"The vocabulary of machines": a coda on politics

True, I hadn't considered this as a possibility, either . . . (Image found here)

In my earlier posts on Arendt's The Human Condition and the apparent goal of interconnectivity for its own sake, the topic of politics--which is to say, how best to govern--never came up (except for the fact that Arendt is clearly interested in those questions). We've all run across commentary on how the 'Nets are affecting our politics for good or for ill, but my experience with those kinds of pieces has been that they are often more interested in the short term: that is, with electoral politics (though over the past few months there have been some good posts (by Republicans as well as Democrats) on our nation's shifting demographics toward a minority-majority population and the need for Republicans to respond to those realities with something other than fear and/or loathing).

But of course, that fact itself begs a question that my colleagues and I have asked with regard to academic work: whether these various media and our new ways of accessing and engaging with information interfere with (or perhaps are by their nature antithetical to) long-term, extended, "deep" thinking--the kinds of thinking we say we value in college and seek to encourage in our students. (In my own classes this semester, I've come up with some research projects that, I hope, will get students to use all this technology against its (and students') tendency to want to Cuisinart information; I'll let you know how it goes.) If at the realm of the political, our elected officials cannot (or, I suspect sometimes, don't care much to) see much beyond the next election, then good public policy (whatever form that may take) and, well, the Good of the Nation will inevitably suffer. In the early days of his administration, as he was giving a pep talk to the Democratic Caucus during the stimulus package debates, President Obama told them, in an oh-by-the-way manner, as if it were (still) common knowledge, "Good policy is good politics." Sorry I don't have a link--I saw it on some YouTube somewhere (yeah, yeah, Mr. Tech-critic, I hear you say: Pot, meet Kettle)--but that line has always stuck with me as being not only the encapsulation of what I take to be Obama's approach to governance but also being about as incontrovertible a statement about governance in a democratic society as there is, no matter one's politics--assuming, of course, one accepts the premise that government in its essence is necessary and, it follows, might as well do some actual good (whether through its actions or choosing not to take certain actions) since we have to have it. Would that more of the politically-engaged among us take that to heart, no matter their allegiances. Some stuff might actually get through the Senate, more people would be happier with a half-a-loaf health care bill, etc., etc., etc.

Anyway. I'm posting all this because of my friend Russell Arben Fox's most recent post at his most excellent blog, In Medias Res. Russell teaches political science at Friends University here in town, and so he has much to say on those sorts of issues, but his interests also range toward popular culture and various issues regarding the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (of which Russell is a member). His starting point in the present post is a new videogame of the kill-all-the-zombies sort, but the zombies in question are Tea-Party zombies: various not-undead conservative politicians and their benefactors. Russell was called up by one of the local TV stations to comment on this because, I assume, this being Wichita, a reporter was pursuing the Local Angle: one of the zombies is a two-headed representation of the Koch brothers. Russell's post addresses that immediate matter, of course, but also engages in some reflection, some of it directed at himself, on the more general question of violence-inflected rhetoric in our politics (which people all across the political spectrum engage in, as we all know) and some worrying over its longer-term consequences for governance. The complicating factor in all this, Russell notes below, is that whereas in the past (that is, before about 20 years ago) this kind of nastiness tended to stay out of the public eye, relatively speaking, our new interconnectedness makes that, sooner or later, impossible. The links and italics, by the way, are Russell's; I've added the cartoon (image found here).

The best thing I said to the reporter--which, of course, also didn't make it into the piece--was a few thoughts drawing on things which Cass Sunstein and Jay Rosen have both argued at length: that the internet has mostly resulted in our ways of sharing and receiving information being broken apart, atomized, sealed off into separate bubbles. We live, too many of us anyway, in various blog-anchored echo chambers, chatting endlessly on Facebook with our selectively chosen friends. Of course everyone has always created in-groups and out-groups; that's nothing new. But the internet has really ramped it up...and if you combine that with all the stresses and breakdowns our democracy is currently experiencing (an almost wholly dysfunction[al] Senate, major parties that no longer share much of any kind of incentive to actually govern responsibly, etc.), then it's not hard to suspect that there has been an increasing in violent rhetoric in American politics, because it's just so easy for everyone in all their little bubbles to continually egg each other on, say the same jokes ever more loudly and ever more fervently, develop a shorthand of humor and rhetoric that is perhaps completely innocent but nonetheless, in retrospect, perhaps is also thorough dehumanizing, angry, and contemptible.

[snip]

ask yourself this question--is anything on the internet capable of remaining private for long? Also a negative answer, except in that case I don't think there's any "perhaps" to it.

Some liberals, at least, are trying to get ahead of the usual cycle of blame (which, I confess again, I've been part of before!), and calling for boycotts of the game. Good for them, though I wonder what difference it will make. The genie--a genie of anger and contempt, fed by a technology that simultaneously encourages people to act out within their little boundaries as well as makes certain no boundaries truly last--is out of the bottle, and fear that, absent a profound political change which leads people to accept that our democracy can function, that government can listen, and that the rules and procedures and methods of elections and parties can be taken seriously, there's nothing that will get it back in. I'm as much at fault as anyone, I suppose. But I can at least refuse to play the game. We could all do that much, at least.

Amen. As always, you should go and read the whole thing.

Something that struck me as I read this--and I'll just say right now that I'm not smart enough to pursue it further--is that since, in an electronic sense at least there is no longer any truly private communication--all is public, potentially, and sooner or later--I wonder if this fact will be ultimately a good or bad thing for our politics, if this fact will a) cause all of us to be more self-policing and, thus, more civil in ALL our discourse, no matter our audiences; or b) cause more and more of us to despair as the rhetorical, um, misstatements and errant keystrokes of even our very best politicians reveal all of us to be flawed human beings (a persistent myth being that those in politics are, or should be, "better" than the rest of us). And, further, no matter whether a) and b) come to pass, what will be the fate of impassioned, well-intentioned political discourse meant not to demean but to strenuously insist on the rightness of some policies and the wrongness of others. Will such rhetoric become bland, uninspiring talk that reveals as little as possible (out of fear that the speaker is in some sense assaulting his/her opposition or lose his/her base or an election), or will it lead to more genuinely-healthy debate? Well: none of us--especially in this brave new world of interconnectivity--is a passive bystander in these issues; we vote with our eyeballs, we can choose to repeat what we say we value, and we can choose to decry what we say is destructive rhetoric.

Language matters more than ever now, there being so much more of it that we have access to. The old horse-led-to-water aphorism no longer quite works: we have almost no choice but to drink. But we do have choices in what we drink, not to mention choices in what to say about it. That--that capacity enabled by this instantaneous interconnectivity--certainly is a good.

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OT from this post, but of a piece with things we've been discussing here of late: I don't know much about Cathy N. Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, except that it's getting a fair amount of attention and that, judging from the blurbs, seems to be something like the rebuttal to Nicholas Carr's famous 2008 essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" I'll be on the lookout for it.

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The first (and last) thing I'll say about Anthony Weiner

A good bit of the brouhaha over Anthony Weiner's actions really is being driven by various subtexts: partisanship (or, in the case of House Democrats' calls for Weiner's resignation, trying not to appear partisan); the tangential (but important) debate about what constitutes "public" and "private" space and activities in this electronic-media-saturated world of ours; definitions of fidelity and infidelity; and a discussion of, for lack of a better way of putting it, the etiquette of when/how/to whom one can send pictures of one's body parts to another party. (Miss Manners needs to do some serious updating, methinks.) No doubt there are others.

All that brouhaha is occurring in various contextual vacuums and thus, to my mind, missing a crucial point when assessing what Weiner did. Once Ta-Nehisi Coates dusts off his Locke and reads Weiner's actions through the lens of the space in which they occurred, there's nothing left to discuss except Weiner's fate as a representative of his district. This is from a few days ago, but it's such a clear statement of the matter, and one that I've not seen elsewhere, that it bears repeating (emphasis added):

I think, among those of us who find the strict moralizing about human sexuality offered up in our political discourse repellent, there's an impulse to defend Anthony Weiner. I sympathize with that impulse, but I do not share it.

