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Tuesday, January 13, 2004

The great emancipator

Why is everyone on the left so outraged by George Bush’s recent claim that he’s done more for human rights than any other President in history?  Really, people, do the math.  As Grover Norquist pointed out in his NPR interview with Terry Gross last fall, the estate tax is just like the Holocaust.  And George Bush has worked like no other President to abolish the estate tax.

Never mind Lincoln and FDR-- they were pikers.  George Bush is preventing future Holocausts for generations to come.  Come, brothers and sisters, all you multimillionaires, billionaires, trillionaires and quadrillionaires-to-be, lift every voice and sing.  Free at last. . . .

Posted by Michael on 01/13 at 09:00 AM
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Monday, January 12, 2004

A fascinating Haaretz article on Judith Butler. . .

is right here.  Gets a great deal of intellectual work done in a very small space, and is eminently fair, too.  Note to Butler-bashers everywhere: this is what responsible, intelligent journalistic coverage of Butler-- and her critics-- actually looks like.

Posted by Michael on 01/12 at 09:28 AM
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On the Mayberry machiavellis:  a theory (cough, cough) by me

Critics of the Bush administration have thus far been flummoxed by two things that just don’t seem to make sense in the context of the administration’s aggressive hawkishness: one, why have Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gone out of their way to disregard and alienate the US intelligence community, even going so far as to blow the cover of a CIA agent who was working on WMD proliferation (of all things), especially when CIA/DIA intelligence is so critical to fighting against a stateless entity like al-Qaeda?  and two, how in the world can the Bush administration keep cutting services and benefits for veterans of the armed forces, while so drastically downplaying deaths and casualties in Iraq and refusing to acknowledge or attend funerals of servicemen and women?

I’m as flummoxed as anyone else, but I do have a suggestion.  Perhaps, for the architects of Bush military and intelligence policy, it’s all just another political campaign, full of the usual leaks and dirty tricks and backstabbing-- except that these people, from the borderline-Strangelove Cheney to the evil-boy-genius Rove, don’t actually realize the consequences of conducting military/intelligence policy like a political campaign.  Take the Valerie Plame scandal, for instance: if we were talking about Bush v. McCain in the South Carolina primaries in 2000, maybe this kind of thing would make sense.  Let’s say Joseph Wilson pisses off the Bush team by endorsing McCain-- OK, then, the long knives come out, and they go to a compliant press apparatchik like Robert Novak with some hot dope on Wilson’s wife, leaking the fact that she just happens to be a McCain staffer.  (Then, of course, they follow it up by spreading the word that McCain himself is really a gay priest with a history of sexual abuse.) But them’s the primaries-- you just don’t do this sort of thing in the real world where there are real consequences involving real weapons.  And yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Cheney or whomever-- or, at least, it doesn’t seem to have bothered them-- that Plame was working on extremely sensitive matters involving the spread of nuclear weapons; no, the important thing was “sending a message” to Wilson and to anyone else in the intelligence community who might consider speaking out about the administration’s abuse of WMD intelligence in re Iraq, regardless of whether this actually damages our national security interests.  It’s just payback, the ordinary kind of retribution meted out by ruthless political machine hacks.

Likewise, with Iraq itself, I have to believe that the whole Project for the New American Century crew think of regional war as a large-scale version of board games like Risk or Diplomacy.  (Well, never mind Diplomacy-- that would involve dealing with Gerhard Schroeder.) That’s why no one in the Bush administration did any serious planning for the postwar scenario in Iraq:  in the board version of the game (the only kind most of these warlike fellows have ever played), you don’t need to secure the energy grid (or the museums!) or put together a police force or deal with massive unemployment, restive Islamist clerics, and guerrillas and their recruits sabotaging international agencies from the UN to the Red Cross.  All you have to do is roll the dice, move your pieces into the territory, and move the other guy’s pieces off the board.  In fact, I’m sure there’s an internal PNAC memo somewhere that says, “after we sweep through Baghdad and secure the Sunni triangle, we’ll move in those little pieces with the horses on them and a bunch of those cannon-things that equal ten units.  Then we can use our next turn to declare war on Syria.” (And so much for all the useful info Syrian intelligence has given us on al-Qaeda.)

