Cobb

As Black As A President Gets

Back when I was a baby, there was some controversy over the Irish Catholicism of Candidate Kennedy. I didn't participate in that sort of thing, obviously, but I heard enough about it so that it was a big deal. Eventually, Kennedy was shot, and so finally was his brother Robert. I suspect that if I read whatever the most notable Irish newspaper in America at the time, I would hear all over the editorial section how blatantly anti-Irish it all was. And the chorus says 'huh?'

I do read the headlines from The Root every day, and they serve to remind me of a number of things. Primarily however they remind me that the American Left is at odds with itself with regard to its multiculturalist principles and priorities. That comes out as frustration with its racial narrative and the actual way that successful ethnics express their power in America. 

America is a melting pot, but only the Civil War made it hot enough to melt Africans into citizenship. The Civil Rights Movement, often interpreted as a grass roots revolution, demonstrated a different kind of heat that melted glass ceilings and second-class citizenship. But between you and me, it was the triumph of Thurgood Marshall's legal practice and that of his amicus partners.  I've always expressed my interpretation of the progress of the African in America as one of human rights to civil rights and continuing on towards social power. But I am rather convinced these days that there are only civil rights in law and the rest requires old fashioned clout of the sort that is never arrayed for the masses outside of revolution. In other words, the only people who get 100% Civil Rights - the only kind of rights there are, are the rich and powerful. Everybody else gets a gentleman's C, and as such they follow the prerogatives of class, education and general human fitness. Nevertheless certain aspects of these rights and privileges accrue through the example of those who amass social capital, of which African Americans have a goodly share, and quite frankly have enjoyed since society girls started dancing Uptown. You could ask Sir Duke or Marion Anderson if they were still alive. 

None of that changes the fact of the Black Power Struggle which always and everywhere refused the very idea of assimilation. America is no melting pot to them, but a lumpy salad and they like it lumpy, with a particularly tart flavor of relativist salad dressing called multiculturalism. But everybody knows a black olive is fundamentally different from egg whites... 

You must keep this in mind when reading contemporary accounts of the complaints of the so-called 'African American' and discussions of 'race' attending such debate. I was reminded of this starkly last week as I tuned in to some of my old favorite reggae albums, notably that of Steel Pulse. Their music provides a very useful insight. 

 

I won't belabor the point of the following lyrics:

They took us away captivity captivity
Required from us a song
Right now man say repatriate repatriate
I and I patience have now long time gone
Father's mothers sons daughters every one
Four hundred million strong
Ethiopia stretch forth her hand
Closer to God we Africans
Closer to God we can
In our hearts is Mount Zion
Now you know seek the Lion
How can we sing in a strange land
Don't want to sing in a strange land no
Liberation true democracy
One God one aim one destiny

Except to point out that they come from an album entitled True Democracy. If you ask a certain type of black American if they are patriotic you will find that they are, contingent on America's ability or willingness to produce True Democracy. I leave it to your curiosity to determine what degree of multicultural salad dressing that is, or more pointedly if there is sympathy with Marcus Garvey, Franz Fanon or Black Liberation Theology. 

That is a very critical question that must be pointedly raised when certain assumptions about 'the' black polity's satisfaction with the purported black agenda of Barack Obama. I understand him very well to be exactly the sort who like me, loves to play the dub version (without lyrics) of that Steel Pulse song, (yes it is very popular). Unlike me, I happen to think Barack Obama would enjoy tweaking our democracy towards the 'True' in service of a lumpier multiculturalism. 

The Washington Post's editorial by Frederick Harris reflects the disappointment anyone in search of 'True Democracy' must have with real political power in America. Him say:

After winning office, such race-neutral politicians don’t normally embrace issues and positions that black voters might prefer. Instead, the imperatives of reelection take over. To maintain their winning coalitions, these politicians usually need to govern in a racially neutral manner as well. (Black Americans understand this: In the 2008 ABC News-USA Today-Columbia University Black Politics Survey, nearly half of all black respondents believed that African Americans must play down their racial identity to get ahead in the United States.)

Obama has followed this pattern. During the 2008 campaign, the most significant moment when race hit the national stage was when controversy broke out over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forcing Obama to deliver a much-heralded speech on race in Philadelphia. During his presidency, racial discussions have been largely limited to his reactions to unexpected public debates, such as the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

In theory, these two episodes offered opportunities for Obama to discuss reforms to the criminal justice system — an issue he’d raised early in his campaign — but instead, he limited his response to tamping down potential racial conflicts, then quickly moving on.

I take this complaint as one typical of the racially minded who can never be satisfied that America is talking enough about race - when the fact of the matter is they themselves can never shutup about race. 

But I saw all this coming back when Obama proved his charm to the American electorate years ago. All of his black politics were a fiction, and then he made all black politics into a fiction - both the traditional and the newly opportunistic. Because it was all about Barack Obama, not about any real continuation of 'The Struggle'. Nevertheless, Obama played the right background music, gave fist bumps onstage and did those things that suited the styles of the revolutionaries and radicals. A suit he wore very well. I believe my characterization of him was 'Barbara Boxer in a black man suit', which is to say a typical Lefty American with no real loyalties but to the prerogatives of Left rhetoric as usual and win, win, win, elections. His agenda was indistinguishable from that of John Edwards basically until Shepard Fairy made the famous poster. And then he went on to raised more money in his campaign than any man in American history.

I understood, as much as I found Obama to be disagreeable, that he would not paint the White House black and that he would fit, one way or another, into the President Suit - that giant robot that says Made in America and Leader of the Free World with the stars and stripes on its chest. And in several ways he has done so admirably. But some fraction of his black electorate has reason to be disappointed in themselves for following a racial line that turns out not to be the doctrine they were expecting. And thus they have to be asked about their definitions of True Democracy.

Well actually they really don't, because if Barack Obama ain't black enough for you, then perhaps you take blackness not only too seriously, and in dubious directions. But the real news is that the next US President of African descent will have much less to prove about his blackness or the color of his skin indicating something about 'race relations.'

You see, the Civil Rights Movement is over. It is as over in 2012 as the Civil War was over in when those society girls were getting their Charleston on up in Harlem. We are fast approaching the day when all Civil Rights Movement veterans will be as dead as Thurgood Marshall. Perhaps Steven Speilberg or Clint Eastwood will direct the movie that has the last word on Thurgood. I'd like to see that movie.  And if the idea that it won't be Spike Lee makes you uncomfortable - well then you just peed your own pants on that one, brother. And every day we will bury with another layer of abstraction those stories that retain their racial purity, as if only Africans can tell the story of Ocean Hill - Brownsville, only gays of Stonewall, only Chicanos of the Zoot Suit Riots. Because it will be America's history, and Americans will only tell themselves the stories that they feel comfortable with. That's not because the truth doesn't matter so much, but because race doesn't matter so much.

When the truth is told, that's what America wants. 

 

The Iz Biz

Jimi Izrael is kicking butt and taking names in the media, and there are few who are as responsible as he is when it comes to representing the flavor of my old school demographic. He's good people, he's my people and if there is any justice in this world he will be righteously famous. I think he's on the right road.

So he let it leak through some ghetto downloading service that he's coming up with a new vehicle called 'First Chair with Jimi Izrael'. I'm going to tune in. I hope it finds the right host and distribution, it would be a disappointment if it were not produced as professionally as his current NPR gig. 

I would love to do a podcast with Jimi sometime in the future and I went over the transcripts of his last three NPR shows just to remind myself of the texture and tone of the verbiage we used to throw down. Brought back fond memories, because we had really good laughs. (Check out Radio Recap)

Anyway, be on the lookout for Jimi. He's real, he's wise, he deserves a listen. 

The Coming Rule of the Market Quants

All I have to say is this. Google getting into the consumer survey business is the beginning of the end of marketing as we now know it. This was something I rather expected to see and because of that I started fleshing out an idea a few years ago called WWID. 