[snip]

[I]t's important to focus on what Anthony Weiner's specific acts. Weiner, at the very least, sent a unsolicited picture of his thinly veiled privates to a woman. This was not a woman whom he'd met socially, or in some private capacity. This was a college student who "tweeted words of support for him as a politician." In other [words, Gennette] Cordoba was interested in supporting a public official whose positions, and stridency she admired. Weiner took that as invite to forward Cordoba a picture of his privates.

Weiner serves in the aptly named House of Representatives. In the most specific sense, he represents his District here in New York. But in the broader sense he represents a set of policies which progressives like Dana [Goldstein], Amanda [Marcotte] and I generally admire. His skill and tenacity in the media, particularly, made him a darling to those, like Cordoba, who shared his policy positions. When you represent a portion of the public, you are awarded a certain amount of social and cultural power. But the source of that power is always the people you represent; it's called a "base" for a reason.

Using the power of representation to send unsolicited explicit photographs of yourself is reckless. It endangers, not simply your private interests, but the public interests of those you represent. When Anthony Weiner goes on Face The Nation and argues for public option, he represents my policy interests to those who are on the fence. He is, essentially, a spokesperson for my causes and the causes of the party to which I belong. When he commits an act which injures, as he's done here, his allies share that injury.

With that said, we all must draw a line where we deem it appropriate. Early in the 2008 campaign it was argued that by dint of race, Barack Obama would be an effective ambassador for his party. I could see the logic easily being extended to gays or women or other minorities. The difference is that opening up electoral office to all Americans is a part of the liberal agenda. Opening up electoral office to those who would use that office to recklessly dispense unsolicited explicit photos of oneself is not.

Word.

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"Today is a good day"--some further comments

It's more than appropriate that, just as I started this post, John Adams' musical tribute to the victims of September 11, "On the Transmigration of Souls," began playing in my iTunes.

The tone of my previous post notwithstanding, I have a mix of feelings about the killing of bin Laden. I'm not alone in this; Aaron over at Zunguzungu sums them up well.

I would much prefer that Obama continue to find more peaceful means to demonstrate his presidential bona fides, and that his political and policy opponents see those means as valid. I'm not at all happy that this event has justified or vindicated, in the minds of some, the use of torture to obtain intelligence. It in fact appears to be the case that torture didn't produce the information that set this operation into motion (more here--and, as final proof, here's Donald Rumsfeld saying torture didn't yield this information--on Newsmax, no less). Still--just as Aaron and others have noted--do we really want to codify actions of this sort as justice? As exempla of American values?

I admit to being an optimist, though, especially where this president is concerned. Maybe this event's extreme nature will give Obama some future leverage in debates concerning how to prosecute terrorism cases: He can point to this event in his arguments with the chest-thumpers that he's no wimp but that, by the same token, we neither can nor should go tearing around the world shooting bad guys or, for that matter, jail all of them indefinitely without trials (preferably civilian ones). He's not afraid of going after these people, he can now say; why are all of you so willing to act from a position adopted out of fear? That's right: call them cowards. Point to the facts that our civilian trials, for all their coddling of the accused via acknowledging their rights, have thus far been far more successful in convicting and imprisoning terrorists than the allegedly less-coddling military courts have, and that we already have convicted terrorists in prisons in this country, not one of whom has even tried to escape. Etc., etc.

Maybe, in other words, as many have suggested, Obama can finally begin to get us out of this defensive, cowering crouch we've been in for the past 10 years.

I for one would really like to stretch my legs a bit. Maybe you don't know it yet--it's hard to remember, after so long, what that would feel like--but you probably would, too.

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"Y'all chill. I got this." (nth in a series)

Image found here.

Case in point regarding this: If one's political news had been supplied by online media, especially in the past couple of weeks, you'd think all the White House has been worrying about was Donald Trump (and/or the severity of his skewering of Trump at the Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday) . . . or, for that matter, worrying about the press's coverage of all this.

Well.

Approve of our president or not, I would hope that the one charge against him that we can finally put to rest is that the man is unserious. It's insulting at best to think that. Disagreement with him does not necessarily equal incompetence on his part, and certainly not his illegitimacy as the leader of this nation. And given that the operation against bin Laden was going on during that same correspondents' dinner, this passage from the President's speech has an especially potent kick to it:

[I]n an episode of Celebrity Apprentice -- (laughter) -- at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil' Jon or Meatloaf. (Laughter.) You fired Gary Busey. (Laughter.) And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night.

(Italics mine.)

Today is a good day, though, no matter one's politics. It was an extraordinary operation conducted with what appears to be the passive-aggressive assistance of the nation within whose boundaries it took place. A whole lot of folks, not all of them presently in office, deserve a whole lot of credit for persevering and pulling this off. Sorry, though, h8ters: Given our internet's dog-mapping ways, Obama's going to get, probably, more credit than he deserves . . . which in this instance, frankly, is about time.

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"Duh. WINNING!"

Or, more precisely, acting like you CAN win.

I've not written about politics in a while; it's just too exhausting, especially when things change so quickly. The recently-concluded budget debate and subsequent score-keeping/coup-counting is a case in point. But it's precisely that recent discussion that reveals itself as another in a long pattern of events that I feel the need to say something about so that I can stop thinking about it and do some things I actually get paid to do.

Here's Dennis Kucinich, quoted in an article about Congressional progressive Democrats' discontent with President Obama:

“Congressional Democrats are going to have to reassert themselves[. . . .] Instead of waiting for direction from the White House, we’re going to have to give direction to the White House.”

Well, yes. But I would respond, though, by asking that on those issues progressives feel Obama has either not led or has settled for too little (we all have our lists; mine would include the closing of the prison at Guantánamo and the prosecution of terror suspects in civilian courts, immigration policy, and climate-change legislation), what sort of support have Democrats offered? It's easy (and convenient) to blame other factors for the perceived lack of success that the progressives' agenda has had, but I get the feeling that Obama is already persuaded on these and other issues. Some rare exceptions aside, I've heard few Democrats argue forcefully out of the courage of their convictions on behalf of these things.

It's Democrats who need the persuading that, as Obama has told them, "Good policy is good politics." As is clear, though, good policy isn't always immediately obvious, much less self-evident: it's far-sighted, long term--it's at variance with the 24-hour news cycle, considerably longer-term than, even, the six-year senatorial election cycle. Also, as is the case with the ACA (not to mention more-beloved programs like Social Security or--hey!--like our slowly-evolving legal codifying of who is a citizen), it's often incremental. And frustrating. But, you know, one takes what one can get.

Like anyone with real power reads good old Blog Meridian, but here's my humble suggestion for those folks: Democrats--especially progressives--should certainly be strong advocates for their positions and be upset if/when the President drops the ball, but they also need to remember that it takes two people to execute the hand-off. I'd also suggest that all Democrats take a good, close look at last week's budget negotiations and the revelation that, far from "winning," the Tea Party Republicans (who really shaped the Republicans' side of those negotiations) "lost" very badly, and they learned this in a very public (and embarrassing) way once the details of what actually got cut and didn't get cut came out. They're angry enough not to vote, in large numbers, for the very agreement that John Boehner had negotiated on their behalf. Any hope of passing significant legislation out of both chambers of Congress will require substantial Democratic input and approval: bipartisanship, in other words, but in the Democrats' favor. No one will get everything s/he wants in such a Congress. But neither side is in a position to play scorched-earth politics . . . assuming, of course, the goal here is to pass legislation that benefits the country.

In other words: for Democrats, the potential for the very dynamic that Obama campaigned on--true bipartisanship--now exists in Congress. Republicans will have to decide whether to continue engaging in purity-test, talk-radio politics that results in nothing substantive but does keep the base and Rush Limbaugh happy, or to propose legislation that is genuinely, traditionally conservative (read: not applied Ayn Rand) that Democrats have a hand in shaping as well but might attract independent voters to vote for Republicans. It seems to me that Democrats have more power in such a dynamic than they think they do--but only if, as Kucinich says, Democrats "give some direction to the White House" by, like, doing stuff and arguing on its behalf to their fellow Democrats. Obama, I strongly suspect, is already persuaded.

