Even if we were to disregard all the cynical barbs about oil thirst and manifest destiny, America's ongoing struggle to stabilize the Middle East has still yielded some troubling consequences. We have spent a great deal of diplomatic capital over the past few years in assembling all of our various “coalitions of the willing,” and even leaving aside the important role humanitarian aid should play in our policy, if a real threat were to suddenly emerge (e.g. Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan), we might be left high and dry. Where exactly does this leave President Obama?
Hopefully learning from the geopolitical mistakes his predecessors made—in Africa.
The year was 1994, a lifetime ago in African politics; civil unrest was rampant, social collapse was imminent—and furthermore, had been for some time—and after having given the nasty idea some deliberation and tested it in the international press, the US and the rest of the United Nations member states withdrew their peace keepers as quietly as they could and watched as the region imploded entirely, with apocalyptic results. The lives of at least half a million Tutsi probably could have been saved, Clinton himself admitted later, if he'd sent even a few thousand of the requested troops. The withdrawal from Rwanda was the darkest hour of his presidency, he said, and like many, many others, I won't disagree, but we shouldn't forget that he simply turned around and twice repeated himself, first with Bosnia and then with Kosovo.
And, of course, we mustn't forget about Somalia, the war-torn coastal nation two countries to the east of Rwanda; its infrastructure has been irreparably destroyed by a civil war that promises never to end, its culture is under the hideous spell of Sharia law, and its international significance these days consists mostly of chatter among pundits about its ongoing problem with piracy. Black Hawk Down came out not ten years ago, and already, we have forgotten everything we might have learned about human solidarity. Actually, that's not true—we never learned anything about it in the first place, and the only reason anyone saw the movie is because it gave us a romanticized impression of ourselves, never minding the collapsing scenery of Mogadishu. A century from now, the cities of Somalia will still be getting riddled with mortars, and we will still be watching that movie, clapping as the credits roll.
This isn't to excuse President Bush; whatever he might have been fighting for in Iraq, it seems inexcusable that he didn't notice Darfur, the region of western Sudan in which the government has essentially decided to orchestrate genocide as a matter of public policy. Not that the rest of the world bothered to do anything, either; never before has so much shouting and hollering about injustice from so many disparate sources led to so little. Yet again, while the UN member states quibble about jurisdiction and responsibility, another country in the heart of darkness rots.
So say whatever you wish about our incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan; it's too easy these days to take shots at Clinton and Bush, but we must ask, what kind of legacy have they left their successor? And more importantly, what will be the Obama Doctrine? What can our new President learn from Africa? It is clearly true that borrowing neo-conservatism from Bush will land him in a quagmire, but if he just squirms, spins around and adopts the stupid isolationism of Pat Buchanan, it won't be merely cowardice, but apparently protocol as well. Please choose wisely, Mr. President.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
...but mostly, it's because he dresses his daughter like an American Girl doll.
The Supreme Court ruling in Iowa a few days ago in support of same-sex marriage has since gotten me into more than a few blistering arguments. Why should a private agreement between two consenting individuals I neither know nor care about have anything to do with me, and why exactly should I feel compelled to disagree with it on principle? Intuition is slanted toward the proponent of same-sex marriage, and the opponents implicitly seem to recognize it.
The savvy opponent is likely to begin by offering a litany of his own intuitionist critiques: same-sex marriage contradicts my religion; it violates tradition; it deprives children of a proper parental cross-section; it isn't natural; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But why are any of these legitimately within the purview of the legislator? Maybe gambling violates my religion; should we ban it? Divorce and one-night-stands often functionally deny children of one or both of their parents, and do so in much larger numbers; should we ban them? Heart transplants aren't natural; should we ban them? Soulja Boy makes me very much more than uncomfortable, and is offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of every single person I've ever met; should we ban him? Because it's protocol in this country not to concoct tyrannical, ad hoc laws to satisfy the whims of even a majority, these arguments are the easiest to dispatch.
The opponent might then argue—à la Rick Santorum—that legal same-sex marriage leads to legal polygamy, bestiality or any of the other usual silly conjectures. But this is a patent non sequitur. It isn't as if marriage has some kind of universal taxonomical tree denoting its structure, on which a marriage of two men or two women is an intermediate between a marriage of a man and a woman and a marriage of a man, a woman, four goats and a toaster. In reality, same-sex and opposite-sex marriage differ only in that one is already accepted and that one isn't, and opponents have just slipped in a preexisting norm as a piece of its own evidence. Even if there actually were that empirical suggestion of causation—which there isn't, by the way, not the faintest whisper—would this be a reasonable basis to begin restricting rights that are, by hypothesis, otherwise legitimate? Of course not. After all, legal marriages in general are themselves also a prerequisite to legal polygamy, but no reasonable person would argue to ban the former simply to rid ourselves of the possibility of the latter.
In lieu of all of those arguments, the opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to assert that gays can change their orientation, a fact which is neither straightforwardly true nor relevant. They might argue that it leads to the breakdown of the family, a curious assertion to make in a country with a fifty percent divorce rate. They might argue that procreation is the true warrant for marriage, which can only make us question where they place the infertile. They might even support the civil union “compromise,” a seemingly pragmatic position that has gained ground on both sides in recent years but is actually entirely arbitrary and self-evidently unnecessary if it has been properly defined.
But in the end, they are forced to recognize that their position is not rooted in fairness or the earnest happiness of man but rather some kind of selfish predisposition, and that while they might well be decent, ordinary people who don't support visiting gays with violence, they still provide ideological cover for those who do. At any rate, both public policy and public opinion in the United States and elsewhere are clearly moving in the right direction, and, as this proxy war begins to draw to a close, we can realize that although the ruling in Iowa is a big victory for gays, it's a bigger victory for the rest of us.
The savvy opponent is likely to begin by offering a litany of his own intuitionist critiques: same-sex marriage contradicts my religion; it violates tradition; it deprives children of a proper parental cross-section; it isn't natural; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But why are any of these legitimately within the purview of the legislator? Maybe gambling violates my religion; should we ban it? Divorce and one-night-stands often functionally deny children of one or both of their parents, and do so in much larger numbers; should we ban them? Heart transplants aren't natural; should we ban them? Soulja Boy makes me very much more than uncomfortable, and is offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of every single person I've ever met; should we ban him? Because it's protocol in this country not to concoct tyrannical, ad hoc laws to satisfy the whims of even a majority, these arguments are the easiest to dispatch.
The opponent might then argue—à la Rick Santorum—that legal same-sex marriage leads to legal polygamy, bestiality or any of the other usual silly conjectures. But this is a patent non sequitur. It isn't as if marriage has some kind of universal taxonomical tree denoting its structure, on which a marriage of two men or two women is an intermediate between a marriage of a man and a woman and a marriage of a man, a woman, four goats and a toaster. In reality, same-sex and opposite-sex marriage differ only in that one is already accepted and that one isn't, and opponents have just slipped in a preexisting norm as a piece of its own evidence. Even if there actually were that empirical suggestion of causation—which there isn't, by the way, not the faintest whisper—would this be a reasonable basis to begin restricting rights that are, by hypothesis, otherwise legitimate? Of course not. After all, legal marriages in general are themselves also a prerequisite to legal polygamy, but no reasonable person would argue to ban the former simply to rid ourselves of the possibility of the latter.
