Twas the Night Before . . . .

I am not sure which of these classics is more representative of me and my feelings about this time of year.

or

or

 or

or

or

Perhaps I should put down the either or thing and just embrace that I am fully of the late 20th century. Each one of these songs carries me back to such almost transcendent moments in my life . Each one speaks to the hopes this time of year carries with it. They are creative, inventive and emblematic of an earnestness  and timeliness that popular culture can capture. Each in their own way have meaning and beauty and the grace of renewal that is the harbinger of year's end and it is our sincere hope that you are swaddled in the promise of wonders to come.
Season's Best to you and yours from Jambangle!

Election 2012 in Historical Perspective, Maybe (Part II)

In the wake of the presidential election, Chihambuane wondered what I thought about an article on Naked Capitalism by Richard Kline. In his piece, Kline makes some notable comments about the actual motivations of the voting electorate. He's not buying the standard narrative that suggests that the 2012 election was the harbinger of some significant political realignment. As he tells us at one point, "The main reason this vote 'seemed close' was that Obama's side had little faith in him or his record, and did not turn out in close to their actual numbers." All Obama had to do, according to Kline, was "convince his side of the electorate that 'he cares about people like us.'" As for Romney, a candidate who had "little love from his party", his path to victory rested on his ability to convince the base of the Republican Party that "he was a nativist bigot."  Interesting and provocative, but these bon mots are not the main portion of Kline's post.

What Kline spends the bulk of his time exploring is the possible implications of the fact that the rural vote in the country is almost completely contained within one party - the Republican Party.  Mind you,  Kline's not trying to construct an operational theory of post-20th century American politics here; it's just a blog shot. But he does an admirable job of laying out one of the more noticeable schisms in American politics, one that does (even after all of these years, cuz this ain't new) remain under-analyzed. Blue urban centers surrounded by a sea of Red - what's that about? Well, as it turns out, it's about a host of things. Initially (from, say, the 1740s to the middle of the nineteenth century) rural folk across the country were culturally (and therefore largely politically) homogenous; they had a lot in common with the elites who ran the cities they were closest to.  Moving into the 19th century, rural folks were still  beholden to the local political elites, though the Civil War and other political/economic realities softened this allegiance, making people politically more fluid, and likely to join the party that appealed to their interests. The Great Depression also served to keep rural folks beholden to the political party of local elites.  We see the rate of Democratic Party affiliation for rural whites seriously erode during the Civil Rights era. This is a story that's been told many times before: race, economics, culture, regionalism and a host of other factors conspired to send rural whites into the Republican Party, where they remain to this day. It is from this perch that rural whites and other conservatives have launched into an urban/blue-rural/red antagonism that, to hear Kline tell it, is going to be an intractable element of American politics for the foreseeable future. Rural red wants to starve Urban blue of federal funds; Urban blue doesn't "get" rural red, "and really doesn't care to." Besides, the demographics are increasingly in Urban blue's favor; they're growing, while Rural red continues to shrink.  "There simply isn't much of a basis for compromise because the factions are culturally distinct," Kline tells us. "It's not just a matter of political leanings, or a simple few issues. It's everything."

Robert O. Self, an associate professor of history at Brown University, has written a book that will go a long way towards helping us figure out our current political landscape, and towards filling in some of the blind spots in Kline's musings.  Self's book, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960's gives us a new tool with which to view the shifting politics of the post-war period - the American family.  Self contends that the struggles of the sixties over race, sexuality, gender and economics, all centered on competing notions of the nuclear family, and on the shift from "equal rights" to "family values." In the center of the conversation is the mythic notion of the nuclear family, neatly defined (as most myths are) as white, middle class, heterosexual. Even while this iconic and largely artificial construct was being contested by blacks, women, gays and others, it's political power remained formidable; both sides of the American political spectrum sought to define its parameters.  According to Self, liberal social/economic policy from the New Deal to the Great Society were designed to make the ideal family structure "attainable for more Americans than ever before." Self calls their operating system "breadwinner liberalism."

By 2004, the nuclear family had been transformed into a repository of conservative ideology. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Pat Robertson and a host of other conservative "culture warriors" had successfully shifted the national political impetus from one that sought to expand the notion of family towards to one that wanted to defend traditional notions of family and cast the liberalization of the nuclear family as a moral (and also political and economic) assault on American families and values.  Self asserts that it is this battle, the battle to define what a "family" looked like, that "drove the larger transformation of American democracy over three generations, remaking a center-left social welfare polity established between 1934 and 1972 as the center-right free market system that emerged from 1973 to 2004." Richard Nixon's "silent majority", the political rise of conservative christianity in the 1970's, the legalization of abortion and the fracturing of the New Deal coalition paved the way for the right's "opposition to the broad liberal left's idea of expanded citizenship - of an expanded body politic." Self calls the operating system of American conservatives in this endeavor "breadwinner conservatism." The family became the central battleground for a moral re-visioning that had explicit political and economic consequences; indeed, the family was the first front in the right's successful reframing of the federal government's role in American life.

