Interview about the Occupy movement

Devin Hunter of Pagan Newswire Collective conducted in email interview of me for an article about Pagans and the Occupy Wall Street movement. As is the way of things, only some of my comments fit into the finished article, so here I have the full text of my comments.

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The Occupy Wall Street campaign has been launched to highlight the economic, health, and taxation variances between the ruling 1% of the American population and “the other 99%”. Do you feel that as a Bay Area citizen you have witnessed a distinct variation between the lower and middle class and the upper-class?

Living in San Francisco confronts one with juxtapositions of class in a way that one does not see as often in suburban America. In an ordinary day — or even an hour — walking around San Francisco one can rub shoulders with well-to-do professionals, hardworking poor immigrants, bohemians both rich and poor, dot-com millionaires, the impoverished underclass, service industry workers just scraping by, and even the stratospherically wealthy. For a while I was working in an office in the same building as Gump’s, a big store which sells beautiful, useless, inconceivably expensive tchotchkes to rich people, yet fifteen minutes’ walk could take me to the charity kitchen under Glide Memorial church in the Tenderloin. I suspect that a similar overlap between rich and poor in everyday life in New York City contributed to the Occupy Wall Street movement beginning there.

This all comes at a time when both the US and World economies are experiencing extreme fluctuations in stability, in your opinion how does this effect your own life as well as those within your immediate community?

I count myself lucky that I work as one of the skilled professionals relatively insulated from the recent shocks in the economy, but I still find these times frightening. Technocrats like me live on a shrinking ice floe, in danger of falling out of the charmed circle: you see it in our obsessions with our careers and our kids’ educations. In the Bay Area, I know a lot of left-leaning professionals who feel frustrated at our complicity in a machine we help to run but cannot seem to change because even we do not hold the real power.

In my greater community, the economic shift has had unmistakable effects. I know a lot of people facing very hard times with no end in sight. Solar Cross has had to set aside our financially ambitious community center project for now, and focus on more tactical projects, because the economy has made the necessary fund-raising impossible.

As a pagan community leader do you feel this is the beginning of the next “American Revolution?”

(I'm not sure I qualify as a “pagan community leader.” I think of myself as just an articulate guy who keeps heavy company.)

I feel the temptation to think of Occupy Wall Street in revolutionary terms, and believe that it has exciting implications if its momentum continues to build, but I hesitate to call it a harbinger of “revolution” just yet. If the Occupy movement proves as resilient as I hope, the next stage will take a form no one can predict. But we cannot yet say what, if any, lasting significance OWS will have. Significance on the scale of the original American Revolution remains a stretch, and much more than we can likely expect of this particular movement, but I hold out hope. The rhythm of American history includes a punctuating crisis once each human lifetime — the Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression/WWII era — and if the pattern holds, that time has come again, so perhaps Occupy Wall Street will prove to be a manifestation of great change brewing.

For the first week of protests media coverage of the events was slim to nonexistence. Reports of major media covering-up the protests by not providing them the appropriate coverage have been made. As a citizen how do you feel about the supposed media cover-up?

I would not call the early invisibility of Occupy Wall Street in news media a “cover-up,” exactly. Never attribute to malice what one can explain better with incompetence. The early hesitation by mainstream news institutions to cover OWS reflects an inability to fit it into the standard narratives they understand. As the growth of the movement has finally compelled attention, we see the media’s limited narratives in another form as they reach for their tropes of hippies and political demands and so forth and stumble trying to describe OWS on those terms. Mainstream American news media is, by definition, a mechanism of our social/political/economic order, which makes it unable to apprehend a movement like OWS which makes a radical critique of that order. The media’s inability to cover OWS properly is frustrating, but unsurprising; if they could tell the story of the fundamental systemic problems that we face, we wouldn’t have those problems the way we do in the first place, and wouldn’t need OWS.

On the first day of protests Comedian Roseanne Barr called for a combination of capitalism and socialism and a system not based on "bloated talk radio hosts and that goddamn Ayn Rand book.” In your own words do you feel that incorporating Socialistic policies into our Capitalistic government is a good thing or bad thing, please explain.

Market capitalism provides enormous benefits. It efficiently allocates resources, produces a cornucopia of goods, and fosters innovation. The abundance it produces sustains modern civilization. But market capitalism for all its undeniable strengths does a lousy job of other things that you want in society, like ensuring that the goods it produces get distributed to people fairly. If you regard prosperity for all as a goal of your society, as I do, then you cannot rely on market capitalism as the only organizing principle in the economy.

The term “socialism” gets overloaded and confused in the US, so I would rather talk about what Europeans call “social democracy”: a society which uses market capitalism to address the many problems it handles well but also uses government to mitigate its rough edges, ensuring that people get fair access to their share of society’s wealth. In the US, we have some elements of social democracy already, like public education and social security, but I believe that we can and should do much more.

To frame this in Pagan terms:

Hermes stands on top of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, cresting a sculpture entitled “The Glory of Commerce;” directly at his back lies the New York Stock Exchange, an institution whose history and spirit descends directly from the agora the Greeks held as sacred to Hermes. I honor Hermes and make an offering to him every day. But a wise Pagan knows that the gods’ purposes differ from our own, and you do not want to live a life of All Hermes All The Time any more that you want to live in Morrigan World or Skaldi World or any god’s domain exclusively. The Pagan sensibility, rightly, sees exclusive devotion to one god as neither desirable nor even truly possible, seeking balance in evoking each god in its time and directed to its proper purpose. So too with market capitalism, a force I respect but wish we had better balanced with its more egalitarian cousins.

The collective movement has proposed a list of four demands for the outcome of the protests which are— One, to protect the environment. Two, to care for the people. Three, to tax the rich. And four, to end the wars. How do you feel this relates to the ethical, spiritual, and economic values of pagans? How do you feel it relates to the Bay Area?

I believe that thinking in terms of conventional demands, even ones as broad as “protect the environment”, misrepresents the nature of the Occupy movement. At this stage at least, OWS offers a radical critique that comes prior to any specific policy solutions. In its rhetoric of “we are the 99%”, Occupy Wall Street says that we have developed a social and political order that does not serve 99% of us properly, that the wealthiest 1% control the system, that therefore that 1% have responsibility for the system, and that until we recognize and address this fundamental failure of equity and democracy we cannot meaningfully talk about more specific problems.

I believe that presuming Pagans to share a set of ethical, spiritual, and economic values which translate in to a specific kind of politics or political agenda misrepresents the diversity of the Pagan movement. Politically and culturally liberal Pagans like me tend to imagine that we represent the core of Pagan culture, but we do not, any more than politically and culturally conservative Christians can rightly claim to represent the core of Christianity. We must respect how Pagans span the full political spectrum, left, right, and otherwise.

Many argue that as Pagans universally call nature sacred, Pagans share a political commitment to environmentalism, but even that seemingly uncontroversial claim of Pagan unity casts our community too simply. Obviously many Pagans have deep ties to environmentalism, and I count myself among them, but that can mean very different things to different people. For example, many environmentalists, Pagan and otherwise, find nuclear power abhorrent, but I myself have come to favor nuclear power because the vital importance of reducing carbon emissions makes it worthwhile to get electricity by every emissions-free method possible. For example, I know a Pagan — not a suburbanite who casts circles in the backyard but someone living very close to nature, deeply committed to reducing his environmental impact — who is also one of the most vigorous global warming skeptics I know. Assuming that “Pagan” implies any particular politics misses the breadth of Pagan culture.

