how to write political poetry

link vandal

"Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn't know anything about the situation in that part of the world...It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces...I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on."   The Stoner Arms Dealers

Revolutions and Information and Twitter

Separation of church and state, a short answer

NCAA Brackets by starting salary for graduates.  Princeton v. Georgetown final

stairway wit

 

George Rousse's Escalier

L’esprit de l’escalier or esprit d’escalier (stairway wit) is to think of a clever comeback when it is too late.  

drawing a map out of here

Politics frustrates me in exactly the same way that religion does: it’s probably best if I keep my thoughts confined to my own head.  It really is narrowing to listen to myself make cutting lines debating it out loud.  And honestly, at this point in history,  the world view of a reactionary makes so little impression on me  that I think I must have broken something in my brain. It’s like a mass in Latin.  It really is a relief to be going away because this whole argument is irrelevant when I am out of my own country.  I think I am writing this blog to mark some new border, to move on to new topics.  Until then, I have a couple more posts mapped out, and DFW (below) is part of this map, so bear with me.

Here is David Foster Wallace from a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon University:

"Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too."

politics of ressentiment

The fatal flaw of the left,  and most irritating habit, is the frequent assumption that their adversaries are just not smart enough to understand their points.   “How can they be so uninformed!?!,”  we have all heard it or said it.  I think conservatives understand the facts perfectly well  but are just not interested in them because in politics, they don’t matter.  In fact, the more educated a self identified conservative is, the less likely that person is to accept objective fact incongruous to conservative political doctrine.  This suggests a character type that is not only immune to debate as understood by a progressive, but that actively seeks to subvert the terms of the debate itself.  Characterizing that habit as “confused” or not as clever not only misses the point but is in fact self defeating.  Conservatives simply play game the way it is scored by their base — plus just enough independents to win any given election.

Julian Sanchez wrote two pieces over the last 18 months that have gone a long way towards defining the conservative thought for me.  In my earlier post, I described not being able to understand at all where right wing messaging comes from, and how their arguments seem intentionally and stubbornly constructed out of spite, not fact.   I went on to say that the debate on the right, to me, is always politically convenient, never substantive.  More simply, it is always political, but never relevant to the facts at hand.  Looking at that post again a day later, I can see how that isn't entirely true.  Its  mostly because, while borrowing from these pieces by Mr Sanchez, I  was also butchering them.  This is the first one, from December 2009:

ressentiment:
Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, an assignation of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

"Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag. Sure, there’s an element of “schadenfreude” in the sense of “we like what annoys our enemies.” But the pathology of the current conservative movement is more specific and  convoluted.  Palin irritates the left, but so would lots of vocal conservatives if they were equally prominent—and some of them are probably even competent to hold office. Palin gets to play sand in the clam precisely because she so obviously isn’t. She doesn’t just irritate liberals in some generic way: she evokes their contempt. Forget “Christian conservative”; she’s a Christ conservative, strung up on the media cross on behalf of all God’s right-wing children.
Think back to the 2004 RNC—which I happened to be up in New York  covering. After witnessing three days of inchoate, spittle-flecked rage from the people who had the run of all three branches of government, some wag (probably Jon Stewart) puzzled over the “anger of the enfranchised.” And it would be puzzling if the driving force here were a public policy agenda, rather than a set of cultural grievances. Jay Gatsby learned too late that wealth alone wouldn’t confer the status he had truly craved all along. What we saw in ‘04 was fury at the realization that ascendancy to political power had not brought parallel cultural power.  The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.

The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance—but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary.  Check out the RNC’s new ad on health reform, taking up the Tea Party slogan “Listen to Me!”  There’s almost nothing on the substantive objections to the bill; it’s fundamentally about people’s sense of powerlessness in a debate that seems driven by wonks. To the extent that Obama enjoyed some initial cross-partisan appeal, I think it owed a lot to his recognition that most people care less about actual policy outcomes than they do about feeling that they’re being heard and respected.