Suffice it to say, Chihambuane, I think there's a lot in Self's book that can help us to wrap our minds around the urban/rural divide we see in American politics.

The post-colonial safety dance: Algerian edition

As of this writing, French President Francois Hollande is concluding a state visit to Algeria to discuss trade and stuff. On the second and final day of the trip Hollande spoke before the Algerian parliament. This was a tense moment, coming with widespread speculation - and some criticism, most pointedly from Algerian political figures - that Hollande would issue nothing like an official apology on France's behalf. This was mainly due to political pressures at home, from French conservatives and Algerian loyalists alike. Oh, and to avoid giving any traction to legal arguments for compensation or reparation.

When the moment came, Hollande did the best version of the post-colonial safety dance I've ever seen. The safety dance (not this one) is my name for what states do as they try to triangulate between sensibly addressing the consequences of their former atrocities and avoiding the still-buzzing trip wires of unreconstructed supremacist politics. We've seen this for years in the US in relation to, well, any number of things, really, but most clearly in relation to Indian policy and chattel slavery. The US finally got around to apologizing for both of these things (see this and this), sort of, but only after many years of equivocation and hesitation. France is early on in this process with Algeria, and given how early it is, What Hollande actually said turned out to be pretty good, relative to how these things can go. What he said: "I'm not here to repent or apologize, but to tell the truth." What is this truth? As DW translated it, that "For 132 years, Algeria was subjected to a brutal and unfair system: colonization." And that it is important to "acknowledge the suffering [colonialism] caused." Then there was a bunch of talk about partnerships for the future, and looking forward rather than backward, and so on. Which is, as I say, about trade and stuff.

Hollande, Sarkozy, and Chirac are the only French presidents to visit autonomous Algeria, and neither of the others came as close to apologizing as the current office-holder. It's a weird dance, splitting hairs between, on the one hand, "acknowledging" that one represents an entity that caused unfair suffering and, on the other hand, apologizing. (Or, better, between apologizing and acknowledging that someone 'was subjected to' suffering that 'a system' caused. Mistakes were made, suffering was caused....) A moral psychologist - that is, a student of the field called 'moral psychology,' not an ethical practitioner of the science of psychology - would make some hay with this. I just want to acknowledge it.

from al-arabiya coverage

Financializing Haiti; or, Today in non sequiturs

I recently read a fascinating piece in Forbes about an NGO in Haiti. The author of the piece is Willy Foote, the founder of "an agricultural lender" called Root Capital.  The point of the piece is to celebrate the work of the expiring Clinton-Bush Fund by explaining some of the fine things that Root has done with Fund resources, and to explain the challenges that make the business environment in Haiti unlike any other environment in the world.

So on the way to doing this work Mr Foote writes the following:

We have worked in 30 African, Latin American and Caribbean countries since 2000 and we’re bringing all that learning and innovation to address the challenges of building agricultural businesses that generate long-term social, economic and environmental sustainability in rural Haiti.  It has been hard, truth to tell. The business challenges concentrated in that one small, impoverished nation are formidable—from weak government systems, to severe environmental degradation (less than 1.5 percent of land is forested in Haiti) to limited education and poor health status.
Consequently, most groups in Haiti, regardless of their business experience, need some form of financial management training intervention in order to grow and thrive.

This is important work, to be sure, and Mr. Foote points us to some important considerations. But that  'consequently' worries me. In order to accept financial management training as the solution to the problems that he mentions, one has to make at least one big assumption, and leave a lot of questions unasked. (OK, so this is less a non sequitur than an argument with suppressed premises. But it feels like a non sequitur.)

In Memoriam

These are the names of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. I believe these are the names we should remember, not their murderer.
CHARLOTTE BACON, 6
DANIEL BARDEN, 7
RACHEL DAVINO, 29
OLIVIA ENGEL, 6
JOSEPHINE GAY, 7
ANA G. MARQUEZ-GREENE, 6
DYLAN HOCKLEY, 6
DAWN HOCHSPRUNG, 47
MADELEINE F. HSU, 6

CATHERINE V. HUBBARD, 6
CHASE KOWALSKI, 7
JESSE LEWIS, 6
JAMES MATTIOLI, 6
GRACE MCDONNELL, 7
ANNE MARIE MURPHY, 52
EMILIE PARKER, 6
JACK PINTO, 6
NOAH POZNER, 6
CAROLINE PREVIDI, 6
JESSICA REKOS, 6
AVIELLE RICHMAN, 6
LAUREN ROUSSEAU, 30
MARY SHERLACH, 56
VICTORIA SOTO, 27
BENJAMIN WHEELER, 6
ALLISON N. WYATT, 6

Whither Wozniacki (a mini-treatise)

Predictably, tennis player Caroline Wozniacki's 'impersonation' of Serena Williams continues to stir controversy. I gestured yesterday at the thought that this is a tempest in a teapot, but didn't develop the thought. Since people keep finding new ways to insist that this is yet another example of anti-black racism (and other bad things), I should think about this some more. Especially since my intuitions pull me in the other direction.

