American Patrol

Yesterday was the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s greatest accomplishments and the occasion of what might arguably be one of the finest patriotic speeches delivered in the history of the United States.

We spent it, and a good bit of the week leading up to it, talking about a former shock jock from the zany morning drive time crew turned coke-fueled drunk turned megalomaniac Fox News commentator who went out of his way to sully that anniversary. They’re probably going to talk about it on the morning shows tomorrow.

The thing is, as appalling as I find Beck and as egregious as his crimes against dignity and tolerance have been, it isn’t strictly speaking his fault. We as a society, as a culture, as a body politic have no reason whatsoever to pay attention to the poor sod. We know he lies, we know he manipulates, we have some fairly well documented suspicions that he is out of his tiny mind, and yet we persist.

Funny thing about attention whores-- they tend to go away once you’ve stopped paying attention.

And funny thing about debasement-- it’s often largely voluntary.

Seriously, once and for all-- there is nothing wrong with Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Hannity, O”Reilly and the rest that can’t be solved by a mere collective turning of the head. Yes, dialogue from diverse viewpoints is completely necessary, but coherence, consistency, and honesty are the minimum price of admission.

Beck and company consistently talk utter bullshit, and we continue to listen. Shame on us.

The long awaited sell off of some of the personal effects of author J.D. Salinger (who is dead) has begun with the auctioning of the repository of some of his most exemplary work. The item is in original condition. Bids start at $1 million, and are being taken here.

Okay-- this crap has to stop now.

The “controversy” surrounding the newly renamed Park 51 center-- the name “Cordoba House” having been made controversial itself for obscure reasons-- is the number one story and the number one political issue in the country. It isn’t a story, really, or at least the real story isn’t being told-- again, the site is not at ground zero, and is not a mosque. It also isn’t a national issue-- it’s a local question in the Borough of Manhattan, where the local government has already signed off on the project and the majority of local residents, according to polls, don’t object to it.

And it isn’t a political issue-- even those most vociferously opposed to the project stipulate that the project’s organizers are well within their rights and that there’s no real legal basis for stopping them. Absent any possible political solution to the “problem,” the demands of the opposition amount to no more than an empty insistence that their sentiments be shared and validated.

It’s bad enough that this collection of fallacies and sweet nothings is dominating the national dialogue at a time when real decisions need to be made on real issues to alleviate real crises. What’s worse is that people are getting hurt. Not people’s feelings-- actual people. The spectacle of national leaders expressing naked anti-Muslim sentiment has, inevitably, inspired naked anti-Muslim action-- terroristic threats, property crimes on mosques and Muslim-owned businesses and homes, random assaults on individual Muslims, and angry anti-Muslim demonstrations protesting nothing more than the existence of Muslims in communities nation wide. The longer this goes on, the worse it will get.

If, as many conservatives are insisting, we are to treat this as a “values issue” in the upcoming elections, then the choice is clear. We can either stand with those who are willing to cynically foment fear and hatred to tar their political opponents and obscure their shortcomings on the real issues, or with those who support the rule of law and the American traditions of tolerance and equality.

A widely reported CNN/Opinion Research poll released this Wednesday revealed that 68% of Americans oppose “(the) plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand.” Far less widely reported is the fact that in America, this opposition doesn’t, and shouldn’t, make a damn bit of difference.

“(O)ne wonders if the will of the American people will once again be ignored by the powers that be,” muses Raven Clabough, blogging at the New American, no doubt speaking for many of the opposed. This makes me wonder where, and under what form of government, these people think they’re living.

There are many reasons to ignore this poll. As Jed Lewison writes in Daily Kos, the poll question itself--”As you may know, a group of Muslims in the U.S. plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand. Do you favor or oppose this plan?”-- is faulty, framed in the terms defined by the opposition and basically eliciting a raw opinion on the building itself with no reference to any of the underlying issues or any actions that could be taken in response to that opinion.

And, as pointed out by Jean Marbella of the Baltimore Sun among many others, the entire “controversy” proceeds from false premises. The “Ground Zero Mosque” isn’t being proposed for “Ground Zero.” The location is two blocks away from the WTC site, and is neither visible from or readily accessible to it. Neither is the proposed building, strictly speaking, a mosque, but rather a Muslim sponsored cultural center that would feature, along with a swimming pool, athletic facility, auditorium, and restaurant, a mosque space for Muslim prayer: as Marbella says, “more akin to a YMCA than a dedicated house of worship.” Those who oppose the building probably haven’t been exposed to the latter premise. As for the former, they have been sold the idea that the whole area of lower Manhattan surrounding the former WTC site-- including, presumably, the strip joint a block away from the proposed cultural center -- is “hallowed ground.”

