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.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
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.
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