And as for Bush’s treatment of our veterans and our wounded and dead in Iraq, well, here I have only a fanciful guess.  What if, just what if, Rove were conducting a kind of evil-genius (bwah hah hah hah) electoral experiment for 2004 and beyond-- to see just how shabbily a Republican administration could treat US servicemen and women and still pick up 90 percent of the military vote?  I know, it sounds loopy-- but then, I look back on the campaign the GOP ran for Senate in Georgia, and I have to think maybe it’s plausible after all.  Imagine that they’d said in early 2002, “Look at this Georgia thing-- now, let’s just see if we can run a Republican-who-avoided-the-draft against a triple-amputee Vietnam war vet, and challenge the vet on his patriotism.  Hey, if we lose, no harm done-- it’s a completely crazy-ass idea anyway.  But if we win? well, holy hypocrisy, Batman, if we win that one there’s nothing we can’t pull off in ‘04.” On that line of thinking, if a Republican White House can turn its back so callously to wounded vets who need long-term medical care and still win the military vote overwhelmingly, they obviously have that constituency locked up regardless of the facts on the ground, and they need never worry about it again.

Just a thought.

Posted by Michael on 01/12 at 09:22 AM
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Saturday, January 10, 2004

Book club recommendation

I just finished the last academic obligation I was supposed to fulfill in 2002 (and can now move on to the couple of things I was supposed to finish in 2003).  It’s a review of John McGowan’s remarkable and compelling (but, alas, no-longer-new) book, Democracy’s Children:  Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics, and when I first read it, fourteen months ago, it spoke to so many of my frustrations, desires, and obsessions that I simply wasn’t able to review it.  I had way too much to say.  I reread it this fall, and it still speaks to my frustrations, desires, and obsessions, but this time I managed to squeeze my response down to 1100 words for the good people at the South Atlantic Review, where the review will appear later this year.

My review describes Democracy’s Children as an “array of theoretically informed dissents from some of the salient projects of the current theoretical scene” (that’s a neutral form of praise, by the way), and suggests that McGowan “take[s] the relative autonomy of intellectuals as an opportunity to voice some serious skepticism about the idea of relative autonomy-- and even more serious skepticism about the cogency of recent critiques of autonomy.” What I like most about the book, though, is its principled pragmatist insistence on a symmetrical account of belief (that is, an account of belief in which those who do not agree with us are presumed to be as reasonable or at least as self-reflexive as ourselves).  Two of my favorite passages:

“Sometimes I think my stance just reflects a sense that the cultural left is too subtle by half.  Injustice and the indignities that attend it are just not that complex.  In particular, I find any reliance on intricate accounts of psychological mechanisms implausible-- and politically troubling when attached to claims about unconscious processes.  Democratic interaction depends, I believe, on a faith that people generally know what they are about and that rhetorical efforts to shift their self-understandings can be direct.  After all, the intellectual will resent attempts at indirect manipulation and will believe herself able to see through this.  Why not accord the same ability to our audiences?  Once we have to rely on strategies that by-pass conscious beliefs in order to transform those beliefs’ unconscious underpinnings, we have entered a realm of discourse that renders autonomy, consent and equality problematic.  That this trinity cannot be assumed is an important truth; that the attempt to achieve it is to be abandoned is far less evident.  Doubtless, the cultural left (of which I am indubitably a member) shares my political commitment to democracy, which is why I feel it important to indicate the undemocratic flavor of some work in cultural politics.” (25)

“The pragmatist must be hostile to theories of ideology that posit motivations and intentions unavailable to consciousness as the determinants of action.  Pragmatism depends on agents who can, for the most part, know what they are doing.  The pragmatist need not deny systemic relations and/or effects, just as he hardly ignores inherited social codings, but must deny that agents are systematically and incorrigibly unable to perceive and take into account these relations, effects, and codings.  The strongest argument here is that the theorist of ideology has achieved a conscious understanding of these matters.  What, in principle, could refute the possibility of all other agents’ attaining a similar understanding?” (214-15)

All of which is to say-- as we ordinarily don’t say in academic book reviews-- buy this book now.  No, not later this month.  Right now.  You can ask Cornell University Press to send it to you, if you visit their website and promise to give them $17.95 plus the usuals.