In lieu of all of those arguments, the opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to assert that gays can change their orientation, a fact which is neither straightforwardly true nor relevant. They might argue that it leads to the breakdown of the family, a curious assertion to make in a country with a fifty percent divorce rate. They might argue that procreation is the true warrant for marriage, which can only make us question where they place the infertile. They might even support the civil union “compromise,” a seemingly pragmatic position that has gained ground on both sides in recent years but is actually entirely arbitrary and self-evidently unnecessary if it has been properly defined.
But in the end, they are forced to recognize that their position is not rooted in fairness or the earnest happiness of man but rather some kind of selfish predisposition, and that while they might well be decent, ordinary people who don't support visiting gays with violence, they still provide ideological cover for those who do. At any rate, both public policy and public opinion in the United States and elsewhere are clearly moving in the right direction, and, as this proxy war begins to draw to a close, we can realize that although the ruling in Iowa is a big victory for gays, it's a bigger victory for the rest of us.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
2012: A Race Odyssey
Anyone in the habit of talking politics with me knows I have a fascination with the American right.
As a left-leaning person, I feel I can't help it; more than a few of my friends are conservatives, and they seem to have a fundamentally different conception of everything. And yet, despite the yawning ideological chasm, I find nonetheless that I have reached with most of them very much more than a cool détente and that our similarities ultimately far outweigh our differences. So I ask myself: why conservatism? Why was it ever successful? Where will it go from here?
Although I was only a child back in 1994, even I recall the birth of the so-called “Contract With America”—the GOP's post-Reagan hostile takeover of the legislative branch, engineered by Newt Gingrich—and over the following few years, the change in the zeitgeist proved itself to be genuine. Socialism had officially become the political and economic albatross of the twentieth-century, domestic crime was at an all-time low, and Wall Street was abuzz about a 36,000-point Dow and the possibility of a federal surplus. America's moderates—those with a gradual inclination toward social permissiveness, a commitment to foreign humanitarianism and a general trust in laissez-faire capitalism—were now alleging to take a “pragmatic” rather than “ideological” approach, and there was no talk of unemployment and no worry of depression. It seemed we had finally found the Grand Unified Theory of politics; Francis Fukuyama wrote famously of “the end of history,” declaring that we had reached the singularity, and we believed it.
But then along came 9/11, the endless incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the unraveling of the financial system, and the center-left started to get its way in the national elections. Long overdue elements of their agenda—the universalization of our healthcare system, expanded support for public education, more comprehensive regulation of our financial system—are inevitable in this climate. The pendulum has swung back to the left, and it seems to show no sign of slowing; in 2010 and 2012, is the GOP going to regain its proud majority and reassert its existence, or is it just going to sink even deeper into political debt? They must adopt a torchbearer, and he or she must be more lucid than Rush Limbaugh. But who shall it be?
Sarah Palin is a twit, and everyone knows it. I wouldn't trust her to hold an actual torch.
The only other person really getting attention in conservative circles, though, is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. On paper, it's not difficult to see why; he's young, smart, ethnically distinct, memorable, relatively well-spoken, and a proven bureaucrat. Unfortunately, he continues to insist on describing creationism as good science and takes a dogmatic, draconian stance on abortion, both positions that will ensure he gets little-to-no support from the center. He has gotten more recent publicity than any other Republican, but it's been mostly negative: his abysmal rebuttal to the State of the Union Address was aimless and patronizing, and it seemed only to prove that he wasn't the kind of transformative political figure the GOP has insisted he was.
Everyone else recedes into the background, for one or more reasons. Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota, is somewhat popular in his state but has little national name recognition. Mike Huckabee is well-known and terrifically charming, but wants to abolish the income tax and change the United States into a theocracy. Mitt Romney also has a strong national presence, but has waffled on key issues in the past and will probably forever be hampered politically by his religion. John McCain declined to endorse any of them, saying he wished to wait for the situation to develop.
Hopefully he doesn't take too long.
As a left-leaning person, I feel I can't help it; more than a few of my friends are conservatives, and they seem to have a fundamentally different conception of everything. And yet, despite the yawning ideological chasm, I find nonetheless that I have reached with most of them very much more than a cool détente and that our similarities ultimately far outweigh our differences. So I ask myself: why conservatism? Why was it ever successful? Where will it go from here?
Although I was only a child back in 1994, even I recall the birth of the so-called “Contract With America”—the GOP's post-Reagan hostile takeover of the legislative branch, engineered by Newt Gingrich—and over the following few years, the change in the zeitgeist proved itself to be genuine. Socialism had officially become the political and economic albatross of the twentieth-century, domestic crime was at an all-time low, and Wall Street was abuzz about a 36,000-point Dow and the possibility of a federal surplus. America's moderates—those with a gradual inclination toward social permissiveness, a commitment to foreign humanitarianism and a general trust in laissez-faire capitalism—were now alleging to take a “pragmatic” rather than “ideological” approach, and there was no talk of unemployment and no worry of depression. It seemed we had finally found the Grand Unified Theory of politics; Francis Fukuyama wrote famously of “the end of history,” declaring that we had reached the singularity, and we believed it.
But then along came 9/11, the endless incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the unraveling of the financial system, and the center-left started to get its way in the national elections. Long overdue elements of their agenda—the universalization of our healthcare system, expanded support for public education, more comprehensive regulation of our financial system—are inevitable in this climate. The pendulum has swung back to the left, and it seems to show no sign of slowing; in 2010 and 2012, is the GOP going to regain its proud majority and reassert its existence, or is it just going to sink even deeper into political debt? They must adopt a torchbearer, and he or she must be more lucid than Rush Limbaugh. But who shall it be?
Sarah Palin is a twit, and everyone knows it. I wouldn't trust her to hold an actual torch.
The only other person really getting attention in conservative circles, though, is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. On paper, it's not difficult to see why; he's young, smart, ethnically distinct, memorable, relatively well-spoken, and a proven bureaucrat. Unfortunately, he continues to insist on describing creationism as good science and takes a dogmatic, draconian stance on abortion, both positions that will ensure he gets little-to-no support from the center. He has gotten more recent publicity than any other Republican, but it's been mostly negative: his abysmal rebuttal to the State of the Union Address was aimless and patronizing, and it seemed only to prove that he wasn't the kind of transformative political figure the GOP has insisted he was.
Everyone else recedes into the background, for one or more reasons. Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota, is somewhat popular in his state but has little national name recognition. Mike Huckabee is well-known and terrifically charming, but wants to abolish the income tax and change the United States into a theocracy. Mitt Romney also has a strong national presence, but has waffled on key issues in the past and will probably forever be hampered politically by his religion. John McCain declined to endorse any of them, saying he wished to wait for the situation to develop.
Hopefully he doesn't take too long.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Which Way To the Bastille, Again?
It's a bad time to be a banker, and not just because President Obama said so.
Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Attoney General, recently subpeonaed insurance giant AIG for a list of the names of every single person in the financial division slated to receive a bonus, for the purposes of some kind of “review.” And an internal memo has recently been circulating the AIG offices, warning all its employees to be cautious of suspicious loiterers, to always travel in groups, and to not make obvious their place of employment. In other words, it seems the people of America have returned to claim their republic, and in a big way.
I don't really wish to be an advocate for outright violence, but it seems like the leadership of this fiscally and philosophically bankrupt firm ought to have a little trepidation about flossin' the corporate logo. Why would they want to, anyway? It's embarrassing enough to wear a Royals hat in the middle of downtown Kansas City, and they're just benign losers. Their executives, on the other hand, have planted themselves directly at the center of a worldwide economic crisis with their greed and stupidity, and now their CEO hopes to pacify the growling mob by urging his employees to return half of their bonuses? “Half-assed,” as David Shuster put it, hardly begins to describe it; it's seems at first surprising not that they still have their jobs, but rather that our stores haven't yet run out of pitchforks.
But, of course, it suddenly becomes a more complicated matter once the apologists arrive. It becomes a matter of “bloodthirsty populism,” “bad risk management,” “socialistic redistribution,” and a million other disingenuous catchphrases from people who are trying to justify the disaster or shirk responsibility for it but don't know anything about macroeconomics. Even Rush Limbaugh slithered from his cesspool long enough to defend the bonuses. (Of course, in typical fashion, he didn't elect to just follow AIG's own propaganda—that they have been forced into payment by some kind of contractual legal obligation—but felt compelled to add that these bonuses for the superrich will actually serve as a positive stimulus for consumption. Rush Limbaugh: chameleon, conservative, champion, devoted Keynesian.) For better or worse, the Treasury itself has suggested that it is unwilling to ever allow AIG to fail, and that it will forever continue to bail them out, numbers be damned. And our venerable media outlets, apparently bored with parroting the “too big to fail” rhetoric but having far too much fun to just shut up, have just taken to babbling one-liners from the French Revolution and fanning the flames. It's all so hopelessly confusing, and the aggregate effect of all of the noise is a kind of intractable agnosticism. Who's to say, suffocating in the data and the chatter, who really deserves what?
Haven't we had enough of this obscurantism? The facts are pretty clear: the situation has nothing to do with retention of top talent, because many of the people slated to get these bonuses have already left, gliding gently back to earth with the softest of golden parachutes. The bonuses themselves are a red herring, a distraction, a pittance compared to the total bill, and our indignation ultimately does us no good. But the anger is certainly understandable. These people have spent the last quarter-century peering down from the heights of the Manhattan cityscape, and now, not only do they need our help, they're perfectly glad to bite our hands as we give it to them. But as we have learned about capitalism, these are ransoms we occasionally have to pay. If we love our system so much, what we ought to be doing is making sure we never have to pay this much again.
Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Attoney General, recently subpeonaed insurance giant AIG for a list of the names of every single person in the financial division slated to receive a bonus, for the purposes of some kind of “review.” And an internal memo has recently been circulating the AIG offices, warning all its employees to be cautious of suspicious loiterers, to always travel in groups, and to not make obvious their place of employment. In other words, it seems the people of America have returned to claim their republic, and in a big way.
I don't really wish to be an advocate for outright violence, but it seems like the leadership of this fiscally and philosophically bankrupt firm ought to have a little trepidation about flossin' the corporate logo. Why would they want to, anyway? It's embarrassing enough to wear a Royals hat in the middle of downtown Kansas City, and they're just benign losers. Their executives, on the other hand, have planted themselves directly at the center of a worldwide economic crisis with their greed and stupidity, and now their CEO hopes to pacify the growling mob by urging his employees to return half of their bonuses? “Half-assed,” as David Shuster put it, hardly begins to describe it; it's seems at first surprising not that they still have their jobs, but rather that our stores haven't yet run out of pitchforks.
But, of course, it suddenly becomes a more complicated matter once the apologists arrive. It becomes a matter of “bloodthirsty populism,” “bad risk management,” “socialistic redistribution,” and a million other disingenuous catchphrases from people who are trying to justify the disaster or shirk responsibility for it but don't know anything about macroeconomics. Even Rush Limbaugh slithered from his cesspool long enough to defend the bonuses. (Of course, in typical fashion, he didn't elect to just follow AIG's own propaganda—that they have been forced into payment by some kind of contractual legal obligation—but felt compelled to add that these bonuses for the superrich will actually serve as a positive stimulus for consumption. Rush Limbaugh: chameleon, conservative, champion, devoted Keynesian.) For better or worse, the Treasury itself has suggested that it is unwilling to ever allow AIG to fail, and that it will forever continue to bail them out, numbers be damned. And our venerable media outlets, apparently bored with parroting the “too big to fail” rhetoric but having far too much fun to just shut up, have just taken to babbling one-liners from the French Revolution and fanning the flames. It's all so hopelessly confusing, and the aggregate effect of all of the noise is a kind of intractable agnosticism. Who's to say, suffocating in the data and the chatter, who really deserves what?
Haven't we had enough of this obscurantism? The facts are pretty clear: the situation has nothing to do with retention of top talent, because many of the people slated to get these bonuses have already left, gliding gently back to earth with the softest of golden parachutes. The bonuses themselves are a red herring, a distraction, a pittance compared to the total bill, and our indignation ultimately does us no good. But the anger is certainly understandable. These people have spent the last quarter-century peering down from the heights of the Manhattan cityscape, and now, not only do they need our help, they're perfectly glad to bite our hands as we give it to them. But as we have learned about capitalism, these are ransoms we occasionally have to pay. If we love our system so much, what we ought to be doing is making sure we never have to pay this much again.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Good Riddance
The cult of Rush Limbaugh certainly is an interesting phenomenon, isn't it? He's an unattractive, poorly-spoken hypocrite who has somehow weaseled his way into becoming the chief spokesman of the country's most powerful minority party.
This particular appointment, of course, was not by invitation. (Well, at least not entirely.) If the GOP are the the Sex Pistols—which I, incidentally, like to imagine they are—then Limbaugh is Sid Vicious, the manic, talentless, pill-popping attention whore who commandeered the band in 1977, probably murdered his girlfriend the following year, and overdosed on heroin the year after that. But the comparison is not entirely fair: while Vicious at least pretended to be the “ultimate fan” of the Sex Pistols before taking the helm, Limbaugh transparently cares for nothing but himself.
The GOP executives are clearly sick of him, and fair enough, but if they're now forced to jump at every crack of his whip—à la RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Congressman Gingrey, and others—it is because they have been so limp and permissive for so long. But why should they be surprised? If you're going to let your party get hijkacked by a professional troll, don't be surprised when he refuses to let you stand on his bridge. Even most of the embarrassingly credulous American public audience has caught on; he has an approval rating that aspires to meet that of the younger President Bush. But for some reason, he is considered nonetheless to be the most important political pundit in the country.