WWID stands for 'what would i do'. I describe it at my other blog. 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Trayvon Martin

A nation mourns its youth, gone away, gone astray, dying by the bullet. And painted in stereotypical black, we have another stereotypical tragedy that cannot be anything but grist for a cycle of protest, outrage, sadness, disappointment and resentment. It quiets down until another bullet gives another HBO writer of 'The Wire' another million dollars. Because that's reality.

One day, America will let its black families mourn their loss in peace. Until that day, scribble another name in grafitti sharpie - the name of the innocent: Trayvon Martin. 

What is forgotten at this moment in time is the politics behind all sorts of pseudo-para-police forces that have always been a flawed concept, but last time around had another group of politically misled people jumping up and down with anticipation. I'm talking about Philadelphia and I'm talking about Sylvester Johnson. What I said:

This is evidence that in Philly (which from my experience, fits the profile) that social segregation is alive and well. I use the term 'social segregation' lightly because I'm fleshing it out. It's basically that the idea of separatism is alive. People *expect* that there is something fundamentally different about black crime, and therefore that there must be some kind of separate solution to it. People then accept that there is fundamentally something different about how black suspects and criminals must be treated and how black families must be organized etc. This is a regional / social / cultural /political thing that's working its way back to Jim Crow. The idea of equality is being undermined from both sides of the law.

Something like 'support your local police' just doesn't work with the black community in Philly. Instead some bizarre hybrid of protest politics and  God knows what else is informing this situation.

I agree that black residents of Philadelphia should expect and deserve equal protection from police. But that also means they should give equal respect for and collaboration with police. I hope this idea never gets off the ground. It's nothing more or less than a call for an ethnic militia, the root of all unrest in the modern world. 

I expect that in the ebb and flow, that black politics is angling more towards an anti-militia sentiment, and perhaps especially an anti-ethnic militia sentiment now that The Man is of African descent. But surely that sentiment is not necessarily logical because this time around it's correct. After all, if that were the case, we would expect to hear a great deal more calling for the head of the President over 16 dead civilians in Afghanistan... but I second-guess people I don't even listen to. 

The answer is for all peasants to support their local police, always. Because this is precisely what happens when knucklehead peasants attempt to take the law (that they don't really understand) into their own cotton-picking hands. 

Obviously George Zimmerman, the shooter, needs to be arrested, tried and convicted. Obviously he will get the benefit of some over-zealous public defender and the slack in the criminal justice system. But I think he should get 2nd Degree Murder conviction, and 20 years. But adding the circumstances of impersonating an officer and acting under the color of authority, I could see the combination get him 40 years, although if I were the family, I'd like to have him pilloried and stoned. 

But Zimmerman will not be stoned because we seem to have lost our perspective of what good people deserve and what bad people deserve. Something is inverted when you get umpty million saying 'I should never have to go broke because I don't have health insurance' but not 'Death to Zimmerman'. 

So I ask the question I've been meaning to write about but haven't gotten around to: Who is your Leviathan?

Or in political terms, are you safer today than you were four years ago?

Occupy Turns the Hoodie Corner

The most serious Occupy organization, the New York General Assembly, has announced support for a 'Million Hoodie March'

Wednesday, March 21 6:00pm
Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin
Union Square
Throw on your hoodies and come gather in Union Square to show your support for justice for Trayvon Martin, the Florida 17-year-old whose killer hasn't been charged! A black person in a hoodie isn’t automatically “suspicious”. Let’s put an end to racial profiling! March 21st is the UN International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Facebook. http://interoccupy.org/march-21-a-million-hoodies-march-for-trayvon-martin-nyc-6pm/

I won't belabor the number of things that are wrong with this except to mention that it demonstrates that the organization has devolved into something typical. This demonstrates an inability to remain focused on the actual problems on Wall Street that can be identified as policy recommendations backed up by popular support. 

Turning the hoodie corner = jumping the shark. Occupy has officially wobbled quietly into the dark night of surrender, perhaps realizing that their supporters have short attention spans. Racist! Squirrel!

 

The Disappearing of Greg Smith

Greg Smith is about to disappear. The reason why is because we live in an era of cowardice and deceit. The reasons for this era are beyond the scope of this essay, however I predict that Smith will disappear. He will go into that same place where I like to think I live, which is the domain of integrity and courage. It's hard for me to tell because life is a battlefield full of smoke and confusion.

Those who are supposed to be responsible to bring such matters to our attention have not, and so it was on Mr. Smith alone to reveal what we all needed to know. Some might pretend that not all of us need to know that there are moral capitalists possessed of integrity and courage, others pretend that there is no such thing. But those of us who try to have integrity and courage know such acts when we see them, and we understand how painful it is to undertake them. I am like you Mr. Smith, in case you may not have realized how many brothers you have out here in the smoke and confusion.

He will enter the realm of people who are unashamed of bronze medals and runner-up status - those of us who sense the butterfly wing's difference between the efforts required to stand on podiums and the massive difference between the accolades given by those who have no sense of the effort.

Listen to me, I am under the influence of NASA. I purchased a five disk boxed set documenting the endeavors of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Last night I watched astronauts - men on a scientific mission enthralled with glee with the spectacle of geology of the Hadley Rille. I watched the extraordinary efforts of men in service of mankind when lives were at stake and millions of eyes were watching. And they were happy, and having the time of their lives. We were right to consider them heroes, even though, by Apollo 15, they were not standing on the podium.

There is an old poem about the strongest and fastest man and to whom life's battles are given. Greg Smith has decided to take no more from the man who thinks he can disrespect his customers and thereby pervert the only morality capitalism possesses which is the mutual benefit of parties.

This is how the decline happens. It happens as those who assumed no good are rewarded with bad news and the myth of evil and incompetence becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But we know not to listen, for we are the disappeared. No film at 11. 

By the way, it is my opinion that the Volker Rule was all that was needed but purposeful obfuscation has ruled the day, and I agree that Smith is toast. 

Symbolically Throwing Away My Vote

In a contest between Romney and Obama, the country loses. Both posers are interested in selling their image and putting a lid on things. Romney because it sounds like the only thing he would say, and Obama because it's what he wishes he could do. That is to say Obama can do the first thing and Romney can do the second, neither of which is particularly good for America at this moment in history. So I think today that I'm going to follow Taleb and cast a vote for Ron Paul, the nutcase crackpot. Why? Because only a nutcase crackpot like Paul (being very specific) has the nerve to base his entire campaign on a few salient facts and properly directed wishful thoughts. 

Let me take a tangent and speak about videogames. 

In Skyrim and all the other best crafted RPGs, you spend a long time wandering around taking odd jobs and dodging authority until you get enough skill to take on more and more powerful characters. At some point, you don't decide which boss you want to support, you decide which boss you want to kill. When you become adequately powerful, even the swarms of police and guards are too weak to contain you. In any case, what you never do is sit around studying positions and strategies and then cast your vote for a proxy who will change the world for you.

You can only see the world by killing the obstacles in your path one by one.

Once you've done that and only once you have done that can you understand the world you have changed through your actions. As I apply this to democratic politics in the context of our bourgeois elections and campaigns aimed at the rhetorical level of peasants, I realize that my symbol is just as good as my vote. Except I get to symbolify as much as I want, here on the blog. In other words, I've recognized the value of killing obstacles blocking my view of the world, and for me, 99% of them are financial. Therefore what I need to do is make every effort to kill financial obstacles. That means voting for Ron Paul because only Ron Paul will create the conditions under which the proper disaster will occur in the short term. Obama and Romney on the other hand will sustain a stasis field which will behave like Wile E. Coyote walking on air over a deeper and deeper ravine.

Since I'm in the 5% and in an industry that grows organically by objective improvements, my primary concern is that new money keeps flowing, and also that I can take advantage of chaos and failure. I cannot advocate chaos and failure because it is not in my nature to be a vulture. 

 

Kirk Sorensen's Thorium Future

All I want is for Kirk Sorensen to have a long conversation with Elon Musk. But then again, I can't imagine how it couldn't have already happened - which is why Flibe must exist. I can't wait for the IPO.  

