So, one year ends and another begins. I'm a bit shocked to see how much less I wrote this year; it's the first time I've posted below 300 a year since 2009. But I think I wrote quite a few good ones, so I'm not very concerned. Several of them were basically series, written as I read stimulating books. (Lately I've been toying with the idea of putting together an e-book from the blog, whether from more or less unrevised posts or compiling series into chapters. Still thinking about that.)
Once again I decided to list the most-viewed posts to sum up the past year. Most of them are posts I agree are standouts, though as you'll see, I was very surprised by a couple of them. This post will serve as a retrospective for those who read This Is So Gay regularly, and as an introduction for people who are new to the blog.
25. You Don't Have to Be a Monster to Be a Bigot. The theme of this post turned out to be a recurring theme in 2013, as several celebrities got into trouble because of racist or antigay things they said, and were defended by fans or supposedly disinterested friends of free speech. As you'll see, I don't believe in the disinterest: in almost every case, conservatives defended conservative bigots and liberals defended liberals. (As the year drew to a close, another uproar attended a conference punk/folk performer Ani DiFranco was going to hold in a former Louisiana plantation. Here's the best thing I saw written about that one.) But I'm also intrigued by the common defense in most of these cases: the idea that calling a bigot a bigot is "demonization," transgressing the bounds of civility in public discourse. That countertactic is nothing new, but it seems to be on the rise.
24. He Brought Me Out. The subtle (sometimes not-so-subtle) eroticism of Christian imagery.
23. Declarations of Dependence. On reading May Sarton's journals about living alone, and adjusting to increasing dependence in her old age.
22. Oooohhh! I Scared Myself. Griping again about the Obama administration's inability to deal firmly but constructively with its opposition. (I looked for a video or audio clip of Tweety Bird's reading of the title line, but couldn't find one.)
21. Real Jesuses Don't Sparkle. Another post on popular Christian imagery, written before the fuss about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly's assertion that Jesus and Santa Claus are really "white men."
20. Free Advice, Five Cents (The Doctor Is In). Freedom isn't free, including free healthcare. But that's okay.
19. Well, I Don't Speak Cracker. On the "nativist" (racist) reaction to Spanish-speaking people in the United States. (This 2013 post on "natives" didn't get as much traffic, but I think it's better.)
18. Word-Sex. A short post on grammar/spelling/pronunciation neurotics, inspired by a lovely reflection on language by Stephen Fry.
17. Perros Cruzados; or, Just As American as Everyone Else. A followup to my post on Sebastian de la Cruz, the eleven-year-old American kid who infuriated Anglo racists by singing the National Anthem (in English) on national television.
16. "Come With Me If You Want to Live" -- James Cameron. A variation on an ongoing issue, namely the authenticity of quotations from celebrities in memes on Facebook. This case intersects with the popular tendency to confuse actors with the roles they play.
15. You're Stupid, Therefore I'm Smart QED. Sure, it's fun to make fun of right-wing foolishness. It provides material for many liberal and progressive blog posts. But The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not My Friend, and just because someone else is wrong, it doesn't follow that I'm (or you're) right. The commenters of numerous liberal blogs and sites spend a lot of time bonding with each other over the stupidity of conservatives, which is a handy way of ignoring stupidity on one's own side. And alas, there's plenty to go around. As Nietzsche once wrote, it's a very popular popular misconception that having the courage of one's convictions (against opposition) is important -- rather, it's having the courage for an attack on one's own convictions. The post also deals with some questions about the nature of Art.
14. The Way It Really Went Down, Sort Of. Sure, heterosexual culture has its blind spots, crudities, and abuses. So does gay men's culture, which is the one I'm stuck with, even if I'm a fringe figure in it. And many of our blind spots, crudities, and abuses are depressingly similar to those of straights. Funny, that.
13. The Only Gays in the Global Village. Quite a few celebrities came out publicly this year. Some were surprising, at least to some people, others were not.
12. Groping the Truth. This post consists mostly of two long quotations from thinkers I admire. I don't know why it got so much traffic, but since the quotations have been important to me, I'm glad others apparently liked them.
