A Snarkfree Suggestion

Taking my cue from Bob Somerby, I suggest that you copy the following information and send it on to at least five people, preferably people who don’t agree with you about health care.

Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:

United States: $7290
United Kingdom: $2992

Life expectancy, 2007:

United States 78.0
United Kingdom: 78.8

An Unfortunate Passage

While waiting for Snow Leopard to finish installing itself on my computer, I idly paged through my old paperback copy of Hannah Arendt’s Origin of Totalitarianism. I had highlighted a passage, which I apparently had somehow guessed would become highly relevant 45 years later:

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that the audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

One is supposed to sympathize with the just plain folk who shout down their representatives at townhall meetings and dream out loud about murdering the goddam liberals before they get a chance to pull the plug on grandma or herd the white Christians into concentration camps. Human actions and ideas have their explanations, after all. There’s a reason for all the paranoia and cultural despair; and, anyhow, it’s political error to scorn so large a portion of the electorate. As of 11:30 P.M. September 1, however, I don’t feel sympathy for the shock troops of the Great American Idiocracy. It’s not that I expect that the mob will prevail exactly. This is not Germany in the 30s: the reactionary program of establishing a white trash republic on these shores once and for all is demographically implausible. Unfortunately, there may be enough of ‘em out there to make the country ungovernable and bring about a paralysis that guarantees a miserable future for everybody. That’s what keeps me awake at night.

Epidemiological Surveillance

One argument in favor of telling the truth is that lying is ultimately self-defeating. It’s worth making claims about matters of fact because somebody is liable to believe what you say. Lying, especially habitual lying, devalues speech. As Robert J. Fogelin used to point out, however, people do lie, quite frequently as a matter of fact, but we nevertheless go on talking. The situation recalls a reply to an objection formerly advanced about a different vice. When told if he didn’t stop, he’d go blind, Woody Allen promised to quit after he got nearsighted.

Human society would hardly be possible if it could be easily subverted by individual acts of bad behavior. Indeed, since a certain amount of skullduggery is built into the machinery, displays of virtue can be entirely more threatening to the status quo than any rampaging murderer. No serial killer ever raised as big a ruckus as Martin Luther King. Of course most ethical behavior is not so alarming. Most of it is largely invisible, and what does surface is either treated as a vestige of a long-dead past like Walter Cronkite’s journalism or else is chalked up to the intervention of an angel of the Lord or the bite of a radioactive spider—religion and/or science fiction. Objectivity and fairness, in particular, are widely regarded to be impractical, either as a matter of principle or because, as one television anchor explained the other day, the threat of losing millions of dollars in income for doing your duty amounts to force majeure. You just can’t expect anybody but a Don Quixote to try to unsell their souls as long as there are several years left in the term of the contract. But are there circumstances under which ethical behavior can infect a diseased social system? Is morality ever catching?

At various times in history, justice, fairness, and disinterest appeared as marvelous new inventions. Societies paralyzed by the tetanus of internecine strife the ancients called stasis found a way out through the intervention of prophets and lawgivers, though it says something about habitual human behavior that disinterested benevolence was commonly associated with supernatural intervention or madness. One of the reasons that modern states emerged from the interminable savagery of early medieval knighthood was that a lawful monarch, be he ever so hypocritical, was preferable to the thugs in the castles so long as something like justice arrived with his regime. Indeed, even the thugs recognized the advantage of such a system, which is part of the reason that the kings eventually prevailed over the dukes.

Well, we don’t live in the Dark Ages, though barbarism and religion are obviously on the march and there is something feudal about the great corporations whose masters claim a right not merely to influence, but sovereignty in the nation. Is it possible that public spirit could spread like a new strain of flu among such swine? I’m not saying it’s likely—if anybody is immune to the virus of integrity, it’s surely Senator Grassley—but I wanted to point out that it has happened before.