This is a man who mimicked on camera the physical manifestations of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease for the purposes of ridicule, and then actually accused Fox of melodrama. This is a man who didn't condemn or deny the torture regime at Abu Ghraib like an ordinary apologist but who rather positively supported it, describing the practices as well-deserved catharsis for the troops. This is a man who suggested drug users should be subjected to lengthy prison sentences and was not more than a few years later himself discovered to be abusing prescription drugs. In short, to merely describe him as a despicable human being just doesn't seem sufficient.
But the tenor of the national conversation with him has changed. He recently made a fairly vanilla comment about a comprehensive health bill being named in memorial of the not-yet-deceased Ted Kennedy—without, it should be said, any innuendo to either Teddy's alcoholism or Chappaquiddick—and still found himself embroiled in controversy. And never mind his public desire to see President Obama fail, other than to observe that saying the same thing about President Clinton a decade ago wouldn't have made him persona non grata in his own party, it would have made him Newt Gingrich.
Perhaps the conspiracy theorists are right. Perhaps the entire affair has been a disingenuous design of the Democrats. It certainly has worked out well for them; about six months ago, I wrote that the GOP was unavoidably headed for a schism, and now it seems like that observation was about six months late. All of this is somewhat satisfying to those of us on the left; conservatives spent a fair amount of time last year crowing about we had finally managed to uncover in Former President Clinton what they had known all along. Well, we're now we're finally in a position to return the jeer. The fact is, the majority of people in this country loathe Rush Limbaugh, and always have. I just hope for the sake of conservatism that when he falls—and he will fall, if he hasn't already—conservatives will be smart enough not to soften the landing with themselves.
This particular appointment, of course, was not by invitation. (Well, at least not entirely.) If the GOP are the the Sex Pistols—which I, incidentally, like to imagine they are—then Limbaugh is Sid Vicious, the manic, talentless, pill-popping attention whore who commandeered the band in 1977, probably murdered his girlfriend the following year, and overdosed on heroin the year after that. But the comparison is not entirely fair: while Vicious at least pretended to be the “ultimate fan” of the Sex Pistols before taking the helm, Limbaugh transparently cares for nothing but himself.
The GOP executives are clearly sick of him, and fair enough, but if they're now forced to jump at every crack of his whip—à la RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Congressman Gingrey, and others—it is because they have been so limp and permissive for so long. But why should they be surprised? If you're going to let your party get hijkacked by a professional troll, don't be surprised when he refuses to let you stand on his bridge. Even most of the embarrassingly credulous American public audience has caught on; he has an approval rating that aspires to meet that of the younger President Bush. But for some reason, he is considered nonetheless to be the most important political pundit in the country.
This is a man who mimicked on camera the physical manifestations of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease for the purposes of ridicule, and then actually accused Fox of melodrama. This is a man who didn't condemn or deny the torture regime at Abu Ghraib like an ordinary apologist but who rather positively supported it, describing the practices as well-deserved catharsis for the troops. This is a man who suggested drug users should be subjected to lengthy prison sentences and was not more than a few years later himself discovered to be abusing prescription drugs. In short, to merely describe him as a despicable human being just doesn't seem sufficient.
But the tenor of the national conversation with him has changed. He recently made a fairly vanilla comment about a comprehensive health bill being named in memorial of the not-yet-deceased Ted Kennedy—without, it should be said, any innuendo to either Teddy's alcoholism or Chappaquiddick—and still found himself embroiled in controversy. And never mind his public desire to see President Obama fail, other than to observe that saying the same thing about President Clinton a decade ago wouldn't have made him persona non grata in his own party, it would have made him Newt Gingrich.
Perhaps the conspiracy theorists are right. Perhaps the entire affair has been a disingenuous design of the Democrats. It certainly has worked out well for them; about six months ago, I wrote that the GOP was unavoidably headed for a schism, and now it seems like that observation was about six months late. All of this is somewhat satisfying to those of us on the left; conservatives spent a fair amount of time last year crowing about we had finally managed to uncover in Former President Clinton what they had known all along. Well, we're now we're finally in a position to return the jeer. The fact is, the majority of people in this country loathe Rush Limbaugh, and always have. I just hope for the sake of conservatism that when he falls—and he will fall, if he hasn't already—conservatives will be smart enough not to soften the landing with themselves.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The Future of Music
From the moment I discovered the online service Pandora, I've been fascinated with it. Not with its predictive acumen, really, or with its method of distribution, but rather, with its broader technological and artistic implications. (For those unaware, it's a radio and music recommendation service that, through its algorithms, its database and the selective input of a dedicated user, “learns” the user's preferences and then streams music it deems appropriate.) It's a nifty little piece of software from the Web 2.0 generation, and it offers an novel and fairly effective method of getting one's musical fix, but it won't transform the world of music the way Wikipedia has transformed the world of information.
But its descendants? They certainly might. Its creators suggestively named the underlying technology the “Music Genome Project,” and its mission is to describe music in terms of its elementary particles. This is a noble but deceptively ambitious endeavor in reductionism, and it involves some strong underlying assumptions about the metaphysics of music; can this software, with only a few hundred genes in its vocabulary, actually develop a sufficiently expressive musical grammar? Could any mechanical software, ever? The naysayers argue against it on principle, but I think we should always hesitate to underestimate our own ingenuity. Pandora is only the very beginning, and with the exponential growth of processing power, future iterations will be progressively more sophisticated, nuanced, and automated. And beyond this project lies even more stunning theoretical possibilities; we might someday be able to create computer programs that can effectively compose music—or can at least imitate those who could—and in doing so, might also come to better understand the principles and metaprinciples of the composers themselves.
This is probably less difficult than it initially seems. Consider the relatively prolific J.S. Bach, for instance, who left fewer than two thousand works; a comprehensive analysis of his music and his methods is far from impossible, and, although it would be a daunting task by current computing standards, encoding his principles into an application which convincingly randomizes music based upon them is certainly not inconceivable. And thus, fresh manuscripts from the grandmaster of the Baroque, at our fingertips.
In the distant future, our computers will be able to “render” these projects in real-time. You might at first direct it to “Play something Wagnerian for about half an hour, with those sensational orchestral tuttis at about thirteen minutes and at about twenty-nine minutes” and then, five minutes into the session, suddenly wish to hear a tutti or a cello solo immediately, or simply wish for the work to conclude, and all that will be required to seamlessly insert these effects into the music in real-time will be a bit of fiddling with the knobs. Our computers certainly won't mind this kind of capriciousness, and they might even find it helpful. There will surely also be an evolutionary component to this kind of software; it will synchronize with a global network, check its work against what other computers have devised with similar guidelines, and continue to discover what works best.
In the very distant future, the computer might simply be able to detect your preferences through some kind of neural peripheral, and adjust itself accordingly. Just plug in, turn up, and tune out. Perhaps some of the music of the distant future won't involve sound at all—not even the illusion of it. People might well wonder what it was like not to take one's music intravenously, so to speak, and they might pity those who didn't.
In any case, whatever Pandora is, it has clearly sprouted something; I suspect this distant future isn't as distant as it seems.