This is the future. I'm optimistic. This is the best energy talk since Koonin.

The Whitney Analogy

The saddest woman in the world is Cissy Houston. 

If you have to ask Wikipedia who Cissy is, then I forgive you. But really, that's all I really had to say to a small group of wonderful but unimportant people, whom I love dearly but hardly ever see any longer. They are my snobby black brothers and sisters who know who they are. There's an old cliche, borrowed of course but the bon mot nonetheless that you can always tell an Alpha man, but you cannot tell him much. I'm an Alpha, a member of the same fraternity as MLK, WEB and Eugene Kinckle Jones. If you have to look them up, I understand and forgive.

You see, I found something out about myself the past weekend, which was that I was expecting entirely too much of my people. And because they never satisfied my expectations, I dismissed their dreams. My people are certainly not a nation of millions, nor an ethnic minority within that nation. My people are a very certain selection of a very few who tend to know a lot about a few things and not much else. I can go to my cousin and she can tell me who Whitney used to hang out with, and we could also trade stories about Don Conrnelius as well. And although I hope he's not the third, I could tell you about some other famous black entertainer whose name is not important right now. What's important is that I'm the kind of guy who could hang out for a while with Greg Tate or with Elvis Mitchell because I have. And just last week I was hanging out with some folks who work on Wall Street but come from that same small exclusive village that I do. It was easy. I knew where to go, and I wanted to and I reconnected just like that. But most of the time I don't bother. 

I'm sad that Whitney died before her time, but in the way I'm connected to my little village, I knew it was coming. We all did, I mean, common sense and TMZ could tell you that. But she was trying to be more than she could be and succeeded. That makes you paranoid, especially when you realize how close you are to your little village. Hard to explain, that. But when all the people seem like little people, especially the ones you are supposed to love and respect - the ones you are supposed to keep in mutual check, power, wealth and fame are deadly. It's hard to resist doing the unthinkable when your success is singular. When everybody buys the package, you become immune to their thinking. And that is what has happened to my people. We got away with it. From Denzel on down. Well, I don't really mean Denzel, I mean Skip Gates. I mean the caretakers of The Positive Black Image.

You see, it happened. Everybody wanted it to happen. Everybody wanted Whitney to be what she wasn't - she wasn't Dionne Warwick. Whitney wasn't a complete pig; the lipstick worked. The Positive Black Image was credible, not just for Whitney but for a generation who saw Bill Cosby as Dad. It went from Sidney Poitier to Bill Cosby with Eddie Murphy in the middle. Eddie didn't have to care, and so he didn't try so much to keep up appearances - which was why his Dr Doolittle was so brilliant and good. But maintainers of the Positive Black Image needed Whitney, in the same desparate way they now need the Obamas even more.

But there's a loose and somewhat disaffected cadre out there in fine clothing and smooth diction who slip in and out of the dialect without straining. And I hope, as long as I've ignored them, that they are robust in their ability not to take themselves too seriously, but love what they have. Whenever I post a picture of my family here or on Facebook, I'm indulging that Old School select village privilege. I used to talk of aggregation and thought as most of us did, that we would all hang out by Nisky Lake in the ATL and swap Boule stories like some blackified Bohemian Club. Yes, my brother what are we taking over this year? It's happening, and it's not. 

My boy (well, he used to be my boy) was just at the White House the other day. I caught the photo on Flipbook. My other boy (well, one degree of separation) is running for DA of LA. We're not actually running things according to any plan, but we're running things. It's a fragile network. It's a good word. It can easily be broken, like speaking out of school - a school that almost exists. Yes I've always called it the Old School, and like balls, strikes, racism and gay marriage, it's all socially constructed. Real but not real. It's just a conventional understanding of things that you shouldn't really take too seriously, nor should you ignore it for too long. 

They said, back in 1968, that all I have to do is be black, pay taxes and die. But it turns out that two those things can actually be ignored, and Jesus has a promise about the third. The conventions we attach to them are ephemera, but we're always curious to know how are you going to live in spite of them? What's going to be your image, and how seriously are you going to play the role? As Cobb readers know, I tend to be about *do* rather than *be*, but in this matter the Stoic takes over. After all, with those inevitables you are going to do them one way or another. So attitude matters. How do you feel about all this? Are you going to be alright? 

The Old School. The maintainers of the Positive Black Image, the exclusive village of the Talented Tenth origins and keepers of all things dignified and uplifting suffered a catastrophic symbolic earthquake with the death of Whitney Houston. But we knew it was coming, and we know it will come again when the manipulations of our social capital are revealed again as they will be in the future. But it's OK, because we really never needed to change the whole world. We just aimed for it. We will be revealed to be frail, damaged and all of the glory about us that people wanted to believe beyond the limits of our gifts and ability to perform, well that glory will fade. And we'll all be a little bit more sad, and a little more real, and then we can finally be only but always what our true talents fated us to be. There will be only ordinary drama and normal tragedy, simple success and standard victories. That's what equality will feel like.

So I am recovering the ordinary dreams of ordinary successful black Americans with a cold eye but a warm heart. There's always something good to appreciate about talent, but we can all do without the symbolism. Whitney Houston is dead. Dead like Elvis.  May their estates continue to sell records, but not sociology. Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. What's wrong with that?

Newt's Decency

I knew that Gingrich won the NC primary, but I didn't know until tonight that he threw CNN's John King to the gators. 

Gingrich is the most peculiar of the candidates. On the one hand, he is an insider's insider having been the Speaker of the House. In that role, ushering in the Contract With America, he went balls to the wall on Federal spending in a game of brinksmanship that brings back chills. On the other hand, he has been making rounds in the media brainstorming ideas that make even Robert Reich say, hey am I really talking to a Republican here? He has a real personal life, meaning he's not *even* trying to look like some Stepford President. (and I'm probably abusing the metaphor). Conservative ideologues and hardliners dont' think he's 'Conservative' enough - and what that means is that Social Conservatives don't think so, which to my reckoning is a plus.

But this is really about Gingrich's moment in thowing the media to the dogs and putting them on notice that he will not be cowed by their bull. Everybody on the Right knows that the media has been soft bigots for the low performance of President Obama on a number of critical issues. So finally he took the stage and reversed the sexual chokehold that the Hollywood Left thinks is a game-changer for what they presume conservatives to be, and left them tapping out. We've even had a little bit of that screwy perception here at Cobb, but it can be instructive to show exactly what kind of Conservatism Gingrich will demonstrate in his campaign. 

This may have been the moment, as with the Army-McCarthy hearings, that the decency of the people asking questions has been astutely brought into focus.

The Galston Memorandum

I have reached the point in my research where I pretty much know the outlines of the useful arguments in my areas of interest down to the level of citable text. That is to say, I've become pretty good at identifying thinkers and theories. The rest is technojargon for academic researchers and world class practitioners, of which I am neither. Technojargon is expensive because researchers and practitioner's time is valuable and the temptation to instruct is often overcome by practical incentives. In other words who's got time for writing a book when there's time to get paid actually building stuff? For those who can't actually build - whose job it is just to write books.. well those books cost even more. 

McWhorter today commented about comments by somebody named Rick Santorum. I don't know Santorum in the way most Americans do, and don't really care to. Santorum was quoting (or paraphrasing) William A. Galston who made a point very clear back before 2002:

Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty—finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.

Anyway, the researcher at Brookings published his findings earlier than 2008, I have an article from City Journal in 2002 that cites Galston, who worked for Clinton, BTW. Still, what's more interesting to me is that I read this exact same prescription back when I was in college in the 80s. The author? None other than Thomas Sowell.  
 
So here's your interesting situation. You have a white Republican in 2012 talking about something a white Democrat said 10 years earlier which was just a repetition of something a black economist said 20 years earlier, and people here on the Root 30 years ignorant of a solution that has been out there for a generation pretending to be insulted by a common sense truth that my dead grandparents knew.  

