Gals Go Wilde

"... Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself."

If I had encountered that line out of its context, I'd have guessed it was one of Oscar Wilde's aphorisms. But Jane Austen wrote it, for her character Elizabeth Bennet in chapter 59 of Pride and Prejudice.*

Nor does it stand alone. There's also this one from chapter 60:

Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere.

And then in chapter 61, the narrator informs us that after her marriage, Elizabeth's father "delighted in going to Pemberley, especially when he was least expected."

This line from chapter 20 isn't Wildean, but it jumped out at me as oddly "modern" the first time I read P&P:

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do."

I've always thought of Wilde's humor as unique to him, maybe even invented by him, but I'm coming to suspect that I thought so only because I hadn't read enough 19th-century English literature. That suspicion was reinforced when I read Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1880 novel A Fair Barbarian, about a wild young gal of the American West who descends upon her father's sleepy English hometown of Slowbridge. Nineteen-year-old Octavia Bassett appears without warning (but with six trunks full of her wardrobe) at the door of her timid maiden Aunt Belinda. Her father, Martin, is a speculator in silver-mines of great but inconsistent fortune, and just as he was about to visit his sister Belinda for the first time in thirty years, his fortune went South, as we Yanks say, and he had to hurry back to America to build it back up again. (Do fortunes go North when they recover themselves?)

Slowbridge is ruled over, socially speaking, by the gorgon-like arbiter (arbitress?) Lady Theobald, a forerunner of Wilde's Lady Bracknell but lacking Lady Bracknell's greater wealth, station, and London address.

In Slowbridge, America was not approved of -- in fact, was almost entirely ignored, as a country where, to quote Lady Theobald, "the laws were loose, and the prevailing sentiments revolutionary." It was not considered good taste to know Americans, -- which was not unfortunate, as there were none to know; and Miss Belinda Bassett had always felt a delicacy in mentioning her only brother, who had emigrated to the United States in his youth, having first disgraced himself by the utterance of the blasphemous remark that "he wanted to get to a place where a fellow could stretch himself, and not be bullied by a lot of old tabbies" [8-9]

Martin Bassett must not have been the only Slowbridge gentleman who lit out for the territories, because there are hardly any left in town by the time Miss Octavia comes to visit. There is, of course, a working-class fellow who brings her trunks from the railroad station; Mr. John Burmistone, the mill-owner, a recent immigrant in small-town terms, of whom Lady Theobald doesn't approve any more than she does of Americans; and the mild-mannered (not to say milquetoaste) curate, the Rev. Arthur Poppleton. Since none of these are gentlemen, a love interest has to be imported, in the person of Lady Theobald's nephew, Capt. Francis Barold, who drops in to visit Slowbridge and becomes fascinated by the fair barbarian.

The first confrontation between Miss Octavia of Bloody Gulch, Nevada, and Lady Theobald of Slowbridge:

"You don't look like an English girl," remarked her ladyship.

Octavia smiled again. ... "I suppose I ought to be sorry for that," she observed. "I dare say I shall be in time -- when I have been longer away from Nevada."

"I must confess," admitted her ladyship, and evidently without the least regret or embarrassment, "I must confess that I don't know where Nevada is."

"It isn't in Europe," replied Octavia, with a soft, light laugh. "You know that, don't you?" [35]

Later, Lady Theobald takes note of the abundance of jewelry Miss Octavia wears:

"You are a very fortunate girl to own such jewels," she said, glancing critically at the diamonds in her ears; "but if you take my advice, my dear, you will put them away, and leave them until you are a married woman. It is not customary, on this side of the water, for young girls to wear such things -- particularly on ordinary occasions. People will think you are odd."

"It is not exactly customary in America," replied Octavia, with her undisturbed smile. "There are not many girls who have such things. Perhaps they would wear them if they had them. I don't care a very great deal about them, but I mean to wear them."

Lady Theobald departed in a dudgeon [39].

Miss Belinda remonstrates mildly with her niece.

But Octavia did not appear overwhelmed by the existence of the standards in question. She turned to the window again.

"Well, anyway," she said, "I think it was pretty cool in her to order me to take off my diamonds, and save them until I was married. How does she know whether I mean to be married, or not? I don't know that I care about it" [40-41].

