It has been a cry of Bush supporters since the disaster of Katrina unfolded and now the LA times (and Matt Drudge) have an Army Major saying much the same thing: the national media was hyping the amounto of disaster present at place like the superdome and local politicians like Ray Nagin could have played a part. The problem was both created and exacerbated, according to the story, by the breakdown of communications in the aftermath.
This seems completely ridiculous on some level. The mass media were there reporting on national TV so someone certainly had mass communications. But there weren't reliable telephones and no way to confirm some of the more horrendous stories being told so it made accurate reporting difficult to perform. On the other hand, according to the article, race played a part in people (i.e. reporters and anchors') ability to believe and then report some of the more outstanding claims of violence.
I know that articles like this--which Matt Drudge ran with a huge photo montage on his front page today--are supposed to prove something for the right. But they don't really prove anything except that when there is a vacuum of power, leadership, and information people will make do. I know that bodies were definitely laying in the street and that some reporters saw some awful things for themselves. Though these may well have been fairly isolated incedents, they are not the kinds of incedents we are accustomed to seeing in the present day, urban united states.
In fact, if nothing else, the right should realize that this is what it looks like when the media is free to report without a government filter guiding them. It is still a filter--and its concern for property damage was just as strong as its concern for people's lives so if it is liberal, it is a very centrist sort of liberalism, quite mainstream in fact, and doing little other than holding the government accountable for the things the government said it was going to do. It is quite ideological to fault the media for expecting the government to protect its citizens. Although the right wing would like to be able to drown the government in a bathtub, this is far from being an idea that has national consensus in theory much less in practice--in other words, though people may agree, over cocktails or dessert, that the government should be very small and people should have individal initiative, when your friends, family or compatriots are drowning in toxic sludge it is a bit harder to hold to your principles--or even see how they apply.
All of us are hypocritical on some level and it is in those desparate, frightened moments that we are most willing to be so. This has been something that the Bush administration has long used to its advantage: the Patriot Act is only the most visible of this sort of policy which they have enacted in a moment of crisis which is basically contradictory to an agreed upon value - privacy and individual freedoms of movement, speech, etc. - that is overlooked in deference to what seems to be a more urgent goal. Now, ironically, instead of responding to the current crisis, exacerbated by the institutions meant to respond being crippled by previous funding cuts, Republicans in congress are using this moment to push through almost $1 trillion in cuts to the federal budget over the next ten years--all from various federal programs; none from a reduction of the next round of tax cuts to the most wealthy in the country.
I am rarely a defender of the national media because I think they are always overzealous and distracting from the real issues people should be concerned with. And I will admit that, during Katrina any hyperbole that existed went right beneath my radar: I bought all of it (except for Geraldo and his weeping for the babies). I also believe that the media likely made more out of certain stories and am very interested in the part that race played in the reporting of the aftermath: if they were more willing to believe outlandish claims simply because they were being made about poor and black people in America--two populations that (obviously) few national correspondents have much experience with in the least. That is a very important cultural problem.
But to accuse the media of a liberal bias because they got worked up when the Federal Government failed to perform what honest conservatives usually say is the most important function of government: to protect the people, this is just moronic and pedantic. When it is done at the very moment that the GOP is planning to gut the federal government further, making many other national tragedies more likely and working against that ethos that the media represented because it assumes--rightly, I think--most Americans share is, well, inexcusably hypocritical.
UPDATE: new story on this subject says that "media re[presentations may have slowed aid."
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Monbiot on a "World Turned Upside Down"
Indeed...He looks at the strange phenomena of businesses begging the government to intervene and put stiffer environmental regulations in place--and of governments refucing to do it.
These corporations recognize that the human life on earth ending because of environmental devastation is really bad for business, but also know that, without some form of regulation, it will be hard to break out of that short term mindset that has been championed even more vehemently over the past two decades. The decadence of this market driven logic is beginning to show, but it isn't something the market itself has any mechanism to control. To say that it is up to consumers is ridiculous because it would take some form of earth shaking devastation (other than two consecutive hurricanes over the heated gulf) to make people willing to dish out the extra dough for greener products--and even that is assuming the market has provided these choices. Until the government intervenes and puts some sort of luxery tax on environmentally decadent practices and products, there won't be any change. It sounds like some companies recognize this and it is now that people could finally wake up and remember that, not only are we consumers, but also citizens. It would be a fairly nostalgic idea at this point, but it just might work. We've already sought protection for rock star nipples and men kissing, perhaps we could flex that muscle for something more important--like say, the future of the planet. I suppose time will tell...yes time...we'll just wait until someone decides to do something...until the time is right...yup...just until then...
These corporations recognize that the human life on earth ending because of environmental devastation is really bad for business, but also know that, without some form of regulation, it will be hard to break out of that short term mindset that has been championed even more vehemently over the past two decades. The decadence of this market driven logic is beginning to show, but it isn't something the market itself has any mechanism to control. To say that it is up to consumers is ridiculous because it would take some form of earth shaking devastation (other than two consecutive hurricanes over the heated gulf) to make people willing to dish out the extra dough for greener products--and even that is assuming the market has provided these choices. Until the government intervenes and puts some sort of luxery tax on environmentally decadent practices and products, there won't be any change. It sounds like some companies recognize this and it is now that people could finally wake up and remember that, not only are we consumers, but also citizens. It would be a fairly nostalgic idea at this point, but it just might work. We've already sought protection for rock star nipples and men kissing, perhaps we could flex that muscle for something more important--like say, the future of the planet. I suppose time will tell...yes time...we'll just wait until someone decides to do something...until the time is right...yup...just until then...
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
another article worth reading
Lisa Randall, in this article, points to, among other things, one of the problems that has been created by "colloquial terminology" in scince. Dewey claimed, in Public and its Problems, that science was unintelligible to people because of the dense terminology they used. It seems the problem lies more in the signified than the signifier.
Scientists often employ colloquial terminology, which they then assign a specific meaning that is impossible to fathom without proper training. The term "relativity," for example, is intrinsically misleading. Many interpret the theory to mean that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. Yet although the measurements any observer makes depend on his coordinates and reference frame, the physical phenomena he measures have an invariant description that transcends that observer's particular coordinates. Einstein's theory of relativity is really about finding an invariant description of physical phenomena. Indeed, Einstein agreed with the suggestion that his theory would have been better named "Invariantentheorie." But the term "relativity" was already too entrenched at the time for him to change.
Malcolm Gladwell on the pill
well he's not on it himself, but he does talk about it...
I was visiting metafilter today and came across this article from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker a few years ago. The focus is on how the man who invented "The Pill" was a Catholic and was, therefore, keen to make the chemicals of the pill fit within those beliefs. But it is more about the changes of modernity to women's bodies based on evidence from medical anthropologists and new cross cultural studies between women in Japan and the US. The upshot is that the menstral cycle designed into the chemistry of the pill is important for preventing certain forms of cancer, but it adds to the risk of breast cancer. This is because, according to these studies, a 28-day, 12 a year, menstral cycle is relatively new and is largely the result of changes in reproductive practices. The Pill was invented with a mind to keep this 28/12 cycle going because it was assumed to be natural and, therefore, simply a chemical way of using the rhythym method of birth control. But the focus on its contraceptive capacity has overshadowed the use it can have for cancer prevention among women who aren't just baby-making machines. One of the proponents of a new drug that intends to focus on this oncological aspect of contraception has this to say about the conditions he is observing:
Many on the right will try to make this about the women's movement or about women's lib. But as bell hooks and others have noted, the problem with seeing women at work as an issue of the women's movement is heavily influenced by a white, middle class perception of women's existence--at least in regard to labor. Minority and working class women had been laboring outside the home or for some form of wages inside the home for the better part of the last century. What began to happen in the 1970s wasn't that women were empowered to go to work, or that they were encouraged to see that they could work on their own and become the kinds of professionals only their husbands could be--or, more importantly, that they didn't need a husband to be successful--though it seems that all these things happened; it was also that more middle class families, like the one I grew up in, needed two incomes just to make it possible to have that three bedroom, two car, one vacation lifestyle that they had been promised and were expected to perform.
To say that women's place is in the home is a laughable anachronism in social and economic terms and its focus on political or cultural changes, while entirely accurate on some level, does little to focus its lens on the reason those changes stuck. It is further hypocritical for the very people who deride female welfare recipients for having too many children or for failing to work while they have children to also refuse to endorse methods that might help them have control over their own bodies. Of course endorsing them too strongly would be equally abhorrent. I remember a program in Fort Worth that offered that five-year birth control method (probably a result of this study) to women who were on drugs and would even pay them to submit to it. In terms of public health, I guess it is hard to argue with, but it just sounds so much like the forced sterilization of the mentally retarded in Virginia to make it palatable as a state program. Perhaps that's why the Fort Worth program was private.
I was visiting metafilter today and came across this article from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker a few years ago. The focus is on how the man who invented "The Pill" was a Catholic and was, therefore, keen to make the chemicals of the pill fit within those beliefs. But it is more about the changes of modernity to women's bodies based on evidence from medical anthropologists and new cross cultural studies between women in Japan and the US. The upshot is that the menstral cycle designed into the chemistry of the pill is important for preventing certain forms of cancer, but it adds to the risk of breast cancer. This is because, according to these studies, a 28-day, 12 a year, menstral cycle is relatively new and is largely the result of changes in reproductive practices. The Pill was invented with a mind to keep this 28/12 cycle going because it was assumed to be natural and, therefore, simply a chemical way of using the rhythym method of birth control. But the focus on its contraceptive capacity has overshadowed the use it can have for cancer prevention among women who aren't just baby-making machines. One of the proponents of a new drug that intends to focus on this oncological aspect of contraception has this to say about the conditions he is observing:
But the modern way of living represents an extraordinary change in female biology. Women are going out and becoming lawyers, doctors, presidents of countries. They need to understand that what we are trying to do isn't abnormal. It's just as normal as when someone hundreds of years ago had menarche at seventeen and had five babies and had three hundred fewer menstrual cycles than most women have today. The world is not the world it was. And some of the risks that go with the benefits of a woman getting educated and not getting pregnant all the time are breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and we need to deal with it. I have three daughters. The earliest grandchild I had was when one of them was thirty-one. That's the way many women are now. They ovulate from twelve or thirteen until their early thirties. Twenty years of uninterrupted ovulation before their first child! That's a brand-new phenomenon!
Many on the right will try to make this about the women's movement or about women's lib. But as bell hooks and others have noted, the problem with seeing women at work as an issue of the women's movement is heavily influenced by a white, middle class perception of women's existence--at least in regard to labor. Minority and working class women had been laboring outside the home or for some form of wages inside the home for the better part of the last century. What began to happen in the 1970s wasn't that women were empowered to go to work, or that they were encouraged to see that they could work on their own and become the kinds of professionals only their husbands could be--or, more importantly, that they didn't need a husband to be successful--though it seems that all these things happened; it was also that more middle class families, like the one I grew up in, needed two incomes just to make it possible to have that three bedroom, two car, one vacation lifestyle that they had been promised and were expected to perform.
To say that women's place is in the home is a laughable anachronism in social and economic terms and its focus on political or cultural changes, while entirely accurate on some level, does little to focus its lens on the reason those changes stuck. It is further hypocritical for the very people who deride female welfare recipients for having too many children or for failing to work while they have children to also refuse to endorse methods that might help them have control over their own bodies. Of course endorsing them too strongly would be equally abhorrent. I remember a program in Fort Worth that offered that five-year birth control method (probably a result of this study) to women who were on drugs and would even pay them to submit to it. In terms of public health, I guess it is hard to argue with, but it just sounds so much like the forced sterilization of the mentally retarded in Virginia to make it palatable as a state program. Perhaps that's why the Fort Worth program was private.