11. Taking Jobs Away from Tape and Giving Them to Microchips. This post is mainly about Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano, a speculative fabulation about the effects of automation on American life. But I read it because David F. Noble wrote so positively about it in Forces of Production, his brilliant and powerful history of automation as a tool for worker control in (especially) postwar America, which inspired several posts last year.
10. The Ancient, Glittering Eye of the Beholder. Sherman Alexie is checking you out in the shower, guys. But he's not gay.
9. The Kind of Authenticity That Can't Be Faked. About a gay photographer's commodification of men's bodies, and his curious idea that he's doing something different than his colleagues. The assumption many gay men share, that only one kind of man is desirable, has long bothered me.
8. Bomb Bomb Assad, Plus Thousands of Civilians. l didn't do much on President Obama's attempt to go to war with Syria, because (luckily) Putin arranged a diplomatic solution while Obama was pretending to ask for Congress's input on the matter. There's still an unfinished post, "Everybody Adores a Quagmire," in my drafts folder, which I should just delete.
7. Because You Are Lukewarm, I Will Spew You Out of My Mouth. On a popular closeting strategy in pop music, the use of "you" in lyrics to avoid specifying the sex of the person being sung to. It's still with us.
6. They Don't Make Sheeples Like They Used To. It's often said that the trouble with the Internet is that you can't tell whether a quotation is authentic or not. I believe it's the opposite: the Internet makes fact-checking much easier than it used to be. The trouble is that most people don't bother to check.
5. Deliver Us From People. Yes, people still believe that computers are already intelligent, sentient, and will be our best friends forever.
4. Come, Let Us Reason Together. I also hear a lot about how neuroscience can explain everything about our minds. No, it can't, not yet.
3. You Made Your Bed, Now Lay in It. Grammar/spelling/punctuation obsessives are a continuing obsession of mine.
2. A Very Practical Post. One of several posts I wrote about critical thinking last year.
1. Operatic Justice. I watched the numbers on this post rise steadily, and I still don't understand why. No one wrote to comment on it, so I have no idea why so many people checked it out. It's about a local controversy involving the loss of classical-music programming on our NPR affiliate, in which my Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One, aka RWA1, was deeply involved. (Background can be found in an earlier post.) The number-crunching management tried to replace the weekly opera broadcast with "news" programs, and had to back down. This had all kinds of implications for the eternal elitism question, but also for the place of government support for the arts in the US, and right-wing ambivalence about culture.
Other subjects I covered at length, but which didn't get as much attention from readers, include several posts on gay life in today's South Africa; two or three on a recent book about gay Christians in the American South; and several on sexually variant American Indians and the problems they pose for "Western" conceptions of homosexuality. Among my own favorites are a series on the strange idea of meritocracy, and another on ongoing flaws and failures in the psychiatric construction of mental illness. drawing on two different books. I may not have written as many posts this year as I did in 2012, but I think I've written some good stuff on some matters I consider important. Thanks to everyone who reads it.
(Views on these twenty-five posts ranged from 144 views to 652.)
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Sunday, December 29, 2013
The Least of These
Today a friend and I had dinner at a local restaurant. Since it's semester break and between holidays, the town is quiet, and there weren't many other people present, so I noticed a group of people sitting nearby. They were two men and two women, all in their late 20s, and a baby about a year old. The adults were college types, possibly young professionals. I noticed that the men were holding and playing with the baby, and I supposed they were two heterosexual couples out for the evening.
But gradually I noticed that the men never handed the baby to the women: they handed him back and forth between them, bouncing him and cuddling him, and though I couldn't make out most of what they were saying, they were both talking about him and his crotchets in a familiar manner. The women commented occasionally but didn't seem to be contributing stories of their own about his sleeping habits, diaper usage, how often he ate, or the like. Gradually it dawned on me that while they were two couples, they weren't heterosexual couples: rather, they were a gay male and a gay female couple, and the baby was the son (adopted, I presume) of the two men. When they finished their meal and got up to leave, the baby stayed with the men; the women didn't even hold him for a moment. The men carried him out to their car, strapped him into his car seat, and drove away. The women went off to their own car.
This wasn't the first time I've seen gay parents in the field, so to speak, but it's still a relative novelty in Bloomington. It inspired a complex mix of feelings, but I think foremost in my mind was protectiveness.