I've followed this thinking wherever it has led me, which I'm sorry to say is into prose very much like what one would find in an academic journal article. So I'll apologize for that in advance, and make a concession that I learned from watching '300': this will not be quick, and (I fear) you will not enjoy it. (Also, there will be no pictures.)

Today in weather, weaponry, and Wozniacki

Some quick thoughts for the day. First on guns, then on white media and black hair, and then on why Caroline Wozniacki is not a racist (as far as I know).

1.  Yesterday's disaster in Portland has me thinking about gun control. There is some evidence, considerable evidence, apparently, that there is a strong negative correlation between rates of gun ownership and crime rates - and, more interestingly, between gun ownership and murder rates. Crudely: more guns = fewer crimes and murders, apparently. More guns = more gun crimes, to be sure, but fewer crimes overall. (That last link goes to the inestimable Fareed Zakaria's blog, but his problem was stealing facts, not making them up, so I don't mind.) This is intuitively plausible in a way, as gun control opponents know. One common argument: a mugger is less likely to step to you if you're more likely to be strapped. I get all that. But...

Y'all Need to Be Ashamed, Vol. 5

What has been fairly sweet to watch, much sweeter than that the deeply insufferable hack Joe Scarborough (MSNBC), is CNN's anchor Soledad O'Brien's regular habit of getting in some conservative ass. This week's example is Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Racist, AL). Sessions, formerly a Reagan judicial nominee for the Federal bench (dream deferred because of his habit of making racist comments to Black people) has revived his political life as a living breathing example of Southern stereotypical ignorance (the guy's middle names is Beauregard-no really). O'Brien manages to hoist him on his own cruel petard. Sessions ( a very fiscally serious man) thinks it is reasonable to cut 11bn from the budget of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP aka food stamps) in order to reign in the deficit but wouldn't think to ask rich people to pay more taxes. Well O'Brien doesn't play the "hear no evil game" and raises some facts.

First Sessions' choice to expand the program under the Bush II regime (two votes in support 2002, 2008), second the fact that 20% of his constituents receive support, third 67% of his constituents qualify for aid, fourth I would bet money that he would get the vapors at the thought of cutting the military budget and fifth he would prefer (as O'Brien ably points out) to take food from the tables of hungry children than ask rich people to pay more all qualify this asshole as an according to Hoyle definition of a greedy, twisted, evil, shit stain of a human being. But the Y'all Need to Be Ashamed of Yourselves Award goes to the people that think he is worthy of being anywhere near the power to make decisions about the lives of anybody in the state of Alabama. For the people that vote for this man to piss on the poor, suck up to the rich and who keep returning this m*****f***** to office? Y'all Need to Be Ashamed!

Vulture Capitalism or How Much Should I Give You to Bleed Me?

As a local official in challenging economic times, economic development is the word of the day and the recruitment of businesses to ones town to set up job, start to hire and pay income and property taxes is at the top of every municipality's "to do" list.  How ever what doesn't get discussed is the price paid by municipalities and states as they offer incentives to attract businesses both large and small. Fortunately, (hopefully) Pulitzer prize winning journalist to be, Louise Story

has been investigating those exact questions. Her three day series on state and local economic policies digs into the nation wide race to the bottom disguised as economic development. Louise Story's journalism is exposing the grating truth that US corporations are taking billions of dollars in tax breaks, cash incentives and property from local and state governments in hopes that they will make it rain for the local coffers. Every area of business takes these "supports" The NYTimes, states

 states, counties and cities are giving up more than $80 billion each year
 to  companies. The beneficiaries come from virtually every corner of the corporate world, encompassing oil and coal conglomerates, technology and entertainment companies, banks and big-box retail chains.

This money comes out of the public coffers and is meant to boister the economic foundations of these communities by creating jobs. However, this "economic development" comes at a steep price.

The Times analysis shows that Texas awards more incentives, over $19 billion a year, than any other state. Alaska, West Virginia and Nebraska give up the most per resident.

For many communities, the payouts add up to a substantial chunk of their overall spending, the analysis found. Oklahoma and West Virginia give up amounts equal to about one-third of their budgets, and Maine allocates nearly a fifth.

In a sense the relationship between municipalities and corporations takes on a distinctly
asymmetrical character.  No longer the mythical equal partnership between the public and private sectors, the outsized power of corporate bodies versus the at times vulnerable and plaintive nature of public bodies dominates the public will for its self interest.  In these negotiations, it is like David vs. Goliath but without the support of a caring deity.

A portrait arises of mayors and governors who are desperate to create jobs, outmatched by multinational corporations and short on tools to fact-check what companies tell them. Many of the officials said they feared that companies would move jobs overseas if they did not get subsidies in the United States. 

The tragedy of this circumstance is the real need and desire for municipal bodies to create, attract and keep jobs for its citizens, which in turn, bolster their tax bases in order to provide the revenue which the public bodies can then use to create the circumstances/conditions in which people choose to live. The irony of course, is that these incentives, tax breaks, and other mechanisms are doing the job the private sector is (as described by conservative thinkers) supposed to be doing.  Representative bodies in essence become the job creators, through legal bribery and payoffs while the private sector gets a leg up through public support for ultimately private ends. Corporate entitlements for all!