The Decision

Obama is quite right to point out that the finances of the United States and the economic health of the nation absolutely demand that we get a handle on health care costs and do so in short order. To this material imperative, one should add the moral obligation we all have of finally addressing the human needs of our fellow citizens in an adequate way. But there is a yet more pressing reason why the system must be reformed this year, a political reason. What’s at stake is the future of the nation as a going concern. It’s not just that defeat of health care in the face of a clear public mandate for change would be a clear proof that the nation is not even minimally democratic. Such an outcome would also and disastrously represent a victory for overt corruption and blatant thuggery. Can we really afford so dramatic a demonstration that our legislature is under the thumb of silver-haired whores and semi-literate ideologues? And what kind of a society can we expect to evolve into if we allow the disruption of our political debate by mobs of crazy, potentially violent, and heavily armed people who have been whipped into nativist fury by nonstop black propaganda? If incredibly cynical P.R. men really can convince people that the majority party in the United States is out to snuff your grandma, we’re simply toast.

Another Argument about a Pig

The American right is currently making yet another effort to show that FDR’s policies did nothing to ameliorate or end the Depression. Their argument, which has the virtue (for a conservative) of a lack of originality, is that it was only World War II that decisively ended the economic slump. I leave it to the economic historians to reprint the relevant graphs and charts that show that things did get markedly better in the wake of the first years of the New Deal, but I want to highlight the essential contradiction of the Republican argument. The first part of their argument is a claim that deficit spending, i.e. Keynesianism, doesn’t work, but the second part of their argument is that it does. War, after all, goes one better than Keynes’ recommendation that the government pay people to dig holes and then fill them up again. It simply blows holes in things all over the place. At the very least, the rightists ought to address the question of how the war ended the Depression if it wasn’t by ending the demand deficit.

In fact, the Republicans are perfectly aware that government deficit spending benefits the economy during times of recession. They just prefer military spending, if not outright war, as the vehicle of stimulus. There is also another peculiarity about their version of Keynes. They haven’t gone along with the second half of the Keynesian prescription: running a surplus when times are good. In my lifetime, only the Democrats have followed that suggestion.

Explanations

Crucial social ideals are not maintained by the magic of personal virtue. Something like tout comprendre c'est tout pardoner applies to good as well as evil acts. I have frequently asserted that American journalism is not atrocious because of the venality of its personnel, but because of the viciousness of a system that promotes and rewards bad behavior. Moralizing about the failings of this or that pretty face on cable amounts to blaming the electrons for the short circuit. Thing is, the same logic applies in reverse. If Cronkite and the other luminaries of the early decades of T.V. news were especially admirable, we should not forget that their careers were made possible because the big company executives temporarily tolerated an integrity from their employees they did not possess themselves—David Sarnoff, after all, was every bit as deplorable a human being as Rupert Murdock. Television news was a loss leader. If the execs of the 50s and 60s had insisted on making a profit from it, it would probably have been as bad as the current cheesy mix of entertainment, advertising, and propaganda.

Both virtue and vice are explicable, which does not mean, however, that we aren’t entitled to praise the former and despise the later.

An Anniversary Card that Demonstrates Why I Never Got Hired at Hallmark

I get the same melancholic feeling looking at Armstrong's footprint as I do thinking about paleolithic grave sites where a handful of shells and beads have been left on the remains of a child. Both vestiges are protests against mortality. The fantasy of manned space flight is a counterfactual assertion of a cosmic destiny for our species just as funeral customs reflect the equally vain hope of personal survival. Unless we find some pretty fundamental loopholes in the limitations that physics puts on technology, we are never going to go to the stars. I assume we could put men on Mars at immense expense, but then I guess the Egyptians could have built a pyramid even larger than the pyramid of Cheops. Meanwhile, for the record, teflon was invented in the 1930s.

The Great Beast: the Real Problem with the Demos

The classic nightmare of the conservatives is that the people will rise up and take their money. Which is the main reason they have the “this is a republic, not a democracy” bit on speed dial. On the evidence, however, an aroused People are more likely to prove reactionary than radical; and for every instance of redistribution at gunpoint one can find several cases of mobs demanding a restoration of the old order. The melody of the rough music is often enough the Horst Wessel song. It takes an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and money to teach the majority of individuals anything, so that activating existing prejudices will always be easier than mobilizing informed self interest. Republicans understand this basic fact much better than Democrats and practice on the simplicity of their constituents with much greater efficiency.

