Monday, October 4
Better Blogs Than This One
SOMEHOW or other, Winston Smith's Philosoraptor disappeared from our blogroll undetected. Corrected.
Times Two
YEAH, I saw it. Brooks, last Friday:
"Most likely", of course, in that he's candidate most like Brooks--and there's a surprise choice, huh?--in that he keeps his opposition to the religioculture-war wing of the party hidden until it's time to come out and declare how much he supports and admires it.
Is this, in fact, the secret of the Republican party's (electoral) success--that it functions as a sort of Rorschach Test for the emotionally stunted and terminally untruthful? In his Times tenure alone Brooks has gone from enthusiastic war triumphalist, to Reasonable Public Intellectual Who Needs Some Time To Think Over the Apparent Discrepancy Between Everything He's Ever Said On The Subject and Reality, to Guy Returning from His Long Ruminations as an enthusiastic war promoter. He's gone from insisting that social "conservatives" were merely the more publicly moralistic tribal faction, to wishing them into the Cornfield, and back; he's gone from proclaiming the desperate need for the Republican party to look more like David Brooks, to "welcoming" the energetic and charming, if somewhat naive and redolent of hay, Teabaggers (though he, like Brother Douthat, is careful to maintain these are outsiders who've suddenly discovered all they have in common with the Party of Henry Cabot Lodge), to, as here, pretty much discounting them as a force in primary elections. The real question here is whether situational ethics and head-spinning hypocrisy should disqualify you from being stabled with the Times' Reasonable Conservative Voices, or whether it is, in fact, the major qualification.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with our own admittedly almost non-existent estimation of either man. It's just that maybe, just once, Brooks might take a column to explain why The Major American Political Party That Spends Its Weekends Discussing Burke is the one which is simultaneously The Party Perpetually In Thrall To One Snopes-Worthy Chain Email or Another. Or maybe just how he imagines Mitch Daniels is going to get through the Republican primaries after someone asks why the only thing he ever tried to do as governor of Indiana is sell off enough resources to build our section of the NAFTA highway. (Take it from me: don't waste your breath asking where the money actually went.)
Then there's Douthat, whose recent appearance on Colbert raised the question, "Who cancelled at the last minute?", as well as suggesting that there's a Wingnut Welfare cash award somewhere for the media personality who smirks the most without cause. Today's column might've been titled, "A History of the Democratic Party, As It Was Explained To Me At Pater's Knee, over the Entire Thirty Years of Life On Earth". One imagines, supposing one is a blogger with space to fill and a large coefficient of boredom, that Douthat thinks of himself as Blake's star: desperate that should he ever have an original thought the Universe might wink itself out.
Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2012...
"Most likely", of course, in that he's candidate most like Brooks--and there's a surprise choice, huh?--in that he keeps his opposition to the religioculture-war wing of the party hidden until it's time to come out and declare how much he supports and admires it.
Is this, in fact, the secret of the Republican party's (electoral) success--that it functions as a sort of Rorschach Test for the emotionally stunted and terminally untruthful? In his Times tenure alone Brooks has gone from enthusiastic war triumphalist, to Reasonable Public Intellectual Who Needs Some Time To Think Over the Apparent Discrepancy Between Everything He's Ever Said On The Subject and Reality, to Guy Returning from His Long Ruminations as an enthusiastic war promoter. He's gone from insisting that social "conservatives" were merely the more publicly moralistic tribal faction, to wishing them into the Cornfield, and back; he's gone from proclaiming the desperate need for the Republican party to look more like David Brooks, to "welcoming" the energetic and charming, if somewhat naive and redolent of hay, Teabaggers (though he, like Brother Douthat, is careful to maintain these are outsiders who've suddenly discovered all they have in common with the Party of Henry Cabot Lodge), to, as here, pretty much discounting them as a force in primary elections. The real question here is whether situational ethics and head-spinning hypocrisy should disqualify you from being stabled with the Times' Reasonable Conservative Voices, or whether it is, in fact, the major qualification.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with our own admittedly almost non-existent estimation of either man. It's just that maybe, just once, Brooks might take a column to explain why The Major American Political Party That Spends Its Weekends Discussing Burke is the one which is simultaneously The Party Perpetually In Thrall To One Snopes-Worthy Chain Email or Another. Or maybe just how he imagines Mitch Daniels is going to get through the Republican primaries after someone asks why the only thing he ever tried to do as governor of Indiana is sell off enough resources to build our section of the NAFTA highway. (Take it from me: don't waste your breath asking where the money actually went.)
Then there's Douthat, whose recent appearance on Colbert raised the question, "Who cancelled at the last minute?", as well as suggesting that there's a Wingnut Welfare cash award somewhere for the media personality who smirks the most without cause. Today's column might've been titled, "A History of the Democratic Party, As It Was Explained To Me At Pater's Knee, over the Entire Thirty Years of Life On Earth". One imagines, supposing one is a blogger with space to fill and a large coefficient of boredom, that Douthat thinks of himself as Blake's star: desperate that should he ever have an original thought the Universe might wink itself out.
Friday, October 1
Recent Discoveries
Matt Taibbi, "Tea and Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster". September 29
Steven Thrasher, "White America Has Lost Its Mind". September 29
IT'S difficult to remember, and hard to defend, but I started this blog with the idea (I started this blog believing a blog should have an idea!) of explaining that the Red States, of which I, though a combination of inertia and indolence, am an inhabitant, were not as Red as they were typically portrayed to be, often by people in Blue states whose level of genuine knowledge of Flyover Land approached, but did not surpass, David Brooks'. This is not to suggest they'd love us If Only They Got To Know Us. To the contrary. But I had the notion--still do, despite it all--that much of the default Republicanism in the middle of the country is a product of misconceptions, internal and external.
Now, it may be added, or objected, that this is an exercise in political argument incompletely disguised as psuedo-sociological (but I repeat myself!) observation, David Brooks with more "fucks". Perhaps this is so, and more than a little. Like all men, as Borges said, I have been given bad times in which to live. I was born the same year that Harry Truman announced the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb, the better to thwart the plans of Peter the Great, and just four months after the Reds returned the favor, sort of, if you looked at it just right. (Full disclosure: I was due four months later; in reality it was four months and two weeks, signaling a lifetime's enjoyment of the Womb.)
Born fully cooked. My government, and its Western henchmen, were going to listen to Edward Teller, not Robert Oppenheimer. Its newspapers would defoliate vast stretches to report the latest pearls of ignorance from Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Liberal Presidents would replace George Marshall with Dean Acheson and give Curtis LeMay the Button.
Did people know? Hard to say. I came of age during Vietnam, often recognized as the tipping point. Left-wing intellectuals in the 50s were certainly aware that McCarthy and Nixon were crackpots and worse, but the threat of global nuclear annihilation was real, as was the sense of having been betrayed by Stalin. I've never discovered a large-scale sense in those days that the US government was lying, baldly and as a matter of course, about matters vital and trivial, for the gratification and financial benefit of a permanent ruling class. After all, FDR had changed government for the good, Hitler had demonstrated what Evil looked like, and Korea had proven that the Commies were bent on global domination. It certainly seemed at the time that the accumulating evidence of our duplicity in Indochina was revelatory, unexpected, of a different order of magnitude from chortling at the anti-communist rhetoric being aimed at the American living room every night.
Whatever, that was then and this is now. Not so long ago educated people scoffed at plate tectonics, believed in a static universe, and used mobile phones the size of grandma's stove. If you wanna feel superior to them by virtue of your having purchased an iPhone you could neither design, repair, or explain to someone who just woke from a coma, then fucking act like you've learned something.
Let's be clear: I agree with Taibbi; the Teabaggers are full of shit. We part ways only in the idea that this is something new, requiring some contemporary elucidation, that it's some nefarious picking of Ron Paul's pocket. Reagan voters were smoking the same shit a generation ago. (The other day Krugman Himself insisted that, unlike Reagan, today's GOP had no pretense of principle, however empty-headed, and its tax-cutting rhetoric would require the complete dismantling of the Federal government, excepting Defense and Social Security/Medicare, to pull off. But the exact same thing was noted at the time about St. Ronnie himself. He just didn't put it in writing, and he faced an electorate which wasn't going to let him wreck things indefinitely for the sake of ideology [there's your change, if any], so he raised taxes, and caved on Social Security.) Nor has this ever been shown to be the Dumbass Philosopher's Stone of America politics: voters have, on a regular basis, shown that they'll support higher taxes, and the concept of higher taxes, when the case is made. But Walter Mondale opened his mouth, and got clobbered, and that was It, as far as our two political parties and our nation's supply of neatly-coiffed newsreaders is concerned. Yet large-scale tax cuts create massive deficits. There's not even enough wriggle room there to pretend there's an argument. And even absent entitlements, and given perfect political will in DC, you cannot begin to slash programs to deficit-reducing levels before voters start screaming like movie extras. Period. And that's without touching Defense, which is our biggest money drain, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Taibbi is no doubt correct that the apparent contradiction doesn't bother many Teabaggers because their dedication to balanced budgets is pure sham. But it's axiomatic that these people do not control elections, so if this is some electoral majority based on pure wishful thinking, then when do we start blaming news organizations and Democratic officials for the poor job they're doing educating America? Break up AFTRA!
But Thrasher, now, really.
Okay, again: I was born at the tail end of 1953, or almost precisely 33% of the way into the Baby Boom. The American economy hummed along mostly unimpeded for the next two decades, high on our economic hegemony after WWII. It sputtered in the late 60s, because we insisted on spending billions on moon rocks and killing Vietnamese nuns. I'm sure there's no need to explain to an expert in Boomer dynamics that many of us actually opposed those things, and went so far as to publicly oppose them at the time, rather than retroactively. Still, I'll accept the tab for Indochina soon as you pick up the tab for Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, I forgot: that check's still open.
In 1973, when I was a sophomore in college, the Oil Embargo ushered in a decade of double-digit inflation and rapidly descending property values. (I believe that at the nadir, '76 or so, you could've bought the entire Hilton hotel chain for something like $2 million. Though I suppose we'll always have Paris.) After the slight recovery of '80-81, accomplished by the Fed throwing masses of Americans out of work in the name of inflation busting, we spiraled back down again, into what looked at one point to be another gaping maw, somewhat averted when Reagan raised those taxes again. Then the Crash of '87, and the worst recession in post-war history, followed by the boom of the Clinton years, which the youngest Boomers entered already approaching middle age. The the Bush Doldrums (or as we like to say in Indiana, the First Daniels Miracle) followed by the Bush Disaster, followed by the God How Fucking Big Can A Bush Disaster Be? Disaster. Which brings us to today, and the Dawn of that New Fucking Era your generation ushered in in 2008, despite the racist machinations of Everyone Else. So, yeah, right. First downturn I've ever dealt with. Life until now has been one bottomless glass of Chateau Latour '61, and two topless hookers with a merit badge in Breath Holding. And ice cream for dessert. Sorry we seemed to've used that all up. Sorry we're scared of brown people. Why don't you go out and win another election predicated on transcending partisan politics? Or go fuck yourself?
Steven Thrasher, "White America Has Lost Its Mind". September 29
IT'S difficult to remember, and hard to defend, but I started this blog with the idea (I started this blog believing a blog should have an idea!) of explaining that the Red States, of which I, though a combination of inertia and indolence, am an inhabitant, were not as Red as they were typically portrayed to be, often by people in Blue states whose level of genuine knowledge of Flyover Land approached, but did not surpass, David Brooks'. This is not to suggest they'd love us If Only They Got To Know Us. To the contrary. But I had the notion--still do, despite it all--that much of the default Republicanism in the middle of the country is a product of misconceptions, internal and external.
Now, it may be added, or objected, that this is an exercise in political argument incompletely disguised as psuedo-sociological (but I repeat myself!) observation, David Brooks with more "fucks". Perhaps this is so, and more than a little. Like all men, as Borges said, I have been given bad times in which to live. I was born the same year that Harry Truman announced the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb, the better to thwart the plans of Peter the Great, and just four months after the Reds returned the favor, sort of, if you looked at it just right. (Full disclosure: I was due four months later; in reality it was four months and two weeks, signaling a lifetime's enjoyment of the Womb.)
