Huck and Jim

The Grand Old Parody

2012-01-26T04:46:00.000-08:00

Things have been quiescent here for any number of reasons, most of them good. Top of the list has been an ingrained reluctance to add, however slightly, to the yammering circus of our commentariot. Long have I held that the GOP is doomed as a national party and that Barack Obama will be easily reelected. Recent events have only made this clear to even your run-of-the-mill reporter.

Frankly, I expected the Repub implosion would come via its elected representatives in Congress, stupid, angry, and disloyal, breaking things in such a heedless way that sane members of the caucus would by necessity have to drift over to the Democratic side on a few big votes for the good of their careers, districts, and the Republic. GOP leadership avoided such awful optics with the help of our brain-dead press and a Democratic establishment tossing lifelines and conceding issues here and there, while taking markers, if only with the electorate, for later.

(And I think last night's State of the Union address neatly outlined the areas of payback to come.)

What I was NOT expecting was this real time, and exquisitely expensive, parade of jackasses, ding-dongs, and stuntmen all fighting to be standard bearer for a load of ideas--at least those not cribbed directly from the Occupy folks--that have become more inane and toxic with every recitation. These people, with the seriousness of seminarians, mock electability with loud, self-satisfied voices. Their reward will be in little corners of right-wing heaven, which is a small and greasy place nowhere near the November polls. I'm not calling a Democratic landslide just yet, but if one is on the way, it will be clear by June.

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2011-07-23T12:22:00.000-07:00

Nearly seven inches of rain fell in about ninety minutes in Chicago early this morning. Awakened by the commotion, I can tell you it was as if my apartment was going through a carwash. It was the highest daily rain total for this city, which is home territory for torrential downpours, in 140 years of record keeping. Number two, by the way, about a half-inch shy of this morning's sum, was three years ago.

Yep my friends, something is abroad in the land, a system-wide disdain for human plans and political positions, an indifference to the best made plans. New rules are in place and even the stupidest climate-change denier must be feeling a certain unease at this summer's events.

No, check that, the stupidest ones likely think this is part of some great plan in which they have starring roles to play. That is certainly the case in D.C. (because everything is connected) where I now put even odds on default, a drop from 3-1 against in a few days. Stated earlier are the four reasons why I think it'll happen. The fifth being that the president, as I thought, for all his high-minded policy flexibility, can and did draw a line.

According to the L.A. Times, the collapse came when the White House wanted to up the scope of the deal to something along the lines of the senate work group proposal (let us note in passing, a fairly rightest plan), while the GOP wanted to hold the health insurance mandate hostage to insure Democratic complicity to tax "reforms". This strikes me as the last cards from both sides; the President wanted something transformative, and the GOP wanted a scalp.

It is worth noting that Republicans are mainly trying to make substantial policy changes divorced from writing and voting on any distinct legislation doing so. I know I'm a little boring on the subject, but this is a tactic of a bankrupt political party; its articulated policies are broadly unpopular, its ruling philosophy utterly schitzophrenic, its leadership fractured, and with yet enough power to presume to control events even as events spin out of anyone's control.

The Republic has been here before, and while I can't say if the collapse of the Whig party led inevitably to the Civil War, or if momentum towards the war tore apart the Whigs, the two events are intimately connected. Though I have been predicting the end of the GOP for a while, what I didn't appreciate until very recently is how when one party in a two party system implodes, the consequences for the nation, in the short term at least, are really very serious.

A Day In The Lie

2011-07-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Oh what to make of today's Murdoch hearing? That members of ~~both~~ all three political parties asked tough and pressing questions was enough to make the old man wish this were happening in the U.S. Senate, where the Republican half of his inquisitors could be counted on to tell him what a great man he is, attack the motives of the majority, and apologize for his having to testify in the first place.

No, money does not mean quite as much in Blighty as it does in the States, where it means everything. One might note too the generally higher intelligence level on display in Parliamentary proceedings than in our highest legislative chambers. Fact is, Americans have always been suspicious of smart people in public life, possibly for broadly democratic reasons and the idea that a stupid politician is easier to control and less likely to cause trouble on his or her own.

James Murdoch, with his American accent and occasionally British pronunciation, came off well enough, I reckon--nervous, helpful, deferential, concerned, and opaque when necessary. One senses that he'd much rather spend his days in the relatively clean and cool lairs of TV and new media. I'm betting that when dad goes, so do the messy old print properties.

The Dirty Digger looked done and dusted, gruff and out-of-it, and certainly gave no evidence of being fit enough to helm a multi-national communications corporation--at least one that's publicly traded. His dignity was saved somewhat when that fuckwit assaulted him with shaving cream, a despicable thing to do to any 80-year-old, especially one giving testimony, for which he should spend several years in gaol; but what will be remembered going forward was a stern old man fond of pounding the table who yet claims ignorance with how a good part of his U.K. business operated.

His denials were not particularly convincing and could be capsized by the criminal investigations. Indeed, the next phase of the drama will be if, or when, the Murdochs will be called upon to add to or amend their testimony in light of further revelations. Because young James was both insistant of what he knows now, and evasive enough, especailly in regard to paying hush money, to lead one to believe he was being prudent in light of fresh revelations.

The Liar In Winter, Cont.

2011-07-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

Rupe is to give testimony (with his son) tomorrow regarding the phone hacking scandal to a panel of MPs. People who know think he won't do well. Be that as it may, as Murdoch's world implodes what should be kept in mind is that no matter the legal outcome--which is years away--the grip he had on the imagination, the public and political mind of Great Britain is gone forever. He might be able to keep some of the juice he has in the States after this, though I doubt it.

It's clear that News Corp. channeled a river of money flowing from cable TV and network sports into any number of questionable (from a strictly financial perspective) if altogether legal investments, to criminal escapades like bribery, industrial and private espionage run by a cadre of goons masquerading as journalists; the main object being to create and maintain a growing bubble of power with the Dirty Digger at its center.

What's notable is how self-reinforcing the project was, that money paid for access, which led to power, and more money, and access, as the influence spread from Australia to the U.K. to the United States. Soon enough a reputation for brains, ruthlessness, and success became a fantasy which bears very little relation to the easily-disregarded human toll of the many victims, underlying political realities, and financial missteps that cannot be wished away. In the end the whole project became so unfeasibly supercharged that all it took was one little story about a murdered girl's voicemail and the whole rotten thing popped like a dead pig in the sun.

The outsized nature of Murdoch's reputation, the idea that he was smarter and more powerful than he apparently was, has vanished in the last ten days. Depend on it, no one of any consequence is afraid of him anymore, and a lot of his former dependents are sorry they know him. This is a fatal blow to an enterprise which has relied on intimidation and illusion for so long. It was all a stupid dream.

Jumping The Shark Jumps The Pond

2011-07-18T06:21:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I wrote that While evidence of outright thuggery in the States has yet to appear, everyone seems to be taking a sensible wait-and-see attitude [...] You can now rest easy knowing that such evidence has shown up, in fact was in something like the public record, as the estimable David Carr reports this A.M.:

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America [a News Corp. marketing subsidiary] of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

(Really, the whole article is required reading.) The case was settled out-of-court to the tune of 655 million scarole, with the plaintiff company quickly purchased by the defendant too. So let us add over two-thirds of a billion dollars to the list of recent News Corp. losses noted earlier here. What's more, the guilty chief of News America has since been named publisher of the loss-leading N.Y. Post, a position he fills today.

I might be wrong, but it feels that, with Carr's piece, the Times is announcing a more active stance regarding its reporting of the Murdoch crime family here in the States. Who knows where it might lead, and one hopes that this possibly new sense of mission and fight has everything to do with the pending departure of the inane Bill Keller as ed-in-chief.

UPDATE: And of course there's the matter of certain Brit-celebs who had their phones hacked while on U.S. soil.

Numbers Crunk

2011-07-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

As much as one agrees with the overall points made by the London Obsever's Will Hutton regarding Murdoch's influence on the D.C. budget madness (and more of that here anon) the notion that, I quote: Fox News, [has] an audience of 100 million... is absurd, and wrong by a factor of 35.

The latest ratings for that mighty propaganda network total on the short side of 2.5 million viewers (aka less than one percent of the population.) It is in fact a measure of the inanity of our media landscape that what Bill Paley would have considered a rounding error 50 years ago is felt to be so goddamn influential. That people who should know better have for years credited the dwarf with a giant's stature, is one more indication of where Murdoch's power will be once the reality principle is finished with him.

Rupe's Snoops' Deep Poop, Cont.

2011-07-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

I had to look it up, but, sure enough, I came up with this nearly two years ago about what I suspected was the looming failure of the Dirty Digger's business:

Depend on it, outside of its pathetic share price, we will not hear about the impending collapse of the Murdoch empire until after it has happened and no one can pretend anymore.

As it transpired, the implosion has been very public and in real time. Still, no one can pretend things are okay, and the celerity of the implosion conforms to another truism I'm fond of, namely that when things collapse, they collapse very fast.

While I admire the paranoid verve of the British MP who suspects this morning's unexpected arrest of Rebekah Brooks was to keep her from giving testimony to a Parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday (at the Guardian blog) one has to think it happened because some new evidence of thuggery popped-up sometime in the last 24-48. No, madame was pinched without warning. If it were the States I'd suspect a plea bargain for sworn testimony is on the table, but recall that in Olde Blighty, one is guilty until proven innocent, so maybe the authorities are not looking to make deals right now.

To reiterate, I expected Murdoch's ruin to come in the shape of revelations of financial chicanery, an idea I am loathe to give up on just yet.

UPDATE: Oh, dear. Apparently Mrs. Brooks' arrest comes as part of an investigation by the Crown's Serious Fraud Office.

News Crips

2011-07-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday saw an apparently abject R. Murdoch begging forgiveness from the parents of the murdered schoolgirl whose voicemail his goons manipulated; not to mention the resignation of two of his closest fixers who were in charge of things during the in-house phone hacking project. One of these worthies was the head of Dow Jones, the U.S. company Rupe paid way too much money for, which publishes the, uhm, Wall Street Journal.

While evidence of outright thuggery in the States has yet to appear, everyone seems to be taking a sensible wait-and-see attitude about it. Frankly, in such an arrogant, macho, and belligerent corporate culture, one in which paranoia also has its place, conditions seem perfect for some kind of surveillance operation, if only against its own employees, quite distinct from the News of the World campaign.

We shall see, but in the meantime it is getting clearer by the day that even if no smoking wiretap is uncovered by the Feds, the corporate culture at News Corp is about to undergo a pronounced readjustment. A British investment blogger (via the terrific Guardian feed)
spells it out:

[Let's say] that I am the CEO of a public company. If I had indulged in the following:

1. Paid >$500m for MySpace and then sold it for $35m;
2. Paid $5.7bn for Dow Jones and written off $2.8bn;
3. Paid $615m for my daughter's business;
5. My company’s shares had underperformed for 15 years;
6. And some of my staff had engaged in criminal phone hacking and bribing Police officers and this had been covered up by my management.

I think the shareholders would have had me fired.

[...] why hasn't Murdoch been fired?

To the list I'd add the N.Y. Post which has been famously losing a million dollars a week (or more) for almost two decades, and the FOX business channel which--last I heard anyway--was venting money outward at a brisk pace.

Mr. Smith is nice enough to answer his own question: because the Murdoch’s control News Corp through differential voting rights: the Murdoch’s own 40% of the B voting shares. The much more numerous A shares have no votes, so the Murdoch’s are able to control a company in which they own only 13% of the issued share capital.

(And let me say in passing how discouraging it is to see an educated Englishman misusing the apostrophe as thoroughly as any U.S. high-schooler.)

Grammatical issues aside however, Mr. Smith raises a jolly good point, and one suspects that if all those class A shareholders have anything to say about it, the days of News Corp. remaining a family enterprise are numbered and few. (The latest Guardian story about who's up and down in such an eventuality gets the stock class conditions wrong, but is worth a read.)

The writer here seems to think that one winner would be Roger Ailes, but of that I wonder. Rupe has been Roge's chief shield from reasonable voices in and outside the company who consider his propaganda operation something of a national disgrace. The story also repeats the common proposition that FUX News makes money hand over fist--to which I've often wondered here how a channel whose top-rated shows attract no more than 2.5 mil. rather old viewers might qualify as such. If someone feels like explaining in comments, I'm all ears.

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2011-07-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

Being something of a betting individual, I'll stick with my prediction--currently at 3-1--that the House will let the debt limit fail. I noted the main reasons a few days ago, to which I'll add that enough players, albeit a minority, want the thing to crash. It's gone on too long and the tolerances are very tight.

I'll add too that nearly everyone believes that the president will do the adult thing and cave at the last best chance. Me? I'm not so sure. Let's see what Reid and McConnell come up with, but our chief executive has already said he wants a deal that includes new revenues. He's also long railed against Washington business-as-usual and advocated shared sacrifice. (See where this is going?)

So what if he decides that shared sacrifice includes a shock to the system--one that abruptly ends business as usual? The senate fix, however expedient, sets a terrible precedent for the future well-being of the state. What if he refuses to trade away core social programs to a radical minority rump lacking any kind of mandate and with a jackass for a leader? Americans are strong and resourceful people, he is fond of saying, and he was sent to Washington to make tough decisions. How tough? We're about to find out.

A Face Worse Than Death

2011-07-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

It's been fascinating these last few days to see Rupert Murdoch's photographed expression go so rapidly from smarmy arrogance, which was standard for decades, to dotty gramps. Okay, he's 80 and probably has not gotten a lot of sleep--of the unmedicated variety--for ten days; but still I can't decide if the vacant, affable grin now plastered on for the cameras is there on instructions from his image consultant, indicates a steady loss of brain function, or if he is simply drifting into a charmed revery, picturing what he would do if positions were reversed and he had the whip.

Or maybe he's marveling in a grown-up manner at the workings of Fate, on how everything he's built his whole life--after inheriting dad's newspaper business, anyway--is just one grant of immunity in U.S District Court away from crumbling into sand.

UPDATE: Forbes and the phiz

The Liar In Winter

2011-07-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

What a difference a day or two makes, huh? The past 24 hours have not only seen the effective, and long-pending, implosion of the GOP (Wonder which of the splinters gets to keep the name? Probably the Banking wing) but the sudden collapse in the fortunes--one long-predicted here--of Rupert Murdoch.

Now admittedly, my suspicions regarding the Dirty Digger's fate relied more on a gut sense than any reading of wind currents. To my way of seeing things, any big operation which relies on swagger, rabble-rousing politics, and intimidation to grow its brand (and, no, I'm not referring to the Republican Party, but the parallel is striking) very likely has something hinkey under the hood, a financial structure over which accountants may disagree, and that may not survive close inspection by legal authorities. Let us recall the fate of the little-remembered Robert Maxwell, once Rupe's main rival in British media piracy whose empire's finances were revealed to be a colossal fraud just hours after the proprietor's fat corpse was found floating in the ocean not far from his yacht. (Was Cap'n Bob pushed? Who cares?)

The main problem of growing big by being Chief Bastard is that, once the image wobbles, those who've had to take shit for so long are eager to return it, with interest. I do believe we'll discover more about News Corp's finances now that its bid for a majority share of BSkyB has been withdrawn, and it's tossed out about $5 billion in a bid to prop-up its stock price, which for years has been oddly soft for a putatively mighty media giant. And honestly, if it turns out that elements of the organization were also spying on Americans, Murdoch's whole rancid operation will be a lovely pile of lawsuits by Christmas.

UPDATE: (via Balloon Juice) If anyone was a target of those goons in the U.S., it was Eliot Spitzer. Is he signaling something here?

R.I.P. GOP

2011-07-12T16:10:00.000-07:00

Mitch McConnell is not a smart person, indeed he may be the dumbest one in the highest position of power in Washington. So it is altogether fitting that today, with his inane proposal on the debt ceiling, that he should ring down the curtain on the GOP as a national force in politics. T'was a day long in the making. Kevin Drum explains (albeit without my gloss.)

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2011-07-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

While conventional, old-hand political observers are certain a debt deal will be made by Aug. 2 I've believed for some time that it will not, and in the wake of the president's pitch-perfect press conference this morning, I'll outline the reasons which no one in the MSM or even Bloglandia have articulated in public. They are simple:

1) Republican leadership in Washington hates President Obama, and will refuse to agree to anything which looks like a win for him.

2) The no-tax pledge is the only issue keeping the dumb GOP coalition together, and they know it. If any House Republicans help pass any new forms of tax revenue, their whole well-funded jackass project implodes forever.

3) Eric Cantor, Jon Kyle, and Mitch McConnell are not very bright, and have no idea what they're screwing with. John Boehner, whom I credit with having more brains than the others put together, never had the needed control of his caucus in the first place, and is now toast.

4) Autocracies and oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy a social system they can no longer dominate. Examples of this litter history; and we are currently observing the 150th anniversary of the last time it happened here.

The Dirty Digger's Dust

2011-07-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

You need to read allll the way to the end of this ABC News write-up of the Murdoch Mess before it mentions that, gee, those sociopaths also own FOX News and the Wall Street Journal. I submit that this information belongs in the second paragraph of a story headlined "Will His Empire Survive?" being, you know, a big part of the empire in the nation Murdoch, presumably, votes in.

This is, of course, emblematic of the system in which that creep has thrived: informed, meritocratic, short-sighted and utterly blinkered to the needs of anything but itself. As newspapers and magazines have withered and died, and TV audiences shrunk, Murdock and his gang gained a certain lustre in the rest of the field. One might disagree over politics and methods, but damn they're smart and what they're doing works. There was also that lingering sense of ~~fear~~ unease that to get on the Dirty Digger's wrong side closed too many doors to count in what may be now laughingly referred to as a profession.