To Hume it may Concern

One can only learn from experience when there is something to learn. As a general method, empiricism is simply a recipe for superstition. Indeed, the history of religion is in large part the history of an interminable research project, an attempt to figure out the wishes of the gods. The ancients were quite methodical about it: the Mesopotamians carefully correlated the configurations of the stars and the shapes of the livers of sacrificed animals with what happened later, and the Roman priesthoods and the Senate itself noted the political results of prayers and supplications to the various gods and tried to learn from experience as best they could. One thinks of theology as a largely deductive operation, but a great deal of scholastic logic chopping is devoted to explaining away the apparent failures of an underlying inductive methodology.

You often hear that science is made possible by the faith that the universe operates according to regular and comprehensible laws, but that thesis can only be valid to the extent that a certain amount of hopefulness is indeed a psychological precondition for persistent inquiry. Nevertheless, the fact that the fisherman who goes on fishing is the one who may actually catch something doesn’t mean that the optimism that motivated his patience is really warranted. After all, as we all know, lots of the time it isn’t, just as for the most part the things in the universe don’t make any damned sense at all. Induction works, when it works, which isn’t often, not because of some theological or metaphysical principle but because detectable regularities do govern a tiny proportion of possible cases. It looks like it works in general only because in general we focus on the exceptions, the relationship between the temperature and volume of a gas, for example, instead of the relationship between a person’s temperament and the position of the planets at her birth or the likelihood of my coming down with a cold and the color of my shirt last Thursday. The much-mooted problem of induction, like the unreasonable utility of mathematics, is a chimera, an accident of sampling. I thought you should know.

What is Corruption?

We let our public people and ourselves off easy. If a congressman hasn’t violated a statute in a provable way, we won’t call him corrupt. For several centuries, however, political corruption wasn’t understood as a crime, though it often enough resulted in bribery and other specific crimes. Corruption was simply the commandeering of public institutions by private interests. By that definition, of course, our entire political system is deeply corrupt. Indeed, under the effective, as opposed to the paper constitution of the nation, the corporations are the fourth branch of the Federal government; and any attempt to limit their power and income amounts to an insurrection. The health care companies and arms manufacturers have a prerogative right to their exorbitant profits, which is why their supporters, who have internalized the American religion of corruption, are sincerely scandalized by suggestions that the public good should sometimes impinge on private interests. Thus in the current debate about health care, we hear that a public option is impermissible because it would provide better services at lower cost than private insurance firms and thus lower their returns to capital or even drive them out of business.

Intelligent Design: Part Deux

Although I’ve been frequently told that the sage does nothing and everything is accomplished, I have reason to believe that the non-sages sometimes do get results by doing something and that they haven’t just been following their noses all this time. Paleontology certainly suggests that the pace of cultural evolution—the development of new tools, the succession of artistic styles—picked up sharply someplace between homo erectus and yours truly with the implication that a greatly increased capacity for insight and planning was involved in that giddy acceleration. In the history and prehistory of our species, intelligent design has resulted in rapid change, in drastic contrast to biological evolution, whose incredibly slow pace reflects the absence of even a moronic mind.

Various people have pointed out the irony that the same people who insist that a divine intellect has to be postulated to explain the emergence of the machinery of life are big fans of the master role of non-intelligent processes in the working of human societies. Automatic market mechanisms are trusted to turn blind selfishness into effective cooperation. Simple instincts allow termites to build arches from their own shit; why look for a fundamentally different kind of explanation for the rise of Microsoft? Even scholarly non-ideologues sometimes show a predilection for this sort of thing. Hence attempts to reconstruct the early history of agriculture usually assume that these developments just naturally happened because hunter-gathers dropped seeds near their huts and one thing led to another. Or consider accounts of the invention of writing that finesse the transition from pictographs to a system that can actually reproduce a specific language as if this process didn’t require figuring out something that wasn’t obvious at all.

