Instant Runoff Voting

ElectionMethods.org: action

Visit this terrific site on various alternative methods of voting and how they work! Mathematically interesting but accessible even to the likes of me. There are links at the site to non-partisan activist organizations that promote alternatives to plurality voting.

I've been converted by my daughter, who is a Green. The Greens' preferred method, IRV, has problems which, ironically, thwart third party candidates but there are other alternatives. Anything has got to be better than plurality voting in a winner-take-all system.

The simplest alternative is Approval Voting (see, e.g. Citizens for Approval Voting. Voters check off the candidates they approve of without ranking them and the candidate with the most votes wins. It can't be too flakey since the Mathematical Association of America (32,000 members), the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (377,000 members).

We now know what's the matter with Kansas: working class social conservatives are sacrificing their economic interests to buy support for their preferred policies on "lifestyle issues" and cynical plutocrats are happy to throw them a bone to get their own economic agenda through. Given the current system however there is no fix because the center will not hold. Neither party can win without the support of socially conservative working class voters but given the current agendas of both parties, working class conservatives lose whichever party they support. And if a viable third party emerged to represent their interests, we could end up with a three-way deadlock instead of a two-way one.

What can't happen in any case is the emergence of any nuanced political position--as distinct from an incoherent politically motivated compromise.

The New York Times > International > Europe > Terrorism: Hostages Urge France to Repeal Its Scarf Ban

Ayman Zawahiri, the No. 2 figure in the terrorist network Al Qaeda, condemned France for defending the freedom of nudity and depravity and fighting chastity and decency with the scarf ban, adding that such anti-Muslim acts by the West should be dealt with by tank shells and antiaircraft missiles.

Vive la France! Liberte, nudite, depravite!

Nice Muslims

Crooked Timber: Light a single candle

I've heard that before the war there were even some fairly civilized Muslims in Iraq--who had electricity and indoor plumbing and didn't carry assault weapons or marry off their daughters to cousins at the age of 9. I can imagine how they must feel now that the US is negotiating with a gang leader whose "militia" consists of young, lower class males from a Bagdad slum--or how they might have taken this article from the NYTimes proposing tribal rule as the semi-final solution to the Iraq problem.

As a thought experiment, imagine that 50 years from now the EU, now the world's hyperpower, invades the US to dismantle WMD and establish democracy. In the process they destroy the electricity grid, disrupt the water supply and demolish the sewage system. But they aren't worried: the US is, after all, a third world country--how many Americans had electricity or running water anyway? how many had ever seen a flush toilet much less knew how to use one?

The looting, rioting and ongoing insurgency is something of a surprise and poses a dilemma. If occupying forces go in with shock and awe the collateral damage will get all Americans up in arms; if they pull their punches it will go on and on and on creating even more hostility from the general public. The puppet regime doesn't seem able to control it.

An editorial writer at the Times (not of NY) proposes empowering Mafia bosses to run the country. They're thugs and we may not like the way they operate, but they have traditionally had the allegiance of many Americans (some 40% of whom are "tribal"--like Iragis according to the NYTimes article) and can maintain order. Most however believe that televangelists and other fundamentalist clerics would be the best qualified to put the lid back on. Pundits debate about whether the cost of supporting them--a fundamentalist Christian theocracy--would be acceptable. Most agree that, while they would put women into purdah, administer shock treatment to homosexuals and burn heretics it's better than chaos and the potential for breeding more terrorism. There aren't that many homosexuals and heretics and third world women are used to being being treated badly--it wouldn't bother them in the way that it would bother people like us.

Meanwhile, diplomats are negotiating with a young hoodlum who, with his gang of ghetto youths from the South Bronx, is holed up in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine trying to parlay his way into a high position in the puppet regime. EU policy makers have learnt from their Cultural Sensitivity advisors that St. John the Divine is the holiest shrine in Protestantdom and that if they storm the place to get the gang out there will be a mass uprising. Here endeth the epistle.

If I were one of those civilized Muslims in Iraq I'd pray for the return of Saddam--or someone like him.

BBC NEWS | UK | Politics | Tory leader attacks 'PC culture'

Maybe the Brits have something to complain about--we in the US don't. Opponents of "political correctness" want a world where I don't get to do guy stuff. They want a world where things look right--where, even if a minority of elite women get to be lawyers and managers, most are concentrated in smarmy "helping professions" and excluded from blue collar work. They want to see to it that employers can hire people according to what looks right and that women are confined to jobs where they have to do boring repetitious work or be nice and help people, and in any case dress up.

"Political correctness" is a straw man. The gist of the argument is that opening genuine opportunities for women outside of the pink-collar sector or enforcing fair practices in hiring and promotion entails commitment to a whole host of silly, coercive and otherwise objectionable practices.