They dictate their terms, and we’re not really in a position to question their deal terms,” Sarah Eckhardt, a commissioner in Travis County, Tex., said of companies she has dealt with recently, including Apple and Hewlett-Packard. “We don’t have the sophistication or the resources to negotiate with a company that has the wherewithal the size of a country. We are just no match in negotiating with that.

 The struggle to pull out of the near collapse of the US economy has its short term and necessary goals but if long term economic stability and real social development are to take place, than what must be considered is the reigning in of the gargantuan nature of corporate power over public bodies. The effect of a corporation's presence or absence on a city, county or state's ability to govern effectively on behalf of its citizens, underscores the growing weakness of governmental bodies as extensions of popular will,  in a society founded on the primacy of the popular will in governance. But then again some argue this society is founded upon the primacy of private property as the primary element in ones participation in governance. The resolution of that quandary as it pertains to corporate and governmental relations, will explicate the past and define the future of this nation.

Update: In Michigan, we are seeing the extreme example of municipal submission to corporations as the state which is the living heart of the power that was once organized labour is on the verge of passing a "Right to Work" law.  Tax breaks, incentives, loans and grants are no longer enough for Vulture Capitalists, now we must return to the direct depressing of labour itself.

The Rubber Chicken was Better or What a Washington Media Hack Told me

  I spent last week at an annual conference of the National League of Cities for Local Elected Officials Conference (no it is not a super team for politicians).

What it is, is a conference designed to expose elected officials to other elected officials and discuss the issues that challenge and enhance life at the local level. At the closing banquet we were served a fairly decent bacon wrapped chicken (I don't eat bacon) and the commentariat stylings of Time Magazine's NYC based Beltway hack, Mark Halperin.

                                                   (one of the MSNBC Morning Joe guys)

After some rather practiced tired rubber chicken belt banter (hahahaha he is a regular guy like us!) Halperin went into the trade required "What's Wrong in Washington" Post Election analysis. It is what you would get watching him on tv or reading him on-line, just with nowhere near the lack of cleverness. Halperin's entire speech was/is not worth the efforts but what pissed off my fellow council person, who was sitting next to me (I was pissed off but he was pissed off because I continued to angrily whisper to him my rebuts to Halperin's inanities and he couldn't get to his dessert) was Halperin trotting out the "False Equivalence" game, better known as the "Everybody in Washington is Fucked Up" stratagem. While discussing that mythical beast known as the Fiscal Cliff nee Deficit Crisis, Halperin argued that the Washington game, i.e. the Congress' inability to come to compromise was the fault of the extremists in both parties and that true resolution could be found by finding the "common sense middle". I don't know what that common sense middle looks like but I suppose they were the creators of half slave/half free America, gradual suffragism America, state by state abortion law America (you get my drift) but I do know that those that support the "common sense middle" America are often guilty of lazy bread and sleepy meat thinking. I fairly shat my mind onto the floor thinking about how lazy Halperin and his colleagues are. The supposition that the few lefties in the Congress (the Progressive Caucus is not as bold as we would like to think) have the same amount of power as the Tea Baggers (almost a hundred strong in the Republican Caucus). I for one would have loved to see Affordable Healthcare Act come under serious negotiation under the cloud of a single payer system. I would love to see "Increase social services!" become a ubiquitous part of the Democratic Caucuses attempt to achieve party alignment on budget votes. But these are not issues or the type of issues Centrist Democrats have to reckon with to make their base happy. Speaker Boehner however, must take seriously, Creationism, Climate Denial, Prayer in School and the limiting of a women's ability to make health care choices on damn near every issue he has to take before his caucus. The tail wags the elephant so effectively that there is no difference between the two.  Halperin's unwillingness to do what pronounced Condservative Norm Ornstein has dared to do, which is admit the Republican Party, in its dealings with the Democratic Party, is like Israel's Likud Party with the Palestinians, fundamentally opposed to peace and cooperation and only interested in domination and submission. Hence, the Republican Party creates and maintains; an ungovernable circumstance, a failing government and the erosion of faith in the government's ability to do anything. Which by the fucking by is not everyone's fault. It's the fault of the republicans, the conservatives, the crypto-christianists, the climate deniers, the creationists, the misogynists, the racists and the xenophobes who have been embraced by the 3 people in the Republican Party that can remember what Nelson Rockefeller looked like.

Obama's talking to himself again

It's good to know that Mr. Obama's omnidirectional placation sensors are still online, even after a grueling campaign season. (And by 'good to know,' I mean 'oh god.') In an aptly entitled piece - 'Snatching Defeat out of the Jaws of Victory' - Robert Kuttner points out that the president is negotiating with himself again, before he's anywhere near the negotiating table. This time it's about the so-called fiscal cliff, with regard to which Mr. Obama has freely declared, via the apparently indispensable Erskine Bowles, that he may be 'flexible' on the question of putting tax rates for top earners back to what they were before the Bush tax cuts took effect. (And by 'be flexible' he means 'may not bother with it, even though I have leverage now that the election is done, and even though the bulk of my constituents want it.')

