Me? "Radical"?

Here we were, my very counter-cultural 30-something friend Sarah and I strolling near work when she asks, “How do you stay radical as you get older?”

I’m 56 and I was bemused by the question because I can’t possibly be “older” yet, but of course I am. More to the point, though, I can’t be “radical” as I understand it. Bougee? Oh, yes. But “radical”? No, I flirted with and then backed away from that route, it seems to me, about 30 years ago or more.

She pressed the point. A bit flummoxed, I babbled something about . . . . Actually, I don’t remember what I said because I was either lamely trying to live up to the compliment or more modestly insisting that I’m sort of in the world, but not fully of it, like so many of us in the Bay Area. No biggee.

A few days later, I ran into Sarah and asked, “What do you mean by ‘radical’ and what is it in me that suggests ‘radical’ to you?” She just said she knows it when she sees it; that it’s a “way of encountering the world.”

So I asked my wife. “You’re not a radical,” she said. “Look it up.” Radically, I avoid dictionaries, preferring a pretty good ear for how words are used idiomatically.

So how do we understand this word? To progressives of my generation, a “radical” was someone who plotted the overthrow of the “capitalist-pig police-state” by nearly any means necessary, only barely acknowledging that a pacifist could be within their ranks. Now, progressives don’t seem to use the term much. Where are the radicals today? Even the Occupy movement doesn’t seem to be “radical” . . . yet.

In fact, we progressives have let conservative US Americans commandeer “radical” so that now their ilk bandy it about with vigor as a pejorative, as hyperbole to discredit even the most moderate liberals. President Obama, for example, is called a “radical” by the foam-at-the-mouth crowd on the right wing. If President Obama is a radical . . . then the term has lost its meaning. Like "awesome."

Still, I have a young friend, SB, whose lovely little voice vocalizes lots of terms of endearment and some radical ideas, particularly about capitalism, war, equity, gender and pronouns. My wife and I call SB our “sweet and gentle” radical. This, of course, presumes that our impression of radicals does not generally include sweetness and light. And that would be true. I think of radicals as lean, angry types with perpetually clenched teeth, bandana’d faces protected from tear gas, necks straining as one arm flings a rock.

To borrow an insight from Russell Baker, calling  myself a radical would seem . . . immodest certainly. Like looking in the mirror and insisting I’m handsome or clever, kind to children and the elderly, or good in the sack. It’s for others to say, not me.

And sometimes those others are mistaken. Sarah sees something in me that I just can’t imagine could be called “radical.” But I appreciate her regard.

Look, I’m married -- heterosexually and even within the same ethnicity; we own a home; we are gourmands, aka, “foodies” following the trends; we read the New Yorker and watch foreign films; when we travel, it’s to Europe; I teach the children of the “1%” in a private high school with a tuition of $34k. Radical? How could it be?

The equivalent, by the way, for conservatives is “patriot,” a term they distribute willy-nilly to even the most weak-kneed privileged draft-dodgers as long as they kowtow to the rants of Lumbaugh et al. They’ve debased and stolen the term so thoroughly that I cannot imagine how it could apply to me or to, say, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose work sprung from a deep love of and abiding faith in this country, and from a real radicalism.

How about “counter-cultural” or even “Bohemian”? Well, sure. We lived together for 21 years before marrying and then didn’t tell anyone for 2 years; we didn’t marry until my wife’s gay brother and his partner could do so; the home we own was, we’re told, “built by hippies” high in the Oakland hills; we don’t eat in chain restaurants and we buy organic; we drive Priuses; I teach “Nature Writing” among other subjects and my Econ class begins with a poem about work each day; we both believe we’ve escaped the South and can’t imagine living anywhere other than the SF Bay Area; a great outing is a hike in Pt. Reyes. Yeah, I’m a stereotype, but not a radical.

We have young friends who may be radical. We love them. Wouldn’t turn ‘em over to the police. Would bail them out if it comes to that. But me? Radical? Me? Only if the term is neutered. Or commodified.