Historians of technology sometimes distinguish inventions that want to be invented from those that don’t, airplanes as opposed to helicopters, buttons as opposed to zippers; and there may be something worthwhile about this idea. Nevertheless, it is obvious that not only all innovation, but also the ordinary operations of civilization require thoughtfulness. Heraclitus asserted that every cow is driven to pasture by a blow. That may work for cattle, but no human economic system would even succeed in getting its floors swept if the janitors didn’t have an idea of what it meant to clean things up. Rewards and punishments—the cattle prods and the cookies—motivate systems of action patterned by language. They are useless in the absence of higher mental functions. For better or worse, we just don’t act like ants in an anthill, a fact that can be verified by comparing San Francisco to the actual anthills described in Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson’s most recent book, Superorganism. All that said, arriving at a new pattern of behavior does require a more conscious intrusion of mind into habit than routine work; and developing and implementing a cooperative plan is still more problematic, which is probably part of the reason we’d like to think that it’s all automatic.

The definitive tome on the history of premeditation in human history remains to be written. It’s certainly the right time to address the topic because, short of relying on the mercy of God, current circumstances demand that we get together and figure out how to fly the plane. We need to look at the precedents. Autopilot is simply not an option in the face of resource depletion and environmental degradation, not to mention the California constitution. Instinct and custom are far more comfortable, far more loveable, than thoughtful action; and in eras when the consequences of bad innovations are likely to be worse than the results of going with the flow, automatism may even be adaptive. Under contemporary conditions, however, the principled rejection of reason and responsibility we call conservatism is simply suicidal, though, to be fair, you have to admit it doesn’t require as much committee work as doing the right thing.

Friendly Advice

With all the problems that Obama will face as he takes office, prosecuting members of the previous administration for their many violations of the law will surely be a low priority. It would seem vindictive and unnecessary. If I were a principled and canny Republican, however, I would insist on a full accounting with all the trimmings even if it meant that some of my friends and colleagues did hard time. Allowing the guilty to escape may seem like a good thing from a partisan point of view, but what it would actually do is establish the precedent that the executive can get away with anything. The last administration invented a utopian solution to many of its problems by essentially legalizing crime, but the Republicans won’t like it when and if the Democrats play by the same rules or lack of rules. I won’t like it either.

I’d like to believe that the people who are currently taking power are morally better than those who they are supplanting, if only because they don’t have to meet a very high standard to do that. However, I also suspect that part of the reason the old order broke the law so freely was not simply a function of their ideology, which at its margins was pretty close to a combination of the Fuhrer Prinzip and a Tammany Hall license to steal, but also resulted from a generally low level of competence. Criminals tend to be stupid and conversely the stupid tend to be criminals. Just as man-eating lions are usually just the animals too old and sick to take their proper prey, dangerous men are often simply not clever enough or disciplined enough to achieve their aims in a constructive, lawful manner. For all their jabbering about John Galt, nothing so characterized the outgoing bunch more than its consistent mediocrity. They weren’t good at much and stole because they didn’t know how to earn. But even if the new men and women turn out to be more able, even considerably more able, and therefore capable of accomplishing their aims without cheating, the power of precedent is so great that I’m afraid that the executive will continue to abuse the Constitution under their charge. If Chaney and Gonzales go to prison, that will be less likely. Maybe somebody at the National Review could make this point in a featured article…

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Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray.

In Backgammon, It’s Called the Running Game

McCain is suspending his campaign for the moment and calling for a postponement of the Friday debate. The dramatic (or erratic) moves are understandable granted the marked decline in his fortunes that has taken place over the last ten days or so as the financial crisis made even the lowest information voters notice how badly his party has handled the economy. He’s in the situation of a chess player with a bad position who complicates the game even at the cost of making inferior moves—a perfectly rational strategy that many losing candidates have tried, though it does seem to work better in chess than politics. McCain’s desperation did not just begin, however.