Octavia is more of a Huck Finn than a Gwendolyn or a Cecily, but Lady Theobald is very much a Lady Bracknell-wannabe. Burnett, though born in England, moved with her family to the US at the age of 16, and spent most of the rest of her life there, with only occasional residence in England. She has a nice touch with the clashing provincialisms of America and Britain, and though A Fair Barbarian drags a bit towards the end -- Burnett seems bored with the story -- she wraps it up neatly enough, with some small surprises.

This was the first book I've read by Burnett with an adult protagonist, and it's a hoot. She's best-known now for her "children's" books Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, which in their day were read and loved by adults as much as children. I think A Fair Barbarian would make a great film. There's a 1917 silent version, but someone today with the right feeling for a comedy of manners could make something very entertaining out of it. It's quite different in its tone and attitudes than I expected from 19th-century fiction, just as Jane Austen's novels shook me out of my preconceptions about what an English spinster would write about 70 years earlier.

Which brings me to something that kept occurring to me as I read Pride and Prejudice last night. The writing drips irony, and some fairly intense sarcasm. Do most Austen fans notice it? After re-watching Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's very fine and successful Sense and Sensibility a month ago, which missed or left out the irony too, I'm inclined to doubt it. As Jane Eyre is often mistaken for a proto-Gothic romance novel ("Always to be a governess and always in love," Virginia Woolf sneered in the 1920s), so Austen's novels seem to be thought of as simple proto-Harlequin romances.

For example, though Austen accepted her society's ideas about class and breeding, she knew very well that a title and thousands of pounds did not automatically make a good person. The Bennet parents in Pride and Prejudice are human failures in their different ways, but there is also the affectionate but insincere Miss Bingley, and even more there is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who despite her august station is not really different from the empty-headed Mrs. Bennet. I've been wondering what Miss Austen would have thought of the great working-class critic Raymond Williams's impression of his class 'superiors' at Cambridge:

The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunately enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people.

*I'm referring to chapters in P&P rather than page numbers because there are so many editions of Austen's novels, and besides, the chapters are short enough to make it fairly easy to find a passage. I quote A Fair Barbarian from a 1995 facsimile reprint, by the University of Idaho Press, of the 1880 original, but it can also be found online.

Letting the PFOX into the PHenhouse

Irony, anyone? This post at Change.org (not to be confused with Change.gov) complains about fliers being handed out at a public school near Washington DC by a group called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, or PFOX (is there a corporate tie-in? if not, there should be). The poster claims that the fliers were handed out "officially", quoting a Washington Post article:

The schools are required to distribute literature that isn't deemed hate speech from any registered nonprofit organization four times a year, the result of a 2006 lawsuit, said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Public Schools.

Fair enough. Are gay non-profits distributing handouts at these schools? How about atheist or secularist groups? Are there gay-straight alliances in those schools? If not, why not?

The Change.org writer provides a quotation from the ex-gay flier.

"Every year thousands of people with unwanted same-sex attractions make the personal decision to leave a gay identity through gender affirming programs, including therapy, faith based ministries, and other non-judgmental environments," the PFOX flier stated. "No 'gay gene' or gay center of the brain has been found. No medical test exists to determine if a person is homosexual. Sexual orientation is based on feelings and is a matter of self-affirmation and public declaration."

This, of course, rouses the ire of the Change.com writer: "Huh, maybe next week the Montgomery County Public Schools would like to hand out fliers suggesting that the world is flat? Because that carries about as much scientific fact as what PFOX is saying."

Well, no, actually. It happens to be true that no "gay gene" or "gay center of the brain" has been found, and that no medical or other test exists to determine a person's sexual orientation. I don't even see what is wrong with saying that sexual orientation is based on feelings (what else could it be based on?) and is a matter of self-affirmation and public declaration (okay, that one's iffy, but just about everybody conflates sexual orientation and sexual identity). "Sexual orientation" is a pseudo-scientific term intended to give the impression that some physical mechanism has been identified which directs people's erotic and romantic interests, but the actual research being done shows that the researchers don't know what they're looking for, and the term has no coherent scientific basis.

The trouble with the quoted material is that, while many people do "decide to leave a gay identity", there is no evidence that they succeed. (By the way, remember what I said about confusing "sexual orientation" and "sexual identity"?) The history of the "ex-gay" movement is a litany of failure and scandal, including sexual exploitation of its clients by the people who run it. Back when it was a secular phenomenon run by psychiatric and other mental health professionals, the most it could claim was to change people's sexual behavior, and it didn't even succeed at that. Oh, and of course the claim that faith-based ministries and therapy are "non-judgmental environments" is absurd.