I find it amusing that Sarah and I enjoyed our conversation while strolling on Haight St. -- the Coney Island, the Fisherman’s Wharf, the tawdry Disneyland of commodified radicalism. Had I looked around me I might have said, “Sure, compared to this commodified radicalism banking on 60’s wannabe fetishism, I am surely more radical.” Had I thought of it, I would have thrust my bag of Haight Market purchased Blue Bottle coffee beans into the air, thus letting my 2012 freak flag fly.

Not Enough Foam at the Mouth

No one reads my blog for political commentary (or . . . no one reads my blog), but I can't let this pass. Still, I'll be brief: Apparently, Sarah Palin doesn't seem rabid enough for some conservatives anymore. Not enough foam at the mouth. And that's why conservatives have turned to Michelle Bachmann. Here's some information from a recent profile in the New Yorker magazine:

Bible: ". . . is the absolute infallible word of God." She believes in the inerrancy of the Bible which must be taken literally as history and science. She is a follower of fundamentalists who publish on this point. Bachmann points approvingly to a fundamentalist thinker who recently wrote that there may be "occasions when Christians are mistaken on some point while non-believers get it right." However, the foundation of non-believer thought is "false" so that "even individual truths will be seen through the distorting lens of a false world-view." This is from a book that Bachmann recently recommended.

Theocracy: She speaks highly of one fundamentalist writer, Francis Schaeffer, who believes that "Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns." Schaeffer argued for the violent overthrow of the the government if Roe v. Wade isn't overturned. Bachmann attended a Bible-based law school where a professor she admires called for a theocracy with Old Testament penalties for adultery and homosexuality: Death! Her mentor in law school has recently stated that the Confederacy, the last Bible-based government in his opinion, understood the Constitution better than Abraham Lincoln.

Slavery: She insists that the slave-owning, slavery protecting Founding Fathers worked incessantly to end slavery. Her law school mentor maintains that benevolence deterred Christian slave-owners from freeing their slaves. Another writer she recommends has written that "most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of good for a comfortable, though -- by modern standards -- spare existence." This writer goes on to claim that Africans brought to America in slavery were lucky. "Africa, like any other pagan country (sic), was permeated by the cruelty and barbarism typical of unbelieving cultures." He also writes that "Slavery . . . was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred . . . mutual respect." And this happy relationship of slave and slaveowner was due, according to this writer, to Christianity.

Climate: "Global warming is a hoax."

Homosexuality: Being gay is a "personal enslavement" and with gay rights "little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and perhaps they should try it." She follows a writer who has written pamphlets entitled: "The Homosexual Revolution: End Time Abomination" and "Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles" which, I'm happy to say, you can buy on Amazon!!!

Senator Al Franken . . . Impressive!

Watch 2 minutes of Senator Franken annihilating the credibility of one of the "Family Values" charlatans. Yes, the Senator is impressive, but, in all honesty, this was easy work.

Official State Weapons! An Idea Whose Time Has Come!

I savor recent reports from Utah and Arizona whose legislative bodies have established an official state gun. For Utah, the Browning M1911 pistol because Mr. Browning grew up in Utah and was the son of pioneers. For Arizona, the Colt revolver because it's made in Connecticut and was used to help settlers kill off the ancestors of Native Americans living in Arizona. That's my guess anyway.

NPR reports that the Florida legislature would bar doctors -- especially pesky pediatricians -- from asking their patients if they own guns, guns being a possible health hazard, especially to children if the parents are careless with the care of guns. Governor Scott says that asking this question of parents constitutes a violation of their Second Amendment rights. Perhaps Florida will honor the loaded-and-unlocked-and-negligently-stored-danger-to-my-child-and-other-children-but-goddammit-that's-my-Second-Amendment-right-and-I'll-give-it-up-when-you-pry-it-from-my-child's-cold-dead-fingers official state gun.

But why just firearms? Why not the official state weapon? Some creative states might designate the pox-infested woolen blanket as the official state weapon. Others, in the South perhaps, the rope! New Jersey might honor cement. And, of course, Nevada would trump everyone with its official state armament: the hydrogen bomb!

Conservatives and Endangered Species

Now, I'll admit I'll occasionally hear about some species of . . . whatever, but anyway it'll be peculiar to some small area and holding up some form of development because, well, liberals like me tend to be alarmed about killing an entire species of anything. So, do we protect the buffalo? Sure. The tiger? Yes. Whales? Mos def.