The issue is whether women can get commissioned sales positions selling electronic gadgets at Fry's Electronics--they can't--and whether they have the same chance as comparably qualified males of getting promoted at Walmart, being auto mechanics or working construction.

The Sleep of Reason

The embrace of relativism by many leftist intellectuals in the United States, while it may not be politically very important, is a terrible admission of failure, and an excuse for not answering the claims of their political opponents. The subordination of the intellect to partisan loyalty is found across the political spectrum, but usually it takes the form of a blind insistence on the objective truth of certain supporting facts and refusal to consider evidence to the contrary. So what explains the shift, at least by a certain slice of the intellectual left, to this new form of obfuscation?

When I was an undergraduate I volunteered to go door to door for Zero Population Growth to promote the liberalization of abortion laws. I thought that, as a philosophy major, I was just the person for the job: I had read Locke on personal identity and could explain to people that even though fetuses were human beings, living organisms of species homo sapiens, they were not persons. I was prepared to expand on this in great detail.

I was told that this was not a good idea. At the training session for volunteers, we were cautioned not to get into "philosophical arguments." If a contact attempted to argue we were to repeat (as many times as it took) that abortion was simply an issue of women's rights, and that was that. If we allowed ourselves to be drawn into arguments of any kind, we were warned, we were lost.

It was the same thing whenever I tried to work for the political causes I supported--argument was out. I don't know whether this was peculiar to leftist causes or a feature of politics as such but the idea was that sloganeering and manipulation were sophisticated while argument was, at best, naive. But it did seem especially entrenched in the Left--it was a commonplace that you couldn't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

This isn't an assumption peculiar to the French "intellectuals" Sokol and Bricmont exposed or to academic literati--it's feature of popular culture. I get it from students. Every year the freshmen in my intro logic classes, where I devote the first 3 weeks to "critical thinking" and debunking rehearse the theme. Many are grossly superstitious and almost all buy some version of mellow relativism. Most don't think logic broadly construed is important--in the words of one haunting course eval comment: "What's the good of being logical if no one else is?"

Talking to upperclassmen who were more articulate and reflective got some idea of their views. Conservative ideologues in my ethics classes believed that "rationality" was coextensive with the Market, which was perfectly efficient--any objections to the free operation of the Market were ipso facto irrational. Some were convinced that not only I, but Rawls and everyone on the syllabus apart from Nozick were warm-hearted sentimentalists who didn't know how the real world worked and that Sen just didn't understand economics. Most of the others believed that rationality was a matter of arbitrary convention. Rationality was a matter of memorizing and following arbitrary rules. To be rational was to be blinkered and constrained, conventional, obedient, rigid, simplistic and dull.

In less than a week I'll be back to teaching after my sabbatical--I've got a lot of work to do. On the whole I'm not a great enthusiast about teaching. But I do get a kick out of it in intro logic classes when students have their satoris and realize that the stuff makes sense--and I can say (it usually gets a laugh) "Hey--that's why they call it 'logic'!"

The New York Times > Opinion > Guest Columnist: Chipping Away at the Wall

In his wonderful book, "Summer for the Gods," Edward J. Larson paints a picture of America in the mid-1920's that's oddly familiar: torn between modernism and religious fundamentalism, Americans felt an old-time burning need for a burning bush. Horrified by the moral and cultural declines of the Jazz Age, they turned away from internationalism and intellectualism.

Welcome to 2004 and "Summer for the Gods Part 2: Revenge of the Public Officials."

So far so good. I'm firmly in favor of internationalism, intellectualism and moral decline as well as stem cell research, socialism, the legalization of recreational drugs and putting redneck Fundamentalists in their place. But why should we worry that--

A crèche on government property is constitutional so long as the manger includes a Malibu Barbie; and state aid to religious schools is constitutional if it's triangulated through the alchemy of parental choice.

I have an idiosyncratic taste for religious displays, from creches in the park to Buddhas in Chinese restaurants. I'd like to see as much of this stuff in public space as possible. Where is the harm anyway? Every English town and village has a market cross but this doesn't seem to have made the Brits religious in any objectionable sense. I don't even understand why state support for religious schools or for that matter churches is a problem. Godless Scandanavian countries support churches but are not considering anything comparable to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Whatever meaning religious believers attach crosses, creches or restaurant Buddhas, to non-believers they are simply decor: I do not see why they should be objectionable to anyone. Churches are de facto public facilities like museums and theme parks: I don't see why they shouldn't be subsidized. We might not want to subsidize all such de facto public facilities but it seems to me we should fund those that provide access to important cultural artifacts and, similarly, we should subsidize churches that have historic interest or architectural merit.