Exactly none of this is relevant. Stripped of false characterization and sanctimony, this situation is pretty clear cut. An American religious group, guaranteed freedom of religious practice under the First Amendment to the Constitution, is making use of a piece of private property which they own outright. Because of the religion that they practice-- that is, because of religious discrimination-- certain people have raised objections to this. Some of these objections are no doubt based on sincere feelings. I am sincerely sorry that they feel that way, but neither their feelings nor mine are relevant either. Inalienable rights are inalienable rights, and are neither dependent on individual emotional reactions nor up for referendum. They are fundamental to what we stand for as a nation.

The reason that we’re all talking about this is the exploitation of those sincere feelings by a political group with a history of exploiting fear and anti-Muslim hatred for political gain. For some odd reason, though, the headline on this story isn’t “Americans Led Around By The Nose By Conservative Establishment Again.” It should be.

I was reading the lead entry in Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook blog in the Washington Post yesterday, which excerpted a story on Christina Romer’s resignation by the Post’s Lori Montgomery, when I ran across the following: “It was not immediately clear who would replace Romer. White House observers called Austan Goolsbee, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, an obvious choice, but that would leave Obama without a woman on his senior economic team."

“Who,” I thought, “could possibly give a shit?” Though I favor the appointment of women to positions of responsibility in government and would not object to a qualified woman replacing Romer as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for any reason unrelated to politics and economics, the suggestion that gender might be a primary consideration in the selection of Romer’s replacement struck me as both ridiculous and offensive, a triumph of PC and PR over common sense. Economic analysis and policy making are functions unrelated to the reproductive organs, and in the current economy the gender of the individuals who compose the President’s senior economic team should be far down the list of concerns. Male, female, who cares?

Maybe not the people who are selecting Romer’s replacement. Rereading the Lori Montgomery quote above, the only thing I can say for sure is that the quote itself is an absolute goddamn mess. Who exactly are these White House observers? Observers in the White House? Observers of the White House? And was that final clause, the one that set me off in the first place, their observation or Montgomery’s? None of this is clear from Montgomery’s text, and bad reporting could easily be walking hand in hand with crappy writing here.

Reading more on the subject this morning hasn’t cleared up the issue one bit. Matt Taibbi asserts in his coverage of the resignation that Romer’s lack of a Y chromosome was a key reason for her selection over Goolsbee back when the original White House economic team was being assembled last year. The Reuters story on likely replacements for Romer cites, along with Goolsbee, Laura Tyson, a current member of the Economic Recovery Advisory board and head of the Council of Economic Advisors under Bill Clinton who features no unsightly dangly bits whatsoever. Tyson, though highly qualified, seems likely to make common cause with Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, Rahm Emanuel, and the other ex-Clintonites who have striven so mightily to keep Administration policy timid, ineffectual, and Wall Street friendly, and would thus be a horrible choice for the position regardless of gender, certainly not because of it.

Unfortunate, then, that the issue was ever raised in the first place. If Tyson is selected over Goolsbee, it will probably be due to the intercession of her fellow Friends Of Bill C rather than her chromosomal make up. Thanks to the ham fisted injection of gender politics into the story by Montgomery and/or her sources, though, it might not play that way, which can only be bad for everybody.

“The rich are different from you and me.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Yes, they have more money.”
-- Ernest Hemingway (probably apocryphal)

"...Demand is weak; we are responding by cutting the fat and becoming leaner and meaner; when demand picks up, we'll be in good shape. ..Still, I often ask myself if they see the connection that's staring you right in the face: when is ‘the consumer’ going to start spending again? Well, maybe when you stop firing him."
-- Carl Hegelman, the Awl, cited by Ezra Klein, Washington Post, 7/26/10

I’ve long noted something interesting happening between the segments on the news, during those “words from our sponsor” that under normal circumstances would have me diving for the DVR remote. Annoying as they are, the commercial breaks in a program represent a judgement on the program in question by the advertising and public relations people who purchase the commercials. The annoyance, though sometimes exploited as an attention grabber, is a side effect. What the sponsors of a program are really trying to do is make the most effective use of their advertising dollars by presenting their message to the people who might actually be persuaded to spend money on their product.

Just what those products are, then, can provide an interesting commentary on the kind of person (presumably according to market research) who watches news programming. This person, so far as one can tell from what is being sold to him or her, is older (pharmaceuticals, insurance, medical supplies), and has plenty of disposable (airlines, resorts, high end automobiles, jewelry) and investible (banks and financial service firms, and corporate “feel good” ads aplenty) income. People like this are known in the trades as High Net Worth Individuals, and known to most of us as the rich. If one sticks around after those commercials are over and watches the news itself, it quickly becomes obvious why rich people would watch the news. It is, after all, all about them, and, by extension, not about us especially.

