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.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The Argument From Pornography
The arguments against the federal legalization of prostitution can be generalized into two distinct but complementary classes; those that seek to establish a causal connection between it and some undesirable consequence or another, and those that simply contend in various ways that personal ethical objections to it are sufficient for prohibition. As intuitive as they might initially appear, however, neither class should be convincing to anyone with more than a passing interest in sensible democracy.
Every argument from the first class can be classified as possibly dubious and certainly vacuous, regardless of its specific content. Some argue that prostitution serves as an impetus to slavery, some argue that it promotes criminal behavior, and some argue that it leads to a greater incidence of sexually-transmitted infections, but even if these are true, not only has prohibition not effectively solved the problem, in removing prostitution from under the aegis of regulation it may have actually exacerbated it. (More sophisticated opponents respond by smuggling into the argument even subtler concepts like wage slavery and familial dysfunction, but those moves in this class just continue to get progressively slipperier.)
The arguments of the second class are the far more dangerous, in any case, because rather than present neat, falsifiable claims about consequences, they instead rely on cherry-picked abstractions and loaded emotional appeals. Our natural (and probably correct) intuitions that prostitution is demeaning to women or that it is guilty of degenerating sexual culture can lead us to favor prohibitions of a categorical sort, even when such action is ultimately self-defeating. (We find ourselves in the same kind of conundrum when justifying silencing obnoxious groups like the Klan and the Westboro Baptist Church.) Some of the arguments in this class can be quite superficially compelling, too. For instance, it seems at least plausible that even if the practice of prostitution is not itself immediately assumed to be immoral in some objective sense, its attraction is due primarily to its taboo, and it thus can be taken as a kind of antisocial deviance. This is not sufficient cause for prohibition, but it's certainly suggestive of it, and it frames the grounds on which the opponents must in turn frame the issue: the law doesn't track the precepts of morality, it tracks the norms of pragmatism.
But the argument against legalization fails even on pragmatic grounds, because it suffers an inconvenient counterexample: all the relevant problems with regulated prostitution arise in identical form during the creation of pornography, which similarly commodifies sex and raises similar regulatory concerns but is able to take sanctuary in the First Amendment. Outside of this consideration (and apparently, according to California v. Freeman, the arcana of the payment scheme), there is no legitimate distinction between them, and thus, a opponent of prostitution is left in the awkward position of having to explain why commodified sex prearranged for broadcast should somehow be endowed with a legal permissibility denied to ordinary prostitution. Legal pornography more than just necessitates legal prostitution—it analytically entails it. The opponents got this right—and, I concede, they have from the beginning—but unfortunately for them, we can't sensibly ban pornography.
You might have noticed, I omitted an old standard; perhaps its merely a matter of semantic squeamishness, but it seems crass to label a crime “victimless” when at every commission, there are at least two victims. Does this change our intuitions about the subject? It shouldn't. Rather, it ought to prompt us to realize that as usual, we've stressed the trivial and left the profound unanswered; rather than ask “How do we fight prostitution?” we ought to have been asking “Why has there emerged a market for victims in the first place?"
Every argument from the first class can be classified as possibly dubious and certainly vacuous, regardless of its specific content. Some argue that prostitution serves as an impetus to slavery, some argue that it promotes criminal behavior, and some argue that it leads to a greater incidence of sexually-transmitted infections, but even if these are true, not only has prohibition not effectively solved the problem, in removing prostitution from under the aegis of regulation it may have actually exacerbated it. (More sophisticated opponents respond by smuggling into the argument even subtler concepts like wage slavery and familial dysfunction, but those moves in this class just continue to get progressively slipperier.)
The arguments of the second class are the far more dangerous, in any case, because rather than present neat, falsifiable claims about consequences, they instead rely on cherry-picked abstractions and loaded emotional appeals. Our natural (and probably correct) intuitions that prostitution is demeaning to women or that it is guilty of degenerating sexual culture can lead us to favor prohibitions of a categorical sort, even when such action is ultimately self-defeating. (We find ourselves in the same kind of conundrum when justifying silencing obnoxious groups like the Klan and the Westboro Baptist Church.) Some of the arguments in this class can be quite superficially compelling, too. For instance, it seems at least plausible that even if the practice of prostitution is not itself immediately assumed to be immoral in some objective sense, its attraction is due primarily to its taboo, and it thus can be taken as a kind of antisocial deviance. This is not sufficient cause for prohibition, but it's certainly suggestive of it, and it frames the grounds on which the opponents must in turn frame the issue: the law doesn't track the precepts of morality, it tracks the norms of pragmatism.
But the argument against legalization fails even on pragmatic grounds, because it suffers an inconvenient counterexample: all the relevant problems with regulated prostitution arise in identical form during the creation of pornography, which similarly commodifies sex and raises similar regulatory concerns but is able to take sanctuary in the First Amendment. Outside of this consideration (and apparently, according to California v. Freeman, the arcana of the payment scheme), there is no legitimate distinction between them, and thus, a opponent of prostitution is left in the awkward position of having to explain why commodified sex prearranged for broadcast should somehow be endowed with a legal permissibility denied to ordinary prostitution. Legal pornography more than just necessitates legal prostitution—it analytically entails it. The opponents got this right—and, I concede, they have from the beginning—but unfortunately for them, we can't sensibly ban pornography.
You might have noticed, I omitted an old standard; perhaps its merely a matter of semantic squeamishness, but it seems crass to label a crime “victimless” when at every commission, there are at least two victims. Does this change our intuitions about the subject? It shouldn't. Rather, it ought to prompt us to realize that as usual, we've stressed the trivial and left the profound unanswered; rather than ask “How do we fight prostitution?” we ought to have been asking “Why has there emerged a market for victims in the first place?"
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
This Year's Parking Garage
When the Senate’s Privilege Fee Committee yanked the pin from this year’s most explosive piece of legislation and forwarded it to the general Senate for approval, it didn’t seem, contrary to their suggestions, as if they were prepared.