Monday, September 19, 2005
profile photo
This was actually taken in June, many moons ago, in Lewes, Delaware. But I have been informed I need a picture for my profile so I chose this one. I think it is indicative of how things are now: we're both happy and Carlos sits peacefully in the background. Actually he's on the bookshelf, but that's an absurdity for another time. For now, just the memories of his last trip to the beach and one of his last excursions without all that hideous gear. Here, he was just a happy dog and we were blissfully ignorant--except that he did try to attack the guy next door...Still, it was a good evening. We walked down the beach with Carlos and he chased Horseshoe crabs. Then as we were coming back, Jill sent me up to the house to get the camera so we could take pictures. I'm really glad I did. I'm happy to have any pictures of him, sentimental bastard that I am, and I especially like the way we look in this one.
Stiglitz on NO--quoting Sen
Stiglitz has a piece in Tom Paine today (could have appeared elsewhere) which is just one of many that I could be reading around the situation in New Orleans. It has definitely blown up into a national crisis and has created a lot of questions that seem to have answers that become political quite quickly. His basic argument--and one that will be repeatedly made, with good reason, is that, "Markets, for all their virtues, often do not work well in a crisis." This is an important point since it seems that it defines the Bush administration's approach to government, which is to say, that for all their propaganda about the importance of markets, they have also created one of the largest government bureaucracies in American history. That they were completely inept at it probably says more about how crippling their worldview is--i.e. they have no idea how to run something that isn't for a profit.
Along these lines (I'll get there in a second), Stiglitz brings up Amartya Sen:
He is right about the failure Sen speaks of but the lack of purchasing power, at least in Development as Freedom, isn't nearly as important in these situations than the lack of democratic accountability. He points to the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s (and others) and says that things like this wouldn't happen if the leaders of these countries were more beholden to their people, if their power relied on a democratic mandate. I don't know enough about the history of famines to judge how correct his argument is, but it does seem to follow that political power is as important in these situations as economic power.
On the other hand, NO and the gulf coast are an important area in the economic and social life of the country so it seems like even the economic motive for saving the gulf or NO wasn't enough. And the powerful people in that city--and powerful oil and chemical companies in that part of the country weren't able--or maybe willing?--to stop the flood. Certainly the slow response is indicative of a lack of concern for a poor and, probably self-disenfranchised, minority. I say self-disenfranchised to indicate that, while the poor and black have been able to vote, it is often noted that many abstain because there is no one who speaks to their interests. The time is, therefore, ripe for someone like Hughy Long to take over in some populist revival. Likewise, the current Republican fascism, gaining its power from fear of a military (or at least physical) threat, could likely be replaced by a more "democrat" fascism like we saw during the New Deal.
As I write that, I notice the nuances of what Polanyi means by fascism. I am not going to attempt to define it, but the important thing is that for him--and for the early twentieth century elites afraid of it--the idea of fascism is related to democracy run amok. Lippmann was afraid, long before Hayek, of the problems of the government intervening in the functioning of society. But he also recognized the alternative as being one less favorable to people who didn't already have opportunity and success on their side and who had little ability to contest monopoly corporate power except through the government. At first, in books like Mastery and Drift, he basically tells the big industries they should just get over it, but by the late 20s, when things start looking more dire and pressing, he begins to think that there could be danger. This danger is at least two fold: on the one hand there is the fear that the masses will rise up and ask for things that are detrimental to the functioning of society; on the other hand, there is the danger that once this request has been made (or even before) someone will arise that will claim they can give it to them.
Polanyi talks about this as fascism, but his object is the functioning of the free market. Certainly there will be an effect on the efficiency of the market--as libertarians say--if this fascism is focused on some form of wealth distribution or increasing corporate oversight, but even this is only interfering with the market as it functioned before the intervention. It is only in relative terms not in absolute. If the market was already a stratified oligopoly, if most of the economic descisions were made not by people in elected office but in corporate boardrooms, if there was no real functioning mechanism of supply and demand, then the market was already ineffecient in absolute terms, right? We might be able to assume or hope or have some sort of blind faith that, someday, down the line, things would change to fix the inefficient aspects: companies would be bought and sold, get started or go broke; new innovations would give an advantage to people who didn't have to retrofit already existing equipment or re-train workers. This is the idea of Schumpeter's creative destruction and it assumes a role in clearing the blockages to this ineffecient market in the same way that we could discuss the possibility that silt would have replaced the disappearing wetlands around New Orleans if we hadn't built levees and that this silt would have helped to absorb some of the flooding waters.
We have perfect vision in hindsight and can try to predict what would or would not have happened in retrospect, but the problem is when we assume extreme positions beforehand and say that there is only one absolute way of doing things. In this way, the earlier understanding of the market, before the new deal, was equally fascist if we define this as being in relation to the unilateral intervention in the relationship of market to society on the part of the government.
...student advisee incoming, will have to pick up later...
...no time today...but wrote a longer discussion of this question of political vs. economic fascism as well as a consideration of the similarities in Freidman and Marcuse, at least in a sketchy way, in the GPE I field notebook...sorry if someone is reading this. It's mostly for me at this point. I don't think I make enough sense to have any regular readers. Someday, perhaps.
Along these lines (I'll get there in a second), Stiglitz brings up Amartya Sen:
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has emphasized that most famines are associated not with a shortage of food, but the failure to get food to the people who need it, largely because they lack purchasing power
He is right about the failure Sen speaks of but the lack of purchasing power, at least in Development as Freedom, isn't nearly as important in these situations than the lack of democratic accountability. He points to the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s (and others) and says that things like this wouldn't happen if the leaders of these countries were more beholden to their people, if their power relied on a democratic mandate. I don't know enough about the history of famines to judge how correct his argument is, but it does seem to follow that political power is as important in these situations as economic power.
On the other hand, NO and the gulf coast are an important area in the economic and social life of the country so it seems like even the economic motive for saving the gulf or NO wasn't enough. And the powerful people in that city--and powerful oil and chemical companies in that part of the country weren't able--or maybe willing?--to stop the flood. Certainly the slow response is indicative of a lack of concern for a poor and, probably self-disenfranchised, minority. I say self-disenfranchised to indicate that, while the poor and black have been able to vote, it is often noted that many abstain because there is no one who speaks to their interests. The time is, therefore, ripe for someone like Hughy Long to take over in some populist revival. Likewise, the current Republican fascism, gaining its power from fear of a military (or at least physical) threat, could likely be replaced by a more "democrat" fascism like we saw during the New Deal.
As I write that, I notice the nuances of what Polanyi means by fascism. I am not going to attempt to define it, but the important thing is that for him--and for the early twentieth century elites afraid of it--the idea of fascism is related to democracy run amok. Lippmann was afraid, long before Hayek, of the problems of the government intervening in the functioning of society. But he also recognized the alternative as being one less favorable to people who didn't already have opportunity and success on their side and who had little ability to contest monopoly corporate power except through the government. At first, in books like Mastery and Drift, he basically tells the big industries they should just get over it, but by the late 20s, when things start looking more dire and pressing, he begins to think that there could be danger. This danger is at least two fold: on the one hand there is the fear that the masses will rise up and ask for things that are detrimental to the functioning of society; on the other hand, there is the danger that once this request has been made (or even before) someone will arise that will claim they can give it to them.
Polanyi talks about this as fascism, but his object is the functioning of the free market. Certainly there will be an effect on the efficiency of the market--as libertarians say--if this fascism is focused on some form of wealth distribution or increasing corporate oversight, but even this is only interfering with the market as it functioned before the intervention. It is only in relative terms not in absolute. If the market was already a stratified oligopoly, if most of the economic descisions were made not by people in elected office but in corporate boardrooms, if there was no real functioning mechanism of supply and demand, then the market was already ineffecient in absolute terms, right? We might be able to assume or hope or have some sort of blind faith that, someday, down the line, things would change to fix the inefficient aspects: companies would be bought and sold, get started or go broke; new innovations would give an advantage to people who didn't have to retrofit already existing equipment or re-train workers. This is the idea of Schumpeter's creative destruction and it assumes a role in clearing the blockages to this ineffecient market in the same way that we could discuss the possibility that silt would have replaced the disappearing wetlands around New Orleans if we hadn't built levees and that this silt would have helped to absorb some of the flooding waters.
We have perfect vision in hindsight and can try to predict what would or would not have happened in retrospect, but the problem is when we assume extreme positions beforehand and say that there is only one absolute way of doing things. In this way, the earlier understanding of the market, before the new deal, was equally fascist if we define this as being in relation to the unilateral intervention in the relationship of market to society on the part of the government.
...student advisee incoming, will have to pick up later...
...no time today...but wrote a longer discussion of this question of political vs. economic fascism as well as a consideration of the similarities in Freidman and Marcuse, at least in a sketchy way, in the GPE I field notebook...sorry if someone is reading this. It's mostly for me at this point. I don't think I make enough sense to have any regular readers. Someday, perhaps.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
mondovino: il mondo
I write you today acknowledging my self-indulgence. The gist of this is inspired by having just finished watching the documentary Mondovino and finished reading the opening sections of Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy as well as a recent book by a prominent libertarian economist (Tyler Cowen) at George Mason called Creative Destruction. It is these moments of synergy in ideas--probably like a rare mix of flavors and aromas in a bouquet--which excite me as a fledgling academic, but I am fully aware of how subjective this excitement is, hence my sharing this with you is, in many ways, quite self indulgent. So, being the busy person that you are, I would understand if you feigned interest and let me ramble on without reading this in full--I say this at the beginning of this letter, because I know full well the kind of rambling that may well ensue. In that case, please just consider this a personal greeting and a touching base after a long absence. I should, indeed, be saying hello after so long.
But I couldn't help but write to you because you are so close to an industry which I had never dreamed was a part of the processes I am working through in my projects. I also recall you asking me at some point to share my thoughts on my work, though this probably isn't what you had in mind. Still the film has exemplified in a mere two hours the awesome terror that capitalism promises right alongside its hope of something better. It is in this that I see what Immanuel Kant called the "sublime." To be perfectly frank, I know very little about Kant, and if you happened to take an Intro to Ethics class in college and paid attention, you are probably way ahead of me on that front. Still, the idea of the sublime has a lot of resonance for people who are watching the progress of global capitalism--and I say "progress" in the sense of a conquering army, trampling forward over everything in its path rather than in the Enlightenment sense that we often use it in the USA--though in truth they are both a part of the same concept and it is usually the case that you can't have one without the other.
The sublime is relevant to this process because Kant meant for it to relate a sense of both awe and horror as well as a feeling of totally overwhelming insignificance and impotence. This is, of course, the feeling that we are supposed to have when we look at capitalism, even as we stand on the threshold of striking out to make our fortune or wait on our rooftops for the help to arrive. Kant's idea was appropriated by Edmund Burke who discussed the sublime in terms of looking at a landscape that was bigger and more beautiful than one could ever imagine, of feeling it overpower you and suffocate you with its sheer bigness. It makes you feel you can do nothing but watch. To compare a social system to this, is far from the truth--especially in a democratic, consumer driven society where protests and boycotts have real implications; but both of these practices are shadows of what they used to be in the public consciousness, even if more people participate in them than ever before. The point is to feel there is nothing to do but get on with one's day.
A few years ago, I stood in my father-in-law's kitchen and he told me about a friend of his who was a furniture builder--redwood patio furniture. He had won a big contract to make this furniture from Wal-Mart and had expanded his enterprise, invested in a new factory and hired workers--all with the intention of making the money back through this lucrative contract. He filled his first order for them, packed it up, and sent it on a truck to their distribution warehouse. Soon after he got the manifest back from the shipment and noticed that just about every third item had been crossed off: the person at Wal-Mart's receiving center said those items simply weren't on the truck.
