A Bird in The Hand? Proverbs Show Differing Cultural Views

I just found this interesting item googling "A bird in the hand"--trying to find whether it was "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" or "a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand." Leaving aside the question of whether we should adopt the presumptive human's perspective or the bird's point of view, there is an interesting ambiguity and both sentences can be read to mean that that it's better to have a sure thing. (1) A bird in the hand has the value of two birds in the bush. (2) A bird in the bush would have twice it's actual value if it were in the hand. Modality rears it's fuzzy head.

The suprise in the article is that Chinese turn out to be much less risk averse than Americans, particularly when it comes to financial transactions. The explanation suggested is that the Chinese, with family networks to cushion them, can afford to take on risk whereas Americans can't. Once the initial shock wears off, it makes perfect sense: if you play without a net you can't afford to take risks.

We've been taught to imagine that the open frontier and the pioneer life, rugged individualism and self-reliance promote courage, but rugged individualists who can't rely on anyone but themselves can't afford to take risks.

USATODAY.com - Democrats' convention lineup emphasizes 'America's values'

"But even before the Democrats announced their featured speakers, the Republicans accused them of trying to paper over Kerry's liberal voting record.

'It will take an extreme makeover of John Kerry and the Democratic Party's rhetoric to make both presentable to Americans,' said Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke."

But does it have legs? And will it fly?

Keeping Hillary, Nancy Pelosi and the other usual suspects off the platform seems a little like cleaning up the streets, banishing the bums and prostitutes. Or like Dukakis' disasterous ride in the tank, or Dean's resolve to win the hearts and minds of guys in pickup trucks with guns and confederate flags. The idea of Democrats as latte-drinking elitists is so deeply entrinched that flag-waving and talk about traditional values could just dig Democrats further into the whole, making them look like patronizing fakes.

I do hope it works though.

But what are the alternatives? It's almost tempting to imagine Kerry standing up and saying, "Yes, I am a latte-drinking liberal. I went to St. George's and to Yale, I'm stinking rich and my wife is even richer but the policies on the platform I support are good for all Americans and a whole hell of a lot better for most Americans who aren't as rich as me--or my worthy opponent--so what do you care where I came from or what I drink?

Read my lips: I am not a good old boy and I have more respect for American voters than to pretend that I am. I don't spend my spare time playing cowboy. I am not an average American--no candidate for high political office is.

And so what? Americans are smart enough, and decent enough, not to reject a candidate because of his race, religion, accent or appearance. Americans vote for candidates who are honest, competent and committed regardless of what they look like, where they come from or how they spend their spare time--so this country is full of congressmen, mayors, governors and elected officials of every kind: members of every race and ethnic group, men and women, short, tall, fat, thin, people from every part of the country.

So, I'm from back east, I speak French and I ski. So what?

Off to a bitter start: "The Republicans...are denouncing Edwards' career as a 'greedy' trial lawyer representing plaintiffs injured by the illegal and mistaken practices of doctors, insurance companies, corporations and other businesses. But surely voters have more empathy for a lawyer who has defended ordinary people against indifferent companies than for a White House that has consistently catered to the whims of those companies"

But surely not. Bush, a National Guard drop-out accused McCain, who spent over 5 years as a POW of being "weak on veterans issues" and Kerry as soft on defense. Dubya awed citizens by landing on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit while Bush Senior, a WWII fighter pilot who was shot down over the Pacific, was always perceived as a wimp compared to Reagan, who only played soldiers in the movies.

I was just reading The Right Nation. The depressing conclusion is that we will never have a European style social democracy no matter who is elected in November or years to come. Conservativism, of a peculiarly American kind, is so embedded in the national ethos that Right Nation is here to stay and we had better learn to live with it.

19% of Americans, we're told, believe that they are in the richest 1% of the population and almost as many others believe that they will be at some time in their lives. They will certainly have more empathy for a bogus cowboy from Andover and Yale who caters for "indifferent companies" than a self-made lawyer from North Carolina State who defends "ordinary people" because they do not believe that they are ordinary people. On holiday, they will certainly prefer mock-ups, theme parks, resorts and cruises to European capitals, Cotswold villages and cathedrals. They like mega-malls and prefer mega-churches, with padded theater seats and singers crooning into mikes to boy choir cathedral Evensong. The will trade off architectural interest for multiple bathrooms and high-tech kitchens.

But wait--that's just my rhetoric getting the better of me. If they want to play cowboy and go to Disneyland it's no skin off of my nose. The core issue is whether it is possible to get a reasonable welfare state. The thesis that our history and ethos lock us in to this brutal system is a little too Hegelian--and Hegel's deductions about the course of the Absolute's unfolding in history through the spirit of nations weren't any better than his proof that there could be no more than seven planets.

Maybe there's hope--if Edwards and other Democrats can convince the electorate that the liberal agenda is not about tastes, pretensions and "lifestyle issues" but economic security and opportunity.

The Sin of Wages - The real reason to oppose the minimum wage. By Steven E. Landsburg: "The Earned Icome Tax Credit...accomplishes pretty much the same goals as the minimum wage but without concentrating the burden on a tiny minority. For that matter, the EITC also does a better job of helping the people you'd really want to help, as opposed to, say, middle-class teenagers working summer jobs. It's pretty hard to argue that a minimum-wage increase beats an EITC increase by any criterion.

The minimum wage is nothing but a huge off-the-books tax paid by a small group of people, with all the proceeds paid out as the equivalent of welfare to a different small group of people."

The core doctrine of conservatives is not laissez faire but the conviction that virtually any institution will do better at any job than government. Conservatives recognize that a variety of jobs need to be done: wars have to be fought and children have to be educated. They even understand that access to health care and a minimially decent standard of life is important. But they are convinced that the government, to the extent that it has to be involved in these projects, should outsource

All other things being equal, outsourcing is inefficient. It introduces additional layers of administrators that have to be paid, time-consuming negotiations and an element of uncertaintly that makes it more difficult to plan ahead. Conservatives however seem convinced that the government is so bad at doing anything that even with the additional costs, private contractors will still do better. Private contractors will do better at providing catering services for the military than grunts on KP peeling potatoes and dishing out Spam, charter shools will do better than conventional public schools at educating children, a patchwork of HMOs and private insurance schemes will deliver healthcare more effectively than a single payer system, private charities and "faith-based initiatives" will be more effective in providing social services and firms, compelled to pay workers minimum wage, will go a better job of maintaining a minimally decent standard of living for citizens than givernment programs like a souped up earned income tax credit.

This is the consequentialist argument for conservative policies--and it seems to be questionable on empirical grounds. Charter schools don't do better, according to test scores, the current healthcare scheme is more expensive and less comprehensive than a single payer system would be and minimum wage both imposes extensive burdens on a small group on employers and fails to benefit all and only the needy.

But maybe conservatives are not consequentialists. Maybe the idea is that government programs are inherently wicked and that outsourcing to the private sector is good regardless the consequences.

TomPaine.com - The Democrats' V-Word

Liberals talk about "values" but the public won't buy it because in American "values" doesn't mean moral convictions--it means constraint, promoted through coercion and backed by punitive policies.

My university advertises itself as "values driven." What this means to parents is that we will supervise their children, see to it that they do their work and prevent them from engaging in risky adolescent behavior. We do no such thing, but parents still believe that sending them to a Catholic college will keep them in line, and that is what they mean by "values."

No matter how enthusiastically Democrats wrap themselves in God and the flag and profess their deep moral convictions about promoting economic equity and supplying health care, "values driven" Americans are not going to be impressed because that is not what they mean by "values." What they mean are boot camps to keep people marching single file down the strait and narrow path together with regulations to suppress overt sexuality, off-color language, wildness and unconventional behavior, and enforcement mechanisms to see to it that everyone gets his just deserts.

Americans don't like liberalism because it is--liberal.

Comment Feature Activated on this Blog!

Crooked Timber: Allowing comments on blogs

Hey, y'll, look at this: now you can comment on my posts! Hello? Hello?

Why is there an echo in here?

The New Cosby Kids: "By BARBARA EHRENREICH

It was such a dog-bites-man story that I almost skipped right by: Billionaire Bashes Poor Blacks. The only thing that gave this particular story a little piquancy is that the billionaire doing the bashing is black himself. Bill Cosby has been attacking the poor of his race, and especially the youthful poor, for a range of sins, including using bad words, 'stealing poundcake,' 'giggling' and failing to give their children normal names like 'Bill.' 'The lower-economic people,' Cosby announced, 'are not holding up their end in this deal.'

Excuse me, Barbara, but Cosby never suggested dismantling social programs or going back on our side of the deal--he said that lower class blacks weren't holding up their side.