I think one reason I've been so inactive lately is that I've been trying to decide whether or not to write about the fuss over the Duck Dynasty "patriarch" Phil Robertson. I imagine most of my American readers know the background by now, but I do get some traffic from overseas, and it's possible that those readers might not have heard. The controversy was summed ably by the blogger Ampersand at Alas, a Blog:
I think the main reason I couldn't bring myself to write about all this was that I was horribly depressed by the Floodgates of Stupid opening once again. On most sides. Rod Dreher began grinding out warnings that Christians were being persecuted by Teh Gey, just as he had so often predicted; I stopped reading after the first two or three. I would not have minded so much the gibbering of the Christian Right, complaining that Robertson was being persecuted just for bearing witness to the teachings of the Bible. I had some fun pointing out that Robertson and his supporters are clearly Cafeteria Christians who ignore Biblical teachings that don't interest them, such as the apostle Paul's declaration that long hair on a man is shameful. The Robertson men are walking, talking, embodiments of shame, going against nature according to Paul, who spoke with divine authority. The conservative Christians I mentioned this to ignored it, thus showing how devoted they are to Scripture. No surprise there.
The responses of most liberals, gay and straight, were just as dispiriting. Many of them spoke piously of the sanctity of contract: Robertson had entered into a solemn binding agreement with A&E, and he'd broken it by saying things they didn't like, so he had no right to complain. Such people didn't have much to say when I asked them if this meant that they were okay with employers controlling every aspect of employees' lives? The First Amendment protects citizens' free speech from government interference, however inadequately, but big corporations are at least as big a threat to civil liberties as big government. Did these people think it was okay for MSNBC to fire Phil Donohue for being too skeptical of the Bush Administration's rush to war in Iraq? I mean, he was an employee too. Again, there wasn't much response to this question. As usual, the reaction was mainly partisan: only people on Our Side, whichever side that happened to be, have the right to say controversial or offensive things.
My Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One did not disappoint: he was furiously indignant about Robertson's suspension. Like numerous rightwingers, he thought that Robertson shouldn't be penalized (or, apparently, even criticized) for saying what many sincere people believe about homosexuality, and after all, that's what the church teaches. Another of his Facebook friends asked him what he thought about Robertson's comments about contented darkies in old Looziana, and he admitted he hadn't read that far. After checking, he answered sullenly that not many churches support racism anymore, which was a charming non sequitur. True, even Bob Jones University has fallen from its former fierce Bible-based defense of racial separation, but a good many American whites still subscribe to the belief that Jim Crow wasn't that bad, that Southern whites viewed their black servants as family, and that now that Those People have their rights, racism just isn't a problem anymore. Robertson was surely talking for about as many people in his remarks on race as he was in his hysterical condemnation of buttsex. I didn't think to ask how many churches have to teach a particular doctrine before it becomes exempt from public criticism; I wish I had. RWA1 went on to link to a post in defense of Robertson's bigotry by Camille Paglia, whom he called a "righteous broad", and he claimed that the attack on Robertson's statements was motivated by an outbreak of class hatred. This from a man who declares that American culture is going down the toilet because of commercial culture, which would surely include Duck Dynasty's white trash aesthetic! It's also instructive to compare RWA1's reaction to Robertson to his condemnation of the Westboro Baptist Church; as I've pointed out before, WBC mainly functions as an extreme, compared to which other bigots can declare themselves moderate. And though RWA1 defended the right-wing doctor Ben Carson, who said similarly stupid and bigoted things about homosexuality, he was silent when the liberal actor Alec Baldwin got into trouble for using homophobic epithets. As I said, partisanship is obviously the deciding factor.
All this confirms my general sense of the inadequacy of American political / cultural discourse, which is nothing new but is still depressing when my nose gets rubbed in it. (I reached a similar point a little over a year ago, during the 2012 election campaign, for the same reason.) I don't think this is anything new, as I've said before, but I still believe that it can and must change. I kept thinking I should write about it, but it seemed like too big a subject, and yet for just that reason I couldn't seem to motivate myself to write about anything else. For one thing, I often have the feeling that I'm repeating myself, taking on the same cluster of topics over and over again, just because they become prominent, over and over again, in what passes for the national conversation. Or maybe just the parts of the national conversation that I see. I haven't started yet another post on The Modern Concept Of Sexual Orientation and Gender Binary for the same reason: I've written plenty about it before, and don't really have anything new to add.