Journalists take pride in access and--in the political and business press especially--the superior knowledge gained thereby. Good stories, interesting, informative, and clear, come out every day, almost none of it of lasting value. In the U.S. the main topic of the biz press is the American Project, and the greatness--albeit with the inevitable shocks that come from a Free Market--of its dynamic results. Political writers love the scrum and the sheltering idea that there are no good actors, only power centers. As a consequence, journalists, ones with mortgages anyway, love to be with winners, and tend to regard the rest of us, the poor, the uneducated, the naive, the dissidents and discontented, as suckers who don't know how things work.

Meanwhile they hew to old narratives, corrosive ideas of balance, and a fealty to white collar hierarchies. Of the latter, the Murdoch Empire is hardly the most sociopathic, only--by the nature of its business--more exposed.

UPDATE: K. Drum, and B. Somersby, on our white collar press.

Rupe's Snoops' Deep Poop 2

2011-07-10T07:02:00.000-07:00

We interrupt our aimless series of book reports to revisit one of my favorite long-term hobby horses: the pending collapse of the Murdock Empire. Noted here last January was a series of revelations regarding the wiretapping, or phone hacking in contemporary parlance, of British politicians and media figures by stooges of the Dirty Digger. I thought the game was up then; but as outrageous as the revelations were, the whole thing seemed rather par-for-the-course to a mostly jaded U.K. public, and not at all a subject for widespread press inquiry. Then things changed.

Last week news arrived that the Murdocperatives accessed the voice mails of crime victims, the families of dead soldiers, and even deleted messages left for a 13-year-old girl who later turned up dead. Please know that while in America murdered children are subjects of morbid curiosity and--if there's a hot, white mom involved--mainly self-serious media displays, in Britain, a far-more compassionate society than ours, they are taken Very Seriously Indeed. A spark was touched, the gas ignited, and things are still exploding.

How long before folks at FUX are implicated? A matter of days is a decent bet.

UPDATE: Wowie: James Murdoch could face criminal charges on both sides of the Atlantic

UPDATE II: Kevin Drum seems to think so too.

The Sunday Review

2011-07-03T06:33:00.000-07:00

The Gift
Vladimir Nabokov

A dense and down-to-earth work shot-through with a lyrical imagination that gives certain vividly-seen details of everyday life an enchanted existence of their own; Nabokov stakes a claim to his own genius, his own gift, in rendering the two-tiered interior monologue of his near-double and main character, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a young Russian nobleman--a poet and struggling author--negotiating life as an exile in '20s Berlin.

Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift is probably his frankest depiction of a poetic mysticism which informs the rest of his mature fiction. Time is an illusion, he posits, and life obscures the true reality of a boundless, and Godless, existence of pure unity and radiant observation we reach upon death. Solitary Fyodor seems to float through a fairly shabby life of rented rooms, mended clothes, genteel poverty, and the loneliness of a society of bickering and pathetic exiles, with the serene indifference of a genius secure on a true path.

Fyodor finds his voice as an author (Chapter Four is his literary biography of the 19th-century Russian political thinker and novelist Chernyshevski) just as fate brings him together with the love of his life. Buoyed by his artist's sense of wonder at the world revealed to him, his victory is one of art and fortitude.

On another plane, The Gift seems to both sum up Russian literature (Nabokov seems to note and review every Russian writer, good or bad, of any consequence) and then cast it aside. His creative sense of self-worth precludes any deep identification with other authors, and his literary sensibility is closer to those French and English writers he admires over every Russian author except Pushkin. It is the Russian language--young Fyodor’s greatest gift--which Nabokov prizes far more than Russian literature and, with this book, bids it farewell forever.

The Sunday Review

2011-06-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
David Foster Wallace

A work of staggering genius, heartbreaking now in the wake of the writer's 2008 suicide. Wallace wrote with a comic invention connected to a forthright catalogue of personal shadows--phobias and painfully aware sensitivities--which seem to intrude at every step of his supposedly benign excursions (to the Canadian tennis open, the Illinois State Fair, a Caribbean luxury cruise--the title essay of the volume) written up for mainstream magazine publication.

What we notice, marvel at, and now mourn, is the acute detail of Wallace's observations and the confident way he rendered them into language which is at once erudite and exceptionally readable--very smart and very funny. The evidence here suggests he was the greatest magazine feature writer who ever lived, something he neither strove to become, nor spent much time doing.

That said, the retrospective sadness of Wallace's suicide hovers over every page. (Even the book's title has now become a wry comment about life.) His immense intelligence and sense of shared humanity was not enough to keep what was apparently an oceanic sense of sorrow, intimated through glimpses throughout the book, at a safe enough remove.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

The Sunday Review

2011-06-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

Gomorrah
Roberto Saviano

A heart-breaking and enraging look at a criminal enterprise that has ruined millions of lives and turned the Italian south, and especially the region surrounding Naples, into a vast toxic waste dump for the industrial north. Gomorrah is as great a work of personal journalism, written by a very brave man, that you will ever read.

Saviano writes with knowledge and passion and makes a very compelling case that the Camorra, the endemic criminal organization of Naples, has evolved to become a deadly shadow multinational corporation (with an ever-shifting board of officers and directors constantly getting murdered, on the lam, or in jail) that does the needed dirty work of international finance capitalism: trafficking in weapons, drugs, toxic waste disposal, sweat shop labor, and mountains of 'duty-free' clothes and electronics from China.

It is impossible for a single work to convey the connivance of 'legitimate' companies and government necessary to allow this horror to grow and thrive in post-war Italy (and here I highly recommend Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily and Alexander Stille's Excellent Cadavers), but Saviano's work makes the case that the situation is an international menace, one past the point of avoiding by looking away.

Our news is filled with putative threats from terrorists and failed states when in fact a far greater threat exists from a vast criminal network designed to deliver the most goods at the lowest cost--at the expense of humanitarian and ecological disasters--one which extends effortlessly into apparently legal enterprises.

Gomorrah outlines a logical endpoint of Edmund Burke's theory of social contracts; being a free market of violence and degradation rooted in a population which mainly exists to produce low-cost service, consume low-cost goods and provide a constant supply of entrepreneurial murderers needed to keep the system working. It induces a lasting moral nausea.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

The Sunday Review

2011-06-12T06:33:00.000-07:00

The Song of the Lark
Willa Cather

The struggle and triumph of a great artist is the subject of this early Willa Cather novel. The gorgeous setting in a small high-plains Colorado town, based on the author's own childhood, which takes up the first half of the book, is as fine an evocation of late 19th century western American life, its people, customs and economy, as I have ever read. From there--following the heroine's escape to study music in Chicago--the story flags as Cather's stand-in, Thea Kronborg, rather awkwardly takes on the personality of a renowned opera singer of the time, soprano Olive Fremstad; an individual the author knew and greatly admired, but could not understand nearly as well as herself.

Cather covers this central flaw with superb writing, careful plotting, and a fine cast of characters, from a country doctor to a New York "opera queen" (in what must be one of the first sympathetic, albeit veiled, portraits of a gay man in American literature.) Despite an unconvincing love story, and later passages of melodrama and fairly self-conscious palaver about the mission of a true artist, we care what happens to the people Cather presents, vividly seen individuals with lives of their own, which is the highest accomplishment of any novelist.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

The Sunday Review

2011-06-05T06:33:00.000-07:00

My Last Sigh
Luis Buñuel

Quite possibly the greatest artist autobiography since Benvenuto Cellini's. But Cellini was a relatively minor sculptor; in the thirty years since Buñuel wrote his memoir--and then so considerately died--his influence on modern filmmakers--especially Pedro Almodovar, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, and (that sponge) Quentin Tarantino--has become deep, wide and indelible.

Buñuel's written style, as his films, is off-hand, sly, in depth, and acidly funny--especially on the subject of his abiding hatreds: the Catholic church, patriotic nationalism, newspapers, spiders, and the blind. He recounts his education in Spain, his student friendships with Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali, the years in Paris among the surrealists, and a very sobering chapter on the Spanish Civil War, in which he served the Republic as a diplomat (and--reading between the lines--an espionage officer) in France. A great many of his friends, like Lorca, were murdered by one side or the other in the war (Buñuel gives as fine a brief account of the Spanish conflict as you'll read), and he was lucky to have found a refuge in exile, first in the U.S. and then Mexico.

For Buñuel, imagination, and the unexpected images conjured from it, always precedes meaning; just as an impish, perhaps eternal, perversity trumps any philosophy. We meet in these pages a warm and amiable man, eager to laugh at the god who supposedly presides over this very cruel world. Buñuel is proud of his obsessions and accomplishments; happy here to talk until his last breath--to outrage the powerful, whip the bourgeoisie, and, always, always, insult devout Christians.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

Hard Cell

2011-05-31T10:27:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, maybe watching the World Series, it occurred to me that advertising for cell phones and wireless networks has now reached a saturation point on TV, radio, billboards, magazines, and newspapers unmatched since the bad old cigarette days, which--for the record--I recall very well (and LSMFT is why.)

What this means, of course, is that the health risks, such as jaw and brain cancers, of said instruments will be ignored by the paid-for corporate media, then minimized until further studies are undertaken, then debated and obscured as long as possible. I bring this up today because we may be starting to enter Phase Two.

The truth of this was sent home for me during a recent visit to my sister's. There I was able to watch part of a Today Show plugging an article ostensibly about the health risks of cell use. The idiot author announced that, whew, moderate call use probably isn't harmful, leaving off what is considered "moderate", and how likely it is that a huge section of the population probably exceeds that level without trying hard. (And I think we can all agree that 16 hours non-stop is probably a fatal dose right there.)

For the record, I live without a cell phone, and TV, and car, and microwave, and DVD player, which certainly qualifies me as a freak and a crank; I know, I know.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

The Sunday Review

2011-05-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

The Castle in the Forest
Norman Mailer

I would have liked to awarded three stars to this title, if only for my deep and abiding admiration of Mailer as an author, and a man; indeed, Mailer describes some individual characters and scenes with great skill here. However, The Castle in the Forest rates but two. It begins with an interesting narrative voice, and the promise of a sort of splendid nonsense--a devil describing the childhood of Adolf Hitler. But the splendor quickly wears off. The narration is slack and meandering, and the epistemology--a cosmos in which supernatural beings have their powers limited (somehow) in space and time--is inconsistent and provisional to the shifting dramatic needs of the author.

Humans, devils and angels are at first posited to stand on something of an equal footing, but Mailer is content to show nothing of the broad conflict between Good and Evil in which the story is set, and the humans are all fodder for his devil narrator's ends. Of them all, only Alois Hitler, the tyrant's father, comes to vivid life. Long-time Mailer readers will not be surprised that Alois, a compulsive philanderer who fathers many children with several wives, allows Mailer ample opportunity to make wry, and tired-feeling, observations about women, sex, marriage, and life.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2011-05-25T16:28:00.000-07:00

I've thought for a while now that one of the stranger features of our political culture is the need to re-fight the Civil War every fifty years. Another possibly related thought is how autocracies, when faced with change to their familiar way of life, are perfectly willing, maybe even happy, to watch their social order, and often the country around it, die. Ancient Rome is a fine example, as is Habsburg Austria, Nazi Germany; Argentina and the Shah's Iran also spring to mind.

What is it about the white-guy south--which I shall extend to Red States in general--that is so in love with stupid ideas of social order, and the lost causes of defending the same? You have to wonder how otherwise rabidly self-interested fatheads (and I'm referring now to congressional Republicans) could show such disdain for their own fortunes, personal and political, and the welfare of their constituents, not to mention the health of our disordered republic.

The lockstep defense of the Ryan budget and the inane gamesmanship over the debt ceiling hike we've seen in the last few days are not signs of strength, just as R.E. Lee's daring thrust into Pennsylvania in July, 1863 was not a sign of strength, rather a desperate gamble with waning resources to force a favorable outcome against the logic of numbers and the times.

Clearly, someone important decided a couple years ago that the only way the old style GOP could survive was to become a boutique brand with the clout of an exclusive club; both aspirational and exclusive at the same time. They had money and organization; and maybe too much of both. What was missing was any kind of ideological flexibility, diverse voices, and, fatally, smart people advancing cogent plans.

Nope. They cleft to nativism, coded racism, no taxes, no healthcare, torture, and war. While almost all have been popular causes from time to time, NONE of have EVER been a demonstrated long-term persuasive force in our politics. Furthermore a healthy political party manages to produce every so often a figure who might single-handedly redefine a party's policies, if not its so-called principles. The Democrats had--for example--FDR, and Clinton; the Republicans, Teddy Roosevelt and Ike. Now these men I mention are, of course, very rare in history, but we might pick out many other lesser lights who advanced in their respective parties by challenging the ways and means of the existing, sclerotic orders.

Ladies and gentlemen, is there one such figure in the modern GOP? Look at who thinks they can be president over there then tell me.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

The Sunday Review

2011-05-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

The Town and the City
Jack Kerouac

Dated, and written with a generally overwrought lyricism, Kerouac's mainly overlooked 1950 first novel offers surprising riches as it charts the disappointments and disintegration of an American working class family in the years before and through the Second World War.

Right from the start, Kerouac identified a nearly inexplicable sense of loss and loneliness in American young people, a climate of the Great Depression; hollow feelings which they push aside, explain with self-involved philosophizing, cover with alcohol or drugs, or try to mediate with a rootless searching which might never end.

Kerouac's innate conservatism--an attachment to religion, tradition, and family--is very clear throughout and ever at odds with his sympathy for, and curiosity about, those who manage to live outside the moral bounds of middle class or lawful society. Homosexuality, for example, is overtly derided, but intense male relationships, only slightly disguised, characterize the second half of the book. (One might observe that this sexual ambivalence eventually killed the author, who came to reject his beat, outsider friends for a kind of non-corporate, reclusive Catholic patriotism, and managed to drink himself to death in 1968 at age 46.)

Though clearly inspired by Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac has an affection for his characters and hometown which the completely overrated Wolfe could never muster. Though The Town and the City is overlong, and often overwritten in a sturdy, Whitmanesque voice, it has frequent passages of great beauty and compassionate observation--a sort of warm regard of a cold world--which will carry most readers along to its beautifully realized finish.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

Gallows Humidor

2011-05-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

In one of my arch-er moments a couple weeks ago, I wondered aloud to my facebook friends if I should start a blog called Climate Disasters in Red States. The very next day an enormous tornado killed around 300 people in Alabama.

Drought in Texas, floods along the Mississippi, a brutally gray and chilly spring across the upper Midwest, these are facts on the ground, or rather in the air, that I think are beginning to (as Dr. Johnson said of the gallows) focus minds wonderfully.

The corporate press is very good at showing healthy skepticism about everything--unless it's the inevitable housing revival, and the return to championship form of Tiger Woods--and it's been impressive to see all those stories about the weird weather without mention of how well it was modeled, oh, gee, fifteen years ago by climate scientists. Over a century ago Twain wondered about how the southern churches of his childhood could lie so much about slavery. The answer, which I'm sure Mark knew, was in the abject eagerness of an unremarkable and lazy people to believe them.

Now I'd like too think that the ongoing and impending climate disasters will change some dim U.S. minds fast, and that the climate-change denial party will pay for their pattern of lies at the polls. No question, that tide is changing. But I also think that some new lies will appear, and that whole populations of unremarkable people will believe them until such groups get washed away.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

Pulp Friction

2011-05-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

It has been a longstanding whimwham here that the Republican Party is a dying thing, a victim of changing demographics, new broad-based communication technologies, and a culture of stupidity and greed left over from the days when our empire was feeling its oats and white guys called ALL the shots.

An associated point is that, given the above, we don't know what such an implosion would look like. (And, relatedly, that most of the pressures outlined above would have a strong effect on the Democrats as well, though their organization would be in a much better condition to absorb the shocks and move on.)

Now there were a few factors I didn't consider, the main one being how deeply invested the corporate media--along with a certain portion of the loyal opposition--is in propping up the sick half of our two party system. I should have been more sensitive to the bonds of education and class which unites all who are vested in the white-collar dream, especially now that it's under direct assault from economic and social realities far outside anyone's control.

On a whole different level, I also didn't consider just how frightened, angry, and spiteful a significant part of the electorate would be once our African-American president took office; impulses which a reactive media were pleased to objectify and, in the worst cases, stoke (see above.)

And while I am willing to shape my long-standing long-term forecast, I will not change it. I do believe that recent events touching the GOP brand: their extremist, and pointless, House bills, the nitwits hogging all the attention "running" (or not) for president, the power grab in Wisconsin, the torture apologists, not to mention the racists camping in their living room, to me indicates a distinct sense of hysteria in the face of dire emergency. When facing the end, people will often do desperate things.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

A Room with a Review

2011-05-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon

The third of what might be considered Thomas Pynchon's California entertainments, Inherent Vice (2009) is a genre detective novel set in El-Lay in the spring of 1970. Doc Sportello (door in Italian) is a 30-ish hippie PI given a couple missing-person cases to look into. Things get complicated, which does not stop Doc from nearly chain smoking joints from page one on.

I am an abiding and devoted fan of Mr. P's, and his many, many strengths as a narrator are all on display, not the least of which is a golden ear for dialogue. He also fills in with a lot of minor characters dotting the L.A. landscape of cheap beach apartments, seedy office buildings, creepy mansions and the offices of Law Enforcement downtown. By the middle of the book the many bit players are hard to keep track of, as is (just sayin') the plot.

But the plot of any American detective novel anyway is just a excuse to hang dark observations of society, and Pynchon serves up the goods. In fact, just when I was wondering if maybe this one had been tossed-off just a tad too carelessly, the looping plot resolved into a very tight-lensed look at a hierarchy of corrupt power that seems to lurk behind everything in California.

While I.V. is missing the radiant, bare-bones paranoia of The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon's first short California novel, and the sincere sense of human loss, nostalgia (and paranoia) of Vineland, his second, the latest work shares their tender regard for a time and place where a brief visit of a certain type of freedom was followed hard upon by an army of losers and cutthroats, come to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.