You can't get the actual Galston research is secreted behind the firewall of academic publication as I mentioned before but you can get an idea of where to purchase it if you check here at Google Scholar. 

And keep in mind that American poverty is pretty damned good, which is why sociologists have to study people at 185% of poverty. 

Mr. Unsmooth

David Frum has a theory about why Mitt Romney is so awkward. 

 

Rahm Before 2008

The Democrats' "New Direction". Listen to the whole 8 minutes. Did Obama do any of that? Especially note where he suggests the partition of Iraq. Amazing. 

Chris Kyle: The New and Last American Soldier Archtype

The first chapters of American Sniper are a perfectly suited introduction to the aw shucks, God, Country Family school of American kickass manhood. It is mind-bendingly simple to understand exactly why this nation will continue to be greatly defended for generations to come, because anyone who reads Chris Kyle's book and knows where Kyle is coming from (I do!) will recognize in a heartbeat the kind of Texas cowboy we will always have millions of. Kyle himself would never tell you that he's a one man army, but he is just the kind to fill the top ranks of the best army on the planet so long as it's funded.

There's only a little to say about the metastory here, as I will be slightly intrigued but much informed and entertained by the story to come. That is that you see in Kyle's story, the new soldier - the prototype by which humanity will be defended for generations to come.

He is not an outsider. He is not from the dregs of society. He loves his father and his family - his is not desperate for approval. He rises to the challenges of defending his country, and it makes all the difference that he is a volunteer and that this remains a free country. So long as our military institutions retain their transgenerational links, then they will be the fuel that will power militaries of the future. We must hope and indeed pray that armies comprised of such free men will remain victorious from here on.

It's corny. It's easy to understand. Because of that we are most fortunate. We retain the formula. He's just a fighter and he hates to lose. He understands that he has become a weapon and he is serious about his patriotic committment. His mission is a job and he is remorseless and relentless. He understands the deal of morality he has made, and he values an American life first. That is the kernel of it. The rest is training and experience, and now his knowhow is plowed back into instruction. That, my fellows, is a professional, and that is what we want our military forces to be. 

Are those Raybans or Oakleys?

Obama's Fascist Temptation Revisited

About four years ago, when I cared a great deal more passionately about the foolishishness of the American electorate I was stunned to discover a sort of childish petulance that needed to slapped around, but was instead coddled by that rudderless gadfly who soon became the Democratic Nominee and then President. I had reasons to be somewhere between upset and merely despondant at the man himself, but I was clearly revolted and disgusted by his shallow partisans and their Black Eyed Peas remixes. I wondered out loud if a man who clearly had no political philosophy outside of expedience would take advantage of such a shalllow set of questioners such as those lobbed to him by the mainstream press. You remember calling me shrill, don't you? Yes, because I used I used the same term as Jonah Goldberg.

Today I think is a good time to look back and play gotcha, and I'm going to do it with a particularly snarky article (this one by New York Magazine). Well, actually I'm not going to reprint it, except to excerpt the following bits.

Then why is Obama doing this to us?
Actually, Obama says he won't ever use the power to detain American citizens indefinitely, because, in his words, doing so "would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation."

So if he thinks the law is so bad, did he sign it as a prank? Ha ha, you thought I was going to shred the Constitution! That's pretty funny, actually. Not as good as the classic Elijah Wood episode ofPunk'd, but almost. 
Is MTV literally the only channel you watch?

Sometimes MTV2.
Obama actually threatened to veto the legislation at first, but after the language was softened enough that he could essentially ignore it, he signed it. Also, it was embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act, a larger bill that funded the military, and he couldn't very well appear as if he didn't want to fund the military, especially in an election year in which the GOP will likely try to portray him as some kind of peacenik.

But if he's not going to use it, then it's all good — no harm no foul.
Except that the next president might not have a problem with detaining American citizens indefinitely, and now that the bill is law, he or she will have the explicit authorization to do so.

There have got to be some smarter liberals out there than this fake dialog exemplifies, but it demonstrates the nature of what passes for political debate in major media. The essential gravity is that Obama is to be trusted but nobody else can be, when in fact it is clear that Obama was elected on the strength of his campaign's rhetorical opposition to just this sort of legislation. I understand that we're all supposed to be cynical about what politicians do and say, but reactionary cynicism is just as bad as ignorance; in either case you shutup and let injustice happen. 

The cost of abandoning the GWOT policy of GWBush is already manifest in the deteriorating situation in Iraq and there will be no simple way to arrest that. And I tend to believe that the significant Al Qaeda threat in America has been crippled to the point at which a strong President could ask Americans to keep calm and carry on. But ours is not the sort of President that asks average Americans to perservere, he sees himself as the deliverer of cosmic justice, a rescuer, a Robin Hood. And so this is how he selects to keep his halo lit.

This is the President who leads from behind the polling of the least thoughtful Americans, and he has squeezed every internet nickel from them with his populist slogans and ran the most expensive presidential campaign in history to conjure up the biggest government budget in history which creates the biggest deficit as a percentage of GDP in American peacetime. I wish he had a real political philosophy. That way we could hold the electorate more responsible to him by disciplining their expectations within the context of proven ways to run goverenment. But what we have is an electorate that has become trained to hew to the words of anyone sufficiently radical who casts doubts on the status quo without having a demonstrated and superior alternative with any philosophical or practical pedigree. It is a cycle of desparation rooted in unreality and only connected to the enthusiasm of the mob.

That is the road to fascism. The question is whether or not Obama can craft out something that disciplines the electorate to its benefit. If he cannot but continues his populist themes, he will have taken one step closer to "power of the people by any means necessary, embodied by me". 

Let's watch how he elbows through the next crisis and with what justifications.

Who Is Gary Johnson?

More than half the battle of doing good politically is getting past the volume of noise generated by the reactionaries on the other side of the aisle. The reactionaries have certain predominance in the mediasphere because today's responsive media is attuned to that thing I like to call Short Attention Span Theater. This essentially means that soundbites are all that are required (and a soundbite's worth of wit) to get your message on blast. It goes from bad to worse considering Twitter and Facebook and other instant media. 

So this is why you haven't heard of Gary Johnson. Not good, nor ill. He just happens to be a candidate for President this time around. So far I like what I see, and this is the second time I have been impressed with the governor of New Mexico. There was no question in my mind that last time around, Bill Richardson was the most qualified and reasonable candidate that the Democrats fielded. What people wanted me to do for Obama, I would have gladly done for Richardson, but the Democrats foreclosed that possibility for reasons that remain murky to me. 

New Mexico looks better and better to me as I age. Something about that state is growing magical. So here is to hope that Gary Johnson shows some class with the airtime he will gain in the next few weeks, as more people start to ask who he is.

BTW. Did I hear right or is Condi considering VP offers?

I'm Rich, Bitch! - A Peasant Theory Overview

According to the NYTimes version of popular opinion, most people would say that I'm rich. And considering what I used to think of somebody in my position, I would have been one of those people. But I don't believe it.

I'd like to think of myself as one of The Slice, the talented segment of society who, by their work, keep actual rich people rich. So let me elaborate a bit about my Peasant Theory while I'm keeping this stuff in mind.

The Origins of the Peasant Theory
I originated the Peasant Theory thinking about what Americans would do if the lights went out. It was also part and parcel of my observation as an emergent minority who has made the best of class mobility over the course of my life. What does the Average American expect? What does he have a right to expect? What would he get if America was not super wealthy, and how big is that gap? One enabling metaphor was that of the National Superhighway System.

It's well known that the Interstates were all built to a specification so that battle tanks could be deployed across the country, if it ever came to that. So our highways are strong and smooth - even though the tanks don't need them to be so smooth. Having a car and the ability to drive across country is a side benefit of the military strategic plan of the powers that be. In fact, an ordinary Joe can afford to buy a cheap motorcycle (as in Easy Rider) and get across country. But that is a privilege of him glomming on to something that wasn't built with him in mind and his ability to cross country owes nothing to his native ability to travel. In short, he's a peasant that doesn't have to think or work hard to cross the country, and were it not for the strategic infrastructure of America, the military superpower, he would be stuck in his hometown. Remember that battle tanks don't need highways at all, let alone superhighways. They'd get along fine with dirt roads or no roads, but Fonda's chopper would get nowhere.