But seeing those two dads and their son in the restaurant made me think of something else, which makes me think I should call this post "Why We Fight." In the last analysis I'm not all that offended by Robertson's remarks about queers; they're predictable and tired, and they don't, by themselves, do me any harm. And I've often griped about liberals' overwrought reaction to offensive speech -- Oh, how can you say such awful things!? -- which I see as self-stroking, self-displaying, self-righteous outrage not very different from that of the bigots. It certainly does nothing to foster dialogue or debate with those who differ from us; but as I've also observed, most people anywhere on the political spectrum aren't really interested in debate or dialogue. It can't be because they've tried it and they're tired of it: those I observe have never engaged in dialogue or debate that I know of. I've done it much more than most people, for all the good it does.
What has concerned me since the 1960s, when I first began delving into these issues -- the Civil Rights and antiwar movements at first, then the gay movement and feminism -- is that other people should not be hurt. I don't want to be hurt either, but I've suffered relatively little. And once I could speak up, it seemed important to do so, so that other people could be emboldened and feel less alone. Just standing together isn't enough -- I think of Stephen Vizinczey's remark about the anti-Semite who "wouldn’t look for a Jew to fight, only for a Jew to mob" (The Rules of Chaos [McCall, 1970], 208). Alas, most liberals aren't looking for fundamentalists or bigots to fight, only for one they can mob. Even in a controlled, structured situation, they can't carry on a discussion. This doesn't distinguish them from their right-wing counterparts, of course; that's the trouble. Both groups can throw up prefabricated, predigested opinions on their Facebook timelines, but if they're challenged about the content or the ideas they can only retreat to abuse and self-pity.
And yet I can't withdraw from the struggle. There are plenty of people who would feel fully justified in taking that little boy away from his fathers. Such things have happened before. They will happen again. I don't know where Phil Robertson would stand on an issue like that. Instead of throwing hissyfits about how awful he is, someone should ask him, in public. If he wants to be grossed out by the idea of two men having sex, that's his right, but I want to know what he proposes to advocate about public policy. The same goes for opponents of same-sex marriage when they pretend that they don't object to gay couples, they just want to reserve the sacrament of marriage for one man and one woman. The same thing goes for someone like Pope Francis, who talks a nice non-judgmental line about gays, but I want to know what that means in practice. Would a male or female couple with a child be welcome in his Church, or its facilities? I don't think this is that hard; finding out that it apparently is too difficult for the reality-based to handle is what depresses me.
But gradually I noticed that the men never handed the baby to the women: they handed him back and forth between them, bouncing him and cuddling him, and though I couldn't make out most of what they were saying, they were both talking about him and his crotchets in a familiar manner. The women commented occasionally but didn't seem to be contributing stories of their own about his sleeping habits, diaper usage, how often he ate, or the like. Gradually it dawned on me that while they were two couples, they weren't heterosexual couples: rather, they were a gay male and a gay female couple, and the baby was the son (adopted, I presume) of the two men. When they finished their meal and got up to leave, the baby stayed with the men; the women didn't even hold him for a moment. The men carried him out to their car, strapped him into his car seat, and drove away. The women went off to their own car.
This wasn't the first time I've seen gay parents in the field, so to speak, but it's still a relative novelty in Bloomington. It inspired a complex mix of feelings, but I think foremost in my mind was protectiveness.
I think one reason I've been so inactive lately is that I've been trying to decide whether or not to write about the fuss over the Duck Dynasty "patriarch" Phil Robertson. I imagine most of my American readers know the background by now, but I do get some traffic from overseas, and it's possible that those readers might not have heard. The controversy was summed ably by the blogger Ampersand at Alas, a Blog:
Phil Robertson, a long-bearded dude from a hugely successful A&E reality show makes racist and homophobic comments during a GQ interview, leading to objections from various lefties and lefty organizations, which A&E responded to by “suspending” Robertson (although the suspension may be “just for show“), which led to various right-wingers objecting to left-wing totalitarianism and blah blah blah you get the gist of it.Ampersand went on to sum up the issues involved quite well, saying most of what I thought about the "kerfluffle" (the word I'd have used for it), so I'll just refer interested readers to that post. Or to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote two excellent posts focusing mostly on Robertson's warped perspective on American race history, without slighting what he had to say about homos. And, as Americans who pay attention to things also probably know, A&E lifted the suspension on Friday, which can hardly have surprised anyone.