But a moth? A moth that can be found, say, only within a five acre expanse in Napa county and would be wholly eradicated by a proposed vineyard? It's a hypothetical, but we hear about these smallish species with powerful friends quite often.

So how do we liberals decide what to do?

Well, here's how current conservatives decide: Kill. Death to the species. Hunt it, competitively, to extinction. The last guy to eat a meal of the animal's flank or make a dollar off its hide or as a result of its extinction wins!

Okay, so maybe that's not as representative of conservative thought as it used to be (and it sure as hell used to be . . . and it might be again if the Tea Party wackos get enough power to eliminate the EPA). Today, conservatives say we should kill the small, localized species that get in the way of the development of whatever cookie cutter mediocrity planned for the day. These conservatives don't value diversity much in their effort to make America look the same wherever you go.

But how DO conservatives really decide to deal with these species? Do they cite Evolution? Yes, only if they can argue that the species in question is not fit enough to survive the "evolution" of the ecosystem in question.

However, conservatives hate Evolution, or at least a scientific view of it, preferring Biblical Literalism/Fundamentalism instead.

This, of course, brings us to Noah and his Ark. God commanded Noah to take two of every species, right? So did Noah take two of some of those species peculiar to the continent that Noah's contemporaries couldn't even imagine? Or did he just take two of every animal as he understood the word "animal"? If the latter, wouldn't God object to Noah's having overlooked some species?

God: Dude . . . where's the buffalo?

Noah: Buff-a-what?

God: Dude, it's on the other continent. Dude, y donde el Snail Darter?

Noah: WTF?!!? You're just NOW telling me there's a whole 'nother continent?!!?


Yes, yes, conservatives believe that we have Dominion over God's creatures and we can do with them as we see fit. But does that mean we can off a species? I just don't see the conservative god happy with that.

God: You eliminated my Speckled Daisy Moth so that you could build another Costco? You are SO going to Hell.


But, to be fair, what about the original question: How do liberals deal with small, localized species? Right now, I believe that just such a species is threatened by the development of a "sun farm" in the desert somewhere. A renewable energy entrepreneur wants to set up big solar panels somewhere, but . . . . So how do we liberals decide which of our oxen to gore? I'm not sure, but, yes, it will require several studies and it may be comically burdensome. But I don't think the answer is to kill the EPA and any species that happens to cross our paths.

Capitalism vs. Family Values and Personal Growth on Sundays

On the Sunday after a Saturday Christmas, stores are a-hoppin' with After Christmas sales and so I recall a conversation I had in Switzerland a few years ago. An elderly relative of T's asked if shops are closed on Sunday in America as most are in Switzerland, a land not known for religious fervor. "Sadly, no" I admitted, and my misgivings were not due to some hearkening back to the Blue Laws and Sunday Services of my youth. No, it just struck me that shopping, the recreational activity of capitalism, has trumped family values and wise personal growth in America.

Here's how I see it: Advertising tells us that to live is to consume and to consume formidably. Wanting and acquiring -- perhaps to the point of avarice -- provide a recreational activity and a sense of identity. And the message proclaiming as much is loud and incessant so that the kind of solitude that can awaken us to ourselves is not only difficult to come by, but is denigrated as suspect.

So we risk developing very little sense of ourselves independent of the things we possess and wish to possess. Merchants understand this and also know that Sunday is the day most of us can use the entirety of to pursue recreational capitalism.

But for years, merchants did not open their doors on Sunday. Blue Laws forbade it and even where those laws didn't exist, there was an understanding among locally owned businesses. Then . . . a few did start doing business on Sundays. This inspired competition to serve the customer on Sundays, too. Giant, national chain merchants opened without a bit of compunction, too, shamelessly forcing mom and pop operations to open as well or face the anxiety of not being open when the whole town is shopping for everything at Costco.

As a result, Sunday became a day to consume, not a day of rest, not a day for other civilizing activities like a big family dinner, picnics in the park, long walks, touch football, a good book, and, yes, going to Church or Temple. No, these civilizing activities were shoved aside.