The novel also has what strikes this loyal reader as the finest confrontation yet between a typical Pynchon good guy and representatives of Them (you Pynchon fans will know what I mean.) Far from the nearly invisible actors of Lot 49, and the nearly faceless law enforcement agents of Vineland, Doc Sportello spends some quality time with several of the sociopaths in question as the story glides towards its beautifully written final page.

As a genre piece, Inherent Vice fits that space between Carl Hiaasen's wacko intrigues and William Gibson's rather more sinister dealings. As a vehicle for a slumming Great Writer's ideas and craft, we'd have to go back to Mailer's terrific Tough Guys Don't Dance, another ga-ga pulp exercise set on the edge of an ocean. Inherent Vice might be a bit overpopulated and scattered, but that sort of goes with the territory.

See also: The author does a VO promo for the book, interestingly, in a first-person narration not used in the novel.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

Blameless Plug

2011-05-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

You several regular readers might be pleased to hear that Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now available as a Kindle download, if, that is, the technology appeals to you. (Me? I'm kinda a book guy.) Any satisfied customers are encouraged to leave glowing comments in the appropriate place there.

What else? Though posts here have dwindled to a trickle, that doesn't mean I don't regularly think about this place. Tired to death of our bitter, attenuated, and increasingly nihilistic politics, and our very modern reluctance to face facts, I've been thinking of posting short book reviews here to--oh, I don't know--promote some kind of clarity of vision, adherence to ideals, if only my own. I'm also thinking of putting together another Guide to an American classic.

And, oh yeah, it looks like the big book I finished writing three years ago will be published in 2012 by a major university press. I'll certainly let you know about that when the time comes.

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95

Hit Parade

2011-05-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Most commentators are expressing caution over how the bin Laden takedown effects the president's re-election chances, but you know me: It seals the deal.

Where to start? With the efficiency and dispatch of the event itself? Of the calm decision behind it? The promise Obama made during the campaign to do exactly what was done? That it wipes clear away about half of the GOP talking points, the ones about his timid, anti-American, leadership? That they can't say Osama is still at large?

That this underlines one more time what a incompetent jerk that squalid little man (meaning, for new readers, our former president), and how stupid his gang of fixers was? (And here let me refer you to the early 2002 news conference in which the SLM natters on about how he doesn't give OBL much thought anymore, along with the inescapable impression he gives of being drunk at the time.) How petty and laughable most Republicans now look trying to absorb some of the credit?

While I would have preferred a live bin Laden on trial in New York, that would have been possible only in a nation which had not been driven mad with fear by seven years of relentless rightist howling, and a profoundly deranged corporate media. We are a far less free and confident nation than we were on 9/10/01, and a lot of people are to blame. Don't get me wrong, Osama got exactly what he deserved, and dropping the corpse in the ocean was an especially pleasing piece of symbolic action. Governments rarely act out disdain so simply, so poetically.

I'm not sure how we can regain that sense of national fortitude, and I submit that the Sunday evening hit job is not the place to start. But it did clear a big field of a lot of brainless opponents; and I am speaking domestically. Clarity is hard to find in our time, and I doubt any single act will provide much for the middle east. But Americans now have a much better sense of how our chief executive rolls, and how no one, Republican or Democrat, even begins to measure up.

Joe

2011-04-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

While I'm here, let me also note with sorrow the recent passing of Joe Bageant, a fine writer, and very nice man, whom I had the good fortune to correspond with a few years ago. Talk about clarity, Joe had it in spades.

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess

2011-04-04T15:57:00.000-07:00

Anyone paying attention, and with no fear of possibly appearing wrong in public, could have predicted late last week that the House GOP would precipitate a government shutdown, which I was meaning to mention at the time, but then lost interest. Frankly, this blogging business used to be more fun. When the government was run by corrupt nitwits, it was easy to cultivate a Mencken-like archness (though my model was the now all-but-forgotten Murray Kempton.) But poking a brain-dead opposition gets old, especially when the ostensible good guys--while at least appearing human--can't seem to stand up and fight for the policies needed to break with a very sorry recent past.

As I recently noted to reader Sglover in the comments section of the previous post, my disappointment with the president is fairly mild compared to the dismay which wells up when I consider principle-trimming congressional Democrats and the paranoid and delusional Republican "policy" enabled by such spineless dithering, and amplified by the protocols of a dying corporate media historically, and hysterically, disdainful of liberal populism.

Add-in a distracted, or bored, or simple-minded, or simply beaten, electorate and the picture emerges of what I referred to a couple years ago during the financial meltdown as a cultural collapse. Well, cracks and meltdowns of all kinds are in the news lately, and even I get tired of saying I Told You So. The problem is no one, and that includes our competent Chief Executive, wants to consider the implications of endemic social failure, and so are pretending otherwise--that the problem is strictly limited to financial realms--as long as possible.

My other prediction which came true--albeit in a way very few may have foreseen--is the implosion of the Republican party, a drama now just beginning Act IV. The nonsense in Wisconsin (and Ohio, and Indiana, and California) and DC, the simmering stupidity of their putative presidential candidates--which even has the egregious Joe Klein yanking out what's left of his hair in vexation--the headache-making spectacle of a pack of beady-eyed losers thinking they're winning, and a press ignoring all the polling evidence to the contrary, just isn't all that funny anymore. What's missing is any clarity from the other side--a banner, a person, anything to rally behind. Our choice is between deep crazy and a sort of crass competence which, as okay as it is, is itself a dreary form of drift.

Perhaps the needed clarity will come in the wake of the federal shutdown, the Wisconsin recall, the defacto state bankruptcies, and a presidential campaign guaranteed to redefine ideas of hateful political inanity. I wouldn't count on it, though; not immediately. If you think things are strange now, wait until the jackasses realize how much, and how badly, they've lost, and how far from any lawful remedy they stand.

Rupe's Snoops' Deep Poop

2011-01-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

The method of Rupert Murdoch's astonishing world-wide success might be boiled down to three clear and easy steps; 1) Hire the smartest sociopaths you can find. 2) Give them unlimited resources. 3) Turn them loose on your business rivals and political enemies.

Loyal readers here will recall one of my favorite hobbyhorses is that the FUX News empire, or, more properly, News Corp., is in fact a house of sticks, held-up mainly by huge revenues from sports broadcasting which are then disbursed to publishing and propaganda outlets by way of the above. The only thing keeping the b-b wolf from blowing it all down--that is, any sort of accurate reporting of financial internals--were outright bribes, and the innate fear of payback in the liberal democracies of the english-speaking world. Though its stock price has lately been languishing in the $15-16 range, meaning someone is hip to the drip, the Dirty Digger's empire seems to chug along from strength to strength.

Well, now, maybe not so much anymore. While we can all marvel at how the UK phone hacking story has not exactly made it to the awareness of US media, thigs are getting worse and worse for ol' Rupe in Old Blighty, and all it will take is one US celeb or politician to find their privacy hijacked by some sweaty limey in the pay of the old guy, then the fun will begin in earnest.

Cutoff At The Past

2011-01-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

The aim of every politician is to be taken seriously on their own terms. Very few achieve this goal, and it is striking how almost no Republicans have done so since that squalid little man declared that no one could have foreseen the failure of New Orleans' levies. This peculiar state of affairs strikes me as pretty interesting.

John McCain's stupid presidential campaign was a constant search for endemic seriousness, from his stern speaking style, the invocation of his military service, his immersion in the pools of town hall talkathons, his drop-everything return to Washington during the financial collapse. Still, a self-defined seriousness eluded him, and was eventually obliterated not long after he chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

The former Alaska governor--who self-immolated in an astonishing display of rancor, illogic, and self-pity yesterday--mainly defines how NOT to go about achieving seriousness on one's own terms. Her poor example points to the overall failure for GOP politicians to gain general stature (and I'll suggest that the only one of them to maybe break through is Speaker Boehner, the beneficiary of events and some luck. Time will tell.)

Barack Obama took on his own specific gravity in a long nominating campaign against seasoned veterans, and by having to articulate the differences, that is, show the nation his thinking, between himself and his nominal pastor. In doing so, he managed to say something true about himself, our fellow citizens, and the nation.

The reason why no Republicans can be taken seriously on their own terms is simple, and indelible. No candidate can afford now to separate his or her self from an info-tainment political apparatus which demands utter fealty to an idealized body which nevertheless contains two broadly conflicting philosophies. Civil libertarians will always butt against religious activists, small government advocates never seem to overcome legislators out to deliver for their districts, budget hawks aren't allowed to raise taxes, Main St. hates Wall St., and Wall St. always wins in DC. Furthermore, NO ONE is allowed to make deals with Democrats

It is worth considering then that the gushing fonts of what Krugman called eliminationist rhetoric which spewed from the Right was meant to cover-over very deep divides in the GOP's beliefs and goals. (Let us note that the notorious ad Giffords' opponent ran evidenced far more ill will towards other Republicans--so-called RINOS--than Giffords herself.) Though many in the GOP disagree over policy details, nearly all could rally 'round a campaign of guns, guts, and glory and direct any rage they might feel for fellow party members towards the other side.

And it worked fine for a while, but anyone paying attention knew something like this was bound to happen; and now that rhetorical low road, so handy for electoral shortcuts, has been effectively cutoff for anyone in, or running for, national office. This is not to say that more than a few might keep at it (one sees no U-turn for the Alaskan queen, for example), but the violence of rhetoric and the rhetoric of violence has become just one more fault line for a political party that had too many already.

That Word

2011-01-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

Let us note that the word slave does not appear in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn until Chapter XVI, just at that point where Mark Twain picked-up writing the book after a hiatus of about three years. What had probably begun as a story meant to profit from his great success with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer had taken a strange turn for the author. The humanity of his characters, and the vividness of their plight, in a time and place firmly rooted in his heart, pulled Twain inevitably away from the children's novel genre into deeper, in fact eternal waters.

The words slave and slavery together appear only eleven times in the book, mostly at the end, after the arch satire of selfish altruism (that least-understood, and liked, portion of the novel--Tom's sadistic plan to free Jim) is completed. From this we might safely presume that Twain didn't intend the book to be about slavery.

The words nigger and niggers appear more times than I care to count; occurring right off the bat, in Chapter I: By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed. Let me suggest that the juxtaposition of the words niggers and prayers is not accidental. Right from the start, Twain meant the word to be far more insulting to a so-called Christian society than demeaning towards black people.

The last appearance of the word is in the final chapter. Huck asks Tom what he had meant to do if his insane plot to free Jim had worked. The answer is just as crazy as the plan: And he said, what he had planned in his head from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight procession and a brass-band, and then he would be a hero, and so would we.

That a well-meaning middlebrow academic has prepared an edition of the novel now to "get out all the 'niggers' around", replacing them with the word slave, for secondary school study should come as no special surprise; and I can't say it bothers me that much. Or, put another way, there are plenty of well-meaning middle- and lowbrow projects out there which bother me a lot more. It points to a certain laziness and prudery in the national character which Twain was very familiar with. If awakened from his eternal rest, he would probably say something acid and funny about it, and make damn sure all royalties from the stupid edition were paid to his estate.

The main problem with Huckleberry Finn, at least how it's regarded today, is partly Twain's fault: It is NOT, and never was, a young person's book. He only dressed it up as one--very deliberately with its many original illustrations--to rather strengthen its subversive blast. It should be read by adults, it needs to be read by adults. Most of the people complaining about the sanitized edition probably haven't read the damned thing since they were forced to in seventh grade, and probably regard it as a coming-of-age tale featuring two true friends. Making Huck Finn safe for kids is about as pointless as removing the drinking from The Great Gatsby for the edification of Mormons.

The new edition creates certain pedagogic difficulties I'm glad I don't need to solve. For one, the words nigger and slave are not exactly synonymous in the book, no more so than in the mouth of Huck's loutish Pap, who in a drunken tirade rages over his encounter with a highly-educated African-American:

Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio [....] And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin.

Stranger still is how the new edition is to be presented to the poor, unsuspecting students. Are they to be told of the change, that whenever they see the word slave the author had written first nigger? (And if not, why not?) And now what to make of all those rappers, calling all their slaves in da house to represent?

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Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited and revised for publication, is now available in a Kindle edition for $3.95.

The Old Wave

2010-12-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

Avast me hearties. Just your little old whine maker, me trying to collect some enthusiasm to kick the last of this dun colored year to the curb. I didn't exactly lose my taste for politics this year so much as my desire to talk about it. Clearly, the Prez was racking up wins while the people paid to pay attention were paying attention mainly to themselves, and that's okay. Selfishness has been the paradigm since Ronnie breezed in from Cali, and the results of which, for some good but mostly ill, hoot at us from trees every day.

Nearly two-and-a-half years ago, I remarked on President's Obama's surfing skills, a natural outcome, I submit, of his Hawaiian birth and boyhood. And let me tell you, my aggrieved liberal buddies, I was way right.

Surfers do not make the wave, okay? They find one then they try to ride. There's a hell of a lot of judgment and skill needed to go far; it's hard to look good, and every so often you miss one (and I think I'm done belaboring this point.)

If the Prez seems to go out of his way to piss-off those supporters rather more to the left of the common body politic, it may well be to goad them into broader action and appeal, or demonstrate the limited capability of their swell. Either outcome is fine by me. I am not so high-minded as to insist about what could have been. Line up the votes, then flog the other side as hard as you can. Some might wonder with some justice if the Great Accommodater even does that much, which will be my subject for next time.

Links All

2010-12-16T16:58:00.000-08:00

Before launching back here in earnest (any day now), a little blogroll housekeeping. Out are a couple college pals who've not posted in months; in are two others well-met at Alma Mater.

Fluff Chance writes about clothes in a loving and deeply knowledgeable way, and can handle a pair of shears like nobody's biz. And, fresh off the high board, John "The Man Who Would Be" King has always been something of a problem (I could tell stories from long ago), but he was a big wheel in advertising in Chicago, and a colossal addict, until a few years ago when his lower lumbar started disintegrating. Sober now, on painkillers, he's writing about it all.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

2010-12-13T05:04:00.000-08:00

Califone

Miss me?

#603

2010-11-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

No real meaning to the title above, other than this post's position in the ongoing series here. And while I have been pleased to be wrong before in these pages, my long-standing call that the Democrats' line would bend, not break yesterday is about as wrong as I've been.

I find reasons to be cheerful however. Let us posit that a good number of wet and cowardly Dems went down to deserved defeats. Unwilling to campaign on the real accomplishments of this session, they got gassed in No Man's Land and it is their own fucking fault. So farewell, you Blue Dogs; I'm not sure we'll see your likes again.

For the liberal wing, Russ Feingold and Raul Grijalva, imho, played HCR too cute by half. There is a pretty solid line between idealism and grandstanding; and though they both ended by doing the right thing, must have left some former loyalists wondering why they were in Washington. Feingold was repaid with the most apathetic constituency in the nation, and a big fat L; right now it looks like Grijalva will eke out a 2-3% win.

I am sorry most about the Senate results in Illinois and Pennsylvania. But--trust me here--Giannoulias, as able as he might have been as a senator, was a poor candidate, bland and tainted. As for Joe Sestak, maybe if the Big Fat Slob reads this he can expound a bit in comments.

So much for the losers, the "winners" provide a more delectable dish to pick over, which I will do shortly. Until then, let me observe that I still think the GOP has been shattered to pieces, a grab bag of knaves supervised by idiots. Events will soon reveal the chaos that lurks. But right now I'll lay even odds Boehner won't be Speaker come summer recess; if, that is, he ever gets to be Speaker at all.

The Wrong Right

2010-10-26T04:43:00.000-07:00

I was braced to read (via Sullivan) of one conservative feeling very much like myself regarding the coming electoral contest. Being mainly:

Gaining 35 seats in the House is impressive, and it will be the second-largest turnover in my lifetime, but after the overhyping of Republican chances for the last year it will seem anticlimactic and unsatisfying.

I will add that the overhyping was as much a product of the progressive fever swamp, your Silvers, Marshalls, and Yglesiasi than the overheated vents over at FUX. The reasons are several: the surety of consensus in the light of historic trends (Matty and Josh), the need to attract eyeballs (Josh and Josh), the desire to appear knowing, and to please the new corporate underwriter (Nate); all aided, to be sure, by fractious and ~~cowardly~~ insecure Democratic elected officials, a no-shit, tough-shit economic landscape, and a chief executive as willing to frustrate his allies as undermine his enemies.

Ignored by people who should know better are the mitigating factors, frequently enumerated here, of big wheel demographic trends, GOP failure and brainlessness, a politico-infotainment media which pays attention only to itself, and the essential practicality of a broad electorate that has become less and less susceptible (my theory) to the blandishments of brain-dead political ads.

Weeks ago I insisted that Democratic losses would be on the low side of what's predicted, at the time something like 15-20, and that both houses would remain in trembling Democratic hands. I see no reason to change this view, even if the under has been upped to 35.

What very few in the business have bothered to consider, and what will be a big topic in a week's time, are the fatal implications for a GOP which has inhaled a bunch of belligerent nitwits without grasping the power needed to keep them from running amok, and the old party from flying to furious pieces.

As Promised

2010-10-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

The weekend slipped away before I could make good on my promise (made in the comments to the last post) to follow-up a couple points from last time, main one being how no one in the "free" press is bothering to consider what will happen in the GOP should the blockheads fail to take the House as promised (w/ the Senate looking safer for the Dems by the day.)

I'll tell you what: a fucking bloodletting the likes of which haven't been seen since Lincoln's re-election. Not only are the furies set to devour the dim Bohner and the canting Cantor, but there is sure to be a viral host of T-P'ers injected into the body of the party at several levels (Personally, as a worshiper of the Aqua Boogie--the lad was surely confused on this point--I am rooting for Rand Paul) who will certainly bring a final air of disaster to the Grown Old Party.

Of course, the MSM will make the turmoil out to be a positive thing, the GOP will gain seats after all; but falling short of summer's lofty goals, after spending all that money, will NOT sit well for a bunch of Red constituencies which have been persuaded to hold fire until now. Also will dawn the reality that they are utterly screwed for '12.