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My two cents

Randall of Musings from the Hinterland has a short post up re the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" and its attendant controversy. Randall, to summarize, acknowledges and respects the First Amendment and property rights at stake in this issue but disagrees both with the building of the mosque and with the wisdom of President Obama's remarks on this issue last week.

I'll make two quick points here:

1) I think quite frankly that anyone's pretense to arguing that certain structures or businesses should be restricted within an arbitrary (and yet-to-be determined) distance of the site of the World Trade Center and its immediate vicinity should not be permitted, arguing that this space is hallowed ground, lost much if not all its resonance when the Port Authority decided that the WTC site was too valuable commercially to leave "vacant" (read: as a memorial to 9/11). One could argue, in fact, that the only religion that has emerged triumphant here, the first one to slap the face of the victims and survivors of that day, was Capitalism. Yes: I understand the other arguments for rebuilding there, but really: a revenue-generator as a memorial of that day?

2) I have grown weary of those people who in effect are making the argument that the Establishment Free Exercise Clause [thanks, Randall] applies only to those faiths within the Christian tradition (Judeo-Christian, if the arguer is feeling especially inclusive). These people rail against perceived and actual disrespect for their faith but do not feel compelled to respect the faith (let alone the rights) of others to worship (or not) when and where and as they please. Religious fundamentalists have for years advocated in the courts over the right to engage in organized prayer in public schools (churches apparently not offering enough space or opportunity for that activity) and cannot comprehend why on earth anyone might find that even coming close to violating the Establishment Clause; yet, let the adherents of one particular religion seek (and obtain, via unanimous approval of the relevant board) permission to build a building not even entirely devoted to worship, and all Heck breaks loose among some of those very same people--people, by the way, who would have said nothing if a Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu entity had proposed and been approved for the same structure.

It seems to me that that was the substance of President Obama's remarks: to affirm the Free Exercise Clause, even in the face of widespread opposition to this particular instance of its exercise. But the Constitution is not a popularity contest. The slap in the face here is being administered those who want to be protected by the Constitution but refuse to extend those same protections to others.

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Why politics exhausts me these days

The FULL video, in case anyone's interested. There's also this, via Talking Points Memo's story: "Quick note: There is, as you can see, an edit in the middle of the speech. An NAACP spokesman tells me that, according to the local chapter, that's when the tape was switched in the recording. What's missing, he said, is a line about Sherrod being offered tobacco."



Well, okay: not politics per se but how it gets "reported" and discussed in these de-centralized, 24/7 news cycle, pick-the-source-of-information-that-most-often-affirms-your-already-established-belief-system days of ours. It is clear, now, that what happened to Shirley Sherrod yesterday--not Andrew Breitbart's release of an out-of-context two-minute edit of a 43-minute speech whose subject is the exact opposite of what he and others alleged it was about, the subsequent real-time back-and-forth on the news about it, and certainly not her dismissal from her position in the USDA without allowing her (and others) to defend herself--should never have happened, either to her or to any person. When even Glenn Beck, that consummate dot-connector, says an injustice was done to Sherrod, it's pretty clear what will happen today regarding her reinstatement. Well: what should happen.

(Yes: I do support this president and most of his administration's policies. But I hope those who keep reading won't miss the frustration I have been feeling these days toward the Obama administration--not to mention the larger frustration everyone should feel toward the way Congress, because of the deliberate choice of Republicans to not be honest brokers in legislating, is (not) working.)

But it did, and why it did will be the subject of many and various discussions headed in many different directions. Indeed, this story would work well as a case study in the (to my mind) now-vexed relationship between noisy activists whose sole agenda is not policy but ends-justifies-the-means "winning," their surrogates in the media and, increasingly, in the elected branch of government, and this particular version of the executive branch, who, any intellectually-honest person no matter his/her politics would agree, has studiously avoided the appearance of any sort of institutionalized favoritism toward African-Americans.

So much so, in fact, that that is surely what drove Tom Vilsack's decision to force Sherrod out.

That leads me to the first big lesson yesterday's events taught me: that the Obama administration's actions, on the matter of race at least, have in effect been shaped not by policy but by the afore-mentioned folks out there so driven by animus toward this president that they do not hesitate whenever possible to invent a pattern of institutionalized reverse-racism. Preternaturally-optimistic person that I am, it's my fervent hope that this episode will serve to discredit the Andrew Breitbarts of the world and make the markets for his, um, journalism a bit more skeptical in their consumption and propagation of it. But that's beside the point, really. This administration's hamartia has been, almost from the get-go, an overabundance of caution. The legislative manifestations of that are driven by politics--in both the House and the Senate, there are enough skittish lawmakers that Obama has felt it necessary, rightly or wrongly, to scale back proposals to better assure their votes--this started with the stimulus package and continued (especially) with health care and is at present the case with climate legislation. But the result, despite what some would have us believe, has on the whole not been overreach but underreach, to the point that, despite a 9.5% unemployment rate, we won't see a full-blown jobs bill this session because of fear about deficit spending. "Good policy is good politics," Obama has said, and I happen to agree with that. But too many senators and representatives instead act as though good politics is half-assed legislation (if we absolutely must). Meanwhile, in the case of Shirley Sherrod, it was clearly administrative overcaution that caused Vilsack to overreact. Today will be embarrassing, and it should be, as things are a) set aright and b) the dawning realization sets in that because of that overcaution they no longer act out of the courage of their convictions but out of a desire to placate people who have made it abundantly clear that they cannot and will not be placated.

That leads me to the second big realization: that the desire to see the Obama administration fail, no matter the cost to the governance of this nation, has become institutionalized on the right to the point that Republicans and their conservative supporters who argue that such a strategy is, at best, misguided (and at worst, unconscionable within the context of having legitimate and healthy debates about policy) are losing primary elections or are literally shouted down (as here). To be sure, back in the day there were folks on "my side" who held a fair amount of enmity toward the Bush administration, but I would argue that did not result in the spectacle of, say, Democrats serving on bi-partisan committees to write bills, keep insisting that further changes to those bills be made and see those changes made, only to refuse then even to vote the bill out of committee (that, in a nutshell, is the history of the Max Baucus "Gang of Six" committee that wrote the Senate version of the healthcare bill). This sort of thing is not statesmanship or governance but winning the day, a creation of our multi-voiced media, itself divided by partisan alliances or by the desire to not appear partisan.

And that leads me to my third and last big realization. From the days of the 2008 primaries, one of the things I admired most about Obama's campaign was its very clear focus on the long-term, the bigger picture. They seemed to understand that, times being what they have become, what seems significant in the moment would, a few weeks or months down the road seem considerably less so--if, indeed, it was remembered by anyone at all. Given that one of my criticisms of the previous administration was its apparent inability to think through any scenario, foreign or domestic, past the horizon of the next election, I looked forward to an Obama administration that was more interested in genuine governance--something that by its very nature is long term--and to sincere debates with conservatives who also were interested in genuine governance. With some profound caveats, I have to say that at its best the Obama administration has satisfied my expectations on this score--this despite Republican recalcitrance and a loud progressive element disappointed (and sometimes angry) with its half-loaves. But the events of the past two days show that, in the interest of maintaining an optics of colorblindness (obviously a laudatory interest), the administration is susceptible to making snap judgments at the expense of careful assessing of facts (not to mention, of course, the grave human cost to Shirley Sherrod). It is angering to see an administration rightly angry about charges from some that it plays a racialized politics make the decision it did, and as quickly as it did--out of fear--what else to call it?--that hesitancy in acting would be read as its being party to a racialized politics.