The Scopes trial locked in a peculiarly American take on the role of religion in public life. We either see it as the bulwark of a decent society, imposing a code of conduct on citizens and exerting social control, or as a reactionary force and threat to individual liberty. In either case we see it as a potent ideology with the potential to transform public life, for better or worse. We do not see it as a package of myths, customs and visible symbols--church buildings, market crosses, holidays, ceremonies and practices--which are inherently powerless.

It's Class Warfare...

...but who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

Since CNN colored Middle America red almost 4 years ago liberals have been meditating on the great mystery of recent American politics: how did the Democratic Party lose the working class? why was Joe Sixpack voting against his economic interests? what was the matter with Kansas?

The orthodox answer was that Joe and his fellow Kansans were bamboozled by the conservative noise machine. If only they could be shaken out of their false consciousness they would recognize that their real enemies were not latte-drinking liberals but the Republican plutocrats who used them to promote their capitalist agenda.

This however assumes that it is in the interests of the American working class to oppose the conservative program. It is not. As all good Preference Utilitarians know, what is in a person's interest is his getting what he wants--and most members of the working class do not want what latte-drinking liberals imagine they "really" want or think they ought to want.

35 years ago the Proles discovered that they could use the rich to promote their agenda. By throwing the plutocrats a few sops--tax cuts for the wealthy and policies that favored big business--they could get everything they wanted: more restrictions on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, more war, more prisons and harsher sentences; the affirmation of their way of life and the humiliation of the effete snobs, hippies, professors, liberal journalists, feminazis and the whole latte establishment which, with good reason, despised them.

The working class is our enemy and the rich are their dupes. The Proles don't need their consciousness raised: they know very well what they want and they are getting it.

The Ethic of Love

By 1963 everyone knew that the Old Christian Ethic--the Rules, undergirded by Kantianism at its sourist and, above all, no sex--was bad. The trouble was that the Ethic of Love promulgated by J. A. T. Robinson and other liberal clergymen, was much, much worse.

The tenets of the Ethic of Love were three: (1) radical altruism, (2) personal involvement and (3) non-reflection.

(1) Christians, according to the Ethic of Love, were to "do what Love would do"--to give themselves unstintingly to the Other, without counting costs. So, in Honest to God J. A. T. Robinson rehearsed the story of a woman who cured a pederast by "giving herself" to him sexually. Quite apart from feminist objections to this recommendation and the fantastical suggestion that Love can cure pederasty, the fundamental claim that the whole of the law and the prophets was unstinting self-giving was oppressive. Buttoned-up clergy, accustomed to dealing with puritanical parishioners imagined that the Ethic of Love was liberating, but it was the opposite.

The Old Christian Ethic made limited, if stringent, demands: if you didn't steal, lie, commit adultery or worship graven images you could do pretty much what you liked. The demands of Love were unlimited. Love demanded constant sensitivity to the needs and wants of others: whenever there was a need or want, Christians were to jump to satisfy it--without thinking of inconvenience to themselves or counting costs.

(2) To make matters worse, Christians were supposed to give of themselves. Impersonal acts of charity were not good enough. Christians were to work in soup kitchen and enter into conversations with derelicts, volunteer for social service projects, keep informed about current events and work politically for a more just society. Contributing to political organizations and paying others to kiss lepers was just not good enough.

(3) Finally, reflection on the costs and benefits of the program was not on. It was, after all, Judas who worried that the ointment spilt on Jesus' feet could have been sold to provide for the poor.

Love was spontaneous and unreflectively generous. Love did not ask whether contributing a day's wages to Oxfam might not be better than spending a day dispensing sandwiches to bums on grates. Love did not even ask whether its beneficiaries wanted the kind of generosity it demanded: it did not ask whether poor families would have preferred an impersonal check coverning the costs of a decent Thanksgiving dinner to a church lady delivering a food basket and ministering to them. Love never asked about opportunity costs either: it demanded a spontaneous, unreflectively generous response to need as it presented itself, without consideration of other needs, most especially one's own.

The Ethic of Love was not so much about how people should behave as about what sort of people they should be--in particular, the doctrine that they should be like liberal clergy. It was liberating and comfortable to people who were uncritical, sentimental and sympathetic; it was flattering to people who wanted to "work with people" and got personal gratification from helping the needy. But it was miserable for people who were simply not like that--and clergy, who were self-selected for these traits didn't realize that for others who tried to practice the Ethic of Love, it was more oppressive and guilt-inducing than the old, sour puritanism.

In the end, most people didn't take it any more seriously than they took old style Christian Morality. They conducted their lives according to the conventions of their particular social groups, with attention to the exhortations of advertisers and self-help gurus. Conservatives looked to their churches to support the social conventions they followed; if a church failed to do the job, they found another that did. Liberals didn't pay any attention to the church at all.