But they were on the truck. He knew that because he had watched them being loaded. He also knew the game that Wal-Mart was playing. He had invested in this enterprise and there was no way for him to make this enterprise profitable except through working with Wal-Mart (known as a monopsony--when the market is controlled by one large buyer.) Therefore his choice was to either take whatever they would give him--or, in this case, give them whatever they would take--or to make some noise about it and risk losing the contract. My father-in-law told this story with awe and amazement, ending it with the statement: "That's just the way capitalism works: it's ruthless." He was stating it in terms of the sublime: it is horrifying, and in its own, craven way, beautiful--and there is nothing anyone can do about it. It is just Ruthless.
Of course he's right: it is ruthless. But if you're a Black citizen of New Orleans, and you did anything remotely resembling what Wal-Mart did--that is, go in and take what you think is your share, muchless what you need to survive--then it is known as looting. The difference, of course, is who is sanctioned by the state to commit theft.
But they were on the truck. He knew that because he had watched them being loaded. He also knew the game that Wal-Mart was playing. He had invested in this enterprise and there was no way for him to make this enterprise profitable except through working with Wal-Mart (known as a monopsony--when the market is controlled by one large buyer.) Therefore his choice was to either take whatever they would give him--or, in this case, give them whatever they would take--or to make some noise about it and risk losing the contract. My father-in-law told this story with awe and amazement, ending it with the statement: "That's just the way capitalism works: it's ruthless." He was stating it in terms of the sublime: it is horrifying, and in its own, craven way, beautiful--and there is nothing anyone can do about it. It is just Ruthless.
Of course he's right: it is ruthless. But if you're a Black citizen of New Orleans, and you did anything remotely resembling what Wal-Mart did--that is, go in and take what you think is your share, muchless what you need to survive--then it is known as looting. The difference, of course, is who is sanctioned by the state to commit theft.
But I am digressing and sounding even more like a crazy Marxist than I ever do. This is capitalism at only its purely economic worst. Mondovino shows the fill spectrum of this system and makes one feel dirty with the ambivalence of its implications. I will assume that you have seen the film. Moreover, I assume you are familiar with this fascinating social, cultural, political and economic totality that is this globalized wine industry.
What is fascinating about this is that we are seeing a snapshot of it at a moment before it becomes totally dominant. In most other areas of culture, American supremacy (imperialism?) is a foregone conclusion. But here there is this little niche where traditional culture is still alive and we are almost certain to get to watch its destruction. In this the concept of creative destruction is apt. The terms are Joseph Schumpeter's. He was talking about it as a process that would effect capitalists themselves, facing competition from an innovative new producer which would make them obsolete. But this obsolescence of old businesses, this destruction was, in Schumpeter's opinion, necessary for the economy as a whole to continue its dynamic march. Tyler Cowen applies it to culture in a way that only a libertarian can, which is that he give no emotion or value to the fact that this means "while some sectors expand extremely rapidly, others shrink or whither away." That these "sectors" are often connected with people's livelihoods, communities and identities is brushed aside as a romantic notion that doesn't understand "progress."
Schumpeter wasn't the first to recognize this as a part of the process of Capitalism. In fact Marx saw it and Lenin even more--and all three saw it as one of the beneficial aspects of capitalist modernization: it destroyed the old, feudal ways of life and brought in modern ideas such as the elimination of patriarchy. It is the reason that Lenin led the Bolsheviks into power in Russia even though it had a very undeveloped system of capitalism and a weak middle class. He believed in the teleology of Marx's theory of history--which was, sorry to geek out, reminiscent of Hegel in its understanding of their being an end toward which history was striving. The idea inspired Lenin to force the country to modernize in order to bring about a proletarian class that would complete the revolution. Of course the idea was supposed to be that the advance of this socializing, modernizing force of capitalism would eventually lead to a type of society that would share equally in the amazing fruits of this productive engine. Needless to say that hasn't happened yet, though the destruction of cultures seems to have become a fairly popular sport in the meantime.
All of this is fairly banal and taken for granted in twentieth century history, but the point is that it is an essential element of capitalism that we see unfolding as we watch these people in France and Italy who are fighting for their traditional way of life against this ideology of "modernization" via the cultural and economic pressures of the international wine market. In this little drama that the early scenes of the movie capture, we see several important characters that act as metonyms for the social pressures capitalism places on people and for institutions that, especially in the last 60 years, have been given the authority to determine the paths of just about every post-colonial and developing country on the planet. They represent, in their seemingly innocuous imperialism, all the contradictions of the post-war US position in the world, all at once, and with only a single communist mayor and a few "backwards" villagers standing in their way.
The film first introduces us to this wine consultant Michel Rolland. Rolland has an idea about what a wine should taste like and imposes that idea on vineyards across the world, advising them to use certain scientific procedures to make their wines palatable for a "global taste." His comparison with the IMF and World Bank couldn't be more easy to make. They enter countries--sometimes for mere hours--and re-arrange entire economies in order to fit a pre-existing idea of what makes a good economy. Like the IMF and World Bank, he holds the promise of wealth and development, of becoming a player on the world stage: in the 50s, the program was to use expensive chemical fertilizers and high tech equipment, to industrialize national industries and substitute imported products with domestically produced goods. This was, of course, entirely reversed in the late 1970s when the clarion became the importance of free markets and reduced government intervention.
At the moment, Rolland says the only way to do it is to use new oak and to micro-oxygenate. Who knows for how long this will be the trend or how many of these vineyards will be left behind when the taste suddenly changes. Either way, someone like Rolland will be there to explain what needs to be done and expect full compliance.
At the moment, Rolland says the only way to do it is to use new oak and to micro-oxygenate. Who knows for how long this will be the trend or how many of these vineyards will be left behind when the taste suddenly changes. Either way, someone like Rolland will be there to explain what needs to be done and expect full compliance.
And also like the IMF and World Bank, he has a seemingly independent accomplice in the Maryland based wine critic Robert Parker whose scores make or break a wine--and seem to be up for sale in a certain way. This is like credit rating agencies on a global scale--such as the S&P 500 and Moody's--who give countries a rating on how much they qualify to receive in private financing. This rating is supposedly separate from their ability to finance projects through the IMF or World Bank--just as Robert Parker's rating is supposedly based on some objective taste rather than a strict adherence to Rollins' or Mondovi's philosophy and methods. This is basically the same thing as a credit rating you or I have and determines how much credit a private financier would want--or even be allowed--to extend to us. In theory, this gives countries another option for raising funds if they don't meet the standards of the IMF/WB. But in practice there is no alternative: the credit rating agencies, like Robert Parker (and to a more ambiguous extent, the Wine Spectator), have a definition of what a country with good potential for investment is and it is basically the same thing that the IMF/WB claim is what makes a good country for investment--or, to complete the analogy, what Michel Rolland says is the final result of his recommendation, i.e. a high quality wine.
Entering into this, of course, is the international corporation: Robert Mondavi. Here the analogy falters some and it is because we are dealing so centrally with questions of culture rather than pure economics. The force of change works in the same way, but with different initial intentions. Certainly the global sourcing of this company is analogous to the way that corporations work now--they are diversified and have divisions or subcontractors throughout the world. Though they appear to produce some products, what they really produce are dividends for their shareholders: the latter, despite the PR or naive beliefs of their managers are ultimately all that matters. On the other hand, Mondavi does have its image to protect
So the question of taste enters into the equation, which is a question of the sociology of culture and best left to someone like Pierre Bourdieu, who was a French sociologist who died just a few years ago. In short, Bourdieu looked at a variety of social processes, but one was to look at the world of art and the way that prestige and consecration was acquired in this system. He has a fairly economistic understanding of the players in a field, but in his description, the economic capital remains unsettled. Not only are people competing with each other for symbolic capital--which would be power of some sort in the field--they are also struggling with the ability to define what tht capital is. The coin of the realm is unsettled, which is precisely the reason for the struggle.
He has three concepts that are important here: field, capital and habitus. The field is somewhat defined by the context but is basically a social plane of different "positions and dispositions" that are defined in relation to each other and in relation to the source of authority in the field. (Hopefully this will make more sense in just a second.) The capital is, roughly, the coin of the realm and it is aquired by the people who do the thing that is valued by the field the most, who have the most authority in the field and are therefore able to define the source of capital within the field--typically the thing they make, think or do.
He has three concepts that are important here: field, capital and habitus. The field is somewhat defined by the context but is basically a social plane of different "positions and dispositions" that are defined in relation to each other and in relation to the source of authority in the field. (Hopefully this will make more sense in just a second.) The capital is, roughly, the coin of the realm and it is aquired by the people who do the thing that is valued by the field the most, who have the most authority in the field and are therefore able to define the source of capital within the field--typically the thing they make, think or do.
This may seem confusing, but basically, both the definition of what makes an authority and the authority themselves rise to promience as the result of some social struggle. So if a social player within the field is able to win the greatest authority in the field, they also win the ability to define what makes someone authoritative in the field. It is in relation to this authority that the different positions are given different values and powers; but it is also in relation to this field that individuals, occupying positions, take on certain "dispositions" or what Bourdieu calls the "habitus." In this Bourdieu is trying to describe how the social force of legitimation of power is able to instill in each of us an understanding of what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to act. We may not do it because we want to or we like to, but because, in order to be successful, that's what we have to do. But as we do those things, we end up further constituting and reinforcing the definition and the authorities who proffer it, as authoritative. That is, of course, unless we want to try our hand at challenging this authority and its constitutive definitions.
Importantly, the authority and success--called symbolic or cultural capital--in one field is often able to be exchanged for other forms of capital in another. Ironically for this context, Bourdieu referred to the cultural field of production as being one in which "the economic world was reversed." He was writing about French culture--mostly different forms of painting and literature--and noted that the closer a work seemed to an appeal to commercial success, the less able it was to gain cultural capital. In laymen's terms, the more it looked like a piece of art or artist "sold out," the less it was seen by the artistic community as being artistic. Instead, a good piece of art was one that was seen as shunning the market. However, the distributer of this product had a longer view, which is that it would aquire its cultural capital over time--being worth a lot of money at some point in the future based on its cultural value as an elite aesthetic production. This is, almost to a point, the way the traditional French and a few of the Italian winemakers discuss their wine--and the changes that they see happening.
Here, I hope, the relation to this film and the wine industry as a field has become clearer. The field has been caputured by a couple of people who are able to define what the authority--the capital--of the field is: Rolland and Parker agree here and have, through some mysterious historical, social, and political process the film doesn't really discuss, become the arbiters of taste. They are able to command this field and, for both the producers and consumers, to define what a good bottle of wine tastes like. And the power to define this--and to effectively reverse the value system of wine taste--is what they see as just a legitimate social role they've been given: Parker himself attributes this to the kind of hard work and perseverance in a way that only an American can with a straight face. He also discusses it in terms of a democratizing mission.
To bring this back round to economics, this is Robert Mondavi's stake in both the cultural and economic fields of wine production. Unlike other corporations--who benefit from the definition of their institutional partners like the IMF/WB and the credit rating agencies by getting countries forced into opening their markets to foreign goods, allowing the privitization of their water or oil or natural resources, and reducing the amount of government oversight and social safety nets, Robert Mondavi benefits more from the cultural capital that it gets from making--or owning the companies that make--the wine that get defined as the best in the world by its friends who help to define this.
The part played by the Italian state or by the local governments in France are more ambiguous, but they correspond roughly to the same positions of states and governments in developing countries are given. They are put in the position to reap some sort of windfall from these arrangements--often through an undemocratic or untransparent process--and thus are often corrupted in their decisions in one way or another. Likewise, the role of the consumers in perpetuating all of this is only a background, but in our day the people who buy the products of globalized corporations often have even more power than the producers to make or break the system--though unless we are to de-link ourselves completely, some form of complicity is almost inevitable and unavoidable. It is here that the horror is mixed with the awe.
And actually, speaking of awe, unlike the global institutions I've mentioned above, the authorities in the wine industry have one thing going for them: they appear to be right. Their recommendations for how to make a wine more palatable and profitable seem to get gulped down by the expanding market for wine around the world. Your thoughts on this process--as a person who, unlike myself, understands the quality that wine can have--would certainly be interesting.
