Some Monks, I Owe Ya

I will indulge this much American exceptionalism: truly, we have built a system to make all the kings and tyrants, party bosses and generalissississimi and primates inter pares and dukes and princess and chiefs and big men over all the ages of mankind weep with jealousy; no hereditary pageantry nor coronation nor victory parade nor one-party election can compete with the multi-billion dollar spectacle of an American presidential election season, its endless lefthand turn toward an identical indycar conclusion, one selfsame auto beating another, a few weird diehards talking pit strategy, the restuvus enjoying the occasional fiery pileup along the way.  A vast spectacle of competition ripping ever-faster toward a foregone conclusion, a breadbowl circus lathered in Applebees Smokey Barbeque Honey Bacon Strudel Pepper Spice Chipotle Doritos Rub by Bobby Flay.  So what if only forty percent of viewers actually tune into the show?  Not even Navy Seal Advocate Investigation Factor: Special Idol Brigade gets those sorts of ratings.  Even those who don't participate get vaguely caught up in the proceedings; a self-consuming nuclear fireball of utter inanity through which one of several psycho clowns becomes warden for a few swiftly-expiring years before the whole thing is recharged, refueled, and rerun.  Ours is not so much a political economy as a syndicated series.

Fandi Fictor Optimus Prime

Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: How Research Assistants Can Help to Transform a Slight, 5,000-word College Essay on a Topic of Modestly Malcolm-Gladwellian Counterintuitive Interest into a Tome, is long, wrong, and yet strangely endearing.  It begins by explaining that Homeric epics and the Old Testament, despite being fiction, demonstrate the empirically undeniable violence of the days of yore, which is rather like some distant, almond-eyed historian-descendant of the present human race telepathically informing a galaxy full of Stapledonian Last Men that twentieth-century humanity was indisputably overrun by immense extraterrestrial robots capable of transforming themselves into tractor-trailers and boomboxes due to the fictional, but nonetheless, you know, representative historical poetry of one Michael Bay.  The rest of the book is devoted to confusing incidence with prevalence and both with averages and everything, everything with percentages; Cain killing Abel being statistically worse than the Ukranian famine, that sort of thing.  It's completely preposterous and really sort of fun, an Indiana Jones adventure for the bored intellectual--a bunch of Rube Goldberg setups for impossible derring-do that delights through the sheer force of its own naivete.  A lark, really.  I run the risk of plagiarizing David Bentley Hart here; a kind reader forwarded me Hart's review, and that was the spark that actually got me to read the whole doorstop.  "But there is also something exhilarating about this fideist who thinks he is a rationalist."  Great stuff, the whole of it.

I found myself asking the same question I find myself asking whenever I come across the old IQ-surveys-prove-niggaz-iz-stupid brigade, which is: to what end, this knowledge?  I mean, even presuming against all evidence, for the sake of argument alone, that the bullshit is true.  Black people are dumb as a demographic which validates that their subordinate position within the body of our society is no one's fault but their own eugenic heritage ergo oh well let them play basketball what are you gonna do it could be worse?  Sure World War II sucked but would you rather get raped by a Mongol?  It attempts, I suppose, to run a subtle epistemological alchemy whereby Hobbes is transmuted from philosophy into scientific theory, the sort of project that has the flinty odor of a crackpot undergrad fresh from the latest Timothy Ferris joint trying to explain to his comp lit cohort that string theory proves Derrida correct.    Why go to all this trouble tying the modern state up in a sac with a duck, a rat, a witch, and a viper and tossing it in the drink just to see if it floats?  Perhaps in a more ancient time that sort of thing would be admissible in court; to us, it's just a bit of kooky antiquity.