But its descendants? They certainly might. Its creators suggestively named the underlying technology the “Music Genome Project,” and its mission is to describe music in terms of its elementary particles. This is a noble but deceptively ambitious endeavor in reductionism, and it involves some strong underlying assumptions about the metaphysics of music; can this software, with only a few hundred genes in its vocabulary, actually develop a sufficiently expressive musical grammar? Could any mechanical software, ever? The naysayers argue against it on principle, but I think we should always hesitate to underestimate our own ingenuity. Pandora is only the very beginning, and with the exponential growth of processing power, future iterations will be progressively more sophisticated, nuanced, and automated. And beyond this project lies even more stunning theoretical possibilities; we might someday be able to create computer programs that can effectively compose music—or can at least imitate those who could—and in doing so, might also come to better understand the principles and metaprinciples of the composers themselves.
This is probably less difficult than it initially seems. Consider the relatively prolific J.S. Bach, for instance, who left fewer than two thousand works; a comprehensive analysis of his music and his methods is far from impossible, and, although it would be a daunting task by current computing standards, encoding his principles into an application which convincingly randomizes music based upon them is certainly not inconceivable. And thus, fresh manuscripts from the grandmaster of the Baroque, at our fingertips.
In the distant future, our computers will be able to “render” these projects in real-time. You might at first direct it to “Play something Wagnerian for about half an hour, with those sensational orchestral tuttis at about thirteen minutes and at about twenty-nine minutes” and then, five minutes into the session, suddenly wish to hear a tutti or a cello solo immediately, or simply wish for the work to conclude, and all that will be required to seamlessly insert these effects into the music in real-time will be a bit of fiddling with the knobs. Our computers certainly won't mind this kind of capriciousness, and they might even find it helpful. There will surely also be an evolutionary component to this kind of software; it will synchronize with a global network, check its work against what other computers have devised with similar guidelines, and continue to discover what works best.
In the very distant future, the computer might simply be able to detect your preferences through some kind of neural peripheral, and adjust itself accordingly. Just plug in, turn up, and tune out. Perhaps some of the music of the distant future won't involve sound at all—not even the illusion of it. People might well wonder what it was like not to take one's music intravenously, so to speak, and they might pity those who didn't.
In any case, whatever Pandora is, it has clearly sprouted something; I suspect this distant future isn't as distant as it seems.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The Election
For once and maybe forever, this year's student elections are actually important.
These are troubled times—on both the global and the domestic front—and next year's student body president will unfortunately be given the right to decide exactly which pennies we're going to pinch. Anderson Hall has also just backed into a new president of its own, and his relationship with SGA next year will probably inform student/administration relations for the duration of his tenure. And most relevantly, SGA themselves have been an embarrassment this year, everyone knows it, and if they don't make some better choices next time around, you can bet that I won't be the only one complaining. Hopefully through all the overblown rhetoric about voices and choices, we'll make a decent choice.
There's an interesting concealed point; our university's recruitment crew makes an awful lot out of the fact that our student government is so comparatively powerful, but is this something about which we should actually be proud? I don't think so, and amidst all their bloodletting, I further wonder: why hasn't anyone thought to turn the gun on them?
We have on more than one occasion this year had fully-tenured professors with decades of relevant experience forced to plead for their lives to inept, self-important kids who neither know nor care about any of the relevant considerations. Of course the situation has ultimately turned out to be a disaster; it should have. But even aside from the matter of disrespect, we ought to also be asking how exactly our student government managed to get so much authority in the first place.
It's not because Anderson Hall is so interested in the pulse of the students; if they were, they'd use the referendum and actually find out. It's also not because the administration actually trusts the student government; no, when the grown-ups feel sufficiently compelled, they're perfectly willing to intervene—à la the marching band fiasco—and nudge SGA back into its kennel. It's not as if the absurdity wasn't already apparent; last year a presidential candidate nearly won the election on the back of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme, and this year he's back, promising to “save the world through juggling.” Why would any reasonable administration ever allow these kind of people power? SGA ought to deciding between Funyuns and Corn Nuts in the campus vending machines, not deciding whether or not the campus arts or media get their necessary funding, and allowing them an inch more is asking to be treated to more of the same confused, obstructionist behavior we've seen this year.
I don't wish to be misunderstood on the general point; many of the student senators are good people who just quietly go about their jobs. Many of them—maybe even most—promptly answer their emails, earnestly listen to their constituents and vote accordingly. I suspect our next student body president is one of these senators. But whoever he might be, he needs to strive for transparency, to never forget that the ultimate prize is a student body not a bolstered resume, and to never forget that he serves at our pleasure rather than the other way around. The person we need to elect president is the person who can best make himself vanish.
These are troubled times—on both the global and the domestic front—and next year's student body president will unfortunately be given the right to decide exactly which pennies we're going to pinch. Anderson Hall has also just backed into a new president of its own, and his relationship with SGA next year will probably inform student/administration relations for the duration of his tenure. And most relevantly, SGA themselves have been an embarrassment this year, everyone knows it, and if they don't make some better choices next time around, you can bet that I won't be the only one complaining. Hopefully through all the overblown rhetoric about voices and choices, we'll make a decent choice.
There's an interesting concealed point; our university's recruitment crew makes an awful lot out of the fact that our student government is so comparatively powerful, but is this something about which we should actually be proud? I don't think so, and amidst all their bloodletting, I further wonder: why hasn't anyone thought to turn the gun on them?
We have on more than one occasion this year had fully-tenured professors with decades of relevant experience forced to plead for their lives to inept, self-important kids who neither know nor care about any of the relevant considerations. Of course the situation has ultimately turned out to be a disaster; it should have. But even aside from the matter of disrespect, we ought to also be asking how exactly our student government managed to get so much authority in the first place.
It's not because Anderson Hall is so interested in the pulse of the students; if they were, they'd use the referendum and actually find out. It's also not because the administration actually trusts the student government; no, when the grown-ups feel sufficiently compelled, they're perfectly willing to intervene—à la the marching band fiasco—and nudge SGA back into its kennel. It's not as if the absurdity wasn't already apparent; last year a presidential candidate nearly won the election on the back of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme, and this year he's back, promising to “save the world through juggling.” Why would any reasonable administration ever allow these kind of people power? SGA ought to deciding between Funyuns and Corn Nuts in the campus vending machines, not deciding whether or not the campus arts or media get their necessary funding, and allowing them an inch more is asking to be treated to more of the same confused, obstructionist behavior we've seen this year.
I don't wish to be misunderstood on the general point; many of the student senators are good people who just quietly go about their jobs. Many of them—maybe even most—promptly answer their emails, earnestly listen to their constituents and vote accordingly. I suspect our next student body president is one of these senators. But whoever he might be, he needs to strive for transparency, to never forget that the ultimate prize is a student body not a bolstered resume, and to never forget that he serves at our pleasure rather than the other way around. The person we need to elect president is the person who can best make himself vanish.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Space Race
How is it possible that there's even a debate about whether we ought to fund our space program?