The ex-gay hustlers like to claim that they just want to give a choice to people who are beset by "unwanted same-sex attractions", and to tell the truth I'm sympathetic to that idea in principle. I've known many gay people over the years who hate being gay and do their best to make gay society unliveable for everyone else as a result with self-pity, self-destructive behavior, passive-aggressive acting out, and general tediousness. And of course there are those who marry heterosexually in hopes that it will normalize them, at great emotional cost to their spouses and children. If it were possible for those who want to change to do so, I'd be all in favor of their changing.

Plus, of course, gay laypeople who buy into the pseudo-science of "sexual orientation" accept the anti-gays' assumption that people have no right to make choices about their sexual lives: if we can change, they agree, we must change. But that doesn't follow, any more than people must change their religious "orientation", even though religion is a lifestyle choice, not an inborn condition.

But to repeat, there is overwhelming evidence that people don't change from gay to straight. This is actually rather odd, given the much vaunted "fluidity" of sexuality, which people who claim to believe in the biological fixity of sexual orientation often proclaim out of the other side of their mouths. The failure of change "therapy" doesn't mean, however, that homosexuality (or heterosexuality for that matter) is inborn or otherwise biologically fixed. Many acquired conditions are permanent. But no one knows why people are drawn to persons of one sex or the other, or to both. A case against the ex-gay movement can be made without relying on bogus science.

I agree that the false claims in PFOX's literature need to be countered, but so do the false claims on which the Change.com writer bases his article. The ex-gays should be challenged, especially on the issue of "choice": do they also support the choice of other gay people with wanted same-sex attractions to live our lives happily and openly, and do they oppose religious bigots who want to silence us? The Montgomery County school officials should be given pro-gay material (not compromised by bad biology) to distribute with the next batch of report cards. Surely the Human Rights Campaign or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force could work on such a worthy project?

Today We Have Naming of Parts

The title of this post, of course, comes from Henry Reed's World War II poem, "Naming of Parts." (Which, until I looked it up, I somehow thought was written by Philip Larkin.) That occurred to me while I was reading Peter Silverton's Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing (London: Portobello Books, 2009). The book generally tends to ramble, but it contains a lot of interesting lore, and every so often I encounter a nice little stand-alone passage like this one, from page 5:

I studied psychology. Often, when you tell people you’ve studied psychology, they say something like: Oh, you can look right into my mind, can’t you? Usually, I say: Yes, I can.

Or this one, pages 87-8:

A good number of penis words involve the naming of the part. The old man, the old feller. Some are purely personal ones. A man called George, for example, might refer to his penis as little George: I am my penis, my penis is me. Or at least a mini-me. Or from another, perhaps, female point of view: his brain’s between his legs. In the intimacy of the sexual encounter, this naming of the penis is, I guess, another part of the arousal dialogue. (Which might explain why American researchers have found men not named Elvis but who do have a Little Elvis.) Beyond the bed, though, it can be something different. It’s hard not to think that by giving a personality to a penis, you are also giving it autonomy, an independent life beyond the rest of the body’s control. Desire is outsourced and can therefore be partly disavowed. It wasn’t me, guv. In the 1980s, there was a series of comic books about a man and his Wicked Willie. It was a dialogue – mostly about women, of course – between the two. Its irony is that the ‘dreadful little trouser mole’ is by far the sharper of the two brains.

Gaze in the Military

A friend sent me a link to this interesting article at MediaMatters.

WorldNetDaily columnist Mychal Massie advanced the dubious claim that if Don't Ask, Don't Tell were repealed, 25 percent of the military would decline to re-enlist, based on an unnamed poll of "military folks." But Massie's claim is refuted by the experiences of several other countries that lifted their bans on gays and lesbians serving but saw no such re-enlistment reductions, even when earlier polling had predicted such reductions.

Lots of useful information in the rest of the article. I was struck by this quotation from Massie's column:

Why is it so important to Obama to have homosexuals openly identified as such in the armed forces? Sexual orientation is a basic foundation of compatibility in battle. This is not a small issue. It will literally destroy the integrity of combat units, whether they be in the field, onboard ships, in airplane cockpits or in submarines.