Somewhere around 1967 white liberals got the idea that there was no virtue in accepting blacks who were solid citizens and spoke good English--to expiate the sin of racism we had to applaud "authentic" blacks who faithfully conformed to our stereotypes. I thought we were done with this and had moved on to the current version of the program--no virtue in equal rights and opportunities for women who were "honorary men"--we had to promote the interests of women who couldn't, or wouldn't, cut it by "male" standards.

You can recognize that the failure of lower class blacks, women, or whatever disadvantaged group you please to meet accepted standards is a consequence of discrimination, and that that is something that needs to be fixed. But it's quite another thing to question the standards or to excuse behavior that isn't so much a direct consequence of discrimination or disadvantage as a repudiation of accepted standards.

Republican Jihad

: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush, seeking to mobilize religious conservatives for his reelection campaign, has asked church-going volunteers to turn over church membership directories, campaign officials said on Thursday.

In a move sharply criticized both by religious leaders and civil libertarians, the Bush-Cheney campaign has issued a guide listing about two-dozen 'duties' and a series of deadlines for organizing support among conservative church congregations.

A copy of the guide obtained by Reuters directs religious volunteers to send church directories to state campaign committees, identify new churches that can be organized by the Bush campaign and talk to clergy about holding voter registration drives.

So that's what religion is all about. I thought it had to do with interesting stuff, like the docrtrine of the Trinity and transubstantiation,

Mainline churches have been hoist by their own petard. Embarassed about metaphysics, they proclaimed that Christianity was really an ethical code, a matter of following Jesus the Great Moral Teacher--theology optional--and now conservative Christians are asking WWJD and "voting their values." We were told that real Christianity was social service and political action in the Secular City with God as our "work partner" but it was the religious right that took up "faith based initiatives" and working politically to promote God, guns and guts. Priests preached that "religion is what Man does with his sinfulness," that church-going was a waste of time better spent working politically for the "justice, freedom and peace" and that every grain of incense was bread from the mouths of the poor--so we gave up religion and stopped going to church.

Now the mainline churches are dead: they function as senior day care centers, providing activities and "community" for the elderly and halfway houses for ex-fundamentalists who can't quite shake the feeling that being secular is not quite nice. The only viable programs they offer are private schools catering for middle-class parents interested in educating their children apart from hoi polloi.

You can't fight the Zeitgheist. There's not much interest in theology and the liturgy has become a pep rally aimed at rousing participants to Moral Action in the World: "Rah, rah, yeah Episcopalians! Get out there and be nice!!!"

What's The Matter With Kansas?

Great book for a journalistic screed--the rhetoric hits some high points but becomes wearing. The explanation of working class conservatism seems fundamentally correct: this is Populism with class reconstructed as a package of "lifestyle" issues and economic concerns wiped out of the picture. I suppose we all knew this--but who can resist hearing it again?

One minor flaw is the author's underestimation of the depth of anti-intellectualism in the US. It didn't start with FDR's appointment of credentialed social planners and re-emerge during the McCarthy era but was a feature of American life since the colonial period (if Hofstadter Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is correct).

The major flaw however is the author's unconvincing attempt to pin the image of political correctness that riles up working stiffs in fly-over country on advertisers and the media catering for the interests of Republican plutocrats. People magazine indeed features the rich and semi-famous campaigning for animal rights and promoting radical chic, but academics do it too. Advertisers feature tight pants teens with body piercing to sell products but they wouldn't feature them if there weren't takers.

Some academics, journalists and other intellectuals engage in "fashionable nonsense" but the real perpetrators are our semi-elite clients: groupies in the "helping professions"--teachers, social workers, therapists and liberal ministers--vegetarian housewives, Buddhist chickies and other wannabes who parody our preoccupations. Working class people never meet us, but they know them well--and are bullied by them. These are the intellectual middlemen who, from the cultural point of view, play the role of Korean shopkeepers in LA ghettos.

Still, it was we who started it as adolescents in the late '60s. We despised and lionized the working class by turn, and always patronized them. But we graduated and put away childish things: a few of us achieved authentic downward social mobility through the counterculture but most, including myself, went on to occupy the social niches that had been prepared for us from birth. It was then that the semi-elite picked up our broken toys and our "revolutionary" rhetoric, suitably modified like Beatles tunes smoothed into shopping mall muzak, became part of popular culture. Smug schoolteachers pumped cultural diversity and treated working class parents with disdain when they came as supplicants on back-to-school night begging for phonics and grammar. Self-help gurus denounced their domestic arrangements as sexist, opressive and sick. The media lampooned the suburban dream that they'd scraped and sacrificed to achieve. Working class people recognized that they were being trashed and fought back.

That they are now fighting back is uncontroversial and it seems likely that they are winning. What to do is a mystery and one that Kansas does not address, though the author hints that consciousness raising and unionization would be a good thing. Personally, I would favor genocide--cultural rather than material. We could let them in and by doing that dismantle their culture--we could wipe out the working class by assimilation. If, as the author suggests, class has become a matter of ethos rather than economics then anyone can join the elite. Ideas are free: anyone can, and should, be a liberal "intellectual."

But we excluded the working class by romanticizing their "culture" and despising their religion, by adopting passes and signs to keep them out and by consuming positional goods to set ourselves apart from them. We despised their food preferences and body fat, their fundamentalism, their leisure activities, their grammar and the little boxes made of ticky-tacky in which they lived because those were the things that set them off from us and gave us claim to elite status. We didn't want them to slim down, repudiate fundamentalism, speak grammatically or develop a preference for microbrews over Budweiser because then our status symbols would be tarnished: there's no point in eating whole grains or practicing Wicca if everyone else does.

Back from China!

Hello, Blog! I've just come back from China after an SCP conference at Chungdu University surrounded by sightseeing in Beijing, Chungdu and various points on the Yangzee River which we cruised down to the 3 Gorges Dam.

I have many thoughts about China, which will probably emerge over the the next few weeks. Visiting China, the worlds longest running high culture I felt crude, vulgar, barbaric and fat. I was at least happy to be short, for the first time in my life.

The cities are hideous though they've been careful to preserve a few pagodas and temples, some of which where splendid. Most of the buildings seem to date from the 1950s and beyond which makes me wonder what was there before the Revolution. The pagoda we visited on the Yangzee cruise, essentially a spiral staircase to the top of the mountain to which it was attached, was built without any nails (except for the floorboards), all pegs and joinery, and it seemed to a number of the other older buildings where like that too--I checked. One of the buildings had a second story that was attached entirely by some system of joints in four tortoises that held the thing up.

I found the culture oppressive. It seemed like what Egypt would have been if the culture had survived intact and, as I said to my roomie, 5 minute idea that it is, it made one realize what a revolution it was when the archaic smile broke, people started arguing and classical Greece emerged.

I've now visited 3 exotic cultures--Kenya, Iceland and China, of which China is by far the most exotic. China and Iceland are liveable while Kenya is not and China is certainly the richest, most interesting place. But prescinding from the utter poverty, crime and misery, and the unliveability, Kenya was in some way more comfey.

However, I'm fed up with exotic cultures. If I ever go anywhere again, apart from England with is more or less like going to Baltimore or New Jersey and doesn't count, I want to go to the conventionally nice places--Venice, Florence, Vienna, Ravenna, Rome, the south of France and, please God, Greece! And to Constantinople because I want to see Hagia Sophia before I die. I want to see, touch, immerse myself in the Mediterranean. It only struck me recently what "mediterranean" meant--I remember my mother saying the Romans called it "mare nostrum" and so it is: our sea, in the middle of our land and, reminiscent of pop biological documentaries about life emerging from the oceans, the sea from which our culture came, our birthplace.

The New York Times > Week in Review > The Sheik Takes Over: In Iraq's Next Act, Tribes May Play the Lead Role

Maybe it is time to bow to the inevitable--civilization can never defeat or assimilate the barbarians: at best it can contain them.

Domestically, we've been trying to civilize the barbarians and introduce law and order in urban slums for decades, working without much success to wipe out gangs, curtail violence and assimilate the underclass into civil society. It may be time to take a new tack and recognize that we can only govern the underclass in the US and abroad through tribal war lords, sheiks, paramount chiefs, big men and gang leaders.

It's time to call a truce: to get out of Iraq and to cede the slums to gang leaders: grant the Bloods, the Crips, the Sopranos and the rest semi-autonomous status and stop interfering in their affairs. Let the tribes in the US and abroad conduct their own turf wars, fight battles over women and other booty, negotiate amongst themselves and, if we're lucky, kill one another off so that we can be done with them.

What Reagan Got Wrong - Liberty is not the absence of government. By William Saletan

Reagan is dead, and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Good riddance.

Reagan was the most destructive president to occupy the White House and the icon of an ideology which, over the past 25 years, has trashed the country.