The contradiction emerges with the brief moments in the film where we see the people who are being helped by these processes--and by the sort of pro-democracy argument that Parker presents: he is bringing quality wine out of its elitism and helping to valorize the wines that "the people" will appreciate them, as barbaric as their palates may be. This is, in part, where the awe is created. Though we don't see much of it in the film, the meteoric rise of Mondavi as a brand--and of the branding movement in wines in general--is certainly something that must have upset the wine industry and to witness this kind of power is always something, regardless of what you think of it, that is hard not to respect--sort of like fascism (something the film makes a point of nudging the wine producers about.)
The contradiction emerges with the brief moments in the film where we see the people who are being helped by these processes--and by the sort of pro-democracy argument that Parker presents: he is bringing quality wine out of its elitism and helping to valorize the wines that "the people" will appreciate them, as barbaric as their palates may be. This is, in part, where the awe is created. Though we don't see much of it in the film, the meteoric rise of Mondavi as a brand--and of the branding movement in wines in general--is certainly something that must have upset the wine industry and to witness this kind of power is always something, regardless of what you think of it, that is hard not to respect--sort of like fascism (something the film makes a point of nudging the wine producers about.)
This recalls a variety of arguments, mentioned briefly above, about the relationship of culture to a commercial system and the way that the free market has the tendency to destroy the older, traditional ways and replace it with what is seen as progressive. When you hear these farmers and villagers talk with such deep passion about something so embedded in their social, cultural and environmental history, it is difficult not to feel their pain. It is also difficult not to long to taste something as beautiful, and to understand it so essentially; to wish you could rush over to Italy or France and to sip on this complex liquid that has been made for centuries but may be fundamentally altered or entirely destroyed within mere years.
But when the film ends in Argentina with the indigenous wine producer, forced to work at other things just to keep his land, you also wonder how much better his life could be if he could benefit from the touch of Parker and Rollins. This is, finally, where the feeling of complete insignificance and impotence in the face of this force. To modernize is to destroy everything that made one's culture unique; but to neglect to modernize in the face of these foreign authorities may be ultimately result in a more empirical destruction: that of the inability to feed one's people or one's family, to keep one's land or to stay alive at all. It is hard to remain steadfast in one's culture when the choices are to sell out or whither away. Given these choices, however, it is no wonder that the communist mayor gets elected, even if the success seems short lived. Just when you think you've won, in walks Gerard Depardeu. Here, perhaps, we see the outline of a challenge to the current cultural definition, something which might salvage some of these terroir focused wines, but ultimately, it will only complement the economic system that will always threaten it with destruction even as it promises the world.
If I knew more about it, and maybe you do, it would also be interesting to look to the latest struggle over intellectual property rights like trademarks and geographic indicators since the latter directly affect the wine industry. All I can say about these is that they are some of the more hypocritical kinds of measures that are being taken, especially since it seems like it is originating mostly in California. In this they are acting like most of the companies from here in the heart of Empire: they hopscotch around the globe, celebrating this new borderless world of fluid markets and mobile capital, claiming to be producing, on balance, producer wealth and consumer choice. This is ultimately what the upside to the creative destruction is supposed to be. If local villagers appeal for protection, they are called hicks or Luddites. But then when these global wine branders are threatened by these same forces, they cry foul and ask for the government to step in and protect them from the scary people who threaten their monopoly. Dutifully, the US government is doing just that.
I am sure you have a much more interesting take on this film and if you've read this far, I hope it has at least made sense, and maybe been somewhat interesting. The takeaway for me is that these forces do have real consequences and that our actions here cannot be severed from the interconnection we have around the world any more than we are able to have complete free will in choosing what those actions might be. In watching the film, I speculated that you would be someone who would appreciate these small vineyards, who would be able to understand the wines they produced and stand in solidarity in their cause on both political and cultural levels. But when double checking your e-mail address, I re-read your last e-mail about your new job, and realized that, as a buyer for a supermarket, you probably had to stock far more of the wines consecrated by people like Parker and the Wine Spectator, created by Rollins and owned by Mondovi. Even if you disagreed with it, you would be required, in order to keep your own job, to sully certain values you might have--or that, in this case, I have projected upon you--and to make these wines available to your customers. You would likely steer them away from these wines if they asked and try to introduce them to the more complex varietels, but at the end of the week you'd probably end up putting in another order with more of those vanilla (great description) new oak wines.
I have to do basically the same thing in my classes, having to tone down my messages because to get to radical will offend my student consumers, being responsible to their learning by presenting them with different points of view and insisting they think as critically about my own views as the ones they have been taught by their parents, churches, schools, the media, and the other laws of the land. And as I teach them more about the way that advertisers manipulate images or thoughts and prey upon our subconscious desires, I know that somewhere around half of them are advertising majors, which means I am basically training the next generation to be better than this one at that job. My hands are dirty, too.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Feds were in charge--or they were supposed to be
The absurd attempts by Bush administration officials--including Chartoff and Brown--and his supporters in the press and right wing blogosphere to pin the blame for the Katrina disaster on local officials should get messy if the mainstream press is as vigilant as the bloggers who are critical of the government on this one--and that isn't at all limited to the left wing or liberal side. In fact, as I mentioned Sunday, there have been quite a few people who are fairly well respected on the right that are calling this a government's flub. The defense of the administration is not strong. In their own documents, the plan for action by the Homeland Security says that the Federal government is supposed to take the lead on these issues.
The more ignorant tack seems to be to blame the chaos on looters, etc. and to trace this back to some sort of moral vacuity on the part of New Orleans or the "Family" or American Culture. This is a laughable tack in its surface manifestations, though I am sure many people who already talk about the problems of "the family" (what does that mean anyway?) will buy it hook, line...but it is so strange to see the way these arguments have to manuever their way around talking about social responsibility while excusing our largest social institutions of any responsibility at all. I just wonder how quickly they are able to generate this chum for their hungry minions. It seems like it would take a couple of editors to make sure they don't make any ideological gaffes.
This is piece in the Chicago Sun Times which was then picked up on Little Green Footballs because it fits with their understanding of the events. It mentions a brief quote from Robert Kaplan's collection of essays The Coming Anarchy in which he mentions the "re-primitivized man" as he's witnessed it in failed states in Africa. Of course both the author of the Sun-Times piece and the clueless dittoheads at LGF interpret this through their ideological worldview that is basically a warmed over version of late nineteenth century race science tempered with an understanding of this being not the result of social Darwinism but of liberals.
The problem with both of these is that niether of them seem to have a clue what Kaplan is actually writing about or what he is pointing to in his collection of essays or in the Atlantic Monthly piece that is often cited. For one thing, if it happens that we are seeing this in New Orleans, no one is being smart or witty by saying it is like the Third World being transplanted to the First World. That was exactly what Kaplan was predicting, hence the title "the COMING anarchy." Kaplan is really a fairly conservative writer in terms of international politics, but he is also halfway intelligent: but they aren't citing him for his intelligence. That is not a priority in these arguments.
The more important insight, which none of these folks are capable of making because they are too screwed up by their fanatic right wing ideology, is one that even Kaplan isn't all that interested in making, but which I would say the conservative "american culture's rotting from the core" family values folks are actually right about but they, again blinded by ideology, can't admit or maybe even recognize. Kaplan is discussing, in the late nineties, when it was very fashionable, the "retreat of the state" but he is doing it, on the ground, in the places where the postcolonial struggle for power, exacerbated by various forms of resource scarcity and prolonged by the desire of international aid and trade organizations to have governments so small that you could drown several of them in a single bathtub. In other words, he is discussing the retreat of the state in areas where, for the past twenty years, the objective has been to whittle the state away and hand more functions over to private industry.
Of course the basic functions of a post-war welfare state aren't for them: no civil service, no education, no health care. NGOs may pick up this slack, but the private industry is mainly concerned with resource extraction. And instead of worrying too much about spreading that national wealth around, they deal mostly with the Kakistocrats in charge, the undemocratically, unelected leaders who the champions of globalization blame for bringing misery to their "citizens." Or, sometimes more problematically, the leaders of a country with all of these characteristics but which has only recently, at the hands of those same aid organizations, been thrust into democracy from above, with no other institutions or history, throwing the legitimacy of the state into question and sparking internal struggles for the few means of making a living--mostly the control over the resources that are shipped off to western countries via western corporations. So yes, the state is weakend and the people are desparate and uncontrolled, but it isn't some natural progression: it is the result of exposing a society to the bare force of market competition with nothing to protect itself; of giving people a partial glimpse of modern industry, medicine, education and society, of telling them "modernization" is the way to go and then tearing it out from under them by changing course and forcing them into a new path. It makes the current class and racial relations permanent and even Kaplan talks about the divisions between rich and poor becoming so stark that they turn into a fortress society. I think the analogy that he uses is the bulletproof limousine: the rich and privileged will have no choice but to wall themselves into it and hope to keep their oasis of safety because there is no other option (Certainly not sharing the wealth and working for a broad, stable society.) This is the explanation the Kaplan gives for the Coming Anarchy (it was the only clip I could finf online:)
So we land up with the "Clash of Civilizations" argument of Huntington, which is grist for a whole other post.
The point to end on here is that, the LGF folks are certainly right that we may be realizing the "third world in the first" as Ankie Hoogvelt calls it, but it isn't due to some impulse that has been taught by rap music or the end result of seeing too many strippers or gambling too much. Certainly all of the social ills of New Orleans society--including its corrupt police force--have played out over the last week. But what we have seen is the rotting of American Culture that has been perpetrated by the blind faith in the market as the most efficient and benevolent institution of society. The truth of the matter is that, in addition to this privatized, stateless vision of society being the one that has resulted in the gutting of the Army Corps of Engineers Budget and crippling FEMA, it is also one that had created a highly stratified society in New Orleans with, evidently, little local concern for the poorest and most needy. On even a local level, this most assuredly resulted from a focus on the joys that the truly free market can bring--that is a market for music, sex, drugs, and pleasures of all kinds. It was virtually the only way that New Orleans was making any money at all and that was spread fairly thinly throught the society.
So yes, it is a problem with American Culture but it is something that moralizing and finger wagging will do little to solve and for which even the staunchest faith in the purest vision of Christ almighty can be little more than a placation.
The more ignorant tack seems to be to blame the chaos on looters, etc. and to trace this back to some sort of moral vacuity on the part of New Orleans or the "Family" or American Culture. This is a laughable tack in its surface manifestations, though I am sure many people who already talk about the problems of "the family" (what does that mean anyway?) will buy it hook, line...but it is so strange to see the way these arguments have to manuever their way around talking about social responsibility while excusing our largest social institutions of any responsibility at all. I just wonder how quickly they are able to generate this chum for their hungry minions. It seems like it would take a couple of editors to make sure they don't make any ideological gaffes.
This is piece in the Chicago Sun Times which was then picked up on Little Green Footballs because it fits with their understanding of the events. It mentions a brief quote from Robert Kaplan's collection of essays The Coming Anarchy in which he mentions the "re-primitivized man" as he's witnessed it in failed states in Africa. Of course both the author of the Sun-Times piece and the clueless dittoheads at LGF interpret this through their ideological worldview that is basically a warmed over version of late nineteenth century race science tempered with an understanding of this being not the result of social Darwinism but of liberals.
The problem with both of these is that niether of them seem to have a clue what Kaplan is actually writing about or what he is pointing to in his collection of essays or in the Atlantic Monthly piece that is often cited. For one thing, if it happens that we are seeing this in New Orleans, no one is being smart or witty by saying it is like the Third World being transplanted to the First World. That was exactly what Kaplan was predicting, hence the title "the COMING anarchy." Kaplan is really a fairly conservative writer in terms of international politics, but he is also halfway intelligent: but they aren't citing him for his intelligence. That is not a priority in these arguments.
