This is your future, if you don’t get your ass in gear, so-called “libertarians.” This is the toilet your life will go down.
Bright blue tarps, painted with glaring yellow letters, are going up on dozens of rooftops in Brooklyn, under the flight paths into busy New York airports. Thousands of delegates and convention guests peering down at the city might see messages like “No more years” and “Re-defeat Bush.”Certainly this is a smarter piece of political communication than the sort of “direct action” examined by Rick Perlstein in this piece in the Voice:
The War Resisters League, like A31.org, cites a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that includes these words, offered as if a taunt: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”As ever, it’s the difference between wanting to actually accomplish change, and merely looking for opportunities to enact your beliefs.It would have taken all of King’s powers of Christian love, I think, not to laugh in these people’s faces. King would never ever simply say, “We need to do what our conscience tells us is important to do,” and somehow leave it at that. King planned his insurgencies with the strategic care of a military general, and with the characteristic obsessions of a top-drawer publicist: no risk of arrest, of violence—even when arrest or violence was welcomed, embraced for its communicative power—was ever left to chance. (Today’s protesters revel in their embrace of improvisation, as if it were a good in itself.) And he never left the field of battle satisfied with mere moral victory, that his side had demonstrated more righteousness than the other. He always had a concrete political goal, that concrete goal but a step toward his continually evolving transcendent goals. […]
[Protest organizer] Rae Valentine is even right, in a cosmic sense, when she says that “people understand that the so-called chaos of streets being shut down by protesters or even a window being broken is nothing compared to the day-to-day chaos and destruction of people being able to afford housing, or health care. That’s where the real violence—in the system—lies.”
But she is not right in the sense that matters: the political sense. “I think people understand,” she says. Linger on that formulation. It is only inane arrogance that gives someone the confidence to pronounce that, magically, “people will understand.” They might not understand at all. Instead, what they might understand is: “Bush is better than anarchy in the streets.” It ain’t fair. But if it all goes down as unplanned, there’ll be a whole lot more unfairness coming down the pike in the next four years.
Essentially, she is an all or nothing pessimist who wants so much from the political sphere that she is perpetually disappointed, whereas I am probably more cynical in my basic assumptions and so vastly more cheered by any small sign of progress.And much else, including the Victorian Royal Navy’s Anti-Slavery Patrol, Beethoven, and food.You could call it a Rousseau/Voltaire split, because I am much more interested in Voltaire’s occasional moments of real political courage and occasional successes in humiliating the Church over its brutal repression of atheists and Protestants than Rousseau’s fantasies of an ideal state. And I accept that this means putting up with Voltaire’s long attempt to fit in with things as they were, and his weird relationship with Frederick the Great, and his long boring poems and perfectly Aristotelian plays, for the few great good things he did. And ‘Candide’.
Whereas she would disapprove of both of them as Dead White Males, but actually be doing so entirely in the spirit of Rousseau.
She is horrified at the human race’s tendency to commit genocide and the way we have got better at it; I am minimally cheered by the fact that we have actually started talking about it and thinking of it as a bad thing for which people ought to be punished. The Aztecs used to manage to sacrifice ten thousand people over a weekend, which is pretty efficient if you are using stone knives and taking the time to tear each heart out or flay each corpse. We invented nothing.
(Chris Bertram may take this excerpt as his cue to explain how we’re missing important aspects of Rousseau. He’s very likely right.)
Speaking of Aztec cannibalism, as we generally are, we appear to have been seeded with yet another round of GMail invites. Since everyone we know who wants GMail now has an account, we figure it’s time to start giving them away first come, first served, like coins being scattered to the crowd by some chariot-mounted proconsul of antiquity, or a god of war, death, and madness. Bow down before Giblets, bow down NOWWWWW…er, sorry, conceit leakage. Rather, share your thoughtful and well-formed entreaties in the comments to this post.
Today I met up with Portland’s most famous author and anarchist, Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea trilogy, etc.) while she was buying movie tickets at our Fox Towers theatre complex. I asked her the same question I’ve asked thousands of our citizens:“Do you want George Bush out of the White House?”
Ms. Le Guin flipped her purse around to reveal a Kerry/Edwards button.
“Wow, I’m thrilled to see an anarchist wearing a Kerry button. All my best anarchist friends are voting for Kerry, but they’re not ready to wear buttons.” And then Ursula smiled broadly as she became the first person I have ever heard utter these words:
“Anybody but Nader.”