As a Practitioner of paganism, what do you feel as a culture pagans could be doing to support the effort — if at all? If you do not support the protests how could pagans help put an end to them?

I believe that Pagan diversity precludes a general Pagan political agenda, but I also believe that Pagan visibility is important. When Pagans speak and act either for or against the Occupy movement, if we identify ourselves as Pagans that will help to make Pagans visible as citizens.

That said, as both a vigorous supporter of the Occupy movement and a Pagan, I would urge Pagans, as I would urge anyone, to take a close look at the statements from Occupy Wall Street and seriously consider supporting both OWS and their local Occupy movement, as I hope and expect that many Pagans will share my enthusiasm.

On October 6th the ongoing movement moved to the streets of San Francisco which included a march from Mission to its base of encampment at 101 Market Street where is continues. Have you experienced the protests first hand? Do you intend to?

I have contributed supplies to both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy San Francisco, and have visited Occupy San Francisco a few times now, though I did not participate in the 6 October march. I expect to continue to vigorously support both, and I hope to spend significantly more time participating in discussions among Occupy San Francisco participants in the weeks to come.

Protesting and demonstration have been a large part of movements commonly associated with paganism such as Women's Rights, the Green and Environmental Movement, and Native rights. Do you feel that this movement is of spiritual significance to the pagan community and/or US population?

I believe that Occupy Wall Street, like many activist movements, reflects for many people a spiritual hunger that many Pagans would recognize. American bourgeois consumerism in itself leaves a vacuum of meaning and purpose in society and in individual life; at the level of society, the hunger to fill that void can bring people to social justice movements like OWS, while at the level of the personal that hunger brings people to spiritual practice, Pagan or otherwise.

Cornell West famously said, linking the spiritual and the political, “never forget that justice is what love looks like in public,” and I believe that a spiritual yearning ultimately motivates OWS.

How do you feel the political climate has changed since the beginning of these protests?

I confess that like many politically-aware people, I had fallen into a kind of despair in the last year; in the wake of the supposedly-transformative 2008 election, too little had changed, suggesting that the American political process could not admit, much less affect, the grip which the wealthiest 1% held over our society. The plutocrats had driven the country into a ditch, crashing the economy with terrible consequences for most of us, and yet they still prospered and had the instruments of government supporting and favoring them. It seemed that nothing could loose their grip or get us to even name what we see happening. I spoke dismissively of the possibility of a mass popular uprising confronting the situation, and I was wrong.

Occupy Wall Street has already done more to name and confront the systemic problems in our society than I had believed possible, so I cannot help but feel excited and optimistic about what comes next. I know that other people feel the same way, and I suspect that there are a lot of us.

What do you feel is the best possible outcome from these ongoing protests?

My greatest hope for Occupy Wall Street is that it permanently changes the way we think and talk about politics in America, that we routinely ask the fundamental question, “What is society for, if not to provide for the needs of all of our citizens? What can we do to accomplish that?” I hope that OWS unlocks the yearning for justice and equity which most Americans feel, turning it into effective action. If we can break the hold of wealth and power over our current politics, and make building a social and political order of justice and equity our new politics, the results would be truly revolutionary.

Declaration

Occupy Wall Street has issued their Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. The whole thing is worth reading, but I want to call attention to a segment of it.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power .... We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

That's followed by a list of specific grievances. Emphasis mine; I read that and thought bingo; if it sounds familiar to you, too, it should. The title of the statement is no accident. Here's the US Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Declaration of Independence, of course, follows with a list of grievances as well. Occupy Wall Street shows that they understand and respect American founding documents a whole lot better than the Tea Party does, for all their claims.

The conclusion of OWS's Declaration is interesting, too.

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

In other words: yes, this is connected to the Arab Spring, and if our leaders won't step up to encourage that global movement, then we will.

Nice work, Occupy Wall Street. Keep it up.

Why Steve Jobs

That’s a picture taken by Matt Harris of the spontaneous memorial to Steve Jobs in front of the Apple San Francisco store tonight.

I am moved by this. I am kin to the people who did this.

And yet earlier today, I invested hours and a big chunk of money into procuring and ferrying supplies for the Occupy San Francisco folks. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a protest of the unjust wealth — and more importantly, of the unjust power — of the wealthiest people in America. And make no mistake, Steve Jobs was one of those guys.

Let me underline that. I hesitated to say this today, not wanting to speak ill of the dead (and I did my little unalloyed appreciation in that spirit earlier), but it’s important to understand that an important but mostly-unhearalded part of Steve Jobs’ business mojo was his understanding of manufacturing. It was the main focus of his attentions during the last few years before he was forced out of Apple in the mid-80s, and his attention to manufacturing is integral to Apple’s current ability to field devices that deliver more for the money than competitors. So when it came out that conditions in Chinese iPhone factories were so horrific that workers were driven to suicide, there was no doubt in my mind that while he likely didn't know the specifics of the story before they came out in public, he did know fundamentally the kind of work situation at his suppliers. When the story came to light, Jobs didn't rush to change what Apple was doing but rather actively defended what Apple had done. I am very clear on that. I am very clear that though this may be the most horrifying skulduggery Apple has perpetrated at Jobs’ direction, it’s not the only example by a long shot.

How can I reconcile this with the urge to be among those building an altar to a fallen CEO?

Let me offer something I have said about Apple under Steve Jobs for years. Apple is a vast machine for making exactly the tools that Steve Jobs wants for himself, and in order to pay for the exorbitant cost of making them it sells copies of Steve's toys to all the rest of us.

People in the industry chuckle when I say that because it describes an important part of how Apple works, but I say it now in order to confess that there’s an important way in which my quip gets it exactly wrong. Just yesterday I pointed to an article by blind blogger Austin Seraphin saying that the iPhone is “the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever.” Apple has aggressively worked on accessibility for users who are blind or deaf or have other limitations, an effort that makes no “business sense” but surely makes human sense if you read that or any of the countless other articles about what a boon the iPhone has been to the blind. Today I see Susie Bright saying that her pioneering magazine of lesbian liberation, On Our Backs, was not just the first magazine created on the Mac. It was only possible to publish it because of the Mac. Both of these stories, and countless others that people are telling today, tell how Apple products empowered and delighted them in ways that are impossible to imagine without Steve Jobs. Speaking for myself, the profession which I practice and love could not exist in the form I enjoy today without the Macintosh and its success and the influence it has had, so in an important way I owe the life I love to Steve Jobs.

That is what Apple is for. Yes, Apple makes money, but that is instrumental to its true purpose. That was what Jobs’ life was about. Yes, Jobs made a mountain of money himself and had his legendary ego gratified, but those are byproducts of his mission of making beautiful things that deliver power and pleasure to people. There are more important things, yes, but that's pretty darned good. It's why people are laying flowers at the door to his store, and why I am with them in spirit.

Bringing it back to Occupy Wall Street, consider:

Is such a memorial to any other CEO even conceivable?

Is it all that hard to see why it isn’t?

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I’d leave it at that but there's just one more thing.

I dig this picture of the original Macintosh development team blogged in a fascinating remembrance by John Siracusa.

Notice that there are a lot of women in that picture? That it’s mostly White people, but not entirely? Both in an era when tech skewed even more White and male than it does now. And notice that there's a fella holding his baby right in front there?