Born fully cooked. My government, and its Western henchmen, were going to listen to Edward Teller, not Robert Oppenheimer. Its newspapers would defoliate vast stretches to report the latest pearls of ignorance from Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Liberal Presidents would replace George Marshall with Dean Acheson and give Curtis LeMay the Button.
Did people know? Hard to say. I came of age during Vietnam, often recognized as the tipping point. Left-wing intellectuals in the 50s were certainly aware that McCarthy and Nixon were crackpots and worse, but the threat of global nuclear annihilation was real, as was the sense of having been betrayed by Stalin. I've never discovered a large-scale sense in those days that the US government was lying, baldly and as a matter of course, about matters vital and trivial, for the gratification and financial benefit of a permanent ruling class. After all, FDR had changed government for the good, Hitler had demonstrated what Evil looked like, and Korea had proven that the Commies were bent on global domination. It certainly seemed at the time that the accumulating evidence of our duplicity in Indochina was revelatory, unexpected, of a different order of magnitude from chortling at the anti-communist rhetoric being aimed at the American living room every night.
Whatever, that was then and this is now. Not so long ago educated people scoffed at plate tectonics, believed in a static universe, and used mobile phones the size of grandma's stove. If you wanna feel superior to them by virtue of your having purchased an iPhone you could neither design, repair, or explain to someone who just woke from a coma, then fucking act like you've learned something.
Let's be clear: I agree with Taibbi; the Teabaggers are full of shit. We part ways only in the idea that this is something new, requiring some contemporary elucidation, that it's some nefarious picking of Ron Paul's pocket. Reagan voters were smoking the same shit a generation ago. (The other day Krugman Himself insisted that, unlike Reagan, today's GOP had no pretense of principle, however empty-headed, and its tax-cutting rhetoric would require the complete dismantling of the Federal government, excepting Defense and Social Security/Medicare, to pull off. But the exact same thing was noted at the time about St. Ronnie himself. He just didn't put it in writing, and he faced an electorate which wasn't going to let him wreck things indefinitely for the sake of ideology [there's your change, if any], so he raised taxes, and caved on Social Security.) Nor has this ever been shown to be the Dumbass Philosopher's Stone of America politics: voters have, on a regular basis, shown that they'll support higher taxes, and the concept of higher taxes, when the case is made. But Walter Mondale opened his mouth, and got clobbered, and that was It, as far as our two political parties and our nation's supply of neatly-coiffed newsreaders is concerned. Yet large-scale tax cuts create massive deficits. There's not even enough wriggle room there to pretend there's an argument. And even absent entitlements, and given perfect political will in DC, you cannot begin to slash programs to deficit-reducing levels before voters start screaming like movie extras. Period. And that's without touching Defense, which is our biggest money drain, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Taibbi is no doubt correct that the apparent contradiction doesn't bother many Teabaggers because their dedication to balanced budgets is pure sham. But it's axiomatic that these people do not control elections, so if this is some electoral majority based on pure wishful thinking, then when do we start blaming news organizations and Democratic officials for the poor job they're doing educating America? Break up AFTRA!
But Thrasher, now, really.
For the first time in their lives, baby boomers are hard up against it economically, and white boy is becoming outnumbered and it's got his bowels chilled with fear.
Okay, again: I was born at the tail end of 1953, or almost precisely 33% of the way into the Baby Boom. The American economy hummed along mostly unimpeded for the next two decades, high on our economic hegemony after WWII. It sputtered in the late 60s, because we insisted on spending billions on moon rocks and killing Vietnamese nuns. I'm sure there's no need to explain to an expert in Boomer dynamics that many of us actually opposed those things, and went so far as to publicly oppose them at the time, rather than retroactively. Still, I'll accept the tab for Indochina soon as you pick up the tab for Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, I forgot: that check's still open.
In 1973, when I was a sophomore in college, the Oil Embargo ushered in a decade of double-digit inflation and rapidly descending property values. (I believe that at the nadir, '76 or so, you could've bought the entire Hilton hotel chain for something like $2 million. Though I suppose we'll always have Paris.) After the slight recovery of '80-81, accomplished by the Fed throwing masses of Americans out of work in the name of inflation busting, we spiraled back down again, into what looked at one point to be another gaping maw, somewhat averted when Reagan raised those taxes again. Then the Crash of '87, and the worst recession in post-war history, followed by the boom of the Clinton years, which the youngest Boomers entered already approaching middle age. The the Bush Doldrums (or as we like to say in Indiana, the First Daniels Miracle) followed by the Bush Disaster, followed by the God How Fucking Big Can A Bush Disaster Be? Disaster. Which brings us to today, and the Dawn of that New Fucking Era your generation ushered in in 2008, despite the racist machinations of Everyone Else. So, yeah, right. First downturn I've ever dealt with. Life until now has been one bottomless glass of Chateau Latour '61, and two topless hookers with a merit badge in Breath Holding. And ice cream for dessert. Sorry we seemed to've used that all up. Sorry we're scared of brown people. Why don't you go out and win another election predicated on transcending partisan politics? Or go fuck yourself?
Thursday, September 30
The Cerebral Ganglia Of The Beast
I AM the executor of my mother's estate. She died a few weeks ago when dementia took from her the memory of what to do with food. Condolences are not in order; the disease took her identity years ago, and death took away the disease. Dealing with dementia is much worse than dealing with death.
That's just set-up, of course: I mentioned a while back that posting here would be as light in quantity as it is in quality for a time. I didn't want to write about it then, and I don't now, not out of some personal or emotional tangle, but because writing is hard, while being a smartass is easy.
So this finds me not at the cemetery, nor watching the river flow (no water in it these days, anyway), but on the 17th floor of Indianapolis' City/County building, which the City Fathers erected in the early 1960s. I was so young I have but vague recollections of it being built, but the optimist in me has always chosen to believe we did so to stop people calling the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, aka the Circle, the ugliest edifice in the history of architecture.
It's an intensely uncomfortable building made much worse now that its welcoming atrium bears the twin scars of a Liposuction of Freedom, the crawling security lines where I was forced to disrobe. This, in turn, informs the wait for the elevators, which must've been insufficient by 1965, though if you knew Indianapolis in the 50s you wouldn't really blame the architects for figuring that within a decade at most the place would be all but deserted. There are maybe thirty people crammed into the hallway, migrating en masse like a hopeful covey as the electronic elevator scoreboard handicaps which descending carriage is likely to arrive next. (Fortunately their number grows slowly, since most people choose to put their clothes back on before continuing.) I managed to catch the third car, which I thought was probably pretty good for a rank amateur.
The trip up, naturally, reminds you that you share a country, not to mention the occasional confined space, with the sort of person who thinks nothing whatsoever of pressing a button to halt a roomful of people in order that the buttoniere may ride one or two floors to his destination. And, also naturally, that the very people who do this not only could've climbed the stairs between those floors in one-quarter of the time but, generally, could really have used the exercise.
Got there, found my lawyer, got in to see the judge. My sense of discomfort in such situations is profound. I sit making professional small-talk with His Honor, which is designed for him to decide if I am mens sana while I, entirely out of self-interest, pretend not to know that's what he's up to. It's like being the Washington Generals. I'm nearly overcome by the urge to grab him by his insurance adjuster's tie and yell, "You've got a lot to atone for, buddy." I manage to resist. He approves me. I can tell he's actually figured me for a potential tie-grabber, but the alternative would mean more paperwork.
On then to where the real work is done, the secretarial pool, where we witness a full quarter-hour of document stamping. Real document stamping, not virtual document virtual stamping. I wonder if I could have gotten coffee past Security. I marvel at the sweeping view of the city, dotted with taxpayer-swindling arenas and centers and malls and attractions hatched in this very building, back when all you could've seen from there was train tracks and warehouses and a block of 19th century department stores. The stamping resonates with that, a time when we did things with steel, and steam, and brawn. A time when we did things because we thought they were worth doing, not because they increased your odds of getting on teevee. Then on to another office, and more stamping. (This time, though, the fancy computer thing came into play, because my attorney failed to tell me I should bring a copy of the death certificate, or, alternately, memorize my late mother's Social Security number, and he had to sweet-talk the supervisor into looking it up for us. I had one in the car, a few blocks and seventeen floors away, but if I'd'a had to go through that line again they would have had a security problem.)
It was interesting, really, that when it comes to important stuff, like divvying up a dead person's possessions, we rely on people and paper and eyeballs and ink. I mean, it's not like we were just there voting or something.
That's just set-up, of course: I mentioned a while back that posting here would be as light in quantity as it is in quality for a time. I didn't want to write about it then, and I don't now, not out of some personal or emotional tangle, but because writing is hard, while being a smartass is easy.
So this finds me not at the cemetery, nor watching the river flow (no water in it these days, anyway), but on the 17th floor of Indianapolis' City/County building, which the City Fathers erected in the early 1960s. I was so young I have but vague recollections of it being built, but the optimist in me has always chosen to believe we did so to stop people calling the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, aka the Circle, the ugliest edifice in the history of architecture.
It's an intensely uncomfortable building made much worse now that its welcoming atrium bears the twin scars of a Liposuction of Freedom, the crawling security lines where I was forced to disrobe. This, in turn, informs the wait for the elevators, which must've been insufficient by 1965, though if you knew Indianapolis in the 50s you wouldn't really blame the architects for figuring that within a decade at most the place would be all but deserted. There are maybe thirty people crammed into the hallway, migrating en masse like a hopeful covey as the electronic elevator scoreboard handicaps which descending carriage is likely to arrive next. (Fortunately their number grows slowly, since most people choose to put their clothes back on before continuing.) I managed to catch the third car, which I thought was probably pretty good for a rank amateur.
The trip up, naturally, reminds you that you share a country, not to mention the occasional confined space, with the sort of person who thinks nothing whatsoever of pressing a button to halt a roomful of people in order that the buttoniere may ride one or two floors to his destination. And, also naturally, that the very people who do this not only could've climbed the stairs between those floors in one-quarter of the time but, generally, could really have used the exercise.
Got there, found my lawyer, got in to see the judge. My sense of discomfort in such situations is profound. I sit making professional small-talk with His Honor, which is designed for him to decide if I am mens sana while I, entirely out of self-interest, pretend not to know that's what he's up to. It's like being the Washington Generals. I'm nearly overcome by the urge to grab him by his insurance adjuster's tie and yell, "You've got a lot to atone for, buddy." I manage to resist. He approves me. I can tell he's actually figured me for a potential tie-grabber, but the alternative would mean more paperwork.
On then to where the real work is done, the secretarial pool, where we witness a full quarter-hour of document stamping. Real document stamping, not virtual document virtual stamping. I wonder if I could have gotten coffee past Security. I marvel at the sweeping view of the city, dotted with taxpayer-swindling arenas and centers and malls and attractions hatched in this very building, back when all you could've seen from there was train tracks and warehouses and a block of 19th century department stores. The stamping resonates with that, a time when we did things with steel, and steam, and brawn. A time when we did things because we thought they were worth doing, not because they increased your odds of getting on teevee. Then on to another office, and more stamping. (This time, though, the fancy computer thing came into play, because my attorney failed to tell me I should bring a copy of the death certificate, or, alternately, memorize my late mother's Social Security number, and he had to sweet-talk the supervisor into looking it up for us. I had one in the car, a few blocks and seventeen floors away, but if I'd'a had to go through that line again they would have had a security problem.)
It was interesting, really, that when it comes to important stuff, like divvying up a dead person's possessions, we rely on people and paper and eyeballs and ink. I mean, it's not like we were just there voting or something.
Tuesday, September 28
A New Low, If Such A Thing Were Imaginable, Let Alone Possible
NBC's Education Week coverage last night was just some bottom-of-the-screen bunting shy of its Shock and Awe coverage. Is Our Networks Learning? Here's what we learned last night, courtesy NBC News Chief Personality and Tanning Salon Model Brian Williams:
1. American (public) schools are failing. We know this because we know it. Plus, millions of eighth graders do no read at eighth grade level. Plus a poll!