This is especially true of the number one story in the country for several years running, the economy. Stories about economic recovery, for example, are at this point almost entirely about the rich, for only the rich have recovered economically-- corporate profits are up, in some cases to record levels, and the stock market, while a bit queasy, is doing fine. The 2.4% rate of economic growth in the 2nd quarter of this year, though somewhat anemic, was nonetheless economic growth, and if it’s like economic growth in past quarters, its benefits went disproportionately to the people in the upper 10%, a nice chunk of this one probably going into those corporate profits and that stock market. Where it’s definitely not going is into job creation and wage enhancements-- unemployment hasn’t improved, and real wages have actually been decreasing as corporate profits have increased.

This suggests that even the growth we’re experiencing, however meager, is unsustainable. The main engine of economic growth in this country is consumer spending, which has not recovered largely because consumers haven’t. They haven’t largely because the vast majority of them are not High Net Worth Individuals. They never were, really, but over the course of the last forty years the average American consumer has gone to heroic lengths to keep consuming, sending newly liberated wives out into the job market for a second income in the ’70’s, putting more and more on the credit cards when inflation ate into both incomes, tapping into home equity when the credit cards topped out, and spending madly all the while. Now that one or both partners are dealing with reduced hours or positions eliminated outright and the mortgage on the house is either under water or in foreclosure, there really isn’t a lot more they can do.

As for the High Net Worth Individuals, who are doing quite nicely, thank you, and some of whose profits are the result of cutting labor costs to the bone, gutting collective bargaining and union membership, and squeezing more and more productivity out of the remaining workforce, there really isn’t a lot they seem willing to do.

This should bring the whole concept of “economic recovery” into question. What exactly is is that we’re trying to recover? The inequities described above aren’t the result of the this last economic crash, but have been worsening for the last few decades, and are likely a substantial part of the cause of the crisis in the first place. Still, the addressing of those inequities has played almost no part in “recovery” policy, ignored in favor of basically rebuilding the same house of cards that just collapsed. Maybe they’ll get addressed after the inevitable next crisis.

By the way, it’s not just economic news in this country that’s largely about the rich-- other stories are too. Illegal immigration? It’s so hard to get good help these days. And all those stories we’ve been seeing about race lately? It’s no coincidence-- uncomfortable as race can be as a topic, it’s what High Net Worth Individuals would prefer that we talk about instead of class.

You know that frank national conversation about race we’ve been meaning to have? We didn’t have it last week, either. Which, among a great many other shames and pities the week brought us, is a shame and a pity. The full story told by Shirley Sharrod in the once infamous NAACP tape, as corroborated by the white Georgia farm couple she encountered and aided twenty four years ago, was a formative experience for all three, and would have made a dandy place to start. No soap, though. Instead, we were treated to an epic display of the cynicism, dishonesty, willful misunderstanding, and moral cowardice that will prevent us from having such a conversation for some time to come.

Politics in America tends to hit the level of metacriticism without stopping very long at either poetry or prose, and the convoluted story of how we heard Sharrod’s story in the first place presents a much brighter and shinier object for the news media than the story itself ever could. By now you’ve heard it over, under, sideways, and down, so I won’t belabor it further, except to note a few of the more poignant lessons this “teaching moment” has produced that might have gotten lost in the din.

*One of the many, many problems with the vaunted “24 hour news cycle” is the fact that it provides far less than 24 hours worth of news. Instead, we get self-serving analysis, far more repetitions than even Goebbels required to make a truth, endless staring matches with plane crashes, car chases, and the like, and the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories. Another is that the media seems so transfixed with the supposedly blistering pace of it all that things like corroboration, fact checking, and plain old reportage have become ballast, discarded at the first sign of things slowing down, leading to the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories.

*The fact that the initial Shirley Sharrod stories were utter horseshit didn’t slow things down one bit. Fox News, where even points of internal consistency were ballast discarded many miles ago, pulled a quick and nasty 180, going from demanding Sharrod’s resignation to criticizing the Administration for forcing Sharrod to resign “before all the facts were in.” CNN meanwhile tried to parlay some video of Anderson Cooper posing some baldly obvious questions to Andrew Breitbart into a claim that they were the real journalists in the game despite having ridden the manure spreader for most of the previous day.

*The response of the Rahm Emanuel-led White House political operation-- a/k/a “Pavlov’s White House”--was a work of breathtaking and dangerous ineptitude. In trying to short circuit the situation in a single news cycle for fear of how it would play in the right wing media, they managed to create a story that would dominate coverage for the rest of the week and serve to legitimize the worst of the right wing media.

The entire situation boils down to one inevitable conclusion-- that the governance of this country has to a great degree been given over to the attempts of cowards to placate liars. And that is bad news indeed.