Before war and scandal made Americans cynical and depressed, we imagined that we could create a Great Society with economic security and fair treatment for all. That was hardly a pipe dream: with vast natural resources, a developed economy and political stability we could easily have created a society where all Americans enjoyed the good life. Instead we let Reagan and the conservative ideologues that followed lead us into the pit.

In the ancient world Tyche/Fortuna was worshipped as a god because there was little anyone could do to circumvent dumb luck. The lives people lived were determined by accidents of birth or capture, by being male or female, slave or free, Greek or Barbarian. Disease was inevitable; poverty and illiteracy were the norm. For the past 25 years we've been busily recreating that world, a society without fairness, security or opportunity.

We don't notice it because now, as in the ancient world, only those of us who drew the lucky numbers get to write about it. It's extraordinary how easily most of the lucky are able to ignore the counterfactuals--the fact that they, we, escaped the shitty life that most people live. Walmart is the largest employer in the US--the life that Walmart employees live on minimum wage, without benefits, trapped all day, working at stinking, boring, mind-killing jobs is the norm. All of us are dangling over that pit like Jonathan Edwards sinners in the hands of an angry god--in the hands of Tyche.

We should contemplate Walmart as a momento mori. I never go through a checkout line, were the cashier is trapped all day in 2 square feet of space without thinking how close I came to being there. I don't place an order by phone or fill in a form without vividly imagining the rooms full of women in carrels answering phones, keying in data and processing orders. That is exactly what I would be doing if it weren't for equal opportunity and affirmative action policies to promote fairness and opportunity. No women is ever overqualified for anything and without government "interference" that is exactly the stinking life I would have had.

Friday was the 15th anniversary of Tienanmen Square and Wednesday I leave for China. The Chinese, embarassed by the events of 15 years ago still argue that it was necessary to suppress the dissidents in order to provide the stability for economic growth in China and a better life for all. They may be right. Political liberty is a luxury. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press are of negligible value compared to economic security, education and decent work. It may be that for poor countries it's worth trading off political liberty to create a better life for citizens.

But we are a rich country and could have had it all. Raising taxes to pay for a single payer health care system, universal child care and education and income transfers would not have made us slaves of the state. Affirmative action policies would not have significantly undermined the vast liberties we enjoy--except of course the liberty of employers who want all women typing and filing. We had the choice between life and death and chose death. We were suckered by the rhetoric of freedom and American greatness and turned a potential paradise into a hellhole where no one is ever safe from poverty and drudgery.

Do we have cause for optimism? Bush will no doubt get a temporary boost worshipping at the round of Reagan apotheosis ceremonies but, mercifully, not close enough to the election to do him much good. Maybe without the Beast stomping the earth, even if only in a senile fog, the country will get back on track and move to becoming a civilized society again.

Sometimes I wonder why most people don't share my take on things. Of course my life is better now than it was 25 years ago--but not because of conservative policies. I lived in blind terror until I got tenure, fighting for all I was worth to get into Academia and stay, knowing that even one slip, even a one degree turn of the wheel of fortune, would land me in a life of pink collar shit work, trapped behind a check out counter or in a carrel, keying in data, ringing up groceries, trapped in a confined space doing mindless work with endless repetitions, without the possibility of any achievement, buried alive.

How the Other Half Votes

The central electoral phenomenon of the past thirty-five years has been the movement of working-class and lower-middle-class voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party....[T]hey now vote for the party that has engineered their exclusion. Real wages in the United States are roughly the same now as they were in 1980; fewer jobs provide adequate health or retirement benefits; the percentage of working people protected by unions has declined precipitously; unemployment benefits are less generous; and the federal government's finances are so gravely impaired that Social Security and Medicare benefits may well be reduced and/or delayed, beginning with the next generation of retirees. At the same time, financial profits and the income of the richest Americans have increased dramatically. That most of the blame for all this can be laid at the door of Republican tax, labor, regulatory, agricultural, antitrust and trade policies has not shaken the allegiance of these working-class and lower-middle-class Republicans. It is, for some reason, completely off their radar screen...

Why, we liberals splutter, this amazing obtuseness? ...The answer, apparently, is anti-intellectualism. Grassroots conservatives have convinced themselves--with a great deal of help from what David Brock's important new book calls "the Republican Noise Machine"--that secular intellectuals form a class (yes, the fabled "New Class") with designs on state power and popular liberties...

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat-packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining

How, and when, did the political in the US become personal with partisan politics dominated by "lifestyle issues"? Is there any other nation on earth where abortion is a major political issue or where a ban on gay marriage is seriously proposed as a constitutional amendment? It's easy to see why the Republican Noise Machine promoted the socially conservative agenda--who but the well off, a shrinking minority, would vote for them on the basis of their economic policies?

But why did Democrats take the bait? It's too late to fix that now because we're hooked. No one dares to say that abortion is no longer an issue because the majority of Americans favor keeping early term abortions legal and partial birth abortions may not such a good idea anyway. No one dares to say that making gay marriage a major political cause is pointless since most Americans already favor civil unions and in all likelihood there would be little effective opposition to low keyed piecemeal legislation guaranteeing domestic partners the social, political and economic benefits of marriage.

Working class conservatives are afraid of a world spinning out of control with kids on drugs and welfare queens in Cadillacs. Liberals obsess about the Handmaids Tale, a puritanical theocracy where women are kept as sex slaves and political liberties are eliminated in favor of Old Testament sharia.

The war in Vietnam may be part of it but that's old news. Maybe Liberals simply didn't want these working class types at the party--but didn't realize how small the party would be if they weren't invited. We didn't like their accents, their tastes in music and entertainment, their religious and patriotic sentimentalities, the way they dressed or the way they decorated their homes but couldn't face the fact of our own snobbery so we put it out that we didn't like them because they were bigots and reactionaries. Now they are. Archie Bunker has the last laugh at us meatheads.

Compassionate Conservativism

w w w . p r o s p e c t - m a g a z i n e . c o . u k: "How old is political liberalism? Here is a surprising answer: it is not a few hundred years old, but 10,000 years old. And this answer matters because it affects our ability to see liberalism as capable of addressing some of the deepest anxieties of modern society. Can we live together with those of different cultures? Can we argue instead of fight?"

The core of liberalism on this account is the establishment of arrangements that facilitate mutually beneficial transactions between people who are not bound together by sentimental ties of kinship, culture or personal affiliation.

What a good idea! It means that I go where I like without being careful to avoid alien tribal territory, that I can deposit money in the bank without worrying that the teller will simply pocket it, that I can live a reasonably comfortable life without depending on the good will, and caprice, of others and that I do not need to count on surviving sons to support me in old age. It means that I can rely on formal regulations and impersonal enforcement mechanisms to insure my personal safety, well-being and fair treatment.

Compassionate conservatives thing that we would be better off with fewer regulations and enforcement mechanisms. They imagine we would do better in a world where there was less state interference--where families took care of their own, neighbors were neighborly, and faith-based initiatives, supported by voluntary contributions rather than coercive taxation, took care of misfits who fell through the cracks.

Clearly they have never spent much time in New Jersey or taken the lesson of the Sopranos to heart. Where taking care of our own is the modus operandi no one recognizes any obligation to strangers, sojourners or members of other tribes:
competing warlords support and protect their kinsmen, gumuhs and sycophants, everyone observes a thousand unwritten rules concerning personal loyalties and tribal territories, women breed, men fight, everyone is chronically on the make or insecure or both and preoccupied with maintaining territory or sucking up to those who do.

That of course is the limiting case but the further we go toward dismantling coercive state mechanisms and formal, impersonal arrangements and the more we depend on personal relationships, the family, the community and grassroots efforts, the closer we will get to the Sopranos world and the worse off we will be.

Cosby the Curmudgeon

The Jackson Sun News - Cosby's words spark debate among blacks

Bill Cosby was being honored in Washington's Constitution Hall commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that cleared the way for desegregation.... The following are Cosby's comments, according to The Washington Post and The Associated Press, at Howard University. The university will not release a video tape of Cosby's speech.

'People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around. The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'

'I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... you can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.'

Cosby then talked about incarcerated criminals.

'These are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake'

It's been a long hard struggle and the end is not in sight but at least we've reached the stage where black people can be curmudgeons. And even though, predictably conservatives have tried to turn his comments to their ends their success has been at best mixed.

Adversity ruins people's character. Poverty is the root of most evil and, in general, it is powerlessness rather than power that corrupts. "Lower economic people"--some, as Cosby later noted, not all--are lousy people because their lives are lousy. If they are lousy people, it doesn't follow that it's their fault rather than the fault of economic arrangements and discriminatory practices that perpetuate poverty and powerlessness--it only shows all the more strongly how these arrangements and practices damage people.