2. The reason public schools are failing is teachers' unions. Because bad teachers. Because hate Change. Because lazy. Because tenure. Because arcane work rules.
3. The obvious solution is Innovation. The obvious place to look for innovation is among people who earn all or a part of their sizable incomes bashing the public schools.
No, really. That's it. Go take a look. Lemme know where I missed the slightest hint there may be other viewpoints out there, or any problems with that one.
Here's Bob Somerby, the morning before this thing kicked off, commenting on a Richard Cohen column of equal value. Bob Somerby is one of the very best writers on education in the country. He has a blog. Pam Geller and Michelle Malkin are on the teevee regularly:
NBC came under fire last week because teachers, and their side, were all but excluded from its little summit. In response, NBC News President Steve Capus disavowed any responsibility for fairness, accuracy, or knowledge of the topic, insisting "the role of a news organization is to put a spotlight on these issues/challenges, and on the people who are doing incredibly strong work to try to affect change."
Interesting, really, that no one ever uses examples of our Plutocrats talking like that, and expecting other people to buy it, at full retail, to question the efficacy of our education system.
We got to hear--at length--from Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone. Mr. Canada is a dynamic speaker, passionate, and a man who has accomplished much good. He is also the man whose flagship charter school has raised $100 million in private donations. Let's just say that under the circumstances I find his lack of enthusiasm for traditional public schools less than surprising.
No one seems to notice--certainly the raccoon-eyed Mr. Williams didn't interrupt the love-fest to mention--that Mr. Canada comes pre-loaded with a Charter School defense perimeter, which included, at one point, the out-of-the-blue declaration that there were failing Charter Schools and such should and could be closed. This was not in response to any tough questioning from Williams; neither did he follow up as to why, if closing failing charters is a sufficient response, why closing failing public schools is not sufficient to preclude charters altogether. The fact is that Canada needs a prolonged defense of the Charter Movement because it hasn't begun to live up to the claims its proponents were making ten years ago, and, in fact, it clearly has, on balance, simply drawn resources from the public schools while producing roughly the same results.
declares Canada, letting Brian and the rest of the NBC gang know he's caught the evening's theme. We get this with as much evidence as we get the rest of the evening, namely, none. The night's other theme.
Where does this come from? To begin with, anyone making such a statement is simply lying: there's no national teacher contract, no national test (the closest thing being the NAEP, which these people don't want to talk about, because test scores are pretty much exactly where they've always been), no philosophical basis for the claims of testing expertise or comparison of results. It's an argument (and an anti-union one) disguised as a profound moral truth. Because it has no other sort of truth to offer.
What are the possible impacts teacher contracts have on "innovation"? Well, it might depend on what state you happen to be in (there was a great deal of blather about tenure last night; there's no such thing as tenure in Indiana.) Here unions may bargain for teachers--it's an open, not a closed shop--over conditions delineated by the state legislature. Wages, class size, number of classes taught per day, prep periods, extra requirements, grievance procedures. Are these things dragging down the American education system?
We've known since the Coleman Report to the Johnson administration that economic level is the key predictor of educational achievement. Nothing's ever changed that or even challenged it. At the same time, we've known this since the Johnson administration. The primary issue is that we've done fuck-all about it for forty-five years, except continue using public schools as a political football. It is the height of insanity to imagine that we're going to get different results by changing the air pressure, or moving the kickoff back ten yards. If we'd pumped $100 million into every public school in America would we be getting different results? If we put $100 million into every community for health care and social services, would we be better off? How 'bout if we stopped creating Saviors, and started creating opportunities for poverty-stricken children that go beyond getting them to do better on a math test? The government's supposed to be deeply invested in turning out little earners, but the government's supposed to keep its corrupt and incompetent mitts off the Free Market.
Next up was NBC education reporter Rehema Ellis, fluffing Race to the Top. Ellis is NBC's education reporter because she's the one who reads education stories. It's not her full-time beat; Our Nation's Failing Schools don't merit a full-timer at NBC, nor one with any more expertise than a J-school degree bestows. Ellis, of course, was up on the night's purpose:
Yes, even some powerful teachers signed on, allowing the governor and state legislators of Tennessee (Motto: Home of the Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park!) to proceed. (I'm going to say this again, and again, as long as necessary: How long have we be listening to demands for educational change and "innovation"? How much has already been put into place, over the anti-progress protestations of teachers and their powerful unions? When do the innovators start to be held accountable? When do the union busters' grades come out? When do the forces for returning our biology instruction to the 18th century, and making our history correspond to how some people would like it get called to account?)
And Ellis narrated the evening's telling statistic, the one moment of scientificalistics:
If you froze the screen and caught the boilerplate, it credited the National Center for Education Statistics Learner Outcomes. Here's the graph. In case you were educated in a public school, I'll interpret. 2009: percentage below Basic 8th grade reading level: 25. Twenty-five. In case you were educated in public school, that leaves 75% reading at Basic 8th grade level or above. You have to throw Basic proficiency into the Trash Heap of Uncaring Union Teachers to get a 68% failure rate. I'm sure this was just an oversight.
Finally, well, look: Brian made a big deal about the final segment featuring a teacher who "tossed a grenade" at their Teachers' Town Hall meeting. Here we go I told my Poor Wife when I heard the exit tease. Go ahead: sit through the commercial and look at the clip, then come back and let me know who in the audience acted like they hadn't heard this same shit their entire professional careers. 1) Early Twenty-something 2) elementary school teacher 3) doesn't see the need for tenure (so move to Indiana, e.g.) because 4) what her students really need is Phonics (or Objectivism, Magic Crystals, and Alien Lizard Masters) and 5) Teachers who spend all their free time doing unpaid tutoring. As a rule I do not hit girls, or boys, and I don't care to now. Check back when you're married. Or check back when you've done this for twenty years, and tell us all the wonderful stories of your 1020 volunteer weekends. Right. Meanwhile, the instruction of ten-year-old Spanish speakers in the rudiments of test-score achievement is an admirable pursuit; I'm glad, and a little surprised, it hasn't aged you more yet. But it's not fucking applicable to every last education issue in the whole goddam country. You're young, and may learn; Mr. Williams is not, and won't. Hand-grenade? Not even a rubber horseshoe.
By the way: what does NBC's prime-time line-up contribute to Our Nation's Education exactly?
1. American (public) schools are failing. We know this because we know it. Plus, millions of eighth graders do no read at eighth grade level. Plus a poll!
2. The reason public schools are failing is teachers' unions. Because bad teachers. Because hate Change. Because lazy. Because tenure. Because arcane work rules.
3. The obvious solution is Innovation. The obvious place to look for innovation is among people who earn all or a part of their sizable incomes bashing the public schools.
No, really. That's it. Go take a look. Lemme know where I missed the slightest hint there may be other viewpoints out there, or any problems with that one.
Here's Bob Somerby, the morning before this thing kicked off, commenting on a Richard Cohen column of equal value. Bob Somerby is one of the very best writers on education in the country. He has a blog. Pam Geller and Michelle Malkin are on the teevee regularly:
Cohen goes on to offer an offbeat assessment; he breaks from the society’s Standard Assessment about the alleged monstrous failure of the nation’s schools. In that Standard Scripted Assessment, teachers and their teacher unions are the villains of the piece; they are the reason—the only reason—why “this nation's schools, particularly the big city ones, are an unforgivable mess.” That script is part of a much larger war, in which the nation’s plutocrats began to target the nation’s unions about forty years ago. But when it comes to those teachers unions, every good journalist knows what to say. NBC’s mewling David Gregory recited the script on yesterday’s Meet the Press, although he doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about when it comes to the nation’s schools. As the day proceeded on MSNBC, Brian Williams, Joe and Mika all continued to pound the script home.
NBC came under fire last week because teachers, and their side, were all but excluded from its little summit. In response, NBC News President Steve Capus disavowed any responsibility for fairness, accuracy, or knowledge of the topic, insisting "the role of a news organization is to put a spotlight on these issues/challenges, and on the people who are doing incredibly strong work to try to affect change."
Interesting, really, that no one ever uses examples of our Plutocrats talking like that, and expecting other people to buy it, at full retail, to question the efficacy of our education system.
We got to hear--at length--from Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone. Mr. Canada is a dynamic speaker, passionate, and a man who has accomplished much good. He is also the man whose flagship charter school has raised $100 million in private donations. Let's just say that under the circumstances I find his lack of enthusiasm for traditional public schools less than surprising.
No one seems to notice--certainly the raccoon-eyed Mr. Williams didn't interrupt the love-fest to mention--that Mr. Canada comes pre-loaded with a Charter School defense perimeter, which included, at one point, the out-of-the-blue declaration that there were failing Charter Schools and such should and could be closed. This was not in response to any tough questioning from Williams; neither did he follow up as to why, if closing failing charters is a sufficient response, why closing failing public schools is not sufficient to preclude charters altogether. The fact is that Canada needs a prolonged defense of the Charter Movement because it hasn't begun to live up to the claims its proponents were making ten years ago, and, in fact, it clearly has, on balance, simply drawn resources from the public schools while producing roughly the same results.
A lot of charters don't have unions, so they're free to innovate.
declares Canada, letting Brian and the rest of the NBC gang know he's caught the evening's theme. We get this with as much evidence as we get the rest of the evening, namely, none. The night's other theme.
Where does this come from? To begin with, anyone making such a statement is simply lying: there's no national teacher contract, no national test (the closest thing being the NAEP, which these people don't want to talk about, because test scores are pretty much exactly where they've always been), no philosophical basis for the claims of testing expertise or comparison of results. It's an argument (and an anti-union one) disguised as a profound moral truth. Because it has no other sort of truth to offer.
What are the possible impacts teacher contracts have on "innovation"? Well, it might depend on what state you happen to be in (there was a great deal of blather about tenure last night; there's no such thing as tenure in Indiana.) Here unions may bargain for teachers--it's an open, not a closed shop--over conditions delineated by the state legislature. Wages, class size, number of classes taught per day, prep periods, extra requirements, grievance procedures. Are these things dragging down the American education system?
We've known since the Coleman Report to the Johnson administration that economic level is the key predictor of educational achievement. Nothing's ever changed that or even challenged it. At the same time, we've known this since the Johnson administration. The primary issue is that we've done fuck-all about it for forty-five years, except continue using public schools as a political football. It is the height of insanity to imagine that we're going to get different results by changing the air pressure, or moving the kickoff back ten yards. If we'd pumped $100 million into every public school in America would we be getting different results? If we put $100 million into every community for health care and social services, would we be better off? How 'bout if we stopped creating Saviors, and started creating opportunities for poverty-stricken children that go beyond getting them to do better on a math test? The government's supposed to be deeply invested in turning out little earners, but the government's supposed to keep its corrupt and incompetent mitts off the Free Market.
Next up was NBC education reporter Rehema Ellis, fluffing Race to the Top. Ellis is NBC's education reporter because she's the one who reads education stories. It's not her full-time beat; Our Nation's Failing Schools don't merit a full-timer at NBC, nor one with any more expertise than a J-school degree bestows. Ellis, of course, was up on the night's purpose:
[Tennessee's bid elicited] promises from powerful players often labelled as holdouts against change--legislators, union leaders, and even some teachers.
Yes, even some powerful teachers signed on, allowing the governor and state legislators of Tennessee (Motto: Home of the Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park!) to proceed. (I'm going to say this again, and again, as long as necessary: How long have we be listening to demands for educational change and "innovation"? How much has already been put into place, over the anti-progress protestations of teachers and their powerful unions? When do the innovators start to be held accountable? When do the union busters' grades come out? When do the forces for returning our biology instruction to the 18th century, and making our history correspond to how some people would like it get called to account?)
And Ellis narrated the evening's telling statistic, the one moment of scientificalistics:
In a nation where 68% of eighth graders can't read at grade level...
