A modest proposal

It's a bit late for this, what with the election over, but I have to share a disconcerting thought experiment that Big Media Matt proposes.

How can a President Kerry scale back some of the more egregious abuses of power Bush has committed without getting blamed for being 'soft' on terrorism. Simply rescinding the 'enemy combatant' orders isn't good enough, since the viability of that strategy depends on the Democrats winning every election ever which isn't realistic. Plus, it makes Kerry 'soft.' But what if he were to order the entire Republican congressional caucus to be arrested, shipped to Gitmo, and held imcommunicado? Then he could tell the GOPers that they're free to go as soon as they produce a bill putting some limits on, and oversight of, executive authority in this regard.

It woulda been fun.

Bowling noir

The web contains pages on every conceivable subject, as well as most inconceivable subjects. Case in point:

A fedora-bedecked man stands in the shadows, staring out at the city lights. A match flares under his Lucky Strike. For a quick, chiaroscuric moment, we see his face: eyes haunted by recent murder, upper lip quivering with psychosexual conflict. He blows out the match. A backlit puff of smoke curls up from his silhouette --- a not-too-subtle brimstonic portent of the damnation that is his fate, beckoning to him like a dark-eyed siren lounging in a cheap cocktail dress on the rocky shore of lust. The man turns up his collar. Touches the warm gun in his overcoat. And steps out to face the night, his bowling bag clutched firmly in his fist.

His bowling bag?

That's right. Because this isn't just any film noir. This is that sub- of sub-genres, the rarest of the rare, the hardest of the boiled: bowling noir. Or, as the French might say: bowling noir.

What's that? You've never heard of bowling noir?

Remember, this stuff doesn't just grow like mold. Someone had to sit down at a keyboard, think, and type those words.

Four versions of Poppy Z. Brite

Even if you're not interested in the writer Poppy Z. Brite, you may enjoy her description of the four stages of her writing career.

Living in the French Quarter wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd always thought it would be, especially since I wasn't drinking alcohol at the time. (How I thought I could live in New Orleans and not drink is utterly beyond me.) Couldn't seem to get serial killers out of my system; in addition to the two novels, I made them the subject of several short stories and one comics script ("Becoming the Monster" in Weird Business, illustrated by Miran Kim) and pontificated obnoxiously about them in interviews. Big influences during this time included Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Nilsen, Dennis Cooper, Gregg Araki's movie The Living End, the Church of Euthanasia, and my own belief that I was some sort of nihilist rock star of the horror scene.

Personally, I don't recommend her writing from the period she's describing: Excuisite Corpse is a serial killer novel too dark and nihilistic even for me. But Lost Souls, from the stage before, is a trashy goth delight about adorable tortured gay goth boys in love (but haunted very literally by ghosts of the past, natch) --- and her short story "Calcutta: Lord of Nerves" is a true horror classic, poetically taking us through the streets of Calcutta in George Romero's zombie world.

Today's quote

From Patriotic High-Fructose Corn Syrup, a little review of National Treasure, which offers a terrific alternate ending to the movie. I haven't seen the picture, and I can tell you that this ending is better than what actually shows up in the movie.

Some day, they should make a movie that only has Sean Bean and Gene Hackman in it, and we could watch them betray each other recursively for 110 minutes.

I'd go see it. David Mamet should write and direct.

More on resentment of the left

Continuing on the theme of Mark A.R. Kleiman's observation about how many Americans feel that the left has unfairly imposed its views on them, that I blogged about a little while ago, Ezra at Pandagon points to the strategic problems with liberal victories in the courts when the legislative battle is intractable.

... the Democratic Party's problems stem from the backlash of a century of victories based on judicial fiat instead of legislative victory. The latter requires dialogue, debate, coalition-building and enough successful persuasion that Congress feels electorally safe supporting the change (not to mention the legislative Crate and Barrel Rule: If you pass it, it's yours to defend); the former is a proclamation from on high, full of the authoritarian, elitist resonances that backlash politics requires.
...
I comforted myself with the thought that the Courts, the Courts would save us. With them, though, the cure is worse than the disease. In the last century, liberals have beaten racial bigotry, evangelical authoritarianism and sexual discrimination through the Courts. And now we're paying the price. And we'll keep paying until we realize that the question isn't how to win the culture battles --- we've spent the last 60 years using judges to rack up a damn impressive string of victories. The question, rather, is how to ensure that 50.1% of America cheers our victories, rather than feels they lost the game on the umpire's call.