When, I wonder, did liberals get the idea that in order to make the case that members of minority groups were disadvantaged they had to pretend that the attitudes and behavior of the most damaged was ok--and even beyond that to castigate those who survived to become decent, educated people as inauthentic? Discrimination is a fact, not a speculative hypothesis that has to be proven. When black people go to buy cars or apply for mortgages, they get lousy deals--and it doesn't matter whether they're well-dressed and well-credentialed, or whether they have excellent credit histories. When the black female president of an Ivy League college shops in an upscale store, security guards tail her. You don't need to make the case there there is discrimination any more than you need to make the case that there are tables and chairs and calling substand English "Ebonics" or making out petty criminals to be political prisoners isn't helping anyone.

The New York Times > Week in Review > The 'Hypermodern' Foe: How the Evangelicals and Catholics Joined Forces

Coalitions of Catholics and evangelicals form the backbone in the fights against gay marriage, stem-cell research and euthanasia, and for religious school vouchers. Catholic and evangelical leaders who forged relationships in the anti-abortion movement, which the Baptist theologian Timothy George has called "the ecumenism of the trenches," are now working side by side in campaigns on other culture war issues, and for Republican candidates...

Now conservatives in both groups share the sense that they are fighting a losing battle against secularism, relativism and a trend that the Christianity Today editorial brands "hypermodern individualism." Though miles apart on salvation, they find common ground in the language of moral absolutes.

When will the Muslims get a piece of the action? I'll give it 10 years at the outside. Islam, after all, is "Calvinism on steroids" and when Muslims achieve critical mass in the US they will be perfectly positioned not only to join the conservative coalition but to lead it. Once the war in Iraq is over and Al Qaida is contained, Muslims will become as clean, wholesome and cuddly as Mormons: we will view women in hajibs in the way we regard Mormon missionaries on bicycles and commend Muslims on their family values.

Secularism has arrived. Even if they are "miles apart on salvation"--not to mention Papal infallability, the interrancy of Scripture, the Real Presence, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the Immaculate Conception--conservative Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals agree on what matters to both of them: the rules of conduct, the importance of following them and the mechanisms for enforcing them. Theology does not matter because both have taken the liberal cliche "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you live right" and run with it. Religion is over.

I'm sitting here revising my paper on the Filioque Clause. I'm against it--but no one else seems to care about it or any other fine points of theology these days. Even as recently as 35 years ago, Episcopalians fought about liturgical revision--and I was there duking it out. Now the foes of secular humanism are primarily concerned with who screws whom, with cleanliness, politness and discipline, with controlling their kids, preventing access to recreational drugs and maintaining their fantasy of the "traditional family." I can't imagine why they want the kind of world they're promoting--the puritanism, lack of options, absence of emotion, the arbitrary, restrictive rules--or they're afraid will happen if this world collapses, as it will. But find it even harder to understand why they are so concerned about these secular matters and so utterly indifferent to central theological concerns.

If you believe in God, if you seriously believe that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being and that enjoying him in this world and the next is the summum bonum then knowing what he is like, even down to the Filioque Clause or its denial, is infinitely more important than any of these "lifestyle issues." If you believe, seriously believe, that there is a God and not merely a mechanism for dispensing reward and punishment, then holy things, holy places and holy actions matter: church buildings matter, liturgy matters, everything that's conducive to piety and the experience of God's presence matters--and the essentially secular concerns of the religious right, as well as the religious left, are all straw.

The Sopranos - Family Values

Being an insufferable pedant I've been reading Sopranos criticism online, including this piece which comes from a book that purports to be a philosophical reflection on the Sopranos repleat with a discourse on Plato's views about the corrupting influence of art. This essay is especially obtuse as well as inflated, but much of the criticism seems to me to get it wrong in suggesting that there's something surprising about the bifurcation of Tony's life as mob boss and family man and that his roles exist in a tension that has driven him to panic attacks, therapy and will likely result in some sort of breakdown.

Nonsense. We all do it. And the real philosophical issue that the author of the linked essay has completely missed is that it is a consequence of the conceptual bifurcation between "private morality" and "professional ethics."

We asked students once, in our Women and Work class, whether there was a difference between "morality" and "ethics" and, if there was, to explain what it was. After about half an hour of discussion eliciting student's linguistic intuitions, we came up with the following picture:

Morality is essentially sentimentality, an "ethic of care." It's not rational and can't be argued about: it's a matter of feelings--not either utility calculations or duty. You should be moral with your family and friends. But morality is impractical and out of place in work situtions--after all, you can't hire someone just because they need the work. In the real world you have to follow "professional ethics," the particular codes of conduct for various occupations. Morality is also not realistic in public life--you can't just give away money, it has to come from somewhere. Liberals just don't realize that businesses can't afford to give away products to people who need them or keep incompetent employees on because they need work; they don' t realize that if you tax the rich to provide handouts so that everyone will be exactly equal there will be no incentives. More generally, they don't realize that you have to be rational in work and politics so you can't afford morality.

Tony is just following the standard program: morality at home; professional ethics on the job. It just happens that the code of conduct for his particular line of work licenses extortion, drug-dealing, whoring and murder. All his troubles come about when the wall of seperation between the domestic sphere and his professional life thin--when, e.g. his gumuhs make contact with Carmella.

On Sunday, Adriana was whacked. The FBI was blackmailing her after one of the drug dealers that frequented the club killed a buy in her office and she became involved in the coverup. She confessed that she'd been an informer to Chris on the promise that the FBI would get them into the witness protection program. Chris told Tony who had her executed.

This was inevitable once Chrissy set up Adriana with a business that would become a venue for mob activities, breeching the wall of separation. The system only works when women, children and other contacts in the "civilian" world are strictly segregated from professional activities. Chris brought it on himself. He could have married Adriana and installed her in a suburban mini-mansion in North Caldwell, or set her up with a boutique or some other safe, legitimate business. But he drew her into the margin of his professional world and made her, unwillingly, subject to its code of professional ethics, so she ends up dead and he ends up in mourning and back on drugs. Tsk, tsk.

Now compare this to Tony who, at the end of the same episode moves back in with Carmella for a happy ending after promising in effect that he will not allow his professional activities, in this case whoring, interfere with domestic life. Tony has played it right, setting up Carmella in North Caldwell, far from the Bada Boom Club, and he shall have his reward. So will Carmella.

Is Carmella as badly off as most critics think--or as one suggests, an expensive whore? Not in the least. For all her intermittent Catholic guilt she is not doing anything wrong by living off of what her shrink calls "blood money." Nothing she does can make any difference to Tony's professional activities and, as Tony reminded her in an earlier episode, she knew what she was getting into. She might as well enjoy it.

The New York Times > National > Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy: "Bill Schambra, director of the Bradley Center at the Hudson Institute and a former director of the Bradley Foundation, one of the biggest conservative donors, said the foundations' supported the institute as part of a broader effort to build a conservative infrastructure after decades of liberal ascendancy had shut out the right.

'The I.R.D. is a kind of parallel universe that upholds the conservative standpoint in the world of religion,' Mr. Schambra said. 'It is no different in that sense from what the National Association of Scholars is for University Professors or the Federalist Society is for lawyers,' he said, referring to two other groups backed by the same foundations.

James Piereson, executive director of the Olin Foundation, said his foundation saw the institute as a Protestant counterpart to the conservative magazine Commentary for Jews or the Father Neuhaus's journal First Things for Catholics. 'If no one commented on and criticized the churches' political activities, it would appear that this was an unobjectionable religious position that was being brought to bear instead of a controversial position,' he said, adding that 'the sexuality issues and the liturgical issues in the churches have never been of great interest to us.'"

Chalabi

Middle East Online

We can't win. We went into the Iraqi misadvanture on the basis of misinformation provided by Chalabi with the intention of installing him as a friendly US puppet. A protege of Cheney who hadn't lived in Iraq for 30 years, it would be hard to imagine anyone whom Iraqis could find more objectionable than this quintessential carpetbagger.

But now that his offices have been raided and vandalized he seems set to become another culture hero

I have nothing interesting to say in this post--just trying to articulate my own churning ambivalence. This affair suggests that there is nothing that the US could do that would even count as a friendly gesture much less contribute to improving conditions. The only solution is to get out. And forget about any multilateral alternative, UN peacekeepers or whatever: what real chance is it that Iraqis would take more kindly to any occupying force?

These are primitive tribal people. Only a ruthless authoritarian regime could keep the lid on and provide minimally decent conditions for a small educated class. We lifted the lid: the only thing left is to let them duke it out amongst themselves and create the squalid, violent, supersitious hellhole they want to live in--their indigenous culture.

News

David Reimer was hailed by scientists as a triumph of nurture over nature. But as his suicide shows, this was a terrible mistake

Yes we'd all like to think that wouldn't we--so now this story of a boy who had his penis chopped off in a botched circumcision, whose parents were persuaded to have him castrated and raised as a girl, was a feminist experiment that failed. But let's consider the facts:

(1) As an experiment is was a botch. There was no double blind--the parents knew he was really a boy and soon the David (a.k.a. Brenda) discovered what happened. It wasn't part of an extensive study of twins where one was sex changed and the other wasn't--which would have been grossly unethical but a gratuitous intervention in one case that couldn't have had any scientific value anyway.