The answer, I think, is in rearranging our own critical faculties, you'll pardon the expression, to see Pinker's writing within the proper context, which is to say: industry writing.  It isn't exactly apologia, and it's not quite panegyric; it belongs to the same genre that arrives in your office, printed on that weirdly too-thick glossy stock, bearing articles with titles like "How Joe Zlotknik of Bumnass Industries Is Revolutionizing the Way You Think about Industrial Lubricant" or "Kineticrux ASGD CEO Viktor Baffleman on the Seventh Sigma"--it all has a certain PowerPoint coherence, a set of texts and images dutifully assembled and carefully put together in a slideshow, the language a slightly deranged adaptation of Journalese, studious objectivity overlaid with the manic desperation of a fading line of cocaine.  This shit is churned out by the long ton each year by our universitarians and their pop-sci counterparts, but usually you just ignore it or toss it in the office recycling bin.  Oh, is that Jared Diamond telling me not to cut down all the trees on my island?  Yeah, I'm gonna go pretend that I'm waiting for a fax for an hour or two.  But Pinker, man, he's pulled off the real trick.  That smiling face on the cover of Electronic Catheter Quarterly is your own asshole CFO; that glowing company profile, that's your bullshit company, where you work . . . and you feel, though you hate this fucking job, hate these assholes, goddamnit, fucking Janet in Finance and that bitch Louise in HR and Chuck, that fat jag who never cleans out the microwave in the kitchenette, you feel, inexplicably, a kind of vicarious, joyful pride to belong.

Easy Marx

Well, the dude may be a lazy man, but I've always found the immensely (if inexplicably) popular Eschaton/Duncan Black the least awful of the liberal set, but still, you'd think that at some point you'd stop being surprised that a system that proudly calls itself capitalism operates in the service of capital.

Chaucer at the Bit

This is an idea I sound in my new book, “The Change I Believe In.” The book is about the journey I and millions of Americans took, from the exhilaration engendered by Obama’s election and the first months of his presidency, through the disappointments and frustrations that have followed. It is, above all, about recognizing how transformational change comes about in a system rigged against it.

-Serena van der Woodsen

These people really need to get religion or something, because this is the worst journey imaginable. Well, look, the change I believe in comes from cultivating mindfulness, equanimity, and compassion. The whole lib shebang, the whole Obama schtick, the wholesale misappropriation of Gandhi's exhortation to be the change you want to see in the world--oy, outside of a philosophy of rigorous Hindu asceticism it is exactly the platitude it's become. And that is really the problem with these well-meaning progressives, I mean, the problem other than the problem of their eagerness to return a child-murdering capitalist stooge to the Throne of St. Lincoln for four more years . . . the problem is an entirely outward-looking vision of transformation; a management-guru spiritualism: five principles, six steps, and seven processes for a better tomorrow, today! It takes the pilgrimage, which is a ritual physical metaphor for a movement of the spirit and flips it and reverses it; it imagines that a lot of banal shuffling about in the phenomenal world is gonna get everyone's Kundalini nice 'n uncoiled. And so you end up at mere tautology: transformational change. Yeah, okay, we are going to transform the change in the system that is rigged against transformation in order to immanentize the system to transform itself to change us? Uh, how about we cultivons nos jardins and all that. Do you consider "navel-gazing" an insult? Maybe you oughtn't.

Hie Unto

Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer; in an older, simpler time, we might've still blamed it on all the vile and poisonous nonsense he hacked up between great gulps of vile, poisonous sustenance.  He was never an especially good writer, which is why he crossed the Oxbridge to America, where accents are mistaken for intellect.  I read Why Orwell Matters, but I can't remember a single word of it; from the title, I suppose it makes the argument that Orwell matters.  I have it filed in my library alongside Harold Bloom's Shakespeare Was Important, Malcolm Gladwell's Noun: A Verb, and my dad's old Tom Clancy collection.  Apparently he was supposed to be some kind of iconoclast because he took some potshots at Mother Teresa, but the tipping of holy cows, like the tipping of actual cows, is better confined to a muddy adolescence.  He was supposed to be searing but was merely snide; his great intellectual trahison stank mostly of a mid-career MBA, a brief strategic necessity in order to pad the paycheck.  A person who uses a natty portmanteau like Islamofascism without a halfhipster of irony is not a writer.  As an atheist, I found him as embarrassing as my loudest aunt's impenetrable Pittsburghese, mortifying in polite company.  If the universe were just, he would wake from his passage on Kolob, basking in the angelic light of billions of perfect, white, immortal Mormon smiles.

I, of Newt.