The challenge here, of course, is that if we can't win an important point in the legislature, can and should we let it slide in the courts, in order to prevent this problem in public perception? The issues actually on the table and the inherent dangers of corrosion of Constitutional protections make this a scary proposition.

Intellectual honesty

Mark A.R. Kleiman shows us what you do when someone takes pains to clarify something for you.

In addition to reminding me about the difference between Aesop and Prokofiev, a number of readers told me I was utterly and completely wrong about what's going on in Iran and what to do about it.

It's not unusual, of course, for me to be utterly and completely wrong, or for my readers to bring my errors to my attention.

What is unusual is that several of them made arguments and offered facts that seemed cogent even to me, and that all of them were polite.

I'm no expert, and they could well be right. So in lieu of a comments section, I'm posting some of their emails.

He's right; the email he got is very clarifying about how to handle a potentially-nuclear Iran. (Hint: if we rush in to kill people and blow things up, it will be counterproductive.)

Bitter

I've been saving all of the unfair, whiny, angry, ranting lefty stuff I've been seeing in the wake of the election for one big primal scream. If you care to see them, I have a collection of the best of the bitter ...

A lot of Americans just want to say they're sorry to the world.

Many wags joke about walking away. An anonymous successionist declares a new blue republic of California ...

We spoke to God, and she agrees that this split will be beneficial to almost everybody, and especially to us in the new country of California.

... which probably should be coordinated with this plan ...

For the past three years, we have, in conjunction with a handful of MIT engineers, been constructing a giant, cordless circular saw, which is now complete. With this saw, we plan to carve our thriving, prosperous eastern Blue nation away from the spreading infection of red America. We will then set a mighty sail, which will carry us around the tip of South America and allow us to join our Blue compadres on the West Coast.

... unless Californians decide to go it alone, or we all just join Canada.

And that's all I have that's good humoured. One guy gets angry and serious about dividing up the country, saying fuck the South.

Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves --- yeah, those are states we want to keep.

Ken MacLeod grieves and starts planning how to fight back.

Well, now the American people have legitimised the bastard. Of course many, perhaps most, of those who voted for the President didn't consciously and deliberately vote for all he stands for. This is because not all, but a substantial portion, were too fucking stupid to find out. These knuckle-dragging cousin-fuckers who are LIVING PROOF that Darwin was right and who were piped to the polls by shills for crony capitalists who are LIVING PROOF that Marx was right still think America was attacked by Iraq, and payback is a bitch. I have news for them. It is. My only problem with that, frankly, is that I love too many folks who don't deserve to be collateral damage.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden thinks that Bush voters only now realize how serious this all is.

You know what’s really happening? They’re seeing our reactions, and they’re scared. It’s like that moment where someone tells you what they’ve done, and it’s disastrously wrong, a complete catastrophe; only they haven’t understood that until now, when they see you stagger and turn pale at the news. And as you’re standing there steadying yourself, feeling your heart pounding and a terrible weight descending on your shoulders … you realize that the other person is preemptively yelling at you. They still don’t quite know what’s happened, but they can tell they’ve screwed up big time, so they’re screaming that they certainly hope you aren’t going to pretend that this could somehow have been their fault, because …

They can tell we’re not just acting like we’ve lost an election. They know that politically, they haven’t been acting like responsible grownups. So now, their reaction is to raise and sharpen their voices, and say they certainly hope we aren’t going to pretend that this could somehow have been their fault …

Well, yes. It is. They’ve been stupid and self-indulgent and irresponsible.

Timothy Burke says that Republicans have no one left to blame, now.

With eyes wide open, in full possession of their faculties, acting as sovereign individuals, around 51% of American voters leapt consciously and clearly into the abyss, taking us with them.

Are you one of them? The nation is yours, but you are not stewards generously preserving something precious to us all. You are destroyers.

And Big Media Matt says that "values voters" are not only wrong, they're chumps.

This is what decades of voting for conservative politicians has wrought: nothing.

Or, rather, not nothing, in another sense it has wrought a great deal. Tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors to Republican-friendly corporations and campaign contributors have proliferated faster than gay pride parades and pornographic websites. Back in Washington for his victory lap, Bush claimed a mandate from the voters and proceeded to outline his agenda for his second term -- tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for energy companies, tax shelters for the wealthy, a massive giveaway to the insurance industry, and a larger giveaway to the financial services industry. The faith-based agenda of his most loyal flock was left on the cutting room floor. Just as it always has been, and just as it always will be. The powers that be in the Republican Party are, as in Andrew Sullivan's memorable phrase, "closet tolerants," uninterested in the values agenda except as a hateful prop to be deployed at campaign time.