Forget about imagination for a minute: its costs are relatively low and amortized over time, and its contribution to the long-term health and survival of our civilization is probably essential. (Stephen Hawking thinks we won't survive another millennium cramped together on Earth alone; I remain slightly more optimistic.) The exploration of the cosmos is the paradigmatic example of a good global expenditure, and to forsake it for some kind of supposed economic reason is to miss the point of our existence in the most misguided kind of way.
And if we are to consider our imagination, then there could not possibly be an investment that pays better dividends. Mars might seem positively ordinary by now, given its extensive coverage, but if you've been paying attention, you've been rewarded for it; the Martian expanse is inconceivably marvelous and paradoxical. Those vivid, Technicolor pictures from midday are themselves already enough of an achievement, but even more evocative are those panoramic shots of the long Martian dusk, which could be mistaken for portraits of evening in the American Southwest. Well, they almost could; the dull blue sunset and the miniature sun on the horizon betray the fact that this eerily familiar landscape is actually very, very far from home. (The few photos we have from Venus, on the other hand, are instead only mere glimpses into a murky heart of darkness; at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and ninety atmospheres of pressure, the Venusian surface only allows our cameras to survive long enough to tell us how much sharper we'll have to become before our footsteps may follow.) And the iconic photos taken during our visits so many years ago to our nearest celestial neighbor—which, in lacking any atmosphere, has both a surface bathed in blinding Saharan sunlight and a sky blacker than the darkest Terran night—have long provided us with a kind of surreal beauty. But most extraordinary of all, I think, is the single grainy image captured by the Huygens probe not five years ago: it might as well just be a photo of some rusty, rock-littered undeveloped property in the middle of Riley County, except that it happens to have been taken on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, nearly a billion miles away.
These humble images—easily accessible through a Google Image Search or even on some of their respective Wikipedia pages—provide us with a haunting sense of cosmic insignificance and a profound sense of human achievement; they provide the seam between the past and the future of our species, and they leave us spellbound in the process.
This month, NASA will have to decide between some very important competing projects. They'll have to decide whether they should fund a comprehensive voyage to the Saturnian system or a comprehensive voyage to the Jovian system, and if some other project ultimately looks more inviting, they won't fund either. To select Saturn is to return triumphantly to Titan to analyze its ocean of hydrocarbons and to visit Enceladus, with its volcanic activity and suggestion of microbial life; to select Jupiter is to visit Europa, with its rolling hills of water ice and its subterranean oceans, and to meet Ganymede and Callisto, two moons certain to be future outposts. In any case, a very large and significant portion of the outer Solar System will go uncharted, for the foreseeable future. Perhaps all of it. And for what? So we can build a couple more ephemeral monuments at home?
We must fund our space program. We simply must.
Forget about imagination for a minute: its costs are relatively low and amortized over time, and its contribution to the long-term health and survival of our civilization is probably essential. (Stephen Hawking thinks we won't survive another millennium cramped together on Earth alone; I remain slightly more optimistic.) The exploration of the cosmos is the paradigmatic example of a good global expenditure, and to forsake it for some kind of supposed economic reason is to miss the point of our existence in the most misguided kind of way.
And if we are to consider our imagination, then there could not possibly be an investment that pays better dividends. Mars might seem positively ordinary by now, given its extensive coverage, but if you've been paying attention, you've been rewarded for it; the Martian expanse is inconceivably marvelous and paradoxical. Those vivid, Technicolor pictures from midday are themselves already enough of an achievement, but even more evocative are those panoramic shots of the long Martian dusk, which could be mistaken for portraits of evening in the American Southwest. Well, they almost could; the dull blue sunset and the miniature sun on the horizon betray the fact that this eerily familiar landscape is actually very, very far from home. (The few photos we have from Venus, on the other hand, are instead only mere glimpses into a murky heart of darkness; at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and ninety atmospheres of pressure, the Venusian surface only allows our cameras to survive long enough to tell us how much sharper we'll have to become before our footsteps may follow.) And the iconic photos taken during our visits so many years ago to our nearest celestial neighbor—which, in lacking any atmosphere, has both a surface bathed in blinding Saharan sunlight and a sky blacker than the darkest Terran night—have long provided us with a kind of surreal beauty. But most extraordinary of all, I think, is the single grainy image captured by the Huygens probe not five years ago: it might as well just be a photo of some rusty, rock-littered undeveloped property in the middle of Riley County, except that it happens to have been taken on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, nearly a billion miles away.
These humble images—easily accessible through a Google Image Search or even on some of their respective Wikipedia pages—provide us with a haunting sense of cosmic insignificance and a profound sense of human achievement; they provide the seam between the past and the future of our species, and they leave us spellbound in the process.
This month, NASA will have to decide between some very important competing projects. They'll have to decide whether they should fund a comprehensive voyage to the Saturnian system or a comprehensive voyage to the Jovian system, and if some other project ultimately looks more inviting, they won't fund either. To select Saturn is to return triumphantly to Titan to analyze its ocean of hydrocarbons and to visit Enceladus, with its volcanic activity and suggestion of microbial life; to select Jupiter is to visit Europa, with its rolling hills of water ice and its subterranean oceans, and to meet Ganymede and Callisto, two moons certain to be future outposts. In any case, a very large and significant portion of the outer Solar System will go uncharted, for the foreseeable future. Perhaps all of it. And for what? So we can build a couple more ephemeral monuments at home?
We must fund our space program. We simply must.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
The Lower Mammals
Someone recently made the following inquiry of me: “Given your other predispositions, how can you consistently justify your consumption of meat?” After a few terrible moments of fluster, I had to admit that my interlocutor had taken the point; I was only Thomas Jefferson at his most vulnerable and disingenuous, inwardly holding the moral view but outwardly insisting on the immoral institution for the economy and shrugging away the objections.
But the same sinister hypocrisy haunts us all; we shrivel in horror at the grotesque cases of cruelty toward domestic animals, yet we meet their advocates in the street with disinterest and irritation. Why, yes, I'll accept a copy of your pamphlet, we respond pleasantly. Anything to placate you. Of course I care about Scruffy, but not the nameless calf hammered into velvety meatloaf with a blunt instrument; why would I ever feel differently? Why should I?
And just in case the notion that our privileged position in the biosphere seems like it might provide the seedling for a good argument, suppose there were some exotic breed of creature who stood in the same supervisory and intellectual relationship to us that we do to, say, the intelligent and sensitive barnyard pig. Would it follow that they would have ethical license to do with us what they pleased—including, perhaps, gouging out our eyes, drowning us in Armagnac and devouring us whole, as we do the Ortolan—simply for the sake of it? Of course not. We would protest desperately that we're sentient creatures and are endowed with rights against such barbarism. You can't fold us into an omelet; we have Aristotle! We have Dostoevsky! We have quantum mechanics!
And even if Papillion dogs and Lowland gorillas cannot nestle cameras inside their own blood cells, our anti-cruelty laws demonstrate that we are wont nonetheless to recognize something like their natural rights, too. We have a natural aversion to needless brutality that clearly extends beyond the scope of our species, and if we insist on housing such thoughts in our heads and housing such laws on the books, then we had better either explain why some animals do not fall under the purview of the law specifically created to protect them as a class or why there are extenuating circumstances so important that it doesn't matter.