We love stories. It’s how we understand the world. Were I to tell a friend what happened in tonight’s Giants game, I wouldn’t send him a box score (though I might refer to one as I was talking to him). I’d say something like “Man, we looked terrible in the first two innings, our rookie pitcher was tight and we had back-to-back errors resulting in a three-run deficit by the second. But then AJ nailed a three-run homer that put us back in the game, and in the 5th we rang up three more (including Barry’s 689th!). It was all Giants from then on, and JT Snow was on fire…!” and so on. A story is our way of taking a journey and making it portable—we can give it to others, and we’re wired to enjoy both hearing a good story, as well as telling it.Laura Rozen:
I think my instinct about intelligence history is by and large correct and not very academic: you can study it all you want, but intelligence failure is basically the almost inevitable consequence not of a lack of information, but of a failure of imagination. The reason the US didn’t foresee Pearl Harbor, Stalin didn’t believe Hitler would invade the Soviet Union, the US didn’t foresee India’s nuclear tests, etc. is not for lack of information. It is about the blindnesses that occur on this side in the processing of information, the inability or unwillingness to yield one’s assumptions to think like one’s adversary, and the moving of such insights within the bureaucracy.John-Paul Spiro:
I have to say I feel just awful for Jack Ryan. He’s now and forever a political joke and he never even got to hold office. Now every single story about Keyes and/or Obama must end with a reference to Ryan bowing out over “sexually embarrassing allegations.” Not that he doesn’t deserve it. If you’re rich and handsome and married to Jeri Ryan, and having sex with her is just not enough so you just want strangers to watch the two of you get it on because then you’re just the man and everyone knows it because they can always suspect that she just married you for your money and you guys don’t have sex at all so you just gotta prove it to them by actually nailing her with the strobe lights flashing and the music pounding and come on honey stop crying it would be cool I’m sorry I thought you might be into it really I promise I’ll never do it again I just think it might spice things up no I don’t mean things aren’t good but it would just be interesting to try once dammit I want people to gape at us while we’re having nasty monkey love because that’s my way of proving how much I value you as my wife oh hell let’s get a divorce just don’t bring this up ever because I want to serve in our government and make laws for this beloved nation someday and if you do I’ll slander you in the press because God forbid our child find out what a sleaze his father is anyway I’m sorry that Boston Public show didn’t work out I told you Star Trek wouldn’t be the best springboard but oh well I’m going to volunteer at some inner-city schools to build up my I Care About The People bonafides so later babe good luck with that stewardess part in Down With Love…Bob Herbert reports from Florida:So, sorry, Jack Ryan. You will be missed. Let the real sideshow begin.
The state police officers, armed and in plain clothes, have questioned dozens of voters in their homes. Some of those questioned have been volunteers in get-out-the-vote campaigns.And from the Seattle Times, an miniature Coen Brothers movie. (Via Roger (Not That One) Ailes.)I asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what criminal activity had taken place.
“I can’t talk about that,” he said.
I asked if all the people interrogated were black.
“Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at—yes,” he said.
He also said, “Most of them were elderly.”
When I asked why, he said, “That’s just the people we selected out of a random sample to interview.”
KALISPELL, Mont. — Until he was arrested this year in his underwear in a motel room with a nearly naked young woman who was behind in her payments to his finance company, no businessman in this town was more respected than Richard Dasen.Also:
Medieval metalwork by Teresa Heinz Kerry’s eldest son.
What Really Happened. (Warning: sound.)
Kip Manley, 11,000,000; Washington Post, 0.
Winner of the Electrolite August 2004 This Guy Is Making Way Too Much Sense Award: Digby.
Remember last winter’s rush of gay marriages at San Francisco’s city hall, following on from the mayoral decree that gays may marry? Remember the rock-concert campouts, the nationwide outpouring of support, the endless parade of joyous images of happily married couples?I have an alternate suggestion: Don’t forget it.Forget it.
Clarke is indeed one hell of an original writer. I’ve just started getting into Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, thanks to Bloomsbury for providing an advance reading copy, and so far it’s as good I would have expected. Or, at the very least, as much to my taste as you might expect from the fact that she’s the only writer with a story in all three of the Starlight anthologies…
Americans who are squeezed are the same Americans who are bursting with patriotism.Eeeuw.