Kuttner's best line:

Obama still has a novice’s habit of softening his negotiating position going in, rather than holding possible concessions in his pocket for the final round. Republicans just take the concession as the new starting point and don’t concede anything in return. Where is his learning curve on this? Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman would weep.

Today in 'What Everyone Knows' (11-28-12)

Everyone knows that public sector pensions are driving US states into insolvency, and that the road to fiscal sanity runs through virtuous austerity, and requires that we rein in these public sector commitments. That piece of common knowledge leads to stories like this one: stories that blame the pension problem - that is, that parrot 'fiscally conservative' politicians who blame the pension problem - for looming threats to vital governmental functions.

Here's how all that looks in Pennsylvania, where the state budget secretary released a report (a policy report, mind you, not a political document reflecting party discipline on a matter of ideology) saying just what you think it would say. First: "Without reforms, the state could be forced to cut funding for public safety, health and human services, education, roads and bridges." Then, the solution, as reported by Reuters: "Instead of raising taxes or cutting current retirees' pension payments, [PA Governor Tom] Corbett should consider increasing employee contributions, raising the retirement age and moving away from a defined-benefit plan, the report recommended."

What this story and stories like it leave out is that the pension problem is not just a problem; it is the core of a political tactic, and the tactic involves treating the problem as a fetish. The pension problem becomes a fetish in the sense that it is treated as a magical phenomenon, with no discernible causes or relations to other states of affairs. So it's not as if pension funds lost value when the bursting housing bubble took down state revenues, or when the stock market collapsed afterward. (Recognizing that factor might put the question of increasing revenue on the table. Or the question of what else took down state revenues, including shady Wall Street financing deals.) And it's not as if these public funds were throwing good money after bad by contracting with Wall Street investment managers, whose work underperforms both their benchmarks and cheaper index funds that are not actively managed. (Recognizing that factor might put on the table the question of our ongoing fealty to Wall Street, and of Wall Street's virtually unacknowledged responsbility for the dire economic straits that most people not on Wall Street now face in one way or another.) It's just that we've finally come to see that we can't afford these pensions, no matter what.

I mention this fetishization of the problem not to say that the underfunding of public pensions is not really a problem - it is a problem, don't get me wrong, given the horizons of our politics and economic policy now. I mention it because it is they key to a political strategy, one of the defining ones of our time. The pension issue is constructed not just as a problem but as the problem, when it might be construed instead as one of the many symptoms of some deeper problems. But treating public sector pensions as the main problem is nicely compatible with campaigns to shrink the state, and to discipline labor, and to foment tensions between private sector workers and their public sector counterparts as a way of disciplining labor, and so on.

Thinking Thanksgiving, part 2: What to the Wampanoag is the Fourth Thursday in November?

Yesterday I introduced the idea of bracketing as a way of accounting for my enjoyment of things that might otherwise be objectionable, like the film '300.' My hope was that this idea could then serve as a way to explain my posture toward Thanksgiving. The posture I have in mind is probably familiar. I recognize that the events we're meant to celebrate today were part of the first act in a drama of expropriation, colonial aggression, and, depending on how one consents to use this most controversial of terms, genocide. But this recognition does not move me to repudiate the holiday, or to reframe it as a day of mourning. Yesterday I thought bracketing was the key to this ambivalence. Today I think the key to making that point has to do with the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Thinking Thanksgiving, part 1: on '300'

I am a big fan of the film '300.' My admiration for the film survives the liberties it takes with history, which might just mean that I'm not an historian. More interestingly, my admiration also survives the film's ethical flaws. I mention this now, today, because I think Thanksgiving Day counts as a holiday for me, rather than as a day of mourning, for the same reason that '300' counts as a piece of entertainment rather than (just) as a piece of propaganda. The reason: I've become quite skilled in the fine art of judicious bracketing. By the time I finish this post I hope to have decided whether this is a good thing.

Today's Sports Short (11-21-12)

Apparently some kid scored 138 points by himself in a D-III game (on 108 shots, but still). I have one thought about this, inspired by Jalen Rose's hilarious account of Kobe scoring 81 (video) against his Raptors: "Hey Coach... you think we might wanna double-team that guy?"

To Purge or Not to Purge or What it Means to Have a Big Tent

  Just in the midst of some good ol' fashioned Democratic chest thumpig, here we have reminders of congresses past. Digby at Hullabaloo reminds us that Blue Dog democrats still live and breathe. Senators from states that Mitt Romney carried have their doubts deficit fighting strategies such as raising revenue and cutting loopholes/subsidies to energy companies. Sens. Landrieu (LA), Hagan (NC) and Baucus (MT) want to make sure that their state's interests are protected (along with their asses in the 2014 campaigns). In short, despite the "mandate" given to the party on taxing the rich and the weakness of the Republicans on this issue, the "financial cliff" battle will be the same absurdist drama as every other attempt to govern at the federal level. Sigh.

Shit Can Get Funky Being Human or Finally! Richard Pryor's Heir Apparent!