The earth spun around, the sun rose and set, while clergy debated the fine points of sexual ethics, preached and exorted, and imagined that they were keeping it going.

Campaigns spar on war leadership | csmonitor.com

Some time ago there was an article, I think in the New Yorker, describing a safety test comparing an SUV with a Porsche sports car. Predictably, the conclusion was that the Porsche was not only more fun to drive--it was a lot safer. Of course it depends on what you mean by "safe." If you are going to get into an accident, you're better off in an SUV. But you're much less likely to get into an accident in a Porche--if you're reasonably intelligent, have good reflexes and aren't drunk.

Gerald Ford billed himself as "a Ford--not Lincoln." Bush is trying to sell himself as an SUV--not a Porsche.

Don't worry that the SUV can't slalom around those cones. There's no point in going around if you can just roll right over them. Besides, changing direction is a sign of weakness: flip-flopping and diplomacy show you don't have the weight, power and guts to smash through.

Bring 'em on and...let's roll!

The Right Rev. George W. Bush - Among the worshippers at the president's traveling revival show. By Chris Suellentrop

"All of you are soldiers in the army of compassion," the clergyman-in-chief tells the crowd. "And one of the reasons I'm seeking the office for four more years is to call upon our citizens to love your neighbor just like you'd like to be loved yourself." After his usual endorsement of the Golden Rule, Bush speaks of souls, which also isn't unusual for him: "We can change America one soul at a time by encouraging people to spread something government cannot spread, which is love."

Maybe the reason I don't trust George W. Bush is because I don't trust anybody.

I don't trust potential employers to assess my application on the basis of merit because I know that they will hire friends and relatives, and that, in any case, I will not even be considered for "men's jobs." That's the way the world works, and it's fine if you are a white male and have connections. It isn't fine for me.

I don't trust family and friendly neighbors to bail me out when the going gets tough. Apart from a casual greeting when I take out the trash I don't have any contact with my neighbors and I don't have a warm, extended family that pulls together in tough times. When my kids were sick and couldn't go to childcare, I had to take them to work--there were no grandparents, aunts or friendly neighbors to help out. When my kids are grown they'll move across the country or to Europe to pursue their careers--I don't expect them to take care of me when I'm old.

I don't trust "faith-based initiatives" to provide a safety net. I suppose that if I were destitute I would be able to get a bed at a Salvation Army shelter, but I certainly hope it doesn't come to that.

The picture of a friendly world where neighbors are neighborly and families take care of their own, where merit and hard work pay off and love conquers all, is a fantasy. Without the government enforcing equal opportunity and affirmative action policies, I don't have a chance of getting a job for which I'm qualified on the basis of merit. And without state benefits I have no safety nets beyond a bed in the Salvation Army shelter.

The Politics of Fantasy

American Prospect Online - ViewWeb

Some time ago I had a big fight with I., who reviews romance novel mss. for a living, about Princess Di. I couldn't fathom why I.'s readers not only followed her career and wardrobe but sympathized with her marital problems and mourned her death. I hated Di. To me it was all very simple: Di was was tall, thin, blond and rich; if she hadn't screwed up, she would be Queen of England eventually. What more could anyone want? Why should she care if Charles had a mistress on the side? Big deal. Yet she had the gaul to want even more--a Harlequin Romance with Charles.

I.'s readers apparently didn't feel that way. Those truckers' wives, waitresses and Walmart cashiers wanted Di to have even more.

Matthew Yglesias wonders why Americans, aren't more enthusiastic about Kerry's proposal to increase taxes individuals who make more than $200,000/year or why they resonate to Bush's stump speech:

Kerry "said he's only going to raise the tax on the so-called rich. But you know how the rich is: They've got accountants. That means you pay. That means your small business pays. It means the farmers and ranchers pay."

After all, Yglesias notes, only 2% of Americans make over $200,000 a year, and very few are small business owners, farmers or ranchers.

Yglesias ignores the Princess Di Phenomenon. Millions of women who were not tall, thin, blond or rich, but wished they were wanted Di to have even more. And millions of Americans who don't stand to gain from tax cuts for the rich or benefits to small business owners, farmers or ranchers, will get on board with Bush's proposal because, while they're fatalistic about their own prospects, they want people of these sorts to do well. They want the rich to do well--so long as they imagine them as entrepreneurs and benefactresses, heroic CEOs with well-dressed wives promoting suitable charities. They want small businessmen, farmers and ranchers to do well because they like that idea of Main Street with Gillis' Grocery Store and Cunningham Hardware, where Grandpa Miller gets his chicken feed and plowshares.