One aspect of the Tea Party phenomenon also gone unremarked on is how it's really a breathtaking repudiation of the system of conferred majesty which rendered that squalid little man, you remember--the war criminal?, the nomination in 2000. That little twerp was massaged into the job starting right after his dad beat Dukakis, the inevitable, and fatal, political logic of which has been commented on here many times.

Nope, they may end up with Mike Huckabee and some desert state sheriff as his running mate in 2012, but by God, no more rich asshole sons of rich assholes.

For in sucking-in the Great White South a generation ago, the Republicans not only gained a couple generations of dependable electoral gains, they also took in an essentially populist, chip-on-the-shoulder, lost-cause white belligerence which tends to look terrible on television, especially when it is elderly, out-of-step, and losing.

I'd say any smart and poised conservative political movement could have made definitive gains this cycle, but you can't define shit when you don't stand for anything, beside anger at the present and power for its own sake. The GOP is a party shot-through with craven and dumb fuck-ups, bound to fuck-up in three weeks.

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels (cont.)

2010-10-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

How can I forget you, my several readers? But what can I say? I wish we lived in more interesting times.

But wait, Will (I hear someone say) aren't the times interesting enough already? To which I'll reply that while we don't lack for incident, interest is sorely lacking. "Tis a dull circus indeed.

(You will have to pardon me, The History of Tom Jones is on the nightstand, and I find Fielding's high style contagious.)

Which is to say this has been the drearyist election season in ten years, thanks in large part to a media entertainment apparatus devoted to the fortunes of the Republican party, even as it burns, crackles and blows away. Precious little space is given anywhere to considering the outcome if the GOP does not win control of both houses, or even the House itself, an event which I still very much doubt. Instead we are given polls and profiles to understand, tactics and policies to bicker over, and a recent history of the Congress and Obama administration which no Democrat is entirely comfortable embracing or running from. Noise and anxiety predominate; and, I submit, that it isn't an accident that these are two products delivered most reliably via your TV set.

Which is to say the magic lantern is trying to reproduce the best possible conditions for magic lanterns. For just as surely as FUX has consumed the GOP, the entire political arena has been moved to the confines of the Box, where a reality prevails which, though familiar, bears no relation to what obtains in everyday life.

(Note that I avoid any notion of the "real world", as TV has ambitions of depicting that, and in truth a great many consider television to be as much a part of their real worlds as, oh, school, their jobs, or social lives.)

We don't vote on TV yet and, I believe, most people who take the right seriously enough to do so regularly, and reliably in an off-year, are not moved by their passions as much as TV would like us to believe. I also think Americans are still a fundamentally practical people who have at this late date also grown fairly sophisticated to the ways of advertising. Which is to say the two pillars of potential GOP success this season look a bit shakey to me.

Indeed one may consider all the money spent on TV ads to be a sign of how ineffective they are. Put simply: why run 100 if 10 will do the job? Consultants have an answer for that, of course, but it is self-serving.

Of course another, very big, reason why the season lacks excitement is an administration hellbent on promoting its brand of technocratic skill which mocks the passion, and several of the political ideals, which put it there in the first place. At best it is understandable and annoying, at worst--e.g. where it "works" to end DADT at one end of town while defending it in another--it is schizophrenic, enraging. In such an environment it is hard for Dems facing reelection to know who their friends really are.

UPDATE: Ambinder re: DADT (via Sullivan)

A Public Service Message

2010-09-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

from Minneapolis artist Al Haug.

Bets

2010-09-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

It does not take a tremendous amount of foresight, or cynicism, to predict the rollout of the GOP's Pledge to America, slated for later today, will be a gassy disaster for the Party of the Rich. Let us count the reasons why:

It is old--since something like it worked so well the last time. Well, times have changed.

There is no need--a gimmick in search of a cause. Either they are going to retake the House or they are not. It smacks of a certain inner lack of confidence.

The devil is in the details--I have a hard time believing that after running from any stands regarding budget cuts for two years they will unveil a document which takes any firm positions on how they'll reduce the deficit. Hard details will draw all kinds of fire and more of the hazy same, in writing, can only attract some overdue criticism from sources so far inclined to let them slide.

They are a fractured bunch--and the document is certain to reflect policies designed to please everyone in such general language so as to make any needed clarification in the coming days dangerous.

Social issues are killing them--I think stiff-arming DADT one last time was a stealth disaster for any party that claims to carry "freedom" into the future. Any defense of marriage nonsense, or just say no platforms, in writing, six weeks before election day, will only alienate centrists and energize so-far apathetic lefties.

They are not very bright--It cannot be emphasized enough how much influence apparently very dumb (or narrow-minded, aggressive, and stubborn--which amounts to the same) men have in shaping the message and direction over there. There is bound to be something included somewhere in the document which, once unveiled, will make nearly everyone weep, in sorrow or with joy.

In sum: call me crazy, but I do believe the Red Team has more to lose than gain with something like this; a bid to show they are in control of their destiny when it is pretty clear they are not.

UPDATE: While I was writing the above, Ez Klein--a brighter, more knowledgeable lad than yr. obdt. hmbl. svt.--was writing this.

Stale, Mate

2010-09-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

To say current events resist interpretation is a tad lazy. While nuts, the scene is all too clear. I submit that facts on the ground are not only stubborn, but boring things, and that all of the noise about the coming midterms--which will see an adjustment to the Democrats' majorities but nothing like the realignment so breathlessly invoked--is pumped out by a relatively new politico-infotainment industry which sucks-in players from the most craven and soulless NRO huckster to the sincerest Kossac out there.

I meant to point you to the level-headed Al Giordano's take on the midterms weeks ago. Still holds.

While our political process has not been hijacked, the vast industry around it has been. But even that is putting it too baldly, because that money circus has been raging for generations. What has, I submit, changed is that the associated industry, ever a self-important endeavor, has become in our self-reflecting age more important to itself than following the needs of what used to be called the polis.

Put another way, the will, and movement, of the people has gradually become secondary, maybe tertiary, to the fierce desires of the commentariot.

Years ago, a good case could be made that polling and advertising could broadly find, and slightly direct, the public instinct in an election year. I'm not so sure that holds in our fractured and rather-more-cynical republic anymore. This whole season we've had to endure the scrim of national concerns held against a very broad base of local elections, where local issues and personalities will surely prevail.

Holding up that scrim is a hypertrophic news media/public relations apparatus that's become ever more ineffective the larger it gets, and is now desperate to run after events it once was able to form.

I do believe this will be a watershed election, not only for the fortunes of the rotted GOP, rent to pieces this past year (though no one wants to say so yet), but for a very expensive constellation of media doctors, actors, and salesmen who will need to figure out what went wrong with all their fundamental assumptions about their own importance.

To illustrate in miniature: while much has been made this past week about Forbes magazine's dumb, and unprecedented, cover assault on the president, none of those taking the magazine to task have mentioned its dire financial straights (and the desperate measures which that might encourage), and how it will be a miracle if it is still a going concern in January, 2013, when President Obama takes his second oath of office.

UPDATE: Like I was saying; from E J Dionne, 9/23/10

But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.

A Sigh Of Things To Come

2010-08-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd get back to at least weekly posting here, but honestly the poor tenor of recent events has given me a good case of the Why Bother?'s.

I am moved today just to note the monumental cowardice of Sen H. Reid (well on his way to returning to the senate, but no longer worthy of the majority leadership) and every single one of the Democratic trimmers regarding the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan.

Really, if you can't stand up for the Bill of Rights as a Democrat, then go join the agate-eyed cement heads over in the GOP. They need smart people badly, and a fresh infusion of amoral dissemblers, with a somewhat more central and clearheaded understanding of how the nation should conduct itself, would only help the party and nation.

For as much as the entertainment media, and sophisticated political bloggers, hate to admit it, the GOP's ongoing hatefest is not a strong hand, and its jackpot will be very meager. GOP gains will be on the low side of what's expected and of those, a certain percentage will be outright national embarrassments, ignored by all within weeks. Others--especially those who gain blue seats in mainly conservative districts--in the wake of close outcomes and less-than-sterling national results will be probably less interested in party unity. I will also submit that the bigger surprises election night will be those unexpected Republican losers, who thought a tide of ignorance is all they needed.

Now, don't get me wrong. Cultivating ignorance plays a central role in politics. The Democratic brand of ignorance tends more towards ideas of what should be, while the Republican variety exists merely to deny, deeply and angrily, what is. Be that as it may, a successful politician must also deliver the goods. In that department the disappointing Dems have done the far better job. The GOP delivers the goods only to those who can pay top dollar. The rest of their aging, white, and shrinking herd is left to feed on stupidity and endless, empty rage.

All Systems Goo 2

2010-07-22T06:08:00.000-07:00

A whole two months ago, I wrote:

If things haven't been exactly lively here of late, it's been because greater events, while not exactly slowing, have fallen into a predictable groove. In Washington, the president will propose, or support, something, the right will be completely outraged, the left partially disappointed, the press happy to slant coverage towards the mass of objections, and then the thing will pass.

Considering past as prologue: Kagan? Good morning, judge. Financial reform? Done. Climate and Immigration? Just you wait.

I bring this up to make two points. One being how little real news passes through our lives each loud and maddening day, and, Two, how fucking successful the administration of B. H. Obama has been, is, and is going to be.

Thing is: I don't quibble with results. Every single outcome mentioned above, along with the health care act and financial stimulus, were carried to completion in the face of relentless political opposition, often rock-headed institutional inertia from the president's own party, and ambivalent--in fact sometimes hostile and ill-informed--press coverage. The widespread notion among "thinkers" left and right that this remarkable success spells a shellacking for Dems this fall at the polls is as nonsensical as nearly every other glass gem the media's been hawking since Vince Foster killed himself.

(For the record, I'm keeping my three-month-old prediction for Democratic losses squarely on the low side of the under. Both houses stay blue--and even a few red patriots going down in unexpected flames.)

But more about the hilarious GOP collapse next time. I wanted this post to review what might be considered White House failures in regards to where the country stands.

Certainly if the Prez could have a do-over it would be the stimulus. As is all-too clear, that $700 bil., as predicted by several smart people, was not enough to do the trick. $1.3 tril. was the better number for Mr. Krugman, but no one wanted to fight for such a scary figure, and now steep unemployment, a situation which cannot surprise anyone who's been paying attention, is the goat at the birthday party.

This trimming of sails is characteristic of every gain the president's made. While I understand the need, and mainly applaud the results, the process encourages exhaustion and disappointment among the most dedicated. Sometimes a sense of command daring is needed, especially if the leaders have proven to be smart and good, and prone to good luck.

Now, honestly, health care reform was too important to court more risk than was already built-in. The stimulus was a triage situation, needed to be done with dispatch. The framing of an inclusive and tolerant military is moving about as fast as it can. I do believe more should have been gained from financial reform, but attempting so would have only torn open a congressional vipers' nest in an election year. Can't win'em all.

I am, for now, giving a pass on our military projects overseas, shitvats of vast proportions and antique features; and taking the Aug. '11 troop withdrawal deadline more seriously than most observers.

For me the administrations biggest failures are ones of omission. That Guantanamo prison remains open is a national disgrace (the whole base, now of zero strategic importance, should be reduced, detoxed, and given to the Cubans once the Castros are history); that some fair, and forgiving, accounting for war crimes has not been made is a rotting canker on the military and nation's soul that will not go away. And there's been zero action on transportation issues which recognizes the, yes, very real Peak Oil situation. (Man, the NSA reports on the Saudi reserves have to be eye-opening.)

From the start, my greatest cabinet-level disappointment was the appointment of Tom Vilsack as Agriculture secretary, guaranteeing policy support for a Big Ag. monoculture food chain which has killed rural life, enriched corporations, and greased the skids for America's population slide into obesity. An organic vegetable garden at the White House is swell (and Mrs. Obama is a ray of constant sunshine for me) but, wow, do we need more.

My advice is, Mr. President, once the elections are past, take your pick at one of the above, and start making some outlandish demands, see what unexpected things can be done. That Sec. Vilsack has just proven himself to be an utter jackass at Agriculture's helm, may be a hint where to begin.

All Systems Goo

2010-07-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

I don't think I need to persuade most of you that we live in an era of widespread system failure. You can see it writ on the obese bodies of our fellow citizens, in the brackish Gulf of Mexico, where Pluto has intruded on the realm of Neptune; in California's finances, in the collapse of the GOP, in the paucity of economic improvement, in the. . . well, why go on?

Eighteen months past the regime of that squalid little man, and we are now on the killing floor, as Howlin' Wolf might have put it. The only way out is forward, and a lot of us, the ones looking back, the ones who slip on the grease of their own asinine understandings of what's happening, the one's who think that everything would be just fine if only the right people are in charge, won't get there.

There are two points-of-view which roughly prevail in our current political arena. Flashiest is the idea that "the people" can somehow "rise up" and "take back" the "country" from "them", those embodied so artfully by that thug-in-chief. Hard knowing exactly how many nitwits really believe this, though I'll chance a guess at a solid 20% of the electorate, inflated to 30% by publicity and thoughtfully crafted polls.

The opposite notion, in my view just as mistaken, is the idea that, in the face of hard times, the mistaken and inept can somehow prevail. Granted, apathy is as pernicious as stupidity (and as much a result of our failed educational system), and well-intentioned Democrats (those of similar stripe having been mainly driven from the GOP) do not have a easy row to hoe from here to election day. But their way, if not free of obstacles, is clear in view, and I might spend some time describing it next time.

Checking In

2010-07-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

Remember me? I hope everyone has been enjoying their summer (as much as possible anyway.) I just wanted to say that I have not forgotten you, my beloved 14 readers; it's just that I have not had a whole lot new to add to the national debate. Lately however I've been forming some thoughts and might start knocking some out, little by little, over the next few days. In the meantime, stay cool.

Liberty Slips

2010-05-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

The great white hope of the great white media has been that the highly-telegenic T-party demonstrations retain their entertainment value through the election season. The great white party, however, needs something a bit more meaningful than entertainment value come November--that is, a largish wave of convincing electoral victories. The twin goals are not necessarily conflicting, but neither are they built to run together flawlessly.

One of the mistakes the great white media made, and which the parties involved had no pressing need to correct, until a few days ago, was conflating the TPers with the libertarians. Though they have little to show for it, the latter have been at this for a while, and have evolved a number of pretty respectable and consistent views regarding the government and rights of the individual, some crackpot, others which beg a wider hearing and no small sympathy from informed citizens. That they might ride a goofy entertainment fad to electoral success bothered them not a jot.

Where the libertarian model collapses, as RaPaul and his reluctant hosts are now discovering, is mostly on the hustings, where the real world constantly interferes with all those reasoned arguments and clean categorical positions. Mr. Paul complains about being the target of liberals as if he is dismayed that such a scurvy thing would be part of an election, and wishes voters to share his pique.

The only informal debate I ever had with a libertarian (a Chicago lawyer--friend of a friend--at whose home I was a party guest) revolved around abortion rights. Let those jurisdictions that wish to criminalize abortions do so, he said, and people who find this onerous move to jurisdictions that allow it. Name me a jurisdiction today, I replied, where clinics are allowed to operate without local protest. His model would not work because abortion opponents would never allow it to.

He had no reply.

Norman Mailer, a writer whom regular readers know I admire greatly, ran for mayor of New York in 1969 on something like a libertarian platform. Among his various proposals was to center police oversight on neighborhoods, each localized force upholding the particular rules of that enclosure--perhaps hash bars and whore houses in the Village, strict shabbat observance in Williamsburg. Cool, right? A vast city lawfully arranged by traditions, mores and need. But, "Mr. Mailer," an elderly jewish man asked him at a campaign stop in Queens, "what happens when their police come after our police?"

The candidate, as Joe Flaherty recorded in Managing Mailer, had no answer.

The last thing the GOP needs this year is attention drawn to their harebrained, and utterly inconsistent, positions on government. This never happened when they were a brand; but now they are just one more failing enterprise in a nation littered with 'em. The earnest and clueless Mr. Paul is no help, nor is the conflicted, minority-driven electoral movement which delivered him.

In the previous post, I suspected that Paul would not be a team player, but in fact there is no GOP team anymore, just a bunch of pick-up minor leaguers and free-agents mainly interested in cash. The gamble is that the crackpot cadres, and those who promote them, will of themselves turn into broad returns at the polls. This morning this looks more doubtful than ever. The every-man-for-himself philosophy Repubs espoused for the larger republic for so long is at last screwing them no less than it did the rest of us.

Loss Leaders cont.

2010-05-19T05:16:00.000-07:00

Pardon me if I don't read a hell of a lot into last night's local elections. The search for meaning is a broad temptation for the national political media; and a handy narrative, good until it isn't anymore, shall be cobbled thereof.

I'm not sure the mood is, as the MSM would have it, anti-incumbent, in that most of the of people who did well last night are office holders looking to move up. The exception is Rand Paul, who has now become a living laboratory (honestly, someone tell me, for his sake, that he wasn't named for Ayn) for a certain type of pressure cooker crackpot politics. He might come around and be a team player, but I doubt it. I'll venture to say that even if he wins, and one suspects there's a likable Democrat somewhere in Kentucky, the GOP broadly loses.

Going into yesterday, what I could not understand--no, hang that, I do understand, rather what's most disappointing--was the level of support Arlen Spector got from the Dem establishment. Craven, elderly, and worst of all mean (for I recall his questioning of Anita Hill), he is the epitome of everything Democrats don't need for the future. I would have been surprised if Sestak lost; that a sizable number of otherwise sensible leaders bet the other way is a shame.

But, hey, now he's gone, and, no, I don't think he'll be a credible independent candidate.

By far the most interesting, if only moderately significant, outcome was the special election for John Murtha's old seat; one more loss for the GOP in an election that, you know, actually means something. I believe they are now 0 for 7 in such contests since November, '08.

