment, by contrast, wasn’t a mistake — it was a purpose-build photo opportunity. The Tory leader went on a walkabout round a London hospital in an attempt to highlight the party's message on the so-called hospital superbug, MRSA. As signature issues go, wiping out MRSA isn't a very interesting one — after all, it's hardly as if any party is really going to come out in favour of more filth and infectious disease, is it? — but as his wife lost a family member to MRSA some years ago, Mr Howard has sought to make hospital hygiene — encouraging hospital staff to clean their hands between handling patients and that sort of thing — a minor focus of the campaign. (Well, at least it beats blaming the gypsies, I guess.) Anyway, in his haste to meet and greet and probably appall as many patients as possible, Mr Howard forgot to, well, wash his hands between patients. And since Mr Howard's campaign has criticised Mr Blair for a tendency to say one thing and do another, this venial sin of omission looked not — as it might have done in Mr Kennedy’s case — ‘human’ or ‘approachable’, but rather ‘incompetent’ and ‘irresponsible’. Still, Mr Howard continues to grin in that glib, complacent, profoundly alienating way of his. And that, at least, is an impressive performance, because he must realise by now what’s coming to him after Thursday’s defeat, if not how richly he, and those around him, deserve it.