It’s not believable that this committee could have thought they didn’t have any reason to prepare a press release; without some kind explanation, this maneuver couldn’t possibly be construed as anything other than a phase out, regardless of whether the athletic department ultimately rescued the abandoned marching band. It’s not believable that they were honestly surprised when the band, the student body and the media at-large didn’t make the same assumptions they did. And it’s least believable of all that the massive controversy this committee manufactured was actually a deliberate method of raising consciousness for the band. This entire situation was a disaster from beginning to end, and they didn’t mean for any of it to happen.
But in spite of my own loyalties and in spite of all this unnecessary tumult, I still have to commit a certain amount of sympathy to our senators: they were then and continue now to be only students trying earnestly to do their jobs, and they continue to not be a single monolithic unit. So I will assume–charitably and perhaps wrongly–that the rest of the Senate had nothing to with the legislation. And furthermore, the band’s victory was swift and absolute; this committee’s intention, regardless of whether they theoretically continue to maintain influence, is no longer of any relevance. (Nor, for that matter, are the marching band’s hurt feelings.) The administration has spoken: at least $140,000 per year is secure for the foreseeable future, and the possibility remains open for positive changes in funding. If this is our principal concern, then the emails should have stopped. But they haven’t. And why not?
Because the war being fought the arts in general is much more important than this proxy, and it raises a larger and more interesting question: how exactly does one explain the importance of the arts to people to whom it isn’t self-evident? The burden seems to be on the artist to justify his pursuit, and this furthermore seems to be reasonable! “Leave the athletic department out of it,” some more radical critics assert, “and just find your own funding. Show me the money.”
It’s an onerous problem, and it’s one that the Facebook coalition of ten thousand has yet to settle. Other than citing the obvious logistical problems, the common response to this objection has been the following: if we exclude the band from funding, we can’t very well include similar programs like Student Publications, can we? The Reductio ad absurdum works until the interlocutor either simply agrees to cut both, or argues that only the band’s funding should be cut, and for some unique reason. The first–the conservative, categorical objection–is actually somewhat easier to handle: while many might see a reason to deny funding to the band specifically, most don’t want to see the fee abolished completely. The second, however, is trickier: it isn’t difficult to demonstrate the need for something like a daily newspaper or student health services, but to what can one appeal to demonstrate the importance of music and the arts? “Music makes kids smarter,” we retort. “It’s in the data.” “Probably,” they return immediately, “but you’ve reversed the causality. I bet you wanted to distribute the Baby Mozart cassettes, too.” Around and around, we go.
This is the battle we should wish to fight, and this is the battle worth fighting. But how? How do we show them the money? If someone has an answer, at least ten thousand are listening.
It’s not believable that this committee could have thought they didn’t have any reason to prepare a press release; without some kind explanation, this maneuver couldn’t possibly be construed as anything other than a phase out, regardless of whether the athletic department ultimately rescued the abandoned marching band. It’s not believable that they were honestly surprised when the band, the student body and the media at-large didn’t make the same assumptions they did. And it’s least believable of all that the massive controversy this committee manufactured was actually a deliberate method of raising consciousness for the band. This entire situation was a disaster from beginning to end, and they didn’t mean for any of it to happen.
But in spite of my own loyalties and in spite of all this unnecessary tumult, I still have to commit a certain amount of sympathy to our senators: they were then and continue now to be only students trying earnestly to do their jobs, and they continue to not be a single monolithic unit. So I will assume–charitably and perhaps wrongly–that the rest of the Senate had nothing to with the legislation. And furthermore, the band’s victory was swift and absolute; this committee’s intention, regardless of whether they theoretically continue to maintain influence, is no longer of any relevance. (Nor, for that matter, are the marching band’s hurt feelings.) The administration has spoken: at least $140,000 per year is secure for the foreseeable future, and the possibility remains open for positive changes in funding. If this is our principal concern, then the emails should have stopped. But they haven’t. And why not?
Because the war being fought the arts in general is much more important than this proxy, and it raises a larger and more interesting question: how exactly does one explain the importance of the arts to people to whom it isn’t self-evident? The burden seems to be on the artist to justify his pursuit, and this furthermore seems to be reasonable! “Leave the athletic department out of it,” some more radical critics assert, “and just find your own funding. Show me the money.”
It’s an onerous problem, and it’s one that the Facebook coalition of ten thousand has yet to settle. Other than citing the obvious logistical problems, the common response to this objection has been the following: if we exclude the band from funding, we can’t very well include similar programs like Student Publications, can we? The Reductio ad absurdum works until the interlocutor either simply agrees to cut both, or argues that only the band’s funding should be cut, and for some unique reason. The first–the conservative, categorical objection–is actually somewhat easier to handle: while many might see a reason to deny funding to the band specifically, most don’t want to see the fee abolished completely. The second, however, is trickier: it isn’t difficult to demonstrate the need for something like a daily newspaper or student health services, but to what can one appeal to demonstrate the importance of music and the arts? “Music makes kids smarter,” we retort. “It’s in the data.” “Probably,” they return immediately, “but you’ve reversed the causality. I bet you wanted to distribute the Baby Mozart cassettes, too.” Around and around, we go.
This is the battle we should wish to fight, and this is the battle worth fighting. But how? How do we show them the money? If someone has an answer, at least ten thousand are listening.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Public Service Announcement
Have you ever been trying to park your vehicle in one of the campus parking lots, and somehow had a space you rightfully deserved stolen by someone who was ignorant of our wordlessly evolved protocol? Have you ever wondered exactly what the rules are? Here are some helpful tips:
- When you arrive at a fully-occupied lot, protocol dictates that you select one row in which to wait, one with at least one unoccupied entrance. If no such row exists, the parking lot can be effectively considered closed. Find another lot, or just continue floating around this one like a transient. Your choice.