This sure looks to me like a shaggy bunch of goddamned hippies who have cleaned up for Picture Day. Which is no surprise: Jobs himself was a goddamned hippie who once lived on an ashram and dropped acid and did his major corporate announcements dressed in a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers and referenced Gandhi and Bucky Fuller in advertisements and thought that finally adding the Beatles to iTunes was an announcement on a par with launching a whole new product line. Jobs was a hippie who built a hippie organization.

I submit that it’s no coïncidence that this hippie organization is now arguably the most successful company in the world. Because while we shouldn’t pretend that Apple isn’t ruthless, isn’t exploitive of its workers, isn’t deeply concerned with bean counting, and all that, just doing those things doesn’t explain Apple’s success, either in making money or in inspiring love. Making great products and services that serve people is what did it. And that, I submit, comes of taking a bunch of smart oddballs and giving them a mandate to do something great. That comes out of a culture, not just in the sense of “corporate culture” but in the sense of culture at large.

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Update: To honor the 10^th anniversary of us losing him, Apple made a lovely little propaganda film of him saying, basically, swing for the fences to make something worthwhile. Whatever ambivalences I still have about him, that is the right project for anyone, especially someone graced by Fortune to hold the resources he did.

Goodbye Steve

Steve Jobs
1955-2011
Titan of industry

Look at his face at 4:00:

He’s not smiling for the applause. He’s smiling because he got it done.

The loss of him would have been news if had he only created the personal computer industry. Or if he had only committed to turning the Xerox Star into the Macintosh, “the first computer good enough to be worth criticizing”. Or if he had only founded the first major computer animation film studio. Or if he had only rescued Apple from the brink of disintegration. Or if he had only led the Macintosh renaissance of OS X and the iMac et cetera. Or had only rescued the music industry from their own stupidity. Or had only captained the creation of either the iPhone or the iPad.

Having done all of those is hard to conceive, even knowing it to have happened. A life well lived.

Let’s memorialize him by making it unexceptional that a corporation should make beautiful products that empower people and bring them joy, shall we?

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It turns out I had a lot more to say.

Marxist imagery

I've had an eye out for a thorough discussion of the history of the Marxist cartoon image of the gluttonous, well-dressed capitalist for a while, and haven't had any luck finding one. I know that it dates back at least to the 1920s. Here's a good example of the type from that era:

Here he turns up in the first Soviet animated film:

(There's a good description of both of these images over at Raymond Owen's film blog, where I found them.)

It's a surprisingly resilient image. In American popular culture it has become deracinated from its Marxist roots in figures like Scrooge McDuck, the Batman villain The Penguin, and The Monopoly Guy.

My hunger to get at the history of the image arises from seeing this country music video a few years back, Montgomery Gentry's “You Do Your Thing:”

It's basically a propaganda film for Republican talking points, and half of it is built out of old Marxist cartoon imagery. It's not only deracinated from its communist roots, in a bizarre reversal we are offered presumptively left-leaning cosmopolites as the gluttonous, well-dressed villains with contempt for the common people.

This comes to mind because at the Occupy Wall Street protest, there was an amazing life-imitates-propaganda moment as champagne-swilling Wall Street WASPs looked down over the protest.

Is there a chance that American lefties can reclaim this old image?

Update: The Gothamist has uncovered the Facebook event invite to the “Anti Hippy Protester Champagne Toast.” Only check it out if you'd like to feel a little rage.

Update: A friend finds John Hodgman in character as the Formally-Dressed Capitalist. We are, again, meant to immediately recognize the image.

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Indiana Jones was right

A little something I made for a friend a while back.

So true.

Disenfranchised

David “The Wire” Simon, from an interview with Bill Moyers.

These really are the excess people in America. Our economy doesn’t need them—we don’t need 10 or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones who are undereducated, who have been ill-served by the inner-city school system, who have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy, we pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it.

William Wall connects the dots in the UK riots.

We are told variously that there is no political context, no political motive, no political enemy – it is ‘criminality pure and simple’. This is because violence against the police (and therefore the state) is not considered in itself to be political. It is because the envy of, the desire for and the acquisition of luxury goods such as plasma TVs and jewellery is not considered political. The political class and the commentariat cannot conceive of themselves as enemies of the people who live in areas like Tottenham where Tory cuts are closing youth centres, which suffer massive unemployment even while the City is booming, and which are the objects of legislation designed to disadvantage them even further.

Approval ratings

Think about how poisoned the word “liberal” is in American political discourse.

Now think about this: almost 1 in 6 Americans disapprove of President Obama's job performance because he is not liberal enough. And the number is climbing.

If it was a snake, it woulda bit me

Matt Zoller Seitz perfectly explains something I didn't even realize should have an explanation.

Hollywood is a dream factory run mostly by and for raging narcissists with power and money. Its mass-produced dreams are overseen by people who want to be constantly reassured that they're talented, sexy, charismatic warrior-poet visionaries, and that you can absorb such invaluable knowledge by being around them that the abuse they heap on you is totally worth it. That's why the preferred dramatic configuration of ensemble TV shows is the ragtag band of eccentric professionals (read as: creative types), led by a well-dressed, middle-aged boss who reflexively needles and insults people and throws temper tantrums and sometimes puts on an expensive jacket and sunglasses, hops in his expensive car or on his expensive motorcycle, and takes off for parts unknown without warning, forcing underlings to wonder where the hell he is and talk about him nonstop until he reappears unannounced and provides them with the final piece of whatever puzzle they were trying to solve in his absence. These shows exist to kiss the asses of people who approve shows.

As always, the structure of an institution is reflected in what it produces. Of course.

Not that this will blunt my enjoyment of House, M. D..

Terrorism and compassion

A Norwegian movingly responds to the terrorist attack in in his country.

He wanted to save the world from the muslim threat. He was afraid. Fear, fear, sickening fear permeates his writing. It is clever. He is well-read. It has all the good, rational ways of explaining a point of view. He is afraid. Nothing in his writing says it clearly.
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I am proud of the fact that we arrested this murderer alive. How would that have played out in USA? Even in this situation, norwegian police was able to catch him alive. It is horrible to have to talk about this. If a sniper bullet could have saved a single life more, of course that would have been immensely much better. But somehow, he was stopped without being killed, and if that happened without risking any more childen's lives, yes, that is a good thing.

My bodily reaction was a sudden wish to have him torn apart by horses. But that is my feelings. Fear. Rage. Disgust. This rage for vengeance is not what makes us human. It is the victory of abstract thought, of faith, that makes us human. The faith that any human can be something different tomorrow than they are today. To him, maybe killing children gave him a physical reaction. For his own sake, I hope he is a complete psychopath, if such a thing exists. If he really did this just to bring attention to his thoughts, and he will now have to face it like a human being ...

I agree with him that the only thing that can truly defeat terrorism is compassion. Violence just won't do the job. A few were wise enough to see this from the beginning, but we remain all too few.

The Dark Knight Concludes

Like any good geek, I have a lot of love for Christopher Nolan's Batman films, and I eagerly look forward to the third and final installment of the series, The Dark Knight Rises.

Someday I mean to write something lengthy about Nolan's Batman as a response to Frank Miller's two hugely successful Batman graphic novels, Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns. Anyone familiar with Miller's books can see their influence on Nolan's movies, but I think a lot of folks miss how Nolan offers a commentary which does not look kindly upon his predecessor. Maybe this just reflects me projecting, but I suspect that Nolan has caught on to Miller's fascism and wants to critique it.