I think the main reason I couldn't bring myself to write about all this was that I was horribly depressed by the Floodgates of Stupid opening once again. On most sides. Rod Dreher began grinding out warnings that Christians were being persecuted by Teh Gey, just as he had so often predicted; I stopped reading after the first two or three. I would not have minded so much the gibbering of the Christian Right, complaining that Robertson was being persecuted just for bearing witness to the teachings of the Bible. I had some fun pointing out that Robertson and his supporters are clearly Cafeteria Christians who ignore Biblical teachings that don't interest them, such as the apostle Paul's declaration that long hair on a man is shameful. The Robertson men are walking, talking, embodiments of shame, going against nature according to Paul, who spoke with divine authority. The conservative Christians I mentioned this to ignored it, thus showing how devoted they are to Scripture. No surprise there.
The responses of most liberals, gay and straight, were just as dispiriting. Many of them spoke piously of the sanctity of contract: Robertson had entered into a solemn binding agreement with A&E, and he'd broken it by saying things they didn't like, so he had no right to complain. Such people didn't have much to say when I asked them if this meant that they were okay with employers controlling every aspect of employees' lives? The First Amendment protects citizens' free speech from government interference, however inadequately, but big corporations are at least as big a threat to civil liberties as big government. Did these people think it was okay for MSNBC to fire Phil Donohue for being too skeptical of the Bush Administration's rush to war in Iraq? I mean, he was an employee too. Again, there wasn't much response to this question. As usual, the reaction was mainly partisan: only people on Our Side, whichever side that happened to be, have the right to say controversial or offensive things.
My Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One did not disappoint: he was furiously indignant about Robertson's suspension. Like numerous rightwingers, he thought that Robertson shouldn't be penalized (or, apparently, even criticized) for saying what many sincere people believe about homosexuality, and after all, that's what the church teaches. Another of his Facebook friends asked him what he thought about Robertson's comments about contented darkies in old Looziana, and he admitted he hadn't read that far. After checking, he answered sullenly that not many churches support racism anymore, which was a charming non sequitur. True, even Bob Jones University has fallen from its former fierce Bible-based defense of racial separation, but a good many American whites still subscribe to the belief that Jim Crow wasn't that bad, that Southern whites viewed their black servants as family, and that now that Those People have their rights, racism just isn't a problem anymore. Robertson was surely talking for about as many people in his remarks on race as he was in his hysterical condemnation of buttsex. I didn't think to ask how many churches have to teach a particular doctrine before it becomes exempt from public criticism; I wish I had. RWA1 went on to link to a post in defense of Robertson's bigotry by Camille Paglia, whom he called a "righteous broad", and he claimed that the attack on Robertson's statements was motivated by an outbreak of class hatred. This from a man who declares that American culture is going down the toilet because of commercial culture, which would surely include Duck Dynasty's white trash aesthetic! It's also instructive to compare RWA1's reaction to Robertson to his condemnation of the Westboro Baptist Church; as I've pointed out before, WBC mainly functions as an extreme, compared to which other bigots can declare themselves moderate. And though RWA1 defended the right-wing doctor Ben Carson, who said similarly stupid and bigoted things about homosexuality, he was silent when the liberal actor Alec Baldwin got into trouble for using homophobic epithets. As I said, partisanship is obviously the deciding factor.
All this confirms my general sense of the inadequacy of American political / cultural discourse, which is nothing new but is still depressing when my nose gets rubbed in it. (I reached a similar point a little over a year ago, during the 2012 election campaign, for the same reason.) I don't think this is anything new, as I've said before, but I still believe that it can and must change. I kept thinking I should write about it, but it seemed like too big a subject, and yet for just that reason I couldn't seem to motivate myself to write about anything else. For one thing, I often have the feeling that I'm repeating myself, taking on the same cluster of topics over and over again, just because they become prominent, over and over again, in what passes for the national conversation. Or maybe just the parts of the national conversation that I see. I haven't started yet another post on The Modern Concept Of Sexual Orientation and Gender Binary for the same reason: I've written plenty about it before, and don't really have anything new to add.