- If vehicles are already parked at the end of both rows, there is no acceptable reason to enter it. No reconnaissance missions, either; even if the drivers of both vehicles had somehow both neglected an open spot, you are certainly not entitled to it.
- Once you have settled in the right lane at the entrance of one row, you are queued in that row. If there was already another vehicle waiting at the opposite end, you are queued second, and if not, you are queued first and are thereby entitled to the first space that becomes available in that row.
- If you leave the row after having been queued to pursue a newly-opened space in a different row, you forfeit your place in the queue.
- One's temporary proximity to a given space has no bearing on entitlement, and if, for instance, you are queued second in a row and a space five feet in front of you becomes available, it is your obligation to allow the other vehicle to park. Furthermore, if that vehicle is not signaling or otherwise indicating its intention to park—which should always be done in such situations to avoid unnecessary confusion—it is also your obligation to extend your hand out the window and invite them to park. If they then respond to this gesture by inviting you to park, then they have acknowledged the protocol and are for whatever reason giving you precedence, anyway—in this case, the space is yours.
- Friends don't let friends cut in the queue; the fact that the person leaving happened to be that guy whose stoichiometric equations you always ripped off freshman year endows neither of you the right to make some kind of transaction that transgresses the protocol. A sufficiently angry and observant person will forget neither of your license plate numbers.
- Obviously, during full-occupancy, even if one is temporarily granted through some double coincidence of luck the ability to “pull through,” this maneuver is strictly forbidden.
- No one is entitled to park and wait for spaces that lie off of the main thoroughfares of the lot; these spots are wild cards. If one should happen to open up during a period of full-occupancy, the vehicles that at the time happen to be traveling on said thoroughfare—not vehicles already waiting in a nearby lane—have first rights to it. Otherwise, the lots would frequently be subject to all kinds of ill-advised Dukes-of-Hazzard-style maneuvers.
- If someone elects not to follow these procedures, do not just overreact. If one space has opened, another is likely to follow. This also gives you an opportunity to pen an especially eloquent missive reminding them of their civic obligations that you can then place on their windshield. Be sure to write legibly.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
"Does that look like spit to you?"
Of all our cultural folkways, the most awkward one might be that which dictates we must nestle even more of our hard-earned bills under our plate after we've already paid. How does such a practice begin? And ought we actually to feel any sense of prompting to follow it?
With only a bit of microeconomic conjecture, one can see not only how it came to be standard practice, but how it was entirely unavoidable that it did. Patient zero of the phenomenon—a tired Patriot at some bar in colonial Massachusetts, I prefer to imagine—probably had no idea exactly what he had started when he first flipped the barkeep a penny for his care. But once he began to tip, he could hardly just stop without an explanation, and moreover, likely had no reason to do so; words between the staff are always loose, and thus, chances are that he was always the first militiaman in all of Boston to get his beer. Customers were not the only ones who benefited from the practice, either, nor were they the only ones who noticed. Businesses, too, probably began to notice a sly opportunity to shift at least part of the business of wage negotiation to their servers, with social politesse serving as the arbitrator.
And why will it never, ever disappear? Label it typical American hubris if you must, but embedded in our claim to personal liberty is our need to have control over the economic incentives of our service providers; even if it didn't originate here, gratuity is paradigmatically American. And if we honestly wished to discourage the practice, how exactly would we proceed? Probably by creating some kind of wage structure that shifted some of the burden back onto the business owner, and minimized the role of customer gratuity, right? This would satisfy Mr. Pink, the character in Reservoir Dogs who, as it must be said, was not against tipping for the extraordinary but against tipping for the ordinary. Unfortunately, this creates a different problem of incentives; if tips constituted only a trivial portion of a server's income, that bottomless iced tea would suddenly effectively become a lot less bottomless. We are trapped between our desire for wage control and our abhorrence of wage responsibility.
But should we follow this practice, or do we have a principled responsibility to end it? Certainly, one should never say “tips” are “to insure prompt service;” not only does this false acronym confuse “insure” with “ensure,” it doesn't even seem to actually be the case. Gratuity does not any longer ensure speedy or careful service at all, but has rather become entirely absorbed as a necessary and expected portion of service sector wages. And it is often said—and not just by absurd characters in Tarantino movies—that we should “rebel” in response. But this maneuver is only wanton self-interest masquerading as some kind of civil disobedience. If someone makes the claim to have an ideological objection to gratuity, they've essentially asked to stop being taken seriously.
But there is, perhaps, also a more final and pragmatic reason to tip: to adopt the non-tipper's stance is only to be cavalier with the livelihood of those who behind closed doors prepare your food, and thus, to be cavalier to your own. (Throwing an economic tantrum might temporarily alleviate one's righteous indignation, but it certainly won't actually do you the slightest bit of good; for a broader discussion of this, just read Steve Dublanica's thoughtful and captivating weblog “Waiter Rant.”) Like our frightening discovery of microscopic bacteria in the nineteenth-century, the servers are our bosses and they always have been, rather than the other way around.
With only a bit of microeconomic conjecture, one can see not only how it came to be standard practice, but how it was entirely unavoidable that it did. Patient zero of the phenomenon—a tired Patriot at some bar in colonial Massachusetts, I prefer to imagine—probably had no idea exactly what he had started when he first flipped the barkeep a penny for his care. But once he began to tip, he could hardly just stop without an explanation, and moreover, likely had no reason to do so; words between the staff are always loose, and thus, chances are that he was always the first militiaman in all of Boston to get his beer. Customers were not the only ones who benefited from the practice, either, nor were they the only ones who noticed. Businesses, too, probably began to notice a sly opportunity to shift at least part of the business of wage negotiation to their servers, with social politesse serving as the arbitrator.