I want to be a long-term optimist in all this. This event, coming as it does in the immediate wake of the recent re-litigating (led by FOX News) of the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case (which, just to repeat, the Bush Administration's own Department of Justice had dismissed as being unfounded), the back-and-forth between the Tea Party and the NAACP, and the on-going debate in New York over the building of a Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero, has the potential to lead to several greater goods: in addition to wanting and hoping to see Andrew Breitbart's reputation as Right-Wing Truth-Bringer electronically drawn and quartered--in particular by those who have been invested in that reputation, I hope that the more vocal elements of those who don't approve of the Obama administration be more loyal in their opposition--that they be a bit more thoughtful about what is at the root of their (and others') criticisms of the administration. Debates over economic policy will reveal tensions over what to do (if anything) about the rapidly-widening gap between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy in this country. That's fine, and inevitable. But there are some in this country, some of them quite prominent, willing to more-or-less explicitly frame economic debates in terms of race, as, for example, Rush Limbaugh's arguing that health care reform is a disguised system of reparations. Especially in a very difficult time, such accusations are not just wrong on the merits, they are obscene and unconscionable. I would hope that the Sherrod case causes GOP candidates and officials who, through their words or their silence, have acquiesced in this rhetoric in hopes of getting elected to look past November and acknowledge that this will come to no good end for anyone, no matter his or her politics: MSNBC and FOX and folks out in the blogosphere will just set up competing electronic guillotines and, increasingly, our politics will be reduced to seeing who can best disguise their pandering so as to earn votes and money (and not necessarily in that order) while we all drown in simple-minded rhetoric often based not on facts but unproven assertions and badly disguised as serious discussion about exceedingly complex and important issues--that they will look at all this and say, For our sake as a nation and the ideals we say we stand for, this must change. But I also hope that Democrats and their supporters will also face all this and not be cowed by it but rebut it, to not just label their opposition as racists and call it good. It's precisely that sort of indiscriminate tarring (or, alternately, ignoring it in the belief that people are decent and smart enough to see through it and dismiss it) that has gotten us to this point. It must stop, no matter our politics.

Someone--actually, LOTS of someones--needs to say, simply and directly, that what happened to Shirley Sherrod yesterday was wrong all the way around, that the polite term for anyone of whatever politics who cannot or will not acknowledge that does not exist, and that that person should be kept as far on the fringes of civil society as possible. But I also have to say that having to say that, necessary as it is, exhausts me. And saddens, and angers me.

There is indeed much to be afraid of--no question. But a politics of fear and of fear-mongering, no matter what the object of that fear or who engages in it, is no way to face these dangers. It's a dangerous amalgam of cynicism and fear; as though some want us to keep seeing the Twin Towers fall in some infinite loop in our collective imagination. Well. If it's okay with y'all, I'd prefer not to think that we're behaving as though our entire nation--the people and its elected representatives--are suffering from PTSD. Why, you'll flinch at little things like seeing some trash lying in the street or hearing a car backfiring. You could be hospitalized for that, if the symptoms get bad enough.

You might do something really crazy if you're not careful.

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"Do you have Calvin Coolidge in a can?": Some musing on texts and contexts

Words are of vital importance. Knowing who says or writes them is of vital importance. So also is/are the context(s) within which they are spoken or written--"context" here meaning not just the other words that surround them but also the larger historical circumstances under which they are spoken; if we do not know them, we cannot, in the fullest sense of the word, read anything. Before someone complains that I'm about to head into a kind of Derridian relativism here, I'll just say this by way of a preemptive strike: I believe there are absolute truths to be discovered and affirmed; I also believe they are few and hard to find and, once found, talked about. That which is absolutely true is that which stands up to repeated examinations of its iterations in various texts and contexts. It is that to which people find themselves returning, ever returning.

Here's an example of what I mean by the importance of texts and contexts. My teaching mentor back in my MA days once wrote the following on the board in his Freshman Comp class: "Who said, 'A little rebellion now and then is a good thing'? A) Axl Rose; B) Thomas Jefferson; C) Vladimir Lenin." The correct answer, most of us know, is "B", but my teacher's larger point was to impress on the class that the mouth in whom we put words will shape our attitudes regarding those words because we're not assessing solely the words themselves. Words have meaning for their users and their hearers and readers only because of the circumstances under which they are spoken.

"Coolidge," you are saying. Okay.

Over at Atlantic Avenue, Amy responds to President Obama's upcoming September 8th address to public school kids (which, just to be clear, schools can opt in or out of as they see fit) with this post in which she imagines Calvin Coolidge offering a response to that address. It's clever and well-written, which I find true of just about everything Amy posts. (Full disclosure: Amy and I do not agree on politics, but I believe that she debates in good faith and so genuinely respect her and her opinions; indeed, if I didn't, I wouldn't be writing this post.) What follows is what Amy describes as a preview of Coolidge's address: a collection of actual quotes from Coolidge. Amy's collection appears in full here:

• Duty is not collective; it is personal.

• The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.

• Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.

• Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.

• The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the government. Every dollar we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.

• There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no one independence quite so important, as living within your means.

• Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped.

• Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.

• Some principles are so constant and so obvious that we do not need to change them, but we need rather to observe them.

• One with the law is a majority.

• Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.

• If all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.

• The words of a President have enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately.

• To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.

• Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking after your country.

• The nation which forgets its defenders will itself be forgotten.

• You can't know too much, but you can say too much.

Another full disclosure: I don't know a whole lot about Coolidge or his presidency. But so I am honest enough to admit that future reading might change some of what follows. On the other hand, my essential ignorance of Coolidge, I'd argue, is a legitimate thing to bring to the task of reading these quotes. They are, after all, removed from their contexts: I have no idea where or how Amy (or her source(s)) found them, but she presents them here as being worthy of our approval devoid of those contexts. That's not something I can fault too much, seeing as I and everyone reading this does this sort of thing--not, I hasten to add, with the intention of tricking the reader, but as a sort of semaphoric conveying to the reader how we think about certain things. The other reason I can't fault what Amy does here is that, considered here as she presents them, I find myself in greater or lesser agreement with just about every item here--as, I suspect, just about everyone else, independent of their politics, would. The vast, vast majority of Americans express admiration for our Constitution. Personal responsibility is indeed a virtue, most all would say. Industry, thrift, and self-control indeed build character--no question.

So what's the problem? you ask. Well, maybe the problem is with me: Amy's list was not completely devoid of context--she supplied the dates of Coolidge's presidency, 1923-1929--and so as I read this list, I kept matching up Coolidge's words with the events of those years and, perhaps not so surprisingly, the decade after, as I understand them. Thus, as I read the list I kept finding myself saying some variation of "Yeah, but . . . " No matter the virtues inherent in Coolidge's words, it's clearly true that not all businesspeople and investors of his day were acting in accordance with them--and the combination of that fact and the Coolidge administration's desire to hew to these principles even if Wall Street was not was clearly, at the very least, a contributing factor in causing the Great Depression. Knowing this, then, makes some of these quotes seem, shall we say, a bit ominous.

None of this is to say that Coolidge is necessarily wrong for saying these things or that Amy is wrong for admiring them--as I say above, when considered in the abstract there is much wisdom in these statements. It is to say, though, that these work better for us as individuals in guiding our behavior than they do as principles by which to govern a nation filled with people who use their wealth to engage in behavior that, though legal (in the sense of "unregulated"), is less than virtuous, or salutary for the very markets and economy in which they participate and on whose health we all depend.

There's another context I'd like to address quickly: As I mention above, Amy wrote this post in part to critique President Obama's address to public school kids next week. It's fair to ask whether such a thing is appropriate for a President to do; speaking for myself, I say it's appropriate for any President to espouse the importance of education, but (agreeing with Amy here) I'd like to think that's a self-evident truth. Even so, it does no one any harm to state the obvious. At any rate, other conservative types I have read who have been critical of Obama's address have said something along the lines of, "I can't remember another President doing this sort of thing; at the very least, then, we should be suspicious of Obama's doing this."

The kindest thing I can think to say by way of rebuttal is that these folks have short memories:

In 1988, then-President Reagan spoke to students nationwide via C-SPAN telecast. Among other things, he talked about his positions on political issues of the day. Three years later, then-President Bush addressed school kids in a speech broadcast live to school classrooms nationwide. Among other things, he promoted his own administration's education policies. [More details on this here.]