“Time ensured that all modern media, not just print, but radio and television later, would henceforth depend on narrative, aspiring to the condition of immediacy, favoring description and personal stories over analysis, and avoiding excessive resort to abstractions. The magazine’s enormous, enduring influence defined, very clearly, the dilemma of journalistic popularization, posing the question of whether, in making everything wholly accessible, one didn’t end up conveying nothing of importance to harried, impatient readers.”
--Nicholas Fraser, in his review of "The Publisher: Henry Luce and his American Century" by Alan Brinkley, in Harper’s, June 2010

“Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.”
-- Elvis Costello

The main project of Beltway Conventional Wisdom-- an arcane alchemical process that attempts to spin the straw of current events into “The Narrative,” a predictive unified field theory of American politics, or at least into the fool’s gold of self-fulfilling prophecy-- is by its nature a perverse one, roughly akin to trying to make a useful relief map of a pot of boiling water. The sheer level of cognitive dissonance between The Narrative (neatly summed up by CNN’s Candy Crowley as “The Republicans have the wind at their backs” going into the 2010 elections) and the actual news lately has turned the act of Narrative maintenance into a strenuous two handed wank.

Still, Conventional Wisdom abides, laying a thick blanket of silly assumptions over the news to obscure its details and shepherd The Narrative to its dramatic, high ratings generating conclusion in the fall. These assumptions are so ingrained into the public discourse that the main practitioners of the dark art of Narrative husbandry-- the aforementioned Crowley and many of her CNN colleagues, the Washington Post’s David Broder and Chris “The Fix” Cillizza, The New York Times’ David Brooks, and the collection of Sunday Morning Quarterbacks that gather around This Week and Press the Meat-- routinely invoke them without even cursory examination.

Underlying the entire enterprise is the hallowed First Principal of Conventional Wisdom, the Horse Race Assumption, which states that serious political analysis consists solely of responding to every event by posing the question “Is this good/ bad for the Democrats/ Republicans in the upcoming elections?”, and that the answer to that question is always more interesting and newsworthy than the details of actual governing, which are considered boring and “wonky,” and in many cases more interesting and newsworthy than the factual details of the story itself.

The either/or slashes imbedded in the Golden Question tip us off to another underlying principle of Conventional Wisdom, the Binary Assumption. Simply put, this states that there are two sides to every story. Only two. The act of objective journalism, then, consists of having one representative from each side state his or her position and then breaking for commercial. These segments will then be honed down into short sound bites that will be used as supporting material for further stories, with no reference whatsoever to the validity of the arguments presented or the facts of the underlying issue. Any points of view existing outside this bifurcated mainstream are considered extreme and irrelevant to the Golden Question, and are thus summarily ignored. Those who express such viewpoints are spoilers (if they are running for office), crackpots (if they are not), or both (Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, etc.), even if such viewpoints are held by a majority of the country’s citizens.

This morning’s coverage brought up a perfect case in point. A recent poll indicates that fully 62% of Americans surveyed believe that the country is on the wrong track, as opposed to 29% who think its on the right one. This, the Russertian Congregation intoned, was Bad For The Democrats/Good for the Republicans. It may well be, and there may well be an argument to be made in its favor of that position, but none of them bothered to make it. Instead, they invoked the Binary Assumption-- there are only two available “tracks” for the nation, and those who disagree with one must therefore agree with the other.

Which is ridiculous. To me, the real story behind 62% of the country believing the country is on the wrong track is that 62% of the country now qualifies for nomination to a Keen Grasp of the Obvious award. The state of the nation and the course that it is on are clearly, dangerously unsustainable, leading one to question the yearly incomes, alcohol consumption, or psychotropic medication requirements of the 29% who think everything’s skippy. I myself think that the country is on the wrong track. Most of the people I know think the country’s on the wrong track. Anecdotally at least, that is not particularly good news for the Republicans-- an estimable part of that number, while disappointed with the Democrats, would no sooner willingly vote for a Republican than pull their eyeball out with a grapefruit spoon. Apparently I know a lot of extremist crackpots.

Further down the rabbit hole, discussions of the new Washington Post/ABC News poll centered on its finding that 58% of respondents indicated low or no confidence in President Obama and how this was Good for Republicans/Bad for Democrats. This occurred despite the poll’s finding that 72% expressed low or no confidence in Congressional Republicans, a poorer showing than both Obama and Congressional Democrats. Much more interesting to them, and much better for The Narrative, was the finding in the generic Congressional ballot that Republicans were leading 47% to 46%. This was presented not as a statistical dead heat, but as Good News for the Republicans. When the contradiction between that finding and the low confidence numbers for Congressional Republicans was pointed out, no mention was made that by indicating that they had lower confidence in Republicans than Democrats but were nonetheless intending to vote for them fully 19% of the respondents were engaging in definitive Orwellian Doublethink.

“See how angry the voters are?” they cheerfully bellowed instead. “That’s Bad for the Democrats.” And The Narrative ground on.