And why will it never, ever disappear? Label it typical American hubris if you must, but embedded in our claim to personal liberty is our need to have control over the economic incentives of our service providers; even if it didn't originate here, gratuity is paradigmatically American. And if we honestly wished to discourage the practice, how exactly would we proceed? Probably by creating some kind of wage structure that shifted some of the burden back onto the business owner, and minimized the role of customer gratuity, right? This would satisfy Mr. Pink, the character in Reservoir Dogs who, as it must be said, was not against tipping for the extraordinary but against tipping for the ordinary. Unfortunately, this creates a different problem of incentives; if tips constituted only a trivial portion of a server's income, that bottomless iced tea would suddenly effectively become a lot less bottomless. We are trapped between our desire for wage control and our abhorrence of wage responsibility.
But should we follow this practice, or do we have a principled responsibility to end it? Certainly, one should never say “tips” are “to insure prompt service;” not only does this false acronym confuse “insure” with “ensure,” it doesn't even seem to actually be the case. Gratuity does not any longer ensure speedy or careful service at all, but has rather become entirely absorbed as a necessary and expected portion of service sector wages. And it is often said—and not just by absurd characters in Tarantino movies—that we should “rebel” in response. But this maneuver is only wanton self-interest masquerading as some kind of civil disobedience. If someone makes the claim to have an ideological objection to gratuity, they've essentially asked to stop being taken seriously.
But there is, perhaps, also a more final and pragmatic reason to tip: to adopt the non-tipper's stance is only to be cavalier with the livelihood of those who behind closed doors prepare your food, and thus, to be cavalier to your own. (Throwing an economic tantrum might temporarily alleviate one's righteous indignation, but it certainly won't actually do you the slightest bit of good; for a broader discussion of this, just read Steve Dublanica's thoughtful and captivating weblog “Waiter Rant.”) Like our frightening discovery of microscopic bacteria in the nineteenth-century, the servers are our bosses and they always have been, rather than the other way around.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Why Vote?
As I completed my ballot last week—absentee from Leawood, mostly but not entirely for Democrats, with many minor elections left blank—I began to mull over whether I was fulfilling a genuine obligation or just engaging in a kind of civic masturbation. Do we, as responsible members of this republic, have a citizenly duty to vote? And if we do, on what grounds ought we to feel compelled to exercise it?
One justification often given by people of a vague righteousness is that we must “uphold the process.” Of course, this is strictly true; someone must vote, or the notion of functional democracy vanishes. But this isn't actually much of a systemic concern, because someone always does. In fact, certain constituencies (the financially interested, the policy wonks, and the culture warriors) always vote. And why wouldn't they? Their unique diligence usually allows them to have it their way. It's a curious idiosyncrasy of our collective political personality that we require prompting to act in our own self-interest.
But those notorious demons haunt us—especially those who find themselves electorally disenfranchised—with words of discouragement. “You have no voice, and you never will,” they whisper in our ears, or perhaps, “You're always voting for hegemony no matter which way you pull the lever.” (The latter, of course, is only the paranoid version of the omnipresent “write-in” crowd.) They dare us to eschew the long lines and the propaganda and the misery, and to allow history to wash over us as observers, rather than participants.
Unfortunately, although these aren't sufficient excuses to stay home, their rejection doesn't exactly provide moral impetus to vote, either. We have been bestowed the option—in financial market jargon, the right but not obligation—to voice our opinion, and such an option includes the privilege of silence. But while there might occasionally be good reasons to abstain, we mustn't forget that this decision is itself a rational choice for which we can be held accountable. It's a right every American is free to exercise, but one he shouldn't thoughtlessly, for if he does, he has forfeited not his right to be a pundit—anyone with a bit of wit and a winning smile can become such a creature, admits your columnist—he has forfeited the right for his commentary to be taken seriously, both by others and by himself. Joseph Schumpeter was fond of saying that the ballot is stronger than the bullet, but why the separation? History is overrun with examples of one being used as means to the other. To these designs, we owe if not the pull of the lever for one shill or another, then an abstention rooted in care and decisiveness rather than a yawning laziness and apathy.
But we should, further, positively desire to lend our voices to the chorus. We should never allow our faculties of opinion to atrophy. We should never allow the capricious cultural zeitgeist built on the shoulders of others to command our own whims. We should never stifle or mute our outrage and indignation at injustice. We should never tire of persecuting our leaders, holding them to the fire and enjoying watching them burn; it's good for us, but it's not bad for them, either. And perhaps most of all, we should never forget what it felt like to be without a voice, without the right to protest for one, and without the hope that we ever could.
These aren't the virtues of a contrarian; they're those of a democrat. Vote or don't—it won't be the worst reason you've ever skipped class—but do so not for the process, but for yourself.
One justification often given by people of a vague righteousness is that we must “uphold the process.” Of course, this is strictly true; someone must vote, or the notion of functional democracy vanishes. But this isn't actually much of a systemic concern, because someone always does. In fact, certain constituencies (the financially interested, the policy wonks, and the culture warriors) always vote. And why wouldn't they? Their unique diligence usually allows them to have it their way. It's a curious idiosyncrasy of our collective political personality that we require prompting to act in our own self-interest.
But those notorious demons haunt us—especially those who find themselves electorally disenfranchised—with words of discouragement. “You have no voice, and you never will,” they whisper in our ears, or perhaps, “You're always voting for hegemony no matter which way you pull the lever.” (The latter, of course, is only the paranoid version of the omnipresent “write-in” crowd.) They dare us to eschew the long lines and the propaganda and the misery, and to allow history to wash over us as observers, rather than participants.