I don't say this often and if you ask me about it tomorrow, I may say something different but I dare say comedian Louis C. K. is approaching Richard Pryor levels of genius. There is a lot that can be said about the use of the word genius but that is a conversation for another day. For me aside from his vernacular genius

his amazing emotional bravery

and his physical comedy gifts

what I realize is the heart of Pryor's appeal is his insight that what links us all together are the fucked up things of  social existence. Unlike Bill Cosby who forged an early Civil Rights comedic persona on the bourgeois commonality of Black people and white people (child rearing, living in the suburbs, marriage, etc), Richard Pryor understood, that those qualities were lies and it was the fucked up, angry, awkward, dangerous and inconsolable yet hopeful sides of us that holds us in common.

That for me is where Louis CK lives. Whether it is the homoeroticism of homophobia

                                                             


the mysteries of sex

or a confrontation with race

 whatever the issue, Louis CK is unafraid of putting himself at the center of that surgery. Louis CK may be the bravest man in entertainment. Anyone that can make Abe Lincoln fresh and different after 160-odd years of solemnity is fastwalking it to genius town.

Oil, Twinkies, and Casting Lead, again: Today's links (11-16-12)

1. Small, very small, victories, the DoJ edition: The Justice Department extracts $4bn from BP to settle criminal charges in the Gulfwater Horizon disaster, payable over 5 years. BP's profits last year alone were $40bn. And the damage is many orders of magnitude worse than $4bn. We'll see what happens with the civil suits.
2. Get your hands off my twinkies, you dirty commie capitalist: If you've heard about Hostess' plans to shut down and you, like Hostess' CEO, want to blame the striking workers for taking away your Twinkies, not so fast: "as the company was preparing to file for bankruptcy earlier this year, the then-CEO of Hostess was awarded a 300 percent raise (from approximately $750,000 to $2,550,000) and at least nine other top executives of the company received massive pay raises. One such executive received a pay increase from $500,000 to $900,000 and another received one taking his salary from $375,000 to $656,256." There's more.
3. Poking the bear, Hamas edition: Given Israel's eagerness to rain lethal violence on the occupied territories at the slightest provocation, you might be wondering why Hamas would fire rockets across the border. Well (and for the moment granting this 'they started it' frame for the sake of argument), it probably wasn't Hamas to begin with, and taking out Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari will likely make things worse instead of better. (Though 'worse' is relative in this astoundingly asymmetric struggle.) It turns out that Israel's leaders are highly motivated to ignore this complexity and gin up a conflict. It's election season, and, as Ahmed Moor puts it, death in Gaza is an effective Israeli electoral strategy. (Helena Cobban provides interesting background on Hamas here and here, from around the time of Operation Cast Lead.)

Today's Best: The Philosopher's edition (11-15-12)

1. Today's best way to celebrate World Philosophy Day: As reported by Inside Higher Ed: "I've gotten word from a philosophy major at Howard University that he and other students will be occupying Alain Locke Hall on Thursday, November 15, to protest tuition rates, administrative mistreatment of janitorial staff, and program cuts."
2. Today's best diss from a philosopher : The mighty Jurgen Habermas writes that the German Constitutional Court is 'solipsistic and normatively depleted.' Wish I'd had that line handy in some arguments with former friends. ("You're not just inconsiderate. You're solipsistic and normatively depleted.")
3. Today's best beneficiary of the view from nowhere (journalistic version): popular-musician-turned-politician Michel Martelly, known during his performing days as 'Sweet Micky,' has taken to the Haitian presidency with enthusiasm.

Architectual Symbolism and Geographies of History or MLK is in a tight spot

    This past weekend was spent at a marvelous gathering of Black philosophers at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. Free time allowed for me to wander down to Washington, DC and take time to peruse the sights. On my list was the National Mall's newest exhibit, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. I hadn't paid very much attention to the debates around the monument (facial expression, wording of the quotes, etc) and simply as someone whose childhood is chocked with memories of visiting the national memorials and the sense of awe that I felt.
  Awe remains an appropriate term to describe my experience at the King memorial.

Playing off of King's use of the metaphoric mountain of freedom, the memorial depicts King as having been hewed from the mountain of resistance and challenge to the quest for human freedom and dignity. The break in the wall is stunning as one mentally shapes the narrative around the constituent parts

In the late afternoon light one seeming walks through a darkened tunnel into an expanse of light and peace

The piece or rather the King character narrates the exhibit underlining the meaning of the monument's design and lays out the character's vision of a just world. Along a curved wall reminiscent of the Vietnam War Memorial, quotes from King's writings surround the peaceful setting.
























King stands, arms folded, though I think the arms should have shown him striding (yes, Toward Freedom) with a manifest temperment 'pon his brow.

No doubt a smiling King would have been problematic at that scale but there is a severity about him that we are not used to from the photographs of his life.

  Like a pharaoh of old (insert the crook and flail for peace) King stands in judgement of a nation too devoted to its harmful past. Yet garden like, the space invites cool reflection as the wind gently blows across the water's surface.