A reader who is in a position to know told me that the "last survey among military folks [revealed] that 25 percent won't re-up if this happens. This means that to allow [the] 2 percent of those out there who choose this lifestyle into the military, we'd lose 25 percent of the experienced military folks who have morals."

Oh, really? "Military folks who have morals"? We're talking about an organization dedicated to perpetrating mass violence, or as Arlo Guthrie put it 40-odd years ago: "You wanna know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after being a litterbug." Or as Naomi Klein wrote more recently, about people who fretted that a photograph of an American Marine smoking a cigarette set a bad example to young children,

Yes, that's right: Letter-writers from across the nation are united in their outrage--not that the steely-eyed smoking soldier makes mass killing look cool but that the laudable act of mass killing makes the grave crime of smoking look cool. It reminds me of the joke about the Hasidic rabbi who says all sexual positions are acceptable except for one: standing up, "because that could lead to dancing."

But that's trivial. I was more interested in Massie's rhetorical question, familiar to me from decades of debating homophobes: "Why is it so important to Obama to have homosexuals openly identified as such in the armed forces?" The point of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell and the prior ban on homosexuals serving in the American armed forces is not to have homosexuals openly identified as such. Many will surely choose not to come out. The important thing is that no one should be penalized when they do, that no one should have to sneak around for fear of being discharged or imprisoned. It also means, for those who care about American military effectiveness, that the US armed forces will not have to deprive themselves of qualified personnel because they turn out to be gay. (The ouster of gay translators expert in Arabic has been something of a scandal since the first Gulf War.)

This has nothing to do with Obama. The justice of the ban on gays in the military has been under attack for a long time. Allan Berube's important book Coming Out Under Fire, Arthur Dong's documentary based on it, and Randy Shilts's book Conduct Unbecoming were important in showing the participation of gay men and women in the US military throughout the 20th century. As the rest of the MediaMatters article shows, there is no reason to believe Massie's unsourced claim that lifting the ban will cause an exodus of "military folks with morals" (giggle snort), based on the experience of other countries that have permitted homosexuals to serve. And I agree that gay people should have the same right as heterosexuals to participate in aggression against the people of other nations -- burning women, kids, houses and cities after being sodomites and sapphists.

Gay visibility has been a sore point for bigots ever since I can remember. I came out, in various senses of the word, in 1971, and have often fielded questions from straights and gays alike who just couldn't understand why I couldn't be discreet about my sexuality, the way heterosexuals are. That modest request has always struck me funny, since heterosexuality is anything but invisible in American society, including the military. It's probably not surprising that straights are unconscious of their inability to shut up about their sex lives, but it still startles me that so many gay people can't see it. When I point it out to them, they commonly respond that we shouldn't sink to Their level, turning straights from Role Models to Bad Examples in the flap of a wrist. And while I have no objection myself to public orgies, by "gay visibility" I mean nothing more blatant or radical than declining to pass for straight. During a recent Facebook dust-up over Proposition 8, someone about my age wrote to me that he had no problem with gays as long as we don't "put it in the street", whatever that means. I suspect he meant nothing more or less than secretiveness, shame, and vulnerability to being outed by bigots at their pleasure. No, thanks. Whatever my objections to gay patriots, I don't want them to be subject to official homophobic repression. If anyone is going to pick on them, it should be me.

P.S. A reader pointed out that the first link led to the wrong article; fixed.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light

I have mixed feelings about Rebecca Solnit. I like her when she's writing critically, as she does in her essay "Men Explain Things to Me Facts Didn't Get in Their Way" or her contribution to The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle. I'm not so pleased when she starts getting spiritual. Take her new and important book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (Viking, 2009). Her project there is to counter the myth of people reverting to "savagery" when things get tough -- you might call it the Lord of the Flies myth. The corporate media dusted this one off right after the earthquake in Haiti, partly to support a US military occupation but also because media people believe it, as most elites do. That's probably projection, because it is elite groups who live in a constant state of Hobbesian war of all against all. The myth also did yeoman's duty in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the media tried to depict black residents of New Orleans (rather than white Blackwater operatives) as violent looters.