Main Street is as remote from their lives as Buckingham Palace, but it doesn't matter. They don't believe that politics can make any difference in the their lives so they opt for politics as fantasy--that vision of America where the Cartwright Boys herded and hunted, the Real McCoy menfolk worked the South 40 while Kate and Hassie cooked grits, and Archie and Veronica hung out at the Malt Shop on Main Street..

Darfur

Oxfam - Sudan - Emergency - A long way from home - interview with Oxfam's logistics manager in Sudan

Incredibly, I discovered that some people are actually reading this blog! So I thought, shit, I should do something! So this is it: Please contribute some money to help the refugees from Darfur. The link above is to Oxfam--but there are plenty of other a agencies helping out that you can find on the web.

Just do it. This is a moral slam dunk. The origins of the conflict may be muddled--here's a link to a NYTimes Ob-Ed piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/opinion/08dealey.html?pagewanted=print&position=--but the bottom line is that people are starving and getting sick and we can do something about it. So please hit the link to Oxfam, or some other, contribute, and pass this on.

The New York Times > Magazine > The Way We Live Now: What Olympic Ideal?
What ever happened to Chariots of Fire, those brave British boys sprinting around the quad at their Oxbridge college, inspired by Principles--those amateurs?

There was a PBS documentary on the Romans yesterday, describing their passive-aggressive rationale for empire building. The Romans make the case that they have to subdue the tribes at their borders to be secure, so they conquer neighboring territory, ostensibly in the interests of defense. Then the neighboring territory becomes part of the Roman empire so, recursively, territory bordering on it has to be conquered to secure what has now become Roman territory. And so on, until the empire reaches the end of its lines of communication.

So, recursively, we create leisure pursuits, turn them into businesses, then create more leisure pursuits. which themselves turn into businesses.

I was in Texas last week visiting L. whose mother has a house on the Gulf of Mexico. We rented kayaks and explored the salt marshes while jet skis and power boats buzzed us. I can understand the jet skis--I'd like to try it--but the powerboats buzzing around and around the inlet, getting nowhere fast, were a mystery. I like sailing, fiddling with the lines, continually solving puzzles. But I don't understand why anyone would want to go round and in round in warm water 4 feet deep in a powerboat, getting nowhere fast and not doing anything interesting. It seems like playing slot machines--about as interesting as working on an assembly line.

We're geared up for puzzle solving and strenuous physical work, hunting wooly mammoths. Mercifully, we don't have to hunt or gather anymore, or farm or weave. So we can garden, do fancy needlework, play games, prove theorems, test ourselves against material and intellectual constraints purely for pleasure. But we don't. We turn sports into a business, make entertainment a life and death affair, and cheat.

Take my money--please take my money...

I've just finished my taxes for the August 15 extension deadline. I don't care about the money. I'd pay twice as much if I could avoid the record-keeping and paperwork and, given my wage rate, it would probably be cost-effective. It took me all day, a bottle of wine, and almost 2 runs of the Bach B minor Mass to get through it. And with all that I am paying the Feds in 3 figures and California in 4.

Ah but now we're on the Sanctus, with the soprano line circling around and brass blasting. I suppose I do like this better than the Russian church music--it is definitely cosmic and much more varied. My colleague J.D. had a short piece of his picked up by the newspapers, "Philosophy Professor Says Heaven Could Be Boring." Could be if they're singing Russian chant, but definitely not if Bach is going.

Baroque was a risk. You could keep chugging on with chant forever, hypnotically. But this stuff, forced up to squeeze out emotion (the sweet violin and tenor solos for the Benedictus, the bouncing Hosanna, and now this brooding Agnus Dei) is unstable and was bound to collapse, like a TV sitcom degrading to warmedy. Even the social critiques became nice: MASH lost its edge and Archie Bunker became a diamond in the rough with a good heart.

It did collapse. Bach begat Mendelsohn--who I LIKE, but whose blocky Lutheran chorales suggest blocky Germans singing Lutheran chorales rather than angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. That brooding Agnus Dei morphed into "Jesus Lover of My Soul" and lesser sentimental Victorian Jesus hymns. Baroque church architecture (I'm thinking of St. Paul's) took a funny turn, branching into smarmy Roccoco, with pink and white gilded putti, on the one hand and earnest secular federal style on the other, the stuff of every state capital in the US. I went with Graham W., to St. Martin's in the Fields where the rot had clearly set in and we concluded that the two fattest putti were Handel and Mrs Anne Kiligrew.

There's a moral in here somewhere but I don't feel capable of extracting it. Maybe it's about the risk of Incarnation, "nothing human is alien to me," taking on intellect, emotion, every human thing and incurring the risk that the whole religious enterprise would become merely human--as it did. Along the way though the parishioners at Thomaskirsche must have had a blast with Old Bach at the organ and his 27 kids helping out with his original productions in the choir and orchestra.