I love Gingrich.  I love his new idea that the President or Congress oughta send the Texas Rangers after judges who issue rulings contrary to their decrees and make em splain themselves.  It just doesn't go far enough.  I think every institution of government should have its own paramilitary, and every minister should have the power to summon any other minister to splain his ministrations; every decision should be infinitely reviewable by every individual; Joe from Public Works should be able to subpoena John Roberts who will be tied up, metaphorically speaking, with John Boehner, who has to rush to testify before Ethyl in the WalMart greeting line.  His totalitarian vision, taken to its own logical end, is the very anarchy we so desire.

@ Risk

Robert Brame, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the lead author of the study, said he hoped the research would alert physicians to signs that their young patients were at risk.

“We know that arrest occurs in a context,” Dr. Brame said. “There are other things going on in people’s lives at the time they get arrested, and those things aren’t necessarily good.”

If doctors can intervene, he added, “It can have big implications for what happens to these kids after the arrest, whether they become embedded in the criminal justice system or whether they shrug it off and move on.”

-The Times

This is the tag on an article revealing that a third of all Americans are arrested by the age of 23, or, if you want to be optimistic about it, not quite a third of all Americans are arrested by the age of 23. The herrenperfessers and the perfesserdokters naturally see a growth industry of sorts here; why should the justice system get all the fun and profits while the psychopharmacologists are stuck merely shoveling speed down the gullets of disputatious pre-teens? What profiteth it the Bayer Corporation or whatever if a kid arrested for selling dime bags (can you still buy dime bags? ach, inflation) gets merely a fine and probation, rather than a lifetime of psychiatric medication? Why make the graffiti boys merely scrub off the evidence of their delinquency when you can also sell them Paroxetine?

Chilling and delightful, like a good snappy horror flick: the total, unquestioning acceptance of this as the natural state of modern life, as regular as pimples with puberty.

"In a fortified concrete courtyard at the airport in Baghdad"

I think the title of this post, selected from all the hilarious phrases in the Times' encomium-epitaph for our late mission impossible, says it all.  Meanwhile, we leave behind a massive fortified city-state garrisoned by mercenaries smack in the middle of the capital with another army massed on the southern border.

Olds at Eleven

Like Crispin I am exceedingly skeptical of "this gleefully publicized notion" that watching FOX News makes you more ill-informed than spending 365 days a year locked in a tanning bed, and since the whole thing smells desperately of the received opinions of competing cable news, we can take it with all the grains of salt at the bottom of all the bags of pretzels in the world.  The most prominent example in the press release abstract?

Among other topics, New Jerseyans were asked about the outcome of the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East this past year. While 53% of New Jerseyans know that Egyptians were successful in overthrowing the government of Hosni Mubarak, 21% say that the uprisings were unsuccessful, and 26% admit they don’t know. Also, 48% know that the Syrian uprising has thus far been unsuccessful, while 36% say they don’t know,and 16% say the Syrians have already toppled their government.

But the real finding is that the results depend on what media sources people turn to for their news. For example, people who watch Fox News , the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all[.]

Those FOX dummies! But before all you Jon Steward fans set to congratulating yourselves over your incisive insight into Egypt, you may consider that there was no "government of Hosni Mubarak"; that Hosni Mubarak was merely the head of a military government; that he was ultimately deposed by the military; and that the military is still the government. Now that is not nitpicking. What "New Jerseyans know", except of course for those who watch FOX, is fundamentally incorrect, not simply a bit off on the details; it reflects the banal, uncritical, deeply parochial, spectacle-obsessed hack journalism of USA Today and MSNBC and the Sulzberger Picayune . . . in other words, this poll reflects that routine FOX viewers are not necessarily familiar with the same canned bullshit as CNN viewers. Well, okay. Sure.

I find FOX grotesquely polychromatic, more garish even than my beloved NFL, which is saying something, but have never understood this idea that it represents some sort of vanguard of media degeneracy; what FOX resembles more than anything else is not some Brave New World, but a thoroughly retrograde aesthetic; it is local news, circa the mid-eighties, from the ambush interviews to the Satanic Daycares (or whatever, their missing-girl equivalents) to the breathless consumer reviews to the--and believe me, a Pittsburgh boy recognizes it well--charming, campy provincialism of the whole proceedings. FOX is the bad old days of broadcast, and the characters it pimps in national elections are the glorious blowhards of local politics writ large; what is Rick Perry if not a school-board president; what is Gingrich but the minority-party city-council smartypants who'll never be mayor?