UPDATE: S. Benen further considers PA-12.

Stark Fable

2010-05-17T06:25:00.000-07:00

If things haven't been exactly lively here of late, it's been because greater events, while not exactly slowing, have fallen into a predictable groove. In Washington, the president will propose, or support, something, the right will be completely outraged, the left partially disappointed, the press happy to slant coverage towards the mass of objections, and then the thing will pass.

Considering past as prologue: Kagan? Good morning, judge. Financial reform? Done. Climate and Immigration? Just you wait.

Now certainly there's plenty of room to quibble about details in all of the above, loopholes, lack of reach, unclear agendas, etc. But the point is that there is a ton of excellent policy bloggers who cover that sort of thing. Me, I'm a big picture guy, and the big picture is: Obama wins.

The big picture, and I promise to drop this trope just as soon as I can, is consequences. What is so exquisite, and scary, about the consequences unfurling now, in the Gulf, Europe, the GOP, the Media, is that they are the fruits of errors compounded over time, generations of bad ideas and policy fuck-ups, which no one sought to correct at the time, because times were too good.

Case in point: Daily newspapers have collapsed from digital competition and an atmosphere predicated on a population of attention deficient non-readers. We can, however, trace the decline back to competition from TV, which began killing the evening papers back in the 70s. Clearly, TV was the big culprit; the intertubes only swept away a dried journalistic enterprise. But recall that newspapers never really tried to compete with TV in the first place, while doing their best to promote viewership. Then recall that newspaper owners, in fact, tended to own a LOT of TV stations too. For a while this made a very tasty package, but then the package fell apart.

Similar assumptions of profit and power have worked for the GOP since Nix '68, but decades of bad ideas and stupid policies led them to the administration of that squalid little man, their own Gulf blowout which they will never clean up after. There's a plume of toxic sludge stretching from Arizona to Alaska which will choke the life out of the host party before it gets dispersed.

Forgive me for waxing too metaphorical, but it is instructive to note that BP was drilling so deeply in the Gulf because good returns in the oil business are now found only at the extremes, where the engineering is very risky. Best not to go there, but there they went anyway, a fable for our times.

UPDATE: (via Sullivan) The End of Magical Oil, in which the writer draws parallels between deep water drilling and the financial meltdown. Nice knowing I'm not the only one.

Truth And Consequences

2010-05-12T05:19:00.000-07:00

I am a small and petty man, which is why stories about natural disasters in Oklahoma and Tennessee leave me with a stern satisfaction I can only characterize as biblical. I see a picture of the Opryland stage under seven feet of water and can only think, Serves them fucking right.

This is, of course, pretty sloppy reasoning. "Them" in this case includes a lot of musicians, technicians, and stage hands whose only business in life is to make people happy. When enormous tornadoes scour Oklahoma, who pays the highest price but mainly poor people without the resources to provide four strong walls and a basement?

But I also think of the elected representatives in such places, and Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida, and all those culture-issue voters tuning-in to fine patriotic entertainment returning them to office, who have for decades not only stood in the way of sensible environmental legislation, and a more compassionate attitude towards what used to be called the biosphere, but actively mocked and stigmatized those in the minority who desired such things.

People are not stupid, but they are easily led. To those of you who can't quite see the distinction, I will stipulate that it is a matter of outcomes. So long as affluence and power kept margins fat, not only in the ledgers, but also in the realms of engineering error, then it was very easy to make a satisfactory case for pillaging the planet based on selfishness and good returns. It is when margins get stretched, and break, and the hard consequences flow thereupon, that people awaken to the sight of a lot of rich white assholes blaming each other, while taking no responsibility themselves, for the shitwaves.

Back when margins were fat, there was never any need to take responsibility; unlike the case with more modest empires--Japan, say, or England--which grew with traditional issues of scarcity or powerful rivals, an etiquette for contrition and amends has never been part of our ruling class culture.

But the shitwaves have started, folks, you can be sure. It is easy to note that the teaparty crowd is mainly congregated in those sunny parts of the land where the housing prices fell the hardest; let me add that it is not coincidental either that these places were mostly remote and arid exurbs which required a great deal of gasoline, electricity and water to keep even barely operable. Arizona only wishes its biggest problem is illegal Mexican yard workers.

The nature and mass of our problems--and let me predict a coming rupture, somewhere somehow, for big Agriculture, one to mirror the crisis in the oil industry--will come to dwarf the current shouting of the petty and enraged. Solutions will have to be both large-bore and small-grained, and like-it-or-not, guided by government. I'm inclined to feel good about that, but see little to celebrate for the foreseeable.

And Their Heads Were Hot And Fat

2010-04-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of an interview David Foster Wallace gave to a German TV book show in 2003, he observes:

The thing about it [rebelling] is that in America we think of rebellion as this very sexy thing, and that it involves, y'know, action, and force, and looks good. My guess is the forms of rebellion that will end up changing anything meaningfully here will be very quiet and very individual and, uh, probably not all that interesting to look at from the outside. I'm now hoping for less interesting rather than more interesting.

(The raw interview is available on You Tube in ten sections, clip below, question and answer start at 2:25; and really should be seen in its entirety. DFW's book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is, I gotta say, required reading.)

I bring up this very prescient observation now to mark how futile the T-Bag movement was from the get-go--old-fashioned made-for-TV kookyness, high in entertainment value, and utterly lacking any meaningful force. That an outlet so keen on reporting its details now calls its importance exaggerated, something clear from the start, is as fine an illustration of how the Hungry Ghost media devours its own empty stomach that I can think of right now.

Say, is it my imagination of did the whole GOP project just snap the last of its drive belts this past week? We had the story quoted above; a Senate candidate who repeated her ka-razy call to barter livestock and produce for medical care (and this from a citizen from one of the desert states); the senate minority leader erasing his line in the sand over financial reform legislation after about 36 hours; the risible GOP party chair telling the truth about the party's Southern Strategy; wingers seeking to out a GOP senator from South Carolina; the gov. of Fla. looking to leave the party; while Newt Gingrich, against all evidence to the contrary, is still regarded as smart; with everything wrapped into the merry bloggy debate (followed over at Matty's and Sully's blogs) regarding the closed epistemology loop of right-wing pundits, and the pure entertainment aims of their output.

Now a lot of this stuff has been grist of the old H&J mill here for quite some time. In the information age, the guidance of doctrinaire, and stupid, leaders goes from being a solid shield to a distinct liability. What Wallace's above observation should make clear is that the old rules of media engagement and direction cannot be applied anymore. If they did, as I am fond of repeating, then the ACA would not have passed, and McConnell and Cantor would be nattering successfully about bailouts to block financial reform. Nope, all that old GOP PR-driven, TV-based, group-focused magic stopped working a few years ago, and they are fucked.

Kindling

2010-04-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

My close friend, and Cliffhanger Press editor, Joe Gioia has decided to give the new paradigm a try and has released the first chapter of his nearly-completed book to Amazon's Kindle store.

The Temple of Music is a stand-alone chronicle of the strange goings-on at the 1901 Buffalo Pan American Exposition, something that Joe likes to call fugitive history; that is, a historic account of weird stuff that really happened, but was then quickly forgotten for being too weird.

He writes: "The Temple of Music" uncovers the strange and forgotten story of Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition; the summer when singing gondoliers mixed with ghost dancers, Geronimo charged five bucks to have his picture taken, Dreamland opened for business, an electrified indian walked the night sky, and William McKinley was shot down in the ornate Temple of Music--only to have the train that took his body back to Washington end up on an Elvis Presley single a half-century later.

Alright, then. I think it's a very entertaining and informative read, and certainly worth the $3.50 to while-away a plane ride or bout of insomnia. But honestly, I'm prejudiced.

Latest Book News

2010-04-19T05:32:00.000-07:00

Word reached the office last week that one of the five copies of Divide's Guide I donated for sale to benefit the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library was placed in the library's permanent collection in the Grosvenor Room. That my little book now resides forever in the company of the manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a breathtaking honor.

And speaking of Twain and libraries. . .

Wave Goodbye

2010-04-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

The usual apologies for my late absence here. I have been thinking, though. Sometime last fall I sort-of promised to handicap the 11/10 elections sometime in April, and I've been trying to come to grips with the currents, if, that is, such a thing is possible.

For god knows what reason, polling wizards, most significantly Nate Silver, last summer decided that 2010 was going to be a bad off-year for the Dems, and their predictions morphed into received wisdom, right and left, with breathtaking dispatch. For months now, hotshot bloggers like Matty have taken the approaching tidal wave as a done deal, the better of them chalking it up to a natural ebb and flow of our politics, the notion that the president's majority party always does badly in the first off-year referendum of his administration.

What I needed to know in thinking about all this is which numbers are connected to "bad", and which to "good". Those were a little harder to figure, until recently at 538 Silver when came up with a figure of 15 House losses at the low end, and upwards of 50 at the high for the Dems. So, okay.

My own, long-held belief--like, going back five years--is that 2010 would be the last for the GOP as a coherent national party, an utter trouncing that would break the back of their failed beast once and for all. After reviewing the landscape, I am not inclined to trim my sails (which might be my favorite mixed metaphor so far this year.)

The GOP strategy, as yesterday's line-in-the-sand stand against financial reform indicates, is apparently total resistance to anything Democratic, reliance on angry T-Party voters, and a confident assurance that "wave" history will send them to huge gains. While I do not track these things closely, this also seems to be the dominant narrative along cable alley, indeed a sure thing.

There are some problems with the above. First and foremost is that the GOP is still dominated, at nearly every post of legislative and administrative power, by exceptionally stupid men, as yesterday's line-in-the-sand stand against financial reform indicates. These guys have been wrong about everything for years, and have some impressive electoral and policy defeats to show for it.

This can't be emphasized enough. There has been for generations an institutional distrust of smart people, "pointy-heads" as they were once called, in the GOP which reached a terminal stage in the administration of that squalid little man, who was, as I am still fond of saying, the apotheosis of every country-club nitwit who ever got rich selling a business his father started. Stupidity at that level is a political statement, that one relies on the power of the system to keep one safe and protected from the consequences of dumb decisions.

Well, as most of us see, the system has changed, and I would point to the TP'ers as Exhibit A for that. Since when, exactly, has a major political party--not to mention one once based upon ideals of modesty, conformity, and devotion to authority--relied so heavily on the goofy apparatus of street theater? Even taking into account that these people are rather-more-exercised Republicans getting their freak on, and promoted as significant by the craven, rightest TV medium--those ding-dongs have yet to score ONE election victory in, let's see, six recent tries.

Now there is certain to be some shakeout in this election, retirements, poor campaigners, and jackass votes (Zack Space, I'm looking at YOU) to account for. There's a lot to be said too for sweeping away those representatives who go south when the chips are down. But whatever the under for the Republicans is, I'll take it. While I've not looked closely at the Senate (watch this space), I'm calling an overall loss of 10-15 for House Dems, which will include, besides some traditionally conservative seats reverting to form, a few districts formerly dependably-red going blue.

The GOP will realize at last it's true identity as an angry regional party, one of ever-shrinking demographics; the election results less a tidal wave than the wash left by a big ship going down.

A Reader Writes. . .

2010-04-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

Someone you might call a satisfied customer sent me this regarding Divide's Guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I mean I really, really enjoyed it. I haven’t had that much fun in a long time. [....] [I]t was very much like attending a great dinner party and listening to someone so well versed on a subject that he can hold an entire table’s attention. Great style…great humor…great insight. I am passing my copy on to other good friends here.

In other news, Divide's Guide is available in Chicago at Quimby's Bookstore and, beginning later this week, at Left Bank Books in St. Louis.

You can, of course, also order it here.

Lost Art

2010-04-07T05:25:00.000-07:00

I want to write more of these things, honest I do. But, you know, I get so tired of politics, especially the worn out American brand. Even our champion president, who I give more credit to than most poli-bloggers, is having a hell of a time dragging a fat and fearful nation in a better direction. No, the last thirty years have been too good for some, and too awful for others, and even those of us like yours truly, who made it through relatively unscathed, now need to come to grips with the damage, and we are old.

There's plenty left to come unglued. I do believe the only thing that can help us now is art, and art right now is not getting through--not enough anyway, to enough people. A great work of art, as Mr. Mailer was wont to say, makes you doubt the way you are living. Let me carry that forward a bit; such a challenge then gives meaning to the day. Our experience then becomes an adventure, maybe even a quest. This does not have to be an enormous, especially life-shattering shift, just a new way of seeing or feeling about something.

Art, and I use the term very broadly, then is the conduit of what's new. Bad art treads in very stale paths, trading for money in what was once new and is now mostly reassuring. Here let me say, reassurance is wonderful; everyone needs it, some of us need a lot of it. (If you need an example of a company that shuttles its products very expertly from art to reassurance, let me suggest Disney, which has been in the national reassurance business since the Great Depression.) Thing is, too much reassurance, the message that the world is fine exactly so, becomes a cultural monotone, dead to the sense of quest. Let me propose that this broadly social no-place is where we are stuck right now.

Bad art brings on boredom, which promotes numbness, which is then treated by any number of addictive measures. Our commercial media do nothing but reassure us, and are we a nation of addicts, right? At the risk of going too abstract here, allow me to say that the easiest response to this numbness is rage, violence. The human spirit needs to feel something, and the easiest thing to feel, our default setting, is fear and loathing of the other.

Which brings me back to our politics.

Both parties are heavily invested in the politics of reassurance, bad art if you will. BUT only one is actively hostile to the possibilities of good art, who altogether hates the idea of challenging, even in small ways, the daily assumptions of how we are supposed to live. It rages instead against the mainly imaginary threats against those assumptions. Imaginary in that though our way of life is under the stress of constant change, at a pace which appears to be speeding up, they have no bloody clue where those stresses really lie, or any idea how to begin to come to grips with them.

So you see, we need good art. But here's the problem. Traditionally, great art reaches us either from the top, by way of wealthy individuals who support it to make a lasting mark upon an otherwise indifferent world, or from underneath, from people who make it for themselves or their neighbors to add beauty and meaning to otherwise hard and dreary lives. For years now the rich have been paying dearly for as much reassurance as they can get, in the museums and from the GOP. And the poor folk (I use both words with all secondary and tertiary meanings in full) were bullied long ago to mainly disdain any true art of their own.

For about 100 years, a very creative commercial press brought pretty good art, stimulating, graphic, and creative, to a mass audience in this country. But that ended about 1980, when magazines gave up against TV. Even bad old TV had its own high art period lasting about 25 years, until about 1980, when executives realized it really didn't need to be any good, anywhere, at all. As for the movies in this country--don't get me fucking started.

Swell, Baby, Swell

2010-04-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

Though the president's unexpected announcement to open up eastern coastal waters to offshore drilling has riled the predictable, right and left, and left behind a wary commentariot, let me slip in a couple points.

First, near as I can tell, the act merely removes a federal ban, leaving the states to allow the advent of the rigs offshore if they so choose. This not only knocks a talking point from the grasp of the Washington drill-baby-drill set, it also leaves the issue to the legislatures of, let's see. . . . South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, three states full of ding-dong GOP lawmakers (all of whom are challenging the constitutionality of the ACA) who for decades have gotten a free ride slagging environmentalists while keeping their coastal waters perfect for tourism.

Well now all those jerks have to decide, right?

In an election year where a badly-riven, and poorly-led GOP is going to need its shit together to take advantage of a roiled political climate, that Obama guy just goes and tosses them one more very charged issue they'll need to take sides on.

Bastard!

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

2010-04-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

Something happy

Program Note

2010-03-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

The Big Fat Slob is back on the exclusive H&J blogroll! Go visit.

Midnight In The Garden of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2010-03-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

In considering the looming fate of the brain-dead GOP, it might be useful to consider the condition of other conservative projects apart from the daily scrum of party politics, like evangelical empires:

The towering glass church, founded by Robert H. Schuller in the 1950s and home to an international ministry and the popular "Hour of Power" televangelist broadcast, has long been a symbol of success. But the church has struggled financially in the last two years, laying off workers and seeing revenues drop 27%.
snip
Church spokesman John Charles could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon. But in January, he told The Times that the ministry was battered by the recession and suffering from declining television viewership and a drop in contributions from its aging congregation.
(R.J. Lopez, L.A. Times)

Or, in a story that has not quite hit the US, which Andrew Sullivan has done a peerless job highlighting these last few days:

What's fascinating in the steady onslaught of new incidences of previous cover-ups of child rape and molestation in the Catholic hierarchy is the notion that the hierarchs tended to see child rape as a sin rather than a crime.

Two datum points, to be sure, but big for what they have to say about US demographics, and the general nature of weird, blockhead, patriarchal hierarchies that have to collapse before they can change. Are Republicans paying attention? I don't think so.

Loss Leaders

2010-03-23T05:01:00.000-07:00

Though I've long predicted the utter collapse of the Republican Party, on what you might broadly call sociological grounds, for the life of me I could not imagine what something as profound as that might look like in real time. Now I know.

A toxic (and by toxic I mean AWESOME) mix of anger, stupidity, delusion, and denial; the system-wide inability to admit error, or that times have changed; the eagerness to follow bad advisers over and over and over and over again; the depredations of con men; the rhetorical switching of Up for Down; and the radical over-estimation of one's powers and abilities--combined with the profound under-estimation of the capabilities of the rival--contributing to an all-in plan of action, the success of which is never doubted, and possible failure never planned.

But how did this happen? By way of the massive noise machine, of course, which, while trying to influence the wider MSM narrative had the unintended effect of shielding its operators from any sense of what's going on in the real world, or the consequences of their many errors of judgment and fact, until it is way too late.

David Frum gets it, and the NY Times today, in its silly and cautious way, tries to break the news gently. But if you read the Times story, you will see that none of the major players will have any of it, because they know they are right.

Anyone anticipating destined and substantial GOP gains in the mid-terms needs to say what exactly that would look like (I want a hard number) and if anything less--given the current status of those gains as a mortal lock--would be a victory for the Dems.