But seeing those two dads and their son in the restaurant made me think of something else, which makes me think I should call this post "Why We Fight." In the last analysis I'm not all that offended by Robertson's remarks about queers; they're predictable and tired, and they don't, by themselves, do me any harm. And I've often griped about liberals' overwrought reaction to offensive speech -- Oh, how can you say such awful things!? -- which I see as self-stroking, self-displaying, self-righteous outrage not very different from that of the bigots. It certainly does nothing to foster dialogue or debate with those who differ from us; but as I've also observed, most people anywhere on the political spectrum aren't really interested in debate or dialogue. It can't be because they've tried it and they're tired of it: those I observe have never engaged in dialogue or debate that I know of. I've done it much more than most people, for all the good it does.
What has concerned me since the 1960s, when I first began delving into these issues -- the Civil Rights and antiwar movements at first, then the gay movement and feminism -- is that other people should not be hurt. I don't want to be hurt either, but I've suffered relatively little. And once I could speak up, it seemed important to do so, so that other people could be emboldened and feel less alone. Just standing together isn't enough -- I think of Stephen Vizinczey's remark about the anti-Semite who "wouldn’t look for a Jew to fight, only for a Jew to mob" (The Rules of Chaos [McCall, 1970], 208). Alas, most liberals aren't looking for fundamentalists or bigots to fight, only for one they can mob. Even in a controlled, structured situation, they can't carry on a discussion. This doesn't distinguish them from their right-wing counterparts, of course; that's the trouble. Both groups can throw up prefabricated, predigested opinions on their Facebook timelines, but if they're challenged about the content or the ideas they can only retreat to abuse and self-pity.
And yet I can't withdraw from the struggle. There are plenty of people who would feel fully justified in taking that little boy away from his fathers. Such things have happened before. They will happen again. I don't know where Phil Robertson would stand on an issue like that. Instead of throwing hissyfits about how awful he is, someone should ask him, in public. If he wants to be grossed out by the idea of two men having sex, that's his right, but I want to know what he proposes to advocate about public policy. The same goes for opponents of same-sex marriage when they pretend that they don't object to gay couples, they just want to reserve the sacrament of marriage for one man and one woman. The same thing goes for someone like Pope Francis, who talks a nice non-judgmental line about gays, but I want to know what that means in practice. Would a male or female couple with a child be welcome in his Church, or its facilities? I don't think this is that hard; finding out that it apparently is too difficult for the reality-based to handle is what depresses me.
Vagabond Scholar's Best of 2013
On Friday the blogger Batocchio posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup for 2013, carrying on the good work of the late Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift. Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio posts them. I'm in there, of course, but so are a good many other writers you might not have heard of. Take a look and see what you think.
I'll be putting together my own retrospective of this year at This Is So Gay, which I'll post in a few days. Meanwhile, Happy New Year to everyone!
I'll be putting together my own retrospective of this year at This Is So Gay, which I'll post in a few days. Meanwhile, Happy New Year to everyone!
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
I'd better write this before the day gets away from me altogether. The blogger Batocchio is collecting his annual list of bloggers' best posts of the year, following the late Jon Swift's tradition. I'm looking through what I wrote this year to see what I might send him, and it occurred to me that I'd be interested to know if my readers have an opinion. Do any of my posts from 2013 stand out for you? If so, I'd be delighted to hear what you think.
I was going to enable comments for this one post, to make it easier for people to weigh in, but that option seems to have disappeared from my setup on Blogger; so I'm afraid e-mail is the only way to let me know. But I'd be glad to hear from anyone who has a suggestion. Happy holidays to all.
I was going to enable comments for this one post, to make it easier for people to weigh in, but that option seems to have disappeared from my setup on Blogger; so I'm afraid e-mail is the only way to let me know. But I'd be glad to hear from anyone who has a suggestion. Happy holidays to all.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
From Our "No One Could Have Foreseen This Outcome" Department
On Friday, Whatever It Is, I'm Against It did an admirable job once again of dissecting a Presidential press conference. He doesn't get very far, being brought up short by this gem which shows the Great Collaborator's brilliance, prescience, and gritty, Chicago-style political street-smarts:
On debt ceiling chicken games: "But I’ve got to assume folks aren’t crazy enough to start that thing all over again."Well, you know what happens when you assume.