The Palin nomination was already a capitulation to circumstances, a Pearl Harbor attack that inflicted temporary pain on the enemy but probably guaranteed defeat. So long as McCain had real faith in his prospects, he kept his distance from the crazy right faction of his own party and tried to run as a moderate. By signing up Palin, he ensured himself of the fanatical support of 40% of the country; but he also gave up on winning the middle. The most probable result of his surrender to the Culture War right is an increased prospect of losing less badly purchased at the cost of forgoing any reasonable chance of eking out a win.

Der Alte

John McCain got confused again last night in an interview about American foreign policy towards Latin America. The details aren’t particularly important—nobody really thinks McCain is unaware that Spain is in Europe. He’s not Palin, after all—but the episode and the somewhat panic-stricken way his spokesmen covered for him is getting to be routine. There’s nothing mysterious going on. McCain is simply getting senile, a fact that is hardly surprising in view of the man’s age and medical history. Time, torture, boxing, cancer treatments, and heavy drinking will do that to you. And blaming the guy is also beside the point since he has far more serious things to apologize for than mere decrepitude. The question is, do we really want to witness a long process of increasingly embarrassing public gaffes, all relentlessly denied and covered up by the PR sharks while a subterranean succession-struggle plays out in the White House basement? That wouldn’t be a very pleasant spectacle even in settled times, but it might be fatal in an age in which great power competition is awakening from its post-Cold War slumber and economic and environmental crisis require an energetic response.

Of course it is possible that McCain’s mental state is better than it appears to be, and the remarkably uninformed or merely strange remarks he makes reflect his previous level of ignorance rather than the advent of dementia. If so, his age remains a serious issue because one can hardly expect a 72-year old to learn on the job—heck, I’m 63 and you can’t teach me anything! McCain is certainly not going to rethink his assumptions or listen to new ideas. What you get it is some fraction of what the man was ten or twenty years ago; and if that wasn’t all that much to begin with, you can’t expect that McCain will turn out to be an American version of Adenauer, Mandela, or Gladstone.

By the way, is it decent or patriotic for Republicans to support the candidacy of an obviously incompetent man? Why do they keep nominating people like that?

A Proverb from the Chinese

The Federal bailout of AIG is demonstrating an important point: the alternative to regulation is not laissez faire; it’s socialism.

You Can’t Get Behind the Man Behind

A right-wing hippy of my acquaintance was giving Obama trouble the other day for trying to buy votes. I didn’t immediately get what she meant, until she explained that the Obama tax plan, which, according to her, would reduce the tax bill of families making around $40,000 by a couple of thousand, counted as a bribe . I was going to point out that the McCain plan, which would save billionaires something like half a million a year, was presumably pretty motivating for them as well. In fact, the issue had little to do with pandering. The lady simply doesn’t believe that income tax should be progressive in the first place. Along with astrology, astral bodies, acupuncture, and seventy-two other kinds of woo, she buys into the flat tax mythology, presumably because, due to a failure of nerve, she chickened out of going all the way to belief in the flat earth. To be fair, she actually doesn’t believe in any kind of income tax. Indeed, for her the very idea of an income tax is so unconstitutional, even an amendment to the Constitution couldn’t make it constitutional.

To me it very much matters to make the following point clearly: Obama’s tax policy is not buying votes or anything of the sort. In favoring a tax system that redistributes wealth, he’s simply supporting policies that are an integral part of the general outlook of the Democratic Party as they are of most political parties of the left, center, and moderate right all over the world. Similarly, Democrats are hardly pandering or buying votes when the call for universal health care. They’ve been calling for that since Truman’s time at least. If you are opposed to progressive taxation, health care, or indoor plumbing, you are of course perfectly within your rights to do so; but it hardly seems fair to equate support for such things with what Republicans do when they grudgingly come up phony health care schemes or float the notion of a gas tax holiday they don’t believe in themselves. That’s pandering. What Obama is proposing may or may not be wise policy, but it is in line with what he and most Democrats think is right.