Unfortunately, although these aren't sufficient excuses to stay home, their rejection doesn't exactly provide moral impetus to vote, either. We have been bestowed the option—in financial market jargon, the right but not obligation—to voice our opinion, and such an option includes the privilege of silence. But while there might occasionally be good reasons to abstain, we mustn't forget that this decision is itself a rational choice for which we can be held accountable. It's a right every American is free to exercise, but one he shouldn't thoughtlessly, for if he does, he has forfeited not his right to be a pundit—anyone with a bit of wit and a winning smile can become such a creature, admits your columnist—he has forfeited the right for his commentary to be taken seriously, both by others and by himself. Joseph Schumpeter was fond of saying that the ballot is stronger than the bullet, but why the separation? History is overrun with examples of one being used as means to the other. To these designs, we owe if not the pull of the lever for one shill or another, then an abstention rooted in care and decisiveness rather than a yawning laziness and apathy.
But we should, further, positively desire to lend our voices to the chorus. We should never allow our faculties of opinion to atrophy. We should never allow the capricious cultural zeitgeist built on the shoulders of others to command our own whims. We should never stifle or mute our outrage and indignation at injustice. We should never tire of persecuting our leaders, holding them to the fire and enjoying watching them burn; it's good for us, but it's not bad for them, either. And perhaps most of all, we should never forget what it felt like to be without a voice, without the right to protest for one, and without the hope that we ever could.
These aren't the virtues of a contrarian; they're those of a democrat. Vote or don't—it won't be the worst reason you've ever skipped class—but do so not for the process, but for yourself.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Conservatism Lost
For the 1999 philosophical thriller Being John Malkovich, the eponymous actor decided to accept credit for his role in the film as “John Horatio Malkovich” rather than “John Gavin Malkovich,” his real name. His justification for this quirky little gesture is understandable: in building emotional distance from his doppelgänger, he was able to wink at the audience and preserve his identity. But even if he hadn't done it, Malkovich still wouldn't have been required to perform his citizenly duties as an absurd caricature of himself; he only had to play one on TV. In contemporary American politics, the conservative has not been so fortunate.
This disaffected person certainly cannot in good faith cast a ballot for either the Republican or the Democratic Party; neither represent his ideological interests. But alas, he also cannot help but feel that his vote and time are equally wasted proselytizing for faceless, nameless third-party candidates who haven't the slightest political purchase. So unlike Malkovich, the conservative actually is compelled to answer to the bastardization of his own name, and face misjudgment. The end effect of such brutal disenfranchisement is that although he might pull the lever as he has always done, he can now only do so with angry disinterest. (It might surprise you, however, or it might not, to know the type of people for whom he's lately been pulling it.) The conservative has lost both his home and the language to protest it.
But not for much longer, I suspect.
The disclaimer, of course, is that I don't speak from the personal experience of any kind of conservatism; my preference is strong for the Left, I find my political beliefs refreshingly well encapsulated by Senator Obama, a liberal Democrat, and I have no fetish for the traditional institutions, especially when they confound societal progress. But a simple observation cannot be denied: the marginalization of conservatism in this country, the metamorphosis of libertarianism into authoritarianism, has been an incredibly destructive force. Our fiscal policy offers corporate welfare egregious enough to turn Marx over in his grave; our civil liberties have been seized, without much of a struggle and without collateral; religious fanaticism and proud ignorance have cleared their throats and claimed seats at the round-table. As ideologically divided as we are, the juxtaposition of such partisanship with the likely results of this election season does not merely suggest a slight change in the zeitgeist, it suggests widespread dissatisfaction with the GOP from the left and the right. (In what kind of universe does Christopher Buckley endorse a Democrat?)
If the GOP wishes to survive, they must make several paradigmatic changes, and they must make them now: they must leave evangelical pretenses to fringe parties, lobbyists on the White House lawn, and interest groups. They must regain moral jurisdiction on the economy, the arena they might have ideologically in their favor. They must start behaving a lot more like Bob Barr, and a lot less like Rick Santorum. They must fight to reduce the sprawling hand of government everywhere, not just in the arena of social welfare. They must abandon neo-conservative foreign policy, and rejoin the global diplomatic community. In other words, they must abandon the silly cult of Ronald Reagan, and return to Barry Goldwater. It's astonishing how few people see it, but it was Reagan, through both his personality and his politics, who provided the foundation for this collapse. Thankfully, the demagogic faction in his wake is in its final throes, and I suspect that within the next ten years or so, we'll see either a collapse or a return to roots. Conservatives—and everyone else, for that matter—had better hope so.
This disaffected person certainly cannot in good faith cast a ballot for either the Republican or the Democratic Party; neither represent his ideological interests. But alas, he also cannot help but feel that his vote and time are equally wasted proselytizing for faceless, nameless third-party candidates who haven't the slightest political purchase. So unlike Malkovich, the conservative actually is compelled to answer to the bastardization of his own name, and face misjudgment. The end effect of such brutal disenfranchisement is that although he might pull the lever as he has always done, he can now only do so with angry disinterest. (It might surprise you, however, or it might not, to know the type of people for whom he's lately been pulling it.) The conservative has lost both his home and the language to protest it.
But not for much longer, I suspect.
The disclaimer, of course, is that I don't speak from the personal experience of any kind of conservatism; my preference is strong for the Left, I find my political beliefs refreshingly well encapsulated by Senator Obama, a liberal Democrat, and I have no fetish for the traditional institutions, especially when they confound societal progress. But a simple observation cannot be denied: the marginalization of conservatism in this country, the metamorphosis of libertarianism into authoritarianism, has been an incredibly destructive force. Our fiscal policy offers corporate welfare egregious enough to turn Marx over in his grave; our civil liberties have been seized, without much of a struggle and without collateral; religious fanaticism and proud ignorance have cleared their throats and claimed seats at the round-table. As ideologically divided as we are, the juxtaposition of such partisanship with the likely results of this election season does not merely suggest a slight change in the zeitgeist, it suggests widespread dissatisfaction with the GOP from the left and the right. (In what kind of universe does Christopher Buckley endorse a Democrat?)