A large bloc of their voters are, meanwhile, chumps. Not because they support a party whose economic agenda departs from their interests, but because they support a party that consistently refuses to take action on the issues that matter to them. It's the product of the same warped worldview that led most Bush voters in 2000 to tell exit pollsters that it's more important to have a president who provides "moral leadership" than one who can "manage the government." Their conception of the presidency -- of politics itself -- is detached from the reality of what can be achieved through political action. The president is not the preacher in chief; he's the chief executive.

Okay, I feel better, having got that out of my system.

Taxes

If you're going to be following the coming political fight over tax code revision, Big Media Matt conveniently gives a capsule review of what W has proposed.

... once the estate tax elimination is fully phased in, if you happen to inherit a large fortune that provides enough income to live off of without working, you'll never need to pay any taxes at all. Note that if the problem with the Alternative Minimum Tax is that it was "designed to ensure that the rich pay income taxes but one that increasingly ensnares the middle class," the solution is to raise the threshold at which the AMT kicks in and index it to inflation so this doesn't happen again. Eliminating the AMT isn't a way to help the middle class ...

Go check it out; it will help energize your BS detector on this topic for months to come.

Making learning fun

Learn about software message exchanges by visiting Starbuck's! Not as much fun as A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, but still pretty good.

More torture

Salon just ran an interview with Leila Sadat, a commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom during the Clinton administration, about the Red Cross report on Guantánamo Bay. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's torture.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I am surprised that they were using torture at Guantánamo.
...
It's torture. A lot of these techniques have been looked at in other countries; there's been a lot of litigation about them. They seem pretty clearly to be prohibited by the torture convention and I suppose even those that don’t amount to torture would nonetheless qualify as cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment, and that is also a legal definition.

Which tells us that the use of torture isn't just a few low-ranking folks at Abu Graib, it's systemic. Not that I didn't already know that.

It's long past time that the President, in his rôle as commander-in chief, took responsibility for rooting this out. But that's hardly likely, given how he just promoted Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel who wrote the infamous torture memo, to Attorney General of the United States.

---

Update: Orcinus has more on Gonzales as a bellweather domestically.

Duh

Jesse at Pandagon makes a connection that I should have noticed before.

I read a good four to five pieces each week declaring that academia is a cesspool of fermenting liberalism, from which spouts the bitter wine of postmodernist humanism. However, they're all from conservatives who, themselves, have expressed no desire to work in academia. If the situation were different, they would still be the $100,000 a year op-ed columnist who gets to be on MSNBC and CNN five times a month and only has to copy think-tank studies from the Heritage Foundation and call it a day. Or, you know, they simply cut out the middleman and work for the think tank itself.

Note to my regular readers: "four to five pieces each week"? Obviously my punditry addiction is not really as bad as I thought, in comparison.

And if you're interested in a long, thoughtful essay following up this point, check out what Juan Cole has to say.

Update: If you're interested in a very silly essay following up this point, check out what Bérubé has to say.

Ninja festivities

As part of our ongoing ninja coverage here at Miniver Cheevy, I inform you that this Sunday will be the second annual Day of the Ninja.

Forget "Talk Like a Pirate" Day. This will truly be our chance to show the world what ninja are made of.

Hmmnn. Ninjas and pirates are rivals? It may be news to this guy, but there seems to be general agreement that it is so. Given my strong pirate allegiance, this may have to be my last ninja post ...

Bye, Colin

Juan Cole, as usual, knows what's what and offers his summation on Powell's resignation, which may be even worse news than I thought.

... insiders in Washington have told me enough stories about Powell victories behind the scenes that I am not sure the marginalization argument is decisive. Powell had an alliance with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the two of them could sometimes derail the wilder plans of the Department of Defense. Blair, and probably Powell, convinced Bush to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan before going on to an Iraq war. Imagine how dangerous the situation would be if the US were bogged down in Iraq as it is now, but Bin Laden's 40 training camps were still going full steam!

Unsurprisingly, he has nothing nice to say about Condi.