Oooo, must go. We're at "Et in spiritum sanctum dominum et vivificantem (I've gone back on the disk). This is where I came in. 35 years ago on a hot night I slept on the fire escape of my college dorm and when I woke up the fields shouted "Lord! Giver of Life!"

The Spittoon and the Veil

I've been trying to find an essay on spittoons I read long ago--the sort of thing Chesterton might have written. In lieu of it, the best I could do was this: The Spitting Syndrome

The gist of essay I couldn't find was that while spittoons were regarded as a necessity of civilized life--the assumption being that all men by their nature must spit--we now don't even miss them.

Veiling, purdah and all the machinery of female modesty were the first civilized response to sexual exploitation and male violence. I'm skeptical about the received view that the whole purpose was to isolate and control women--after all, it wasn't as though before purdah women were free and equal, running peaceful, prosperous matriarchies. Women were bought and sold, beaten, raped and enslaved. Men stole them and fought over them, individually and tribally, from the Rape of Dinah to the Trojan War.

Assuming that men's urges for sex and violence were uncontrollable, in the interest of civility, the obvious solution was to keep women inaccessible and out of sight. If men must spit, spittoons must be one of the amenities of civilized society. The trouble is that the more spittoons there are, the more people spit--and the more firmly entrenched the idea that they must spit becomes. And to right thinking people, radical proposals to unveil women or retire spittoons will seem like an invitation to barbarism--brutality, violence, public disorder and spit all over the floor.

Still, somehow we managed to become a spittoon-free society without even an unsanitary transitional period: without fanfare, the spittoons vanished and men stopped spitting. Women walk unveiled in the streets without the protection of male relatives, but men don't run amok. It's never even occurred to most that they should.

American Prospect Online - Have Faith

Whatever happened to civil religion, the faith of Ike who believed that "this country doesn't make any sense unless it's founded on some deeply held religious faith--and I don' t care what it is."

Most Americans, including those who say they wouldn't vote for an atheist, still practice and profess this innocuous folk religion. All the religion they want in their president is formal affiliation with some respectable denomination, visible cultic practice and the assurance that his deeply held religious faith has made him both principled and nice.

Kerry doesn't have to quote Scripture, pepper his conversation with folksy allusions to "the good Lord," or give testimony. All he has to do is say that his faith (and they don't care what it is) has gotten him through tough times and given him strength to make hard decisions, and follow up by pulling out the rosary he carried with him in Vietnam.

The religious dilemma is of the cultured despisers' own making. They imagine that only religion virulent enough to scare off liberal voters would impress the masses.

Stupid White Men

NDOL: The White Male Problem by William A. Galston

Is Joe Sixpack a distinctively American phenomenon? This isn't a rhetorical question: I'm curious.

Lads are universal: young, lower-class males engage in soccer violence, gang warfare or jihad, until they get killed off or grow up and get tired. But Joe Sixpack is grown up--married with children and socially conservative, a working stiff and good provider, he still honors the Lad cult, detests intellectuals, latte-drinking liberals and wimps, and is convinced that get-toughism will cure all social ills.

Lower class women, even those who misspend their youth boozing with the lads and participating in wet tee-shirt contests, grow up. The whining smarm in women's magazines is on a continuum with the most elevated New Age self-help literature. Almost all adult women participate, however ineptly or incompletely, in elite culture even if they are behind the curve, consuming vegitarian health foods after elite women have moved on to Atkins. They are aspirants. Lower class men are adversaries.

It may be because, at least since the Victorian period, women have had the job of doing culture. Clarence storms into the house, after a day of ruthless capitalism at the office, upsetting the palms Vinnie has rented for her afternoon musicale. Lower class women are usually more educated than their male counterparts: Tony Soprano never went to college but Carmella is a Montclair State drop-out. Lower class women can pass, or at the very least, be accepted. Carmella knows how to pick a good, safe suit when the occasion demands it. At the Cuzimanno's barbeque, even with her accent, she gets on reasonably well with the wives. Tony in the meantime gets patronized and treated as a specimen by the men.

Women are less firmly rooted in class and culture: they take on the status of husbands, sons, and patrons. Shylock's daughter is the Jew's daughter, never the Jewess, and the taint vanishes instantly when she is baptized and married. Poor relations and ladies' companions take on the class of their patrons. Even without the benefit of affiliation, good looks and a safe suit are all a woman needs for a reasonable facsimile of class. No one is checking credentials

For men, credentials--the family and schools, the job and professional resume--are vital. Safe suits are to no avail. No amount of latte-drinking, liberal rhetoric or ecological concern will will make a blue-collar worker acceptable in polite society--if anything, it will only make him more interesting specimen. They can't join us so they do what they can to beat us by turning the scale of values upside down, extoling the goodness of stupidity, ignorance, crudity and brutality--in much the way that good liberals who secretly believe that there is no hope for brown and black people proclaim the virtues of their native cultures. (Of course I, as the mama of The Enlightenment Project, would like to see everyone, regardless of sex, race or class origin, become enlightened and assimilated--something most people nowadays don't think is possible or even desirable)

The only scrap of prestige lower class white males have comes from being white and being male. Any political program that promotes women's rights or racial equality is inimical to their interests. It is a zero sum game that Democrats cannot win unless they abandon support for programs aimed at providing equal opportunity for women and minorities.