Conservative Opposition to Repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and to Gay Rights in the Military

According to conservatives, here's a typical scenario that can be expected in a war zone after the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell":

The shit could be all around them at any moment. So in this bunker, 15 soldiers, mostly men, but a few unattractive women, too, quietly, expertly, prepare for battle. All except one: Johnny Bigun. Wearing his boots untied, a flak jacket, and thong underwear, he fashions a makeshift ironing board to sharpen the creases in his fatigues, dancing all the while. His iPod? Pointer Sisters, of course, with whom he lip synchs "Yes We Can Can." Or the Village People. Though Johnny is in the army, he insists, "Oh, I've been IN the navy!"

The women, all unattractive soldierly types, but expertly prepared, tend to Johnny's duties, telling him not to worry about anything. "You GO, girl!" they whisper to him as he lip synchs to the unheard Pointers. They offer to do everything for Johnny except clean his weapon which Johnny does lovingly twice each day.

The other men in the unit are strangely attracted to Johnny for reasons they can't understand and they hate him for it.

Suddenly, mortar fire, AK-47s everywhere along with men shouting in some local dialect. The bunker is under siege. However, due to their expert preparation and drills, the soldiers all assume their positions and their roles with their equipment in hand and at the ready. Here a radioman calls for backup, there a lieutenant issues orders, here a medic readies supplies and runs to the aid of a wounded comrade. Despite the menace of arms, the soldiers in that bunker comprise a well-lubricated unit, the pride of the CO, and if casualties are suffered, it won't be for want of preparation.

Focus is everywhere. Fear is there, too, but not expressed or even exhibited. Focus defines the unit . . . until Johnny Bigun realizes he hasn't had sex in nearly 12 hours. Knowing he can't function without sex, Johnny yells above the din of arms, "Does anyone here want to have sex with me now?" Three men who'd never experienced homosexual sexual relations nonetheless figure that homosexual sex is better than no sex at all and they shouldn't turn down this offer of immediate sex and so they decide to leave their posts and have sex with Johnny Bigun.

Unit cohesion deteriorates. Everyone dies.

Everyone dies . . . all but one with the names of their heterosexually wed wives and husbands back home.


Graphics from: Unconfirmed Sources. www.unconfirmedsources.com

Taxes You Have to Love . . .

From: "Find the Taxes That Due Double Duty" by Robert H. Frank in the 2.20.11 NYT

Taxes levied on harmful activities kill two birds with one stone. They generate desperately needed revenue while discouraging behaviors whose costs greatly outweigh their benefits.

Antigovernment activists reliably denounce such taxes as “social engineering”— attempts to “control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we live our lives.” Gasoline taxes aimed at discouraging dependence on foreign oil, for example, invariably elicit this accusation.

But it’s a strange complaint, because virtually every law and regulation constitutes social engineering. Laws against homicide and theft? Because they aim to control our behavior, steer our choices, and change the way we live our lives, they are social engineering. So are noise ordinances, speed limits, even stop signs and traffic lights. Social engineering is inescapable, simply because narrow self-interest would otherwise lead people to cause unacceptable harm to others. Only a committed anarchist could favor a world without social engineering.

If outright prohibitions are an acceptable way to discourage harmful behavior, why can’t taxes be used for the same purpose? Taxes are, in fact, a far cheaper and less coercive way to curtail such behavior than laws or prescriptive regulations. That’s because taxes concentrate harm reduction in the hands of those who can alter their behavior most easily.

When we tax pollution, for instance, polluters with the cheapest ways to reduce emissions rush to adopt them, thereby avoiding the tax. Similarly, when we tax vehicles by weight, those who can get by most easily with a lighter vehicle will buy one. Others find it cheaper to pay the tax.

The list of behaviors that cause undue harm to others is long. When we drink heavily, we increase the likelihood that others will die in accidents. When we smoke, we cause others to suffer tobacco-related illnesses. When we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we increase the damage from greater climate volatility.

EVERY dollar raised by taxing harmful activities is one dollar less that we must raise by taxing useful ones. The resulting revenue would enable us to reduce not only the federal deficit, but also the highly regressive payroll tax. And cutting that tax would stimulate hiring and help low-income families meet the burden of new taxes on harmful activities.