President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.

[snip]

I can appreciate there's a question of whether the Department of Education erred in the wording of one sentence in the supplementary materials. It's reasonable to think officials should have been more cautious.

But that's not what this is about. The administration not only edited the supplementary materials, but has offered to make the text of the address available in advance, just so everyone can see how innocuous it is. It's made no difference. Conservatives don't want school kids to hear a message from their president. Those who claim superiority on American patriotism have decided to throw yet another tantrum over the idea that the president of the United States might encourage young people to do well in schools.

This is what American politics has come to in 2009.

Skepticism of government is a virtue--no question. But surely even fair-minded folks who didn't vote for Obama can see that what's going on here far transcends skepticism. Their disappointment and/or anger over the results of the 2008 election have so blinded them that they have great difficulty remembering the previous eight years, or can only see Ronald Reagan when illuminated by his "Government is the problem" halo, or, most perversely of all, simply refuse to accept the possibility that Obama and his administration and supporters, misguided or mistaken though they may be, genuinely have the best interests and values of the nation--as they understand those interests and values--at heart . . . and that those interests are ones all of us would understand as "American" in nature: that they are governing in good faith and will listen to reasoned and reasonable objections, in other words. I mean, much as I disagreed with the Bush administration, I believed it governed in good faith. Well, okay: I wanted to believe that of them. If I were a Freudian, I'd argue that much of that disappointment and anger is actually a projecting of their feelings about the GOP's abject failure to govern either responsibly (my complaint) or in accordance with its own stated policies regarding fiscal responsibility (the base's complaint). But whatever the case, it's absurd, not to mention dangerous, to behave as though Obama's acts as President so completely run counter to those of previous presidents that their precedents--the context of the office of President--become erased in the resulting critique of his presidency. It's also foolish to ignore another context when wondering, as some do, about the extent to which the Obama administration's actions in the marketplace are some sort of dictatorial consolidation of power: the fact that our nation's economy was and remains in very dire straits--the market, having self-regulated us into this pretty state, lacked the ability to self-regulate us out of it--and, most economists across the political spectrum agreed, only the government was big enough to get us out of those straits or at least make them less dire. Yes: we can quibble about particulars, not all of which I'm all that thrilled about. But the government has taken extraordinary actions because the times required such actions, and immediately. Celebrations of self-reliance and economic sobriety, no matter who's doing the celebrating, weren't sufficient in Coolidge's time, and they weren't and aren't now.

I have some ideas as to why Obama is being criticized by some on the right in the way that he is, but that will have to wait for a while yet. But in the meantime I'd like to direct those curious about what I have to say to this one-sentence statement and really ponder it.

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Front Porch Cycle Chic: A bicycle on every autarchist's front porch

The Roberts and Gregory families, Kentucky, early 20th century. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

What follows isn't exactly a continuation of yesterday's post. It's more like a picking up of another thread and unraveling a perfectly good idea from Front Porch Republic so as to hastily (and, no doubt, clumsily) re-weave it here in combination with other recent concerns of mine as a garment to hang in cycling's metaphysical closet. I'm not sure, incidentally, whether the following, famous injunction from Thoreau's Walden--"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes"--implicitly condones or condemns that re-weaving. But if the latter, I take some presumptuous hope from George Bernard Shaw's statement, "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

Enough preambling. On with the ambling.

One of the central causes of what the writers of Front Porch Republic contend is our current cultural and political predicament is a perversion of our understanding of property and the resulting policies and politics arising from that perversion. This matter gets addressed directly in James Matthew Wilson's "The Need for Autarchy": Following Hannah Arendt, Wilson argues that that perversion is the result of "the specious conflation of the idea of private property (which Aquinas was right in defending as necessary to a good society) with that nefarious invention of modern usury, unlimited wealth accumulation." Here's Arendt, as quoted by Wilson:

Private property is not a euphemism for anything I happen to acquire, but a reference to the place in the world that is necessarily mine if I am not to be reduced to dependence on another. The way to secure such property is not usually to expand it and widen its frontiers (though that may sometimes be the case), but to fortify it, to fill it with the productive means necessary to maintain it and for it to maintain me. That kind of security and self-sufficiency-in a word, autonomy and autarchy-requires stewardship and conservation rather than expansion and avarice. Such virtues serve the purpose of having the property remain my property with a permanence approximating to the solidity of its literal foundations. [. . . ] [W]e reply to the capitalist that he does not defend private property but, instead, rationalizes endless wealth accumulation, and in so doing he does not defend the one, best hope for the wide distribution of private property. He advocates, rather, the source of its usurpation and dissolution.

Wilson then sums up Arendt's argument: Private property, once freed of market capitalism's co-opting of it, "is a public good but also provides for the individual household the basis for what is itself a great good, the foundation of a family’s liberty: autarchy [which literally translates from the Greek as "self-sufficiency" and thus is not to be confused with "autocracy"]. And the autarchy of the family household, I contend, is the analogous foundation, the microcosmic model, for still another public good: the sorely needed autarchic independence of our country." (Wilson's italics)

So: what does all this have to do with cycling in particular and, more broadly, issues of livability?

The rest is here.

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Front Porch Cycle Chic: The revolt against lifestyle

Two people converse next to a high-wheel bicycle at the fence of the first home of Alfred W. Bitting, 259 North Emporia Avenue, Wichita, c. 1882. Unknown photographer. Click image to enlarge. Repository: Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. Image found here.

I don't know whether the bicycle in the picture belonged to the Bitting family or to a visitor. But it doesn't matter. What matters for purposes of this (very long) piece is what that bicycle suggests to me and, indeed, what cycling has come to embody for me: an easy, practical means for its owner to maintain a connection with others who don't live within its owner's immediate vicinity.

Something I'd never before imagined myself seeing was a philosophical kinship of any sort between Copenhagen Cycle Chic and Front Porch Republic. But that was before this morning. As strange a confluence as this is, though, it matters to you--or should--if you share my interest in trying to shift the conceptual frame cycling gets placed in by Wichitans--even by most cyclists--known by the insidious term "lifestyle." Until that shift occurs, we'll continue to see really, really nice bike paths built that don't really go to places where people live, work and shop and, at the same time, a continued lack of on-street infrastructure for cyclists that would facilitate their getting to places where they do live, work and shop.

(Much) more here.

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"You might want to reconsider," indeed

Really, truly, Onion-esque:

Fresh off his stint as a war correspondent in Gaza, Joe the Plumber is now doing political strategy with Republicans.

When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.

[snip]

“In case you weren’t planning to attend CWG tomorrow morning, you might want to reconsider because Joe the Plumber will be joining us!” Kimberly Wallner, an aide to South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, wrote in a message to her e-mail list this afternoon. [emphases added]

(Hat-tip: Washington Monthly)

Politico tries to write this up with a straight face but can't quite manage it (note the initial introductory clause, for example, which also happened, courtesy of Pajamas Media). And, really, what serious person could?

Others will make considerable comedic hay out of this; but really, it's so easy to do it, why bother? I'll just make this observation, though, by way of a re-reading of Ms. Wallner's pitch for the meeting: The liberal-leaning blogs I read, when not taking pot-shots at the Republicans' all-around unhelpfulness and ineptitude regarding the Congress's and Senate's debates on the stimulus package, would welcome serious suggestions from the GOP. But to argue, as some Republicans in Congress did, that the stimulus package is far too big yet singling out considerably less than 1% of items in the package for specific criticism is not serious. It's weird: there's a much more constructive debate in the liberal blogosphere over this thing--they're even making some conservative-leaning arguments and have duly noted that the bill that passed the House of Representatives contains more tax cuts than were originally in the proposal because it is true, generally-speaking, that tax cuts will stimulate the economy more in the short term than investments in infrastructure. At the risk of overgeneralizing things, though, conservatives seem content to label the entire thing as socialism and wash their hands of it--we're going to hell in a handbasket, but it'll be the Democrats' fault, by God. (But--nota bene, CWG et al.--if this thing works, that too will be the Democrats' fault: how can one legitimately claim credit for something one has voted against, no matter how much it might reflect one's own thinking?)