(2) Dr John Money, at Johns Hopkins Medical school when I was there as a grad student in Arts and Sciences, was not a feminist ideologue aiming to show that nurture would trump nature. On the contrary: his aim was to justify his program of sex change operations on the grounds that psychological gender was innate and unchangeable, that it usually matched physiological sex, but that in those rare cases where it didn't transsexual surgery was the best option. If anything his aim would have been to show that in a case where the surgery was performed on an individual who showed no signs of sex-gender mismatch it would have resulted in exactly this sort of disaster.

Scientists never hailed this case as a triumph of nurture over nature. In fact Dr. Money was asked by the administration at the Johns Hopkins Medical School to stop doing these operations

(3) The spin on the story was that David's suicide showed that the experiment was a failure--nature triumphed. But later in the article we read that he was depressed because his non-sex-changed twin brother had committed suicide 2 years earlier. If we can infer anything from one case it should be that it wasn't the sex-gender mismatch he had to cope with as a child that resulted in his suicide. Either both twins were genetically predisposed to depression and that resulted in both suicides or, more likely, that the stress of dealing with the aftermath of this experiment botched things for everyone involved.

(4) David, we read, didn't like being brought up as a girl. But lots of physiologically normal girls don't like being brought up as girls--that's why there are feminists.

It's Democracy, Stupid

The New York Times > International > Asia Pacific > In Huge Upset, Gandhi's Party Wins Election in India:

"Unlike in the United States, where the most prosperous also vote the most, in India it is the poor who turn out in greatest numbers. That means that the very voters for whom India has been shining — urbanites from the middle and upper classes who benefited from globalization and reforms — are also least likely to vote. The B.J.P. also seemed to suffer from its association with the Hindu nationalism that had powered its rise. Muslims, still repelled by the anti-Muslim carnage in the B.J.P.-controlled state of Gujarat in 2002, resisted the party's efforts to woo them, as did many Indians concerned about the weakening of the country's secular identity"

Meanwhile in the US as the underclass sinks we watch for our investments in prison stocks boom.

Are prison stocks a secure pick? - Apr. 30, 2004: "Attracted by an expanding prison population and an overcrowded penal system, investors have sent shares of Corrections Corp. of America and Geo Group soaring over the last year. Both stocks now trade at or near multi-year highs.


'The prison population really never stops growing,' said Irving Lingo, chief financial officer with Corrections Corp. 'Even if the growth rate slows, the real issue is that inmates are coming into systems that are already overcrowded.'


Throughout the last decade, the U.S. prison population has grown by 3.6 percent annually to 2.2 million people -- or one in every 143 residents -- at the end of 2002, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.


That may be a scary statistic if you're a student of sociology, but it points to a nice 'customer base' if you're Corrections Corp. or Geo Group."

OK, shoot me...

Did American soldiers treat the Iraqi prisoners they "humiliated" any worse than the Iraqi prisoners routinely treated their wives?

Innocent people shouldn't be imprisoned and no one should be beaten or raped but the routine treatment of women in the Arab world, South Asia and other "traditional societies" doesn't occasion this level of outrage. To be fair, it's largely because it's routine, and the commonplace isn't news. But there's also the pervasive sense that, even if the more egregious acts of brutality--honor killing, dowery murder and stoning for adultry are deplorable, women can't be "humiliated" because they're accostomed to subservience. Young Arab males are another thing--humiliating a macho man constitutes a grievous harm. No one worries about women--they're used to it.

One of our part-timers, with an MA in philosophy and no prospects, got a job xeroxing. Within 3 months he was put on the management track, not because he showed great promise in collating and stapling reports but because management a manager passing by saw him and thought he would be bored at his job. No one ever worries that women who xerox, staple and collate get bored. Women are used to it--it's just routine.

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'Acquainted With the Night': Troubled Children and Troubled Parents: "Could there be an incoherent rebellion under way against the relentless pressure to achieve, which kicks in now at the preschool stage? It may be a clue that the symptoms of many childhood psychiatric disorders seem to preclude schoolwork and attendance. Maybe the only problem with the kids is that they have been watching their own high-achieving parents, and they have seen where all that leads."

After Nickled and Dimed in America Barbara Erenreich should know better. If you don't get the credentials to make it into the talented tenth, you'll be kicking around between Walmart and the miscellaney of other jobs in the service sector that she describes in vivid detail.

Every year we have a session for academic advisors at which we are fed the usual pious sentiments about the value of a liberal education and eschewing narrowly vocational goals in favor of critical reasoning and self cultuvation. This would be fine if students were independently wealthy or sufficiently privileged to walk into sinecures on graduation. Realistically it is B.S.: students need to be trained in technical skills and credentialed. High achieving is a prerequsite for the good life--students are merely worried that they won't be able to make it in a viciously competitive environment where without the grades and credentials life will not be worth living.

Playing Tough

From Crooked Timber: Previous convictions: "I’ve just been over to Electrolite, where Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted this stunning excerpt from the New York Times :


"… the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system"

Why should we be surprised? For the past quarter century or so most Americans have been convinced that tough will solve all out problems--if only in the long run when we're all dead. The hypothesis isn't falsifiable: if we get tough and things don't get fixed it shows that we haven't been tough enough; if things get worse it shows that have to stay the course to recoup sunk costs. Anyone who leaps off the tough train will get ground under the wheels because if things don't improve immediately--and they can't after years of destructive get-tough policies--he'll be blamed for derailing a get-tough policy that was just about to start working.

I don't think that Bush or his American supporters are really bothered by prison brutality as such--it's the kinky fun and games, prisoners on leashes, sodomized, made to simulate homosexual group sex that gets up their noses. I doubt that they would seriously object to a little sleep deprivation or good, clean flogging, in Iraq, Gitmo or in prisons stateside.

We got into this mess because liberals made no serious attempt to offer the America people a viable alternative. Home on the range there are only cowboys and wimps. The only alternative middle Americas see to get tough policies is the program of the "helping professions"--therapists, social workers, liberal ministers and the education profession.

The Clash of Civilizations

The year: 2043. The EU (since admitting Japan, the “Eurasian Union”) has become the world’s only HyperPower. The US, along with China, has been demoted to mere SuperPower status.

Within the EU there is growing concern about America's weapons of mass destruction as well as its ongoing human rights violations. In addition to stubbornly retaining the death penalty and allowing its citizens virtually unrestricted access to fire arms, the US remains one of the last nations on earth to resist the establishment of a socialist-democratic welfare state. While all nations in the EU have achieved 100% adult literacy and fund higher education, through the graduate level, for all citizens who qualify, the US continues to regard effective education as a luxury item for the elite--the majority of children are warehoused and, in the better public schools, entertained.

As a consequence, productivity has steadily declined in the US and the economy remains stagnant while the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. In short, the US has joined the "Third World": a small group of technocrats and families of the hereditary plutocracy enjoy lives of fabulous opulence in gated communities while the greater part of the population, without hereditary wealth or the education to participate in a labor market that requires a high level of technical skills, are locked out. Each year an increasing percentage of the GDP goes to fund security--police, private security guards, increasingly high tech surveillance equipment and prisons.

Sigrid Eriksdottir, Prime Manager of the EU, in consultation with her advisors, has finally made the decision to invade the US in order to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction and initiate regime change. "We're going to disable their nukes, take out that cowboy George Bush III, liberate the American people and make the world safe for Democratic Socialism," she says, in the perfect English which all citizens of EU nations speak as their second language. "Americans will welcome our forces as liberators."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, George Bush III holds a war council with his advisors in a reinforced, lead-lined bunker a mile underground, fitted with shocks and McPherson struts to absorb the vibration of falling bombs. Bush's staff sociologists have assured him that, contrary to Eriksdottir's predictions, Americans will not welcome EU forces as liberators; indeed, they predict that the majority will fight to the death to preserve the American Way of Life. He has also been advised that the US may get military support from the UK, Canada, Australia and even a number of nations in Anglophone Africa if he plays his cards right.

Above ground, ordinary citizens prepare for war: most have no interest in being "liberated" by the EU and do not understand why Eriksdottir has decided to invade. Stubbornly monoglot, with little interest in the world outside the US, they get all their information about "Old Europe" from the American media, which portrays Europeans as decadent sissies who spend most of their time participating in bi-sexual orgies.