Why your kids need Batman

Indri tells me that a study covered in New Scientist reveals that Superman is a counterproductive role model.

Students who thought of Superman volunteered much less of their time than those who thought about other superheroes. Furthermore, Superman-primed subjects were significantly less likely to show up at a meeting for volunteers held three months after they were initially asked to participate.

Got that right. Teach your kids about Batman, who's just a very determined guy. My mon Bats, he don't shiv.

Arrr

Pharyngula is my new hero. His blog is available in both regular and pirate mode.

List

At my mother's request, I offer y'all this list of things I want as Christmas gifts.

Friends and loved ones reading this, please don't feel obligated to run out and score me something; I try to live as much as possible in the world of gifts as targets of opportunity, rather than obligations. I'm willing to splurge on an expensive gift for a friend if I find something clever that I know that they wouldn't find or purchase for themselves. Hunting for something, anything, to give to someone in the absence of inspiration is a bit silly. If you feel the same, there's no dishonor if you just don't find something suitable and decide you won't give me a Christmas gift. I'll still love you.

That said, gratuitously cool little bookish or leatherish things are cool. Gratuitiously charming artefacts of manly grooming are cool. Certainly I always want more cufflinks. They are the perfect gift: delightful but unnecessary, they don't take up space, but I do use them all.

I don't need sweaters; I've got that one covered.

Of course anyone reading this blog who has never even met me will guess that I have an insatiable hunger for books, music, and movies. Weird new music I don't know anything about is fun.

I should say about that last link link that it leads to my Amazon wish list. I don't see any dishonor in buying DVDs from Amazon --- especially if you have five grand burning a hole in your pocket and think your buddy Jonathan needs the complete Criterion Collection gift set --- but if you can, you always want to support local retailers with your music and book dollars.

Archive

I've been cackling with glee over the trailer for National Treasure. The whole thing is stupid, of course, and I gather that the movie is a turkey, but as usual Bruckheimer is the best short filmmaker in the world. I really think that he produces these films in order to get a hundred million dollars to finance the making of the trailer. But what's not to like about a pop culture exploitation of the legend of the Templars begetting the Illuminati begetting the Masons begetting the American Revolution, and leaving their secret code on the Great Seal of the United States? And then stealing the Declaration of Independence?

The other thing that I love about it is that it reminds us that the National Archives in Washington DC is cool. I went there some years ago when I was visiting my folks, and it was as mighty as the Lincoln Memorial.

Of course, you get to see the Declaration of Independence, for which I have veneration beyond even the American norm. And the Constitution, ditto. And they had a display of the Magna Charta on loan from the Brits. (Slightly less impressive, as it turns out that they were smart enough to have King John sign several copies.)

They also have a rotating display of other cool stuff from the archive. My Dad and I cackled with glee over Nixon's resignation letter. (It's short.) I bowed before the might of Maya Lin's original design for the Vietnam Veteran's memorial. (It's handwritten, her handwriting is terrible, and her sketches suck too — neatness counts, my eye — but looking at it you can still see how brilliant the design is.)

Most delightful of all, there was a recent political cartoon that someone at the archive had clipped from the paper. In the cartoon, the President is reading the newspaper, and there's a headline about Vladamir Zhiranovsky, the scary Russian populist who was very big at the time, saying “Zhiranovsky demands return of Alaska.” The cartoon President is on the phone, saying, “Can you find me a receipt?” And sure enough, next to to the cartoon, there was the original receipt for Alaska.

I could just see some person who worked at the Archive seeing that cartoon in the paper in the morning, saying “I can find that!” Delicious.

Sticker

Hey, kids! Apostropher found these cool stickers! I like this one:

This textbook contains material on gravity. Gravity is a theory, not a fact, regarding a force that cannot be directly seen. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

Remember, most Americans think science is bunk, and the Cobb County, Florida school board is working hard to keep it that way, so let's make sure that people understand that "spooky action-at-a-distance" is just a theory.

And while you're at it, you know Gary Pearse at bOING bOING has another idea for stickers.

Is it just me?

Or does she look like Hiro Protagonist?

The problems of populism

Digby just hits the nail right on the head, pow, with a long post about the challenges of constructing a Democrat populism that will play in red America.

We cannot make a populist case to rural America as long as rural America continues to believe, as it has for centuries, that the government only takes their money and gives it to people they don't like. This belief is why people who should naturally support our programs instead vote for tax cuts.
...
So, Democrats are left with a difficult problem of how to deal with a region that is in economic distress but whose culture traditionally believes that government only helps people unlike themselves.