The Fallacy of "Cyberutopianism"

editorial cartoon by Joel Pett


From Frank Rich in the 2.6.11 NYT:

Among cyber-intellectuals in America, a fascinating debate has broken out about whether social media can do as much harm as good in totalitarian states like Egypt. In his fiercely argued new book, “The Net Delusion,” Evgeny Morozov, a young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of what he calls “cyber-utopianism.” Among other mischievous facts, he reports that there were only 19,235 registered Twitter accounts in Iran (0.027 percent of the population) on the eve of what many American pundits rebranded its “Twitter Revolution.” More damning, Morozov also demonstrates how the digital tools so useful to citizens in a free society can be co-opted by tech-savvy dictators, police states and garden-variety autocrats to spread propaganda and to track (and arrest) conveniently networked dissidents, from Iran to Venezuela. Hugo Chávez first vilified Twitter as a “conspiracy,” but now has 1.2 million followers imbibing his self-sanctifying Tweets.

This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

From "Twitter Can't Save You," by Lee Siegal in the 2.6.11 NYT Book Review wherein Siegal reviews "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom" by Evgeny Morozov.

Morozov urges the cyberutopians to open their eyes to the fact that the ­asocial pursuit of profit is what drives social media. “Not surprisingly,” he writes, “the dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation.” In 2007, when he was at the State Department, Jared Cohen wrote with tragic wrongheadedness that “the Internet is a place where Iranian youth can . . . say anything they want as they operate free from the grips of the police-state apparatus.” Thanks to the exciting new technology, many of those freely texting Iranian youths are in prison or dead. Cohen himself now works for Google as the director of “Google Ideas.”

For Morozov, technology is a vacuum waiting to be filled with the strongest temperament. And the Internet, he maintains, is “a much more capricious technology” than radio or television. Neither radio nor TV has “keyword-based filtering,” which allows regimes to use URLs and text to identify and suppress dangerous Web sites, or, like marketers, to collect information on the people who visit them — a tactic Morozov sardonically calls the “customization of censorship.”

More Wacko Conservative Moments

I don't fully understand why, but I sometimes subject myself to conservative talk radio to see what sort of churlish, loutish ranting qualifies as temperate deliberation on any given day. Maybe I just like the taste of my own bile as my indignation gets exercised. I listen for about 5 minutes and then wonder what in the hell I did that for.


Well, because it's fascinating. I feel like the anthropologist of some whacked culture of foam-at-the-mouthers. (You can actually learn more, by deduction, from the ads run on these shows: Lots of predatory loan, insurance, legal, mortgage, and precious metals ads for which Rush and others act as shills: "See my good friends at _________ and remember to tell that the Rush sent you! That's ___________ and, remember, tell 'em Rush says they're the best!")

Here's a little of what I've heard and read among whacko conservatives -- just in the last few days! Take it from me, turn away now!

Rush Lumbaugh, always the triumphalist when it comes to the impact of European settlements and conquest on Native Americans, insisted that the introduction of tobacco by the Native Americans to the Europeans was far more deadly and sinister than the slaughter and displacement of Native Americans and the annihilation of their cultures and languages. I guess, if I follow Rush's logic, we white folks should go out and kill the rest of the Natives because of the noxious carcinogen that they foisted upon us. Nevermind that conservatives, until well into the 80's, consistently opposed science linking tobacco to cancer, consistently opposed the regulation of tobacco, and remain opposed to the regulation of tobacco as a drug.

Some conservative radio host on Thanksgiving morning expressed outrage toward the new scanner and the optional pat downs at airports. He said, "It's time we targeted terrorists instead of sexually assaulting Americans!!!" Well, who could disagree with that? How about we give terrorists their own line at the security checkpoint? Perhaps we could just ask terrorists to identify themselves. Or we could just not check "Americans" at all and anyone who isn't an American would be, by definition, a terrorist.

I saw a big pickup truck today pulling a huge travel trailer (basically a motorhome with no engine so you have to pull it). With bay windows busting out of the sides, this travel trailer seemed disinclined to stay within the lines of its lane on the highway. Seemed like if I passed it, I'd go under one of those bay windows. Anyway, on the back of the travel trailer were two decals: One was a Ford decal which included this information: "Eating Dodges" and "Shitting Chevies." Now, I'd just spent a couple of days around Thanksgiving subjected to network television which seems to consist of screaming, almost unimaginably bad halftime shows, and the celebration of our greatest national holiday: Black Friday. But I wasn't prepared for the vulgarity of this decal. But what's conservative about this driver?