The more important insight, which none of these folks are capable of making because they are too screwed up by their fanatic right wing ideology, is one that even Kaplan isn't all that interested in making, but which I would say the conservative "american culture's rotting from the core" family values folks are actually right about but they, again blinded by ideology, can't admit or maybe even recognize. Kaplan is discussing, in the late nineties, when it was very fashionable, the "retreat of the state" but he is doing it, on the ground, in the places where the postcolonial struggle for power, exacerbated by various forms of resource scarcity and prolonged by the desire of international aid and trade organizations to have governments so small that you could drown several of them in a single bathtub. In other words, he is discussing the retreat of the state in areas where, for the past twenty years, the objective has been to whittle the state away and hand more functions over to private industry.
Of course the basic functions of a post-war welfare state aren't for them: no civil service, no education, no health care. NGOs may pick up this slack, but the private industry is mainly concerned with resource extraction. And instead of worrying too much about spreading that national wealth around, they deal mostly with the Kakistocrats in charge, the undemocratically, unelected leaders who the champions of globalization blame for bringing misery to their "citizens." Or, sometimes more problematically, the leaders of a country with all of these characteristics but which has only recently, at the hands of those same aid organizations, been thrust into democracy from above, with no other institutions or history, throwing the legitimacy of the state into question and sparking internal struggles for the few means of making a living--mostly the control over the resources that are shipped off to western countries via western corporations. So yes, the state is weakend and the people are desparate and uncontrolled, but it isn't some natural progression: it is the result of exposing a society to the bare force of market competition with nothing to protect itself; of giving people a partial glimpse of modern industry, medicine, education and society, of telling them "modernization" is the way to go and then tearing it out from under them by changing course and forcing them into a new path. It makes the current class and racial relations permanent and even Kaplan talks about the divisions between rich and poor becoming so stark that they turn into a fortress society. I think the analogy that he uses is the bulletproof limousine: the rich and privileged will have no choice but to wall themselves into it and hope to keep their oasis of safety because there is no other option (Certainly not sharing the wealth and working for a broad, stable society.) This is the explanation the Kaplan gives for the Coming Anarchy (it was the only clip I could finf online:)
Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades-and with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other states-peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them.A stark and scary prediction. It is too bad there are no agents in this change, that globalization is an inevitable process and the privitazation of everything existing will continue apace without any direction or intervention from anyone. Then we could discuss it as something that someone were doing and we could suggest to that someone that, perhaps, we wanted a bit more protection. Unfortunately, the state is not powerful anymore except in matters of the already powerful. This is ultimately what more academic ideologues like Hernando de Soto (so aptly named I really thought it was a joke for a while) argue: that increased property rights would help development. It seems that most countries already have a problem with property rights--that is too many of them are in the hands of the powerful. Luckily, we can rest assured that eventually everything will even out, the market and globalization will give rise to a new human being, an Ubermensch-ish fellow capable of dealing with this terror (now we're back to social darwinism--though now with Adam Smith)
Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between peoples?
So we land up with the "Clash of Civilizations" argument of Huntington, which is grist for a whole other post.
The point to end on here is that, the LGF folks are certainly right that we may be realizing the "third world in the first" as Ankie Hoogvelt calls it, but it isn't due to some impulse that has been taught by rap music or the end result of seeing too many strippers or gambling too much. Certainly all of the social ills of New Orleans society--including its corrupt police force--have played out over the last week. But what we have seen is the rotting of American Culture that has been perpetrated by the blind faith in the market as the most efficient and benevolent institution of society. The truth of the matter is that, in addition to this privatized, stateless vision of society being the one that has resulted in the gutting of the Army Corps of Engineers Budget and crippling FEMA, it is also one that had created a highly stratified society in New Orleans with, evidently, little local concern for the poorest and most needy. On even a local level, this most assuredly resulted from a focus on the joys that the truly free market can bring--that is a market for music, sex, drugs, and pleasures of all kinds. It was virtually the only way that New Orleans was making any money at all and that was spread fairly thinly throught the society.
So yes, it is a problem with American Culture but it is something that moralizing and finger wagging will do little to solve and for which even the staunchest faith in the purest vision of Christ almighty can be little more than a placation.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
collapse
I am a little upset that I am not more eloquent. It really can't be traced to my upbringing, but I simply can't not curse when I'm angry. Obviously, my career as a pundit or public speaker is going to be a limited one. oh well. I feel better...
One other thought and then I must retire (I can practice, can't I?)...
A while back I was thinking through Jarrod Diamond's new book Collapse...I don't really have time to read what I wrote then, but I have read a good many reviews of it since then and it seems that the major argument people advance against him is that the societies he looks at are too removed from modernity to be compelling examples of his thesis. The latter is, basically, that we will ignore impending environmental peril which will result in the collapse of our society and ecosystem, even if it could be halted, if it isn't in the immediate self interest of the elites of the society. After reading all the reports about how certain it was that New Orleans would be destroyed if a fairly statistically probable weather event occurred, it seems clear that Diamond has his best example for the intro to the paperback. This one even has a gut wrenching aftermath.
There are some times when it really sucks to be right.
One other thought and then I must retire (I can practice, can't I?)...
A while back I was thinking through Jarrod Diamond's new book Collapse...I don't really have time to read what I wrote then, but I have read a good many reviews of it since then and it seems that the major argument people advance against him is that the societies he looks at are too removed from modernity to be compelling examples of his thesis. The latter is, basically, that we will ignore impending environmental peril which will result in the collapse of our society and ecosystem, even if it could be halted, if it isn't in the immediate self interest of the elites of the society. After reading all the reports about how certain it was that New Orleans would be destroyed if a fairly statistically probable weather event occurred, it seems clear that Diamond has his best example for the intro to the paperback. This one even has a gut wrenching aftermath.
There are some times when it really sucks to be right.
What company did these guys run?
To continue my recent splurge in postings, here is a link to an AP story that should have appeared two years ago--or at least before the last election. The story is titled "Rhetoric Not Matching Reality," but I think the clever fellow who put up the story on the web had a better title, found in the link itself, "Katrina Happy Talk." The gist of the piece lies in happy talk that we've all been fed for four years.
Four years, going on five of a constant refrain that goes something like this: we know with absolute certainty what we are doing, but it is too complicated for you to understand. Some people might be trying to call foul and make you think there is something we are wrong about, but those people are just ____. You should ignore those critics, those cynics, and just be patient; the thing we said was going to happen is happening--in fact it has already happened! The people out there, the people who control the filter, just haven't shown it to you. Just wait...or forget about it and LOOK OVER THERE!
Actually this is where the piece could be more reflective because there is a reason that the rhetoric and reality are only now beginning to part ways. What Lippmann refers to as the divide between "the world outside" and "the pictures in our heads;" what Galbraith, speaking of "conventional wisdom" called "the relations between events and the ideas that interpret them;" what Marxists have been calling the difference between ideology and material reality - each of them no longer depend on a clear connection with the everyday experience of people on the ground. In each of these theories there was an assumption, as Galbraith puts it,
In some ways there is a charming faith here, a holdover from the progressive era, that says that people can see reality for what it is, unmediated. I am being reductive of course, but for the most part there is a belief that once people see things as they are, rather than as they thought they would be, things will change. But the fact is that few people have any access to the "reality" which the president talks about except through various mediators. The AP and their ilk--the fourth estate, as it were--are partially responsible for this misrepresentation of reality.
As are what communication effects scholars have called "opinion leaders" which we can recognize in the columnists and opinion leaders who also populate the media and interpret events for us, regardless of whether we've seen the "news" and the opinion leaders that we run into in church, in the workplace, and, now, on the internet, who help us selectively perceive and retain certain facts to keep our worldview stable. This is not just a top down process as we all participate in our own delusion: it keeps the cognitive dissonance to a minimum.
In other words, for many of us, Bush's rhetoric rarely matches the reality we are looking at. This is just the latest bungle in a series of boondoggles. The difference this time is that, unlike things like the economy and WMDs and Iraqi insurgents, the media is actually less able to play the role of mediator. Not because they aren't still selecting items for us, but because we KNOW what we're looking at. It doesn't take any careful study to see an absence of any leadership for five days, a descent into chaos, and no one in a high ranking level willing to do the two things we expect to see when something like this happens: no one is saying "Oh shit!" and no one is saying "Move your ass!" We didn't need anyone to explain that to us. And when people tried to "catapult the propaganda," as Bush has said, it just landed at our feet, stinking like the bullshit that it was. In this regard the story is right about what has happened in this instance on a public level, but that is not the Conventional Wisdom that has been challenged.
When leaders from the federal level did appear they seemed completely disconnected from any reality we'd been seeing. The echo chamber online was doing its level best to say that the problem was still the liberal media, out to get president bush, showing only the bad stuff, not blaming the black folks enough for the chaos. But the pres and Co. did not have this to fall back on, instead they tried to invoke the "cushion" that has insulated them from any blame for four years. This is where the conventional wisdom has been blown out of the water. (Or God help us it better have!)
The Conventional Wisdom is that being president is hard work and this guy is doing his best in the circumstances. To add to the line we've heard for four years, the moment before the statement above was made, something catastrophic has happened that is a holdover from a former time or is totally new and thus completely unpredicted. The way that the cusion works is that we are led to believe that it should inspire confidence that they now have a handle on things, even though yesterday something really bad happened for which they are not to blame.
Too abstract? Okay how about 9/11. Bush is not to blame even if he was informed about terrorist threats but didn't do much about it; even if he was on vacation for a full month beforehand; even if the only actions he had been taking was making bombing runs on Iraq and trying to figure out how to get in a conflict there; etc. this was unexpected and the last president didn't do enough to let him know about the problem or to fix it. It wasn't expected, he can't be blamed--but he's working with the situation on the ground now, he knows what's up, give him a chance and he'll fix the problem.
Iraq war--no WMDs? Well we didn't know, we were working with what we had--who could have predicted that he didn't have any! Even the last president thought they were there. Everyone thought they were there...
The same thing happened over and over again and every time we were supposed to believe it was just a litle bit worse than they thought or something unpredictable happened that threw the whole thing off kilter and it just went to shit.
And now, from the Mr. Burns over at homeland security we have this,
They really have a lot of nerve if they think it gets them in the clear. But why shouldn't they. It is the same strategy that they have used before and it has worked like a charm. Anyone who tries to criticize them is dismissed as crying sour grapes and being the politically motivated wolves their painted to be.
They did the best they could under the circumstances. This, evidently, is enough to get you re-elected in this country. Well fuck that.
If the conventional wisdom in this country has changed, if the reality really has burst through the rhetoric like those levees in New Orleans, the reality isn't that they are liars--though they may be that--it is that they are grossly incompetent and that is the message they have been telling us all along.
I can only imagine if I worked for someone and for four years straight almost every task I tried to accomplish was overcome with some unforseen event; if every time I came back and said, "gee, boss, I tried real hard but my intelligence was wrong...I didn't see that coming--but I am on the case now, trust me." I would be fired. I would be looking for work without a recommendation. And I would certainly not be given any more responsibility.
The last four years the fear has been ratcheted up beyond anything we've ever known and the promise made was, "we will protect you." That is why we've surrendered our freedoms and civil liberties; its why we've watched as we took on an elective, preemptive war; it is why we sat idly by as the president was given power to make these decisions without congressional approval. We will protect you.
As much as they claim to be promoting independence and freedom, this has been the message we were supposed to hear. And ultimately, whether it was protection from terrorists or married homosexuals, this administration vowed to protect this country.
Which is why this was such a disconnect from the rhetoric. It has already been pointed out that Bush cut his vacation short last year in order to fly into washington to stop one woman's feeding tube from being removed. That was ridiculous. But at least there was some hustle. For this, nothing. He plays the guitar while New Orleans drowns.