Posted by Michael on 01/10 at 10:13 AM
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Friday, January 09, 2004

Unsafe at any speed

Malcolm Gladwell has a fine essay about S.U.V.s in this week’s New Yorker.  It’s always fun to hear, once again, just how much contempt automobile engineers and manufacturers have for the people who buy these stupid metal boxes, but what’s interesting about Gladwell’s essay is that he doesn’t simply cite the standard industry market research that shows that “S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.” (David Brooks once did a column mocking this finding as a form of S.U.V. envy, neglecting to note that the finding came not from some Volvo-driving, latte-drinking left-wing freak show but from the auto industry itself.) Instead, Gladwell finds that people buy S.U.V.s because they think that big vehicles are safe, and they employ bizarre rationales like “if the vehicle is up high, it’s easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking under it.” (There’s an online New Yorker interview with Gladwell here).

But here’s the really telling thing: the things that people like most about S.U.V.s, and that lead them to associate S.U.V.s with safety, are what make the vehicles so unsafe.  They’re basically big hunks of inflexible steel-frame construction, they don’t maneuver well, and they’re so heavy that they require an extra two car lengths to come to a stop from 60 mph.

All right, let me think.  So there’s this thing that people associate with safety, and the very features they associate with safety are the features that make the thing so unsafe.  I’ve been waiting all week for someone to make the obvious point, namely, that the S.U.V. couldn’t be a better metaphor for the Bush-Cheney response to 9/11, but the week’s nearly over, so I might as well make it myself.

Posted by Michael on 01/09 at 10:18 AM
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More Dean news

Following yesterday’s news that various far-left fringe groups had united behind Howard Dean as the Democratic candidate most likely to advance the cause of revolutionary socialism, readers have written in to this site to ask why the Socialist Workers Party has withheld its endorsement of Dean.  One reader suggests that the SWP must be holding out for a Nader/neo-Trotskyite ticket, trying to play “spoiler” in the last weeks of the campaign by throwing its support further left in key states like Michigan, Florida, and Missouri where the question of “council communism” is likely to determine the eventual outcome.  I happen to have it on good authority, however (and this is an exclusive-- I’ve been talking to Washington insiders that Josh Marshall doesn’t know about), that the SWP intends to endorse Wesley Clark in a surprise “all is forgiven in Kosovo” announcement sometime later this month.  Sounds to me like the SWPers are looking to become power players in the primaries this time. . . .

And over on the premier listserv of Dissent-style worshippers of American power, DemocraticLeft, DLer Mike Hirsch writes in to say,

What did you expect?  If Dr. Dean sees a contradiction between workers councils and a revolutionary vanguard, I say he doesn’t deserve to be president.  Those idiot sects can stump for Herr Doktor, but I’m sticking with Kucinich.  The son of workers from west Cleveland, he knows you need both a cadre party and factory organs of workers power. It is dialectical, dontcha know?  Lenin said that when you are sick, never go to doctor comrades, and this is-- I believe-- exactly what he was talking about.  If we can’t get single-payer health care out of Dean, what hope is there he will recognize a revolutionary situation when it is staring him down or deliver a democracy based on soviets?

Well, yes, this is exactly what Lenin was talking about (though in liberal circles there are still some who insist that he was warning us about Bill Frist), but it dodges the critical issue by awarding the palm to Lenin when Leninism is precisely what’s at stake in this primary season.  As if there were no contradictions between the vanguardism of Lenin and Karl Kautsky and the workers’s councils advocated by Anton Pannekoek!  Leaving aside the whole Kucinich question, it’s this kind of faux-"dialectical" thinking that cost Dukakis dearly in 1988 when he said, “this election is not about ideology, it’s about building a party in which all power rests in the soviets.” Remember that by the time Dukakis finally stopped running away from the “c-word,” he was down 17 points to Bush.  Yes, he closed the gap by half, but he’d opened it in the first place because of his attachment to vanguardism.  Let’s not go down that road again, comrades. 

Posted by Michael on 01/09 at 10:13 AM
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