So I started to think about this phenomenon in all parallels for emergent classes of Americans. What can we expect in America that we couldn't expect elsewhere and what politics is considered legitimate, what culture is considered legitimate, what education is considered legitimate that is not actually self-sustaining but a consequence of the fact of America's power? In other words what is the difference between a peasant and a free man? What must the free man know and do for himself that the peasant doesn't bother with?

This is a view of society and of mankind that exists independently of our traditional measures of socio-economic class. And it is in this way that I seek to understand people throughout history - with specific regard to their Foucaultian relationship to regimes of power and truth. Are we really free, or are we merely riding in the comfortable belly of the beast? For me, the best way to make the distinction is to consider how people make themselves useful to the powers that be. This is consistent with feudal hierarchies going back throughout history. And what I have concluded is that there is the Slice in every society, just as there are sovereign powers and peasants in every society. What may become absolutely fascinating is whether the Slice can become autonomous. But let's leave that discussion for another day.

Class in America
When I look at the standard definitions of class I have basically started with a compressed version for black Americans. These are from top to bottom {Hill, Burbs, Hood, Ghetto, Projects/Sticks} It was conveniently five, but there's probably enough reason to split Projects and Sticks into their own separate categories. My upbringing was in the Hood, in the shadow of the Hill, but with ample distance from the Ghetto.  I think I live in the Burbs, but perhaps I live on the Hill considering the priceyness of this particular Burb. By the way, I've always considered $300,000 to be rich. In my mind you make that kind of money not just being a doctor, lawyer or businessman, but a *good* doctor, lawywer or businessman. Be all that as it may (and not so crucially important) these follow a kind of 'geography / demographics as destiny' sort of thinking that was useful in my investigations of redlining (with the subheader 'American Apartheid' c.f. Massey & Denton) and my own national search for the right place to raise my family. It also played along the dialogs of 'mentality' for those interminable internecine discussions about proper blackness. 

The larger picture was not incedentally part of the rumnations of comedian Chris Rock who spoke about the difference between 'rich' and 'wealthy', and of course by Dave Chapelle from whose comic bit the title of this essay comes. So from that perspective, the top down view of all of America is {Wealthy, Rich, MiddleClass, Poor, Indigent}. What's most important about this selection is that I think of it directly in terms of the capacity of an individual of one class to assist a member of another, it is my rule of Each One Teach One. 

The rule works like this. If you are wealthy, you can move someone from the middle class into the rich class. But it is unlikely, without threatening your own position that you can make someone rich wealthy. Similarly and pointedly at liberal politics, if you are middle class, you can make someone who is indigent poor, but you can't make someone who is poor middle class without threating your own position. Similarly if you are rich you can make someone poor middle class. These are, in my mind, hard and fast economic laws - and like the speed of light, they are regularly abused in fantasy fiction but are never broken in reality.

Weath and Freedom
Let's start with rich - because it is the baseline of freedom looking at the high side of Boyd's Razor. (If you want to be free, there are two ways you can do so, you can be rich or you can reduce your needs to zero). I'll deal with the low side later. A rich man is free, and he will remain free so long as the powers that be respect his freedom. A rich man must defend his riches, he must have some skill in that regard no matter how he acquired them. But the most important aspect of riches are that they enable freedom in the civilized world. A rich man can employ others to assist him in accomplishing anything he desires - there are no basic things he cannot afford. Essentially, a rich man can fund his own destiny. I use such vague terms because I'm not trying to think in terms of affluence in the context of a consumer society, but in terms of the broad and general affairs of man. What can a man who is not oppressed do? What might he want to do with his freedom? Whether such things are wise or foolish, the free man is not constrained by his own lack of financial wherewithal.

Wealth and Work
The inspirational thought presaging this essay was the idea that if I am to be considered 'rich', which I don't think I am, there has got to be two kinds. Working rich and idle rich, and I am most definitely in the former category.  The same can be considered, to a lesser defining degree of the working and idle wealthy. But I suspect that the idle wealthy tend to use a bit less of the Slice than the working wealthy. The business of the world, it seems to me, is more dependent on the machinations of the wealthy whether they work or not. The Slice are the enablers, the demiurges of human affairs. I think much more depends upon their moral decisions - to the extent that they are to offer their services for the various masters they might have. 

So there it is, basically.

 

Herman Cain for America: Dead

When I was a kid and we played football on the lawn at Virginia Road School, the right sideline was the sidewalk and the left sideline was made of bushes and shrubbery. Every once in a while there would be some kid that for some reason we didn't particularly like. If they crossed the line, we would bush them. Instead of tackling them on the grass near the sideline, we'd smack them wholly into the thorns and briars off the left sideline. 

Herman Cain once had a television ad that brilliantly showed his face in close-up turning into a broad smile. That one should be playing in reverse right about now. He has been bushed. 

It's marginally sad. I liked Cain's campaign for its iconic 'smoker ad'. Cain himself was (always was now) not slick, stuck to the issues when he could, and never gave the impression that he was entitled to anyone's attention. He wasn't a zealous missionary and he wasn't overly reliant on bunting and baby kissing. But he was no John B. Anderson.

Cain was slow. He hadn't mastered the ability to have a snappy answer to stupid questions, reroute, redirect and command the conversation. This is something Hillary Clinton has to the fault of not being able to answer a direct question with a direct answer. Cain asked us all to take a leap of faith that he was a *doer* and not a *negotiator*. Uh. Wrong answer Mr. Candidate. Because Cain was slow, he could get caught on an overburdened phrase. He needed to churn out more and therefore dilute the impact of his verbiage. Kind of like Romney in 08, except that Romney kept saying the same damned thing. Sigh. I guess I'm going to have to listen to see if he's gotten any better.

As I said before, Cain never impressed me as the sort of person with the deep desire to be a public servant. And so the degree to which he ginned that up in his campaign can now be laid aside, and he can go back to some measure of anonymity. I would suggest the South of France. 

--

There are people commenting that race was a big deal in the Cain campaign, and it's only true in a post-modern sense - there is an economy of wish-fulfillment entertained by a wholly impractical electorate. All I can say is that the liberal regime remains in command of that bullshit narrative, which was nicely revealed in the Economist piece I posted the other day.

The short and sweet nut of that is that for some politically defensible reason, all black Americans in politics are assumed to have a great burden of debt to the inflated champions of the Civil Rights Movement and their legacies starring the likes of Congressman Alcee Hastings, an incumbent from Florida going on 19 years. I mean how can you be a legitimate black American politician if you don't have sponsors in the CBC? If Maxine Waters doesn't like you, how can you call yourself black? Such rhetorical questions are written in stone which has yet to be shattered, while Republicans like Allen West are chipping away. But you see those questions are never asked of Asians. Everybody in America and many people around the world have benefited from the American Civil Rights Movement but only blacks are asked to bow down.

There's a great line in the new Starz show 'Boss'. One day the Hispanic alderman takes one of his boys out golfing. He talks about golf starting off with flamboyant sytles of dress, but then becoming conservative over time. That's the mark of progress and sophistication. Are there any sports where the uniforms don't calm down over time? Ice Dancing answers one of this protoges. Yes, ice dancing is the exception that proves the rule. He then talks about the tradition in American ethnic politics. That everybody starts out flamboyant but sooner or later they wear the uniform. The Jews, the Irish, the Italians and now the Hispanics. What about the blacks? The alderman responds, "The blacks are the exception, the blacks are like ice dancing." 

Yes. In everything, the blacks are the exception. We're too big to be anything but everything we are. The first mistake is not to recognize that. There is nothing black about Cain and there is everything black about Cain. It just depends on your political definition of 'black', which by the way makes no difference to me and I would guess probably not to Cain. The loose rule is that any black American bold enough to declare for the Republicans against the orthodox liberal narrative, is less likely to care for those very definitions. 