So I believe that Alyssa Rosenberg has it right in her reflection that Nolan might put Bruce Wayne in a wheelchair by the end of his movie, and that he should.

If Batman Begins was about the virulence of criminality, and The Dark Knight was about the limits of government institutions in the face of unspeakable evil, it would make sense for The Dark Knight Rises to be about the fragility of the superhero enterprise as a whole. Batman may be able to stop a small number of very dangerous criminals and terrorists. And society may be able to accommodate his violations of rules—such as bans on electronic surveillance—because he’s one man, and because he isn’t broadly challenging norms. But if Gotham can’t or won’t change its institutions in the name of building a safer, less corrupt city, and instead relies on one man with a limited license to break the rules, then the city is awfully vulnerable to that man’s destruction.
....
His Batman has been a fragile, limited bulwark against chaos, occasionally surprised by a flash of human goodness. If Nolan breaks Batman, he’ll provide a sharp rebuke to his fellow superhero storytellers. And he’d be the first among them to tell a truly complete story, to make a cohesive argument about superheroism, in the three movies allotted to him.

I particularly like her point about the advantages of telling one big story with the trilogy. No less an expert than the greatest English-language comics writer of all time, Alan Moore, tried to tell the DC Comics editors this very thing twenty-five years ago:

As I mentioned in my introduction to Frank's Dark Knight, one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time; Robin Hood is driven to become an outlaw by the injustices of King John and his minions. That is his origin. He meets Little John, Friar Tuck and all the rest and forms the merry men. He wins the tournament in disguise, he falls in love with Maid Marian and thwarts the Sheriff of Nottingham. That is his career, including love interest, Major Villains and the formation of a superhero group that he is part of. He lives to see the return of Good King Richard and is finally killed by a woman, firing a last arrow to mark the place where he shall be buried. That is his resolution--you can apply the same paradigm to King Arthur, Davy Crockett or Sherlock Holmes with equal success. You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth.

The reasons this all came up in the Dark Knight intro was that I felt that Frank had managed to fulfill that requirement in terms of Superman and Batman, giving us an image which, while perhaps not of their actual deaths, showed up how they were at their endings, in their final years.

I cannot imagine that Nolan has not encountered this argument.

Let me add another speculation to Rosenberg's. I notice that Nolan makes a point of showing that Batman requires more than just Bruce Wayne in a cape. We can see his Batman as a conspiracy of tough old guys. Without Gotham cop Jim Gordon, technical whiz Lucius Fox, and right-hand man Alfred Pennyworth, Batman cannot function. Plus, Nolan's Bruce Wayne regards Batman in a very instrumental way; he sees Batman as a tool for fixing Gotham City.

Contrast that with Frank Miller's Batman. While working on Dark Knight Returns, Miller said:

Bruce Wayne is Batman's host body. Bruce Wayne died when his parents got blown away. He really loves fighting crime.

Nolan gives us a completely different Bruce Wayne. He does not want the job but he feels compelled to do it. Unlike Miller's Batman, who cannot retire, Nolan's Wayne wants to. Maybe a crippled Bruce Wayne will look at the world without Batman and decide he likes it better that way. Maybe the tough old guys can do the job at least as well without him. Maybe Nolan won't just have Bruce Wayne relieved to hang up the cape ... maybe he will make us feel the same way.

The Secret Origin of Captain America

An extra thought (after my earlier Captain America post) in honor of the Captain America movie: John Seavey’s wonderful speculation that Steve Rogers, in being a “premature anti-fascist” must have been a red diaper baby.

Ever notice how sometimes, there’s a weird synchronicity at work in the things you read? I just got done reading a book about the Hollywood blacklist, and I’m now reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (not bad, but I’d still rather read a biography than a roman à clef). Both of them focused a lot on the social unrest of the 1930s, as the world headed for war, and on a society that was far less united in its opposition to Hitler and fascism than we like to mythologize. (America has a disturbing tendency to mythologize its own past, and then unfavorably compare it to the realities of the present.)

Reading the two books together have sparked an idea in my head for a comic book. And since I’m probably never going to get a chance to write it, I’ll share the idea here.

It’s the biography of Steve Rogers.

When you think about it, we really don’t know much about Steve Rogers before he became Captain America. We know he walked into a recruiting office eager to do something — anything — to help fight the Nazis. We also know that his parents were dead by then (one of the reasons he was accepted as a volunteer was that he had no family.) But beyond that, it feels almost like he wasn’t a real person until the day they gave him the Super-Soldier Serum.

But I think he must have been a very interesting person indeed. Because Steve Rogers has always been socially progressive–his attitude towards Sam Wilson might seem patronizing to modern audiences, but for someone born in 1917, Steve Rogers is pretty damned enlightened. He seems to have been working-class; there’s no real mention of an inheritance anywhere in his background, and he’s had to take jobs to make ends meet on several occasions. And he’s very strongly anti-Fascist; it’s telling that he signed up to fight against Hitler a year before the United States’ entry into the war…and was passionate enough about it that he wouldn’t take 4F for an answer.

All those things add up to a very interesting, potentially shocking, probably fascinating backstory that’s never been touched on. Namely, that Steve Rogers probably grew up in a Communist household. He might not have been a card-carrying Communist himself, but his parents almost certainly were. Because being a Communist had a different meaning during the Great Depression than it did twenty years onwards, in a Cold War America. During the 1930s, when unemployment was high and a privileged few were almost completely insulated from the Depression’s effects, lots of people joined the Communists because they believed in things like unionization, racial equality, and fighting back against the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in Europe. (Lots of prominent leftists went to help in Spain against Franco before Hitler rose to power. It was the cause celebré of its day.) The later political connotations didn’t come about until after World War II…which is part of why so many people wound up getting nailed by accusations of associating with Communists when the witch-hunts started.

Both of Steve’s parents were Irish immigrants; I see Steve Rogers’ dad as a union organizer, perhaps a dockworker or a teamster. His mother might have been a seamstress, also a highly politically charged profession (when Steve Rogers would have been born, the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was still a pretty recent memory.) The two of them probably believed solidly in the rights of the working man and woman, joined the Communist Party because many of their friends and fellow activists were members, and probably didn’t know nearly as much about Stalin as they thought they did. They might have led a fairly bohemian social life, rubbing shoulders with upper-class leftists like Hemingway or Dorothy Parker who liked to get involved with the lives of the people they were fighting for.

And by the time Steve was twenty, they were both dead. Certainly, that’s something that shouldn’t be treated lightly in any story about his life; union organizing in the ’20s and ’30s was a dangerous business. Activists could get beaten, jailed, or even discreetly murdered by hired thugs kept on the payroll. Maybe Steve’s dad died in a riot at the docks caused by paid agitators? Maybe his mother worked herself to exhaustion, eventually dying of pneumonia from trying to support the family single-handedly because Steve was too frail to get a job like his father had?

Steve’s poor physical health speaks volumes, too. It suggests malnutrition, childhood illnesses, the sort of thing that happened a lot in families too poor to afford good food and real doctors. Maybe Steve had a brother or a sister once, someone he never talks about because it’s too painful. Maybe he narrowly avoided the same fate.

The more I think about this, the more I think it would make a great story, a vibrant chronicle of pre-WWII America as seen through the eyes of a young man who would someday become its emblem. (Although he probably wouldn’t have stayed that way if he’d been around in the 50s. The HUAC would have had a field day with him. Maybe it was a good thing he stayed frozen in ice for a decade or so…) I’d love to write it. Tom Brevoort, if you’re reading this, call me!