So, with a "strategy" like that, what's to plan? Why show up? I feel Ms. Wallner's pain ("In case you weren't planning to attend . . . "). I'm not sure, though, that bringing in Joe the Plumber will add any new wrinkles to the debate, no matter how many warm bodies his presence adds to the room. After all, if public opinion is any indication, Joe's opposition to the stimulus package is out of step with precisely the constituency--the American people--the GOP has mythologized him to be the standard-bearer of. Yet, even in the wake of the 2006 and 2008 elections, the party looks out over the political landscape and sees, and hears, only itself. Hence, you betcha (to borrow another current GOP standard-bearer's phrase) "you might want to reconsider."

I'm entirely serious when I say I'm tired of alternately laughing at and shaking my head in despair over what the Republican Party has devolved into. I want to see Democrats and progressives have true, substantive arguments with it over matters of policy. Otherwise, the only argument left is the extent to which we collectively should take at all seriously much of anything conservatives have to say about this crisis in which we find ourselves. To those of us not rabidly partisan, that would be a sad argument to have.

Along these lines: Reread this Mark Schmitt piece from December of 2007 in light of the Congressional debates over the stimulus package, especially the final three paragraphs. It's hard to overstate just how prescient that piece looks now.

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"Be Real Black for Me"; or, the One-Drop Rule turned upside-down

More substantive blogging to come, but this got my attention this morning:

Part of the running discussion between my colleague and me that I alluded to here was that my colleague had recently been hearing discussions of the "Is Obama black enough?" meme that appeared shortly after Obama announced his candidacy. While I cannot pretend to speak for any African-Americans or out of the experience of growing up black in this country, I can say that a) I understand what gives rise to such questions; and b) those questions (still) strike me as just a wee bit denigrating of both Obama and, I have to say, the people (blacks as well as whites) asking them: Purity Tests are not a healthy direction for discussions of the politics of race.

Anyway. Here, via Ta-Nehisi Coates from a few days back, is a nice rebuttal from American Exception to all that:

Here is a useful bit of information that we might reflect upon during the next four years: Barack Obama is the President, not the host of Soul Train.

What more needs to be said on this? Here's hoping I'll not again feel the need to revisit this.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama

Go and read.

These posts, when read within the context of Coates' commentaries on Affirmative Action a while back, make Coates' essential point about Affirmative Action: that it's in essence a cosmetic sop that appears to right historic wrongs with as little cost to The System as possible; it doesn't fix the educational and economic poverty needed to be fixed so as to raise all the boats in the harbor. In its essence, AA isn't intended to make impossible the ascendancy of the economically-disenfranchised into good jobs, much less positions of power, but neither does it make that more possible.

Obama's emergence is the exception that proves Coates' argument about AA. Those cheered by or outraged by where Obama is (and anyone who paid close attention during the primaries know that plenty of Democrats as well as Republicans, blacks as well as whites, fall on both sides of that divide, too) both understand that, even though they may not realize they understand it.

Win or lose, Obama's story is not an AA success story. It's an American success story. Read any behind-the-scene story about his on-the-ground operations during the primaries or the elections, and you'll be stunned. I'm not especially happy that in his Chicago days he has associated with some of the people that he has; but, as has also often been pointed out, the fact that those people are in positions of power now despite their pasts is an indictment on all who have allowed them to acquire their power and positions in the first place--and that goes for lots of conservative Republicans, too. In any even, those people have nothing to do with this campaign. Obama has earned this, by outworking else, by not buying into narratives of inevitability (not just Hillary Clinton's version of that narrative, either). There's simply no other conclusion, and--honest political disagreements aside--whoever says otherwise is ignorant or blind.

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"Conservative" conventional wisdom does a head-stand

A quick observation on a moment from last night's debate:

I'm not interested here in arguing that my guy won or the other guy lost; my interest is more a matter of philosophy than of politics.

What follows is an excerpt from Hilzoy's live-blogging of the debate. I'm not being facetious when I say that I no longer recognize the terms liberal and conservative as used today when I compare them to how they were used back in the dark ages of the '70s (when [full disclosure] I grew up in a Texas household so Republican that we weren't entirely sure Nixon should have resigned). But one formulation from those days remains in place today: conservatives say they want smaller government in favor of more personal responsibility; liberals see government as a mechanism for improving people's lives and righting inequities of, it seems, every sort.

That's what made this bit so striking to me. Hilzoy does a pretty good unvarnished paraphrase of its contents (I watched the debate, too). The parenthetical comment is Hilzoy's:

9:30: Qu [sic]: What sacrifices will you ask of Americans? McCain: we will have to examine programs and cut some. I have cut defense spending. I will examine earmarks. I will freeze spending, except for vets, defense, "and some other vital programs." (I wonder which?)

9:33: Obama: after 9/11, the country was willing to come together. But we were never called to service. Energy: we will all need to think about how we use energy. We need more production, but we can also start thinking, as individuals, about our choices. And government can help make sure that you can weatherize your home, etc. Also: young people especially want to serve; we should provide opportunities, so that our troops are not the only ones who do this.

One addition to this summary: Hilzoy did leave out a small but not insignificant part of Obama's response, when he mentioned that Bush, in the days immediately after 9/11, encouraged Americans to go shopping--Obama said that that didn't square with his (Obama's) understanding of sacrifice. But what strikes me is that McCain frames "sacrifice" here in terms of what government will have to give up. Unless I'm just overlooking it in my recollection, he says nothing about what citizens should/must be asked to do along these lines--which is, as I understood it, the thrust of the question.

Obama, though, does address that thrust--and indeed could have said more. As one example, some conservative folks made hay of Joe Biden's statement last week that paying taxes was "patriotic." It struck them as absurd. But consider that the present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the first since we've had an income tax that our taxes have not gone up so as to help pay for its cost. Some have made the argument that if the War on Terror is indeed the danger of the magnitude the government claims it is, why aren't we all being asked to contribute more than the surrendering of our civil liberties (sorry--couldn't resist) to this cause? That lack of a call to service and sacrifice to face this danger struck struck these observers as being, at best, inconsistent: Well? Should we citizens be doing more, or not?

At any rate, it strikes me that Obama's response is actually the more "conservative" one, with its calls for accountability and service from citizens as well as government in a time of what we are told is a collective need, if by "conservative" one sees as a part of its meaning a valuing of tradition. This country does indeed have a long tradition of asking its people to sacrifice in those times of collective need. Where is the Scary Black-Radical (Straw)man in that response? Far from being some sort of Muslim-controlled Manchurian Candidate sent to destroy our nation, Obama's response to the woman's question is an honoring and affirmation of that long tradition. Embedded in McCain's response, it seems to me, is the default setting that it's government's job to take care of everything that needs taking care of but, by golly, it just may have to do a bit less for a while. But y'all just go on about your business now like nothing's wrong, as best you can.

Sure: I'm stating McCain's position here pejoratively. But on the other hand, speaking for myself, I can't help but see in Obama's response an appeal to something fundamentally American, something that the "conservatives" of the Bush administration and, now, the "conservative" John McCain, for whatever reason, have set aside at a very time in our history that we most could use it.

Oh, yeah: speaking of Scary Black-Radical (Straw)men: will you just look at this latest viral smear of Obama? Don't turn away--really, really look at it: The only way we can become equal as a people to the ideals we say we embody as a nation is by looking at something like this and calling it what it is to its face.



It's sad, isn't it, the depths to which some people will stoop and muck about in the sewers of their own obsessions and then foist them on us.

Well? Are you outraged or terrified yet by this exposure of our nation's reptilian brain? No? Well, there's more where this came from.