Inflamed by the preaching of fundamentalist Protestant televangelists and Muslim mullahs (Islam has become a major force in the US), the masses vow to resist. Most have little interest in issues or ideologies—they just want to defend their homeland. A sizeable minority however are concerned, with good reason, that an EU invasion and subsequent occupation will undermine their culture and take away what they hold dear: the right to buy guns, to have their kids taught Creationism in the public schools, to eat junk food and to drive SUVs.

By contrast, most members of the elite outside of the President's small coterie are eager for the invasion. They wish the US had joined the EU years ago and established a humane welfare state. They do not own guns or want their children taught Creationism and, privileged though they are, would prefer to live like citizens of other affluent nations, without gates, bars, security guards and beggars in the streets.

Eriksdottir is shocked when her sociological reconnaissance team reports that there will be resistance from the very Americans who would benefit most from liberation--the masses who get least from the conservative economic policies that are locked into place in the US and who are least able to isolate themselves from the violence, crime and public disorder that are pervasive. This isn't the way Marx said it was supposed to be.

Neo-liberals in the US, looking forward to the invasion and occupation, are not surprised. They have known for decades that the real "clash of civilizations" is not between the East and West, as it had been during the Cold war, between the North and South or between Christendom and Islam. It is between the Enlightenment and Traditional Societies, between the educated, cosmopolitan upper middle class around the world and the tribal masses in the US as well as elsewhere.

Sopranos: Carmella and Tony, Meadow and Finn

Tony and Carmella slept together, and enjoyed it but Tony left before Carmella woke up to "avoid sending the wrong message" as he told Dr. Malfi, and Carmella got on the phone to her lawyer to get divorce proceedings going in earnest.

Meadow and Finn were having problems too: Finn wanted to go back to his parents in San Diego for the summer. Meadow, afraid he'll bail, becomes demanding and difficult. So Finn proposes--at least he got it right. End of show: Meadow on the phone to Carmella to announce her engagement while Carmella looks out to the pool where Tony is floating like a bloated marine mammal.

Why do people behave this way? Why didn't Tony stay the night? Why doesn't Carmella just put a stop to the whole thing? Why did Meadow make more demands because she was afraid that Finn was cooling towards her? Why is it that when we want someone's favor, dread the loss of their friendship and feel insecure in the relationship, instead of extending ourselves to secure it, we undermine it?

Why aren't we rational self-interested choosers?

Of course one can read it as a Prisoner's Dilemma. Tony, Carmella and Meadow are betting that their partners will defect and playing the D strategy to counter. But it isn't a Prisoner's Dilemma strictly speaking because there are feedback effects: a player's countering a predicted defection makes the defection more likely. The rational play, I think is the leap of faith

Whether it's rational though depends on how heavily you weight avoiding rejection and failure, and that should be a matter of taste about which there is no disputing. But it still seems irrational to weight the avoidance of failure heavily if there are no opportunity costs.

Red and Blue America: Culture Wars Revisited

The Atlantic | December 2001 | One Nation, Slightly Divisible | Brooks:

"We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books and attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We're more sophisticated and cosmopolitan—just ask us about our alumni trips to China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism. But don't ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know. We don't know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though the novels they have co-written have sold about 40 million copies over the past few years. We don't know what James Dobson says on his radio program, which is listened to by millions. We don't know about Reba or Travis. We don't know what happens in mega-churches on Wednesday evenings, and some of us couldn't tell you the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical, let alone describe what it means to be a Pentecostal. Very few of us know what goes on in Branson, Missouri, even though it has seven million visitors a year, or could name even five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country. We don't know how to shoot or clean a rifle. We can't tell a military officer's rank by looking at his insignia. We don't know what soy beans look like when they're growing in a field.

"All we know, or all we think we know, about Red America is that millions and millions of its people live quietly underneath flight patterns, many of them are racist and homophobic, and when you see them at highway rest stops, they're often really fat and their clothes are too tight.

"And apparently we don't want to know any more than that"

Actually, I know quite a bit about Red America having lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and, more importantly, having grown up in Paterson, NJ--Sopranos Country. Unlike David Brooks, I never had the urge to explore the heart of darkness--I was only too happy to get out. Now I watch the Sopranos and reread Updike's Rabbit books regularly for sheer pleasure of reminding myself that I am not there.

Returning from safari in Flyover Country, PA, Brooks assures Blue Atlantic Monthly readers that underneath their crudity, ill-fitting clothing and fat, Red Americans are really decent people--not the homophobes and bigots Blues imagine them to be--as Blues, irritated by some of the excesses of the coastal elite, nod at their flatscreen displays and develop an urge to visit Des Moines.

I would council them to resist the urge. Reds are boring. Their intellectual landscape is impoverished, sparse and arid--and I for one have no taste for desert landscapes. They are emotionally flat, and do not tolerate passion, except in strictly circumscribed areas, or deviation from routine. They are unreflective, uncritical and conventional. Conversation with them is difficult and unrewarding. After the rigors of making appropriate small talk, avoiding vocabulary or topics that intimidate them, stretching to find safe general interest topics and make the ritually correct noises there is nothing left: all the conversational foreplay leads to nothing.

Why do we ignore or demonize them? (Brooks is right--we do) I think it's our entrenched moralism, our guilt for disliking good people. We have to rationalize our distaste by pinning moral failings on them--otherwise we should have to face the fact that we are snobs, that our likes and dislikes aren't tied to any moral qualities people possess but rather to how entertaining they are.

Could this be why we watch the Sopranos? There is, of course, the voyeristic impulse--getting inside the lives, and inside the heads, of people very different from us. That's what's fascinating about Rabbit: Updike pulls us inside the head of a character that we would not want to meet socially. But the Sopranos also provide the perfect moral excuse for our distaste: Tony, Chris, Pauly and the rest of them kill people and their wives, mistresses and whores live off the proceeds. So, we can persuade ourselves that we don't find them repugnant because they are dull, ignorant and conventional--we find them morally repugnant. That explains it: we not only get off scott free--we can congratulate ourselves on our moral sensitivity, as we do when we condemn the bigotry, homophobia and jingoism of the white working class.

Guarding the Guard Dogs? - Are you a dog "owner"—or a dog "guardian"? By Jon Katz: "Are you a dog 'owner'—or a dog 'guardian'?
By Jon Katz


Last month, In Defense of Animals, a California-based animal rights organization, sent me some materials about its 'Guardian Campaign.' A polite letter complimented me on my most recent book, then requested that I use the term 'guardian' rather than 'owner' in future writings about dogs.

The benefits of relating to animals as guardians rather than as owners would be 'far reaching,' wrote IDA president Dr. Elliot Katz (who's no relation). Changing how we speak would help change how we act. In a world where dogs are protected rather than owned, Katz argued, it would be easier to crack down on animal abuse, end the puppy-mill trade, and stop the killing of animals at shelters.

As a dog lover, owner of a rescue dog, and member of two rescue groups, I'm not convinced there will be concrete benefits from this metaphoric, even Orwellian revolution. "

I'm a cat owner. Cats don't benefit very much from being owned--they do fine being feral. When Katherine a.k.a. Kitty escaped from the St. Francis Day Animal Blessing at St. Johns (she bolted when the rector sprinkled her with holy water) she lived off the land for two weeks while finding her way home. Dr. Carillo, my dentist, and Nancy Painter who worked at the local supermarket reported on her progress as she wended her way east on Kearney and up Second Street.

Dogs are quite another thing and can't really make a decent living in the suburbs. I haven't owned a dog since Brownie, my childhood mutt, died at 16. In those days where I lived there were no leash laws: dogs roamed freely like cats, formed packs and cavorted around the neighborhood raiding trash cans and occasionally bringing down squirrels and rabbits. It was a good life for a dog: I won't have a dog if I have to keep him confined and walk him on a leash. Still, ownership benefits dogs and there's hardly a downside since, without any possibility of grasping the concept of property, they don't mind being owned.

It's hard to understand why people put such stock in word magic. Calling secretaries "administrative assistants" and addressing them as "Ms." doesn't make the job any tedious. Euphemisms and metaeuphemisms and euphemisms to the nth degree don't give sight to the blind, heal the lame or make "senior citizens" any younger. Whatever is the point? In England Old Age Pensioners get better treatment than Senior Citizens in the US and people happily chuck loose change into boxes for charities devoted to helping spastics. The halt, lame and blind, and the elderly and infirm, do not seem to do any worse than they do in the US.

It puts me in mind of one of the few good books Atheneum published while I was working there, Dr. Bowdlers Legacy by Noel Perrin, a history of expurgated literature. When I was there we couldn't imagine how the process could have gotten started--now we know.

It's an empirical question whether euphemism, bowdlerization and and political correctness do any good. I doubt it. If anything they are a cheap substitute for costly, inconvenient material improvements. So even while women with BAs in humanities disciplines have no options beside secretarial work we style them "administrative assistants" or as my university has it, upping the ante, "executive assistants." Talk is cheap.