If you froze the screen and caught the boilerplate, it credited the National Center for Education Statistics Learner Outcomes. Here's the graph. In case you were educated in a public school, I'll interpret. 2009: percentage below Basic 8th grade reading level: 25. Twenty-five. In case you were educated in public school, that leaves 75% reading at Basic 8th grade level or above. You have to throw Basic proficiency into the Trash Heap of Uncaring Union Teachers to get a 68% failure rate. I'm sure this was just an oversight.
Finally, well, look: Brian made a big deal about the final segment featuring a teacher who "tossed a grenade" at their Teachers' Town Hall meeting. Here we go I told my Poor Wife when I heard the exit tease. Go ahead: sit through the commercial and look at the clip, then come back and let me know who in the audience acted like they hadn't heard this same shit their entire professional careers. 1) Early Twenty-something 2) elementary school teacher 3) doesn't see the need for tenure (so move to Indiana, e.g.) because 4) what her students really need is Phonics (or Objectivism, Magic Crystals, and Alien Lizard Masters) and 5) Teachers who spend all their free time doing unpaid tutoring. As a rule I do not hit girls, or boys, and I don't care to now. Check back when you're married. Or check back when you've done this for twenty years, and tell us all the wonderful stories of your 1020 volunteer weekends. Right. Meanwhile, the instruction of ten-year-old Spanish speakers in the rudiments of test-score achievement is an admirable pursuit; I'm glad, and a little surprised, it hasn't aged you more yet. But it's not fucking applicable to every last education issue in the whole goddam country. You're young, and may learn; Mr. Williams is not, and won't. Hand-grenade? Not even a rubber horseshoe.
By the way: what does NBC's prime-time line-up contribute to Our Nation's Education exactly?
Monday, September 27
Back Home Again
AND these are the guys who say comedians have no place in the national debate. Douthat:
Brendan wrote me over the weekend to get the Disgruntled Hoosier take on Mike "Choirboy" Pence's stunning victory in some Iowa Church Basement Straw Poll last week, which, of course, led our nation's political insiders to start pundicating about his potential for a stunning third-place showing when the official Iowa Church Basement Straw Poll takes place just sixteen months hence.
Spite Across America! sounds like a good theme to me, especially since he's not going to go for Mike Pence: Holy Shit! my first choice.
(Of course, as you and Brendan already know, the Disgruntled Hoosier take is Lying cocksucking motherfucking thieving microcephalics! which is his answer to just about everything. This makes him sound dangerously like a Libertarian, except that the predictive value and real-world correspondence of his Answer For Everything can be expressed as a Natural Number, without recourse to the Integers.)
What Brendan really wanted to know was my take on what a potential Pence candidacy has on the odds that all those interested parties will convince the Reluctant Mitch Daniels to save the country. My short answer is "It's not for nothing that among this generation of Hoosier politicians the breakout stars were Dan Quayle and Evan Bayh, the Mamie Van Doren and Diana Dors of Marilyn clones".
And my long answer is "I spent a decade telling everyone that Americans would never elect Ronald Reagan President, and this was after they'd elected Nixon." I pretty much stopped talking to anybody after that. In fact, this the real reason I hate cellphones; the odds are there's a person on the other end of the conversation, and the two of you share a language, at least nominally.
So here's the thing, and if you can get someone to lay the bet off in Vegas for you, doubling down on the opposite of what I say is always a sure winner: Daniels is just the middling wet dream--the fantasy constructed in the odd bathroom half-hour with just the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue for assistance--of Republican insiders in the darkling of the second Bush administration, back when they--like Douthat, like anyone with a reasonable amount of sense and absolutely no familiarity with the moronic potentiality of the American voter--figured the Republican Jig was Up for at least half a generation and they'd better see what they could do to sound sensible. Options, of course, were few. Even in 2006 you needed a second helping of Kool-Aid to truly buy into Daniels' Indiana Miracle; today, well, you really should see what he's reduced to. The Mighty Atom has been convinced--he's constantly bombarded by advice givers, and oddly so for a man with such an oversized Ego--to use his PAC money to pepper the airwaves with ads urging Hoosiers to elect a Republican majority in the House. It makes the same fictitious claims about the state economy he made in his own Last Campaign, but he's now reduced to quoting the Wall Street Journal, some made-up anti-tax think tank, and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone*. "While other states were raising taxes, we were lowering ours," he says, confirming that for the Big Brains of the Republican Economic Wing, sales taxes don't count as taxes (when you add in the 1% increase used to convince the rubes their property taxes were going down **, Daniels-era Indiana has the highest tax increases of any state east of the Mississippi).
Of course, this is why having Daniels and Pence in a Presidential primary has such a fantasy appeal: Mitch forced to attack God & Guns, while Pence has to spill the bean-counting about Daniels' little accounting tricks. It has, as St. Ambrose once said, the satisfying effect of witnessing our enemy's helpless gurgling after an imaginary debate with ourselves. Not gonna happen, in other words: Daniels is perhaps the first general in history to be fully prepared to not fight the last war, which didn't occur. Palin usurped his place in '08. He needed to come out swinging right then, but, of course, he couldn't. And these guys will for ever more run scared of the GOP primaries. (This is, by the way, part of the distinctly masochistic enjoyment of the current political landscape, this idea that the Grass Roots Teabaggers have shunted the religious nuts to the side. They'll be right back at the table as soon as there's the tiniest success come November. It's going to increase the criticism of the Republican party as insufficiently Teabaggerist for 2012. Daniels real hope is for a massive repudiation this fall. Otherwise he's in Iowa for the next sixteen months trying to out-flag-lapel-pin and Ten-Commandments-on-the-Courthouse-lawn the likes of Palin, Huckabee, and, yes, Pence. And you can take that to Vegas.)
As for Pence, well, I'll never say never again, and to the extent that intellectual incapacity for the job is now seen as a positive attribute he's well positioned. I would just add that these days one should perhaps take extra caution around the professional religious figure who hasn't been caught in a sex scandal. It's just not natural.
__________________
** Advance Indiana brings us the shocking news that nearly three-quarters of the ballyhooed Property Tax Relief is going to landlords and businesses; this, coupled with the fact that the real costs of roping yourself into pseudo-reform will become apparently only after Daniels and associated henchmen have skimmed the cream and skedaddled. California, here we come!
The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it’s the conviction that the Republicans as much as the Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude.
Brendan wrote me over the weekend to get the Disgruntled Hoosier take on Mike "Choirboy" Pence's stunning victory in some Iowa Church Basement Straw Poll last week, which, of course, led our nation's political insiders to start pundicating about his potential for a stunning third-place showing when the official Iowa Church Basement Straw Poll takes place just sixteen months hence.
Spite Across America! sounds like a good theme to me, especially since he's not going to go for Mike Pence: Holy Shit! my first choice.
(Of course, as you and Brendan already know, the Disgruntled Hoosier take is Lying cocksucking motherfucking thieving microcephalics! which is his answer to just about everything. This makes him sound dangerously like a Libertarian, except that the predictive value and real-world correspondence of his Answer For Everything can be expressed as a Natural Number, without recourse to the Integers.)
What Brendan really wanted to know was my take on what a potential Pence candidacy has on the odds that all those interested parties will convince the Reluctant Mitch Daniels to save the country. My short answer is "It's not for nothing that among this generation of Hoosier politicians the breakout stars were Dan Quayle and Evan Bayh, the Mamie Van Doren and Diana Dors of Marilyn clones".
And my long answer is "I spent a decade telling everyone that Americans would never elect Ronald Reagan President, and this was after they'd elected Nixon." I pretty much stopped talking to anybody after that. In fact, this the real reason I hate cellphones; the odds are there's a person on the other end of the conversation, and the two of you share a language, at least nominally.
So here's the thing, and if you can get someone to lay the bet off in Vegas for you, doubling down on the opposite of what I say is always a sure winner: Daniels is just the middling wet dream--the fantasy constructed in the odd bathroom half-hour with just the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue for assistance--of Republican insiders in the darkling of the second Bush administration, back when they--like Douthat, like anyone with a reasonable amount of sense and absolutely no familiarity with the moronic potentiality of the American voter--figured the Republican Jig was Up for at least half a generation and they'd better see what they could do to sound sensible. Options, of course, were few. Even in 2006 you needed a second helping of Kool-Aid to truly buy into Daniels' Indiana Miracle; today, well, you really should see what he's reduced to. The Mighty Atom has been convinced--he's constantly bombarded by advice givers, and oddly so for a man with such an oversized Ego--to use his PAC money to pepper the airwaves with ads urging Hoosiers to elect a Republican majority in the House. It makes the same fictitious claims about the state economy he made in his own Last Campaign, but he's now reduced to quoting the Wall Street Journal, some made-up anti-tax think tank, and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone*. "While other states were raising taxes, we were lowering ours," he says, confirming that for the Big Brains of the Republican Economic Wing, sales taxes don't count as taxes (when you add in the 1% increase used to convince the rubes their property taxes were going down **, Daniels-era Indiana has the highest tax increases of any state east of the Mississippi).
Of course, this is why having Daniels and Pence in a Presidential primary has such a fantasy appeal: Mitch forced to attack God & Guns, while Pence has to spill the bean-counting about Daniels' little accounting tricks. It has, as St. Ambrose once said, the satisfying effect of witnessing our enemy's helpless gurgling after an imaginary debate with ourselves. Not gonna happen, in other words: Daniels is perhaps the first general in history to be fully prepared to not fight the last war, which didn't occur. Palin usurped his place in '08. He needed to come out swinging right then, but, of course, he couldn't. And these guys will for ever more run scared of the GOP primaries. (This is, by the way, part of the distinctly masochistic enjoyment of the current political landscape, this idea that the Grass Roots Teabaggers have shunted the religious nuts to the side. They'll be right back at the table as soon as there's the tiniest success come November. It's going to increase the criticism of the Republican party as insufficiently Teabaggerist for 2012. Daniels real hope is for a massive repudiation this fall. Otherwise he's in Iowa for the next sixteen months trying to out-flag-lapel-pin and Ten-Commandments-on-the-Courthouse-lawn the likes of Palin, Huckabee, and, yes, Pence. And you can take that to Vegas.)
As for Pence, well, I'll never say never again, and to the extent that intellectual incapacity for the job is now seen as a positive attribute he's well positioned. I would just add that these days one should perhaps take extra caution around the professional religious figure who hasn't been caught in a sex scandal. It's just not natural.
__________________
* That's a joke, in fairness to Mr. Travers' political beliefs, though not his movie reviews.
** Advance Indiana brings us the shocking news that nearly three-quarters of the ballyhooed Property Tax Relief is going to landlords and businesses; this, coupled with the fact that the real costs of roping yourself into pseudo-reform will become apparently only after Daniels and associated henchmen have skimmed the cream and skedaddled. California, here we come!
Wednesday, September 22
Don't Ask
THIRTY-five years of Nixon's Favorite Mayor Goes to Washington, appropriately crammed in a nutshell by the Racist Beacon:
Mind you, the longest serving Hoosier in the history of the US Senate (you're welcome) doesn't oppose the Maybe We Might Possibly Occasionally Help A Brown Person In This Country Illegally amendment, as John McCain does, now that he realizes he's against it, and as the rest of his Senate colleagues do on grounds that it violates their party's principle of Unbridled Racism in the Pursuit of Votes. No. Lugar co-sponsored the amendment, but now doesn't think it should come to the floor because, for the first time in his third-of-a-century in America's Oldest Whites-Only club, it was attached to a political maneuver. Right out in public an' everything. And this maneuver would have helped Harry Reid, by making Hispanics love him, but now they'll be thanking Republicans.
Sen. Richard Lugar joined with all Republicans to oppose debate [on the 2011 Defense Appropriations bill].
Lugar did so even though the bill was a potential vehicle for a measure that Lugar has sponsored for years that would let illegal immigrants who grew up in the United States earn legal status by going to college or enlisting in the military.
Lugar voted against proceeding to debate because the Democrats wanted to limit how long the bill could be debated and which amendments could be offered, said Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher.