Updates

• Steven Attewell at Lawyers, Guns, and Money elaborates, directly calling shenanigans on Mark Millar’s misreading of Steve Rogers
• More from Attewell
• And Brian Cronin offers Ed Brubaker’s response to Mark Millar
• Infamous Brad observes that this explains why Steve Rogers and Tony Stark do not get along.
• Lance Mannion says something similar looking at Age of Ultron
• “Moviebob” Chipman admires movie Cap standing up for what's right
• Delicious fanfic on this subject from Idiopathic about Steve Rodgers, PR disaster and reflections on the theme from Tumblr

(And while we are here, I also have a moving little reflection from theumbrellaseller about why Stark and Banner are Science Bros.)

Captain America

So being a geek, I've enjoyed the embarrassment of riches in superhero movies this summer. Thor was good fun and Asgard looked great. Green Lantern was kind of hokey and soulless, but impressed the heck out of my nephew. X-Men: First Class was, despite a few false notes, terrific.

But the one I was excited about opens tomorrow.

A few years back, in the pages of Marvel comics, Captain America took an assassin's bullet and died. (Don't fret; being a comic book superhero, he eventually got better.) A friend who isn't geeky—but knows that I am—asked if I could shed a little light on what it signified, but I couldn't think of anything to say. Cap has never been a character I've cared much about. Save for his memorable guest appearance in Daredevil's “Born Again” storyline, as written by the unstoppable Frank Miller, I've not felt much interest in him.

The one idea I do have about Captain America didn't do me much good in that situation, but the nifty trailer for the movie sold me completely, because it demonstrated that the filmmakers obviously have been thinking the same thing.

Captain America has a terrific arch-nemesis. Possibly the best.

Those are strong words, because the quality of your opposite number is a big deal in the superhero business. Many comics fans would say that I'm wrong about Captain America having the best foe, since the Joker obviously takes the prize. Surely Joker is an all-time great: he's the common sentiment Clowns Are Scary, made into supervillain form. Plus he plays well opposite Batman, which is important. Thanks to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight film, you don't have to be a comics geek to know about this symbiotic relationship between superhero and archnemesis; when Joker says to Batman “you complete me” it's scary and funny, but most of all it's uncannily true, and you can see how it cuts both ways. Batman ain't Batman without the Joker to fight, and vice versa.

While we're on the subject, Batman also benefits from a deep bench of second string enemies, including supervillainous versions of a Sexy Catburglar, Earth First!, not just one but two Insane Psychologists, and many more, all contributing to Batman's general superheroic coolness. Similarly, Superman has a big rogues gallery helping to make him super, and his arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor, is great fun because he's basically Supervillain Thomas Edison.

A good enough villain can elevate a mediocre superhero into the big leagues. Nobody cared about Daredevil until Frank Miller gave him Kingpin, The Capo of All The Mafia In The World, as his nemesis, then topped that with Elektra: Your Psycho Ex Girlfriend Has Become The Deadliest Ninja In The World. (Miller is both a terrific writer and a sexist creep; Elektra remains an excellent character, nonetheless.) Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is made much more interesting by having as his nemesis Victor von Doom, whose story is “I have lived out every damned trope in the entire Gothic literary tradition, we were best friends in college, and I have conquered an entire Eastern European country as the first step in my plan to kill you.” Superhero fans reading this may want to argue that Galactus, who is sort of Supervillain Jehovah, is Reed's greatest foe, but I think we have to reserve him as nemesis for the Silver Surfer ....

Point being, to be a superhero, you should have a cool supervillain to foil.

So who is this arch-nemesis for Captain America, who beats out the Joker, Lex Luthor, Galactus, Doctor Doom, and all the rest?

Comics fans are probably rolling their eyes reading this, because Captain America's nemesis is generally accepted to be a guy called the Red Skull, who is your basic evil megalomanic with endless cannon fodder minions and one plan after another to conquer the world. You can see him in the trailer, if you know to look. The Skull is pretty cool, but he's not in the very top tier. But I submit that Red Skull is just a stand-in for Captain America's real nemesis: Adolf Hitler.

And I don't know about you, but Lex Luthor, Darth Vader, and the kid who took my lunch money in 5^th Grade can all get in line; in my fantasy life, there's nobody I'd rather punch in the face.

The people who made this film obviously know that. So count me in.

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Update: The Secret Origin of Captain America, with links to reflections on his politics and the films.

Politics

Timothy Burke, in the middle of struggling with why we should even talk about politics at all, says a bunch of things I think:

I think individuals, institutions, communities don’t always or even often just defend their particular self-interest. I don’t think they often accurately understand or clearly express their interests, any more than I believe human psychology or agency is well-described by the sketch version known as homo economicus. I think political agency, whether expressed narrowly in the drafting of policy or broadly in the mobilization of resources and constituencies, frequently leads to unanticipated or surprising consequences, some unexpectedly good for almost everyone and others terrifyingly destructive even to the agents who initiated a particular course of action. I think it’s intellectually possible and morally desirable to understand people unlike yourself, even people whose aspirations and worldview are genuinely antagonistic to your own. I think totalizing ideologies and totalizing social philosophies are intrinsically ill-suited to explain the human past or set a course for the human future. I think language isn’t just a framing device or an instrumental apparatus for the production of consciousness and subjectivity. I think every imagined alternative to liberalism and modernity ends up reinstating both of them under the table as well as using both of them to generate complaints about their shortcomings.

Yeah, pretty much.

Yes, Minister

Yes, Minister is one of the funniest, cleverest television shows ever made. It’s also a work of political propaganda. The original is linkrotted, so here is the original pulled from archives

Yes (Prime) Minister – The Most Cunning Political Propaganda Ever Conceived

by Dan Haggard

The BBC series Yes Minister and its sequel Yes Prime Minister are two of the most renown and acclaimed television series ever made. They are timeless classics that can be watched and re-watched over and over again. Anyone who has seen them will express their admiration for the shows without hesitation. However, what many people don’t realize is that the shows were written by an advisor to Margaret Thatcher – Sir Anthony Jay – and were perhaps one of the most cleverly disguised vehicles of right wing propaganda ever conceived.

For those who don’t know of it, the series follows the exploits of a British MP James Hacker and his management of the ministry for administrative affairs, and then subsequently, the Prime Ministership. He is thwarted and manipulated at every turn by the chief public servant assigned to his department, Sir Humphrey Appleby. We learn fairly quickly that it’s the public service, not the democratically elected government, that really runs the country; and that their chief aim is to protect their own power, comforts and privilege. Hacker tries to get the upper hand, and occasionally succeeds, but rarely in the sense of actually doing any public good.

If you have friends on the left side of politics, one of the most amusing things you can do is either ask them about, or introduce them to Yes (Prime) Minister. If they are astute you’ll at least provoke an entertaining rant about its evils. But if they are not, you’ll get to watch them recount their favourite scenes and episodes; laughing all the while, praising the show for its incredible wit, acumen and insight into human nature. You’ll then get to watch their discomfort when you tell them that it was written by an advisor to Margaret Thatcher and that she was its biggest fan. And when you reveal that it is a propaganda piece for the right, a confused and pale pallor will stretch across their face that will be somewhat akin to the expression of a jock being told he had just had sex with a gay man.