If the GOP wishes to survive, they must make several paradigmatic changes, and they must make them now: they must leave evangelical pretenses to fringe parties, lobbyists on the White House lawn, and interest groups. They must regain moral jurisdiction on the economy, the arena they might have ideologically in their favor. They must start behaving a lot more like Bob Barr, and a lot less like Rick Santorum. They must fight to reduce the sprawling hand of government everywhere, not just in the arena of social welfare. They must abandon neo-conservative foreign policy, and rejoin the global diplomatic community. In other words, they must abandon the silly cult of Ronald Reagan, and return to Barry Goldwater. It's astonishing how few people see it, but it was Reagan, through both his personality and his politics, who provided the foundation for this collapse. Thankfully, the demagogic faction in his wake is in its final throes, and I suspect that within the next ten years or so, we'll see either a collapse or a return to roots. Conservatives—and everyone else, for that matter—had better hope so.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
An American Tragedy
Not a single night in Aggieville elapses without the occurrence of at least two kinds of culinary injustice: consider the person in a crowd who edges meekly up to the bar, requests a “Bourbon County Stout” and is denied, and also consider everyone else at every other bar, slamming their fists upon the counter and accepting or even demanding some horrid, yellow swill. The sin is not in the denial or acceptance itself, but rather in the mechanism by which this travesty comes to pass.
I'm not “writing one on corporatism,” so to speak; Sierra Nevada, one of the biggest craft brewers in the country, produces in a factory in California several world-class brews. Craft brewery market leader Boston Beer is continually adding new and exotic varieties to its extensive stable, and its famous flagship “Samuel Adams Boston Lager” is available nationwide. Goose Island, out of Chicago, seems unable to produce anything but excellence and its offerings are available to most of the Midwest. These breweries and many, many others produce superb products, ship them all over, and do so at only trivially higher prices. No, craft beer commands only a four-percent market share for a different reason: because of our credulity and susceptibility to slick propaganda. Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors don't really even try to argue, and historically have responded by quietly swallowing up the smaller breweries like whales and minimizing them in their stomachs. They always win, and we always lose; this isn't a meritocracy, it's hegemony.
These shameless profiteers have intentionally contributed to the erosion of our faculties of discrimination, and they have succeeded both in the way we conceive of our beer, and the way we conceive of ourselves.
We are wont to describe beer—as my former roommate and I half-facetiously observe—as possessing only four characteristics: “light,” “heavy,” “bitter,” and “smooth.” No wonder so many are convinced of their distaste! In this does, in fact, lie a good indicator: if these terms are sufficient to describe a given beer, you've learned everything you need to know about it. But this set of adjectives is hardly complete; a quality beer doesn't just have a laundry list of characteristics, it has an entire dynamic landscape to be explored. A pale ale is not just a “beer with more hops,” it's a prickly frolic in a sunny, summer orchard, an India pale ale doubly so. At the other end of the spectrum lives a dance of a different kind, the stout; dark and sometimes brooding, it's a midnight ballet deep in a forest of oak, sherry, and dark chocolate. The Oktoberfestbier sings breezy notes of toffee and autumn, the nut brown of roasted malt and molasses, the golden ale of bubbly and velvet and the ballroom waltz. Our palates should have to rise to meet the imaginations of the brewers, not the other way around.
Equal dysfunction lies in the careless invention of “beer snobbery.” This notion is misleading, for there need be nothing exclusionary about it; the term “beer geek” is more precise. After all, nobody thinks the burgers served at McDonald's are as good as the ones at So Long Saloon, do they? And furthermore, does making this observation require any kind of real elitism? The subtleties begin to become more readily apparent, between different species of beers and eventually between brewers themselves. But one can never forget that Joycean epiphany; that first sip, the thoughtful emergence of that understanding.
To paraphrase: let the brewers of yellow beer tremble at a revolution. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win. BEER CONNOISSEURS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!
I'm not “writing one on corporatism,” so to speak; Sierra Nevada, one of the biggest craft brewers in the country, produces in a factory in California several world-class brews. Craft brewery market leader Boston Beer is continually adding new and exotic varieties to its extensive stable, and its famous flagship “Samuel Adams Boston Lager” is available nationwide. Goose Island, out of Chicago, seems unable to produce anything but excellence and its offerings are available to most of the Midwest. These breweries and many, many others produce superb products, ship them all over, and do so at only trivially higher prices. No, craft beer commands only a four-percent market share for a different reason: because of our credulity and susceptibility to slick propaganda. Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors don't really even try to argue, and historically have responded by quietly swallowing up the smaller breweries like whales and minimizing them in their stomachs. They always win, and we always lose; this isn't a meritocracy, it's hegemony.
These shameless profiteers have intentionally contributed to the erosion of our faculties of discrimination, and they have succeeded both in the way we conceive of our beer, and the way we conceive of ourselves.
We are wont to describe beer—as my former roommate and I half-facetiously observe—as possessing only four characteristics: “light,” “heavy,” “bitter,” and “smooth.” No wonder so many are convinced of their distaste! In this does, in fact, lie a good indicator: if these terms are sufficient to describe a given beer, you've learned everything you need to know about it. But this set of adjectives is hardly complete; a quality beer doesn't just have a laundry list of characteristics, it has an entire dynamic landscape to be explored. A pale ale is not just a “beer with more hops,” it's a prickly frolic in a sunny, summer orchard, an India pale ale doubly so. At the other end of the spectrum lives a dance of a different kind, the stout; dark and sometimes brooding, it's a midnight ballet deep in a forest of oak, sherry, and dark chocolate. The Oktoberfestbier sings breezy notes of toffee and autumn, the nut brown of roasted malt and molasses, the golden ale of bubbly and velvet and the ballroom waltz. Our palates should have to rise to meet the imaginations of the brewers, not the other way around.