A Little List

2010-03-22T11:33:00.000-07:00

This morning I estimated there were seven Democratic cement heads who voted Nay contra the wishes of leadership. Turns out there were eight, one of whom being the fuckwit who thinks he can be governor of Alabama. TPM has the list.

Party Time

2010-03-22T05:27:00.000-07:00

While I have been as exasperated as most of you over the brain-dead objections of Bart Stupak these last few weeks, I believe the utility of the final deal offered by leadership, reached with such drama yesterday, became clear when the representative rose in the chamber last night to make his stumbling rebuttal to the Republicans' attempt to turn back the reconciliation bill by invoking the anti-abortion measure which bears his name.

Clearly, Bart is not the brightest bulb on the marquee, but he managed to bring a sincerity to his brief remarks which the other side, for all their talk about ramming, socialism, and granny-killing, has remarkably lacked. Like it or not folks, the Democrats are the true big-tent party, and Bart--in over his head this past week and given a very decent means of saving face--did the right thing, unlike more than several of his colleagues.

I'd predicted something like 231 Yeas, mainly on assumptions of optics and basic party identity. I would not presume to know what Speaker Pelosi considered the optimum number, but 34 Nays is more than I'd accept, and it sets up an interesting dynamic for November. I'm thinking out loud here, but let's say 20 of those votes are stone Blue Dogs, and half the remainder were released by the majority leader for sincere re-election needs. That leaves about seven deadheads, seven active liabilities to the party who deserve primary challenges in districts which the Democrats can gamble with, and lose without undue cause for concern.

Because the real big thing which happened last week was how this vote came together as the defining act for a contemporary Democratic identity. Labor, Anti-abortionists, Progressives, Hispanics, and Women (and these constituencies certainly overlap) managed to hold together and accomplish something historic. The world changed last night, and while many in the MSM and GOP will pretend it most certainly has not, at least in regards to how they plan on conducting themselves for the foreseeable (and I plan on going over their fucked fortunes shortly), the Democrats, thanks to some brilliant leadership, are remade.

UPDATE: I swear to God, I hadn't read Josh Marshall's piece before writing the above.

Midnight In The Garden of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2010-03-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

One of the stranger outcomes of the last year, for me anyway, was how closely the MSM stuck to the GOP. I'd predicted a gradual winnowing away, as news orgs came to realize that the dying Republicans had little to offer in terms of access, accomplishment, or advertising. That the dying MSM clung so warmly to the GOP brand finally came to make a certain amount of sense in that, as I've written here, both groups were firmly vested in a status quo which for various and similar reasons, in several spheres, is coming quickly unglued. The MSM needed the GOP and quid pro quo. It also didn't hurt that both are traditionally connected by a conservative public relations umbilical which hones talking points, gins up opinion polls, feeds reporters and moves a LOT of corporate money around DC. Certainly the assumption going forward since BHO took office was that the GOP would get a big pass with the understanding that they'd succeed in cutting down the new guy, and everything would return to normal in '12.

But here we are instead. After months of willful shallowness and obfuscation, the press is now obligated to report what really is in the new health care reform bill. After weeks of conventional wisdom humming about Dems in disarray and a desperate and embattled president, the story is now one of the greatest legislative achievements since Reconstruction; and Republicans, so damn sure they were in the driver's seat have to take a good look at their confident assumptions about November and feel more than a bit ill. Things are not working out as planned, and, really--FUX News reports to the contrary--have not been for quite some time.

I'll have a few posts kicking around in the next couple days (at this hour I'm still waiting to see if my call for the final Yea total--around 230--will be correct; if so, I plan on being insufferable), but right now let me propose that one of the remarkable developments in the unwinding of this great story is the genuine influence bloggers like Ez Klein and Kevin Drum had; knowledgeable, fact-based, current commentary that provided a crucial backstop, and mop, for the drivel the Republicans were committed to spew, and the MSM felt duty-bound to spred. The policy Bloggers may not have won any particular day, but overall they kept a lot of people focused and aware, and a number of reporters honest in spite of themselves.

Speaking Of. . .

2010-03-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

On the morning of this great vote, on this great day for our Republic, I'd like to recall something I wrote, gee, about three-and-a-half years ago:

to underestimate Nancy Pelosi, to presume to grasp how she thinks or even assume how she'll react, are mistakes of the first water; mistakes you will never find me making.

And so onward.

Booked Solid

2010-03-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

After no small editorial effort by the nimble Cliffhanger Press, I am very pleased to announce the publication of my readers guide to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first blog-published here last year. The Press is dedicated to a sort of popular criticism not much practiced anymore, clarifying looks at American writers meant for a general audience, the sort of critical journalism once advanced by H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, now mainly gone from contemporary letters.

The hard-eyed among you might reasonably insist that any sentimental notion of contemporary American letters is a busted mill on a dusty plain, and you'd get no argument from me. However, there was very little to the idea when Twain first set pen to paper; and all his books were first sold door-to-door. So let us give people something they might enjoy, and take Mark as an example for what might follow, even in our digital time. Such things are born of impudence, style, and a certain amount of luck.

I am deeply grateful to Ms. Laura Sullivan of TypeStyle Graphics and Mr. Hugh Butler of Graphateria, both of Tallahassee, FL, for the marvelous job they did designing and printing Divide's Guide. Mr. J. Gioia was also a help, if only to keep my identity a secret.

The Butter End

2010-03-14T06:17:00.000-07:00

It seemed to me, on hearing the news a couple days ago that the House HCR vote will go ahead without catering to the anti-abortion caucus, that there really is no A-AC to speak of now; that leadership had whittled away at the Stupak dozen (or whatever) and now have the votes counted. Anything otherwise and it would not be brought to the floor. In fact, I suspect all the drama that awaits this week's vote will be nothing more than the sort of entertaining theater our elected official live to act in.

Way I see it, the question is how many defections for hard November reasons Speaker Pelosi will allow. Looking ahead, I suspect leadership will accept a close vote, but not that close. A mere 216 (or whatever) majority will play to the entirely made-up (albeit well market-tested and sold) narrative that the bill is deeply unpopular and only passed thanks to the worst sort of party head busting. No, I see passage with at least 15 votes to spare.

That number could even grow a bit depending how a No vote might be seen back home as a solid reason for a primary challenge. Yep, it's gut-check time, and I suspect more than a few of those spineless fawns are beginning to fear fellow Democrats more than Republicans. Which is the way it should be.

Which is to say November is shaping up nicely. Loyal readers will know I have not strayed from my long-held prediction of a disaster for the GOP at the polls this year, even as the prevailing narrative has been crowing for months about a definitive Repub comeback. Looks like the CW is beginning to reconsider the creeps chances; and I reserve the right to sketch out what this disaster might look like, and will do so, I hope, shortly. First let's see how close my vote count is.

UPDATE: Speaking of drama, this from Greg Sargent this AM:

But: The chief vote counter for House Dems flatly acknowledged on NBC this morning that the Dem leadership doesn’t have the votes to pass health care as of now. Asked whether Dems have the votes, Dem Rep James Clyburn said:

No, we don’t have them as of this morning. But we’ve been working this thing all weekend, we’ll be working it going into the week. I’m also very confident that we’ll get this done. I’ve been talking to members for a long time on this, and they have the will to do it.

Which, I believe, is to say they do have the votes, but are not sure, as of this morning, who gets to vote no if they really really have to.

Dollars And Nonsense

2010-03-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to write something about the gooey mess that is Eric Massa, once praised on these pages, but his story just gets weirder and weirder. So fuck it. Our times are not right and he will be a silly memory soon.

Rather I'd like to draw attention to something which has been nagging at me for weeks, and that maybe one of you can help me with; two figures I find irreconcilable.

First one is the supposed yearly profits of FUX News, generally stated, as in D. Carr's profile of R. Ailes to be in the nabe of $700 mil:

The division is on track to achieve $700 million in operating profit this year, according to analyst estimates that Mr. Ailes does not dispute.

Not income, mind you, profits.

Now consider their audience size, which is, by TV standards, laughably tiny, one to two mil. in prime time. (Here see, most recently, Mr. Drum and The Newsosaur.)

Which means that FOX News is supposed to make something over $2 per viewer per day. With their demographic? Allow me to opine: Ba-fucking-loney.

I am not saying there isn't $700 mil. sloshing around News Corp somewhere. They peddle sports on TV all over the world, while the movie division has done pretty well of late. And Rupe certainly isn't shy about moving money around the company to bolster the brand in his failing or low-return endeavors (see: the NY Post, and the WSJ, discussed by the Newsosaur above.)

This is just to say that the idea that FOX News (and I am calling them by their real name to attract search engines here) is a financial juggernaut, certainly something Mr. Ailes would like everyone to believe, strikes me as a colossal tower of horseshit. Who knows? Maybe there is more gold in them thar brain-dead hills than I could possibly imagine. What I am certain of is that no one in the MSM is going to be the first to bust the scam, indeed most will be pleased to play along for as long as possible.

About The Bag

2010-03-01T04:08:00.000-08:00

While I agree with everything Mr. Carlin has to say in this very worthwhile vignette, (found at Chris Smith's very worthwhile Buffalo Geek blog), give a watch and see if you can spot the flaw in his reasoning.

Well, aside from the fact that a huge broadcast media company makes Carlin's collected works readily available on dvd (and here let me just say that you are speaking to someone who bought Carlin's first record, Take-Offs and Put-Ons, when it first came out); in fact, if the rulers of this country really had congress bought and paid for long ago there would be no need to spend billions lobbying it every year.

Point being that though the rich rule this country, the status of the bag keeps changing and they have to run like mad to keep up with it (there's a mixed metaphor in there somewhere.) Digital communication has now broken the century-long grip of the news brokers. And as far as healthcare reform is concerned, the steady and combined efforts of corporate communicators, along with all the silly knashing of teeth from the GOP, and the over-hyped yelling of the pathetic TPers, were not enough to stop passage in both houses and will not be enough to stop a final adjustment via reconciliation.

Here is the big news: not that HCR is in any danger of failing (and let me say I've never shared my big blog brothers doubts as to final passage--looking at YOU, Matty), but that if the big right-wing noise machine was all that effective (pace, Mr. Benen), HCR would have died long ago.

Fact is, people matter; shit gets done. No amount of advertising can disguise a broken system, or stupid arguments make most people ignore it. And though, looking toward November, I doubt the character of some members of the Dem caucus in the wake of the Coakley debacle (I tend to assume, naively perhaps, that elected representatives are mainly made of sterner stuff--but more of this later), Americans at heart are a very practical people, and the practicality of the fix by now is clear to all, even those doing their damnedest to prevent it.

UPDATE: Lots o' good stuff regarding HCR passage from Greg Sargent this morning.

Slaughter On Pennsylvania Ave.

2010-02-25T16:29:00.000-08:00

Longtime readers are familiar with my high regard for western New York Representative Louise Slaughter. She is chair of the House Rules Committee and one of those VIPs without whom nothing advances in the Democratic caucus. Lately there's been some question regarding her enthusiasm for the Senate bill.

Consequently, it brings me great pleasure to pass along the clip above, a genuine highlight of today's healthcare conference. Sounds like she's on board.

Old Yellers

2010-02-23T05:48:00.000-08:00

Mr. Drum hits upon something I've been harping upon for simply yonks.

. . . this is a disaster not just for small-government conservatives but for the GOP as well. Their earlier embrace of social fundamentalism was largely responsible for driving away young voters in the first place, and now, left only with a core of middle-aged and elderly voters that they need to keep loyal, they're likely to pursue policies that push the young even further away. This might produce occasional victories, but no political party can survive this kind of vicious cycle in the long run. Having long since alienated blacks, Hispanics, and virtually the entire Northeast, Republicans can hardly afford to permanently lose young voters as well. The white South and the elderly just aren't enough to sustain a national party.

Kev has the good taste not to add that the elderly excel at dying in droves everyday; to be replaced, I submit, by the new-elderly who are not nearly so dedicated to the party as the late lamented.

As a consequence of this trend, it's pretty clear to me that the broad GOP brand has decided to become an entertainment choice, with its own network and TV stars, which seems to be working well-enough right now. (Though I tend to question the punch FUX Snews really packs with the body politic, no question rival broadcasters show it a lot of respect.) The problem with this, long-term, is that entertainment choices have a definite, usually pretty short, shelf life. The audience inevitably moves on. Sarah Palin is a lot more Jessica Simpson than Eva Peron, and poor Jess is now mainly famous for gaining weight, and poor choices in men.

So sad.

Mad Fad

2010-02-18T05:14:00.000-08:00

Before we move on to other issues, I wanted to spend just a bit more time nattering about the TP movement; mainly to observe its faddish nature, and the actuarial condition of its makeup.

Notice anything about that photo? All those white guys, as angry and electorally-engaged as they might be, are also pretty damn old. (And I am, btw, speaking as someone who qualified for the AARP a few years ago.) Another anecdotal measure of the disorganized opposition came via a Sullivan post several weeks ago in which a reader told of his Palin-fiendly family, sketching them mainly as rural, overweight smokers, fond of guns and, the younger ones, prone to meth addiction.

I want to make clear right now: I am not saying this to mock these people. In fact, I consider it a national tragedy that 70 years of Big Ag. farm bills have wiped out rural communities to a terminal degree. While the Sullivan reader wrote to warn us of the real anger among real people out there, what I came away with was a snapshot of a rural society in the last stages of decay.

Which is all prologue to my proposition that this rightist uprising is not a new wave, but a last gasp.

Something else we might see in the photo above is a fashion choice that would have gotten Abbie Hoffman beaten by cops in most jurisdictions 40-some years ago. I'm not sure when exactly it became okay for some people who say they love the flag to turn it into loud shirts, ties, and head rags. Which causes me to observe, again, that what we are seeing is the far right's Summer of Love.

Just like the last time, this one has been picked-up and oversold by a media delighted in its ability to promote, then suck dry. I also think that the central observation of the "uprising" phenomenon has gone unsaid: that underlying it is the utter failure of what might be called the Reagan Morning in America Project. The decent and hard-working guys shown here were led to believe they were doing something useful 30 years ago putting RR in the White House and launching the conservative wave. To put it bluntly, they are still fucked, now more than ever. And they are angry about that.

Now we can shake our progressive noggins about how uninformed, how easily manipulated these guys have been. I suspect though that most of them know a royal screwing when they receive it. Thing is, it is easy to show you are angry, and really hard admitting you are wrong. And as much as the GOP would love to co-opt the TPers, I suspect a sizable percentage, now in their sunset years, are not buying it anymore.

**Photo: Matt Nager**

Winter Of Our Disconnect cont.

2010-02-16T04:18:00.000-08:00

Some time ago here, while remarking upon the ongoing implosion of the GOP, I proposed that the same digital-media pressures which were wrecking the top-down model of the Republicans would also affect Democrats, though not as adversely. Their traditionally fractious nature would have a buffering effect as the party shook off some dead wood (which would find common cause with more moderate Republicans fleeing their former ranks) and mainly drifted leftwards towards younger, more progressive voters.

(If you don't believe me, start here.)

There's very little of the above I'd care to change right now. Rather let me observe how all the DC media buzz about a "a newly 'strengthened' conservative movement" is mostly self-serving. It juices the narrative for an election year and mainly supports the corporate business model of what remains of the mainstream fourth estate.

Let me offer another point-of-view.

The conservative project is now less a movement than a collection of rightist, often mutually antagonistic, groups; the best of whom are sincerely dedicated to granular, people-driven, small-govt aims, the worst being con men, paranoids, and racists. I'm guessing the latter outnumber the former by three, maybe four to one. While this makes great copy, I see very little of it translating into long-term political gain.

Lost in all the talk about S. Brown and S. Palin (who continues her ditsy transit, and slide in the polls) is the big news that a predominate majority of citizens have no problem at all with gay people serving their country as members of the armed forces. Add to that, a majority, in some polls, favor legalizing marijuana--along with a rising tide of some state-sanctioned use--and you can only see a certain type of social tide running very much against the traditional cops of what they liked to call the American way.

Which is to say that the social demographic is ever-slanting away from conservative ideology. The fact is, in spite of the Republican Party, we are becoming a kinder and more socially-tolerant nation, and have been for over 50 years. Once a majority come to appreciate an equitable, and progressive tax structure, all the GOP will have left is Jesus fighting Darwin in Alabama.

I'd say that the unity shown by the Republican minority (whose dim leaders, btw, have grown no smarter in the last two months) is less a matter of political strength than the realization of our vastly diminished resources. It is easy to make deals, to get along, when times are good. There is plenty of pie to go around. Let me suggest that the bipartisan age certain elderly commentators yearn for was also one of historic, world-leading national power and affluence. Those days are gone now, and the GOP is left fighting for the scraps of dinner they did their level best to push off the table in the first place.

Times continue to be hard, and I continue to believe that if Democratic candidates, with the help of our president, make an active case that they are working hard to fix what's broken, in the face of uninformed and reflexively mean political opposition they will, as a body, prevail. This depends a lot on the kinds of campaigners they have this year, of course; and if there's been one discouraging note in the last few months it is how callow and lazy too many Democrats are.

Out Of The Past

2010-02-14T06:03:00.000-08:00

If my older readers have not re-read Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72 in a while, let me recommend doing so. A number of things will jump out at you immediately. First is how knowledgeable and skilled a political observer Hunter was. His writing is infused with a seriousness that after a while he was loath to admit to publicly. (In fact, the central tragedy of HST's life was the long-term care, passion, and supreme technical skill he invested in a calling he came to portray as an elaborate con.) But be that as it may. . .

The second thing you old readers might notice is how names which once loomed so large in politics and journalism have faded utterly away: your John Lindsey's and Shirley Chisolm's, Frank McGee's and John Chancellor's. Even George Wallace and Hubert Humphrey might require crib sheets for anyone under 40. (That sound you hear is me whistling past the graveyard.)