Twixt the Jefferson and Washington Memorial, King is positioned in the midst of the purveyors of the original sin King gave his life exorcising. It should be noted that the Lincoln Memorial is not within sight of King's.

 Though King's visage is not one of a man satisfied with what sits before him, this monument to him sits in the midst of an urban garden peaceful, reflective, contemplative and welcoming.

 The King Memorial is inviting and as I spent an autumn day their I watched all manner of citizen come and go, laugh and  think, no doubt on the man and his legacy, its transformative power and all those that are and will be touched by the ripples of it.

Yes Were Are Here or Y'all Should Be Ashamed Vol. (I am Looking at You Cornel West)

  In an ongoing demonstration of what even the most sympathetic allies think of as deeply problematic, Dr. Cornel West (I would mention the other guy but do we really care) continues his criticisms of the policies of Pres. Barack Obama. Except policy critiques are no longer enough. Apparently Dr. West's consistent attempt to establish a new Black authenticity demands that Barack Obama be seen ideological, thus

Obama should be criticized for the use of drones in Pakistan, the lack of real corporate sector reform and magical thinking around poverty in the US and his failures to even imagine a real re-organization of the manner in which US economic, social and political culture arraigns itself.  But this shit above? This shit above is insulting to anyone that once looked to Dr. West for insightful meditations on the nature of US society. Cancel Christmas because those days are over! There are more reasoned, engaged, credible and mature ways to engage in political debate and criticism. However Dr. West seems to be ramping up the Black authenticity debates of the 60s by accusing Obama of a "fear of free black men and the like. This shit is childish and beneath people that want to engage in a real criticism of centrist neo-liberal policies. What Dr. West is doing is the opposite and his slinging of dated, nationalist provocation is beneath rationality. I am almost waiting for West to start talking about whose has the bigger afro and the longer penis. (F*** the flourishes) Dr. West You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself.

New Jambangle department: 'grand bargain hunting'

Now that the election is over, we've already been introduced to the Next Big Thing in politics. Turns out it's one of the previous Big Things: the so-called Grand Bargain. This is the name that's gotten attached to the on-again, off-again attempt to exchange cuts to entitlement programs (the democratic concession to the bargain) for higher taxes (the republican concession). The bargain-hunting impulse has manifested itself most recently in Obama's Deficit Commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson; in the scuttled 2011 debt deal between Obama and Boehner, effectively chronicled by Matt Bai in the Paper of Record; and in the 'fiscal cliff' that will loom larger and larger in the media imagination - like this - as a December deadline for automatic spending cuts and tax increases approaches.

The Simpson-Bowles Commission, also known as "The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform" (its formal name) or 'The Catfood Commission" (the derisive moniker chosen by some of its critics), established our bipartisan commitment to the mania for deficit reduction and entitlement reform. There are many questions to ask about just how bad it is for sovereign, currency-creating states to run deficits, what kind of shape social security is actually in and what it would take to fix it, who stands to gain from the most popular schemes for reforming public programs (here's a hint: who would want to take money that would go to a public program and divert it into something that earns someone a commission?), and just what it means for Democrats, in a tradition stretching back at least to Clinton and Robert Rubin, to thumb their noses at the New Deal in the pursuit of bipartisanship, or in pursuit of the post-public-service goodies they get for pursuing certain forms of bipartisanship while in office.

So we here at Jambangle hereby introduce a new addition to our recurring offerings. Alongside 'Y'all should be 'shamed" and 'Today's Links' and 'What [blank] looks like,' we will have (hopefully) regular updates on 'grand bargain hunting.' The name is negotiable - if you have ideas, please share them - but whatever we call it, we will be watching.

Election 2012 in historical perspective, maybe

I wonder what The Detective thinks of this piece from Naked Capitalism, which attempts to read the election against the currents of US political history. The money quote, or one of a few:

The 2012 Election was a demonstrably party line affair. ...[I]t was a canvas with a deeper meaning in US history than the results for individual candidates and parties: this is the first time in American history that all of the rural vote was committed to a single party. That seems a non-earthshaking statement, but is non-trivial looking at the socio-political landscape in the USA previously, and has implications for the future.

Some of the comments complain about the author's shortsighted view of the relevant histories, but I'm not a practicing historian and so can't evaluate. So the ball's in your court, Detective.

That aside, here's a good line developing the author's claim that the election was less about the candidates (and what I've and others have referred to as the electoral spectacle) than about deeper forces:

Obama simply had to convince his side of the electorate that ‘he cares about people like us,’ while Romney had to convince his that he was a nativist bigot. Both succeeded in misrepresenting themselves successfully...

Today's links (11-8-12): Ole Miss is not post-racial, David Brooks is still David Brooks, and education is a tough racket

1. Today's best repudiation of facile post-racialism: Ole Miss students protesting Obama's victory - by doing what at least some people found worrisome enough to refer to as a riot (n.b.: it takes a lot to get journalists to say that white people are rioting), an activity that  apparently featured the shouting of racial epithets. Let's hear it for the land of cotton - good times there are indeed not forgotten.
2. Today's best nod to a more subtle approach to race: a nice Seattle Times article on Jack Turner's fine book, Awakening To Race.
3. Today's glimmer of hope that David Brooks isn't who we thought he was, until you remember that he is:...