Now Democratic candidates certainly hope that people will vote for them because of the benefits they will gain from their policies. I’m not clear what’s wrong with that. Or is the problem that the wrong sort of people will benefit? After all, Republican policies are also aimed to benefit somebody, just not the majority of people. The structural difference between the two parties is that the more democratic party doesn’t have to lie as much as the oligarchic party to get elected by popular vote. McCain is setting some kind of record for bald-faced lying on television; but the fundamental reason he is lying is not a character flaw, but a deep political necessity. When Democrats get dishonest, as they surely do from time to time, it is a moral defect. It isn’t a part of the partly platform.

A Whiff of Sauerkraut

It is a misunderstanding to suppose that human beings descended from chimpanzees or gorillas. In reality, both modern apes and modern men have a common ancestor, albeit one that would have struck an observer as distinctly apelike. Anybody who suggests that the current administration is analogous to Hitler’s regime falls into a similar error. Bush and his cohort are obviously not Nazis. They simply share a common ancestor with them, namely, the Second Reich. Bush is not very much like Hitler, but he’s quite a bit like Kaiser Wilhelm II and he’s surrounded by quite a few Ludendorff wannabes—McCain is more in the tradition of Hindenburg, a dullard who looks good in a uniform. Unfortunately, many of the people with a spiritual kinship with pre-1918 Germany are not part of the Bush administration or even necessarily Republicans.

It is well known that the American system of postgraduate education follows a German model. Unfortunately, the Ph.D. is not the only institution we borrowed from them. Our military was formed on a German model. If you read old American army textbooks on the conduct of war, you’ll find that our ideas of how to deal with insurgencies are distinctly Teutonic, featuring bland instructions to take civilian hostages and burn down villages. The similarities are small wonder since the infantry manuals recommend, with footnotes, no less, the methods the Germans used against French guerillas during the Franco-Prussian War and against the Herero in Southwest Africa. Of course all modern militaries borrowed a lot from the technical innovations of the German military. What worries me, however, is not that our men go into battle in German helmets or that we have a general staff, but the way in which the military has become for us as it was for the Germans: the moral model for national behavior.

The German Empire was characterized less by an ideology than by a set of practices, a general admiration for authority and violence, and a tendency to automatically justify any action by appeal to military necessity. Long before Bush and Chaney dispensed with international law, the Germans were abusing prisoners, engaging in preventative wars, and using terror weapons such as gas, not because a threat to national survival justified these transgressions but because victory was thought to depend upon them. The precedent for our occupation of Iraq was the German occupation of Belgium and Eastern Europe in the years 1914 to 1918; and the methods of occupation were not dissimilar either, i.e., they were both characterized by the extraordinary levels of incompetence and corruption that are routine in areas run by military fiat. The Republicans may give lip service to the virtues of a competitive market economy, but in giving carte blanche to the military industrial complex they are really opting for a command economy.

The Teutonic/American idealization of the military has a disastrous effect on strategy, which, contrary to the usual bleat, is not about winning victories. That’s simply not the point of rational policy. It’s the object of a game of tin soldiers. Serious strategy may certainly include resort to violence, but the German example shows what you get when you make a fetish of the glorious decisive battle. Before World War I, the military philosophers of the Reich endlessly dreamed of repeating the triumph of Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae and contemplated with rapture (if not tumescence) the neat diagram of his paradigmatic double envelopment. They spent much less time noticing that Carthage lost the war. Many Americans also make a fetish of purely operational and technical military efficiency as if a big, smash up victory solves all problems. Of course, at least in the case of the Second Iraq War, it was the civilian authorities who imposed this mind set on the military and not the other way around since many professionals in the American army have a far more adult conception of war and politics than the average right-wing politician.