From what I’ve seen and read about the first day of the convention, the Democratic talk about toning down the rhetoric was a smoke screen, pure and simple. Their strategy is to say they will be reasonable and moderate, and then to stand up and tell it like it is. When the predictable screams come in from the right, they can say they were being reasonable and moderate, so what’s the problem, and besides it’s all true.I think this is pretty much right. On one level it’s analagous to the way George W. Bush gets to change positions and policies six times in an afternoon and yet be portrayed as “resolute.” He gets away with it because he never misses a chance to tell everyone how resolute he is. (As Fafblog summarized a recent presidential press conference, Bush’s resolve “is resolute and firm. It is so firm! You have no idea how firm our resolve is. It’s pretty firm I’ll tell you that.”)
But on another level it’s just a way to give supporters more flexible rhetorical tools. Here’s today’s Washington Post, showing how this strategy plays out:
Before Kerry’s arrival in Boston, former senator Max Cleland of Georgia roused a sleepy Virginia delegation with a fiery breakfast speech in which he charged that there is a “total disconnect” between Bush and the troops he sent into Iraq […]“Oh, I’m supposed to be nice.” Much deadlier, really, than the same old insults. And nobody reading it is in any doubt who Ms. Reigel is referring to.The veteran and longtime Kerry friend, who lost his legs and an arm in Vietnam, nearly brought several of the delegates to tears.
“I love Max Cleland,” said Wava Reigel, a delegate from Virginia Beach. “He can identify with people who go to war and have injuries. And you know who can’t. Oh, I’m supposed to be nice.”
Former British Foreign Secretary David Owen has a fascinating article on the role of disease, depression, and dementia in modern matters of state.
It’s already been hashed over in detail in some corners of the blogosphere, but this New York Times Magazine article on the newly-emerging network of big-ticket progressive donors is worth a look. So are these two posts about it by strategist Ruy Teixeira.
Speaking of names, I wouldn’t turn down one of these red signs, should one come up spare. Just a thought…
Finally, the great Garry Wills, whose first name is misspelled by bloggers almost as frequently as Teresa Heinz Kerry’s, reviews Bill Clinton’s memoir with his usual elan. No More Mister Nice Blog and Digby take issue with Wills’s idea that we’d all be better off if Clinton had simply resigned and handed the country over to Al Gore in 1998.
If I were any more impressed I’d be packing my bags and moving to Illinois to vote for him this year. Glory and also hallelujah. Bring him on.If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper—that makes this country work. […]
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of “anything goes.” Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.
There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into “red states” and “blue states”; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
UPDATE: More. Just as good.
It is an odd notion that the Democratic Party is about to flicker out and, like Tinker Bell, can be saved only if all the delegates chant, “We do believe in moderation. We do. We do.” An especially irritating variant, usually from conservative commentators, holds piously that the Democratic Party must save itself because two parties are essential to democracy or because competition is good for the Republicans.Funny about that.These themes have reverberated around Democratic conventions since the first post-McGovernite election year of 1976. By now the word “McGovernite,” never exactly filled with schismatic drama and romance, must be about as meaningful to the average voter as “Shachtmanite” or “Albigensian.” George McGovern, children, was a senator from South Dakota (a region of the upper west side of Manhattan in the geographical mythology of Democratic Party critics) and the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972. He was, and is, a left-liberal. The Republican offering that year was Richard Nixon (with Spiro Agnew for dessert), but it is the Democrats who have been apologizing for their choice ever since.
You would not know from the Democrats’ three decades of defensiveness about themselves and the label “liberal” that the Democratic candidate got more votes than the Republican one in each of the past three presidential elections.
Needless to say, but the Free Press says it anyway:
Blacks comprise 83 percent of Detroit’s population, and the city routinely gives Democratic candidates a substantial majority of its votes. […]Of course, Rep. Pappageorge is truly, deeply sorry if anyone has drawn any conclusions from his accidentally telling the truth:
“In the context that we were talking about, I said we’ve got to get the vote up in Oakland (County) and the vote down in Detroit. You get it down with a good message. I don’t know how we got them from there to ‘racist,’” Pappageorge said. “If I have given offense in any way to my colleagues in Detroit or anywhere, I apologize.”Yeah, it’s not like Republicans have any kind of history of hanky-panky along these lines. Or, perish the thought, like if you’re particularly good at it, they’ll elevate you to high office.
Bring on the legal SWAT teams, is all I can say. We’re going to need them.
Some samples:
2. Our promises for the future are supposed to be fiction.Oh, and this too:10. When we sling mud, it’s probably in a workshop on making alien pottery.