The other decal showed a little boy arcing his pee onto the word "terrorists." So, I'm guessing, no terrorists allowed in this mode of travel either. What's more, any terrorists on American roads will get their comeuppance when they come upon this American!

On the other hand . . . it's clear to me that this driver is himself al-Qaeda terrorist. A terrorist trying to fit in, to draw attention away from himself by seeming to be a vulgar gas guzzler. If not a terrorist himself,he is, at the very least, a sympathizer with terrorists insofar as he contributes to our dependence on foreign oil, a portion of the funds for which goes to regimes that support those who would roast us alive. So I assume he's part of the terrorist-sympathizer wing of the conservative movement which believes that some god will provide all the fossil fuels we could ever want and burning 'em won't cause any problems for us.

Okay, this next one doesn't involve politics so much, but . . .

Finally, Sarah Palin. In her new book, Palin apparently compliments former American Idol judge Simon Cowell for being the only person who tells the talentless that they are talentless instead of massaging their "self-esteem" like too many others do. However, when the judges on "Dancing with the Stars" dismissed Palin's daughter as talentless a la Simon Cowell, the Palinites called in with their support nonetheless and kept the kid alive! Where was Palin then with her defense of Cowell-like discernment? She'd probably dismiss Fred Astaire as "elitist." Later, when daughter finished high in the ranking, the young hoofer said, "This is a big middle finger to my mother's" opponents. Still more proof of a so-well-raised child.

For an excellent insight into the history of conservatism as an idea beginning with Edmund Burke's defense of Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy, read Corey Rubin's essay, "The Party of Loss" in Harper's magazine 2010.

Wacko Conservatives -- How They Misunderstand the Founders and the Constitution

Columbia historian Alan Brinkley reviewing "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History" by Jill Lepore:

The architects of the Constitution, [Lepore] makes clear, did not agree about what it meant. Nor did they believe that the Constitution would or should be the final word on the character of the nation and the government. It was the product of much compromise, and few were satisfied with all its parts.

There were enormous omissions — among them the failure to define citizenship, the lack of a clear definition of suffrage, the evasion of most of the issues connected to African-Americans and Native Americans. Jefferson insisted that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” Madison asked in Federalist 14, “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” The reality of the creation of the Constitution is a far cry from the idea that it instituted immutable limits to what government could do....

We should not be surprised that so many Americans are angry. Almost four decades of growing inequality have left most of them no better off than they were in 1970, and many worse off. The recklessness and greed of much of the financial world — the principal causes of the crisis — have done far more damage than taxes or the deficit. The corruption and dysfunction of Congress and much of the rest of the government have disillusioned many. Everyone should be angry about these injustices, even if no one has proposed a workable solution to them. The Tea Partiers are right to be angry. But the objects of their outcries — taxes, deficits, immigration and supposed violations of the Constitution — are of far less consequence than the great failures that plague the nation.

Ouch! Why My Generation is Lame

From the 9.12.10 column by Thomas Friedman in the NYT:

Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.”

Contrast that with the Baby Boomer Generation. Our big problems are unfolding incrementally — the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our generation’s leaders never dare utter the word “sacrifice.” All solutions must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? A national energy policy? Too hard. For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, while telling ourselves we could have the American dream — a home — without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years. Our leadership message to the world (except for our brave soldiers): “After you.”

Wacko Conservatives and Why Obama Should Go After Them

From the 9.12.10 Frank Rich column in the NYT:

In June, the Business Roundtable chairman and Verizon chief executive Ivan Seidenberg gave a speech so rank with self-victimization — he claimed that government was “reaching into virtually every sector of economic life” — that the normally polite Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein reviled him as “a corporate hack” peddling “much-discredited country-club nonsense.”

Seidenberg was soon topped by a multibillionaire Republican contributor, Stephen Schwarzman, who likened Obama’s modest financial regulatory package to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Among the clients of Schwarzman’s private equity company, Blackstone, is Goodyear, which signed on in 2004 to get advice on “optimal business configuration” and announced it was shipping more jobs to Asia the following year. That narrative, one of countless like it, might have come in handy last week when Obama was speaking in Ohio, just 30 miles from Goodyear’s headquarters.