Monday, December 16, 2013
Thought for the Day
Sorry I've been inactive lately. I've been reading a lot, which is good, and doing things -- such as joining some friends to sing Christmas carols at local nursing homes on Saturday. That was an interesting experience: the irony of an atheist singing Christian music wasn't lost on me, but I was also struck by how some popular carols ("We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and "Deck the Halls") are really drinking songs. And the nineteenth-century lyrics of some of the overtly Christian songs were weird, like
Late in time behold Him come
Offspring of a Virgin's womb
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the incarnate Deity ...
I hadn't really listened to the words before, since as with "The Star Spangled Banner" most people only sing or pay attention to the first verse. It was a day well spent in many respects.
There have been a lot of things going on that I wanted to write about, without having time to write about them: more conservative Christians casting themselves as victims of gay marriage repression (plus polygamy) for example, but also some weird reactionary writing about schooling: is learning cursive writing a fundamental right? Should the college essay be abolished? The wack factor is strong with these young ones.
I'll try to get to some of these presently. For now, I wanted to mention a small epiphany I had this morning, listening to Democracy Now before I went to work. I've always been bothered by the Bush gang's use of "homeland" as patriotic, warmongering propaganda, but couldn't quite put my finger on what it made me think of. Today the word "homeland" recurred in a DN report on Nelson Mandela's funeral. For example, in this interview with Amy Goodman's brother David:
Qunu was also in the heart of a former apartheid Bantustan, or homeland, called the Transkei, which when I was in South Africa at the height of apartheid in the ’80s was—had actually been declared an independent country by South Africa, populated only by black South Africans. It was a way of dispossessing blacks of citizenship in their home country. And it had all the trappings of a country. I had to pass through border posts, had my passport stamped, and there was a Transkei defense force. And it—this so-called independent homeland, which no one recognized except South Africa, actually existed until Mandela became president in 1994.That was why I had such negative associations with the word, so that when the Department of Homeland Security slouched into the light I reflexively reacted against it: it was Newspeak from another repressive regime. There were plenty of other reasons to dislike the term, but I think the South African connection was a strong one for me.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Dynamic Tension Turns an Eighty Pound Weakling into a Stasist King of the Beach
I decided not to read any more of Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (The Free Press, 1998). Maybe I'll be missing something really great, but unless she changed her approach after the first eighty pages, I doubt it. Here are a few more bits that show why I can't take her too seriously.
An airport, to say nothing of the airlines it serves, can hardly be a dynamist enterprise. It requires centralized, long-term planning. There's no way it could be dynamist, but then the older Stapleton airport is no different in that regard. I wonder what folks around Denver thought about it when it was built? Leaving for the airport forty-five minutes before your flight departs could well have seemed too much then. (Since the 9/11 attacks, which took place after this book was published, increased "security" measures have made it necessary to arrive early anyhow.)
Finally, Postrel quotes with approval the right-wing writer (later to be a Bush II flunky) David Frum:
This example shows how lopsided Postrel's stasist vs. dynamist categories are, and it's why I decided to quit reading her. You can't have dynamism without some stable institutions, and a government is the best bet (though not a perfect one, especially when it is taken over by business types) over the long haul. Thrift and prudence means that you expect some stability in an unstable world, or why bother to save and invest? Of course it's possible for control and stability to go too far, just as dynamism can go too far; but neither one can be rejected altogether. Postrel writes as though she really thinks that stasis should be abandoned altogether, and that's ridiculous.