If Cain utters a word about the racial context somewhere down the line, you'll hear it on black radio and elsewhere. 

The Responsible 1% of the 99%

Witness the NYCGA - the New York City General Assembly -the leadership and coordinating & funding center of the the most legitimate OWS faction that exists, the original one in New York. We'll see how long they keep their books open. 

Their working manifesto:

What follows is a living document that will be revised through democratic process of General Assembly.

On September 17, 2011, people from all across the United States of America and the world came to protest the blatant injustices of our times perpetuated by the economic and political elites.  On the 17th we as individuals rose up against political disenfranchisement and social and economic injustice.  We spoke out, resisted, and successfully occupied Wall Street.  Today, we proudly remain in Liberty Square constituting ourselves as autonomous political beings engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love.  It is from these reclaimed grounds that we say to all Americans and to the world, Enough! How many crises does it take? We are the 99% and we have moved to reclaim our mortgaged future.

Through a direct democratic process, we have come together as individuals and crafted these principles of solidarity, which are points of unity that include but are not limited to:

• Engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy;
• Exercising personal and collective responsibility;
• Recognizing individuals’ inherent privilege and the influence it has on all interactions;
• Empowering one another against all forms of oppression;
• Redefining how labor is valued;
• The sanctity of individual privacy;
• The belief that education is human right; and
• Endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source.

We are daring to imagine a new socio-political and economic alternative that offers greater possibility of equality.  We are consolidating the other proposed principles of solidarity, after which demands will follow.

¹ The Working Group on Principles of Consolidation continues to work through the other proposed principles to be incorporated as soon as possible into this living document.This is an official document crafted by the Working Group on Principles of Consolidation. The New York City General Assembly came to consensus on September 23rd to accept this working draft and post it online for public consumption.

To find out more about recent items presented at the General Assembly, please read the General Assembly minutes.

Interested in starting your own General Assembly in your area? Here is a quick guide to starting a General Assembly from Takethesquare.net.

Now we can have a handle on what OWS actually intends to mean, be and do. 

185% Poverty

I came upon a bit of statistical propaganda today - all for a good cause of course. I was re-introduced to the term 'Food Security'. What the heck is 'food security'? Are the people hungry or not? Are they starving or just hungry?

I leave it to you as an exercise to get a handle around the concept. I will do it in terms of historical comparison. Which is to say, to flesh out my Peasant Theory int he context of what Americans take for granted and what the world standard for hunger and poverty actually is. Always in the back of my mind is the Gapminder. By world standards, poverty is defined as living on less than $2 per day. Yes that's two.  So ask yourself, while you are watching one of the Discovery Channel survival shows exactly how many calories you really need. Since we live in America nobody really says. Wolfram says anywhere between 1600 and 2800. Everywhere on the web there are Body Mass Index calculators which are just guides to help you become slim by convincing you that you are overweight. But that's not about the biological facts of what is necessary for you to survive. So such a wide range makes me want to hazard a guess, but I won't. I'll just say that hunger is relative. Consider the following survey question:

 “We relied on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed our children because we were running out of money to buy food.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

Hell, I ate mackerel when I was a kid because we couldn't afford Chicken of the Sea. We endured the shame of shopping at Lucky Supermarkets and ate plain wrap. Horror of horrors.

Fortunately, there is some nice transparency if you want to dig into the matter. A reasonably complete accounting of the terms and methods can be found at the USDA. Since I look at boundary conditions, I immediately went to check out Wilcox County, Alabama which had the highest rate of food insecurity in America - something on the order of 38 percent. It turns out that Wilcox County's population has been shrinking since after WW2 and is now about 11,000 folks with only 13 people per square mile. I'm not surprised that there are people who miss meals in Alabama, and it stands to reason that when you're that far out in the sticks, there ain't much work nor an easy way to get McNuggets. 

What strikes me when I read such matters (and in parallel, I'm reading Niall Ferguson's latest book which reveals that in 16th Century Western Europe the murder rate was 50/100,000 and the average height of a Frenchman was 5' 4") is how it is somewhat relativistic. In particular, coming across this particular paragraph was remarkable:

While children are usually shielded from the disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake that characterize very low food security, both children and adults experienced instances of very low food security in 1.0 percent of households with children (386,000 households) in 2010, essentially unchanged from 1.2 percent in 2009. However, among households with children in which incomes were below 185 percent of the poverty line, the percentage with very low food security among children declined from 2.9 percent in 2009 to 2.1 percent in 2010. 

Several observations:

1. I recall that there are 119M households in America. About 38M have children. 

2. Incomes below 185% of the poverty line.. OK the poverty line is not a line so much as a matrix. Here's the matrix:

 

 

Size of family unit	100  Percent of Poverty	110  Percent of Poverty	125  Percent of Poverty	150  Percent of Poverty	175  Percent of Poverty	185 Percent of Poverty	200 Percent of Poverty
1	$10,830	$11,913	$13,538	$16,245	$18,953	$20,036	$21,660
2	$14,570	$16,027	$18,213	$21,855	$25,498	$26,955	$29,140
3	$18,310	$20,141	$22,888	$27,465	$32,043	$33,874	$36,620
4	$22,050	$24,255	$27,563	$33,075	$38,588	$40,793	$44,100
5	$25,790	$28,369	$32,238	$38,685	$45,133	$47,712	$51,580
6	$29,530	$32,483	$36,913	$44,295	$51,678	$54,631	$59,060
7	$33,270	$36,597	$41,588	$49,905	$58,223	$61,550	$66,540
8	$37,010	$40,711	$46,263	$55,515	$64,768	$68,469	$74,020

 

 

 

So apparently it's a regular thing to not just talk about poverty, but people who are near to poverty. We are being statistically inclusive when we talk about 'the poor'. 

An old friend of mine used to joke about the 'LA Poverty Line' which for single hale fellows well met was 36K in 1985. By which we meant that our basic necessities included a sporty automobile and a nice apartment near the beach. Both of us celebrated when we rose above that 'poverty' line. And while today we can easily be considered to be part of the 5%, what I refer to as The Slice, it's clear that while we were joking about poverty inflation, others in the government were not and are not. 

Clearly it would be an abomination to inflate America's baseline poverty rate to something like the 150% or 185% levels. But we accomodate the public interest in fractions above 1% by including the inflated poverty benchmarks. It *is* interesting to know that food security in the 185% poverty category for children decreased 80 basis points from 2009 to 2010 from 2.9 to 2.1% - even though most of the general public doesn't use the term 'basis point'. 

I think I would actually like to see the return of plain wrap, but they'd compete with store brands and probably wouldn't do so well. The American poor. How poor are they?

Spank!

posted without comment.

Herman Cain's America: Eyeglasses, Moustaches & Cigarettes

About four years ago, I had a belly laugh. It was the first time a candidate for president made me crack up. The moment belonged to Fred Thompson on the occasion of him putting his foot in the butt of Michael Moore on health care. It was practically Churchillian in flavor. Unfortunately Thompson had none of Churchill's luck or longevity and fell over.

It was not the first time I had marked my sentiments for the time when America would tire of slick politicians and think about somebody with a moustache. As sick as I get of dainty utopians and their manicured dreams, I knew some kind of catastrophe would be necessary for Americans to finally elect somebody with real working class credentials. When they elected Obama, I could only hope his disaster would show Americans finally to get rid of slick, fast-talking, Ivy League, pontificators. I want an America confident enough in itself to vote for a Mike Ditka instead of some Armani role-model. I want an American president who drinks Jack Daniels.

This is an advertisement that I thought I'd never see in my lifetime. Non-slick. Non-corny. Maybe America has learned its lesson. This will be a lightning strike across the land. I think it could very well make Herman Cain the inheritor of Sarah Palin's mob, and another little bit of my heart.