20. Our speakers are actually entertaining.
34. We won’t be saying nasty things about other conventions.
36. If we rewrite history we label it as fiction or “alternative history”.
66. At both shows, people will play fast and loose with numbers. At Noreascon, this is called “world building”. At the DNC, it will be called an economics platform.Nice! Now that the organizers of Noreascon have very kindly explained that Democrats are liars, I look forward to seeing their other exciting opinions about the non-fannish affiliations of various of their members. Perhaps Noreascon will take up insulting Catholics next. Or people on one or another side of the gun argument. That should work out well.
Here’s another way a World Science Fiction Convention isn’t like an national political convention:
1. People overseas are rarely thrown in jail for struggling for the right to organize science fiction conventions.
But enough with the humorless jazz! After all, the practice of democracy in America is so firmly established that it’s just fine for Noreascon Four to devote a portion of their web page to expressing science fiction fandom’s traditional contempt for normal democratic politics. Since, after all, it was science fiction fandom that brought America the five-day week, an end to lynching, checks against corporate power, cleaner air and water and, oh yeah, the space program. You may have thought politics and government had something to do with all of those those, but actually, it’s we science fiction fans (who never sling mud, give boring speeches, or prevaricate) who really know what’s what. You know, unlike those “mundanes.”
UPDATE, 25 July: Good on Noreascon 4 for subsequently editing some of the excesses on the page in question. Bad on them for not acknowledging that they’d done so.
Our media systems have created a simple-minded, schoolyard culture of question and answer that the good people at Fox News have adapted into a public version of an interrogation. “Are you a liberal?” “Do you support Saddam Hussein?” “Is your Epidermis showing?” “Have you got a bike?” We know that a lengthy explanation is a shady explanation and all answers to some questions are just wrong. Moore has mastered this technique. He is a doggedly stupid journalist, “How can you do these things to people?” “Why did you fire all the workers? Why did you bomb Iraq? Why? Why? Why?” He doesn’t load himself down thinking about the answers to questions before he asks them. He fires away greedy for easy satisfaction, like a child who trusts authority figures and yet is continually disappointed by them. He wants to hear the simple truth simply. Because he hasn’t received straight answers, he’s decided that these people are untrustworthy, and sometimes he’s right. […]RTWT. Discuss.
The enlightenment liberal prizes truth arrived at through an exchange of ideas in a zone free from basic prejudices of faction or identity. If he wishes to keep a sense of his value inside our big polis, he must forget this unpleasant fact: Americans make too many decisions on appearance. Call it stupidity or call it emotional intelligence, “I liked his face,” but whatever you call it, it’s not foolproof. Moore feels America’s love of stupidity. He is part fat clown and barking Barnum. If it makes anxious left wing intellectuals feel better, we can reach to academic language for an ennobling term, the Rabelaisian. Moore is our gigantic carnival figure. He plays us for suckers and we love him or hate him for it. He mocks the reasoning that has tied us in circles and does what he wants. He stands up for the oppressed, for the left of flesh and blood: prick us do we not bleed, tickle us do we not laugh? And he farted in the general direction of the liberal order of fair play, reasoned debate, and open covenants openly arrived at, because he felt wronged and he took his revenge.
The best way to enjoy Fahrenheit 9/11 is as a revenge flick. It is fine vengeance for all the indignities the liberal left has suffered at the hands of the Republicans and especially the Bush dynasty and its minions since 1988. Moore has plotted his payback for a long time. For Willie Horton, for Hillary Clinton’s social kiss of Yasser Arafat, Moore returns the favor with a montage of handshakes with kaffiyehed Saudis that is undeniably racist. No American politician will ever shake hands with an Arab wearing traditional garb again without first banishing all cameras. In retaliation for the success the Republicans had with the wooden Al Gore of 2000 and the ballyhooed bad pancake make-up in his first debate with Bush, Moore fires back with W.’s flickering lost look when he hears that the planes have hit, and, of course, the make-over sequence at the beginning of the film. The final touch, Moore hopes, will be fooling the same people the Republicans have been fooling for years.
The revenge isn’t finished, and there may yet be an honest judge waiting in the wings to make sure that the pound of flesh isn’t fully exacted. But regardless of the outcome of the next election, no one on the left, or even in the liberal center, can keep a nervous distance from this film.
Okay, that’s done. Onward, then.