Work life itself is different from a generation ago – freer and more fluid, with greater risk and greater reward – and the general public is much more aware of the textures of how markets actually work [35].I can't help wondering whose "work life" Postrel meant here. For most people, as far up the scale as middle management, work is "freer and more fluid" only in terms of greater job insecurity. Today's business ideal is, as Noam Chomsky has often put it, that you should never be able to assume that just because you had a job today, you'll have a job tomorrow. At the same time, the degree of control exercised by employers has increased steadily over the past few decades: drug testing, psychological testing, background checks, and computerized surveillance of workers' "productivity", right down to counting the number of keystrokes one types in. Lately I've helped some friends apply online for entry-level, menial kitchen jobs, and I've noticed that even if you're going to wash pots and pans in the back of a chain restaurant, you're expected to answer a long (100 questions or so) personality assay. I suspect that Postrel is thinking only of a select group of workers, the kind often called "the creative class," but even if so, she's tripping. And things have only gotten worse since The Future and Its Enemies was published. Next slide:
Rather than try to address worst-case scenarios with technocratic schemes that will create legacies of their own, he [Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation] urges an evolutionary, common law approach. “Almost always,” he says, “the time-tested laws and legal principles we already have in place are more than adequate to address the new medium” [46]As I pointed out in my previous post on Postrel, she seems pretty sloppy in classifying ideas and behavior. Hanging onto "time-tested laws and legal principles" sounds stasist by her criteria, but she seems to take Godwin's remark as an example of dynamism.
Consider the infamous Denver International Airport, (DIA). Aviation officials touted the $4.6 billion project as essential to keep up with the region’s growth. They promised it would be a vast improvement over the old Stapleton Airport, which was often locked in by bad weather. But its sponsors foisted DIA on unwilling customers. The airport is twenty-five miles outside Denver, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, while Stapleton was just fifteen minutes from downtown. To make matters worse, there are no hotels neaer DIA. And the new airport’s cost per passenger is somewhere between $11.75 and $11.84, depending on how you count – substantially more than either the $4.59 at Stapleton or the $9.91 promised by former mayor Federico Peña. Frequent travelers resent the inconvenience and the generally higher ticket prices. “I liked Stapleton better,” one told The Denver Post. “You would literally leave about 45 minutes before your plane departed. With DIA, you have to leave an hour and a half before. “ A flight attendant expressed a common sentiment: “It’s a beautiful airport. But we hate it” [76].These people are obviously statists, technophobes, and Luddites. When people resist the installation of a Walmart in their area, Postrel accuses them of stasism. Maybe the objections to DIA are okay because they're after the fact and ineffective? Change is good, says Postrel, except when it isn't. But I can't tell how she decides which is which. I doubt she can either.
An airport, to say nothing of the airlines it serves, can hardly be a dynamist enterprise. It requires centralized, long-term planning. There's no way it could be dynamist, but then the older Stapleton airport is no different in that regard. I wonder what folks around Denver thought about it when it was built? Leaving for the airport forty-five minutes before your flight departs could well have seemed too much then. (Since the 9/11 attacks, which took place after this book was published, increased "security" measures have made it necessary to arrive early anyhow.)
Finally, Postrel quotes with approval the right-wing writer (later to be a Bush II flunky) David Frum:
Why be thrifty any longer when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligately you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow, and rescues you when you stay into a foreign battle zone? [77]I read Frum's Dead Right, from which this quotation comes, and I don't remember its being this delusional. When there was no social safety net to speak of, most people didn't manage to provide for themselves very well -- that's why Social Security and other such programs were instituted. One reason why personal thrift is not a reliable means to a comfortable old age is that it relies on institutions, and those institutions turned out to be unreliable. In the Great Depression people who had saved lost their money when banks failed. That's why bank deposits were insured, to protect people against irresponsible bankers. Banks aren't supposed to be dynamist institutions. When regulations were loosened at the close of the 20th century, people who had thriftily and prudently put their money into investments against their retirement lost money again, which is why privatizing Social Security is a bad idea. Whom do you trust more, Wall Street or the Federal Government? Like most small-government rightists, I would expect both Frum and Postrel to be the first to yammer for government disaster relief if their houses were flooded. Insecurity is for other people, not for them.
This example shows how lopsided Postrel's stasist vs. dynamist categories are, and it's why I decided to quit reading her. You can't have dynamism without some stable institutions, and a government is the best bet (though not a perfect one, especially when it is taken over by business types) over the long haul. Thrift and prudence means that you expect some stability in an unstable world, or why bother to save and invest? Of course it's possible for control and stability to go too far, just as dynamism can go too far; but neither one can be rejected altogether. Postrel writes as though she really thinks that stasis should be abandoned altogether, and that's ridiculous.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