Obama the Hack

David Brooks. Him say

Obama faced a choice. Double down on conciliator mode or become a fighter. Think of the latter as the Bibi Netanyahu strategy: since I have no negotiating partner I’m going to come out swinging in a way that pleases my base.

If Obama were a Republican, he could win with this sort of strategy: Repeat your party’s most orthodox positions and then rip your opponent to shreds. Republicans can win a contest between an orthodox Republican and an orthodox Democrat because they have the trust in government issue on their side.

Democrats do not have that luxury. The party of government cannot win an orthodox vs. orthodox campaign when 15 percent of Americans trust government. It certainly can’t do it presiding over 9 percent unemployment. It’s suicide.

Yet this is the course the Obama campaign has chosen. He’s campaigning these days as the populist fighter, the scourge of the privileged class.

That makes him easy to beat, actually. Obama cannot win a second term on his record, and he can't win by promising to be a healer again. He needs a miracle, which could only be delivered by the continued abject poverty of spirit in the Republican candidates.

Tax Loopholes & Social Progress

I think most people hate tax loopholes because companies figure out how to use them. But when it comes to tax loopholes for themselves... well.

Argument #1
The entire financial crisis can be considered as part of the result of giving one massive tax loophole to Americans. That would be the mortgage credit. Everybody knows that the financial crisis was initiated because of the failure of housing prices and the increased default rate among mortgage holders. But what got all of those people into the mortgage game in the first place. Well, we always talk about how greedy banks approved ninja loans and burdensome ARM rates. But part of that equation was the fact that all of the families in that game knows they get a huge income tax deduction on their house payment. It is the single largest income tax deduction American families get. Bigger than earned income, bigger than child deductions, and it is especially the case for those sub-prime lendees who spend more than the recommended 30% of their income on their mortgage (and mortgage insurance and all that).  

People going out and getting mortgages is what the government is trying to make you do. That's why they give a tax break for you doing it. 

Argument  #2
Corporations who pay no tax are doing exactly what the government wants them to do. If you believe that what the government wants is good for society, then you should be happiest with those corporations that comply the most with government incentives. 

--

When I think about Argument #2 it makes me think about why a flat tax would be very difficult to achieve. First of all, closing loopholes would remove the incentives that companies now have for their behavior. Secondly, it would cost the government power.

You see, when considering the difference between regulation and tax incentives, it is clear to me that tax incentives are easier to do. If you want a company to give public transportation discounts to their employees, you (the Governnment) could do it three ways.

1. You could write that into the tax code.
2. You could write it into regulatary statutes.
3. You could do it yourself.

If you did #3 that means you would have to setup a new agency or new function at a current agency, everywhere. You'd have to hire and train people, buy property or expand current facilities and run all that it takes to get new bus and train passes to millions of Americans.

Or you could have America's companies do it for you. 

If you go with #2, you'd have to provide some kind of enforcement and that means inspections and fines and bringing cases to court for violators. You'd get higher compliance for sure, but..

#3 is a win-win. Just change the tax code and let the facts be known. Already H&R Block and a boat load of tax attorneys everywhere are on retainer by companies everywhere to let them know all of the tax breaks they can get. The effect is that government subsidizes public transportation all the same just by giving up some tax revenues. Compliance is volunatary and the company bears the cost of training and distribution of all those free passes.

Now think of all of the government work in this vein that would get destroyed if you simplified the tax code in the way Herman Cain proposed. Who on Congress is going to give up the win-win way of getting what the government wants out of American business?

Fire Insurance for Everyone

If I had to describe the root of all our financial difficulties in two sentences they would be:

1. The linchpin in America's financial system was that it assumed that in the worst of times only 3, or maybe 4% of Americans would stop paying their mortgages.
2. When that number DOUBLED to 6% the whole system froze up. 

Now, let's use one more simple analogy. This from Lingales. All of the dicey CDOs, swaps etc were all hedged risk. In short, they were nothing more or less than insurance policies against mortgage defaults. The net effect was some four fools bought four separate insurance policies on the same house. When the 6% f America's houses burned down (against all the odds and anybody's best guess) all of those policies could not possibly pay off. So the all of the insurers were headed for certain failure. Except that 'we' wouldn't let them fail, because, analogously speaking, we would have no more such thing as fire insurance. And we couldn't have that, now could we?

What we have essentially done now, is to use the 'full faith and credit of the USA' aka Treasury Bonds to use instead of fire insurance, and given the all those insurers a bailout via low interest rates and cash until they get on their feet. But the cost of all those insurance payouts have now been transferred from Wall Street to the US Treasury (meaning you Mr. Taxpayer) - mind you without much work being really done on making any houses more fireproof. 

So all of these corruptions the OWS crowd will inevitably find are just kids playing with matches. The larger problem remains unsolved. Which is how do you stop from over-insuring against 'fire' i.e. financial failure?The problem isn't that capitalism is broken. The problem is psychologically, we don't like the consequences of losing the wealth it produces. We like playing with fire. We just don't like getting burned. Nobody does. So we keep insuring against getting burned. 

The problem is that you can't. Because this is America, and most Americans believe they can guarantee anything. That's why Obama was elected because he promised he could guarantee healthcare insurance for everyone. And this is the fundamental problem.

Everybody in OWS is suffering from the exact same illusion that caused the problem in the first place. They believe in guarantees. They believe that all you have to do is find the right sucker (or class of taxpayers, or government agency, or Wall Street company, or Buffet-like billionaire) who will pay a little bit more for the guarantee. 

It is not the desire for security that causes our ruin, it is the implacable demand for it.

Listen to the rhetoric and you will see the fragile state of the American soul. We demand infinite recourse against all slights and offenses. Against fat in the food at McDonalds. Against incompetence in the teachers in free public schools. Against offensive remarks and jokes. Against the very presence of unwanted people from undesireable countries. Against unbelievers. Against believers. Against the possibility of dying of cancer. Against the belly fat you get from AIDS medication. We have become a nation of infants with zero tolerance for pain. So somebody has got to pay.

Today is a good day to be a grifter. That is because all the yellers and screamers want to hear is how somebody screwed up and made their life miserable. All a grifter has to do is agree and sell them an insurance policy against that somebody, write up some legal fine print that says 'you take your chances' and voila - there's an app for that. 

The Credit Crisis Explained Without Nuance

This is a good overview, but fails to show exactly what the margins are in accurate terms. So what we had was more accurately double the default rate, from about a 2% default rate to a 4% default rate. So that's one point. The second point was that this failed to show any government complicity in this with regard to the role of Fannie and Freddie as rating mortgages and what political motivations were to increase the size and scope of Ninja loans (no job, no income) and changes to the rules of 'conforming' loans. It also failed to show what segments of the market were actually bought by investors - it only showed the difference on the rate of returns between Treasuries and CDOs which are only a fraction of the investment vehicles out there. It did nothing to show how the second trust deed market contributed to putting houses underwater or which credit markets were affected.

I think most importantly, this clip didn't show the extent to which different Wall Street firms and banks were exposed to bad assets, the whole mark to market controversy and the specific way in which the Fed determined who would get what amount of bailout money no matter what their exposure. In other words, in terms of demonizing 'Wall Street' it makes for good propaganda to suggest that everybody was playing the same game to the same extent, when in fact banks were forced to take TARP money to keep all that secret.

Still, it gets the fundamental connections right, but anybody who thinks they have a good idea on exactly which part of this business to regulate and to what degree based on this cartoon is way way off base.

A New Class of Stock

I just had a bit of genius idea. I'll share it.

(I keep writing stuff on Google+ which swallows up my comments and gives me no way to search for them). I've been considering the similarities and differences between the Tea Partiers and the 99ers. I have less sympathy for the 99ers because they don't know their enemies and are even more incoherent than the Tea Party rabble. But within their ridiculously large scope of concerns are some legitimate ones about public bailouts.