The third thing Thompson's time capsule reveals is just how much of a freak show the Democratic Party was in 1972, when politicians as diverse as Humphrey, Wallace, Chisolm, McGovern, and the strange Ed Muskie (the early, insider favorite that year) could make legitimate bids for the top spots on the ticket. This is the party that Nixon's southern strategy busted apart, to which I say: Yippee.

Finally, because this is not just an exercise in nostalgia, consider what Hunter had a ringside seat for that year: A centrist, anti-war, prairie state Democrat with a championship grassroots organization (that's George McGovern, for you tyros), stomped the party favorite in the primaries, earning the enmity of Dem bigwigs (H. Humphrey, R.J. Daley, G. Meany) who did everything they could to kneecap the challenger and deliver the (landslide) election to R. Nixon.

(And here, while we're at it, let's note the utter complicity of Meany's AFL-CIO in promoting the Republicans and their anti-labor agenda to a country just beginning its industrial decline. How'd that work out for you guys?)

Maybe you see where this is heading. Thirty-six years later, the (nominally) anti-war, centrist outsider won the nomination AND the election, which however has not prevented the rather more conservative elements of his own party from doing everything they can to undermine his agenda. Because even though our president is a process guy through and through, he still represents a break with the past which those Dems quite comfortable with what the old system delivered loathe and fear.

In this light we can better see the nature of the problem facing our chief executive (who may or may not be up to the task of addressing it.) He said he wanted to change the way Washington did business. It is not outlandish to think that an entrenched portion of his own party took him at his word, and now hate him for it.

Selah.

This Note's For You

2010-02-13T04:35:00.000-08:00

I've been a bad blogger, and for that I apologize. It's just that whenever I get in the mood to write one of these things, something happens that makes me either question my grip on some issue, or realize I'd just be repeating myself.

Now I understand that both notions--along with a lack of eye candy and absence of any geeky obsessions with pets or science fiction--practically disqualify me from being your Main Street, big time blogger. Ah, well. Be that as it may. It's still free, and some days I have nothing better to do.

Meet And Bleet

2010-01-30T06:26:00.000-08:00

I will try to be charitable here regarding the Republican House caucus' invitation to the president to speak at their meeting and then take questions. The televised exchange did the country a great service and two or three of the questioners sounded smart, engaged in policy, and frustrated with this past year's outcomes.

The balance of the audience, however, ranged from the clueless to the corrosively stupid, and illustrated--when one-on-one with a very bright, informed, and at ease chief executive--just how conniving and brainless the GOP has become. (If you have not seen it, you really must.)

And, given the Republicans' MO since Bill Clinton had the gall to replace Poppy B. in the WH, one can only assume that someone conceived yesterday's exercise as a means whereby they could trap the president--because, you know, he's not that smart, and is lost without the tele-promptor--in their midst and then wail on him for an hour in front of TV cameras. Great idea, right? Got him right where we want him. What could go wrong?

You gotta think that someone just lost his job for that. Not, I submit, because the Prez looked so good and the Rep. Reps so bad--there was in fact more light from their side of the isle, not a lot, but some, than I would have given them credit for--only that it highlighted so directly Obama's point about contemporary politics exactly. It gave him a stature of being both engaged and above-the-fray, which their PR klaxons have been blasting full vol. for a year to deny him.

What should be clear from Obama's very plain-spoken and relaxed State of the Union, is that he is much more interested in being president of the whole nation than leader of the Democratic Party. This has its good points and bad, both pretty obvious.

On the good side, broadly, is the country really needs a chief executive working and thinking that way. The bad side, broadly, is that sometimes--and especially in the past year--to do the most good for the most people, the president HAS to be the head of his party and smack some genuine fear into the souls of his enemies, both Republican and Democrat, to give them something to keep company with their hatred of him.

Does Obama get this now? Maybe; I'm not sure. Thing is, you are NEVER sure with that guy; that's mainly how he rolls. I like him a lot, though, and you have to admit he is fascinating to watch.

The Winter Of Our Disconnect cont.

2010-01-27T04:10:00.000-08:00

My admiration for the regular, paid band of bloggers leapt immeasurably these past ten days as they found words to describe the situation once the Democratic caucus became unglued in the aftermath of the worst performance by a so-called public servant--for her party and her nation--that I can recall in 45 years of following politics.

That Martha Coakley had the gall to ridicule the need to shake hands with voters in cold and dreary neighborhoods, in the city where modern American politics was more or less invented (and I am thinking back to Elbridge Gerry); a city once ruled by such champion campaigners and fixers as John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald (the grandfather of the man she had the temerity to want to replace in the U.S. Senate) and James Curley, only indicates the atrophy Massachusetts Democrats suffered under decades of reliable Kennedy returns.

The woman is a jackass and fool, and succeeded in launching her poor husband's last name into the dictionary, as a new adverb for fucking-up a sure thing. That said, the disgraceful reaction of elected Democratic officials once the results had been tabulated sounded a lot like fourth graders discovering a king snake on the school bus.

If nothing else, you figure, these people are professionals and should be able to spot a horseshit campaign and draw no further conclusions. But no, the charge to the rear was lead by a tired and emotional Barney Fraud, uhm, Frank, a top-tier drama queen, who immediately declared health care reform dead. Next day, after ~~sobering up~~ some sleep, he walked back his limbic reaction, but the damage was done.

Now, in truth, the collective lack of spine and overdose of dismay by the congressional Dems was so immediate and systemic that it could only have been simmering for weeks, if not months. And cooler heads have since prevailed. The freak-out was not pretty, and it certainly gave a ton of free chips to the GOP, but it may have saved us further weeks of hurt bickering, and called attention to an effectively rudderless majority.

This last I find inexcusable. Whether he likes it or not, the president is the party's leader, Harry Reid and Nan Pelosi his captains. I suspect he has limited influence over entrenched senators, and I don't expect him to win every battle with those baboons, BUT, neither do I see him trying awfully hard to shape events for his own and the nation's benefit.

In fact the most dismaying development dropped 36 hours ago, when the administration signaled a mainly pointless freeze on discretionary social spending, without a whisper of going after the hypertrophic military budget.

Christ. On. A. Fucking. Crutch.

I've been mainly sympathetic to the overall challenges of the game to this point. The big majorities notwithstanding, I know this shit is not easy. I can dig that a lot of small steps in education, law enforcement, and Pentagon reform are underway. And I can let a lot of the big stuff slide, like a war crimes truth commission, reforming the Department of Agriculture, a restructure of the finance industry, until health care is squared away. What I cannot abide is that at the first sign of trouble, the Obama administration spits out a stale GOP nostrum that does nothing so well as sanction an utterly bankrupt and discredited way of managing the country's affairs.

You probably hear this a lot, but if they've finally succeeded in antagonizing pragmatic and sympathetic me, the administration is risking a ton of friends when they need them the most.

Yo-yo MA

2010-01-16T08:29:00.000-08:00

A few days ago my estimable colleague Prairie Weather and I had a brief discussion about the campaign in Massachusetts, and the nature of candidates today, which you can read here. I used to know a lot more about Massachusetts politics than I do now, so I can't judge the outcome of the special election for certain. I don't even know if the remainder of Ted's term is three years or five.

I will point out that Coakly won a primary, first in a field of four. Consequently I have a hard time seeing how her particular weakness as a candidate is at all the fault of "Democrats". As I said to PW, attorney generals are mainly not the sort of glad-handing, loud-talking pols who just love engaging people on the hustings. Oh well.

I will also observe that our current election industry seems geared for these high-drama ratings extravaganzas. Everyone from the pollsters to reporters to consultants have a deeply vested interest in making these things look close, even when they ain't. It aptly fits the national mood of belligerence and misunderstanding too.

Still, I'll venture to say it'll be close, but not that close. The president is popular in the state; he will certainly help turnout and maybe even say something that goes to the heart of our contemporary disorder that resonates from the North End to Stockbridge, and beyond. I don't sense a betrayal of Ted's legacy on the way.

That said, if Brown truly was smart, and ambitious, and his party flexible and secure, instead of a zoo of vicious numbskulls, he'd have announced last week that, if elected, he'd vote with the Democrats against any further cloture on health reform--modeled so closely on what has been achieved in the Bay State. He'd win going away, and would so launch a very interesting political career. So tell me, which party is stupider?

Notice

2010-01-14T16:49:00.000-08:00

Lemmie tell you, don't fuck with this guy.

So, I know everybody in the media is all in a tizzy -- "Oh, what's this going to mean politically?" Well, let me tell you something. If Republicans want to campaign against what we've done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have. (Applause.) If their best idea is to return to the bad policies and the bad ideas of yesterday, they are going to lose that argument. What are they going to say? "Well, you know, the old system really worked well; let's go back to the way it was"? That's not going to appeal to seniors who are now seeing the possibility of that doughnut hole finally closing and so they can finally get discounts on their prescriptions. (Applause.) That's not going to appeal to the small businesses who find out all the tax credits that they're going to get for doing right by their employees -- something that they have been wanting to do, but may not have been able to afford. It's not going to be very appealing to Americans who for the first time are going to find out that they can provide coverage to their children, their dependents, all the way up to the age of 26 or 27.

And that's why I'll be out there waging a great campaign from one end of the country to the other, telling Americans with insurance or without what they stand to gain -- (applause); about the arsenal of consumer protections; about the long-awaited stability that they're going to begin to experience. And I'm going to tell them that I am proud we are putting the future of America before the politics of the moment -- the next generation before the next election. And that, after all, is what we were sent up here to do: standing up for the American people against the special interests; solve problems that we've been talking about for decades; make their lives a little bit better; make tough choices sometimes when they're unpopular. And that's something that every one of you who support this bill can be proud to campaign on in November.

Tea Beggers

2010-01-12T04:10:00.000-08:00

For weeks now I've been meaning to write something about the fractious tea party cadres, which are supposed to be the future of something or other, mainly to say that, as fundamentally constituted, all they are capable of doing is to fracture into smaller and smaller knots of soreheads (or maybe it's sores of knotheads). But I tarried too long, and instead of impressing you now with my perspicacity, I can only direct you to this link at TPM regarding a Maddow segment from last night.

The essential problem of the TP movement is how, at its most sincere, it is a collection of, oh, let's call them rugged individualists over-impressed with their reasoning skills. Earnest, bright without being especially smart, willing to work out whatever disappointment they feel about their lives by standing up for SOMEthing, as such they immediately fall into two temperamental camps: the cynical and the naive.

While I'd say both types are sincere in their anger, the cynical actors are, of course, looking to ride this into power--having perhaps no patience earlier for the moneyed mummery of the old GOP--and are willing to trade to get there. The naive are the the child crusaders, lit inside by ideals they can barely express beyond a yearning for the sort of freedom that is just not available to members of modern affluent societies, no matter what their status is, anymore.

Now apart from the temperamental differences, there are those of philosophy. Broadly this breaks down to libertarian TBers vs. control TBers, and racist TBers vs. those for whom race is not an issue. I will leave it to pollsters to determine the strength of each camp of the above, but these are sizable sub-categories.

Now divide them into regional groups, the shoal upon which the Detroit protest discussed in the link above foundered. NOW add on the circling wolves of the Grand Old Pooty, those looking to take pure financial advantage of the assembled believers, and the deforming attention of the national press, mix with people for whom compromise with others is anathema to start with, then stir.

All of the above should make you appreciate what a fine and sturdy thing a truly national political party is, and what a great job Democrats have done over the last half century to define and promote their dynamic, if sometimes aggravating, coalition. It should also help you see how totally fucked the Republicans are if they think they can use people who mainly can't agree with each other in order to advance an agenda no one can define.

UPDATE: Steve Benen dives in after me.

Changing Crimes

2010-01-09T06:34:00.000-08:00

One of the most popular media fallacies of our modern times, now that history has been effectively abolished, is the notion that the present moment extends forever in every direction; that things have always been like this and always will be like this. Furthermore, since history troubles no one anymore, the present moment is exactly what anyone defines it to be.

Those most invested in this inane, if understandable, perspective are those with the most to lose when things change. Now some media players, notably the record and movie companies, have more or less succumbed to change, even as whole branches of their biz model whithered away. They were pretty porous to begin with, broad-based and staffed with relatively young people who, eventually, got it.

The GOP/corporate communications nexus is none of the above, and have spent the past year wishing frantically that times are not changing. This is a lot easier to do when you have money to burn, indeed nothing validates a world view longer than money. Sooner or later though, reality intrudes.

It has long been my contention that the news organizations will stick with the GOP only so long as there was some hint that their old buddies would waltz back into power. Once the stink of losing settled over them, however, you could kiss sympathetic coverage goodbye. I figured it would take about a year, and am happy to report it seems to be un-peeling right on cue.

Take this story from just yesterday: Rudy on a morning show telling us how the squalid little man kept us safe. Because history does not exist on TV anymore, his tame interlocutor said nothing to challenge that rather bizarre proposition. But, mirable dictu, that then turned into a story.

The best part of the AP piece adds that this has been a popular untruth with the GOP faithful of late:

That statement set off waves of protest in the blogosphere. And it echoed a recent claim by former Bush press secretary Dana Perino. GOP strategist Mary Matalin also recently said the Bush administration "inherited the most tragic attack on our soil in our nation's history," implying that the 9/11 attacks resulted from mistakes by the Clinton administration.

Only the day before the nauseating Chris Matthews decided to go after a GOP hatchet man, who ended up on camera with nothing to say.

That the shameless Matthews, the craven Blitzer and the utterly corrupt AP are starting to call the previous narrative into question, says a lot. It says they can't make money by sticking with teh stupid anymore. It also says the intertubes are driving from here on out.

Changes

2010-01-08T05:18:00.000-08:00

Gave the Ol' blogroll a bit of a tweak for the new year. Out goes the Big Fat Slob, who has not been exactly active these last many months (if this changes Slob, lemmie know), and the ever-illuminating raging universe. In comes the famous Driftglass, whose rage can warm the coldest night, and Mr. Keith "Keitho" Saunders, a jazz piano player who can really turn a phrase (we would expect nothing less from a New Yorker), like:

There is a special place in hell reserved for those with the lack of imagination to request New York, New York. If there is a more clumsy and obvious song dedicated to a municipality I have yet to find it. That's right, Randy Newman fans, even "I Love LA."

His deconstruction continues here.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

2010-01-08T04:23:00.000-08:00

the king, playing Scotty's guitar.

Copyright Infringement Theater

2010-01-01T04:45:00.000-08:00

wishes a happy 110th birthday to El Rey de Rumba, somewhere in that big cabana in the sky.

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2009-12-31T06:49:00.000-08:00

You longtime readers will remember I've been predicting the disappearance, for lack of funds, of right-wing media vents for a couple years now. Noted here with something like glee is the recent and ongoing implosion of the Washington Times and its affiliates.

The reasoning behind my call is simple enough. A LOT of these organs are utter vanity projects of hateful rich jerks, who even so need answer the same calls to accounts as the rest of us. So long as oceans of fake money were pouring over our heads, life was going to be fine in Wingnuttia. But very few of these jackasses actually made money advocating war and intolerance and the combination of our successful new prez and the cratering of the old regime's fake economy has bumped, and will bump, a lot of those douchebags to the curb.

Let's see, a family rich beyond measure falls into filial bickering as their patriarch ages, directly resulting in the collapse of their vanity right wing media empire. While this certainly describes the unhappy Moons, I submit it is also the tale of the disgusting Murdochs, the latest from their palace being any number of ideas on how to squeeze more money from their cable and newspaper projects.

Now, I've been guilty of being naive before, but don't you think that charging customers more (as costs settle from the boardrooms onto the suckers) for services once considered nominal if not free--in the aftermath of the collapse of our consumer economy--is, well, stupid?

I know, I know, it's TV, and sports, the IV line to our distracted body politic. Clearly Rupe is confident that people will pony up the dosh. And a lot of them, especially the older ones, will. But I am here to say that digital killed the video star, and a lot of people, mostly under the age of thirty, will have no trouble bidding cable TV, at least as currently constituted, goodbye if need be. This is the same demographic which has also utterly rejected the dying GOP, which is not a coincidence.

The Head Counts

2009-12-21T05:38:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that if the Republicans were really so confident that the healthcare bill was such a loser for the Dems they would happily stand aside and let the thing pass like an express train. But no, dragging out the process, hoping that someone on the majority side will maybe become incapacitated, or something, (Gee, I wonder who they have in mind?) before the final vote Xmas eve.

Which is not to say I am breathing easy just yet, even after this morning's early vote. But mainly the other side has been reduced to mean-spirited prayer, the likely outcome of which will be to prove that either Jesus does not give a fuck about their hateful policy concerns, or that HE wants the US to ease into a national full-coverage healthcare plan.

But I mainly wanted to direct readers' attention this morning to a profound heathcare issue now undergoing a rapid and positive re-evaluation which has mainly, near as I can tell, been overlooked by the Washington punditcracy. I am referring to the NFL at last finding religion regarding the devastating long-term effects of brain injury among their players.

For decades the NFL considered the health of their players about as casually as the American Tobacco Company took the well-being of their customers. In fact, if one were inclined to monolithic political thinking, both institutions were fully invested in a sort of post-war, he-man American dream long on swagger and recklessness and short on long-term consequences. The NFL, being a government-protected co-op rather than a publicly-held corporation, was able to slant studies and deny reality far longer than the tobacco criminals. But in the last eight weeks, in the face of some very damning research and a contentious congressional hearing, the NFL's institutional opposition came apart like a rotten box.

Long time readers here know my fondness for symbolic thinking, and I don't want to go overboard here. But the fact that the NFL, one of the most proudly conservative elements in our mainly moronic popular culture, has come to regard the long-term well-being of the men who work for it in a honest and compassionate way, is an astonishing change in the social landscape, one as profound and far-reaching as passage of decent healthcare reform.