If you want to be really mean, and perhaps even threaten your friendship, you can accuse your socially conscious brethren that their enjoyment of the show demonstrates that they secretly do agree with the essential psychological truths that underlie the economic theories of the right. While on the outside they profess to believe in the altruistic core of the human spirit, on the inside they delight in the satire of the essentially selfish and petty human animal.

Okay, maybe you shouldn’t do that – it’s too mean! But you should definitely educate them as to the true intent of the show. Sir Anthony Jay, along with the Thatcherites, believed in a political theory called public choice. This theory originated in the works of Kenneth Arrow, Duncan Black, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Anthony Downs, William Niskanen, Mancur Olson, and William Riker. They attempted to apply the principle of rational choice theory to the realm of political theory.

Rational choice theory is the view that individual were autonomous units that act purely in their own selfish interest. There were no altruistic saints that sacrificed their own comfort for the comfort of others, rather everyone aggressively sought to position themselves at the expense of others. The best you could hope to do was to achieve a maximal equilibrium which allows each individual their greatest share. Out of this view came the ideal of freeing individuals by means of the free market which in turn led to the heady 80s where individual greed ruled the world (and in more recent times as well).

Applied to the political realm, rational choice theory became public choice theory. Led by James Buchanan, they challenged the idea that public servants and politicians act in the public good. Rather, they really only pursue their own interests and seek to consolidate their power at the expense of the people they were expected to help. The solution was to radically curb the power of government, thereby enabling the freedom of the masses.

To espouse the ideals behind public choice theory, Sir Anthony Jay began writing Yes Minister. Once you understand the philosophy behind it, it becomes impossible to view the show in any other way. The public servants, as exemplified by Sir Humphrey Appleby all work to thwart the government where it tries to break down the barriers preventing social progress. But even though the politicians express a desire to help the people, they ultimately end up only serving their own interests as well. The only real difference between Humphrey and Hacker is that Humphrey is at one with his selfish nature, where Hacker cannot admit it to himself. This lack of self-awareness allows Humphrey to easily manipulate him. Most of Hacker’s noble plans are shelved because Humphrey either shows or engineers it such that to pursue the noble policy would damage Hacker’s own self interest.

The show played directly to the cynicism that the public has for their elected representatives and the political process as a whole. It was so well written, and so genuinely funny that only recently has it been outed as the propaganda piece that it really is, with Adam Curtis making the criticism in his documentary – The Trap. One might of course wonder if its status as right wing political schill in any way lessens the quality of the show. I won’t cast judgement. No matter what your political beliefs, its very hard to deny the immediate appeal of the show and its brilliance. But you can’t ignore the role it was intended to play. You have to keep in mind that it was intended to manipulate your beliefs and your ideals. The one thing you must do is watch it with a very careful and critical eye.

I first learned this through the amazing Adam Curtis’ long video-essay The Trap mentioned at the end of the article. I have reservations about Curtis but it is still well worth your time.

Federal deficit

Conservatives consistently talk about reducing government spending. Lately we've been hearing a lot of talk from them about the evils of deficit spending. Fundamentally I agree; we cannot rely on running a deficit year after year without screwing up the economy.

(Actually, economists I respect argue that if the economy is growing, modest deficits are safe and even healthy; I won't quibble. And I vigorously believe in the Keynesian argument that temporary large deficits are desirable in deep demand-failure recessions like we're in right now. But my point is that you cannot run big deficits year after year indefinitely.)

But in understanding what's going on with this conservative rhetoric, one must look at both the past and the future.

The past: Throughout Bush's administration Republicans held the House. Four out of eight years they held the Senate as well, and the other four years the Senate was exactly split between the parties. Republicans were steering the bus. They turned the balanced budget from the end of the Clinton administration into rising deficits. And no, we did not hear conservatives talking about how the deficit was bad.

Now that we have a Democrat in the White House, conservatives are talking a lot about deficits. This pattern arouses my skepticism.

The future: I was inspired to write this post because a conservative was telling me that conservative commentators promise to hold Republicans' feet to the fire about the deficit ... which they want to see addressed only through spending cuts, not by raising taxes.

This tells us that the deficit itself is not the priority. If it were, tax increases would be worth discussing. Combine this with conservatives' silence about the deficit during the Bush administration and I conclude that conservatives are insincere with their concern about the deficit. The point is cutting spending, the deficit is just rhetorical support for that project.

Well okay, conservatives are unmistakably consistent in talking about cutting spending. But most conservatives and practically all Republican politicians are evasive about what spending they would cut. Saying they want to eliminate “waste” and the Department of Education isn't enough. What will it take?

Federal spending consists of four roughly-equal major chunks:

1. Military
2. Social Security
3. Medicare/Medicaid (and miscellaneous other health insurance stuff)
4. Everything else (embassies and the FBI and maintaining the interstate highway system and NASA and farm subsidies and federal prisons and keeping the lights on in Washington DC and the immigration and naturalization service and the CIA and on and on ....)

The deficit is currently about 30% of total expenditures. So you have to cut two of those in half, and then some, or eliminate one of those entirely and sweat something else down significantly. If you're sincere and serious about cutting spending then you have to say which of those it's gonna be.

But conservative commentators and Republican politicians don't do that, because most Americans are in favour of Items 1, 2, and 3, and if you cut significantly into Item 4 you can count on hitting something they care about there, too.

So: What's it going to be? What are you going to cut? Until you answer that, I say shenanigans.

I'm sincere and serious, so here's my plan:

1. Fix the weak-demand recession with as much deficit-funded stimulus spending as Paul Krugman says we need. This is a temporary measure, so it should focusing as much as possible on one-time infrastructure investments.
2. Cut the military in half.
3. Raise taxes on income over ^$100k to fill the gap.
4. Switch our broken health insurance system to Medicare For Everyone so we start working on long-term cost controls. (No, this doesn't have to cost more money; most rich countries with universal government health insurance spend no more per capita than we already do.)

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Update:

A clever video about how projects Republicans propose cutting have trivial costs:

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Update

Since people get confused about what these numbers are, checking Wikipedia I see that the Federal budget for 2011 was ^$3700 billion. That breaks down to ^$835B for Medicare/Medicaid, ^$725B for Social Security, ^$700B for the military (or about $1000B or even more, it depends on how you count), and ^$1340B (or ^$1000B) for Everything Else, including $225B in interest on the outstanding debt. Note that this is on ^$2300B in revenue, leaving a deficit of ^$1400B. (Note also that Social Security payroll taxes brought in ^$820B, so that program is almost ^$100B in surplus, which is set aside to pay for rising expenditures in benefits for retiring Boomers.)

Note also that the ^$1400B deficit sounds pretty scary until you realize that total GDP for 2011 was ^$15,000B. No, we cannot tax all of that out of the economy — that would leave nothing for people to buy shoes and pay for groceries — but it means that the country isn't “broke”. We can pay for everything in the Federal budget now if we really want to.

Deficit hawkery is a lie.

The Jerusalem of our imagination

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

David Shulman at the New York Review of Books blog offers hope that the Arab Spring is inspiring Arab Palestinians.

A Mediterranean variant of Gandhian-style mass protest has by now taken root among Palestinian communities in several parts of the West Bank: Ma’asara, Nabi Saleh, Dir Kadis, Na’alin, and Bil’in, to mention only a few. There is by now a clear awareness among many that non-violent resistance is far more likely to be effective against the Israeli occupation than violence; and these days the humane principles of Gandhi and Martin Luther King are frequently and clearly articulated in Arabic by grass-roots Palestinian leaders.