Now, we could, of course, make a fetish of pointing out the awful truth --- that most federal transfers come from the blue states to the red states. But, that doesn't really address the problem, which comes down to attitudes about the big city poor (blacks) vs the rural poor (whites.) And all that is tied up with the monumental social changes of the last fifty years, which mostly benefit them but which Rush and Sean tell them is the cause of all their problems. Every day, all day, with relentless precision.
...
Yes, if people were rational about these things you could sit down and have a nice discussion with spreadsheets and diagrams
...
But, as we've seen, people are not rational.

It's long, and well worth reading the whole thing.

I'd further emphasize the difficulty of the problem in that the VRWC has a whole noise machine built that churns out the raw material of infosphere manipulation to make sure that the the Republican populist smokescreen is secure. They have think tanks and advocacy organizations, busy turning out books and reports and bogus research and talking heads to appear on TV. This is to make it seductively easy for the mainstream news media --- increasingly short of time, attention, and resources because of their corporate masters' penny-pinching --- to play the political discourse using their terms and ideas. Plus they have whole media outlets which they outright own and control. And they have pots of money to give to politicians. And they have tightly-run, well-funded political organizations that span the local to the national. And they have their people well-trained to coordinate their talking points, stick to them, and articulate them well.

A few good populist ideas are not enough. It's going to take money, dedication, discipline, and time.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I, for one, know that I have a lot to be thankful for.

In honor of the day, I'd like to solicit some insight about a mystery that I have wondered about for some time.

I see Thanksgiving as a food-oriented holiday, and I'm comfortable with that, in spite of the creepy mythos of the holiday's origins. Eliminating Thanksgiving is a level of cultural reconstructive surgery that I'm not prepared to undertake, but I do think that all Americans need to acknowledge the problems in the "Squanto brings maize" myth. So I gather that Native Americans don't feel so charitably about the holiday, and I certainly respect that.

Among American Jews, it's a great legendary pseudo-tradition to go out to dinner at a Chinese restaraunt on Christmas Day. You have the day off from work, no other place is open, you don't celebrate the holiday, and everyone knows that pork is kosher if it comes in the form of pork fried rice. It's not actually something we ever did in my family; in a great show of Jewish-Catholic syncreticism, we kinda figured that more holidays equals more fun, an attitude which I have retained. But it's a well-known practice, and here in San Francisco it's commemorated by Kung Pao Kosher Comedy night, a revue of Jewish comics performing at Christmas in a Chinese restaraunt.

So I wonder: is there a Native American equivalent on Thanksgiving? Are all of the SF Native Americans over at Café Bastille right now, partying with the European expats? I hope that folks who have good reasons to feel uncomfortable with Turkey Day are doing something fun to reclaim the holiday for their own purposes.

Does someone in my vast reader population know?

Big fat lie

Why do we teach this to children?

I before E
except after C
and when sounded like A
as in neighbor and weigh

.... with just a few exceptions:

• ancient
• caffeine
• concierge
• conscience
• deity
• efficient
• either
• Fahrenheit
• feisty
• financier
• foreign
• forfeit
• height
• heist
• heinous
• kaleidoscope
• keister
• leisure
• obeisance
• protein
• reify
• reïnforce
• science
• seismic
• seize
• slight
• society
• sufficient
• their
• weird
• ....

Campaign

Arianna Huffington has a fascinating article about the mistakes of the Kerry campaign.

In conversations with Kerry insiders over the last nine months, I've heard a recurring theme: that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas (including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced that this election was going to be won on domestic issues, like jobs and healthcare, and not on national security.

As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me: "I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you're going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality --- they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone's strategy; he had none of his own."

Her description rings true, as far as it goes, but given how crafty the Republicans are at framing the debate, I wonder whether other strategy really could have worked any better. Yes, tactically, the Kerry team should have had a rapid-response team early to KO stuff like the Swiftvets for Bullshit, but strategically, it's going to take a long-term party-wide (and beyond) effort to take control of the issues on the table.

Not the kind of design I do

I caught The Incredibles last week and it's as fun as everyone says.

It's strange to say this about a movie with no real props or sets, but one of my favorite parts of the picture is the production design, which an article in Design Observer describes delightfully.