Or consider the study Ryan Sager highlighted a while back, showing that many SUV owners don’t merely think their choice of vehicles is harmless or morally neutral, but positively virtuous. Apparently the “moralistic critique of their consumption choices readily inspired Hummer owners to adopt the role of the moral protagonist who defends American national ideals.” Note two things here.  First, this is classic ressentiment: It’s not just that SUVs are great in themselves because they somehow “embody” some set of ideals. They’re good just because they symbolize an inversion of the “anti-American” values of critics. Second, think what it reveals that people feel the need to construct these kinds of absurd rationalizations—to make their cars heroic rather than simply denying that they do much harm. It betrays an incredible sensitivity, not to excessive taxes or regulations on the vehicles, but to the feeling of being judged.
Since everyone’s favorite way to excuse indefensible political behavior is to point out that they staaaaaarted it, let me point out that the ’70s mantra that the “personal is political” and some of the the ’90s obsession with policing language and attitudes  probably exacerbated the blurring of lines between questions of public justice and matters of personal virtue. Hell, we can translate the the basic beef of the Tea Partiers into faddish 90s jargon easily enough: They’re reacting against a hegemonic discourse in the centers of power that constructs them simultaneously as a bearers of class privilege and as a bestial Other.  The elevation of figures like Palin represents an attempt to reappropriate an oppressive stereotype, akin to the way some hip-hop embraces a caricaturish racist vision of violent black masculinity. To be sure, most of what gets cast as “oppression” here is just the decline of privilege, but the perception is what matters for the social dynamic.

Ultimately, this is a doomed project: Even if conservatives retook power, they wouldn’t be able to provide a political solution to a psychological problem, assuming they’re not willing to go the Pol Pot route. At the same time, it signals a resignation to impotence on the cultural front where the real conflict lies.  It effectively says: We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment.

To see how the difference between ressentiment and simple schadenfreude matters, consider Palin one more time.  If the goal is just to antagonize liberals, making her the Republican standard-bearer seems tactically bizarre, since ideally you want someone who isn’t so repugnant to independents as to be unelectable. If the animating force is ressentiment,  the leader has to be a loser to really deserve the role. Which is to say, expect the craziness to get worse before it gets better."

This, I think, is at the very heart of why the conservative movement inverts their own position and assumes that is the goal of their opponents, but then picks up random arguments that work only to spite what may be only an  imagined proposal.  Very smart people argue about economics all the time, each claiming that it is a science in support of their position.  But, as Tyler Cowen notes,  "economics is most like a science when people do not care about the outcome of the argument."  Exactly so.

anything different is good. or not.

I think the fact that I have never read this perspective on the great  marriage debate just shows how little time I have spent on a college campus in the last 20 years.  From PZ Meyers:

"We say the ties between a couple should be made with respect and affection, not the strictures of law and precedent; letting gays marry, for instance, strengthens the public approval of our kinds of bond, while weakening the authoritarian bonds. Our ideal is a community of equals, while theirs is a hierarchy of power..."

This makes a certain amount of sense.  It has been hard for me to understand what a "threat" to marriage is,  being a godless liberal hedonist and all.  But this seems to put it in a pattern that I recognize where there is pushback  whenever traditional roles and relationships get more fuzzy.  I think this theme is played out over and over for as long as I can remember.  Our relationship with our environment has changed from one where we were living off the interest, of exploitation without consequences, to one where we are clearly depleting the principal.  Our role as a superpower is not simple anymore.  Wars are a mess where you can't even tell who is a soldier anymore.  Even our own history as a nation has changed, gone are the days of  "Born perfect and improving ever since."

It must feel like the last damn straw when the dirty hippies want to change marriage, too.

should I move my blog to wordpress?

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I have a duplicate site at wordpress.com.  Wordpress has more tools, and a huge dev community, but blogspot has more tools for free that I will actually use.

Click here to see my wordpress site.