Equal dysfunction lies in the careless invention of “beer snobbery.” This notion is misleading, for there need be nothing exclusionary about it; the term “beer geek” is more precise. After all, nobody thinks the burgers served at McDonald's are as good as the ones at So Long Saloon, do they? And furthermore, does making this observation require any kind of real elitism? The subtleties begin to become more readily apparent, between different species of beers and eventually between brewers themselves. But one can never forget that Joycean epiphany; that first sip, the thoughtful emergence of that understanding.
To paraphrase: let the brewers of yellow beer tremble at a revolution. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win. BEER CONNOISSEURS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Implosion of the GOP
In the span of only a single tumultuous month, the entire landscape of the election has been transformed. Following the Republican National Convention, John McCain found himself enjoying his first lead in the popular vote since before the end of the primaries and basking in the meteoric glow of his new lieutenant. The two were able to finagle victories on the issues of offshore drilling and the Surge, and amidst all the flying rhetoric, it seemed that the GOP might grab yet another election from the jaws of defeat. The battle cry was sounded, and the base, as they say, was energized.
But now, only a month later, the senator finds himself in a dark political wasteland: he has earned himself an insurmountable deficit in the polls, an even larger massacre scheduled for the Republicans in Congress, an economy rushing swiftly toward bankruptcy, and a running mate whose hypocrisy and utter ineptness have embarrassed her into silence. In short, I can only reiterate a position of mine from about six months ago: Senator Obama will almost certainly win, probably by about five points.
Mind you, the GOP hasn't exactly been left shaking its head, just trying to understand this sudden spate of misfortune; they already know what happened. Kathleen Parker certainly does, as does Karl Rove. This recent rapid erosion of support was not simply a natural abatement of euphoria following the RNC, but rather, a distinct and discrete phenomenon. In my reckoning, the blame can be approximately divided down the middle: half for Sarah Palin, half for the economy.
The economy's role is obvious: when a country's finances go south, the sitting bureaucrats always take the blame. The fault on the side of the governor, however, yields more tragedy, because it could have been so easily mitigated.
Troopergate is a good example: the controversy rests entirely on the fact that she shouldn't have used every avenue available to her to rescue her family and the public from an armed, psychopathic civil servant. (Whether or not this is actually a fair appraisal makes little difference, because a base credulous enough to accept her at face value usually doesn't bother to beleaguer how issues come to be framed.) But since she was evasive, disingenuous, and outright obstructive about it, rather than being given an overwhelmingly sympathetic and charitable response by the public at large she is going to be left only with some kind of ethics demerit.
Her aloofness with the mainstream media is another: she has tried to paint their obviously innocuous behavior as “gotcha” journalism, and thanks to Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live, has managed to become a literal self-parody in the process. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is stunning—this is a woman who could not name a single Supreme Court case with which she disagreed, and who seemed unaware of the particulars of the Bush Doctrine, the overarching philosophy that has for the past decade guided the foreign policy of her own party. And she seems unable to answer even the simplest questions in a straightforward way; one must ask, when an interviewer asks which newspapers one reads or has read, what kind of person answers, without irony, “all of them?”
She did, of course, channel a few badly needed volts through the far-right base—which I'll admit I simply didn't predict—and they continue steadfastly optimistic. But thankfully, her idiocy has not gone uncondemned, and in pandering to the gullible, anti-intellectual faction of the electorate, McCain and Palin are not only losing, but losing for all the right reasons.
But now, only a month later, the senator finds himself in a dark political wasteland: he has earned himself an insurmountable deficit in the polls, an even larger massacre scheduled for the Republicans in Congress, an economy rushing swiftly toward bankruptcy, and a running mate whose hypocrisy and utter ineptness have embarrassed her into silence. In short, I can only reiterate a position of mine from about six months ago: Senator Obama will almost certainly win, probably by about five points.
Mind you, the GOP hasn't exactly been left shaking its head, just trying to understand this sudden spate of misfortune; they already know what happened. Kathleen Parker certainly does, as does Karl Rove. This recent rapid erosion of support was not simply a natural abatement of euphoria following the RNC, but rather, a distinct and discrete phenomenon. In my reckoning, the blame can be approximately divided down the middle: half for Sarah Palin, half for the economy.
The economy's role is obvious: when a country's finances go south, the sitting bureaucrats always take the blame. The fault on the side of the governor, however, yields more tragedy, because it could have been so easily mitigated.
Troopergate is a good example: the controversy rests entirely on the fact that she shouldn't have used every avenue available to her to rescue her family and the public from an armed, psychopathic civil servant. (Whether or not this is actually a fair appraisal makes little difference, because a base credulous enough to accept her at face value usually doesn't bother to beleaguer how issues come to be framed.) But since she was evasive, disingenuous, and outright obstructive about it, rather than being given an overwhelmingly sympathetic and charitable response by the public at large she is going to be left only with some kind of ethics demerit.
Her aloofness with the mainstream media is another: she has tried to paint their obviously innocuous behavior as “gotcha” journalism, and thanks to Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live, has managed to become a literal self-parody in the process. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is stunning—this is a woman who could not name a single Supreme Court case with which she disagreed, and who seemed unaware of the particulars of the Bush Doctrine, the overarching philosophy that has for the past decade guided the foreign policy of her own party. And she seems unable to answer even the simplest questions in a straightforward way; one must ask, when an interviewer asks which newspapers one reads or has read, what kind of person answers, without irony, “all of them?”
She did, of course, channel a few badly needed volts through the far-right base—which I'll admit I simply didn't predict—and they continue steadfastly optimistic. But thankfully, her idiocy has not gone uncondemned, and in pandering to the gullible, anti-intellectual faction of the electorate, McCain and Palin are not only losing, but losing for all the right reasons.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Karma: O.J.'s 100th Problem
June 17th, 1994—I shall never forget it.
I was only a little boy, but the memory is electrically vivid: my family had taken a weekend jaunt to Omaha, and through the fuzzy television set in our hotel room we joined the rest of the country in watching the “slow-speed chase,” the opening narrative of a thriller so surreal and excessive that it parodied parody itself.