Shooting Their Wahhhh

2009-12-18T03:44:00.000-08:00

As the votes on healthcare reform dwindle down to a precious few, nerves all around are frayed to reveal true colors at last. I believe it was Isiah Berlin who called children moral imbeciles, and so a lot of the current debate is ipso facto childish. Clearly, Ben Nelson wants something for Christmas, and I don't think it is really stronger abortion wording (if I were he it would be a more realistic toupee), and he will get it. Joe L has probably had his fun, but you never know with imbeciles. I keep thinking that the honorable ladies from Maine will be eleventh-hour cloture votes if needed, especially if the last sticking point revolves around women's health, but, hey, I've been wrong before.

Most astonishing to me is the childish display from the leftward over the last 48, not so much the tone as the message. As someone whose memory stretches back to the Kennedy administration, (You want disappointment? I give you Hubert Humphrey.) let me advise my comrades to shut up, help the thing pass, then go whip every blue dog they can find next year. That's how things work in this country; though, granted, things generally don't work all that well.

Nate Silver did a tremendous service the other night, asking 20 good questions to aggrieved liberals, which Markos Moulitsas and some guy from FDL were good enough to answer. Silver posted the results, and his brief replies. It's long, but very much worth a read. The main differences seem to boil down to the question as to whether the mandate and insurance exchanges will deliver the savings the experts say they will. MM has his severe doubts. Fine. I say there's a great way to find out.

The biggest danger the kos crowd runs right now is to demonstrate just how very little influence it really has over substantial policy. Put another way: Never start a fight you can't win. It would be ironic, and sad, if one outcome of reform's passage would be to show that the new left coalition is as immature and fruitless as the old GOP rump. This is about the future, folks. Take what you can and run with it. Winning in politics is mostly about being around next year.

Midnight In The Garden Of Goobers And Weasels cont.

2009-12-12T05:10:00.000-08:00

It is fashionable to decry the Democrats' fortunes as we stumble into the coming election year. Lots of frustrated liberals, and amped up 'baggers clog the intertubes as surely as the avatars of the dumb right (or is it the right to be dumb?) stop-up congress.

Though I am as aggravated as any normal person over the noise, it is easier to ignore than the garbage truck in the alley, just don't watch TV.

I am here to remind you that the Republican Party and its officials have been colossally wrong about everything ever since that day nearly nine years ago when Dick Chain-y (Just came up with that one--waddaya think?) appointed himself that squalid little man's running mate. To think they have finally figured out the pulse of the electorate, absent any evidence to the contrary, and that their tactics of No will reap big rewards next November, is the stuff of moonbeams.

The media will try its best to make it feel like a GOP surge. Indeed the media is the only stable constituency the old boobs have left anymore. But the media ain't what it used to be either (noted here is the demise of E&P, an utterly unthinkable development to those of a certain age and profession.) Whatever momentum the poor nuts have mainly boils down to the commentariot repeating the old saw that the party out of power always makes gains in this particular election cycle.

To this I'll say banana oil. The GOP is not a party, at least in the sense of a functioning legislative and uniformly organized national force, anymore. This election promises to the their last shattering disaster.

Not being one of your fancy policy bloggers, I can't explain in great detail why or how that will unfold. I'm a big picture guy, and the big picture is that, left or right, good or bad, right or wrong, Americans are a fundamentally practical people, and pragmatism (as noted earlier this year by our chief executive) is the national philosophy. As a people, over the arc of years, we figure out what works and head in that direction.

Let me suggest that on election day it will be blisteringly obvious to a healthy majority of voters from sea to shining sea just which slate of candidates is prepared to solve the nation's many problems. If you feel like worrying about voter turnout and youth apathy, be my guest. And if you are a Democrat running for office, you still have much work to do. What I'm saying is, the end is a lot closer than a lot of people think. One more good push and the rotten GOP culture which has done so much fucking damage these last 30-odd years will be gone for good.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

2009-12-08T04:30:00.000-08:00

Wringing In The New

2009-12-06T06:28:00.001-08:00

Been busy elsewhere, sorry. Not like there's been a lot to comment on lately anyway. What there has been is a lot of head shaking and hand wringing over the Democrats' prospects next election, mostly based on the assumption that the Republicans always bounce back. I say gains in both houses and will get back to you about it in April sometime.

Honestly, it's been saddening to see how otherwise responsible news and comment sites (TPM, I'm looking at you) run day-four takes on dumb stories or are so prone to worry about recent polls of so-called voter sentiment. Granted, there are mainly two reasons for this: a molasses-like outpouring of real news regarding the most pressing items on the agenda, numero uno being healthcare reform, and a constant need to, like TV, keep eyeballs occupied, or click numbers up.

Happily, there are no such needs here. As for healthcare in the senate, I think it is awfully instructive to look at those statistical maps which chart poverty rates, food stamp use, measures of the uninsured, illness and mortality rates, and find red states leading the charge for nearly all (which will be interesting come election time.) One in particular which stands out is the great state of Maine. Now, I need not tell you I'm sure, Maine is special for a few reasons: it is not in the Rabble, excuse me, Bible Belt and it has TWO women senators at equal odds with their GOP colleagues for being--in a party increasingly keen on ideological purging--slightly to the left of, oh, Joe Lieberman, and, well, women.

I do believe the GOP fatheads went screaming off on the senate healthcare issue without exactly considering the concerns, moral and electoral, of their Down East Two. I suspected a few weeks ago that someone like Snowe was Reid's answer to Lieberman. (I also thought the truly friendless JL would come around. I don't anymore.) Here let me say Collins is the trump for Nelson, and is suit for Landreau, McCaskill, and Lincoln. And I will further observe that it is a remarkable achievement for women in the senate today, that they are allowed to be as limited intellectually and as cravenly mediocre as their male colleagues.

Debt, Doubt, Dubai!

2009-11-27T04:58:00.000-08:00

It is hard enough finding a path of reason through the thickets of the American Now, or, put another way, a peak from which to survey the surrounding shifting landscape of events without having to account for foreigners. But our world is global, ha-ha, and a lot of stuff will blow in from nowhere to mess up the view.

Take Dubai, for example. Up until 24 hours ago all I knew about the small oil sheikdom was that it was building a sort of shiny concentration camp of wealth; a new international business headquarters--a desert Liechtenstein, a mid-East Miami Beach; a creepy city of the future, built by underpaid Asian laborers, designed to be a legit work destination for newly-formed Harvard MBAs and a shopping refuge for the more accomplished international money set. A year ago there was speculation Dick Cheney would buy a "vacation" home there.

Turns out it just went tits up, for all the usual reasons.

Usually surprise vies with speed in these collapses, One does not see the unexpected coming from a mile away, slowly anyway. But Dubai World's (if ever there was a hint of future trouble, maybe it's associating your civic name with the Disney Flagship) sudden "suspension" of debt payments announced on the eve of the U.S. and Muslim holidays has astonished the watchers, the most interested (or frightened) of whom are the Euro Banks carrying its $59 billion (UPDATE: make that maybe over $90 billion) debt.

Yesterday there was some question if this was a big deal or not. Structurally, I gather, that's hard to determine at this hour. Culturally, however? You bet your ass, as apparently many in the smooth money crowd have done already.

This Is Just To Say . . .

2009-11-22T09:25:00.000-08:00

I am tempted to go on at length regarding our dense contemporary politics, but will hold off, for now. I would like to suggest however, before several ideas completely congeal into received wisdom, that the pending senate debate over healthcare will provide handy cudgels to beat the Republicans' heads in in time for the next election. While a few individual seats may hang in the balance, to suggest, or worry, at this point that the Dems face wholesale losses for supporting universal healthcare borders on the delusional.

I know, I know, many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip, but honestly, I expect putting the fatheads on the floor of the senate arguing against a pretty damn smart bill will make for some very edifying sound bites, not to mention negative campaign ads. Even if that does not quite come to pass, confidently expecting the opposite, that the Dems are running their car off a cliff with the bill, is all only make believe. It makes more sense to believe that the next election will be, effectively, the last for the GOP as a national party

I also don't think the unemployment level will have much bearing on the coming election, provided the administration and congress are seen as trying hard to make things better. And, pace Messrs. Rich and Kunstler, there's no danger of the well-armed right rising up in breathless number to take back what they think they've lost. We are dealing, in the main, with thorough spectators; frustrated and hurt, no question, but fundamentally lazy viewers. Statistically, they are far more likely to accidently shoot themselves, family, and friends, in pathetic numbers, (see Cheney, Dick) than leveling any righteous (f)ire at gub'mint tyranny.

GOPathetic

2009-11-09T10:08:00.000-08:00

A rare two'fer today, seeing as how the great healthcare victory in the House last Saturday night is worth some comment. And it is not how Speaker Pelosi won the vote, which I never felt was much in doubt, which is so remarkable; rather how the Republicans lost.

Namely, if Eric Cantor--who, honestly, has never struck me as being all that bright--knowing that this would be a hard vote for Joe Cao, had stood up the day before and said something like, "Though, of course members are encouraged to vote their consciences here, I believe we will hold together unanimously against the Democrats' bill", then Cantor not only provides cover for a guy trying to keep a red seat in a blue district, he also doesn't look like a full-grown jackass when one of his guaranteed votes migrates to the other side.

And if Cantor didn't know this would be a hard vote for Cao, then he has NO business being minority whip.

I was going to say that the predictable racist right reaction against Cao was the last thing the GOP needs, but upon reflection that would be the reaction against the House GOP basically shouting down the Democratic Women's Caucus during Saturday's debate. I guarantee you, EVERY woman on the Hill noticed that needless bit of swinishness on the part of all those white guys, and something tells me that maybe, just maybe, Harry Reid won't have that much trouble finding one or two female senators willing to vote against a filibuster even if they will not support a final bill. There may also be one or two old friends of Ted Kennedy on the other side of the aisle who might, in a pinch, be the needed 60th cloture vote.

Just sayin'.

I do believe Joe Lieberman is playing his last cards here, and in fact will fall in line when it is pointed out to him, privately, that the votes needed will be at hand, and his committee chairmanship lost, if he carries out his threat.

Post Toasted

2009-11-09T04:39:00.000-08:00

Frequent readers here know my fondness for regularly passing along bad news about Murdoch products, especially the NY Pest, so today is more catnip:

Nearly every paper in America has lost circulation, but The Post more than most — down almost 30 percent in 2.5 years, to 508,000 in the most recent reporting period, against 544,000 for The Daily News. The slide accelerated after The Post’s price returned to 50 cents last year. And this year, The Daily News has surged far ahead in online readership.

Mr. Allan, [the Post's editor] who called it “a joyous occasion” when The Post took the lead, now takes a more subdued view of the competition, saying in an e-mail exchange that “whether we are a little in front or a little behind has no impact on our forward business plan.”

Business plan. A paper which has historically lost a million dollars a week, for over 15 years, has a business plan. Honestly, who needs a humor column? Three years ago (where DOES the time go?) I noted a rather suspicious inflation in the Post's circulation figure. Maybe because the competition smelled a rat too, it has been falling ever since.

The Times story, as most Times stories, is a funny one. Over halfway through, it does let drop just how much money the Post loses (now in the nabe of $70 mil. per annum), though not for how long it has been like this. Because it is a business story, it natters on about cover price, discretionary sales, and how well the tabloid competition News has done, with no word on how maybe, just maybe, New Yorkers are mighty tired of the pro-biz, right wing hogwash Rupe has spewed in a steady jet in his paper as long as he's had it. Maybe Mike Bloomberg's recent squeaker gives a hint here.

My impression is that few in the news biz have wanted to cover Murdoch organs too closely, or criticize them too harshly, over the years. There is fear of retaliation along with a certain collegial bias. As long as he seems strong, then newspapers in general are stronger, and cable "news" is a vital agent in the national debate. Take away his imaginary audience however, and he's just one more rich jerk, one of several in the news racket, boring the nation while losing money hand over fist.

Depend on it, outside of its pathetic share price, we will not hear about the impending collapse of the Murdoch empire until after it has happened and no one can pretend anymore.

The Great Wit North

2009-11-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

Congratulations are in order for Bill Owens who prevailed, as anticipated here, in the NY-23 election. An occasion which allows me to berate those big-deal pundits, left and right, resigned to think that the broad American electorate is incapable of choosing wisely in its best interests, especially when the baubles of celebrity, such as it is, and money are dangled before it.

The Right, of course, will want to crow this morning about the New Jersey and Virginia governors, which, you know, is fine. Statewide races are probably as apolitical as our politics gets, by which I mean a great deal depends on local economies, the popularity of the incumbent (if that person is running), the mood in the state capital, and the ability of the campaigners. Once elected, most governors, the GOP ones especially, need to stick pretty near a pragmatic line (see: Ah-noldt) in order to govern, at least so far as their legislatures allow (see: Ah-noldt). And the shelf-lives of governors is notoriously short (see Ah-noldt, Elliot, Jon, David et al), unless they are exceptionally gifted.

All politics is local, right? And up north the local guy won, the first Democrat to hold that seat since Lincoln slept in the White House. Some on the left may feel disappointed that the wingnut lost, thereby discouraging more Jacobin fun in the GOP contests. This is short sighted on two counts. First, we have enough right wing nitwits in congress to start with. I suppose one more would not have amounted to much, but honestly, you need to draw the line somewhere.

Second, and more to the issue, I don't think this setback will deter the true believers one jot. As noted in these pages, there is an unprecedented leadership void in the GOP. There is no one in charge to say no to these mischief-makers, who are perpetually just one win shy, in their minds and on TV, from Total Victory.

I had meant to say something about the White House challenge to FUX news closer to the first slap, mainly to say I thought it was a great idea. I still do. First, there is no real world downside. Barely two million people, tops, watch it. Then there is that adage, popular during the administration of that squalid little man, that power creates its own reality. It does, only not so much in the real world as in the media landscape of our collected imaginations.

By which I mean that by calling the Murdoch product for what it is, and inducing all sorts of petty indignant reactions, the administration has ipso facto defined FUX as a bias machine, a definition which, going forward, it either challenges or justifies every minute it's on.

My money is on justifies.

Hurl From The North Country

2009-11-01T14:27:00.000-08:00

Mr. Rich's fine column this morning could not quite frame the rather astonishing events in the special NY-23 election for what I believe they represent. So let me: this is what a political party looks like as it dies.

Let us note that the Republican candidate was driven from the race by apostates on her right and, just about two hours ago, endorsed her Democratic opponent. While Mr. Rich wants to consider this an attack by GOP Stalinists, it bears repeating that this is an election for the House of Representatives, in a district the Republicans have held since the Civil War, that for all intents and purposes does not have a Republican on the ballot. Let that sink in a minute.

It is altogether interesting that NY-23 probably resembles the far west more than any bailiwick east of the Mississippi. Far flung, mountainous, rural and forlorn, with long and harsh winters, its central employer is a Army base, home to a large division of alpine troops which has seen long tours in Iran and Iraq. What makes the election interesting to handicap is how NY-23 also differs from reliably conservative western districts. For starters, this is a part of the country people move away from, not to. Consequently outsiders are held in minimal regard. Independence is probably put at a higher value than out west, where a certain lock-step, Mormon-style fealty to the cause seems to hold, hence Dede Scozzafava's "liberal" profile among her cohort. That the Watertown paper, and now Scozzafava, have endorsed Owens, the Democrat, as the true local candidate means a great deal.

One local factor that the commentators rushing to see have overlooked is that, for all its rural aspect, NY-23 shares an enormous international border. People up there live closer to Ottawa and Montreal than to Albany. While this might not strike your average big-city pundit as a big deal (and you can insert your hockey joke here), let me suggest that those people might not be quite as parochial as one might assume.

In thinking about this yesterday, I decided that Scozzafava coming out for Owens would be enough to tip the election his way. That said, I didn't expect her to do it. So there you are. The GOP death spiral tightens apace.

UPDATE: A Sullivan reader reports from the ground, and it's not pretty.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

2009-11-01T07:32:00.000-08:00

K L Burgess, a man out of time.

TV Slide (Cont.)

2009-10-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

Oh look! (via The Raw Story):

CNBC Viewership Plunges 50% In October

Specifically, CNBC has experienced a massive 52% decline in overall viewers during business day hours (5 am - 7 pm), and a not much better 49% drop in its demo (25-54) in the month of October as compared to last year. Specific shows that are likely to follow the fate of Dennis Kneale's recently cancelled 8pm gobbledygook are likely the Kudlow Report and Mad Money, which are down 59% and 56%, respectively.

Awww....

The writer goes on to speculate that perhaps if CNBC stops peddling right wing free market bullshit (not his words exactly) the audience will return, to which I reply: nope. I do believe the dream is over for those clowns. When last I checked no one was watching FUX Business either and it remains to be seen in what form, if any, financial TV will stand. The marks wised up and moved on. (While we are at it, just for the mental exercise, we might also game-out what's in store for all current forms of cable news. I do believe the latest newspaper circulation figures give some hint)

If you'd like to speculate too that this is a pretty good indicator of just how shallow, or rather narrow, the recovery has been, feel free. Consider also what this bodes for heavy reform of Wall Street in the coming twelvemonth, as it looks like there won't be much popular opposition.

This is a good opportunity to bring up an element of Marshall McLuhan's thinking I've been pondering for a while, a proposition of his which we may be on the threshold of seeing tested in the real world. Briefly, McLuhan considered one of TV's main attractions to be the relatively fuzzy, pixel-based image it presents to viewers. The automatic effort people made to "fill in" the image with their imagination gave TV, according to McLuhan, an irresistible grip on their central nervous systems.

Strange idea, no doubt about it. But if he was right about this subliminal attraction (written, remember, over 50 years ago), then hi-definition TV is a death knell for the sort of addicted viewer engagement with television which has been the true lifeblood of the networks from the beginning. Put simply, people will not find hi-def images so mysteriously fascinating, so utterly involving as low rez pictures. TV will lose its addictive nature and become something people can take or leave, like magazines. The test of this idea has only begun, but as flat screens take over it will, so to speak, bear watching.