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Of being deferential

As you may have guessed via my previous post, I don't hold Sarah Palin in very high regard for having agreed, without blinking, to be John McCain's running mate, nor John McCain for selecting her in the first place, and I see her ignorance (which is, of course, something different from being stupid, and I do not think she is that) of the Bush Doctrine as only one of the more compelling of many pieces of evidence I can offer in support of that opinion. As the proud father of two daughters myself, I have other reasons for that opinion that are, shall we say, more informed by the passions than by the intellect; and seeing as the blogosphere already has more than enough rhetorical frothing to go around, I'll spare you that.

But seeing as the linked-to post touches on women, I'd like to say a few words about two closely-associated words that have been used by Palin's defenders as they characterize the criticism her candidacy has received, "deferential" and "respectful." And to do so, I'll write about a time when I submitted my own 13-year-old daughter to unmitigated ridicule.

Made you look! Made you look!
Actually, "very gentle ribbing" is a much more accurate description--and only for a brief while.

Some background: G. (the 13-year-old) and C. (who is 10) are beautiful, intelligent and thoughtful, strong girls. Even better, that's not just their proud parents' opinion: their friends' parents seem genuinely to agree with that assessment, and they know this about themselves but without being arrogant about it (about which more in a bit). They are entering the treacherous territory of adolescence, so, you know, their mother and I are knocking on wood whenever any is handy. So far, though, so good.

The other day, my older daughter G. and I were talking on a theme which I understand is a matter of all-consuming importance to most adolescent girls: her friends, and friends of her friends. Well, actually, it was more like my listening to her offer up a monologue on this theme, but that's okay. I want, as much is possible, for topography to be the only distance between us. I was happy that she was eager to share all that with me. Anyway, at one point she was describing a circle of friends which she is not a part of whom she described as "sedated--which means, you know, they're very calm, they don't get excited about much."

Me: Um, I don't think that's the word you want--at least, I hope it's not.

G: "Sedated" doesn't mean that?

Me: No--that describes someone who's been tranquilized.

G (laughing): No--that's not what I meant!

Me: I think the word you want is "sedate."

G (still laughing): Oh--okay.

Sorry if this makes me sound monstrous, but I'll say it anyway: G., despite my loving her and despite her recently scoring quite well on the ACT, is not someone I would defer to in matters of vocabulary. The rate she's going, though, I might find myself doing that one of these days. She's smart as a whip. But, for now, I'm still ahead of her in the book-larnin' department. I sincerely look forward to deferring to her one day. But that day has yet to arrive.

My choosing to defer to someone means that I have come to recognize that that person knows at least as much as I do, if not more, about a given subject. Sure: all people, until or unless they show they don't merit it, deserve our basic respect as fellow human beings. But it does not follow that I should defer to them just as a matter of course. It is reasonable to expect a person to demonstrate his or her credentials before we can make a fair assessment of that person. G., to her credit, had a good laugh at her own expense because of her confusion over "sedated"--that laughter made me respect her even more than I already do.

Now: lest you leave here thinking that G. is a buffoon or that I regard her as such, earlier this week she and I talked about an acquaintance of hers whose behavior indicates she may have anorexia. G. was a full--and intelligent, informed and sensitive--participant in that discussion. She has read articles about eating disorders in a girls' magazine that she subscribes to, and she displayed to me that she understood and took seriously what she had read--and her acquaintance's condition. She was so well informed, in fact, that I couldn't really add to her understanding, apart from encouraging her to talk to a teacher or a counselor about this girl.

It is at times like that when I find myself briefly forgetting that she is only 13. That forgetting, I would submit, is a sort of deferral. Certainly, it was a silent acknowledgment on my part that G. indeed knew whereof she spoke.

I cannot, yet, say the same thing of Sarah Palin. Though I respect her as a fellow human being, as a mother who indeed made a difficult but informed choice regarding her fifth child, and as an obviously-skilled politician, I simply have no reason to be deferential to her as a vice-presidential nominee. Nor does anyone else for that matter, with the exception of the person(s) who thought it would be a good idea for her to be the nominee. They are welcome to defer all they want, but no one else is otherwise under any obligation to. I don't say that because she is a woman, or I disagree with her politics or religion, or I am a low-information voter; it's because there is an exceedingly small body of information (never mind accomplishments--I'll settle for ideas and opinions attributed to her) available that would allow reasonable people, partisans or not, to assess her abilities, here and now and not in the future, as a potential Chief Executive. That's just demonstrably so, and it is no insult to her or to any woman--any person--to say that sort of thing when it's simple fact. Yet the McCain campaign asks us to believe that to protest this lack of information and to see to want to know more is not being deferential.

Emerson famously said, "I hate quotations; tell me what you know." Until yesterday, all we'd had from Governor Palin are quotes; to a certain extent, even after yesterday, we still don't have much more. There has to be something to defer to. When that shows up, then we'll talk; then, we won't be arguing about someone who, at least as regards her fitness for the office of Vice-President, remains a cipher.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates and the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twenty-first Century

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.--W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, "I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings"

To call Ta-Nehisi Coates the Second Coming of DuBois is perhaps a bit much; I think it's nevertheless true, though, that Coates at his best is doing what DuBois is doing in Souls: taking stock of How Things Stand; acknowledging that, yes, the past sucked for black people but it also sucked in very different ways for whites as well; and so now, what can we all do about the Here and Now and beyond to make it less sucky for everyone? [Edit: and pointing needed fingers at those (black as well as white) who are less than helpful in this project.] That's both ambitious and, as Coates works these themes, a whole lot of intellectual and even smile-inducing fun.

Coates is a relatively-new African-American blogger not afraid to speak a bit of truth (as he sees it) to both white and black folks. His is a thinking-outside-the-box take on black politics and culture that, as I'm bumping around his blog's archives, I'm finding enervating and thought-provoking. To be sure, Barack Obama figures prominently among his posts, but have a look as well at this Village Voice piece on Condoleeza Rice--that, in its own way, serves as an interesting chiasmus of the interesting discussion going on among black conservatives about how to respond, as members of the electorate, to Obama.

A couple of examples below the fold.

Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph to a brief take-down of conservative civil-rights icon Shelby Steele (spellings here and below are Coates'):

When I watched Steele talk [at the recent Aspen Ideas Conference], I didn't feele bad for black America, I felt bad for the white people who were there drinking it up. (In fairness, many were not.) It really saddens me to write that. I actually agree with Steele on one thing---the end of the Civil Rights Industrial Complex is great thing for black people everywhere. But Steele is tied to that complex, and his ideas are just as bereft. Like the men he derides as extortionists (which they are) Steel is running a hustle--Sharpton and Jackson traffic in white guilt. Steele traffics in white ignorance. And they keep all the profits. I've never seen "white guilt" or "white ignorance" do a damn thing for black folks.

There's also this discussion of some of the discussion of this recent Emily Bazelon article on class-based integration of schools. Coates signs on, but with a compelling observation about the similarities in how government at whatever level goes about addressing racial and economic inequalities:

Matt, Kevin and Richard Kahlenberg are debating over whether a solution like this could be applied nationally. The consensus being basically, no, because we aren't going to blow up the system of school districts in this country. But to my mind, the piece helps us get out from under the cloud of pessimism that follows any conversation about the gap in test-scores.

But there is something else at work here. [Bazelon's] research on class and achievement is helpful because it really shows (to me) that the real problem of America's racist past is that it basically affected a massive wealth-transfer out of black communities. More than that, I like Emily's piece because it exposes the lie that racial inequality is completely intractable. But that's never really been true. There are two questions here--how are we going to fix the race chasm, and how far are we really willing to go to do it? People like to focus on the former, because the truly frightening one is the latter. We're forever trying to achieve equality by not negatively impacting white people. You can look back at the War on Poverty and see how desperate folks were to make it look color-blind. How'd that work out? I think one of the reasons Affirmative Action was extended to basically everyone by white males, was likely, so it wouldn't be reparations. Ironically, class-based integration uses the same logic. I'm a fan because I believe in it on principle. But the politics of it seem to be captive to ancient formulations: Despite the fact that slavery and Jim Crow crippled black folks, we want to heal those wounds by inconviencing white people as little as possible. It's been this way since Reconstruction. If I'm pessimistic about anything it's not knowing the right thing to do, it's the will to get it done.