Mind you, the longest serving Hoosier in the history of the US Senate (you're welcome) doesn't oppose the Maybe We Might Possibly Occasionally Help A Brown Person In This Country Illegally amendment, as John McCain does, now that he realizes he's against it, and as the rest of his Senate colleagues do on grounds that it violates their party's principle of Unbridled Racism in the Pursuit of Votes. No. Lugar co-sponsored the amendment, but now doesn't think it should come to the floor because, for the first time in his third-of-a-century in America's Oldest Whites-Only club, it was attached to a political maneuver. Right out in public an' everything. And this maneuver would have helped Harry Reid, by making Hispanics love him, but now they'll be thanking Republicans.
And this from a man who last week, while in town for one of his bi-annual photo ops which, if you've seen Dick Lugar lately, you might imagine were contraindicated, bemoaned the hyper-partisanship of our politics. Because they prevent us from dismantling Social Security and Medicare like we need to. And yes, I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. If we'd all just follow Dick Lugar's example, and pay lip service to our higher ideals while voting reliably for every shit-grubbing, pro-Defense and Big Business piece of Republican legislation lobbyists can dream up, the world would be a much nicer place. At least the Senate would.
Don't Ask Don't Tell? Oh, like the Pentagon, Lugar needs more time to study the issue.
You may recall that the last time we saw Lugar in these parts he was explaining to the local hairdos how really truly sincerely he wanted to help Hoosier families (by extending unemployment benefits), if only we could clear up a couple of procedural problems he had with the vote, which he was confident we would. Then he voted against it and disappeared. (In fairness, the locals then reported his office had "no comment" about the results, which, for them, is like working up the courage to kick his dog while he's not looking.)
Lugar, of course, is a moderate Republican, meaning he occasionally counsels caution in executing the military disasters he votes for. He's ninety-six years old, and his first vote as a US Senator helped create the Trans-Atlantic cable. Yet, somehow, he's aware of political partisanship only insofar as it thwarts the minority party's desire to shred the social safety net. And Senate procedural prestidigitations are constantly thwarting his innate humanitarianism, but never his admiration for billions in military hardware with no purpose.
This is the sort of thing his "Democratic" junior, one Birch Evans Bayh III, just couldn't take anymore, right around the time people started insisting he either act like a Democrat on national healthcare, or explain to a curious public just what qualifications put his wife on the boards of so many pharmaceutical giants. This opened the door for former Senator, lifelong government teat-suckler, and Chamber of Commerce cipher Dan Coats to take another shot at the seat, although going through that door meant he had to drive in from North Carolina. Coats' retirement hobby--collecting pictures of famous Americans in exchange for access to his government contacts--got some play in the Republican primary, where his major opposition was Some Effin Teabagger, but shortly after he secured the nomination the revolutionaries discovered that most of the Founders had been lobbyists, too, so the matter was dropped. This allowed Coats more time to paint his opponent, Representative Brad "Blue Dog" Ellsworth, as a man who isn't a Stalinist only because Stalin is dead.
Seriously, the man's campaign ads are keeping Channel 8 news afloat, despite it's continuing difficulties in finding anyone who can read English. It's the Mitch Daniels' Drown Everything Else Out approach, featuring charges that Ellsworth "voted to close Gitmo and let terrorists loose on US soil" and "voted to bankrupt decent Americans to give healthcare to lazy illegals". This, despite the fact that two Novembers ago Hoosiers rather famously voted for the guy who promised to do precisely those things. And, naturally, Coats is leading the race by like 20 points.
And here's a guy who's about as exciting as the dessert menu in a Chinese restaurant, and half as innovative, so you might be wondering how he accumulated all that money. Assuming you're not familiar with which end is Up. But I would like to point out that he's already mastered the art of not letting what he thinks is right get in the way of a good political decision. So, thirty years in the Senate, here he comes.
Don't Ask Don't Tell? Oh, like the Pentagon, Lugar needs more time to study the issue.
You may recall that the last time we saw Lugar in these parts he was explaining to the local hairdos how really truly sincerely he wanted to help Hoosier families (by extending unemployment benefits), if only we could clear up a couple of procedural problems he had with the vote, which he was confident we would. Then he voted against it and disappeared. (In fairness, the locals then reported his office had "no comment" about the results, which, for them, is like working up the courage to kick his dog while he's not looking.)
Lugar, of course, is a moderate Republican, meaning he occasionally counsels caution in executing the military disasters he votes for. He's ninety-six years old, and his first vote as a US Senator helped create the Trans-Atlantic cable. Yet, somehow, he's aware of political partisanship only insofar as it thwarts the minority party's desire to shred the social safety net. And Senate procedural prestidigitations are constantly thwarting his innate humanitarianism, but never his admiration for billions in military hardware with no purpose.
This is the sort of thing his "Democratic" junior, one Birch Evans Bayh III, just couldn't take anymore, right around the time people started insisting he either act like a Democrat on national healthcare, or explain to a curious public just what qualifications put his wife on the boards of so many pharmaceutical giants. This opened the door for former Senator, lifelong government teat-suckler, and Chamber of Commerce cipher Dan Coats to take another shot at the seat, although going through that door meant he had to drive in from North Carolina. Coats' retirement hobby--collecting pictures of famous Americans in exchange for access to his government contacts--got some play in the Republican primary, where his major opposition was Some Effin Teabagger, but shortly after he secured the nomination the revolutionaries discovered that most of the Founders had been lobbyists, too, so the matter was dropped. This allowed Coats more time to paint his opponent, Representative Brad "Blue Dog" Ellsworth, as a man who isn't a Stalinist only because Stalin is dead.
Seriously, the man's campaign ads are keeping Channel 8 news afloat, despite it's continuing difficulties in finding anyone who can read English. It's the Mitch Daniels' Drown Everything Else Out approach, featuring charges that Ellsworth "voted to close Gitmo and let terrorists loose on US soil" and "voted to bankrupt decent Americans to give healthcare to lazy illegals". This, despite the fact that two Novembers ago Hoosiers rather famously voted for the guy who promised to do precisely those things. And, naturally, Coats is leading the race by like 20 points.
And here's a guy who's about as exciting as the dessert menu in a Chinese restaurant, and half as innovative, so you might be wondering how he accumulated all that money. Assuming you're not familiar with which end is Up. But I would like to point out that he's already mastered the art of not letting what he thinks is right get in the way of a good political decision. So, thirty years in the Senate, here he comes.
Tuesday, September 21
I Know You Are, But What Am I?
Why does Ross Douthat have a job, again? Part 637
LOOK, Ross-boy, I'd be happy to ignore Christine O'Donnell; it's precisely the sort of thing I spend a lot of energy, on a regular basis, doing my best to ignore. If you think we all ought to live on a higher plane, eschew the cheap, the tawdry, and the facile guffaw, let's do so. You start.
And another thing: I don't really care that your party nominates idiots. It is, after all, a tried-and-true strategy for gaining a majority in Congress. But do you have to idolize them? Jesus Christ.
Sure. Can I make a request? Would you finally take a look at your oeuvre and die of embarrassment already?
You're thirty years old. Yes, it's hard to believe; I remain unconvinced that it's your chronological age, rather than some sort of average of your teenage beard, twentysomething html show-off persona, and seventy-year-old political outlook. There's been a "culture war" as long as you've been alive, and, unlike David "Springsteen fan" Brooks, you've been on the same side all that time. This means it is way, way too late for you to be making a crack about "your side does it too-ooo" without sounding for all the world like a miffed slumber-party attendee. If this really was the principled battle you pretend it to be, and not the accumulated disgruntlement because your Supreme Being won't let you zap everyone who disagrees with you with His Holy Lightning, you'd have gotten this stuff out of your system before you could drive.
Hell, yes, I enjoy it. What's not to enjoy? Some twenty-seven-year-old would-be Christian theologian with terminal mall hair publicly denounces masturbation; a decade later she's your nominee for a Senate seat, and you rush to defend her like she's a White Flower some Negro lad winked at. Sheesh, my one regret is that Jean Arthur and Preston Sturges aren't still with us to turn screwball into screwball comedy. You expect people to refrain from laughing? Did your parents even let you out of the house before your 21st birthday?
Really, if I get a request to match yours, it's this: let's have an honest Culture War, instead of an interminable pandering. No more pretending your moral objection to abortion is distinct from your objection to contraception. No more pretending you don't think masturbation, and pornography, are identical to adultery. No more running and hiding, as here, by claiming you aren't speaking about governmental coercion. The only time you explicitly take it out of politics is when you know you don't have the votes (which just happens to be most of the time); the minute you think Terry Schiavo is a jim-dandy opportunity you're on it like a drunken priest on a particularly dewey altarboy.
You put a loaded pistol in your mouth, then accuse your opponents of being insufficiently anti-suicide when they don't try to stop you.
But let's just get our history straight, if nothing else. Your people rallied around Sarah Palin before T Bogg had a chance to throw out the first snark. They did so, you may recall, because the campaign decided to release the news that she couldn't keep her own daughter unsullied. GOP delegates weren't heading back to the hotel to catch up on leftwing blogger reaction; they were watching the networks, and hearing questions about Palin's fitness for office and mental capabilities (sometimes, when the mic was supposed to be off, from the Right). And rightly so. But, conveniently, the natural level of mainstream news coverage is always biased against you whenever the news is bad, so you get to claim Palin as some sort of backlash, rather than the paragon of Stupidity Trumps Reason. (Doubly interesting in your case since, like Brooks, you won't come out and say it, and you have to flatter her admirers come Hell or high water: "As with Palin before her," you say, O'Donnell's "vulnerable to all sorts of possible attacks, and whose record and qualifications and positions provide plenty of fodder for either a high-minded, issues-based critique, or a more no-holds-barred assault on her honesty and integrity." That's not an opinion; it's boilerplate from the warranty for a particularly shoddy piece of merchandise.)
O'Donnell's no different. She's not rallied 'round on the issues, but because she appears to represent what you think Liberals don't like. And if they'd just forego making fun of her, why, this sort of thing would crawl back to the church basements and feed stores and Klan rallies where it belongs, and Reason would rule again.
Sure it would, Ross.
LOOK, Ross-boy, I'd be happy to ignore Christine O'Donnell; it's precisely the sort of thing I spend a lot of energy, on a regular basis, doing my best to ignore. If you think we all ought to live on a higher plane, eschew the cheap, the tawdry, and the facile guffaw, let's do so. You start.
And another thing: I don't really care that your party nominates idiots. It is, after all, a tried-and-true strategy for gaining a majority in Congress. But do you have to idolize them? Jesus Christ.
[C]an I make just one request? Can we officially retire the notion that liberals don’t like the culture war? That it’s something foisted on them by knuckle-dragging conservatives? That they would prefer to only talk about Very Serious Economic Policies, and that they hate the way the right wing keeps dragging the conversation around to sex and God and all the rest of it?
Sure. Can I make a request? Would you finally take a look at your oeuvre and die of embarrassment already?
You're thirty years old. Yes, it's hard to believe; I remain unconvinced that it's your chronological age, rather than some sort of average of your teenage beard, twentysomething html show-off persona, and seventy-year-old political outlook. There's been a "culture war" as long as you've been alive, and, unlike David "Springsteen fan" Brooks, you've been on the same side all that time. This means it is way, way too late for you to be making a crack about "your side does it too-ooo" without sounding for all the world like a miffed slumber-party attendee. If this really was the principled battle you pretend it to be, and not the accumulated disgruntlement because your Supreme Being won't let you zap everyone who disagrees with you with His Holy Lightning, you'd have gotten this stuff out of your system before you could drive.
Hell, yes, I enjoy it. What's not to enjoy? Some twenty-seven-year-old would-be Christian theologian with terminal mall hair publicly denounces masturbation; a decade later she's your nominee for a Senate seat, and you rush to defend her like she's a White Flower some Negro lad winked at. Sheesh, my one regret is that Jean Arthur and Preston Sturges aren't still with us to turn screwball into screwball comedy. You expect people to refrain from laughing? Did your parents even let you out of the house before your 21st birthday?