Arriving at the estate of Edna Mode, visitors are led up a manicured hillside to an International Style house of uncertain provenance. Edna’s diminutive size (she admits to three-foot-eight) makes the scale of her minimally furnished home seem even more preposterous: from the Miesian lobby to the Bulthaup-inspired industrial kitchen (and let's not forget the George Nelson benches) it’s an aesthetic travesty: design beyond reach. Edna herself is a kind of cross between the diminutive actress Linda Hunt and the design impresario Murray Moss --- with dashes of Anna Wintour and Edith Head thrown in for good measure. In Edna’s domain, design manifests as a kind of Napoleonic obsession. A devout minimalist permanently clad in monochromatic shades of black and grey, she’s the ultimate cartoon embodiment of design.

Though it's strange that the article misses how much of Carrie Donovan there is Ms. Mode.

The mass psychology of Republicanism

I have three heaping servings of the dark psychosexual undercurrents of politics for you.

Mark Ames makes some very unhappy speculations about Bush voters in his recent essay The Spite Vote. (He later published a revised version of this essay.)

This is why [the left] will forever struggle to understand the one overriding mystery of why so many working- and middle-class white males vote against their own best interests.

I CAN TELL YOU WHY. They do so out of spite. Put your ear to the ground in this country, and you'll hear the toxic spite churning. It's partly the result of commercial propaganda and sexual desperation—a desperation far more common than is admitted. If you didn't know anything about how America's propaganda worked, you'd think that every citizen here experienced four-dimensional multiple orgasms with beautiful, creative, equally satisfied partners, morning, noon and night.

The wretched truth is that America is an erogenous no man's land. Most white males here (at least the straight ones) have either dismal sex lives or no sex lives at all. As bad as this hurts, the pain is compounded every time you expose yourself to the cultural lies that await you at every turn—that is, every waking hour and during deep REM sleep, when the subliminal messages kick in. This wretchedness leads to a desire for vengeance, to externalize the inner famine—it leads directly to the Republican camp.
....
non-millionaires who vote Republican, the so-called “Reagan Democrats,” know that the country is not theirs. They are mere wage-slave fodder, so their only hope is to vote for someone who makes the very happiest people's lives a little less happy. If I'm an obese 40-something white male living in Ohio or Nevada, locked into a permanent struggle with foreclosure, child support payments and outsourcing threats, then I'm going to vote for the guy who delivers a big greasy portion of misery to the Sarandon-Robbins dining room table, then brags about it on FoxNews. Even if it means hurting myself in the process.
....
SPITE VOTING IS not just an American problem; it's a flaw in democracies everywhere. When I lived in Kosovo in the late summer of 2000, I asked my Serb friends there if they thought Milosevic was going to win the upcoming Serbian presidential elections. Most were pessimistic. They told me of friends, young people even, who voted for Milosevic “just out of spite.” The Serbian spite voters believed that if the opposition got their way and Serbia became as tame and civilized as Luxembourg, all those college-educated Otpor protestors and pro-Western intellectuals would simply take the privileges for themselves. They didn't want caste-based happiness and its accompanying propaganda, so they voted for Milosevic precisely because he was wrong, because he was a vote against hope. Under Milosevic, nearly every Serb was fucked equally, and that suited some people, particularly some Serbian males, just fine.

George W. Bush and Milosevic have a lot in common.

Now I don't want to sound like I'm overstating the case. I don't believe that everyone who ever votes Republican is driven mainly by spite and deep psychosexual frustration and jealousy. But I think that Mark Ames is right that this is part of what's going on—think of the resonance that the meme of the “limosine liberals” in the “cultural elite” has for so many Americans.

There's a striking resemblence between that screed and what Wilhelm Reich, Freud's protégé, wrote in The Mass Psychologly of Fascism in 1942. (A book which the Surveillance Camera Players have conveniently summarized quite cunningly.) In “Preface to the Third Edition,” Reich says

The suppression of one's primitive material needs compasses a different result than the suppression of one's sexual needs. The former incites to rebellion, whereas the latter—inasmuch as it causes sexual needs to be repressed, withdraws them from consciousness and and anchors itself as a moral defense—prevents rebellion against both forms of suppression.
....
It is not only by means of this process that sexual repression strengthens political reaction and makes the individual in the masses passive and nonpolitical; it creates a secondary force in man's structure—an artificial interest, which actively supports the authoritarian order. When sexuality is prevented from attaining natural gratification, owing to the process of sexual repression, what happens is that it seeks various kinds of substituting gratifications. Thus, for instance, natural aggression is distorted into brutal sadism, which constitutes an essential part of the mass-psychological basis of those imperialistic wars that are instigated by a few.