If you give a fuck about your citizens, you hustle. You don't make excuses and hedge your bets and wait and see; you don't blame the mayor of one town in the south because the Homeland security excuse of a Federal Emergency Management Agency, which you castrated two years ago because you don't believe in those sorts of hand outs, failed to respond for four days to a multistate catastrophe. You don't dish out platitudes and pablum and put on your shit eating grin and hope you can get by on that frat boy charm. People have died. We want to see repentance. We want to see tears of apology. We want begging for forgiveness. We want cupcakes and sno cones for every fucking kid on the gulf coast every day for a year served in their brand new schools with well trained teachers. We want admission that, perhaps, getting a blow job is less damaging to the office of the presidency than making excuses for standing by while a major city explodes into chaos, while people dehydrate, starve, run out of oxygen and insulin and still you stand by because someone else was supposed to be taking care of this. If that's the case--FIRE THEM ALL and get your ass in gear. You work for us motherfucker!
That is what should be happening. That is what we should see tomorrow morning. WE are in charge here. The state, the government answers to US. We don't need to stand for excuses and empty promises. If you aren't there to protect us, to organize the things that we can't do ourselves, then we don't need you...but that is exactly what you wanted us to think. Drown the federal government in a bathtub, eh, Norquist. Act completely incompetent until we come to realize that there are only a couple of things the state is good for and we can't even depend on you for that. Back to the wild west, to the glory days of brutal, no holds barred capitalism. Let the market decides who lives and who dies--you'll be safe on your ranches and in your mansions and on your private islands. Well news flash, assholes. I am a peaceful person most days, but before that happens, mark my words, there will be a Thermidor to your little conservative revolution. If the state goes down, you guys are going with it.
Hopefully it won't come to that. Some people are already seeing the misguided direction that this revolution has steered the country. It is a rare day that I agree with David Brooks, but for once I think he's right on:
or maybe I just hope he is. Americans, you've already disappointed me once this week and several times this year: give me just a little satisfaction. Open up your windows...
Four years, going on five of a constant refrain that goes something like this: we know with absolute certainty what we are doing, but it is too complicated for you to understand. Some people might be trying to call foul and make you think there is something we are wrong about, but those people are just ____. You should ignore those critics, those cynics, and just be patient; the thing we said was going to happen is happening--in fact it has already happened! The people out there, the people who control the filter, just haven't shown it to you. Just wait...or forget about it and LOOK OVER THERE!
Actually this is where the piece could be more reflective because there is a reason that the rhetoric and reality are only now beginning to part ways. What Lippmann refers to as the divide between "the world outside" and "the pictures in our heads;" what Galbraith, speaking of "conventional wisdom" called "the relations between events and the ideas that interpret them;" what Marxists have been calling the difference between ideology and material reality - each of them no longer depend on a clear connection with the everyday experience of people on the ground. In each of these theories there was an assumption, as Galbraith puts it,
"the enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events [. . . .] while the world moves on, the conventional wisdom is always in danger of obsolescence. This is not immediatly fatal. The fatal blow to conventional wisdom comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palapably inapplicable. This, sooner or later, must be the fate of ideas which have lost their relation to the world.
In some ways there is a charming faith here, a holdover from the progressive era, that says that people can see reality for what it is, unmediated. I am being reductive of course, but for the most part there is a belief that once people see things as they are, rather than as they thought they would be, things will change. But the fact is that few people have any access to the "reality" which the president talks about except through various mediators. The AP and their ilk--the fourth estate, as it were--are partially responsible for this misrepresentation of reality.
As are what communication effects scholars have called "opinion leaders" which we can recognize in the columnists and opinion leaders who also populate the media and interpret events for us, regardless of whether we've seen the "news" and the opinion leaders that we run into in church, in the workplace, and, now, on the internet, who help us selectively perceive and retain certain facts to keep our worldview stable. This is not just a top down process as we all participate in our own delusion: it keeps the cognitive dissonance to a minimum.
In other words, for many of us, Bush's rhetoric rarely matches the reality we are looking at. This is just the latest bungle in a series of boondoggles. The difference this time is that, unlike things like the economy and WMDs and Iraqi insurgents, the media is actually less able to play the role of mediator. Not because they aren't still selecting items for us, but because we KNOW what we're looking at. It doesn't take any careful study to see an absence of any leadership for five days, a descent into chaos, and no one in a high ranking level willing to do the two things we expect to see when something like this happens: no one is saying "Oh shit!" and no one is saying "Move your ass!" We didn't need anyone to explain that to us. And when people tried to "catapult the propaganda," as Bush has said, it just landed at our feet, stinking like the bullshit that it was. In this regard the story is right about what has happened in this instance on a public level, but that is not the Conventional Wisdom that has been challenged.
When leaders from the federal level did appear they seemed completely disconnected from any reality we'd been seeing. The echo chamber online was doing its level best to say that the problem was still the liberal media, out to get president bush, showing only the bad stuff, not blaming the black folks enough for the chaos. But the pres and Co. did not have this to fall back on, instead they tried to invoke the "cushion" that has insulated them from any blame for four years. This is where the conventional wisdom has been blown out of the water. (Or God help us it better have!)
The Conventional Wisdom is that being president is hard work and this guy is doing his best in the circumstances. To add to the line we've heard for four years, the moment before the statement above was made, something catastrophic has happened that is a holdover from a former time or is totally new and thus completely unpredicted. The way that the cusion works is that we are led to believe that it should inspire confidence that they now have a handle on things, even though yesterday something really bad happened for which they are not to blame.
Too abstract? Okay how about 9/11. Bush is not to blame even if he was informed about terrorist threats but didn't do much about it; even if he was on vacation for a full month beforehand; even if the only actions he had been taking was making bombing runs on Iraq and trying to figure out how to get in a conflict there; etc. this was unexpected and the last president didn't do enough to let him know about the problem or to fix it. It wasn't expected, he can't be blamed--but he's working with the situation on the ground now, he knows what's up, give him a chance and he'll fix the problem.
Iraq war--no WMDs? Well we didn't know, we were working with what we had--who could have predicted that he didn't have any! Even the last president thought they were there. Everyone thought they were there...
The same thing happened over and over again and every time we were supposed to believe it was just a litle bit worse than they thought or something unpredictable happened that threw the whole thing off kilter and it just went to shit.
And now, from the Mr. Burns over at homeland security we have this,
Defending the administration’s response, Chertoff said the double-barreled hit
taken by the New Orleans area — the hurricane, and the breaching of the city’s
levees — is what has complicated the government’s response. “We were prepared
for one catastrophe,” Chertoff said. “The second catastrophe, frankly, added a
level of challenge that no one has seen before.”
They really have a lot of nerve if they think it gets them in the clear. But why shouldn't they. It is the same strategy that they have used before and it has worked like a charm. Anyone who tries to criticize them is dismissed as crying sour grapes and being the politically motivated wolves their painted to be.
They did the best they could under the circumstances. This, evidently, is enough to get you re-elected in this country. Well fuck that.
If the conventional wisdom in this country has changed, if the reality really has burst through the rhetoric like those levees in New Orleans, the reality isn't that they are liars--though they may be that--it is that they are grossly incompetent and that is the message they have been telling us all along.
I can only imagine if I worked for someone and for four years straight almost every task I tried to accomplish was overcome with some unforseen event; if every time I came back and said, "gee, boss, I tried real hard but my intelligence was wrong...I didn't see that coming--but I am on the case now, trust me." I would be fired. I would be looking for work without a recommendation. And I would certainly not be given any more responsibility.
The last four years the fear has been ratcheted up beyond anything we've ever known and the promise made was, "we will protect you." That is why we've surrendered our freedoms and civil liberties; its why we've watched as we took on an elective, preemptive war; it is why we sat idly by as the president was given power to make these decisions without congressional approval. We will protect you.
As much as they claim to be promoting independence and freedom, this has been the message we were supposed to hear. And ultimately, whether it was protection from terrorists or married homosexuals, this administration vowed to protect this country.
Which is why this was such a disconnect from the rhetoric. It has already been pointed out that Bush cut his vacation short last year in order to fly into washington to stop one woman's feeding tube from being removed. That was ridiculous. But at least there was some hustle. For this, nothing. He plays the guitar while New Orleans drowns.
If you give a fuck about your citizens, you hustle. You don't make excuses and hedge your bets and wait and see; you don't blame the mayor of one town in the south because the Homeland security excuse of a Federal Emergency Management Agency, which you castrated two years ago because you don't believe in those sorts of hand outs, failed to respond for four days to a multistate catastrophe. You don't dish out platitudes and pablum and put on your shit eating grin and hope you can get by on that frat boy charm. People have died. We want to see repentance. We want to see tears of apology. We want begging for forgiveness. We want cupcakes and sno cones for every fucking kid on the gulf coast every day for a year served in their brand new schools with well trained teachers. We want admission that, perhaps, getting a blow job is less damaging to the office of the presidency than making excuses for standing by while a major city explodes into chaos, while people dehydrate, starve, run out of oxygen and insulin and still you stand by because someone else was supposed to be taking care of this. If that's the case--FIRE THEM ALL and get your ass in gear. You work for us motherfucker!
That is what should be happening. That is what we should see tomorrow morning. WE are in charge here. The state, the government answers to US. We don't need to stand for excuses and empty promises. If you aren't there to protect us, to organize the things that we can't do ourselves, then we don't need you...but that is exactly what you wanted us to think. Drown the federal government in a bathtub, eh, Norquist. Act completely incompetent until we come to realize that there are only a couple of things the state is good for and we can't even depend on you for that. Back to the wild west, to the glory days of brutal, no holds barred capitalism. Let the market decides who lives and who dies--you'll be safe on your ranches and in your mansions and on your private islands. Well news flash, assholes. I am a peaceful person most days, but before that happens, mark my words, there will be a Thermidor to your little conservative revolution. If the state goes down, you guys are going with it.
Hopefully it won't come to that. Some people are already seeing the misguided direction that this revolution has steered the country. It is a rare day that I agree with David Brooks, but for once I think he's right on:
Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of
the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are
entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P.
nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for
McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that
the political culture is about to undergo some big change.We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.
or maybe I just hope he is. Americans, you've already disappointed me once this week and several times this year: give me just a little satisfaction. Open up your windows...
Friday, September 02, 2005
Bush: 'Results are not acceptable'e
No shit, sherlock.
His bumbling attempt at a reassuring press conference made him look like a scared kid. He keeps talking about food and water "on its way." If people weren't dying and killing each other, this sort of incompetence would be farcical. You need supplies to a region fast: okay let's send them by BOAT! Great idea! Like it's the 19th-frigging-century! He has flown back and forth around the country over the past few days: you'd think it would occur to him--or someone--that, perhaps, a faster mode of transport might be necessary, something that could bring the supplies from the other side of the country, from all sides of the country in a matter of hours instead of days. Have there been any inventions in the past century that might improve upon the speed of the "floatilla?" Perhaps the "truck" or the "airplane" might be more efficient for speeding immediate help to the region, with reinforcements coming by sea. Jeez a wagon train from west Texas would be there by now! My only conclusion can be that the reason we have no airplanes or trucks filled with supplies and troops to get to them is that they are all tied up in a quagmire thousands of miles away. This gives me absolutely no confidence in the federal government or in the leadership of this president. It also makes me think that the best course of action is to make sure if something like this happens here I am ready to take "personal responsibility" myself. When I go to sleep wondering how I could defend my apartment building from looters it is a sad day for American society--from top to bottom--if we can even venture to call something as rotton and disfunctional as what is happening in New Orleans "society."
update...reporters loosing their cool--finally!
