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?

click me

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.

when everything is political, all you need are politicians

I was reading one of my favorite bloggers this morning, Kevin Drum, and he is talking about how Republicans are just plain better at kneecapping their opponents. I hear this complaint a lot from my lefty friends, usually in the form of how is it that Fox and talk radio have no real analogue on the other side (sorry, NPR doesn’t even come close).  Its something that’s frustrating to me too, but I don’t think copying it is healthy or even possible for someone with a left leaning temperament.  In America today, the Left and Right are just not symmetrical in our thinking.

Republicans are ruthless about politics because all they do is politics. There is nothing behind the curtain.  There is no policy interest apart from winning elections.  The simplest, most reductive ideological bumper sticker babble binds it all together in a way that hurts my head. I have seen Mr Drum say it a few times, and its true…most of the arguments and messaging raised by Republicans these days would never even have occurred to me, either. I submit that it wouldn’t have occurred to Republicans had their daily tactical political needs not required it.  It is all just talking points for the aggrieved in-group, all sound and fury.  It really isn’t meant for me, its directed at the already converted or those genetically predisposed.  Its like overhearing a religious service in a foreign language.

Our political debate is completely asymmetrical.  For example, one side thinks the debate is about unions and budgets while the other couldn’t care less about budgets or deficits; they are getting rid of unions and kneecapping the opposition .  It is a useful means to the singular political end.  Those are two very different kinds of argument and tactic.  Even mainstream Republican thought these days is constructed entirely in service to political utility and ideology is the convenient tool at hand.  If deficits are the key to this singular end, so be it.  Since political calculus is the only math Republicans trust, deficits matter.  Today.  Funny how they didn’t matter from 2001 to 2008.
These games should not even be played on the same field.

I think this is all part of the bigger question “Where does politics end?” For the right, I can’t squint hard enough to see a line. Since there is no actual policy goal and no interest in government,  let alone well-run government,  there is only and always politics.  Objective facts are political if they don’t fit the strategy.  Every personal issue, every far flung backwater country, ever potential threat…it is all grist in the election mill.  With a party not interested in governing,   there is nothing better than an issue to declare war on but be held blameless for failing to achieve any kind of “victory.”    But we end up with a war on science and math, too.
I believe that there is an actual element of temperament involved here, and I think it was discussed on Kevin Drum’s  blog before . The modern American conservative has a habit of assuming that a political opponent must have the exact opposite position of his own, and then argues with that evil opposite position instead of an actual one. Its a whole straw army conscripted to stand in as “the enemy.”  It seems ludicrous to have to spend any time explaining the difference between a Democrat and a Communist, let alone a socialist and a National Socialist, but this is how the game is played to win when your goal is to make your state one big company town.

I’ll have to do a post on what I think DOES matter soon.

hoarding bullets is not an earthquake plan

My first memories of living in California are the riots in L.A., so I tuned right in to this question: "Why aren't the Japanese looting?"   The  Japanese seem to be handling all of this calmly, decently even.   There is plenty of looting in more recent memory, eg. Katrina, Haiti, and Cairo.  Why not in Japan?  The answers given suggested something uniquely Japanese, a cultural looting aversion. It was wanking. 

I like the simple answer here: the Japanese spent time planning for earthquakes and tsunamis. They did so efficiently and persistently and it has paid off, moreso by comparison to the free for all American approach.  Here in California, we had a creaky public service message to evacuate 100 feet from the high tide line at a handful of beaches..  So of course there was mass stupidity.  Thousands of people drove halfway up the coastal mountains and then parked all over the highway breakdown lanes.  I can't blame them. What the hell do we know about tidal waves, after all.  What we do know about is panic. And feelings of imminent doom. Also, traffic.

Clearly, there are no plans in place here that anyone has ever seen.  If there is an earthquake or a hurricane in the US,  its every man for himself. That works exactly like looting, but with fewer TVs balanced on people's heads. This isn't complicated.

Gin and Tacos says:

Looting (or doing anything, for that matter) is pretty difficult after a tsunami. Note that there was little looting in Indonesia in 2004. But the most persuasive answers are…political. The Japanese government is by all accounts remarkably well organized and prepared to respond to this kind of disaster. All of the failures in New Orleans, by comparison, have their origins in the crooked, incompetent crony politics of the local government and the non-existent Federal response. Japan is among the many non-American nations that recognize that government is not inherently useless and evil.

Beyond that, Japan hasn't built its entire society on the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Their idea of disaster preparedness is not hoarding enough bullets to shoot their neighbors who run out of food...If your neighbor needs help, the American response is to lecture him about failing to better prepare himself for the crisis.

Sounds about right.

natalie portman's most disturbingly sexy movie.

I know, it's wrong.  I think this artist would agree me though. This is part of a series of images based on Luc Besson's "The Professional"

and this is a minimalist version of the movie's poster:

the trend for iconic  minimalist reworking of classic movie posters is welcome.  more posters here and here.

hibrow minimalist ferris. memed

I like the new minimalist reworking of classic movie posters; better yet, with an arty recut of the trailer:

more great posters here and here. 

once more for the cupcakes

 

link to pdf

this explains everything about crime in the Mission district.  Its been a turf war over cupcakes.

via mission local

the great wave of kanagawa

Sullivan points to this post on the painting above, the "Great Wave of Kanagawa"

"In Shintoism, nature is recognised as infinitely more powerful than humankind - as in the wave - and that humankind is in nature with the permission of the gods but with no particular concern from the gods. Shinto rituals show respect for the gods of nature, befriending the enormity of the forces, if you like. But, apparently, there won't be much of the moral affront at what's happened - the problem of evil - from the Japanese perspective."

There is neither good nor evil in the event and the Japanese people, to their credit, seem to be taking this with resolve and equanimity.  Earthquakes do not care who we pray to and tsunamis drown us all the same. There are only infinite tons of water and earth moving beyond our scale, and more human stories in motion than grains of salt dissolving into the sea.



Following up:

To stop earthquakes, we need to follow the commandments, says one fool. God is mad at japan because of all the atheists, says another idiot.

and mmmmm, Pi

Happy Pi day.  3.14 units of nerd awesomeness at the link:

How many instruments can this man play, wow!  The best part is that, since pi is and infinite and never repeating series of numbers, every song ever written appears somewhere in it.

the best day of the year

via Boing Boing

bug love beatle geek

Beatle Chart Mania Link Here

via love all this

lack of imagination makes us come to imagined places

 

via Sotona

A Question of Travel

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

enter the road

On the Road itinerary

“I can just see the shabby literary man carrying a “bulging briefcase” rushing from one campus to another, one lecture club to another, nodding confirmation with his hosts that he is right, hurrying to the next town … a whole gray career of proving himself to others, to as many as can hear him, that he was right … till finally people say: “Here comes the self-prover again, O dear … bring out the papers and the canapes.”

This my friend is what I will become if I accept all lecture offers, TV appearances, radio interviews and start arranging with reviewers and critics who want information and my books through me, a great long lifetime in a briefcase proving my work and my work itself stopped dead at the level where I took to proving myself. So, I say, life is too sweet to waste on self propaganda, I quit self promotion, I enter my page.”

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
quote appeared in LA Times

for the 2 at the tree's trunk

"How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

Paul Bowles

its always leaning in Pisa

At the Tower in Pisa, the making of (see below)

“As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts…-and-find-some-way-t o-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”


David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)
from Consider the Lobster

 

via fuckyeahdementia

the journey toward home is our home

“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle.  That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)
from Consider the Lobster

no brakes. no anchors

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."

John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968)
Travels with Charley: In Search of America, 1962.

(Source: anneyhall)