Right now Democrats seem keen to appeal to lower class white males. There is no way that they can do that short of sending the message that they will bring back the days when white men had a lock on well-paid blue collar jobs because they were white and were paid more than women simply because they were men. That is what they want. If this is so than maybe the best strategy for Democrats is simply to write them off and frankly direct their efforts toward women, members of minority groups and white men who have more going for them than being white and being male.

Movie Money

Some time ago I was discussing funding for professional travel with a friend. My travel money is fine; his is flat out lavish. He explained that in his college fraternity this was called "movie money." When potential members were being interviewed, the really obnoxious brothers were given money to go to the movies--or anywhere off the premises.

When I went to Von's this morning to buy cat food there were two beggars at the door: one at a card table, soliciting for a bogus charity, with a crudely lettered sign leaning against a coffee can; another just begging. I would happily pay movie money to get them out of sight.

I think I'd pay $5 per supermarket trip to avoid having these guys hanging around the entrance. I'd probably pay $1 a pop to avoid beggars at freeway exits. I don't think I'm atypical: people are prepared to pay movie money to keep beggars and other offensive nuisances out of sight, even if there are differences in how much. They pay a hefty premium to live where the streets are free of prostitutes walking their beat, lower class youths hanging around, piles of rotting trash, boarded up buildings and burnt out cars.

Bush dropped the rhetoric of "compassionate conservativism" soon after his selection and no one missed it because no one, liberal or conservative, is seriously motivated by compassion. An occasional human interest story may make sentimentalists sniffle and pictures of starving children will squeeze out a few bucks, but no one is willing to make serious outlays, particularly in the form of taxes, to improve the lot of people who are badly off.

Maybe Democrats should appeal to Americans' baser instincts. My fellow Americans: your taxes go for movie money to get these people cleaned up or, failing that, out of sight.

USATODAY.com - Bush: Re-election will ensure U.S. safety

Safety from what?

Even counting 9/11 Americans are statistically less likely to be hit in a terrorist attack than they are to be struck by lightening. No one is buying lightening rods or obsessing about thunder storms.

Walmart is the country's largest employer, with over a million workers getting on the average a little over $8 an hour and no benefits. Americans have a much better chance of working at Walmart than of being bombed, and an even better chance of not working at all. One in five surveyed say that there is a good chance that some member of their household will be unemployed within the year.

But Americans aren't worried: they load up on consumer debt and take second mortgages on their homes--the only retirement plan most have--to pay off their credit cards. Americans are surely the least risk-averse people on earth: they can't count on either children to support them in old age or on state sponsored social safety nets. But they tremble at the remote possibility of crime and terrorism, and fall for candidates who promise more cops, more jails and more military while cutting away the last scraps of social safety nets left over from the New Deal and the Great Society.

Let's get real Democrats and run campaign ads that address the issues:

Show a TV ad--the Wheel of Fortune. Show the prizes--from the shiny, new SUV to the complete Ginzu knife set, valued at $29.95. Now spin the wheel. Here's your prize, a room in a residence hotel where you can spend your Golden Years living on cat food. Or Seven-Eleven. Buy your lottery ticket at the counter and scratch off the silver stuff to see your prize. You have won...UNEMPLOYMENT! Relax and enjoy it--you have x weeks of pin money benefits and then you're on your own. Don't get sick now because your benefits went with your job.

Girlie Men

Politics News Article | Reuters.com

Good move, Arnold: we're forked. If we let that remark about Democrats being "girlie men" ride we tacitly agree to the received wisdom that Democrats are wimps. If we object then we get pinned as "humorless feminists" or "politically correct liberals." We can't win, can we?

When did "conservative" become cool? Years ago conservative was precisely what no self-respecting kid wanted to be: conservative meant cautious and cowardly--it was what old ladies like my mother and grandmother, who wore sensible oxfords, voted Republican and spent their time worrying about crime and disease were. They even got their oxfords at Coward Shoes in Hackensack, which I thought was shameful.

Arnold explained that he meant that Democrats were wimpy for being intimidated by unions and other "special interests." There is another switch. Special interests used to be small groups of plutocrats who promoted agendas that were contrary to the general interests of the common people. Democrats boldly defended unions which represented the workers' interests.