His bumbling attempt at a reassuring press conference made him look like a scared kid. He keeps talking about food and water "on its way." If people weren't dying and killing each other, this sort of incompetence would be farcical. You need supplies to a region fast: okay let's send them by BOAT! Great idea! Like it's the 19th-frigging-century! He has flown back and forth around the country over the past few days: you'd think it would occur to him--or someone--that, perhaps, a faster mode of transport might be necessary, something that could bring the supplies from the other side of the country, from all sides of the country in a matter of hours instead of days. Have there been any inventions in the past century that might improve upon the speed of the "floatilla?" Perhaps the "truck" or the "airplane" might be more efficient for speeding immediate help to the region, with reinforcements coming by sea. Jeez a wagon train from west Texas would be there by now! My only conclusion can be that the reason we have no airplanes or trucks filled with supplies and troops to get to them is that they are all tied up in a quagmire thousands of miles away. This gives me absolutely no confidence in the federal government or in the leadership of this president. It also makes me think that the best course of action is to make sure if something like this happens here I am ready to take "personal responsibility" myself. When I go to sleep wondering how I could defend my apartment building from looters it is a sad day for American society--from top to bottom--if we can even venture to call something as rotton and disfunctional as what is happening in New Orleans "society."
update...reporters loosing their cool--finally!
judicial "huh?"
Ok so last night I am reading this article in Mother Jones and I start to think that maybe the critics of "judicial activism" have a point. The article is about a group of lawyers attempting to sue gun manufacturers for not doing enough to stop the sale of guns that are eventually used for criminal purposes. The lawsuit if being filed in New York and the claim is that since New York has such tight gun sale laws, the only way these guns are getting into the city is from people smugling them in after buying large quantities in the south Eastern US. Some of their data...
"According to one widely cited study published by the Clinton administration in 2000, just 1.2 percent of dealers accounted for more than 57 percent of the guns used in crimes nationwide. If gun companies stopped their products from getting into the hands of such dealers, far fewer guns would flow into the local black markets—leading, it's hoped, to a commensurate drop in violent crime."
So basically they are asking the gun companies to regulate themselves and take social responsibility. This hardly seems like a tall order--except that it involves a combination of the second amendment and an interference in a major national industry so inevitably there are going to be some people who don't approve. Still, it seems like they have a fairly legitimate case for some sort of policy change and it seems like it is sort of sketchy to go about it through lawsuits instead of trying to get some public approval for the measure. This seems to be a flaw in some of the thinking around things like gay marriage and abortion. Though I see their point and I agree with the ideas, if you go through the courts it seems a very shallow victory in that it isn't done with public support. This makes getting it overturned more likely and makes the winning side at any one time too smug to be forced into a full argument or compromise with their critics. On the other hand, there is a reason the judiciary is supposed to be independent of public pressure and, as many point out, it is likely that segregation would still be with us were it not for the way it was dealt with by the court.
In any event, I was really thinking about this for a few minutes, which is longer than I have for a while, and it seemed like there was certainly something practical, if not ethical, that trying to accomplish things legislatively recommended. Then I woke up this morning and, besides more harrowing tales of New Orleans and the utter incompetence of the federal government in restoring order (disgraceful and distrubing to say the least) I also heard on the local NPR station and read in the WaPo Express a little story about one of the groups who is working on this issue--though almost always from a rigth wing perspective--Judicial Watch. The story leads with this
A conservative legal group sued the town of Herndon yesterday in an attempt to block an official site where day laborers can wait to be hired, saying the plan would attract immigrants who are in the country illegally.
So, just to recap, the issue that groups like Judicial Watch claim to be dealing with is activist legal arguments that avoid being put to a public forum--though their site says something about abuse of political power in general which makes it kind of confusing that they call themselves "judicial" watch and, perhaps, a bit clearer what their true goal is: not objective problems with the government or the legal system but a bludgeon for when things don't go their way. And this is just what they are doing.
The situation in Herndon is far from settled. If I understand it, the town council hadn't yet made a decision and, as of August 17 had put the decision on hold. So basically, this group--which isn't based in Herndon and has no stake in the Herdon situation--is coming in from the outside to "legislate from the bench" by keeping the legislation from passing via a lawsuit. They are, in other words, forgoing public discussion in order to force through a judicial solution. I thought that was what "Judicial Watch" was supposed to be against. If they would simply claim that they are a bunch of right wingers who have issues with immigration and anything remotely liberal and they will do anything, by any means to prevent it, then I guess they would be at least justified. But doing this just makes them look like hypocrites.
The previous article in the WaPo said that the town council meeting meant to decide this two weeks ago brought in over 150 people to speak on the issue--from both sides. This was, it seems to me, a rare moment of civic engagement and an opportunity to really try to deal with a complex problem through discussion and debate. This has been sorely lacking in our country lately, even if the divisive, rhetoric polarized rhetoric that probably ensued is pretty much par for the course. But it was still in process and it is really low for these meddling right wingers to decide they would better serve the population than anyone actually living there. Certainly they found six opponents of the bill to be the names on the lawsuit, but that is a contrived way of going about this--even for the six opponents. Furthermore, it makes me think that the lawyers in NY might as well go ahead with their lawsuit because if they don't, someone else will.
Some days I just wonder if this country is, for lack of a better word, fucked. If I didn't live here and didn't care, I'd just throw up my arms, make a cynical joke and laugh it off. Unfortunately, I don't have that luxery. But what to do? There are such powerful forces polarizing every issue from outside and using blunt categorical imperatives that it doesn't seem to matter whether we have a vibrant civil society because the well is already poisoned. Discussion in a community cannot happen because we have to think about what Charlton Heston and Martin Sheen would like us to do or what Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh might recommend or what the founding fathers or Karl Marx really meant when they said "..." It is no wonder people avoid politics. It is the most thankless subject one can ponder, the results are almost always disappointing to someone, and getting to that disappointment can sometimes take the better part of one's life. Sounds like a lot of fun and it makes it easy to see why fascism is so attractive--which, perhaps, answers the question I asked at the end of my post yesterday...
"According to one widely cited study published by the Clinton administration in 2000, just 1.2 percent of dealers accounted for more than 57 percent of the guns used in crimes nationwide. If gun companies stopped their products from getting into the hands of such dealers, far fewer guns would flow into the local black markets—leading, it's hoped, to a commensurate drop in violent crime."
So basically they are asking the gun companies to regulate themselves and take social responsibility. This hardly seems like a tall order--except that it involves a combination of the second amendment and an interference in a major national industry so inevitably there are going to be some people who don't approve. Still, it seems like they have a fairly legitimate case for some sort of policy change and it seems like it is sort of sketchy to go about it through lawsuits instead of trying to get some public approval for the measure. This seems to be a flaw in some of the thinking around things like gay marriage and abortion. Though I see their point and I agree with the ideas, if you go through the courts it seems a very shallow victory in that it isn't done with public support. This makes getting it overturned more likely and makes the winning side at any one time too smug to be forced into a full argument or compromise with their critics. On the other hand, there is a reason the judiciary is supposed to be independent of public pressure and, as many point out, it is likely that segregation would still be with us were it not for the way it was dealt with by the court.
In any event, I was really thinking about this for a few minutes, which is longer than I have for a while, and it seemed like there was certainly something practical, if not ethical, that trying to accomplish things legislatively recommended. Then I woke up this morning and, besides more harrowing tales of New Orleans and the utter incompetence of the federal government in restoring order (disgraceful and distrubing to say the least) I also heard on the local NPR station and read in the WaPo Express a little story about one of the groups who is working on this issue--though almost always from a rigth wing perspective--Judicial Watch. The story leads with this
A conservative legal group sued the town of Herndon yesterday in an attempt to block an official site where day laborers can wait to be hired, saying the plan would attract immigrants who are in the country illegally.
So, just to recap, the issue that groups like Judicial Watch claim to be dealing with is activist legal arguments that avoid being put to a public forum--though their site says something about abuse of political power in general which makes it kind of confusing that they call themselves "judicial" watch and, perhaps, a bit clearer what their true goal is: not objective problems with the government or the legal system but a bludgeon for when things don't go their way. And this is just what they are doing.
The situation in Herndon is far from settled. If I understand it, the town council hadn't yet made a decision and, as of August 17 had put the decision on hold. So basically, this group--which isn't based in Herndon and has no stake in the Herdon situation--is coming in from the outside to "legislate from the bench" by keeping the legislation from passing via a lawsuit. They are, in other words, forgoing public discussion in order to force through a judicial solution. I thought that was what "Judicial Watch" was supposed to be against. If they would simply claim that they are a bunch of right wingers who have issues with immigration and anything remotely liberal and they will do anything, by any means to prevent it, then I guess they would be at least justified. But doing this just makes them look like hypocrites.
The previous article in the WaPo said that the town council meeting meant to decide this two weeks ago brought in over 150 people to speak on the issue--from both sides. This was, it seems to me, a rare moment of civic engagement and an opportunity to really try to deal with a complex problem through discussion and debate. This has been sorely lacking in our country lately, even if the divisive, rhetoric polarized rhetoric that probably ensued is pretty much par for the course. But it was still in process and it is really low for these meddling right wingers to decide they would better serve the population than anyone actually living there. Certainly they found six opponents of the bill to be the names on the lawsuit, but that is a contrived way of going about this--even for the six opponents. Furthermore, it makes me think that the lawyers in NY might as well go ahead with their lawsuit because if they don't, someone else will.
Some days I just wonder if this country is, for lack of a better word, fucked. If I didn't live here and didn't care, I'd just throw up my arms, make a cynical joke and laugh it off. Unfortunately, I don't have that luxery. But what to do? There are such powerful forces polarizing every issue from outside and using blunt categorical imperatives that it doesn't seem to matter whether we have a vibrant civil society because the well is already poisoned. Discussion in a community cannot happen because we have to think about what Charlton Heston and Martin Sheen would like us to do or what Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh might recommend or what the founding fathers or Karl Marx really meant when they said "..." It is no wonder people avoid politics. It is the most thankless subject one can ponder, the results are almost always disappointing to someone, and getting to that disappointment can sometimes take the better part of one's life. Sounds like a lot of fun and it makes it easy to see why fascism is so attractive--which, perhaps, answers the question I asked at the end of my post yesterday...
Thursday, September 01, 2005
CNN.com - Gunmen target medical convoy - Sep 1, 2005
Curiel and his National Guard escorts, were returning to the hospital after
dropping off patients at nearby Tulane Medical Center, when someone started
shooting at their convoy of Humvees."We were coming in from a parking deck at Tulane Medical Center, and a guy in a white shirt started firing at us," Curiel said. "The National Guard (troops), wearing flak jackets, tried to get a bead on this guy. "
The incident happened around 11:30 a.m. (12:30 p.m. ET).
About an hour later, another gunman opened fire at the back of Charity Hospital.
This is abhorrent. It is so disturbing to see the complete brakdown of social norms in just three short days. I can understand looting for food and even looting empty electronics stores--not that I would condone the latter, but I would expect some of that to happen. But shooting at people trying to evacuate a hospital! WTF?! What kind of unhinge group of people would do this. It really does show how fragile society can be.
Along these lines, it has been interesting to hear the reports of how devastating (to use a word on everyone's lips) a blow this will be to the US economy as a whole. It is a huge port and, as is common in Modern life, its destruction will have very real effects on people thousands of miles away. That my gas and food prices depend on the port in New Orleans may seem to make sense in the truncated style of explanation provided by cable news and the Associated Press, it really is baffling how interconnected we can all be.
This makes not only the breakdown of society in New Orleans so disappointing--because it points to the kind of agressive impulse Freud said exists in all of us--but it also makes the argument that seems to be emerging on cable news and among the knee jerk libertarians and right wing hypocrites (the ones who want to pay to rebuild Iraq but not NO) seem all the more ridiculous--as well as making their claims of Robinson Crusoe individualism seem trite and confused. First there is the evidence that is emerging from a variety of sources that officials in New Orleans have known something like the current disaster was a possibility for at least three years. Environmental issues (as discussed in this article from Scientific American from Oct. 2001-available for free as a result of the catastrophe but maybe not for long) have led to perfect storm of issues--from the foundering levees to the disintegrating delta that is made worse by the levees holding back the sediment that would contribute to rebuiling the delta and marshlands to the sinking city of New Orleans and rising ocean levels as a result of global warming, melting ice caps, etc.--which led the author of the this SA article to lead with the statement: "If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water." Eerie stuff. On the political front of this issue is the fact that money was not given to rebuild some of this foundering infrastructure and their budget was cut by the Bush administration, who, instead, sent the money (and the Louisiana National Guard along with its specialized equipment) to fight the war in Iraq, leading to the very nasty joke:
q: what is the difference between new orleans and Baghdad?
a: The Louisiana National Guard is protecting Baghdad.