Really, if I get a request to match yours, it's this: let's have an honest Culture War, instead of an interminable pandering. No more pretending your moral objection to abortion is distinct from your objection to contraception. No more pretending you don't think masturbation, and pornography, are identical to adultery. No more running and hiding, as here, by claiming you aren't speaking about governmental coercion. The only time you explicitly take it out of politics is when you know you don't have the votes (which just happens to be most of the time); the minute you think Terry Schiavo is a jim-dandy opportunity you're on it like a drunken priest on a particularly dewey altarboy.
This is just further fuel for polarization, since it’s prompted conservative Christians to rally around O’Donnell just as they rallied around Palin. But more importantly, it’s a sign that in their heart of hearts, liberals love the culture wars too.
You put a loaded pistol in your mouth, then accuse your opponents of being insufficiently anti-suicide when they don't try to stop you.
But let's just get our history straight, if nothing else. Your people rallied around Sarah Palin before T Bogg had a chance to throw out the first snark. They did so, you may recall, because the campaign decided to release the news that she couldn't keep her own daughter unsullied. GOP delegates weren't heading back to the hotel to catch up on leftwing blogger reaction; they were watching the networks, and hearing questions about Palin's fitness for office and mental capabilities (sometimes, when the mic was supposed to be off, from the Right). And rightly so. But, conveniently, the natural level of mainstream news coverage is always biased against you whenever the news is bad, so you get to claim Palin as some sort of backlash, rather than the paragon of Stupidity Trumps Reason. (Doubly interesting in your case since, like Brooks, you won't come out and say it, and you have to flatter her admirers come Hell or high water: "As with Palin before her," you say, O'Donnell's "vulnerable to all sorts of possible attacks, and whose record and qualifications and positions provide plenty of fodder for either a high-minded, issues-based critique, or a more no-holds-barred assault on her honesty and integrity." That's not an opinion; it's boilerplate from the warranty for a particularly shoddy piece of merchandise.)
O'Donnell's no different. She's not rallied 'round on the issues, but because she appears to represent what you think Liberals don't like. And if they'd just forego making fun of her, why, this sort of thing would crawl back to the church basements and feed stores and Klan rallies where it belongs, and Reason would rule again.
Sure it would, Ross.
Monday, September 20
The Joys Of Congratulating Yourself For Being In Some Advertiser's Ideal Demographic, Part 6,521
Jessica Grose, "Christine O'Donnell, the First True New Media Candidate". September 20
WE last encountered Ms Grose's Where-else-but-Slate handiwork when she announced last spring that casual sex had lost its cachet for the under-twenty-five set, whose Voice she is (though I notice that she doesn't confine herself to tweetering and sexting and speaking in acronyms, and more's the pity). We scoffed. Naturally. But in the ensuing half-revolution of the Sun not a single twenty-something nubile has offered me an afternoon of unbridled and anonymous perversion, so I guess there's something to it at that.
And swear to God when I clicked the link I had no idea it was one of Ms Grose's pensées, or even associated with that godawful Reverse 180 post-post-feminist XX Factor thing; I'd seen some commenter say something similar elsewhere, and I thought Christine O'Donnell, (Negative) Harbinger of A New Political Age had merit as the potential Stupidest Thing Said About American Politics on the Internets Today. I just didn't realize that come January it would be in the running for some sort of annual award. And yes, you're right, it is my own fault for reading Slate.
O Lord, is there no way to put a stop to this sort of thing? O'Donnell's an idiot, and a Teabagger of the professionally religious sort. This has encouraged people who don't like Teabaggers, the professionally religious, nor the Republican party which succors them, to turn her into an icon of sorts, but that only gained traction when the GOP couldn't stop her from being its nominee for Joe Biden's old seat. Such is the glorious tradition of two-party politics in this country, which, as all good students know, is precisely the same age as Her tradition of political sleaze. But here's a certain class of people who imagine that their side of the argument is protected, not just by the free speech provisions of the First amendment, but by the Free Exercise clause as well, so that any attack on Christine O'Donnell, even one that originated with her innocent but artificially glistening lips, is an attempt to thwart God's Plan on Earth.
(So much so that Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson finds the AP's Nafeesa Syeed explaining in a news story that the whole Witchcraft thing is Bill Maher's fault.*)
And I'll be happy to settle, if we might just stop pretending this sort of thing is new, rather than a decades-old dodge. Either it matters that O'Donnell (read: Sarah Palin) is such a religious nutcase and mental incompetent that she gives even this country pause, or it doesn't. That's the issue. It's not whether some people hate her. That's a given. Everybody in politics is hated. So is every religious nut. So's the intersection. It stopped being an epistemological question when O'Donnell filed for public office. When she says things that even marginally-sane people have to regard as iffy, then she has to answer for them. And the answer is not "some people hate me."
I was prepared for more of the same. I was ready, naturally, for that special Slate brand of If Rationality Doesn't Have All The Answers Stupidity Wins By Default. What I wasn't ready for was this:
Okay, one: unless there's some major threat, now invisible, that Future Journalists might come without factory-installed careerist obsequiousness toward the rich, powerful, and potentially sourceable, the risk is really low; consider, for example, what Frat Boy Bonhomie did, not just for George W. Bush, but his feloniously self-absorbed and binge-drinking offspring. Two: "youthful" indiscretion does not extend into your leaving the 18-25 demo. It's only a fractional part of the amusement over that Masturbation video that O'Donnell was a fame-whoring twenty-seven year old spouting absolute nonsense in hopes it would lead to a career; the larger joke is that she's now a 41-year-old woman who still imagines the same thing, and it's worked.
So old, in fact, that back then "media" was the plural form of "medium". Don't mind me.
Y'know, here's an idea: if you stop congratulating yourself for being the inspiration for the Bestest, Most Technologically Advanced Era Evah, the one which allows you to be so remarkably shallow at light speed, maybe, just maybe, it'll all work out, and you and all the other teenagers will grow up to realize you're as idiotic as everyone else tells you are, just like the people who are telling you grew up in their turn. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it. We're doomed regardless.
_______________
* Which story included the line that "the context of the comment is not clear", despite the fact that the context, O'Donnell's anti-Halloween fetishism, was all over the internets by that point. This is the sort of due diligence and natural skepticism which saved Shirley Sherrod's job.
WE last encountered Ms Grose's Where-else-but-Slate handiwork when she announced last spring that casual sex had lost its cachet for the under-twenty-five set, whose Voice she is (though I notice that she doesn't confine herself to tweetering and sexting and speaking in acronyms, and more's the pity). We scoffed. Naturally. But in the ensuing half-revolution of the Sun not a single twenty-something nubile has offered me an afternoon of unbridled and anonymous perversion, so I guess there's something to it at that.
And swear to God when I clicked the link I had no idea it was one of Ms Grose's pensées, or even associated with that godawful Reverse 180 post-post-feminist XX Factor thing; I'd seen some commenter say something similar elsewhere, and I thought Christine O'Donnell, (Negative) Harbinger of A New Political Age had merit as the potential Stupidest Thing Said About American Politics on the Internets Today. I just didn't realize that come January it would be in the running for some sort of annual award. And yes, you're right, it is my own fault for reading Slate.
O Lord, is there no way to put a stop to this sort of thing? O'Donnell's an idiot, and a Teabagger of the professionally religious sort. This has encouraged people who don't like Teabaggers, the professionally religious, nor the Republican party which succors them, to turn her into an icon of sorts, but that only gained traction when the GOP couldn't stop her from being its nominee for Joe Biden's old seat. Such is the glorious tradition of two-party politics in this country, which, as all good students know, is precisely the same age as Her tradition of political sleaze. But here's a certain class of people who imagine that their side of the argument is protected, not just by the free speech provisions of the First amendment, but by the Free Exercise clause as well, so that any attack on Christine O'Donnell, even one that originated with her innocent but artificially glistening lips, is an attempt to thwart God's Plan on Earth.
(So much so that Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson finds the AP's Nafeesa Syeed explaining in a news story that the whole Witchcraft thing is Bill Maher's fault.*)
And I'll be happy to settle, if we might just stop pretending this sort of thing is new, rather than a decades-old dodge. Either it matters that O'Donnell (read: Sarah Palin) is such a religious nutcase and mental incompetent that she gives even this country pause, or it doesn't. That's the issue. It's not whether some people hate her. That's a given. Everybody in politics is hated. So is every religious nut. So's the intersection. It stopped being an epistemological question when O'Donnell filed for public office. When she says things that even marginally-sane people have to regard as iffy, then she has to answer for them. And the answer is not "some people hate me."
I was prepared for more of the same. I was ready, naturally, for that special Slate brand of If Rationality Doesn't Have All The Answers Stupidity Wins By Default. What I wasn't ready for was this:
Though certainly O'Donnell is an extreme example, I wonder if she is a harbinger of political coverage to come—by which I mean, I can foresee a media universe in which old, dumb Facebook posts and unearthed tweets become a consistent source of fodder for journalists.
Okay, one: unless there's some major threat, now invisible, that Future Journalists might come without factory-installed careerist obsequiousness toward the rich, powerful, and potentially sourceable, the risk is really low; consider, for example, what Frat Boy Bonhomie did, not just for George W. Bush, but his feloniously self-absorbed and binge-drinking offspring. Two: "youthful" indiscretion does not extend into your leaving the 18-25 demo. It's only a fractional part of the amusement over that Masturbation video that O'Donnell was a fame-whoring twenty-seven year old spouting absolute nonsense in hopes it would lead to a career; the larger joke is that she's now a 41-year-old woman who still imagines the same thing, and it's worked.
O'Donnell is 41, so her earlier transgressions were on an older media, television.
So old, in fact, that back then "media" was the plural form of "medium". Don't mind me.
However, the incredibly quick dissemination of O'Donnell's ridiculous comments is all thanks to blogs and online video. Budding candidates a decade or two younger have lived their entire adult lives with these media. They've also lived in a world where most people have camera phones and even video—so there is an even greater chance that mistakes they made in their college years and beyond will be available for public viewing. If he were 20 years younger, perhaps a photo of Barack Obama with cocaine in the background would have shown up on Facebook; or if they were 40 years younger, George W. and Clinton might have been caught red handed on camera, clutching doobies. Just look at what happened to wunderkind Obama speech writer Jon Favreau, who was embarrassed when photographs of him groping a cardboard cut-out of Hillary Clinton surfaced.
Y'know, here's an idea: if you stop congratulating yourself for being the inspiration for the Bestest, Most Technologically Advanced Era Evah, the one which allows you to be so remarkably shallow at light speed, maybe, just maybe, it'll all work out, and you and all the other teenagers will grow up to realize you're as idiotic as everyone else tells you are, just like the people who are telling you grew up in their turn. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it. We're doomed regardless.
_______________
* Which story included the line that "the context of the comment is not clear", despite the fact that the context, O'Donnell's anti-Halloween fetishism, was all over the internets by that point. This is the sort of due diligence and natural skepticism which saved Shirley Sherrod's job.
Thursday, September 16
Grading On A Scale Of 'F' to 'F-"
Tim Noah, "The United States of Inequality: How the decline in K-12 education enriches College Graduates". September 15
THE penultimate entry in a Slate series on US income inequality, which was motoring right along there (grading on a Slate curve) until we drove right over a familiar cliff:
Same sale stores up only 1%! What's wrong with you?
Okay, so maybe we should be glad, for once, that someone's trying to put Our Failing Schools in some perspective that doesn't involve sweeping pronouncements based on the comparison of incompatible test scores. (Of course, Noah keeps the other old standby, Comparison of Incompatible International Test Results, revved and ready.) The result, though, is the same: Our Failing Schools are Failing, and the fault lies with the failure of Our Failing Schools. (The piece ends with--this is America, after all--a sort of Top Ten list of causes of The Great Inequality. Education is assigned 30% of the blame, sharing the Number One spot with, get this, "Wall Street and corporate boards' pampering of the Stinking Rich". (Gee, which one is the result of a positive corporate and government effort for forty years, and which the result of those same entities "benign" neglect?)