Anyway, early on in her book Solnit writes:

Few speak of paradise now, except as something remote enough to be impossible. The ideal societies we hear of are mostly far away or long ago or both, situated in some primordial society before the Fall or a spiritual kingdom in a remote Himalayan vastness. The implication is that we here and now are far from capable of living such ideals. But what if paradise flashed up among us from time to time -- at the worst of times? What if we glimpsed it in the jaws of hell? These flashes give us, as the long ago and far away do not, a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become. ... The door to this era's potential paradises is in hell [page 9].

Eeeuuuw. I'm sorry, there are just so many things that I object to here. I'm not interested in an "ideal" society, which almost by definition is a society that exists only in ideas. Yes, a man's reach should exceed his grasp and blah blah blah, but I think that in trying to imagine a society worth living in, we must also attend to what is possible. (I think Paul Goodman said something to that effect once.) The good news of Solnit's book (and others like it -- see also Alfie Kohn's The Brighter Side of Human Nature) is that solidarity, consideration, empathy, kindness and generosity are possible, are workable.

But y'know, it isn't just "now" that paradise is used to refer to something far away or long ago. It has been used that way for a couple of thousand years. Ultimately it comes from a Persian root meaning a walled garden, which tells you something right there: it's a hiding place, a refuge from the unpleasantness outside. Luke's gospel says that Jesus assured the good thief on the next cross over that "today you will be with me in paradise," presumably meaning Heaven -- which is something remote and impossible if anything is. But I also see from the Wikipedia article that in contemporary secular use the term refers to "'a society (whether it be hypothetical or otherwise) whose organizational features serve to render, and are fully calibrated towards, the harmonious luxuriating development of the psychological, physiological and creative natures of mankind. As such, a society, continent or planet so constructed, naturally provides a suitably nourishing and convivial social and educational formulae apt to bring about unconditional joy and happiness within that populace'."

An old friend, who was in Philosophy before she switched to Political Science, took a similar stance, which now that I think of it helps me understand why that last sentence I quoted especially sets my teeth on edge. We were discussing the problem of suffering (or the problem of evil, as it is more commonly called), the dilemma which asks how an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good god could permit so much misery in the world. My friend argued that this world is Hell: it's a test, or a purgatory, or something. Apparently she believed that when we die the testing will be over and we'll go to a better place. I've run into numerous people since then who've said the same thing. But according to the standard justification of Yahweh's relation to suffering, we suffer here because it's the best of all possible worlds: as the conservative Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga put it, God could not create a world with less suffering in it. That doesn't mean this world is perfect, only that it is the best that poor, helpless, bumbling but well-meaning Yahweh can provide for us. This argument has troubling consequences for belief in a paradisiacal afterlife, because it means that this life is Heaven -- it can't, or at any rate doesn't, get any better than this. If that is true, we're in deep trouble, but I don't think it is true; and I don't believe in other worlds or an afterlife anyway.

Oh, maybe it does no real harm to use words like "paradise" and "hell" in connection with human societies, but it still makes me put my guard up. I know that it's probably impossible to avoid the use of symbols and metaphors, but these strike me as notably ill-chosen. "Hell" is particularly troublesome when applied to disasters, natural or artificial, since Hell is a place made by Yahweh for the punishment of the wicked; I don't think Solnit wants to suggest that the residents of New Orleans or Haiti were wicked and merited horrific punishment -- that's the attitude she opposes. As for "Paradise," I would like to live in a world where people had enough to eat, had suitable shelter, received adequate and acceptable medical care, were encouraged to educate themselves and provided the resources to do so; where conflicts were resolved without violence, where people renounced vengeance, and treated one another with empathy and compassion. But I don't think it would be Paradise -- for one thing, I suppose that in such a world there would still be conflict, still illness, accident, and ultimately death.

Especially there would be conflict. I don't think a world without conflict would be a good place to live. So we must learn to live with conflict, not to fear it, even to welcome it as a way to learn from others and from ourselves. So I reject that secular definition of an earthly paradise which requires that such a society would be "harmonious" with "unconditional joy and happiness" in its citizens. Even if such a society were truly "ideal", it's not my ideal. But neither is the kind of society I just briefly outlined; I submit that it would be better than ours today, that it is possible and could be worked toward if not fully achieved. (How to work toward it is another question too complex to address now; I'll try to begin to address it some other time.)

And I had better concede right away that I haven't yet read all of A Paradise Built in Hell. It might be that at some point in that hefty volume she addresses questions like these. I've put the book aside for the time being, however, because I realized Solnit didn't need to convince me of her primary thesis about human cooperation during disasters -- I already believe it -- and I didn't feel like wading through her supporting evidence yet. I have too much else to read right now.