I hope you'll go and have a look at more of his work. He's worth your time.

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Noted without comment

(well, okay--one comment: the place I found this is a pro-Obama post, but the comment's content is not.)

From Brendan Loy's comment thread:

WTF!?! An ABC reporter just interviewed someone who talked about how people were disappointed that the first 45 minutes didn't focus on the issues. The reporter responded, "They can always look at their websites for that."

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"The body politic": Some thoughts on caucusing

For those interested, I've posted my impressions of the caucus format (as I experienced it) at redblueamerica.com.

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"The smallness of our politics"

Sarah Obama Onyango, Barack Obama's grandmother, in her living room in Kogelo Community in Kenya, February 4, 2008. Image found here.

In the speech in which he announced his candidacy for President, Sarah's grandson uttered the phrase that serves as this post's title. But this is not a pro-Obama post.

It's Super Tuesday, as you know. I will be caucusing tonight with some of my fellow citizens. The weather will be sucky, as the kids would say: If I arrive before the doors open, I'll be standing with some other folks in predicted sleet and/or snow. Once we all get inside, I will stand with some of those others in support of my candidate and listen to the blandishments of the supporters of the other candidate and maybe even offer up some of my own. Someone will count heads and determine which candidate has more support in this room. We will then go to our respective homes, some of us happy and some of us less so.

No blood shed. Heads will have been counted, not severed. No matter how vehemently we may disagree with the supporters of the other candidate, no one will have set fire to our caucus site or our houses because of that disagreement.

Today and tonight, as I read a few blogs whose writers treat politics as though it were a blood-sport, I will also spend some time thinking about the woman in this picture and the people of her nation, and the smallness of our politics.

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An "ordinary American"'s take on Obama's Kansas appearance

First things first: Fellow Wichita blogger (and political science prof) Russell Arben Fox's comments on Obama's visit and on his candidacy generally are here. Russell was kind enough to link to yesterday's post even though I hadn't said anything, so thanks to him for that.

I refer the curious to some posts I wrote on Obama's post-race politics, here and here.

I look like "an ordinary American," according to the Obama campaign worker who selected me and a co-worker of mine to sit on the stage behind Obama as he spoke; as I oh-so vainly pointed out in the previous post, that's this blog's author seated in the lower row, second from the left; my co-worker is the woman with the bright-red hair on the same row. Seeing as I had doubts that I'd even get in the building at all, the fact that I ended sitting on the dais, even if only as window-dressing, is something I'm still having a bit of difficulty processing.

Below the fold, you'll find some travelogue-y material and some discussion of what Obama had to say. Something to keep in mind: I quite literally did not see this event as, even, the vast majority of the people in the gymnasium did, which made for a strange dynamic as far as I'm concerned. I'll explain that later.

Just about every let-me-tell-you-about-the-Obama-rally post I've ever read says something about the crowds this man draws, and this one will be no different.

El Dorado is about 30 miles east of Wichita. I left town so as to arrive there about an hour early, thinking that would be plenty early--after all, the temperature was in the low 20s, the wind was blowing a steady 30 mph, and it was snowing besides . . . what sort of line would there be?

When I arrived, not only was all the school's paved parking already filled, but the 100 yard-wide grassy space between that parking and the main road was filled with parked cars, and the drive-in theatre across the street was also filling up quickly. The line already had several hundred people in it, almost all of them directly exposed to the snow and wind, and even as they started letting people into the gym the line continued to grow in length. The gym seats only 1500 people; I was told later that three other large spaces were opened up on campus to handle the overflow--perhaps another several hundred, maybe as many as another thousand. This thing effectively shut down the college for the day.

It was as diverse a crowd as you're likely to see at a political rally in south-central Kansas: white and black, young and old, rural folks and a slim majority from Wichita. Others were from considerably further away. Not everyone there, I know, considered themselves Obama's political fellow travellers; one of my colleagues, a Republican, told me she was there because of this event's historical significance and because she admired his candidacy; and I suspect some were there more out of curiosity or an attraction to the spectacle. My co-worker who ended up on the dais with me volunteered that she had wanted to support Hillary Clinton's candidacy because she is a woman but gradually became turned off precisely because, as it seemed to my co-worker, Clinton began in various ways to draw attention to the fact that she's a woman. Events in South Carolina didn't help her opinion of (either) Clinton.

We got inside, we were able to get seats closer to the podium than we were initially, and the next thing we knew, my co-worker and I were invited to sit on the dais. Underneath the podium was a small wooden box, about a foot square, clearly intended to be stood on by a speaker. Some of us began to joke that perhaps the candidate was vertically-challenged and only now, figuratively being behind the curtain as we were, did we know the Truth of Things. More fodder for Drudge and all that.

Another hour, and then Obama arrived. He's about 6' tall, in case you were wondering. And here's where things become a bit strange. I may have been dubbed an Ordinary American that day, but I literally didn't see Obama as most everyone else did. One of my colleagues asked me today if he is as charismatic in person as he is on television, and I said, "Well, seeing as all I saw for the duration of his speech was his backside, it's kinda hard for me to say." An extraordinary orator Obama may be, but his backside is, I'm sorry to say, rather lacking in its ability to radiate rhetorical splendor. A speech's effectiveness depends on delivery, too, not just content, and delivery incorporates body language as well as the particulars of spoken language. I'm going to assume, based on what I heard, that Obama looked his usual, supremely-comfortable self.

And the speech itself? In those earlier posts of mine that I linked to above, I've pretty much said much of what I would say here--that the man not only knows what he's doing, but he is not shy to say some politically-risky yet absolutely-correct things (depending on your politics, of course) in front of the sorts of audiences that would find these things politically risky. While I understand why some people tend to dismiss Obama's rhetoric as kumbaya-speak, I'd argue that I personally find it much more substantive than that: it's borne of his experience as a community organizer in Chicago and an Illinois state senator. His image of the "working majority" is something that, on a smaller scale, he has already accomplished. By running for President, Obama "just" wants to do these same things on a larger scale. Maybe I've read enough of his speeches to know this; maybe I've imbibed deeply and often of the particular Kool-aid this man serves up (it's pretty tasty, by the way); but I really do believe that when he says "we," he really means "we." We've become so accustomed to politicians promising what they can do for us that when Obama talks of what we can do for each other--a dynamic that ignores all those divides that others have exploited for their own gain--we keep looking for the catch.

Or, more kindly but still suspiciously, we look for some particulars, some substance. In the El Dorado speech (scroll down past Sebelius' endorsement to find Obama's text), Obama provided some: a few that I recall are income tax exemptions for retirees earning less than $50,000 per year, yearly increases in the minimum wage, tuition credits of $4000 per year for college students in return for a period of national service, opt-out savings plans for workers that both they and their employers would contribute to. As I listened, I was struck by how much his speech sounded a bit like a State of the Union address, with its laundry-list quality. Thus, this speech didn't have quite the lift that Obama's speeches are known for--but then again, consider the view I had: had I been in the audience where I could see his face, I might have felt that lift.

But I did get to shake his hand afterward. I thanked him for his candidacy as I did so.

I want this man to be our President, though there have been times when I've thought that winning his party's nomination will be the harder task. It really does seem as though the Republicans see more clearly than do Democrats just how dramatically Obama shifts the usual paradigms we have regarding politics and politicians--and here I am speaking of his politics and not his race. I have good friends who argue that Hillary does, too; to them I'd ask, with all due respect: setting aside her gender, what does she offer as a way out of the morass our national politics has mucked about in for (again, sorry, Clinton fans) the past 16 or more years now? That's not a knock against her; she offers experience, and that's a legitimate offering. In the past, I would have happily opted for voting for someone--man, woman, black or white or what have you--whose pitch is that s/he knows how the game is played and plays it well as it stands now. But of late I've come to the conclusion that the issue is better framed not by asking Who can more competently play the game as is, but Who wants to change how the game is played?

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