This being BLTR, let's start with the wisecrack: how much has Journalism improved over the last fifty years? How much has governance? Is Corporate America churning out better products these days, or just better margins?
Who is it, exactly, who's letting Sweet Lady Liberty down? High school graduates? Not much beyond their voting preferences over the period. When I go to the grocery store the cashiers all seem to know how to operate them newfangled scanners, more or less, and the people who keep 'em running, and the people who program them to overcharge me on 10% of the items seems to do the jobs they're assigned. If I've been let down over the last three decades it's by the people who devalued the grading of meat (aka, the Reagan administration in full buttsexs mode with the cattlemen and meat packers), the people who're supposed to inspect the worthiness of foodstuffs before they reach my table (now there's a labor force that's been cut in half without automation entering into it!), and the general trend of bigger and bigger suppliers and bigger and bigger boxes in an endless circle jerk having nothing whatsoever to do with the consumer's wishes.
And on and on (while you're there, take a walk down the liquor aisle and note how many people these days earn a living from the simple expedient of selling actual beer, not the petrochemical-and-food-grade-mule-piss the "innovators" came up with in the 50s and 60s). Noah noted earlier in the series that most Ivies now get jobs in the financial sector. This is not due to some epistemological breakthrough of the last couple decades. It's due to greed, and government regulatory practices, or not-practices.
Yes, indeedy, in the first half of the 20th century, when the things around us were made of steel, worked mechanically, and were husbanded, US education gave a wide range of citizens (our great advancement!) the necessary skills (practical, mathematical, detail oriented) to fit into the marketplace. Today, when everything's made of plastic, works electronically, and is disposed of the minute it stops working or goes out of fashion (our worst advancement!) you're welcome to explain what those skills are, or should be for the next generation. I'm not exempting the so-called Educational establishment from such considerations--though we might point out that "herding everyone into a paycheck line" is not a universally-accepted standard for pedagogy--but I would like to note that this same period neatly coincides with the political Back to Basics movement which insisted that public education go back to doing just what it was doing in the highly successful 30s and 40s, and leave modernity to the Europeans.
Listen, I'm almost the opposite of mechanical--my dear Dad has, to this day, a toolbox under his sink containing 1 (one) hammer and one (1) flat-head screwdriver, probably as pristine as the day he bought 'em. He didn't give me a whole lot of hands-on maintenance experience. Yet even I could keep most cars built in the 50s in something close to running shape. Today I can't find the goddam oil filter on my truck. The world got immeasurably more complicated, and it sure as fuck is easy for someone who needs only the same skills a 1930s typist had to do his 2010 job to demand that Education move at lightspeed. Fuck, then type something that takes the stupid politics out of it so educators can at least concentrate.
The Greeks knew that rapid expansion was easier in a new enterprise than in a mature, established one; we've got a thousand examples of that bombarding us every hour, but we don't seem to get it. It's as if advertising was in our marrow, and we've forgotten that the whole thing's a shameless con to begin with. Washday miracle! Fast, fast, Fast relief! Unfortunately, Universal Truth and Waxy Yellow Buildup are two very different things.
And the other side is this: we seem to imagine that the Past has nothing to do with the present, that once an extravagant and useless war, or a massive oil spill, is out of the headlines, it's over. The major contention in American education over the past fifty years has been whether white students had to sit with the coloreds. That's what we've argued about. Not technological advancement. Prayer. Teaching Genesis in biology class. Rewriting History to make it more palatable for disgruntled Confederates. You can't be an anti-intellectual country and expect high achievement, or not high achievement that isn't the result of cheating on the test. Most people in this country think evolution is "just a theory". Half believe angels watch over 'em. A goodly number think the Earth is younger than many of its artifacts, and that Global Warming is a political subterfuge. Where'd they get those ideas? Not in class. At least not in public schools.
THE penultimate entry in a Slate series on US income inequality, which was motoring right along there (grading on a Slate curve) until we drove right over a familiar cliff:
For Katz and Goldin, the solution to this riddle isn't that computerization created a larger demand for better-educated workers than did previous innovations. Rather, it's that during the earlier upheavals the education system was able to increase the necessary supply of better-educated workers. During the Great Divergence, the education system has not been able to increase the supply of better-educated workers, and so the price of those workers (i.e., their incomes) has risen faster relative to the general population. At a time when the workforce needed to be smarter, Americans got dumber. Or rather: Americans got smarter at a much slower rate than they did during previous periods of technological change (and also at a much slower rate than people in many other industrialized democracies did).
Same sale stores up only 1%! What's wrong with you?
Okay, so maybe we should be glad, for once, that someone's trying to put Our Failing Schools in some perspective that doesn't involve sweeping pronouncements based on the comparison of incompatible test scores. (Of course, Noah keeps the other old standby, Comparison of Incompatible International Test Results, revved and ready.) The result, though, is the same: Our Failing Schools are Failing, and the fault lies with the failure of Our Failing Schools. (The piece ends with--this is America, after all--a sort of Top Ten list of causes of The Great Inequality. Education is assigned 30% of the blame, sharing the Number One spot with, get this, "Wall Street and corporate boards' pampering of the Stinking Rich". (Gee, which one is the result of a positive corporate and government effort for forty years, and which the result of those same entities "benign" neglect?)
This being BLTR, let's start with the wisecrack: how much has Journalism improved over the last fifty years? How much has governance? Is Corporate America churning out better products these days, or just better margins?
Who is it, exactly, who's letting Sweet Lady Liberty down? High school graduates? Not much beyond their voting preferences over the period. When I go to the grocery store the cashiers all seem to know how to operate them newfangled scanners, more or less, and the people who keep 'em running, and the people who program them to overcharge me on 10% of the items seems to do the jobs they're assigned. If I've been let down over the last three decades it's by the people who devalued the grading of meat (aka, the Reagan administration in full buttsexs mode with the cattlemen and meat packers), the people who're supposed to inspect the worthiness of foodstuffs before they reach my table (now there's a labor force that's been cut in half without automation entering into it!), and the general trend of bigger and bigger suppliers and bigger and bigger boxes in an endless circle jerk having nothing whatsoever to do with the consumer's wishes.
And on and on (while you're there, take a walk down the liquor aisle and note how many people these days earn a living from the simple expedient of selling actual beer, not the petrochemical-and-food-grade-mule-piss the "innovators" came up with in the 50s and 60s). Noah noted earlier in the series that most Ivies now get jobs in the financial sector. This is not due to some epistemological breakthrough of the last couple decades. It's due to greed, and government regulatory practices, or not-practices.
Yes, indeedy, in the first half of the 20th century, when the things around us were made of steel, worked mechanically, and were husbanded, US education gave a wide range of citizens (our great advancement!) the necessary skills (practical, mathematical, detail oriented) to fit into the marketplace. Today, when everything's made of plastic, works electronically, and is disposed of the minute it stops working or goes out of fashion (our worst advancement!) you're welcome to explain what those skills are, or should be for the next generation. I'm not exempting the so-called Educational establishment from such considerations--though we might point out that "herding everyone into a paycheck line" is not a universally-accepted standard for pedagogy--but I would like to note that this same period neatly coincides with the political Back to Basics movement which insisted that public education go back to doing just what it was doing in the highly successful 30s and 40s, and leave modernity to the Europeans.
Listen, I'm almost the opposite of mechanical--my dear Dad has, to this day, a toolbox under his sink containing 1 (one) hammer and one (1) flat-head screwdriver, probably as pristine as the day he bought 'em. He didn't give me a whole lot of hands-on maintenance experience. Yet even I could keep most cars built in the 50s in something close to running shape. Today I can't find the goddam oil filter on my truck. The world got immeasurably more complicated, and it sure as fuck is easy for someone who needs only the same skills a 1930s typist had to do his 2010 job to demand that Education move at lightspeed. Fuck, then type something that takes the stupid politics out of it so educators can at least concentrate.
The Greeks knew that rapid expansion was easier in a new enterprise than in a mature, established one; we've got a thousand examples of that bombarding us every hour, but we don't seem to get it. It's as if advertising was in our marrow, and we've forgotten that the whole thing's a shameless con to begin with. Washday miracle! Fast, fast, Fast relief! Unfortunately, Universal Truth and Waxy Yellow Buildup are two very different things.
And the other side is this: we seem to imagine that the Past has nothing to do with the present, that once an extravagant and useless war, or a massive oil spill, is out of the headlines, it's over. The major contention in American education over the past fifty years has been whether white students had to sit with the coloreds. That's what we've argued about. Not technological advancement. Prayer. Teaching Genesis in biology class. Rewriting History to make it more palatable for disgruntled Confederates. You can't be an anti-intellectual country and expect high achievement, or not high achievement that isn't the result of cheating on the test. Most people in this country think evolution is "just a theory". Half believe angels watch over 'em. A goodly number think the Earth is younger than many of its artifacts, and that Global Warming is a political subterfuge. Where'd they get those ideas? Not in class. At least not in public schools.
Wednesday, September 15
How To Tell There's A Real Daniels Groundswell: 1) He Appears Almost Life-Sized…
POLITICAL Season: the biennial period when political reporters pretend they don't know anything about politics.
So some over-ripe frat boy and Politico reporter (but I repeat myself) with the Mitch the Knife beat and a steno pad reports on the Bantam Menace's recent string of garden parties with Republican fixers, bag men, and...but I repeat myself. Daniels has been holding these soirées at the Governor's mansion, which immediately raises two questions: one, who told him how to get there? and two, are they having a problem keeping Cheri-with-an-i sedated enough to allow visitors into his real residence? I think if I were being asked to pony up a few black millions I'd be more than a little interested in what the wife is up to, and how many days per week she'd have to disappear from the campaign trail for "treatment". I mean, it can't be leftover anthrax from that bulging envelope someone sent her in 2001; that was another house. Plus we're pretty sure the talc-sniffing dogs found it all, and they dye all her powders fluorescent orange these days.
This, of course, and thank you so much, set off another round of "speculation" about Daniels' "intentions" among local "reporters". In fact, part-time Racist Beacon political columnist and full-time amateur Daniels flack Matt Tully jumped the gun over the weekend and wrote a column saying, c'mon, we all know he's running. Which, by the way, was amazing perspicacity, or might've been if he'd written it six years ago.
Because, well, look: I'm not paid to follow this shit full time, not that there's that much money anyway, but Daniels quit the Bush OMB to run for governor of Indiana (with, we might add, the same coy bullshit about "people urging him to do so"). Why? There was plenty of national economy left for him to wreck, and at the time, at least, two or three more Mideast wars to misunderestimate the cost of. Daniels isn't a Hoosier; he's a Princeton elitist, and if he were a Democrat he'd'a been laughed all the way back to Georgetown. The man finds a taste for elected office just as the Democratic incumbent dies suddenly. The national Republican field is wide open for 2008, because Dick Cheney insists he won't run, and, hell, even by 2003, in the midst of Victory Hoopla, he was generally regarded as a particularly noxious species of toad. And speaking of toads, this is the heyday of Karl Rove's New Republican Majority, and lemme tell you, friends, you do not want to get caught between Mitch Daniels and the open bar where they've just uncorked the new Kool-Aid.
Once elected Daniels set out to run up gaudy economic numbers by changing the rules (and exaggerating the state's financial condition to make it look like he'd started way behind), selling off any piece of state property that wasn't nailed down and could attract a buyer who'd agree not to raise rates until Mitch was out of office, and touting all the jobs he'd created in the burgeoning Vapor and Fantasy sectors.
Now, granted, the only thing required for these people to lie their asses off is sufficient oxygen to draw breath. And with zero concern about being discovered; Mitch hadn't suckled from the right side of the Strategic Federal Teat System for thirty years to no purpose. He clearly knew there was no way to underestimate the savvy of the American voter. It's possible all the man was after in 2005 was a second term as governor and a big enough McMansion that he wasn't kept awake every night by breaking glass. And I don't believe it for a moment.