All of this seems to make the Bush administration at least partially responsible for this disaster--even though the real issue seems to be that people were living on borrowed time in the Delta to begin with. Nevertheless, it is certain that Democrats will blunder their way through trying to hold Bush politically responsible, Bush will take absolutely no responsiblity and no one will have their mind changed.
Second, already on the Alternet article linked above, as well as on most of the other sites I've linked, the argument about the role that the federal government should have in this situation--and that they should have had before the hurrican--seems to be filled with far more heat than light. The Central Question seems to be whether the "taxpayers" money should have been used to fix the levees and/or help repair and rebuild the city after the disaster. First off, it is so interesting that almost all of these arguments do not include the inhabitants of New Orleans as members of the category "taxpayers." In setting up the "Us vs. Them" dichotomy, it is important to separate the Other in order to dismiss their claims. Thus irregardless of the taxes the people or businesses in New Orleans pay or the additional money they contribute to the commerce of the nation, they become the equivalent of the Reagan era "welfare mother" trying to milk the government for money.
I do see some of the logic of these arguments as they have been made before by people on the Left. Mike Davis, who wrote a fantastic account of the politics of working class america called prisoners of the american dream, is now an urban studies prof and has written extensively about Los Angeles and southern California politics and culture. In his book Ecology of Fear, he discusses, among other things, the different narratives that circulate around disasters in the Los Angeles area. He looks at two different types of fires that happened at relatively the same time in the early 1990s: several inner city slums burnt down and wildfires engulfed the wealthy mansions on the hills near Los Angeles. The aspect of the coverage that entrigues him--and is intriguing to me if his characterization of it is accurate--is that the inner city victims of run down buildings whose slum lords don't keep those buildings up to fire safety codes are depicted in the press as somehow responsible for their own problems and not deserving of aid. On the other hand, the wealthy owners of mansions chose to live in fire prone areas, expected local fire departments to come up with the technology to save their homes, and then denied those fire departments the tax money they needed to do so, yet these individuals were depected in the press as being the victims of a natural disaster beyond their control and thus should be aided by FEMA--which they were, several times.
Assessment of Davis is not that different than the right wingers above on some level, though it is a bit more nuanced. He says that if people choose to rebuild in disaster prone areas, they should be forced to pay a higher insurance premium. At this point, almost ten years after the book was written, this is surely happening. I don't recall what he says about FEMA or the federal govt's role in rebuilding, but I think he would just add that the same money that might go into fixing levees and improving response to wildfires would do even more good if applied to creating good public housing. The former activities are, after all, basically fighting the response of nature to human activity: typically, this is a losing battle.
Still, the situation in New Orleans seems to me an entirely different situation than when a hurricane hits places like the Outer Banks. The Outer Banks is basically a tourist destination, though people do live there, while New Orleans is an essential hub of culture, commerce and industry. It feels dirty for me to distinguish places in this capitalist framework, but since we are talking about federal money, it seems easiest to use their own logic about what is important in the country. And, though it seems that more commentators are willing to voice some vague animosity to FEMA helping people rebuild in bad locations, it only seems to be happening because unlike in California and the Outer Banks--where it is mostly rich white folks who get their mansions washed off the cliffs in mudslides, blown off the shores in Hurricanes, or burnt up in wildfires--New Orleans is a mixture of classes and races. Perhaps that is why this conversation is easier for the right wingers to take up--that and its going to cost A LOT more to fix what has just happened. And it is probably as good a time as any to ask some tough questions.
Though what is happening in New Orleans is more complex than this, it has been interesting to see the way a similar dynamic has been playing out in the coverage and discussion around Katrina. On the ABC chat rooms last night, a discussion began to focus on the looters and the rescue operation and the same comment kept coming up which was that the people of New Orleans knew this was coming but the ones who are still there didn't heed the warning, didn't get out and/or prepare themselves for an extensive period without food, electricity, etc. so it is basically their own fault; they are putting an unacceptable strain on the rescuers and any looting--even food and water--is unacceptable because they were irresponsible to begin with. It seems to overlook the fact that many of the people who got out were able to do so because they owned that ever so handy possession "a car" and/or were not living on such a tight budget that they could afford to stock up for the coming storm.
Race also played a part in these conversations since many of the images of looters on television were Black or African American (according to the posters--I wasn't watching: could be selective perception on the part of the viewers) , but there was a class element that seemed to take precedent (if we define class in terms of access to cars and money rather than relations to production). Of course these arguments, as I have noted before is the norm in chatrooms, led others to take a position on the polar opposite, saying that the people looting were doing so out of desparation and only stayed because they couldn't get out.
I would like to think the best of people as well, but judging from the events going on right now, it is within the realm of possibility that there were a number of people--whatever their race or class--who decided to stick around to take advantage of the chaos. In this case, I would point back to the aggressive tendency mentioned by Freud, the way that it is inhibited by civilization, and turn to President Bush's response to the looting this morning which was to ask people to "take personal responsibility." This is where the right wing obsession with the individual (a holdover, I am convinced of a similar left wing tendency in the 1960s) looks both quaint and confused. The fact of the matter is that "personal responsiblity" means almost the opposite of what Bush is asking for, but he is so hamstrung by his own ideology that he can't articulate the command he is trying to. The looters, after all, are taking "personal responsibility" just in a socially unacceptable way. In fact, the command to take "personal responsibility" in this context seems much more like something Ayn Rand or Wyatt Earp or Nietzsche would recommend. In that case, what people in New Orleans should do is band together, get some guns and people to protect you. Predictably, this is just the recommendation that comes from the National Review's Jonah Goldberg via the Wall Street Journal's corner (hat tip Sivacracy)
ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg] I think it's time to face
facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the
Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself
now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While
you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not
expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell
the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate
without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of
gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared. Posted at 10:05 AM
Granted I like this argument better than the argument noted by Andrew Sullivan today, made by a Christian Conservative on the Repent America website, which, like Falwell et. al. on 9/11, justifies the catastrophe in terms of punishment from god:
"Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed
a wicked city," stated Repent America director Michael Marcavage. "From 'Girls
Gone Wild' to 'Southern Decadence,' New Orleans was a city that had its doors
wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation may a city full
of righteousness emerge," he continued.
At least the description of the world as basically the wild west gives you some hope of agency, some way of taking "personal responsibility." But the latter is obviously not what Bush means. He is obviously asking them to overlook their hardship, maybe even blame themselves a bit (rather than justifying looting as "getting back at society" which several sources have noted is a common refrain--though often without looking too deeply at what those ails might be or assessing whether they might be justified). He is asking them, in short, to "love their neighbors" which is the refrain Freud links to the socializing command of the state. It is, as he calls it, (direct quote someday...) the antithesis of individualism. It is asking people to subject themselves to society and to work for its betterment even if it means a slight restriction of their own freedom in exchange for the security that society provides.
Granted, in this case, the failure of society is already in evidence and so the call is actually meant to stave off any further disruption. There is little, however, that Bush can offer in the way of renewing security in the very short term, so he has to rely on some value that should be socialized into us. It is and if he had the right words he might activate it--assuming, of course, that anyone in New Orleans has any way of hearing news, which is a big IF. But unfortunately, Bush and the right wingers rely more on this belief that individual responsibility is something that is anything but an outgrowth of social responsibility, that the idea of "responsibility" itself is only possible in terms of society if it is to mean anything other than a primitive battle for one's own interests against any odds, in the face of any consequences. This is, of course, the dillemma of modern society. We have more personal freedom but for that freedom to mean anything or to be anything other than corrosive to our neighbors, it is better that we restrain it in some way. The same could be said of our tax money: modern society has made enormous fortunes possible, but all of this was based not only on personal initiative but the collective efforts of hundreds of millions of people and massive government infrastructure and security projects. The call to reduce taxes or government programs must take into account the positive externalities (as economists might call them) as well as the negative. And when you can't evacuate a hospital because of snipers--not in Baghdad, but New Orleans--there doesn't seem to be much argument about which way we should go on this. Hold the ideology, thanks, I'll take a public works project.
This leads me to wonder if Bush's second term will consist of the final contradiction to his 2000 campaign. We know environmental concerns have never figured into his agenda so the elimination of that was foregone. But he also said he wasn't into nation building. Though it is arguable how much building is actually going on in Iraq, it is certain that expenditures are high and, if nothing else, he has been forced to move more towards the nation building type of president. Still, with tax cuts for the rich and various forms of deficit spending meant to starve the federal government to that programs can be cut out of desparation, he has held strong to his stubbornly ideological views on the role of the domestic state.
Enter Katrina. Her damage has been to three "Red States." And the sympathy the collective national "We" have for their catastrophe leads us to identify with them and watch carefully what Bush will do. What we have here is a devastated city that is, right now, a cornerstone of the US economy; we have hundreds of thousands of people who do not have homes and whose livelihoods are under at least eight feet of water and will be for a matter of months. It will take, in the words of the president, "years" to rebuild and it is already evident that he is going to do all that he can since he stopped his vacation to retain his legitimacy and his party's authority. So the question arises: will he put these people to work on rebuilding their own city or will he leave it to private contractors and keep those folks on permanent unemployment? Either way there is a huge entitlement program and a government funded reconstruction. It is quite a pickle. He has already tried to best FDR in terms of protecting freedom and liberty, associating himself, even this week, with WWII; now he may end up being forced into being an FDR knockoff by creating some form of a WPA for the 21st century. Oh how the Republicans would howl! But what sort of politician would basically tell them to shove off? ON second thought, there is the division between word and deed that Bush milks so well. He may very well claim to have programs in place to help these folks and never really do anything to help, dismissing criticism as sour grapes. In that event, we won't know anything for decades since our media and political environment prevents any sort of conversation that would actually reveal facts that we can actually agree on and discuss in their own terms.
A final note...I heard a rather interesting story on NPR today as I drove to lunch--Hugo Chavez has offered to send gas to the US. A brilliant political strategy on his part because he has the fuel to give, he ends up looking like a very powerful guy who can even help a coutry as powerful as the US, and when the Bush Administration inevitably refuses the offer, they will look like assholes. Which they are. This was another theme on message boards--an uninformed rant about how no one ever sends us help even though we send others aid. Most of them forget that we had to be embarassed into giving more than a paltry $15m for tsunami aid, we give less aid to foreign countries than we hurt their economies in subsidies and tarriffs, and we have refused to sign off on the UN proposal to reduce global poverty. The fact is that many countries are offering aid in money, medical assisstance, and fuel, but it is unlikely that the smug Bush administration will accept this aid because of the political message it sends to the world. In fact, many countries probably had to hedge on what or how loud they would offer in terms of help because it would risk insulting us. This is obviously part of Chavez's strategy as he was simultaneously criticizing Bush's failure to coordinate an adequate evacuation. This seems like a fair criticism to make. Bush was, after all, right next door (on vacation in Texas) just a few days ago. Lucky for us Clinton and Bush, Sr. will be taking over part of this effort. Foreign relations just isn't Bush's strong suit. Nor are domestic relations. really, he's only good at relating to the people he has to dinner or to his ranch. Lucky for the citizens of New Orleans they'll be bussed a few hundred miles closer, though they should know from Cindy Sheehan that just showing up doesn't insure you'll get in the door. How this guy ever got elected is beyond me.
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