Now bring it back to the Sontag essay about Abu Graib that I linked some time ago.

Is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to “suspects” in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, Photographing the Holocaust, by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.
....
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such “stress” fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet—and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.
....
What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings—as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, Salo (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era—is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To “stack naked men” is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation —or is it the fantasy?—was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response: “Exactly!” he exclaimed. “Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.” “They” are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: “You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?”

I'd add one little coda. This makes clear to me something about the ongoing kulturkamph.

To folks like the cheerful San Francisco libertines I know, it's absurd that anyone should think that dirty pictures are dangerous. Yes, much of American porn is both aesthetically and conceptually ugly, one might admit, but we can solve that problem by creating and enjoying beautiful, uplifting, joyful erotica. People understand the difference between fantasy and reality. They're just pictures, or words on paper, just fun.

True for folks who have other erotic outlets, perhaps. But in a culture with an unhappy ambivalence about eros, without other outlets? Where women have to get drunk to enjoy desire and being desired, where men are awash in frustrations at every level? Is not erotic art of any kind not a cruel taunt—be it Playboy, Mapplethorpe, Susie Bright, or pretty girls in beer commercials? Why are we making so much of the stuff? And where does the frustration finally surface?

What have we built here?

Short sharp shock

Deadly Warren Ellis has just finished his 50 part series of very short fiction and essays, "Scream Talking", published on the web.

They are good, but not nice. Really not nice. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I give up

For readers' convenience, I've created an index of the Kevin letters so you can see the full progress of the dialogue

Kevin:

I have lost my faith in the productiveness of our dialogue. Take this most recent round as an example ...

I made a post quoting Mark A.R. Kleiman saying that, contrary to many lefties' protestations to the contrary, Americans are quite right to worry that the left is eager to impose its moral principles on them, as demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement.

You commented to that post with a scattershot collection of observations. The red states of the '04 elections don't match the slave states, no matter what your lyin' eyes tell you looking at the maps. Government programs don't work because they discourage people from taking responsibity for themselves. The teaching of evolution had nothing to do with the results of the election. Kerry wants to tax the rich, but people don't want to vote for that because they might be rich someday. There's nothing special about slavery in the South because in the North many people were wage slaves, trapped by debt.

You cover a lot of ground, Kevin, and in order to try to clearly address just one of those points, I have to take time to unpack it clearly.

In this case, I responded in three pieces. First, I tried to clarify my own central point that Kleiman's thesis tells us that the South's resistance to liberalism is not a consequence of some Southern moral failure, but rather a direct experience of the heavy hand of the left. Second, I countered your seeming defense of Southern slavery by describing how it was more unjust than wage earners' situation in the North, taking great care to make clear that though slavery was a moral wrong unique to the South, it certainly did not make the North (or West) morally superior to the South across the board. Third, I connected your point about slavery to two other places where you have made statements that seemed morally slippery --- calling UK Guardian readers "terrorists," and saying that the Abu Graib "torture is bad, but so is terrorism" --- and proposed that you should state very plainly that, of course, you didn't mean to speak in support of torture, slavery, or treating British liberals as terrorists.

Take a close look at that post. In the first part, I came to the defense of anti-liberal South, saying they have a good cause for their anti-liberal sensibility. In the second part, I started by stacking up a bunch of facile lefty critiques of the South and shot them down, then took pains to critique your comment in a narrow and specific way. In the third part, I made sure to offer that it was likely my misreading of your writing that led to these disturbing conclusions. Yes, my writing was forceful, but also conciliatory, polite, and grounded in specific things that you said.

You responded by saying, of course I don't believe in those bad things, but then offer no real clarification of what you did mean.

On slavery, you still did not allow me my very narrow and specific claim.

The North is not always correct in this matter

I'm sorry, Kevin, but this is exactly my point. The North is not always correct, true. But in this matter, the North was correct and the South was wrong. In the matter of slavery, the South had a brutal practice that the North did not. I hope that you understand why lefties like me become so very uncomfortable when folks on the right will not simply let it rest when we say "slavery in the South was wrong."

On calling the UK Guardian readers "terrorists," you just flatly deny the connection I made without any explanation.