According to Perrin, Addison, who saw the beginning of the Bowdlerization movement, objected that calling a kept women a "mistress" rather than a strumpet, trollop or whore only obscured the reality of the arrangement and made it seem respectable. By the same token, official loquitions concerning Walmart associates, undocumented workers and the differently abled put a kind face on a nasty situation and absolve us from doing anything to fix it.

Woodword Redux

Watching the interview with Bob Woodward on 60 Minutes last night it was delicious to realize (1) that lots of non-PBS-viewing, non-NYTimes-reading Middle Americans were also watching it and (2) that Bush and his staff were also watching it.

It sounds like a pulp novel with all the characters charactured: Colin Powell, prescient and schoolmasterly, counseling prudence"--Nestor amongst the Whitehouse staff of cavorting centaurs drunk with blood; Bush on orders from his "heavenly father" to save the world. What matters is not whether it's true but that it will be believed.

Now the younger generation, who missed out on the fun of Vietnam and Watergate can enjoy the new, improved version as the Iraq bodycount ticks up and the 9/11 hearings grind on. Admittedly, it may be a little early for the election. Bush afterall has Saddam in reserve. A show trial strategically timed could give him a boost and, if the 60 minutes piece can be believed, declining gas prices will delight the American public this summer. Still, the slow grinding mill diminishes him and will make it impossible for him to appeal to his performance as a war president.

Personally, I couldn't care less about the war except insofar as it erodes Bush's electability. Wars happen--though this one was a morally outrageous blunder.

BayouBuzz.com - Louisiana Politics and News

You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist
with a knack for both making sense of the
current economic situation and exposing the
Bush administration's lies about it. You
somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on
the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your
guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell
with 'em.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
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The New York Times > Washington > News Analysis: President Makes a Case for
Freedom in the Middle East: " President Makes a Case for Freedom in the Middle East

"WASHINGTON, April 13 — Facing a moment of political peril unlike any in the more than one thousand days of his presidency, George W. Bush made the case on Tuesday night for staying the course in Iraq with the language and zeal of a missionary and combined it with a stark warning that failure would embolden America's enemies around the world.

"'We're changing the world,' Mr. Bush said halfway through a speech and news conference that was largely an hourlong justification for holding fast in Iraq, no matter how the casualties mount, no matter how chaotic the process of forming a new government.

"Drawing later on a line he often slips into his campaign speeches, he reminded a global audience that 'freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."

Ruat coeli:"no matter how the casualties mount, no matter how chaotic...we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." I wonder what sense, if any, he gives to "freedom" or what Americans who buy this think the goal is.

I'm an imperialist too. I'd like to see the whole world made over into the image of the latte-drinking, NY Times-reading, Volvo-driving Eastern Liberal Establishment--everyone educated, reflective and critical, well-read, politically liberal and reasonable. My aim is cultural genocide: to wipe out "traditional societies" and spread the Enlightenment--but that will take a lot of doing in the US as well as abroad. And Bush's policies aren't likely to achieve it.

A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity

"This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinctions by decree...

That new thinking has its critics — those who say that denying that ethnicity exists merely suppresses the painful ethnic dialogue that Rwanda requires.

But the government insists that if awareness of ethnic differences can be learned, so can the idea that ethnicity does not exist. Rwanda has an entrenched culture of obedience, and the populace has been quick to pick up on the government's no-ethnicity policy, at least in conversations with an outsider.

To hear Mr. Twahrwa put it: 'Ethnicity is bad. I want it to go away.'"

What a brilliant counter-cultural idea! You'd think that we Americans with our vast experience of ethnic diversity, or anyone following conflicts in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, India or anywhere else in the world where tribalism is a force could have figured that one out.

It isn't even clear that the Hutus and the Tutsis ever were ethnic groups in any robust sense: they speak the same language and intermarry, they're not readily distinguishible even by other Hutus and Tutsisi, they're all Catholics and the distinction between them was blurred until colonial powers decided to make it official, in some cases reclassifying individuals for its purposes. Yet even where ethnicity is conjured up it can still lead to genocide.

Ethnicity is bad. I want it go go away too.

Yes, It Is a War Against Islam

"The problem of modern terror--terror that combines an apocalyptic ideology and a yearning for destruction--demands honesty with ourselves about the nature of the threat and honesty in politics. Capturing the top leaders of Al Qaeda is a necessity, but terror is not a threat that will end with decapitation. Nor will it end with the ordinary politics of negotiation and concession... The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Their sense of difference is encapsulated in the declaration of an alleged Al Qaeda spokesman: “You love life, and we love death.” Transnational terror cannot be combatted in an atmosphere of international distrust. At the very least, the terrorists have proved themselves to be as good as their word. Governments that hope to resist them must be, too."

The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Meanwhile romantics and postmodernists in the West bash the Enlightenment imagining buccolic tribal villages of happy peasants in local costume producing traditional crafts.

Today is Good Friday, and I remember my own romantic fantasy: a Byzantine world saturated with religiousity, icons and chant, legends of the saints, processions in the streets, churches encrusted with mosaics, stinking of incense. Of course I wanted the sanitized Episcopalian version, without the superstition, squalor and violence.

There is no free ride. It is a pity that the only viable alternative to Jihad is MacWorld, incarnate in Southern California. The price for security, fairness and opportunity is high--the loss of aesthetic value, romance and charm--but it's worth it.

Remember Lucy Killea?

Kerry, Candidate and Catholic,
Creates Uneasiness for Church

"Senator John Kerry's support for abortion rights and stem cell research has prompted discussions among Roman Catholic bishops and Vatican officials over how to respond to a presidential candidate who professes Catholicism while taking stands contrary to church teaching...

"The Rev. John McCloskey, the director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington and a member of the conservative organization Opus Dei, said, "Senator Kerry considers himself a Catholic, but on issues that are fundamental in terms of Catholic morality, he appears to be off the reservation."

"However, Father McCloskey said, American bishops are "in a quandary" over just what to do about Catholic politicians who fail to uphold church doctrine on issues like abortion. Punitive measures like denying Mr. Kerry communion could backfire, he said."

It might be interesting if Kerry were excommunicated--when our late Bishop Maher excommunicated Lucy Killea it did such wonders for her political career (in a heavily Catholic constituency) that other local politicians clammored for excommunication.

How many members of Opus Dei are there? Of course no one knows because it's Opus Dei. How many cultural Catholics and just plain ordinary mainline Catholics are there? When I take informal surveys of my classes, probably 65% Catholic, on abortion virtually all are pro-choice (and pro-capital punishment).

The Catholic Church de facto is the last viable "mainline Protestant" denomination in the US, regardless its official position, mandates from HQ and manifestos by Opus Dei. Extra ecclesia there are only a few fulminating fundamentalists, who've appropriated the name "Christian," even fewer liberal Protestants from the old majority denominations hanging on by the fingernails and the Unchurched, the third largest "denomination" in the US and the fastest growing.

In the US, serious political candidates still have to maintain a religious affiliation. But, as Howard Dean's abortive efforts to present himself as a devout Congregationalist (oxymoron?) suggest, outside the Catholic Church these days, there are only fundamentalists and fakers.

Kudos to the Catholic Church--as it is rather than as it's supposed to be!

News Analysis: U.S. Optimism Is Tested Again After Ambush Kills 4 in Iraq

I'm ambivalent about the pure hatred that, apparently, these citizens of Falluja bear to us.

I can see their point: we had no business getting into Iraq in the first place. We could have "contained" Saddam and more importantly could have done a whole bunch of other things globally to isolate him and other tin-pot dictators, to undermine the motive for terrorism and to make life better for people.

But I have no sympathy for the resistance. Saddam was a high-tech tribal warlord who beat up other tribes to get booty for himself and cronies, his clan and his tribe. He and his supporters exploited the rhetoric of anti-colonialism and national-self-determination to promote his agenda. I wonder how many Iraqis care, or know, what country they live in. Here are primitive people, living in mud-brick hovels who have no loyalties extending beyond their clan or tribe. They want their tribal leaders in power so that they can get the goodies. The prospect of a civil society thwarts their agenda.

What vision, if any, do the thugs who blew up Americans in Falluja and dismembered their corpses have for the future of Iraq? Most have none: they were just a mob of young, lower-class males out for a good time. Those who do want to keep Iraq the primitive tribal society it's always been, where Big Men achieve power through violence and corruption and their tribe-mates depend on their largess.

It's easy to see why Big Men like Saddam and other local warlords like the arrangement. And, where there's an excuse for violence, there will always be hoards of young, lower-class males rushing in to have a good time. But why do the majority of people go along with it? I suppose because they can't imagine what civil society would be like, or because they don't seriously believe that any alternatives to tribalism are possible. They imagine that Bush is simply another warlord out to loot and pillage so that he can dispense the proceeds to his tribe, and that attempts to establish civil society will leave them without patronage.