Perhaps there actually are extenuating circumstances, like considerations about the survival of mankind. Well, perhaps there once were; vegetarians in modernity, armed with supplements and a mountain of empirical data, no longer need strive only to demonstrate the mere feasibility of their choice, but can rather convincingly—spotted a few supplements—argue its positive moral and nutritional superiority.
The fact of the matter is, no matter which way we turn or which utilitarian calculus we invoke, in the end we have only cold explanations of our behavior, not justifications for it. The flesh of animals is a culinary pleasure that tickles taste buds otherwise dormant, and if its owners need suffer a blindfold and a cigarette to provide it, that's not exactly too bad for us, is it? In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that this issue is not even particularly dear to me, but I also must recognize that it is quite dear to some, and clearly for good reason. So, I suppose all along, the sobering thesis was the following: even if we don't ourselves abstain from eating meat, we ought to take seriously the objections of those who do, and admit that either we're not civilized enough to have a coherent ethics distinct from lower mammals, or that we're just too savage to follow them.
But the same sinister hypocrisy haunts us all; we shrivel in horror at the grotesque cases of cruelty toward domestic animals, yet we meet their advocates in the street with disinterest and irritation. Why, yes, I'll accept a copy of your pamphlet, we respond pleasantly. Anything to placate you. Of course I care about Scruffy, but not the nameless calf hammered into velvety meatloaf with a blunt instrument; why would I ever feel differently? Why should I?
And just in case the notion that our privileged position in the biosphere seems like it might provide the seedling for a good argument, suppose there were some exotic breed of creature who stood in the same supervisory and intellectual relationship to us that we do to, say, the intelligent and sensitive barnyard pig. Would it follow that they would have ethical license to do with us what they pleased—including, perhaps, gouging out our eyes, drowning us in Armagnac and devouring us whole, as we do the Ortolan—simply for the sake of it? Of course not. We would protest desperately that we're sentient creatures and are endowed with rights against such barbarism. You can't fold us into an omelet; we have Aristotle! We have Dostoevsky! We have quantum mechanics!
And even if Papillion dogs and Lowland gorillas cannot nestle cameras inside their own blood cells, our anti-cruelty laws demonstrate that we are wont nonetheless to recognize something like their natural rights, too. We have a natural aversion to needless brutality that clearly extends beyond the scope of our species, and if we insist on housing such thoughts in our heads and housing such laws on the books, then we had better either explain why some animals do not fall under the purview of the law specifically created to protect them as a class or why there are extenuating circumstances so important that it doesn't matter.
Perhaps there actually are extenuating circumstances, like considerations about the survival of mankind. Well, perhaps there once were; vegetarians in modernity, armed with supplements and a mountain of empirical data, no longer need strive only to demonstrate the mere feasibility of their choice, but can rather convincingly—spotted a few supplements—argue its positive moral and nutritional superiority.
The fact of the matter is, no matter which way we turn or which utilitarian calculus we invoke, in the end we have only cold explanations of our behavior, not justifications for it. The flesh of animals is a culinary pleasure that tickles taste buds otherwise dormant, and if its owners need suffer a blindfold and a cigarette to provide it, that's not exactly too bad for us, is it? In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that this issue is not even particularly dear to me, but I also must recognize that it is quite dear to some, and clearly for good reason. So, I suppose all along, the sobering thesis was the following: even if we don't ourselves abstain from eating meat, we ought to take seriously the objections of those who do, and admit that either we're not civilized enough to have a coherent ethics distinct from lower mammals, or that we're just too savage to follow them.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The Untouchables
If you were to solicit opinions on campus about the demographic factor that most divides us as a student body, you'd likely to get an motley assortment of answers—one's political persuasion, one's status as a Greek, one's financial wellbeing, and so forth. But having come from Kansas City, I'm sensitive to how narrowly-defined we come to be simply by virtue of our answer to a single binary question: are you from the Metro Area?
The tenor of the relationship between Kansas Citians and everyone else in the state is difficult to grasp and even more difficult to taxonomize. Perhaps it's best illustrated by comparison: it's less openly antagonistic than the cultural conflict between Americans and the French, but it lacks the novelty, exchange, and genuine curiosity that runs between Americans and the Japanese. It doesn't have any of the sinister and creepy undertones like the relationship between Americans and Russians, but is without the good-humored cheekiness of the relationship between Americans and Canadians. And although there's an explicit economic class component, there aren't any dark injustices lurking in the annals of history, so the struggle is not generally a personal one.
The truth is, for all the rhetoric about “small-town values,” and “big-town opportunities” (and all the other lazy and vague platitudes in between), people from inside the Metro Area just don't understand or care to understand the people outside of it—and vice versa—and other than the fact that “Johnson County” has been established as something of a slur, nobody has ever bothered to have a serious dialogue about it. The implied KC-centric dichotomy here is admittedly slightly false, but even that doesn't hurt my case: students from Wichita, Topeka, Salina, and possibly a few other places scattered around the state probably understand the nature of urban and suburban life, but they usually just ally themselves with the small-town folks, anyway. Students from the Metro Area stand alone.
This line drawn in the sand isn't exactly invisible, either; every freshman knows within two weeks of orientation which side of the tracks he or she lives on. Regional relations at K-State are a terrific mess, probably always have been, and although the disparity of wealth, education and opportunity between us does underlie some of the problems, I think the conflict is in essence a cultural one. I don't know whether the situation is getting better or whether it's even soluble at all, but I think it could be, if only some of my fellow suburbanites would take to heart the following:
Your obnoxious behavior has made us unpopular. Stop.
Righteously indignant rural folks certainly own some of the blame for perpetuating the conflict (every Kansas farmer feeds how many of us?), but the very fact that no explanation needs to be added to the above directive to make it coherent seems proof enough that we all know where the fault lies essentially. In a basic sense, the burden is on the city folk to understand that people who have until now lived their lives on farms and in small towns ultimately ask the same metaphysical and moral questions that we do (or at it's at least not necessarily the case that they don't), and that just like us, they're simply trying to make their way. I make this offering not to imply that I have any genuine understanding of “life in the country,” as it might be trademarked—I don't—but only to illustrate to my compatriots that there's a place under the sun for all of us, and if they figured this out, we would all be better off.
The tenor of the relationship between Kansas Citians and everyone else in the state is difficult to grasp and even more difficult to taxonomize. Perhaps it's best illustrated by comparison: it's less openly antagonistic than the cultural conflict between Americans and the French, but it lacks the novelty, exchange, and genuine curiosity that runs between Americans and the Japanese. It doesn't have any of the sinister and creepy undertones like the relationship between Americans and Russians, but is without the good-humored cheekiness of the relationship between Americans and Canadians. And although there's an explicit economic class component, there aren't any dark injustices lurking in the annals of history, so the struggle is not generally a personal one.