. . . .

Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

Why I Love Wacko Conservatives -- Consider Elena Kagan

The conservative argument against the confirmation of Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court goes something like this:

1. She hasn't done anything.

2. What little she has done was all wrong in every way that something can be wrong.

3. She hates the military.

4. If she objects to the characterization in no. 3, she's a liar.

Look here, here, and here, too.

5. Finally, they say she's ugly.

Excerpt from NYT: Rand Paul and the Perils of Libertarianism

Rand Paul and the Perils of Textbook Libertarianism
By SAM TANENHAUS
Published: May 21, 2010, NYT

". . . Mr. Paul has tangled himself up in a . . . contradiction. His championing of private businesses, ignoring the rights of just about everyone else, places him on the wrong side of history, just like the first opponents of the Civil Rights Act. One fierce opponent of civil rights legislation, William F. Buckley Jr., admitted as much. 'I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow,' Mr. Buckley said in 2004. 'I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.'”

(That's Ayn Rand on the left up there. My guess: Rand P. got his name from A. Rand.)

Michael Kinsley on "Tea Party Patriots"

Michael Kinsley in the 6.10 Atlantic Monthly:

Some people think that what unites the Tea Party Patriots is simple racism. I doubt that. But the Tea Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America. Not because it is right-wing or because it is sometimes susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories, and not because of racism, but because of the movement’s self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.

“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

This kind of talk is doubly self-indulgent. First, it’s just not true. Second, it’s obviously untrue. The government’s main function these days is writing checks to old people. These checks allow people to retire and pursue avocations such as going to Tea Party rallies. This basic fact about the government is no great secret. In fact, it’s a huge cliché, probably available more than once in an average day’s newspaper. But the Tea Party Patriots feel free to ignore it and continue serving up rhetoric about “the audaciousness and arrogance of our government,” and calling for the elimination of the Federal Reserve Board or drastic restraints on the power of the Internal Revenue Service.

“I like what they’re saying. It’s common sense,” a random man-in-the-crowd told a Los Angeles Times reporter at a big Tea Party rally. Then he added, “They’ve got to focus on issues like keeping jobs here and lowering the cost of prescription drugs.” These, of course, are projects that can be conducted only by Big Government. If the Tea Party Patriots ever developed a coherent platform or agenda, they would lose half their supporters.

Financial System as a Casino Producing . . . Nothing Except Losers and Lost Possibilities

From Frank Rich column, 4.24.10, NYT:

"Even if the [financial] reform bill does bring stringent regulation to derivatives — a big if — that won’t rectify capitalism’s worst “innovation” in our own Gilded Age: the advent of exotic, speculative “investments” that have no redeeming social value and are instead concocted to facilitate gambling for its own sake. Such are the Goldman instruments of mass financial destruction that paid off for John Paulson. In 2007 alone, according to Gregory Zuckerman in his book “The Greatest Trade Ever,” Paulson’s personal take amounted to over $10 million a day, “more than the earnings of J. K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods put together.” That “financial alchemy,” as Zuckerman calls it, explains why the finance sector’s share of domestic corporate profits, never higher than 16 percent until 1986, hit 41 percent in the last decade.
As many have said — though not many politicians in either party — something is fundamentally amiss in a financial culture that thrives on “products” that create nothing and produce nothing except new ways to make bigger bets and stack the deck in favor of the house. “At least in an actual casino, the damage is contained to gamblers,” wrote the financial journalist Roger Lowenstein in The [NY] Times Magazine last month. This catastrophe cost the economy eight million jobs."

Consider also Garry Kasparov, former chess World Champ, in the New York Review of Books a few months back. He reviewed "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind." In his review he writes:

"Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors."