An eloquent statement of the philosophy and method was delivered on June 5 by Bassem al-Tamimi, one of the leaders of the Nabi Saleh protests, at his trial at an Israeli military court for organizing demonstrations. Al-Tamimi’s text will, I am sure, someday be taught in schools, maybe even in Israel; it is remarkably reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement to a now forgotten British judge in Ahmedabad in 1922, when the judge sentenced him to jail for six years.

Non-violent resistance is also the official policy of the Palestinian government in Ramallah.

He isn’t fooling about the statement from Bassem al-Tamimi. It’s good stuff.

I organized these peaceful demonstrations in order to defend our land and our people. I do not know if my actions violate your Occupation laws. As far as I am concerned, these laws do not apply to me and are devoid of meaning. Having been enacted by Occupation authorities, I reject them and cannot recognize their validity.

Despite claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East you are trying me under military laws which lack any legitimacy; laws that are enacted by authorities that I have not elected and do not represent me. I am accused of organizing peaceful civil demonstrations that have no military aspects and are legal under international law.
[⋯] Regardless of how just or unjust this ruling will be, and despite all your racist and inhumane practices and Occupation, we will continue to believe in peace, justice and human values. We will still raise our children to love; love the land and the people without discrimination of race, religion or ethnicity; embodying thus the message of the Messenger of Peace, Jesus Christ, who urged us to “love our enemy.”

The example of the Arab Spring presents a great opportunity to break the tragic deadlock in Israel and Palestine. May we, for once, miss the opportunity to miss the opportunity.

Independence Day

I consider this essay largely supplanted by my later, hopefully more astringent, version, but you may still find it interesting.

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Today is Independence Day in the United States.

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite, with my soft spot for lefty activism) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

I've posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence. The nation was born not when people used force of arms to secure the nation, either for the first time or the last time. Rather the nation was born when the idea of the nation was first named clearly.

It's easy to forget what a rhetorical achievement the Declaration really is. The world of 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.

Here's David Hume working to name a moral theory for equality, taking pains to say that there's nothing special about a king.

Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate.

Here's John Locke trying to talk about individual human rights, taking pains to say that this makes sense if you think about it carefully.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Now here's Thomas Jefferson summing it up in the Declaration, asserting that these things are obvious givens.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

There you go. There's the fundamental principles of human rights, democracy, state legitimacy, and revolutionary action, rolled up in two hundred and three words.

I'd like to say that you couldn't improve it by changing a single one of those words. It's very, very close. But—forgive me getting feminist for a moment—those two uses of the word “Men” really stick out. I'm prepared to forgive Jefferson that one; he was a man of his time. He knew that the principles he describes meant that America was engaged in a terrible evil in the form of slavery. Check out his rough draft of the Declaration in which this is the longest complaint against the King of England.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

So I believe that Jefferson understood the radical implications of the idea that all people are equal, but didn't think to fit it into the language.

I gave you the best part, but hey, you really ought to take a few minutes in honor of the day and read the whole thing — it's really good stuff.

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Bonus posts:

• Me on Hollywood movie stars and liberal patriotism—plus those movie stars reading the Declaration
• Brad DeLong and Don Herzog on Jefferson, rights, and Nature's God

• Hilzoy on Abstract Words, Too Noble To Neglect
• Fredrick Douglass on What is the 4^th of July to a Slave?; you can hear a podcast of it read aloud ... or the marvelous Baratunde Thurston reading both Douglass and Jefferson

Midrash

Yes.

The only way to cultivate organic symbols is midrash. As a discourse, midrash is completely different from scientific discourse. [...] Scientific analysis strives to reveal the conceptual world of the creators of symbols; midrash tends to ignore the conceptual world of these symbol-creators. Scientific analysis sees the symbol as a means to reach the past; midrash sees it as a way to reach the future. Scientific discourse aspires to be objective; midrashic discourse is intentionally subjective. Midrashic discourse takes symbols out of context; scientific discourse strives to place symbols in their contexts.
....
Children do not like to be spoken to in the analytic mode of discourse. They are eager for midrash of organic symbols. At a very young age, they discover that the world is round, but their inner world stays pre-Copernican, and angels climb the ladders of their world and slide down slides into their sandboxes.

Identity politics

Lady Gaga: “Essentialized conceptions of gender, sexuality, and other identity categories compel a celebration of diversity. Also, at Haus of Gaga we're bored with Matthew Barney videos and have started watching a lot of Kenneth Anger and Ken Russell instead.”

Weird Al: “Your Ladyship, if anyone is a demonstration that gender, sexuality, and other identity categories are performative, it's you. Also, don't go all highbrow, you're ripping off Madonna's act more than anybody else's, and I started doing that before you were born.”

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Advantage: Weird Al, channeling Judith Butler.

On the behalf of all Generation X cultural theory nerds, I'd like to offer our apologies to the Millennials. We tried really hard to sort this identity stuff out in the ’80s and ’90s, but it's harder than it looks. And I'm afraid it's not getting any easier; now we have the transgender liberation movement trying to make both arguments at the same time ...

Lifestyle advertising

I stumbled across this clever little trifle today. It's a takeoff on Ice Cube's “It Was A Good Day,” depicting a good day as a young tech startup employee in San Francisco. I recommend you watch it. It's cute.

It filled me with disgust.

The romanticized vision it offers of this character's life ... or, I should say pointedly, lifestyle ... is part of the waters I swim in. I meet folks all the time who want to believe in this romantic image, want to live it, want to think they are living it now.

I myself am living something like it. And I believe in the embodied life, the urban life of simple pleasures and bonhomie and all that. I believe in it fervently, like I believe in democracy and feminism and good design. I believe that making The Good Life happen is a technological, personal, social, political, even spiritual victory in a struggle with a world that too often conspires against it. No small thing.

I know I'm overthinking this, but I felt that the video makes that profound little victory somehow small, just the sum of its pleasures. Less than the sum of its pleasures, with the implication that small pleasures are not only important, but the only thing. And the video is actually — in a weird recursive loop of self-reference — a San Francisco startup advertising their product. It's lifestyle advertising, selling both the product as a marker of the lifestyle, and the lifestyle itself as an object of desire. And the video represents the victory of the transformation of the rakish San Francisco of my youth — the transformation that began with the first dot-com wave in ’99 — away from countercultural and toward being merely hip. And the video deracinates the Ice Cube song “It Was A Good Day” that has more than a bit of political context.

I'm not too serious to enjoy trifling celebrations of The Good Life. I actually think the product advertised is quite a good one, made by a good company. I don't wish for some kind of unchanging San Francisco, trapped in amber. I'm in favour of playful, artful remixing of culture. I'm not radically opposed to any of these things I'm complaining about.

But still. It's smug. It irked me.

Sorry. I'm being a cranky middle-aged man today. Haters gotta hate. I guess I'm a hater.

X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is elaborately plotted, smart, and melodramatic. It's full of in-jokes, sexy ladies in absurd costumes, and symbolic subtext. It plays clever games with the continuity established in the other X-films, and opens up opportunities for endless sequelæ. It ends with sock-o action and anguish.

In short, it's even truer to the spirit of the Claremont X-Men comics I grew up on than Bryan Singer's two X-films.