“You know, Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”
-- Dick Cheney

“He steals from the poor
And gives to the rich
Stupid bitch...”
-- Monty Python, “Dennis Moore” theme

One million seven hundred thousand Americans lost their unemployment benefits on the day before the Fourth of July. Another three million two hundred thousand are likely to by the end of the month. Republicans in the Senate have offered many reasons for refusing to support the extension of unemployment benefits to these people, several of which are so morally reprehensible as to deserve posts on their own, but the reason they all seem to agree on is that extending unemployment benefits adds to the deficit, and would have to be paid for with other cuts in spending before they’d agree to them.

Except no cuts in military spending. We’re at war. With Terror. Al Qaida. Osama. Boogah boogah!!!! No cutting any Department of Defense projects whatsoever, even the ones the Department of Defense doesn’t particularly want. Likewise business subsidies. Likewise what many of them refer to as “lawn forcement,” except as it relates to paying cops’ salaries (union members that they are).

And no raising revenues. As every good Republican knows, any attempt to raise government revenue actually decreases government revenue (or, in the original Neanderthal, “Taxes BAD!!”). Even letting the sunset clauses their own party voted in to the Bush tax cuts counts as “raising taxes” and will be placed on the doorstep of the “tax and spend” Democrats like a flaming bag of poo.

Read their lips...Republicans are Serious About Deficits, one of the reasons the exiled Republican hegemony is preparing to make their triumphal blah blah blah... Sound the vuvuzelas...

It’s all a scam, of course, the political equivalent of one of those engine propeller gadgets at the county fair that supposedly gets you 40% better gas milage, all delivered with a smile and a shoeshine, too good to be true because it just plain isn’t. As admirable as Republican fealty to conservative principals might be on some purely abstract level, those principals-- no new taxes, no defense cuts, ongoing war, support for “private sector incentives”-- make any serious attempt at deficit reduction an empirical impossibility and any argument they might make on the subject an empty construct. Contrary to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), ample evidence exists that the Bush tax cuts added to the deficits, and reliable projections indicate they’ll add over three trillion more to it by 2018 if allowed to continue.

It’s an old scam at that, three decade old Reaganite orthodoxy as interpreted by the W Revival (a/k/a “what got us here”), and one that failed spectacularly for both of them, at least on a policy level. Policy was never the point of the exercise, though-- it’s been an open secret, openly acknowledged even by some members of those Administrations, that reduced deficits and balanced budgets (things neither President achieved) were mere Trojan horse selling points for the goal of disempowering government, the better to usher in a market based utopia of unimpeded rich people, with a government that shields them from the inconveniences of accountability and democracy. That actually worked pretty well.

Like many a good scam, this one involves misdirection by emotional appeal. This deficit, we are told, is a burden we are putting on the backs of our children, cue violins. Kindly avert your eyes from the fact that some of those backs might be a little stooped from malnutrition and poor health care caused by cuts Republicans are willing to make. They believe in starving the beast, and don’t give much thought to who else may be starving-- there’s charities for that.

Even if the Republican’s mania for cutting deficits and taxes were a sincere appeal for a policy that actually worked, it would still be macroeconomically idiotic. Shifting money away from the unemployed (who would spend it, stimulating economic activity) and towards the already wealthy (who are likely to save and financialize it, laying the foundations for another economic house of cards) is a deeply recessionary move in an already recessionary economy.

Beltway conventional wisdom tells us that Republican fiscal conservatism in all its counterfactual, value blind, ahistorical glory, will power a Republican “tidal wave” come November. Beltway conventional wisdom thinks we’re idiots. If that tidal wave actually happens, Beltway conventional wisdom is correct in that assumption.

1) A Keen Grasp of the Obvious award to The Honorable Joseph Tauro, US District Judge for the State of Massachusetts, for declaring that two key sections of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. Tauro cited the law’s clear violation of the equal protection clause and its “offense” to the tenth amendment, stating it encroached on individual states’ long recognized right to establish the definition of marriage under state law.

In so doing, Judge Tauro put himself in prime KGO territory, for the extraconstitutional nature of DOMA has been prima facie since 1996, when my taller-than-me fifteen year old son was a toddler. DOMA existed solely for the purpose of appending the words “except for gay men and lesbians” to whole sheafs of Federal law, obviously establishing unequal treatment, and carved an unsupported gaping exception into the Full Faith and Credit clause for good measure (though Judge Tauro’s rulings did not address that clause specifically). The question of how such a thorough affront to the constitution and simple precedent could be passed, much less sit festering in Federal law for fourteen years, would make a fascinating sociopolitical case study on its own.

2) It will be interesting to see how the far right responds to Judge Tauro’s use of a conservative, tenth amendment based argument-- their favorite song and dance lately on issues from health care reform to stimulus spending to immigration-- in the furtherance of gay rights. Or rather, it would be if the far right in this country, for all their yammering about the constitution, had any real grounding in constitutional law and weren’t in a constant state of unashamed internal contradiction and hypocrisy in the first place.