Nobody is advocating killing the misguided British (and other) letter writers

Well, you said very clearly "These pasty-face English liberals are as much terrorists as those in Al Queda," and also said "We need to continue to kill terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe, or anywhere that they assemble." So you can understand my confusion. How do I reconcile these three statements? Are the Guardian readers not terrorists after all? Or are they a special class of terrorists who we should not kill? What are you talking about, here?

And strangely, you follow up that point with this:

accusing the President of lying as you did ... Do you think that it helps anyone? Debate is good, but name calling is not so good.

Eh? Saying that I think the President lied because, gee, he keeps saying things that are not true, that's name-calling. Saying that the Guardian letter-writers are "terrorists" is not name-calling, it's ... debate?

At every turn in our dialogue, you've answered my attempts to clarify key disagreements with comments that are scattered, unclear, and seemingly self-contradictory --- as I've catalogued in this post. Do you see why I find it just too difficult to puzzle out what you mean, Kevin, and respond to it thoughtfully, clearly, and civilly? I had hoped to learn something about where you're coming from in this dialogue, but I emerge only more frustrated and confused from each round.

So I give up. Is there something we're accomplishing here that I don't see? Because I'm feeling like I've wasted your time, for which I apologize.

Review

If you're the sort of person who's thinking of picking up Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, then you'll want to have a look at Kenneth Hite talking about how Neil Gaiman seems to have overstated the appropriate level of enthusiasm for the book.

Neil Gaiman, writer of unquestionably the finest fantasy comic book in the last twenty years, calls Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke "unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years." One hesitates to tangle with the Dream King, but he's wrong-wrong-wrong.
...
Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written, well, ever, and certainly since 1934 or 1926, is either The Hobbit or The Once and Future King. Gaiman says that The Lord of the Rings (which isn't The Hobbit, anyhow) is not "an English novel of the fantastic," which would perhaps come as some shock to the Professor. I agree with Gaiman that LOTR isn't a novel, in the formal sense (it's an epic), but it's pretty English, and The Hobbit is even Englisher, and definitely a novel.
...
Professor Tolkein was explicitly writing "English fantasy," so the Englishness quotient can be taken as a given. Apparently Gaiman and Tolkein disagree on what's "Englishness," in which case I can only say that, yes, Strange & Norrell is veddy veddy English, but so is The Hobbit, to this American at any rate. (One doesn't expect Gaiman to even try to question T.H. White's Englishness, but someone who will claim that hobbits are un-English will claim anything.)

I'm tempted to question Neil's Englishness at this point --- he's lived in the US for about a decade now, I think --- but I won't, as I wish to sleep well tonight.

Today's quote

So I learn from Errol Morris' wonderful website that Donald Trump's favourite film is, of course, Citizen Kane.

Morris: If you could give Charles Foster Kane advice, what would you say to him?

Trump: Get yourself a different woman.

Tip o' the hat to Kottke for spotting the clip.

Stay on target

Part of how a lot of lefties, like me, got fooled into thinking that Bush would lose the election was that we imagined that the Bush "rally the base" strategy was ill-conceived. Traditionally, that's a Democrat strategy, since Democrats' turnout is more variable than Republicans'. Where was the extra base to draw from?

This was an underestimation of Republicans' organizing power, and an overestimation of Democrats'.

There's a lot of "let's get to work" talk on the left right now, and I think Todd Gitlin discusses the point well by comparing to how the right organized in the last few decades.

Those in the Democratic camp and the rational liberal-left who believe in long-term institutional politics should conclude that they could not possibly have compensated for 30-plus years of right-wing base-building with one year's fever of anti-Bush resolve. They should, like the Republican Party after the Goldwater cataclysm of 1964, sigh, shudder, mourn--and organize. They'll pick themselves up and get back to work building their start-up think tanks and media and Internet networks, from the Center for American Progress through Air America Radio through MoveOn.org and various 527 soft money distributors, all of which, despite starting late, made up for a good deal of Democratic organizational weakness in 2004.

That is, if they're smart. The post-Goldwater Republicans were smart. Despite what looked like a calamity, they didn't bolt from the GOP. They didn't break off as a third party, though some of them dearly wanted to. Will the rebellious left discipline itself, cool its boiling blood, and decide that the pleasures of sectarianism are worth less than the steady resolve of infrastructural work?

I hope progressives will be able to hold this thought in the coming years.