Republiconfederates and Slavery Month

For a long time now the Republicans have looked in vain for some governmental initiative they can actually say “Yes!” to with fervor. And so it comes as no surprise that slavery-nostalgia has once again risen with it’s gory frame in Virginia just in time for Republicans and their Tea Party cousins to say “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

You see, a Republican’s idea of “civil rights” would have us all return to the romantic past of nearly free, but wholly exploited, labor and godlike power over other human beings who would provide that free labor and all the economic benefits that can accrue thus allowing for the fetishization of such luxuries as chivalry and gentlemanliness, courtesies not extended to black women who were, instead, sexually exploited and at very young ages. What a wonderful world!!!

And so we have the recent decision by the Republican Master of Virginia to proclaim April as "Confederate History Month"?

Yes, yes, Republicans and a few hard core old-time leftists argue that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. But try telling that to the enslaved folks of the day or their descendants. I can hear it now as a slaveowner speaks to one of his enslaved at the time: “Henry, you been with me a long time, as were your wife and children before I sold them to those Georgia planters, and I want you to know that I don’t intend to fight for the Confederacy so that I can continue to enslave you or even so that I can continue my nightly visits to your daughter! No! In fact, I’m opposed to slavery, but I’m enslaved by it as much as you are!”

Because, as Republiconfederates will tell you, the war was fought to defend “States’ Rights!” Like, for example, the States’ Rights to trample on Human Rights without interference from the pesky Bill of Rights. Or to put it another way, it’s the States’ Rights to enslave, exploit, sell, maim, rape, torture, and kill other human beings.

Now, the Virginia proclamation doesn’t mention any of that. Defenders of it speak of the South’s “War of Independence” without mentioning that the enslaved people who really needed independence would have seen little of it had the South won its war of independence.



The proclamation called for a remembrance of a time when Confederate soldiers "fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth in a time very different than ours today."

Yes, a different time, and . . . a better time our Republiconfederates wistfully tell us.

That language – “a different time” –is meant to exculpate the Confederacy of its support of slavery. This is the kind of cultural relativism that conservatives generally reject.

True, after a while, the Virginia Governor apologized for omitting any mention of slavery in the Proclamation. However, I’d argue that he did not omit a mention of slavery in the Proclamation. “Confederacy” is synonymous with “slavery.” The two are at least inextricable. Praising the Confederacy, praising those who fought for the Confederacy, amounts to praising the right to enslave. The Rebel flag on your truck says, “I appreciate those enslavers!”

Now some Republiconfederate leaders around the country if asked to comment on the Virginia proclamation that seems to ignore an evil defended by the Confederacy at the time would probably say, “You know, slavery . . . that’s all behind us now. No point on dwelling on that.”

Well, the Confederacy, having lost, is surely behind us now, too, until, that is, Republiconfederates want to fire up the base. What’s next? Slavery reenactment gatherings?


The Huffington Post reports that Governor McDonnell amended the original Proclamation: "The original declaration called on Virginians to 'understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.' McDonnell added language to the document that said slavery 'was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders.'"

How do we honor the "sacrifices" of those who would have perpetuated the deprivation of "God-given inalienable rights"?



Now, if we press the slavery point with Southerners, while they press the "honor of our Southern way of life and our homes" bilge, they will often regard us with contempt and say, "You just can't understand," as if we are some sort of uncivilized brutes. But I do understand this: If the South had won the war, slavery would have been perpetuated.

Maybe it can be reduced to this question: Is there one black person in Virginia or anywhere in the country who will honor the Confederacy . . . ever?


Lincoln was right to make an effort to heal the wounds after the Civil War. It was a magnanimous gesture and necessary given a war that pitted family members, not just citizens, against one another.

But the ongoing Confederacy fetish dragged out of some murky Southern swamp for the purpose of firing up the deranged right wing of the Republican base doesn’t deserve magnanimity. It deserves, as it always has deserved, derision and opposition.

The List of Conservative Wrongheadednesses

See if you can add anything!!!

Here's the list of the ideas and efforts that Conser- vatives have gotten all wrong throughout the ages. Not in any particular order.

Heliocentric galaxy
Child labor laws
Jazz
Women's right to vote
The American Revolution (conservatives were loyal to King George)
Interracial marriage
Contraception
The Inquisition
Translating the Bible into common vernaculars
Role of women in . . . just about anything
Environmental regulations of industry
National Parks
Slavery
Ecumenicism
Seatbelts
Beethoven

. . . and these are just off the top of my head! Add to the list!