3) As important a development as Judge Tauro’s rulings represent, it should be noted that this is far from the end of the story on DOMA. Their effect is limited for the moment to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and appeal to the Federal First Circuit and beyond is all but inevitable. The fact that these appeals will be pursued by the Obama Justice Department is bound to lead to some disquiet on the left and criticism of the Administration, and shouldn’t-- the Justice Department is, in theory at least, independent of the President, and is duty bound to defend challenges to Federal law in the same way the system is duty bound to provide a rigorous defense for a red handed serial killer. And while the thought of this case reaching the Roberts Court is a somewhat scary one, it shouldn’t be, either-- Tauro’s ruling is predicated on a lack of any rational basis for the law in the first place, and any successful appeal will have to explicitly establish that the law serves a compelling interest not grounded in mere prejudice. Seeing those particular cards laid out on the table will contribute much to our national discussion of gay/ lesbian rights in particular and on civil rights in general.

It’s a discussion well worth having on as high a level as we can manage, and if at the end of it the Defense of Marriage Act stays dead, then the legal system works just fine and we can get on to one of the many next things we need to address in this country. If it doesn’t, then we have some work to do. Stay tuned...

Before I get started, a little disclaimer on some of the headings below and on The Ash Heap in general. In most cases, casting something on The Ash Heap is a recognition of its fundamental uselessness, and is a dishonor generally reserved for concepts so illogical, counterfactual, or egregiously failed as to have no further place in a rational discussion of the subject at hand. In a culture that actually had rational discussions, that would be that. In American culture circa 2010, however, concepts cast on The Ash Heap are perfectly capable of picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and further affecting, or even dominating, the national discussion, utility and reason be damned.

That said, the Gulf oil spill should prove just as damaging to the following ideas as it has been to the economy and ecology of the Gulf Coast.

“...GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEM. GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.”: This quote from Ronald Reagan, the deficit increasing, tax raising President conservatives inexplicably revere, has provided the rhetorical lynch pin of their governing philosophy ever since. Government cannot do anything right (an assertion for which they offer ample proof every time they get control of it), and should get out of the way and let the marketplace do its magic. Deregulation, lax oversight, and nod-and-wink safety and inspection standards have been the result, and have now further resulted in the biggest environmental disaster in American history.

This one is so ripe for the ashes that not even the conservatives themselves believe it any more. Since the gulf spill they have called for extensive federal involvement up to and including the commandeering of boats to clean up the results of this particular example of free enterprise, and criticized the Administration for not being activist enough in handling the spill and not acting quickly enough to reform the corrupt, slipshod regulatory regime conservatives had established on their watch. Internal consistency has never been a hallmark of Republican policy, but this insistence that the government they’ve hated, slandered, and tried to starve should take responsibility for the irresponsible actions of a multibillion dollar corporation puts them both outside the realm of rational discourse and firmly and consistently on the side of that irresponsible multibillion dollar corporation. The Party of Hell No, indeed.

REPUBLICAN ENERGY POLICY, A/K/A “DRILL, BABY, DRILL”: The idea that the exploitation of domestic oil reserves would provide a path to American energy independence was always complete horseshit, a cynical attempt by 2008 Republican candidates to exploit the then-hot issue of rising gas prices that never had anything like practical value. The US uses over twenty percent of world oil resources. It controls just over 1.5 percent of proven oil reserves, meaning that if all of those reserves could be safely and quickly exploited-- an assumption recent events clearly argue against-- American production would only cover a small fraction of American consumption.

Or would, that is, if oil produced in America was somehow pumped into special barrels marked “AMERICAN OIL” and exclusively refined, priced, and consumed here. It isn’t, and those who think it is are wished a belated welcome to the global marketplace, wherein a barrel of oil is a barrel of oil whether it came from Texas or Siberia and the economic entities doing the buying and selling are multinational corporations whose only allegiance is to the bottom line. Take, for instance, the company currently in the news for their role in the production of American oil-- BP, formerly British Petroleum.

The fact is, we use way too much of the stuff, we import the vast majority of what we use, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do to address the problem from the supply side. We could cut demand, of course, but we won’t.

LITTLE FEELINGS: Tony Hayward is distraught. Barack Obama seems emotionally distant. Does anyone care, and if so, why?

STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM: We are told to number among the victims of this catastrophe the pensioners of Britain, who have been deriving up to one sixth of their income from the usually generous BP dividend, and BP stockholders in general, who have lost something like half the value of their shares. While some limited sympathy can be justified for the pensioners, whose nonvoting shares are likely held in managed instruments and who probably never made a conscious decision to tie their futures to BP’s, the assertion that those investors who did have that choice are in any way victims here is both morally repugnant and a direct repudiation of the main tenets of investor capitalism.