P.S. Solnit has a pretty good article at The Nation this week. I hope I'm not being too hopeless when I say that I think I'm actually pretty hopeful about human possibilities, even though I remember that Hope was the final evil to emerge from Pandora's box, and that the word "Hope" was co-opted by the Madison Avenue election campaign of our current President. Don't let him have it.

Individualists of the World, Unite!

Now that the Heterosexual Oscars are over, many Colts fans are in deep mourning. Such is life -- you can't have a winner without a loser, or many losers. At alicublog Roy Edroso reports on rightbloggers' reactions to the big game, and quotes one Troy Nelson:

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom [sic!] best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

Ah yes, professional sports are certainly capitalistic, with the heroic players working for the Ellsworth Tooheys of America. But "Darwinian"? I thought good conservatives repudiated Darwin. What the Creationist/Intelligent Design take on team sports would be I don't know. "Randian"? Ayneleh was apparently ambivalent at best about Darwin. I'm not sure what she would have thought of the Superbowl -- surely it would have been too corporate for her, though she never let herself be hobbled by consistency -- but one of her disciples assures the faithful that "no guilt is called for, because watching sports satisfies a vital human need." And this acolyte somehow manages to turn subordination and sacrifice in the service of the group into selfishness and self-glorification; that's fundamentalism for you, which manages to interpret a text until it means its opposite. (Not all Objectivists agree, however.)

That is why the economist John Kenneth Galbraith took on the subject years ago:

I once wrote a piece of which I was at the time very proud (I maybe shouldn't go back and read it again), arguing somewhat ironically that socialism in the United States was the result of organized sports. It takes people at a vulnerable age and makes teamwork, more than individual work, the thing. It subjects people to the authority of the team captain or the coach, and as I say, this is at an age where people are vulnerable. And therefore, team sports are the breeding grounds for socialism and must be watched very carefully. And I had an organization in the piece -- this ran in Harper's -- called "the CIA": the Congress for Individualist Athletics. It was written under a pseudonym because I was then an ambassador, I couldn't write under my own name. One day the postman struggled into my room at Harvard with a pile of letters this thick that had been sent on from Harper's from people who, well, they fell into three classes:

• people who wanted to know whether it was real or not;
• people who wanted to join; and
• people who demanded that I exclude baseball from the list because baseball is not, as they said, a "socialist" sport: when you're up at bat, you're on your own.

Well, it's an example of the dangers of using irony. Under the best of circumstances, many people are going to take it seriously.

The Party of Populist Anger -- The Envelope, Please

Glenn Greenwald has some good commentary on a New York Times article about Wall Street's "buyer's remorse" -- that is, they bought and paid for Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress, but now they don't think they got their money's worth, so they're going to buy some Republicans instead. As Greenwald points out:

that Wall Street is dissatisfied with the Democrats and the Obama administration reveals how extreme are their expectations of control of the Government. The second-highest-ranking Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, recently conceded of the Democratic-controlled Congress: "frankly, bankers own the place." It's impossible to find a more loyal and attentive servant to bankers than Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. As the NYT article this morning details, Wall Street executives and their lobbyists have virtually unfettered access to the administration and to the President himself. You would think they'd be satisfied with the state of affairs in Washington. Yet so extreme are their perceived entitlements of control that even mere symbolic and rhetorical disobedience from the politicians they own -- he said some mean things about us -- creates a sense of righteous grievance: our government employees do not behave this way toward us and will be punished if it continues.

And:

note that, more than a year later, Wall Street can only complain about "rhetoric," not any actual legislation that has been passed ...

As the Times writer says, "Bankers, unhappy at the president’s proposals for tighter financial regulations, are shifting donations to Republicans." That's proposals. By the time Obama gets through being bipartisan, it's not likely those "tighter financial regulations" will amount to anything that could trouble a banker's sleep or digestion. Read all of Greenwald's article. Every voter should be aware of the Times article, the bankers' threats, and the Republicans' (and the Democrats') readiness to do the bankers' bidding.

And not that it matters, but this might come in handy:



But don't forget that Obama also supported Bush's bailout. It's easy to make fun of the ignorance of Palin's fans, but Obama's fans are no better.