The show's over. Now for the serious politics.

The best thing I saw during our recently concluded election season came from the Working Families Party in New York. Like many of us, the people in the WFP are distressed at the state of US politics, dominated as it is by the two legacy parties and their deep-pocketed backers, indifferent as it often is to the needs and interests of ordinary citizens. Like not-quite-as-many of us (though more than one would think), the people in the WFP translate their distress into work aimed at putting us on a better path. The precise path they have in mind is interesting, and I'll say more about it in a moment. More interesting, though, is what the path leads to. The WFP has a serious politics in view, and signaled it with the image below. I ran across the image near the end of the campaign, and immediately recognized it as an emblem for the kind of serious politics that we need, now more than ever in the wake of this presidential race. 

Don't You Have Something Else You Should Be Doing? or Happy Election Day!

  Hey you! Unless you live in one of the states that has early voting Ohio, Florida etc and have voted already don't sit on your a** looking at this screen, go vote! We will talk later. And in case you need some encouragement . .  .

Race in Real Time

A few days ago, I was talking with a friend about a sticky state of affairs that bubbled up in my office a few weeks back.  Like most situations that arise in an office occupied by humans, this one was probably more than a bit overblown; it was also marked by a clash of egos, and viewpoints that were just far enough apart to ensure a heightened level of rancor.  Relevant musical aside: In “Lush Life”, the classic jazz ballad penned by Billy Strayhorn, the protagonist remarks that the object of his affection wears a “poignant smile” that is, perhaps, “tinged with a sadness”, a sadness that (may) mark her true feelings for him. I love that line, if for no other reason that it stands out as a most elegant speculation; the lovelorn protagonist thinks it’s there, and the possibility of its presence alters the essence of their interaction. That “tinge” – it changes everything.

Back to my office.

The conflict was tinged with a racial dynamic that was evident to everyone caught up in the discord – everyone, it seems, except the lone white male in the middle of the melee’.  As I tried to explain the contours of the conflict to my friend, and illuminate the sundry issues that I thought needed to be hashed out, I lingered on the racial dimension of the conflict, in an attempt to explain how its presence served to further complicate an already complicated situation. In response, my friend offered an old, familiar chestnut that wrecked the edifice I was trying to construct: “Well, if it were me, I would look past all the race stuff you’re talking about…”

Yes, of course you would. Thanks.

I left our meeting feeling crummier than usual in the wake of this “advice”, and immediately began wondering why.  Was it the willful ignorance that my friend thought he could simply impose over all things/issues that even remotely carried within them a racial component? Was it the “I don’t see race” canard that irked me more than usual? It took me a few days, but I think I finally figured out why this little “post-racial” nugget stuck in my craw more than usual.   It occurred to me that my friend has little to no substantive experience interacting with people of color in a sustained way. His anchoring institutions (church, schools, neighborhood, civic organizations – the places that comprise the totality of his social universe) are overwhelmingly white.  I may be wrong about this (although I doubt it) but I don’t see him entering into any type of sustained interaction in which he would find himself in the racial minority. So, when I and other colored folks present him with scenarios that cry out for racial analysis, he substitutes the platonic ideal of himself in the situation – the guy he would be if he ever found himself in a long-term relationship with a gaggle of colored people struggling with the vagaries of race.

To be sure, we all place this platonic version of ourselves in situations that will more than likely never actually happen to us. Why yes, if I ever landed in the middle of a war, I would bring honor upon myself and upon my grateful nation, thank you very much. And yes, if I found myself in the middle of a terrorist plot to rob the Nakatomi Towers in Los Angeles during Christmas, I would singlehandedly thwart the plot, even with shards of glass stuck in my feet. Come to think of it, if I ever held high office, I would always be thoughtful and passionate – and the accolades my colleagues would heap upon me would be most deserved.  The point here is that we all do this. And even when we know what we’re doing, and own up to our unique set of shortcomings, we hedge our bets in this little game, reluctant to concede the possibility that our humanity might intervene: “I’d like to think that I would…”

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem.  My friend told me that he would “look past all the race stuff.” Yup – that’s just what his best self would do if given the chance.  His platonic doppelganger would never seek to engage in the hard, slow work related to racial understanding; for him, the best position is to remain “above the fray” when it comes to white supremacy and its many-headed minions. (Incidentally, I think this is why the dubious concept of “post-racial” is so popular with a contingent of white folks in the country right now.)

But here’s the kicker about this little game: while my friend gets to imagine he would behave like Atticus Finch in all matters racial at every point, he’s also comparing this idealized version of himself with the real me. My friend – who in his mind would be a superb ally to the Negro – floats above it all, while I confront the concentric entities of race, blackness and white supremacy with my humanity painfully intact. It’s an unfair comparison, and everything I do will more than likely fall short in Atticus’ eyes.

Well, at least now I know what I’m up against.