I’m a little amazed that anyone needs reminding in this biz school dominated culture, but it works like this: when one buys a share of stock, one is buying a measure of ownership of the issuing company, representing both an entitlement to a proportional share of the company’s profits and a responsibility for a proportional share of its losses. If the latter outweigh the former, you have made a bad investment, and you lose-- tough shit, schmucko. The notion that such a loss should be in anyway offset or compensated, particularly through public sector action, renders the entire capitalist system a particularly successful long con.

“...And the young people ask, ‘What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question...
-- Eric Bogle, “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda"

"You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."
-- George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), Easy Rider, screenplay Dennis Hopper et al.

The role of Memorial Day here in the Republic of Amnesiastan is, obviously, a complicated one (I offered a brief primer here), and seems particularly so this year. We are, they tell us, at war, two wars actually, neither of which we understand particularly well or approve of at all. The US Senate just simultaneously devoted another $60 billion to the war effort in the midst of widespread unemployment, and for good measure dropped a rider to the bill that would have extended unemployment benefits for over a million Americans, presumably on the theory that homelessness and starvation will be wonderful motivators. The final passage of a bill allowing gay Americans to serve openly in the military may very well be held up by the exclusion of funding for a jet engine the Department of Defense no longer wants. In a political climate that supposedly favors fiscal conservatism, the defense budget is fully 23% of federal spending on its own, and is held sacrosanct less anyone get the impression one was “weak on defense.”

Whether we understand and support our wars or not, people still die in them, and this day by rights belongs to them. It should be a day of thanks and simple patriotism. Unfortunately there is little that is simple about patriotism in America 2010. Patriotism, defined as 100% conformity to the political kitsch of the Bush administration as they lied us into a needless war and curtailed the individual liberties and human rights a lot of us thought our country stood for in the first place, was turned into a blunt political weapon long ago, with the love of country of anyone not in full agreement with the ruling regime subject to accusations of treason. President Obama’s failure to attend ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery today in favor of a rained-out ceremony and visiting wounded veterans in his home state of Illinois was taken up by the remains of this crowd today as a means of questioning his patriotism, as if the President were a national figurehead with strict ceremonial duties at national monuments, as if fallen soldiers in DC were more important than fallen soldiers in Illinois, as if their gross opportunism and flagrant disrespect didn’t sully the spirit of the day a thousand times more than the President’s actions ever could.

And the President, who many of us voted for based on the promise that he could clean up this mess, has done nothing of the kind, refusing to support even basic accountability for those responsible for gross violations of the Constitution, much less the reversal of their decisions,

We have a lot to mourn today. And a lot to organize tomorrow.

"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

My emotions, such as they are, were remarkably mixed when I learned of NBC’s cancellation of the twenty year old Law and Order. Though a devoted fan from the start, it’s been years since the show fell off my DVR schedule, and despite NBC’s tendency to use the program to fill the numerous holes in its schedule post-Leno, I hadn’t watched any of this season’s episodes at all, and probably wouldn’t have watched next year’s, either. Though it was for much of its run one of the best weekly hours on television, L & O had over time metastasized (along with The Simpsons and SNL) into just one more bolus in an increasingly constipated culture, another blankie that the dominant Boomer demographic refused to let go of, a series of comforting cliches worn by repetition into the national consciousness.

And oh, what repetition. Anyone who’s been unemployed, convalescing, or otherwise involuntarily exposed to daytime television over the last decade or so can attest to the constant marathon of L&O reruns that blanket daytime cable programming. Add in the series’ franchised spin-offs--Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the short-lived Law and Order: Trial By Jury, as well as my own unproduced pilot script Law and Order: SUV (“In the criminal justice system, four wheel drive vehicle related offenses are considered especially heinous...”)-- and its influence on a slew of other crime procedurals and their spin offs and imitators, and what was once a paragon of television turned into a giant, gelatinous megatrope.

Still, it’s almost impossible to express just what a revelation the first few seasons of Law and Order were back in the early ’90’s. Showing up at the exhausted tail end of the Reagan/ Bush era and competing in a television schedule dominated by coziness (Matlock, Murder She Wrote, Father Dowling, In The Heat of the Night) and slickness (LA Law, thirtysomething, Macgyver), Law and Order was nothing short of startling. It was grimly New York, in stark contrast to the dominant sunshiny LA paradigm, and grimly realistic in comparison to the ridiculous Hollywood fantasies of most television writing before and since.

It was also impeccably produced and acted. The original cast, with George Dzundza, Chris Noth, Dann Florek, Steven Hill, Michael Moriarty, and Richard Brooks, and subsequent ringers Paul Sorvino, Sam Waterston, S. Epatha Merkerson, Jill Hennessy, and Jerry Orbach, made up one of the strongest acting ensembles in television history (though the ensemble nature of the show eventually drove off would be prima donnas Dzundza, Sorvino, and Moriarty), and they were supported by a veritable pantheon of American stage and screen character acting week after week. The stories were refreshingly street level, unsentimental and unglamorous, and often commented satirically on the days’ events.