It began conventionally enough: a woman and her close friend had been the victims of a grisly double homicide, and the perpetrator—a scorned-lover-turned-cold-blooded-killer—was preparing to strike himself from the record in grand fashion. The main characters themselves were a perfect exercise in archetypes, too, the murderer a powerful and sinister black man, and his victims a beautiful, wholesome white couple. After having left behind something of a suicide note, he had summoned a close friend and together they tried to flee Los Angeles on the freeway. (Famously, of course, this silly little getaway only proceeded at only thirty-five miles an hour, drawing the annoyed relief of the authorities and the amusement of their audience.) But very best of all, the murderer was a famous football hero and public icon! Could we possibly ask for more?
Apparently we could, because the ensuing trial soon metamorphosed into a high-profile theater for hucksters, thrill-seekers, attention whores, and other opportunists. Between camera flashes and via the front pages, more characters became distinct: the prosecution, the woefully under-prepared, unqualified and overwhelmed antagonists; the flamboyant defense, a legal “Dream Team” with a plethora of charisma and a thousand alibis to spare; Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective whose stupidity and thoroughgoing racism damned the prosecution; Kato Kaelin, the irrelevant idiot jester who never saw a couch he wasn't willing to crash on; and the hapless Judge Ito, the only member of the circus who seemed to have less control of the court than the prosecution. And what of our protagonist? O.J. himself sat quietly for the duration of both trials, smugly chitchatting with his lawyers and occasionally grinning.
This was a marvelous and grotesque epic, perverse enough to enthrall even the hardened American imagination; it had sex, violence, voyeuristic intrigue, socioeconomic and sociopolitical commentary, comic relief, celebrity fetishism, boatloads of theatrics and melodrama, and a pair of heartbroken children trapped in the middle. Rightly so it was dubbed “The Trial of the Century,” but in hindsight, we were the ones really on trial. And although American tribalism was acquitted, our national dignity still ultimately found itself at the scaffold, because everyone knows what happened next.
The astonishing acquittal handed down from the exasperated jury sent a shock wave through our culture and gave us a collective judicial midlife crisis. How could our system have failed us so miserably? How could we—through the proxy of twelve of our own—have allowed ourselves to be distracted by and give sanction to the defense team's outrageous dog-and-pony show? And how else could we view such a situation, other than as yet another embarrassing snapshot in the photo album of American race relations?
The latest (and hopefully last) chapter in this drama almost seems like a hasty afterthought, doesn't it? Last Friday—on the thirteenth anniversary of his acquittal, coincidentally—he was convicted for kidnapping and armed robbery in connection with some shady memorabilia dealings, a crime for which he might just spend the rest of his life in prison. To label this anticlimactic little epilogue “karmic” is to betray my opinion, but schadenfreude aside: justice needn't be poetic to be satisfying.
I was only a little boy, but the memory is electrically vivid: my family had taken a weekend jaunt to Omaha, and through the fuzzy television set in our hotel room we joined the rest of the country in watching the “slow-speed chase,” the opening narrative of a thriller so surreal and excessive that it parodied parody itself.
It began conventionally enough: a woman and her close friend had been the victims of a grisly double homicide, and the perpetrator—a scorned-lover-turned-cold-blooded-killer—was preparing to strike himself from the record in grand fashion. The main characters themselves were a perfect exercise in archetypes, too, the murderer a powerful and sinister black man, and his victims a beautiful, wholesome white couple. After having left behind something of a suicide note, he had summoned a close friend and together they tried to flee Los Angeles on the freeway. (Famously, of course, this silly little getaway only proceeded at only thirty-five miles an hour, drawing the annoyed relief of the authorities and the amusement of their audience.) But very best of all, the murderer was a famous football hero and public icon! Could we possibly ask for more?
Apparently we could, because the ensuing trial soon metamorphosed into a high-profile theater for hucksters, thrill-seekers, attention whores, and other opportunists. Between camera flashes and via the front pages, more characters became distinct: the prosecution, the woefully under-prepared, unqualified and overwhelmed antagonists; the flamboyant defense, a legal “Dream Team” with a plethora of charisma and a thousand alibis to spare; Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective whose stupidity and thoroughgoing racism damned the prosecution; Kato Kaelin, the irrelevant idiot jester who never saw a couch he wasn't willing to crash on; and the hapless Judge Ito, the only member of the circus who seemed to have less control of the court than the prosecution. And what of our protagonist? O.J. himself sat quietly for the duration of both trials, smugly chitchatting with his lawyers and occasionally grinning.
This was a marvelous and grotesque epic, perverse enough to enthrall even the hardened American imagination; it had sex, violence, voyeuristic intrigue, socioeconomic and sociopolitical commentary, comic relief, celebrity fetishism, boatloads of theatrics and melodrama, and a pair of heartbroken children trapped in the middle. Rightly so it was dubbed “The Trial of the Century,” but in hindsight, we were the ones really on trial. And although American tribalism was acquitted, our national dignity still ultimately found itself at the scaffold, because everyone knows what happened next.
The astonishing acquittal handed down from the exasperated jury sent a shock wave through our culture and gave us a collective judicial midlife crisis. How could our system have failed us so miserably? How could we—through the proxy of twelve of our own—have allowed ourselves to be distracted by and give sanction to the defense team's outrageous dog-and-pony show? And how else could we view such a situation, other than as yet another embarrassing snapshot in the photo album of American race relations?
The latest (and hopefully last) chapter in this drama almost seems like a hasty afterthought, doesn't it? Last Friday—on the thirteenth anniversary of his acquittal, coincidentally—he was convicted for kidnapping and armed robbery in connection with some shady memorabilia dealings, a crime for which he might just spend the rest of his life in prison. To label this anticlimactic little epilogue “karmic” is to betray my opinion, but schadenfreude aside: justice needn't be poetic to be satisfying.
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