There's a lot to like. McAvoy and Fassbender are terrific as Xavier and Erik, both individually and playing off of one another; it's a tall order to play characters who are going to age into Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, and they deliver the goods. As villain Sebastian Shaw, Kevin Bacon is even better; he's as terrifyingly convincing a psychopath as Hopkins' Lecter. There are a number of other good performances as well, including some pleasant surprise appearances by great character actors like Michael Ironside, and Nicholas Hoult as an anxious young Hank McCoy. The production design is marvelous, with great little winks toward the world of early James Bond movies. The movie delivers good superheroics — incredibly it even sells Banshee's power of flying by yelling really loud, which seems goofy even in the comics — with nifty special effects and the characters using their distinctive powers intelligently. The movie is smart and fun and a lot of the characterization is rich.

That said, it has a few serious flaws. There are patches in the middle where it bogs down with Too Many Mutants; my non-comic-book-fan companion fell out of the movie at that point, and never quite found her way back in. Surrounded by good performances, January Jones' Emma Frost stands out as, well, looking great in '60s hair. The uncanny blankness of her Betty Draper in Mad Men is apparently the only note she can hit; the computer-generated diamond version of her is a better actor. The evocation of '60s sexism, which could have been witty, is undercut by the sexism of the movie itself. Among other things, having established that movie Mystique walks around blue and nude, and having included Emma Frost as a character, you'd think there was more than enough womens' skin showing, but no we have see every female character in her lingerie at some point while the men get all the good lines. There's racism to go with the sexism; all of our central characters are White ... though there is one Black guy in the movie. Just guess how things work out for him. I try not to let that sort of thing get under my skin too much, but it is especially disturbing given the Civil Rights Era subtext of X-Men in general and the choice of the early '60s as the setting for this story.

Still, First Class is a much, much better superhero movie than I was expecting, and suggests that the series will recover from the hugely disappointing X-Men: Last Stand. Joe Bob says check it out.

Magick, reason, and science

This, in a nutshell, is how I reconcile magickal practice and the understanding of reality we get from the natural sciences.

I take Uncle Al's maxim “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion” to mean that magick is to one's personal, subjective experience of one's life as science is to the physical universe. Your life is the material you're working with in magick.

Obviously your subjective experience is profoundly conditioned by your encounter with the material cosmos. What you see is shaped by what's in your head, yes. But what you're looking at, outside your head, also has a big effect. (At least, it does if you're sane.)

Science organizes the application of reason to the physical universe through the use of meticulous experimentation and observation within controlled conditions, confirming its models of the world through reproducible results. These rigorous standards produce High Quality Truth. Let me say that again. Science produces High Quality Truth. If you are wise, you will not fuck with it.

Magick organizes the application of reason to your life through the use of meticulous experimentation and observation ... but in your life you cannot have controlled conditions, and you cannot get neatly reproducible results. In studying your life, it is impossible to use the full rigorous standards of science. But you can still apply reason and experiment to get very useful results.

Science produces models of how the physical universe works. Models are regarded as strong to the degree that they predict what the universe does, using the simplest explanation of the widest range of phenomena. Again, this marvelously rigorous standard gives us extremely reliable models. These models tell us that at the scale we live in the cosmos has crisp, mechanical rules for causality in which the operations of the mind do not directly affect what the cosmos does.

Yeah, yeah, quantum mechanics, I know. QM does not apply at human scales. Do not kid yourself with some What The Bleep bullshit about how QM proves that the universe is just craaaazy. It does not. That is fucking with the High Quality Truth of science, and I warned you about that. The world of people and teacups and cheeseburgers that we live in is Newton's clockwork automaton. But don't worry, it has plenty of room for magick.

Magick produces models of how your life works. Consider two types of models that can describe the effects that you get: Consciousness and Spookiness. In the Consciousness model, you understand a magickal operation as having altered the processes of your mind, resulting in changes in behavior and perception that produce the effects that you get. In the Spookiness model, you understand a magickal operation as having connected to spooky patterns in the cosmos (gods! angels! demons! egregores!) which use spooky means to reshape the cosmos, bringing the effect to you.

Both models provide explanations of the results you get from magickal practice. Early in your magickal practice the Consciousness model seems tidy and straightforward — “after the ritual for A New Job, I started talking to people about A New Job more, started preparing for it, started looking for it, so it's no surprise that I was able to bring myself A New Job when I bumped into it in the form of Jane at that cocktail party” — while the Spooky model seems elaborate and tortured and, frankly, a little goofy. This is comfortingly consistent with Newton's clockwork universe that we know about from science; you can see all the material, causal connections at work. But as your magical practice progresses, the Consciousness explanations you can come up with for the magickal effects you get become increasingly elaborate and tortured ... while the Spooky explanations become increasingly tidy and straightforward.

Models should be regarded as strong to the degree that they predict what your life does, using the simplest explanation of the widest range of phenomena.

Both explanations will always continue to apply. You will never get magickal results that outright conflict with a Consciousness model consistent with the scientific understanding of the material world. But your life is inherently a great big irreproducible result, with plenty of room for the improbable. Looking at your life, performing magickal experiments, seeking the simplest explanation, things can get very, very Spooky.

SlutWalk

I just succumbed to the temptation to respond to someone who said this:

I do not want anyone to assume this is anything to do with trying to excuse the actions of the perpetrator.

What I want to talk about though is that I think we should be able to acknowledge that people should try to not put themselves in bad positions. Lets be realistic. The world is not a perfect place, in fact very far from it. Should we be working to make it a better place? Absolutely. But in the mean time we also have to live in the world as it is.
....
What I am saying is that the “slut walk” is absolutely right to be trying to change the culture, but I think it got started for the wrong reasons. I think the police were absolutely right to suggest that people make decisions to improve their own safety in the imperfect terrible world that we have to live in.

Damn. Duty calls. I responded with this:

There's a meaningful distinction between blaming victims and talking about what behavior is wise in an imperfect world. Surely there is stuff that would be wrong to say to someone who had just been victimized that is entirely appropriate to say during a safety training.

Let's look at the incident that sparked the SlutWalk movement. It was a safety training, but it wasn't even an appropriate comment in that venue.

Constable Michael Sanguinetti made the stunning remark during a meeting about safety at Toronto's York University.

While a more senior officer was talking, Mr. Sanguinetti interrupted and reportedly said: ‘You know, I think we’re beating around the bush here. I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this, however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.’

So what's wrong with this picture?

There's the important context that we live in a culture where there is a lot of victim-blaming going around. So one should step carefully to avoid reïnforcing that pattern. Constable Sanguinetti didn't make any effort at that; in fact, he alluded to having been warned about it and dismissed that warning.

If you look at his comment, he implies that dressing differently is reliable protection against being victimized. He's not talking about improving your odds; he's implying that it's a way to be safe. Which we all know isn't true. You may protest that I'm reading the comment too closely, and that the constable meant to say only that dressing provocatively increases the risk of being raped. If we grant him that meaning — which in his position as an expert offering his expertise he should have made more clearly — then he's still wrong because there is no reliable evidence that how a woman is dressed significantly affects her risk of being raped. (Look it up.) So even if we set aside the cultural politics, this was a very irresponsible statement.

And he didn't say “dressed provocatively,” did he? He said “dressing like sluts.” Sluts. Not a neutral term, a derogatory term for women who are “too willing” to have sex. Using the term “slut” at all is using a slur; using it linked to the threat of sexual violence is even worse.

So no, the police were not absolutely right.