I resent Arnold's suggestion that girliness is synonymous with wimpery: as a feminist my goal is to show that we women are as macho as anyone else. And I wouldn't be caught dead being a conservative any more than I'd wear sensible oxfords.

The New York Times > Week in Review > Israel's Wall: Building for Calm by Giving Up on Peace

"QALQILYA, West Bank — Inside the 'War Room,' as it is informally called, Israeli soldiers gaze at banks of computer and television screens...An officer shows off the gadgetry: night-vision cameras trained 24 hours a day on a barrier loaded with electronic gizmos that signal the precise location of anyone who touches it, ensuring that Israeli forces reach the area within two to eight minutes to stop the sort of infiltration of Palestinian suicide bombers that brought nearly 100 Israeli deaths in March 2002 alone...

"If Israelis are going to the beach and to clubs again, and if bombings have become rare, it is thanks in large part, they insist, to these ditches and guard towers and coils of barbed wire and miles of wire fencing that separate two peoples, demarcating the gulf between them...

"What often seems to be missing from these Israeli musings is any grasp of the life of the Palestinians on the other side of the barrier. On those war-room screens the most common sight is a Palestinian in a donkey cart trundling along a dirt track. The contrast between the high-tech Israeli cameras that deliver these images and the abject existence of the Palestinians photographed provides an apt summation of the divergence of the societies: a first-world Israel forging ahead as best it can, a third-world Palestinian society going backward.

"To move through the West Bank today is to witness the growth of parallel networks. Israelis drive on highways to settlements spreading like garrisons on hills. Palestinians are increasingly confined to dirt tracks beside these roads...

"[T]he army is building tunnels under the fence, to be used by Palestinians. Israeli officers say this is a generous gesture. They are proud of helping the tunnel people communicate. They point to flourishing orange trees as proof of how 'we let them into their fields.' At one gate, Mutassem Abu Tayem, a 36-year-old Palestinian farmer, waits on a donkey cart to be let onto his land. His view? 'We are living in a prison and are treated like beasts.'"

Why be surprised? We adopted the same policy decades ago when we decided that the Great Society was a failure, and that the urban underclass could never be integrated into civil society but could only be controlled and contained.

Israelis will never be convinced that, after a near miss at peace 10 years ago, any other solution is possible any more than Americans can be convinced that is would be feasible to wind down the system of get-toughism and have another go at creating a civilized social democracy in which everyone has a part. Our new hero is Joe Sixpack, who believes that the only way with kids is the strap and that it was the wimpery of liberal elitists, soft on crime, supporting bums and welfare queens, that got us into this mess in the first place. The politically correct way of putting it is that we can't have the kind of welfare state that exists in ethnically homogeneous European countries. And now we secretely gloat at the problems European countries face absorbing brown and black immigrants: "See, see if you had our problems you wouldn't be doing any better than we did."

Money Buys Happiness, But Not Sex

"Great sex at least once a week is worth $50,000 in happiness, while the emotional lift of a long-lasting marriage is worth $100,000. A divorce will cost you $66,000 of happiness."

Truth, Beauty and Goodness

I'm listening to a CD of the St. Vladimir's Seminary Choir singing the Orthodox liturgy.

I find it profoundly moving--I'm iirresistably taken by the thickness, the a cappella close harmonies and the words, which are in English. I can't understand what it would be like to be authentically secular--not to be moved by this music, or taken by the picture of glory and transcendence. I can't imagine what it would be like not to be interested, or tempted.

But what it really cashes out to is brutal, illiterate, superstitious Russian peasants living in filth with their chickens and pigs, beating their wives and conducting pograms. For them there was no beauty or hint of transcendence in this--it was nothing more than a way of making the corn grow, getting babies and good luck. God, the angels and saints were just so much machinery to promote human interests in lieu of technology.

I wonder why we should be moved by it any more than we would be moved by smoke stacks, slaughter houses, sweat shops or any of the machinery of production. Yet inexplicably it pierces to the heart and feeds our souls.

There is no free ride. Art is expensive. The money it takes to support symphonies, operas and choirs could provide medicines for people with AIDS, TB and malaria. The inevitable concomitants of romance--religion, emotion, beauty and transcendence--are poverty, superstition and bigotry. If we want the good life--comfort, health, tolerance, and security, and want everyone to have it we have to sacrifice romance. Plato was wrong about the unity of the virtues: truth is dull and the price of beauty is superstition and squalor.

I wish it were otherwise. The best we can hope is that if we're smart enough and efficient enough there will be enough left over after we get everyone fed, clothed, housed and healthy to pay for a few CDs like this and that we can afford to maintain churches as theme parks, without promoting superstition and bigotry.

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.