Last year Daniels fought tooth-and-nail to keep his imaginary budget surplus over $1 billion, despite the fact that Hoosiers were suffering mightily from the continuing effects of the two Bush administrations they'd voted for. Why? He torpedoed a done deal between the Republican Senate and Democratic House which would have increased education spending, alone among all other government programs. Why? Not for Hoosiers. For Mitch.
Okay, so he lied about not wanting to be President. I don't give a fuck; I'm just astonished that no matter how many times you run the scam it manages to work.
This routine represents, at bottom, the desperation of those same Republican financiers now facing a party of Palins. I don't know whether this means they are smarter than your average Teabagger, or more cynical, or just differently invested. I do know they're busy fighting the last war. Daniels' luster has been rubbed to the pot metal underneath. Not that that'd keep him from being elected, considering all the other idiots who've made it. And maybe we deserve him. But he's not the Fantasy CEO the banking wing of the GOP thinks will tame the Teabaggers. Do yourselves a favor. Just slip him a few thou and move on.
Tuesday, September 14
Well, When You Put It That Way…
Marc "How Many Fucking Nutcases Did It Take To Write A Bush Speech?" Thiessen, "How will al-Qaeda mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11?" September 14
PUT on you tea shades, kids, and let's mess with The Man's head.
There must be hundreds of wobbly but still doddering Americans who remember how the War on Drugs worked back before Nancy Reagan got her husband to formally declare it. Namely, that it worked on lies. And not good lies, either, no. The transparent fumblings of emotionally stunted authoritarians, little Hoovers in and out of drag. The acid-tripping college students blinded by staring into the sun (twice!). Art Linkletter's dead daughter. The turkey in the crib and the baby in the oven. Hell, the historically minded may even recall that Federal marihuana laws are predicated on the causal relationship between the first puff of Weed and that lifetime pass on the Smack Train. Though that, of course, was really just cover for one of our earlier wars on chinks and mesicans, you gotta admit that in those days people knew how to lie. (Nancy Reagan, it turns out, may've been more concerned that a new generation of talentless Hollywood startlets, gag reflexes anesthetized by the Snow, would usurp her rightful crown.)
Okay, so Thiessen isn't The Man. He's a jock sniffer too cowardly to witness, let alone take part in, any of his torture fantasies. He's the poster boy for a certain type of Federal weasel; remember, it was the local Alabama boys turned the firehoses and billy clubs and German shepherds on King's marchers. The Feds drilled peepholes into his bathroom and sent dirty pictures to his wife.
Actually I'm not quite sure how I came to read this thing, except the Post offered it as the counterpoint to a Fareed Zakaria op-ed on how We're Safer Now Than We'll Admit, and the second worst sin in American political life today is pretending to be reasonable now when, in the heat of the moment, you thought 9/11 seemed like a good excuse to go kill Iraqis. I have so little regard for Fareed Zakaria I'm willing to read Marc Thiessen. So it was kind of a spite fuck. (I say "read" only because that's the conventional term; the reality is that Thiessen just rains on you, in the urological sense.)
Let's say one thing further about the rapid decline in the quality of our prevarications: it doesn't even seem to've occurred to Thiessen to consider whether this game is worth the candle. Thiessen "argues" (again we are prisoners of linguistic convention) that al-Qaeda will strike on 9/11/11. Sure, he fails to come within a parsec of making the case, but why fucking bother in the first place? Why is the idea that al-Qaeda is equally fetishistic about The Magic of 9-1-1 so important? Why are you so concerned that someone is laughing behind your back? Hmmm? Admittedly this is nothing new with the American right, elements of which are still skirmishing with Charles Darwin, but still: wouldn't your warning of the dire consequences of Complacency be a little more effective if you weren't still screaming about the subject 24/7? Complacent? Jesus Christ, it's tough enough just to get to sleep nights with all the screaming and yelling and banging pots and pans coming from that double-wide of yours.
Not to mention that maybe, just maybe, it'd be a little more convincing if you weren't the guys who allowed the attacks to happen in the first place.
Okay, sure, Thiessen has a career of sorts to protect, but what of the Post? Oh, hell, forget I mentioned it. The one notable thing about the 850 words (again, aside from the fact that they have nothing to do with the ostensible argument he's making) is that they're full of shit. Completely full of shit. Thiessen's first example of al-Qaeda's Hallmarkesque obsession with anniversaries--and the only one which happens to come attached to The Date, though purely by fiat--is the London Liquid Explosives case of 2006. (The Fifth Anniversary is traditionally wood, but, I dunno, maybe in the Middle East it's Prell™.) Thiessen's been peddling this one for years, with its "seven airliners" and "imagine teevee shots of floating wreckage" and "if they'd exploded over populated areas it could have been worse than 9/11", though formerly in support of waterboarding. Well, if you're gonna jerk off, it may's well be circular, I guess. Problem is that the whole "9/11 anniversary" thing depends on the London cops' telling. As do the "liquid explosives" "seven airliners" and "al-Qaeda" routine. You can mix up some Gee Your Bomb Smells Terrific in an enclosed space, but in 2006 even Walking Towards the Bathroom While Swarthy risked having some cub reporter for the Ladies Home Journal of Wall Street start screaming like Evelyn Ankers. And the stuff's too unstable to've mixed beforehand. Which would tend to argue against a successful completion of the Plot, except that's not really all that necessary when the Bobbies didn't actually find one, just some guys with martyr porn and great-looking hair. No liquid explosives, no instructions for manufacturing liquid explosives, and, in the ensuing investigation, no link to any financial support whatsoever. Maybe a couple pair of tea shades.
And that's the best he's got; we're then treated to Jose Padilla (convicted of conspiring with himself to fantasize about killing people), a not-quite specified plot to blow up our consulate in Pakistan or the Marine camp in Djibouti (is this terrorism, exactly? If the threat of someone attacking your Marine base in Africa gives you the interminable squirts, maybe you oughta think about keeping them home, and leaving the White Man's Burden to someone better equipped emotionally), an al-Qaeda anthrax lab (you can't kill masses of people with anthrax. Period. The domestic anthrax letter bomber had access to USAMRIID stuff, the Peruvian flake of the terrorist world, and he killed fewer people than Taco Bell does. Plus what, exactly, is the track record of Bush administration officials identifying Islamic Death Labs?), and, fer chrissakes, The LA Library Tower, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of the War on Terra set. And, as they used to sing on Gilligan's Island, the rest, mostly classified, of course, but including the imaginary Heathrow Plot and this corker:
Yeah, they'd love it in Pamona.
Of course the Tower is built of bricks, not substandard steel, but, y'know, there's no sense wasting a perfectly good pair of pants by not pissing 'em.
PUT on you tea shades, kids, and let's mess with The Man's head.
There must be hundreds of wobbly but still doddering Americans who remember how the War on Drugs worked back before Nancy Reagan got her husband to formally declare it. Namely, that it worked on lies. And not good lies, either, no. The transparent fumblings of emotionally stunted authoritarians, little Hoovers in and out of drag. The acid-tripping college students blinded by staring into the sun (twice!). Art Linkletter's dead daughter. The turkey in the crib and the baby in the oven. Hell, the historically minded may even recall that Federal marihuana laws are predicated on the causal relationship between the first puff of Weed and that lifetime pass on the Smack Train. Though that, of course, was really just cover for one of our earlier wars on chinks and mesicans, you gotta admit that in those days people knew how to lie. (Nancy Reagan, it turns out, may've been more concerned that a new generation of talentless Hollywood startlets, gag reflexes anesthetized by the Snow, would usurp her rightful crown.)
Okay, so Thiessen isn't The Man. He's a jock sniffer too cowardly to witness, let alone take part in, any of his torture fantasies. He's the poster boy for a certain type of Federal weasel; remember, it was the local Alabama boys turned the firehoses and billy clubs and German shepherds on King's marchers. The Feds drilled peepholes into his bathroom and sent dirty pictures to his wife.
Actually I'm not quite sure how I came to read this thing, except the Post offered it as the counterpoint to a Fareed Zakaria op-ed on how We're Safer Now Than We'll Admit, and the second worst sin in American political life today is pretending to be reasonable now when, in the heat of the moment, you thought 9/11 seemed like a good excuse to go kill Iraqis. I have so little regard for Fareed Zakaria I'm willing to read Marc Thiessen. So it was kind of a spite fuck. (I say "read" only because that's the conventional term; the reality is that Thiessen just rains on you, in the urological sense.)
Let's say one thing further about the rapid decline in the quality of our prevarications: it doesn't even seem to've occurred to Thiessen to consider whether this game is worth the candle. Thiessen "argues" (again we are prisoners of linguistic convention) that al-Qaeda will strike on 9/11/11. Sure, he fails to come within a parsec of making the case, but why fucking bother in the first place? Why is the idea that al-Qaeda is equally fetishistic about The Magic of 9-1-1 so important? Why are you so concerned that someone is laughing behind your back? Hmmm? Admittedly this is nothing new with the American right, elements of which are still skirmishing with Charles Darwin, but still: wouldn't your warning of the dire consequences of Complacency be a little more effective if you weren't still screaming about the subject 24/7? Complacent? Jesus Christ, it's tough enough just to get to sleep nights with all the screaming and yelling and banging pots and pans coming from that double-wide of yours.
Not to mention that maybe, just maybe, it'd be a little more convincing if you weren't the guys who allowed the attacks to happen in the first place.
Okay, sure, Thiessen has a career of sorts to protect, but what of the Post? Oh, hell, forget I mentioned it. The one notable thing about the 850 words (again, aside from the fact that they have nothing to do with the ostensible argument he's making) is that they're full of shit. Completely full of shit. Thiessen's first example of al-Qaeda's Hallmarkesque obsession with anniversaries--and the only one which happens to come attached to The Date, though purely by fiat--is the London Liquid Explosives case of 2006. (The Fifth Anniversary is traditionally wood, but, I dunno, maybe in the Middle East it's Prell™.) Thiessen's been peddling this one for years, with its "seven airliners" and "imagine teevee shots of floating wreckage" and "if they'd exploded over populated areas it could have been worse than 9/11", though formerly in support of waterboarding. Well, if you're gonna jerk off, it may's well be circular, I guess. Problem is that the whole "9/11 anniversary" thing depends on the London cops' telling. As do the "liquid explosives" "seven airliners" and "al-Qaeda" routine. You can mix up some Gee Your Bomb Smells Terrific in an enclosed space, but in 2006 even Walking Towards the Bathroom While Swarthy risked having some cub reporter for the Ladies Home Journal of Wall Street start screaming like Evelyn Ankers. And the stuff's too unstable to've mixed beforehand. Which would tend to argue against a successful completion of the Plot, except that's not really all that necessary when the Bobbies didn't actually find one, just some guys with martyr porn and great-looking hair. No liquid explosives, no instructions for manufacturing liquid explosives, and, in the ensuing investigation, no link to any financial support whatsoever. Maybe a couple pair of tea shades.
And that's the best he's got; we're then treated to Jose Padilla (convicted of conspiring with himself to fantasize about killing people), a not-quite specified plot to blow up our consulate in Pakistan or the Marine camp in Djibouti (is this terrorism, exactly? If the threat of someone attacking your Marine base in Africa gives you the interminable squirts, maybe you oughta think about keeping them home, and leaving the White Man's Burden to someone better equipped emotionally), an al-Qaeda anthrax lab (you can't kill masses of people with anthrax. Period. The domestic anthrax letter bomber had access to USAMRIID stuff, the Peruvian flake of the terrorist world, and he killed fewer people than Taco Bell does. Plus what, exactly, is the track record of Bush administration officials identifying Islamic Death Labs?), and, fer chrissakes, The LA Library Tower, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of the War on Terra set. And, as they used to sing on Gilligan's Island, the rest, mostly classified, of course, but including the imaginary Heathrow Plot and this corker:
(imagine Big Ben collapsing like the Twin Towers)
Yeah, they'd love it in Pamona.
Of course the Tower is built of bricks, not substandard steel, but, y'know, there's no sense wasting a perfectly good pair of pants by not pissing 'em.
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