It was, of course, too good to last. NBC network interference resulted in the sexing up and dumbing down of the cast and concept starting in the third season (which initially brought in the still superlative Hennessy and Merkerson), with a series of supermodel types eventually replacing Hennessy, Benjamin Bratt clomping around in the too-big shoes of Noth, and Steven Hill’s bracing New York Jewish irascibility replaced by the incongruous folksy Southern cracker barrel philosophizing of conservative icon Fred Thompson. As for the setting, it is telling that L&O’s replacement on next fall’s schedule is Law and Order: LA, a seeming final triumph of Hollywood hegemony over much of what was good and different about the original series.

Nothing lasts forever, and in some ways L&O didn’t last much longer than those first few seasons. Still, it will continue, both in its influence, its spin-offs, and those interminable reruns. News of a possible cable run for the unseen British spin-off Law and Order: UK (Jamie Bamber! Freema Agyeman!! Bill Paterson!!!) has even this lapsed fan a bit excited. Stay tuned...

Embarrassing but true. It started out innocently enough-- Ezra Klein linked a page in his WashPost blog, and I was required to join to read it-- and spiraled to the point where there is now a page for this blog. Oh, what we do for eyeballs...

“And it seem like
Total destruction
The only solution.”
-- Bob Marley

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light...”
-- Dylan Thomas

“We live in troubled times. But let’s give thanks that we avoided the era of the weasel testicles.”
-- Gail Collins, NYT, 5/8/10

There wasn’t any official declartion, but we nonetheless seem to have spent the last several days observing National Fatalism Week, with bad omens and dark clouds collecting on the edges of our cheery, positivist, celebrity-obsessed mainstream national culture and distracting us from Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and Bret Michaels’ aneurysm.

Some of this, of course, is the normal background noise from the Shadow Ministry of Fear, a/k/a the conservative Republican establishment, which has spent the week encouraging people to wet themselves over terrorism (in the face of an unsuccessfully staged and successfully investigated truck bomb incident in New York that has been disavowed by the international terror networks they tried so hard to connect it to) and the rise in the unemployment rate (which accompanied the best job creation month in four years and should highlight once and for all what a vacuous statistic the unemployment rate really is). Most of it, though, derives from a series of events that could conceivably tip us into a situation that would make petty political pissing matches (continent or otherwise) utterly irrelevant.

As the Ministry was challenging our national continence, they were ignoring another continent entirely. Real economists spent the week observing the fiscal collapse of Greece, considering to what extent the interconnectedness of European Economic Community states might make this a crisis for the whole of Europe, and taking side bets as to which domino will fall next, with Spain and Portugal neck and neck at the clubhouse turn and Britain coming up fast. While most Americans either ignore “furriners” when they aren’t actively denigrating them or cheerily contemplate how much more their dollars will buy on that trip to France this summer, the inbred, capitalistically convenient “global economy” we’ve been putting together for the last thirty years means that an economic earthquake in the Euro zone could cause an economic tsunami here.

Furthermore, the system we have in place here spent part of last week showing that it’s perfectly capable of cacking over even without international assistance. Thursday’s 1,000 point interday crash in the Dow Jones Industrial average was the largest and swiftest in history, and the explanation that this was a “technical glitch” that the system eventually corrected shouldn’t comfort anyone. That “glitch” occurred in a highly automated trading system that is now so technologically advanced and interconnected-- another “financial innovation” brought to you by the same Wall Street interests who gave you derivatives trading and subprime lending-- that it can instantaneously toss trillions of dollars of market value down the shithole without any human intervention, foreign or domestic, required. This highlights two salient and rather scary facts about US markets: first, that they have become a vastly complicated game with a tenuous relationship at best to the real economy; and second, that the game is rigged to the advantage of the minority of players big enough to exploit those complications regardless of real economic and social fallout. The effects of a wave of international calamity on this rickety infrastructure are likely to be devastating.

Speaking of waves, the as of this morning unabated oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, quite apart from its effects on energy and environmental policy and politics, is almost certain to depress the economies of the Gulf Coast states, already one of the poorest regions of the country, with the already troubled regional tourism, seafood, shipping, and refining industries leading the spiral.

And, as Ezra Klein pointed out this week, this is just the stuff we know about. “Many people think China is in a housing bubble, and it could pop. Instability in the Middle East, or any of a number of other factors, could send the price of oil skyrocketing. A successful terrorist attack in America, or some sort of pandemic flu, or...” While this all adds shadows to an already scary picture, it should be noted that the vast majority of these calamities present and future are entirely of our own making. Anger is probably a more appropriate response than fear, and cold, unsentimental rationality probably a more appropriate response than either.

Here’s wishing you all a good week, and a quick and painless death.