The truth is, for all the rhetoric about “small-town values,” and “big-town opportunities” (and all the other lazy and vague platitudes in between), people from inside the Metro Area just don't understand or care to understand the people outside of it—and vice versa—and other than the fact that “Johnson County” has been established as something of a slur, nobody has ever bothered to have a serious dialogue about it. The implied KC-centric dichotomy here is admittedly slightly false, but even that doesn't hurt my case: students from Wichita, Topeka, Salina, and possibly a few other places scattered around the state probably understand the nature of urban and suburban life, but they usually just ally themselves with the small-town folks, anyway. Students from the Metro Area stand alone.
This line drawn in the sand isn't exactly invisible, either; every freshman knows within two weeks of orientation which side of the tracks he or she lives on. Regional relations at K-State are a terrific mess, probably always have been, and although the disparity of wealth, education and opportunity between us does underlie some of the problems, I think the conflict is in essence a cultural one. I don't know whether the situation is getting better or whether it's even soluble at all, but I think it could be, if only some of my fellow suburbanites would take to heart the following:
Your obnoxious behavior has made us unpopular. Stop.
Righteously indignant rural folks certainly own some of the blame for perpetuating the conflict (every Kansas farmer feeds how many of us?), but the very fact that no explanation needs to be added to the above directive to make it coherent seems proof enough that we all know where the fault lies essentially. In a basic sense, the burden is on the city folk to understand that people who have until now lived their lives on farms and in small towns ultimately ask the same metaphysical and moral questions that we do (or at it's at least not necessarily the case that they don't), and that just like us, they're simply trying to make their way. I make this offering not to imply that I have any genuine understanding of “life in the country,” as it might be trademarked—I don't—but only to illustrate to my compatriots that there's a place under the sun for all of us, and if they figured this out, we would all be better off.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The Sacred
Last week, on campus, somebody swore at me from a distance. This happens not entirely infrequently, and usually seems deeply satisfying to its perpetrators. Who am I to stand in the way of their fun? I usually think in response. Let them holler.
All I could hear distinctly from him was the word “fuck,” which, if you ask me, was actually a demonstration of eloquence in the following way: at some point we've all had the kind of feeling aptly expressed by “fuck” in its various formulations, and he simply elected to use the corresponding language.
In the specific case of my anonymous antagonist, the motive was to express some kind of dissatisfaction with your poor, humble columnist (imagine the thought!), and in general, the locution of the subsequent utterance or thought is usually secondary to the feeling that provokes it. Now, can anyone claim to be so righteous that they've never even had a vulgar thought? Of course not, as anyone who has, for instance, ever attempted to make a left turn at the intersection of Tuttle Creek and Bluemont can attest. And furthermore, not only have we all had these thoughts, we've all voiced them, too; for some, it might come out as “darn it,” “shoot,” or some other euphemism, but the sentiment is common to us all.
So why not articulate these thoughts accordingly? It is hardly foolish or immoral to voice frustration or discontent; vulgarity for its own sake is the explicit purpose of at least some of our prohibited words, after all, and on those we ought to ignore the vacuous self-imposed ban. Now, this proposed permissibility comes with a laundry list of qualifications: moderation and diversity of vocabulary is still important, vulgar slurs and self-serving blasphemy are still probably inappropriate in almost any social context, and most of the sexual vulgarities are still somewhat socially unsuitable even in non-vulgar form. (How much more appropriate is it really in most nontechnical situations to talk of “penises” rather than “dicks?”)
Indeed, there are many prohibited vulgarities that would not benefit from the change at all, but some would, especially those that suffer from what I call, for lack of a better term, the “Voldemort effect,” an absurd kind of liminality in which the subject is permissible in conversation but the specific word denoting the subject is not. (And pardon my ignorance if there were, in fact, practical reasons why his unholy name should not be uttered.) One victim of this strange condition is “shit;” there isn't a prescriptive difference between “shit” and any of its variants, and there isn't much of a descriptive one either, other than that “crap” is acceptable, “feces” is stifled and technical, “poop” is just silly, and “shit” is vulgar and prohibited. Another example is “bitch,” which still has an important and widely used technical definition and several distinct vulgar definitions, one of which concerns the socially safe subject of crabbiness and has several synonyms that don't remove any offensiveness or intentionality from the concept but are somehow permissible (“shrew,” for instance). Stranger still is “bastard,” which has several other proper and distinct definitions, but whose unfortunate status as a vulgarity has rendered all of them unusable.
We are fortunate to speak such a vast and expressive language, and it is a gift we should not forsake, even if for all the right reasons; swearing for the sake of something else might be wrong (for a variety of reasons), but swearing for the sake of expression is sacred.
All I could hear distinctly from him was the word “fuck,” which, if you ask me, was actually a demonstration of eloquence in the following way: at some point we've all had the kind of feeling aptly expressed by “fuck” in its various formulations, and he simply elected to use the corresponding language.
In the specific case of my anonymous antagonist, the motive was to express some kind of dissatisfaction with your poor, humble columnist (imagine the thought!), and in general, the locution of the subsequent utterance or thought is usually secondary to the feeling that provokes it. Now, can anyone claim to be so righteous that they've never even had a vulgar thought? Of course not, as anyone who has, for instance, ever attempted to make a left turn at the intersection of Tuttle Creek and Bluemont can attest. And furthermore, not only have we all had these thoughts, we've all voiced them, too; for some, it might come out as “darn it,” “shoot,” or some other euphemism, but the sentiment is common to us all.
So why not articulate these thoughts accordingly? It is hardly foolish or immoral to voice frustration or discontent; vulgarity for its own sake is the explicit purpose of at least some of our prohibited words, after all, and on those we ought to ignore the vacuous self-imposed ban. Now, this proposed permissibility comes with a laundry list of qualifications: moderation and diversity of vocabulary is still important, vulgar slurs and self-serving blasphemy are still probably inappropriate in almost any social context, and most of the sexual vulgarities are still somewhat socially unsuitable even in non-vulgar form. (How much more appropriate is it really in most nontechnical situations to talk of “penises” rather than “dicks?”)
Indeed, there are many prohibited vulgarities that would not benefit from the change at all, but some would, especially those that suffer from what I call, for lack of a better term, the “Voldemort effect,” an absurd kind of liminality in which the subject is permissible in conversation but the specific word denoting the subject is not. (And pardon my ignorance if there were, in fact, practical reasons why his unholy name should not be uttered.) One victim of this strange condition is “shit;” there isn't a prescriptive difference between “shit” and any of its variants, and there isn't much of a descriptive one either, other than that “crap” is acceptable, “feces” is stifled and technical, “poop” is just silly, and “shit” is vulgar and prohibited. Another example is “bitch,” which still has an important and widely used technical definition and several distinct vulgar definitions, one of which concerns the socially safe subject of crabbiness and has several synonyms that don't remove any offensiveness or intentionality from the concept but are somehow permissible (“shrew,” for instance). Stranger still is “bastard,” which has several other proper and distinct definitions, but whose unfortunate status as a vulgarity has rendered all of them unusable.
We are fortunate to speak such a vast and expressive language, and it is a gift we should not forsake, even if for all the right reasons; swearing for the sake of something else might be wrong (for a variety of reasons), but swearing for the sake of expression is sacred.
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