In the absence of a sense of specific purpose, a military will more or less inevitably pursue the abstract, almost tautological goal of absolute power. That’s what happened in Germany before World War I. In the quest for the ability to crush all enemies, the Germans guaranteed a non-stop arms race that they could only lose and alienated much of the world. Our situation is similar. We keep pouring money into the military, not to defend ourselves from any particular threat, but in pursuit of the dream of total world dominance. Now it may be that we can afford to spend more money on arms than the rest of the world put together, though I doubt if that will remain possible indefinitely or even very much longer; but unless you plan on actually dominating the world, all the money you spend over and beyond what it would take to remain safe is in any case a sheer waste. Worse, since the other countries are aware of what we are doing and will take steps to match our endless build up. The most important strategic consequence of the anti-ballistic missile program, for example, is likely to be an increase in the number of Russian and, more importantly, Chinese weapons aimed at us. Our endless quest for overwhelming power also has the effect of encouraging the development of non-conventional ways to thwart our power. Terrorism is the most obvious asymmetric response. There will be others.

Northern Lights

Obama is certainly wise to avoid commenting on the Palin situation. It’s not a good idea to interfere when your opponent is committing political suicide. You will only impede the process. But I strongly disagree with the idea that private citizens are somehow out of line when they address the many policy issues that are raised by recent developments. Democrats aren’t the ones who like to hide under beds with tape recorders. We are entitled, however, to read the papers.

To be absolutely clear, nobody on the planet is trying to give a pregnant teenager a hard time. We are simply pointing out

a. The rampant hypocrisy of Governor Palin in regards to sex education and abortion. c.f. bragging about her daughter's supposedly free choice and also her own free choice about her own pregnancy even though she is on the record as opposing the right of any woman to have a choice in such situations.

b. The way in which the whole affair points out the stupidity of abstinence only sex education.

c. The willingness of Palin to mislead the public--she only fessed up to the family problem because of pressure from Daily Kos and a few other journalists. She obviously planned to keep her daughter's pregnancy quiet until after the election.

d. The political cynicism of McCain in making a rash and spasmodic decision about a running mate for temporary political advantage.

e. The remarkable ineptitude shown by McCain and his staff in handling the whole affair.

f. The way in which picking Palin reflects McCain's subservience to the radical Christian right. Far from being a soaring eagle, he is only a bird in a gilded cage.

For these and many other reasons, the Palin problem is not going to go away, nor should it. But, once again, nobody, except Mrs Palin, of course, is guilty of willfully putting a pregnant teenager through the wringer.

A Face the Color of Sepulchers

The issue that matters in the forthcoming election is not about foreign policy or health care or, more generally, the choice between Neoliberalism and Social Democracy, though these and many other issues are in play. The great question of the day is about whether the United States will be an ethnic state dominated by white males or an inclusive state where everyone is welcome and citizenship depends upon allegiance to a set of ideas. If McCain, wins at a time when his party has made a mess of everything for the last eight years, the reason can only be that a decisive mass of Americans has opted for a racial definition of membership in the nation. It’s almost as if the Republicans, driven by an unconscious logic, have selected a candidate so obviously inferior in order to make things as clear as possible. Just as committed monarchists best show their principles by supporting the birthright of a moronic prince, nativist Conservatives want to make the point that even a senile mediocrity is preferable to a brilliant and dynamic black man so long as he is white. And McCain is perfect for that role.

I don’t mean to claim that there aren’t lots of other reasons that people will vote for McCain. If you are very well off, the Republican tax plan and hostility to unions will mean money in your pockets. The Republican foreign policy is also a meal ticket for a significant group of people. And there are plenty of non-racist innocents who continue to believe against all the evidence that the Republicans stand for small government, sound economic policies, and individual rights, though their actions mark them as cynical authoritarians. If there are any rational reasons to vote for McCain, however, they have to be balanced against the consequences of going down the road of culture war. White supremacy, which really means the dominance of a certain kind of white, has no future. Whitebread Americans are shortly going to be in the minority in this country, and the Republican policy of us versus them is going to look pretty foolish once the tables are turned and they decisively outnumber us. I suppose somebody might argue that the Call of the Blood really is more important than the merely rational appeal of Enlightenment ideals; but from a practical point of view, cultural politics is a dead end. A multi-cultural America may well fail, but a monochrome America is not possible and just saying never is a prescription for disaster. Voting Republican at this historical juncture is simply unpatriotic.