Maybe they're right.

Wages of Wealth: All This Progress Is Killing Us, Bite by Bite

The litany:

When Americans have more than enough money to buy food, they buy more food.
When they have more than enough money to buy cars they buy SUVs.
When they earn enough to live comfortably they work longer hours.
And, one might add, even when they're healthy enough they obsess about their bodies, frequent chiropractors and acupuncturists, and dose themselves with herbal teas to get even healthier.

The problem isn't American affluence but American puritanism which obscures the obvious truism that when the necessities are taken care of you can stop thinking about them and enjoy yourself. When you have enough food to live, you can stop thinking about food; when you earn enough to live comfortably you can buy leisure.

The whole purpose of affluence is liberation from those miserable necessities: eating, working, getting from place to place, dealing with the dull business of life, so that you can engage in "liberal pursuits"--literature, the arts, travel, crafts, sports and learning for its own sake.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Spain united in sorrow and anger

Who done it? Islamic revolutionaries? Basque nationalists? Or a bunch of working class youths out for a good time? At least the spontaneous mass demonstrations send the message that most of the world is thoroughly sick of terrorism: revolutionary chic is over.

For the past four decades cute little revolutionary groups could count sympathy and support from right-thinking left-wing Americans and others intent on registering a protest against colonialist imperialism, capitalism and white, western, male hegemony. Any nationalist movement could be squeezed into the Revolutionary Template as an oppressed racial-ethnic-religious minority fighting for independence against colonial-oppressive-privileged overlords. Jewish settlers in Palestine against the British mandate, Algerians against the French, Irish Catholics against Irish Protestants, Mau Mau against the colonial government and, more recently, everyone against the American Cowboy. Any street gang or band of thugs could gain support by making ideological noises, preferably Marxist, as the Black Panthers discovered.

Now it's wearing a little thin. Spain is a respectable EU country and the Basques are not an oppressed minority group struggling for independence against an oppressive racist, colonialist regime.

I have nothing against violence per se: if the benefits outweigh the costs so be it. But what have these revolutions accomplished and how do the states of affairs they're brought about compare with other possible worlds? Without Soviet subsidies, Cuba is an economic basket case. Israel is a land-hungry racist state, perpetually at war. Kenya is an impoverished, corrupt, crime-ridden hellhole. The US, with all its natural resources and other advantages, is a socially backward anomaly amongst affluent nations where 40% of the population is functionally illiterate and there are beggars in the streets. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are doing much better. As for the goals of the Islamic revolution , there is nothing to recommend them: the aim is to expunge Western influence and turn the Islamic world into a puritanical theocracy.

Anyway, I'm making a bet now, though not a big one: I don't think that Eta or Al-Qaida as such was responsible for the bombings in Spain. I think it was a group of young lower-class males, a street gang, with a few romantic middle class hangers-on, who picked up an eclectic assortment of ideologies and possibly some financial support from "revolutionary" groups.

The Atlantic | March 2004 | How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement | Flanagan

This is yet another wallow in liberal guilt about what is supposed to be the Original Sin of feminism: shifting the burden of domestic work to poor women, immigrant women and women of color. It rehearses the stock confession of the aging Yuppie (if that isn't an oxymoron): I hired a nanny, but I knew what I was doing, am ashamed of myself, and do all I can to be nice to my nanny to make up for it.

What is uniquely bad about domestic work is that, for the most part, it hasn't been captured by the capitalist net. Women who hire nannies, "housekeepers" and cleaning women don't regard what they're doing as an impersonal market transaction. They construe it as part of an archaic quasi-feudal arrangement of patronage and servility and, if they are right-thinking liberals, exascerbate the feudal character of the arrangement by striving to be good patrons.

We don't worry about hiring gardeners to mow the lawn or plumbers to unstop our toilets or dentists to fix our teeth. We don't feel that we have to make up for the arrangement by establishing personal, quasi-familial relationships with them. We don't take an interest in our plumbers personal lives or give our dentists cast off clothing or assume that we're doing gardeners a favor by chatting with them.

But domestic servants are another matter. Women assume that domestic work is inherently degrading, that it essentially involves a personal relationship of patronage and servility in a way that gardening, plumbing and dentistry don't, and that it has to be sweetened with compensation beyond monetary payment. Yet ironically what makes domestic work humiliating is precisely the fact that senoras and servants don't construe their arrangement as an impersonal market transaction.

Child care and cleaning are bad jobs, though not nearly so bad as most jobs women can get--data entry, waitressing or cashiering. But they aren't degrading unless we make them so--as we do when we attempt make up for the arrangement by being nice and taking an interest. We know that we're not doing the dentists, stockbrokers or lawyers whose services we buy a favor by taking a personal interest in their lives or making conversation with them: we know that if we do we're prying and wasting their time. It is the assumption of privilege that blinds us to the fact that when we do the same with nannies and maids we're not doing them a favor either, and that by treating them differently from other workers whose services we buy we perpetuate the system of patronage and servility.

There is no practical way of eliminating shit work. The best we can do is see to it everyone has a fair opportunity to avoid it and that those who can't avoid it are fairly treated and decently paid. As for us good liberal feminists, the best we can do is recognize that nannies are on a par with gardeners, plumbers and dentists, providing services for a fee, and that well-meaning attempts to sweeten the bitter pill are insulting, patronizing and burdensome to the women who do these jobs.

Ethical Universalism and Particularism

I've just been reading some rubbish about "ethical particularism" in David Miller's book On Nationalisty. Rather I should have said that I've been reading some good stuff about this "ethical particularism" rubbish--the book is quite good: it's the doctrine that sucks.

There are two reasons that we should reject ethical particularism in favor of ethical universalism:

(1) Ethical universalism (like physicalism) is an aggressor hypothesis. Historically, the further we go in ethical reflection, the smarter, more educated, more experienced and more sophisticated we become as individuals the more we move int he direction of ethical universalism. Like Newtonian mechanics as an explanation of celestial motion where there was formerly a grossly disjunctive one, ethical universalism provides a unifying hypothesis.

(2) We don't just go increasingly toward ethical universalism, both as individuals and as a species: at every stage, we regard our progress along the way as a good thing. We have meta-intuitions, so to speak.

Michael Schwartz: Inside the California Grocery Strike

Maybe this is just naive of me but I don't understand why firms should be morally obliged to pay unskilled workers wages suitable to provide a middle class life for them or to provide health benefits. The question isn't, as the author suggests, one of whether people ought to have a decent standard of living or whether health care is a privilege or a right. It's whether Vons, Albertsons and Ralphs are supermarkets or social service agencies.

It is not the case that the employees' only alternative to going on strike was to watch while their wages and benefits were cut to the point where they had to work 2 jobs to make ends meet. They could have used their savings from those middle-class wages to get training that would have given them the skills to compete for better jobs. That would have diminished the pool of unskilled labor and eventually have forced supermarket chains to provide reasonable wages and benefits for their employees.

Eventually--in the long run when we're all dead. In the meantime, instead of rehearsing the Old Left rhetoric about unions, corporate greed and solidarity of the Working Class, activists should be campaigning to get the state to provide the safety nets, social services, income transfers, training opportunities and, why not, help with relocation that would provide a decent life for these people without bullying firms into doing its work.

A New Order: Imagining Life Without Illegal Immigrants

We need illegal immigrants because every reasonably complex society needs a cadre of intelligent, responsible, competent people, who have no other options (at least temporarily) to do its dirty work. Dirty work has to be done, and done reasonably well, to keep the wheels turning. But without large groups of people who are forced to do it, by discrimination and legal constraints, it would be left to people who were too stupid, irresponsible and incompetent to make a go of it.

When I was a kid blacks and women did the dirty work because that was all that any black person or woman, however smart, responsible or competent could get. Lily Mae Brown cleaned the house, and Bill Myers, who had elaborate horticultural theories and a complicated routine for dealing with my mother's peonies, did the garden. Jimmey, an elderly white male with a remarkably bulbous, red nose who wore the same oversized overcoat summer and winter took out the trash--irregularly. Lily Mae and Bill were likey overqualified; Jimmy had risen to his level of incompetence. As for my mother, with her degree in Classics, she was a school teacher--which was the best any middle class woman could do.

Now only those who can't, teach: the standard program for smart, middle-class women is law school. Teacher shortages are chonic, turnover is high and, apart from a few saints, teachers are stupid. Women who are smart enough to be nurses become doctors as the market struggles to provide better wages, benefits and working conditions to attract a sufficient number of competent workers to the profession. And, even with gross, ongoing discrimination, most competent, responsible blacks can do better than cleaning and gardening.

We need an underclass. Discrimination is rational because there aren't enough good jobs to go around and because bad jobs have to be done reasonably well. We need guest-workers.