In one of those discussions on G+, somebody mentioned the pain problem of golden parachutes, with which I actually have no beef. No corporation dispenses with all that moolah if it needs it. In other words, no board of directors worth beans would allow for a CEO or other exec to take shareholder money out of the corporation. But then you have to ask questions about shares...

What if corporations, in order to receive a lower tax bracket, were required to issue a certain fraction of their shares as voting shares? And what if these voting shares could not be proxied? That would mean that such corporations, in putting significant questions before the shareholders would have to hold the sort of elections that probably have not been possible. But we can certainly do that with our new technologies.

This would bridge the gap between the foolishness of these populist movements and the recklessness of the boards of directors by empowering shareholders.

I Am Not Troy Davis

Apparently a black man was killed. 

There was some purpose in his killing, and some people felt it was the right thing to do, and some other people felt it was a waste of a human life. I have no opinion on the matter because I haven't bothered to look. Nevertheless, the head of the NAACP as well as the editors at The Root felt that it was important to put themselves in his shoes - this dead black man named Troy Davis.

On the surface, which I'm fairly certain that some Cobblers will point out, this is nothing more than a lack of respect and attention paid to the fate of a fellow black American - a particular type of antipathy. Yes, it is. Everyone should know as a prima fascia matter that I have no instant nor global sympathy for people who share my phenotype. Rather, I have sympathy for people with whom I share values. I have no place for the use of race to indicate value, nor for calls for victimhood as a virtue.

So there's the deeper (but only one level) matter. Why should there be any coordinated effort to say "I am Troy Davis". The voice from The Root pretend to represent the voices of the black masses:

Our uneasiness about fairness in America helps explain why Troy Davis became such an obsession in the African-American community, to the bewilderment, if not outright annoyance, of some of our nonblack neighbors. As the hours ticked down, it seemed that all of black America was glued to their televisions, computers, mobile phones and iPads, as if watching a perverse 2011 version of a Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling bout.

Really?

 

Herman Cain from the Kwaku Network

I suspect that one of these days black Americans are going to treat Herman Cain the way they used to treat him before he became prominently known as a Republican, which is to say, a man of great accomplishments. That day may come soon. Witness the following from the Kwaku Network:

Herman Cain is running for president. He’s not a career politician (in fact he has never held political office). He is known as a pizza guy, but there’s a lot more to him. He’s also a computer guy, a banker guy, radio guy, and a rocket scientist guy.

Here’s his bio:

   • Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.

   • Master’s degree in Computer Science.

   • Mathematician for the Navy, where he worked on missile ballistics (making him a rocket scientist).

   • Computer systems analyst for Coca-Cola.

   • VP of Corporate Data Systems and Services for Pillsbury (this is the top of the ladder in the computer world, being in charge of information systems for a major corporation).

All achieved before reaching the age of 35. Since he reached the top of the information systems world, he changed careers!

   • Business Manager. Took charge of Pillsbury’s 400 Burger King restaurants in the Philadelphia area, which were the company’s poorest performers in the country. Spent the first nine months learning the business from the ground up, cooking hamburger and yes, cleaning toilets. After three years he had turned them into the company’s best performers.

   • Godfather’s Pizza CEO. Was asked by Pillsbury to take charge of their Godfather’s Pizza chain (which was on the verge of bankruptcy). He made it profitable in 14 months.

   • In 1988 he led a buyout of the Godfather’s Pizza chain from Pillsbury. He was now the owner of a restaurant chain. Again he reached the top of the ladder of another industry.

   • He was also chairman of the National Restaurant Association during this time. This is a group that interacts with government on behalf of the restaurant industry, and it gave him political experience from the non-politician side.

Having reached the top of a second industry, he changed careers again

    • Adviser to the Federal Reserve System. Herman Cain went to work for the Federal Reserve Banking System advising them on how monetary policy changes would affect American businesses.

   • Chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. He worked his way up to the chairmanship of a regional Federal Reserve bank. This is only one step below the chairmanship of the entire Federal Reserve System (the top banking position in the country). This position allowed him to see how monetary policy is made from the inside, and understand the political forces that impact the monetary system. 

After reaching the top of the banking industry, he changed careers for a fourth time!

   • Writer and public speaker. He then started to write and speak on leadership. His books include Speak as a Leader , CEO of Self , Leadership is Common Sense , and They Think You’re Stupid .

   • Radio Host. Around 2007—after a remarkable 40 year career—he started hosting a radio show on WSB in Atlanta (the largest talk radio station in the country).

He did all this starting from rock bottom (his father was a chauffeur and his mother was a maid). When you add up his accomplishments in his life—including reaching the top of three unrelated industries: information systems, business management, and banking—Herman Cain may have the most impressive resume of anyone that has run for the presidency in the last half century.

 

So while I'm on the subject, I should say that I like his Triple Nine tax plan.

Thinking Too Much About America

I was going to write a 9/11 piece and I haven't really thought of what I wanted to say. But now I see in my periphery a host of productions now starting to pile up. It's almost as if, having done one dastardly deed, Osama has created a new American holiday. Walk it off America, walk it off.

Dennis Miller is the smartest conservative on the radio because he reads people very well. He is one of those rare individuals who can talk with the ordinary Joes and understand how they're twisting themselves up to be something they aren't in the presence of celebrity. It's a sense that I think all stars get, but few handle well. His lesson to me is to go home. When you start getting emotionally involved in something over which you have absolutely no control, go home.

There is something about American democracy that has been tweaked a little too much - given too much attention in the abstract and not enough direct focus. We all feel that we have some right or duty or function in standing up on our hind legs and barking at the moon of America. There's always some pundit that nobody in any American highschool has ever heard of who can, in his market segement of the long tail, go on about 'the problem with American x'. It brings to mind a conversation I had with a psychologist who said that people overuse their strengths in a crisis. When the crapstorm begins, singers will sing, bloggers will blog, complainers will complain, presidents will preside. Except for those at ground zero whose lives are directly affected, we knit up the metathreads into some narrative tapestry whose patterns need to be familiar. Something about our history keeps reminding us that we the people are supposed to be involved in our little part of history.

I don't think so.

I don't want to be harsh, but I think we are bearing burdens our shoulders weren't meant to carry. It has to do with our judgment in the details of things - details we don't care to know and wouldn't make sense of if we were presented with them. And I think we believe a bit too strongly that our positioning is all that significant. It's easy for me to say that we are all peasants and nothing peasants say matters, although what it is we do is the basis of the entire economy. That should be, in it's own way, self-evident.

But what is not self-evident is the extent to which we are actually not getting added value from adding our voices to the democratic end of our national governance. Mind you I see this in more and more things these days. Are newspapers really improving because they have comment sections? Is there really something to be appreciably gained by reading through all that? I'm tending to think not. Rather I think we're all a bit neurotic about describing what's going wrong in America.

The worst part is that all of this is a function of who we are, that is to say, Americans love America but hate the other-Americans polluting this place. What's emerging is all of that literate discontent in e-text.

En Passant: Gloria Molina, as tenured a pol as can possibly exist, is proposing creating a second Hispanic majority minority district.

 

Outlawed Sharia vs Your Sharia

From Tennessee:

This bill defines "sharia" as the set of rules, precepts, instructions, or edicts which are said to emanate directly or indirectly from the god of Allah or the prophet Mohammed and which include directly or indirectly the encouragement of any person to support the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States or Tennessee Constitutions, or the destruction of the national existence of the United States or the sovereignty of this state, and which includes among other methods to achieve these ends, the likely use of imminent violence. Under this bill, any rule, precept, instruction, or edict arising directly from the extant rulings of any of the authoritative schools of Islamic jurisprudence of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali, Ja'afariya, or Salafi, as those terms are used by sharia adherents, is prima facie sharia without any further evidentiary showing.

So what's wrong with that?

MLK In Stone

Someday in our family history it will be recorded that on the day of its inauguration, my neice performed with her orchestra at the dedication ceremony of the MLK Memorial in Washington. And we will have pictures and video and memories to commemorate the realization of the event. The event will live on in the memories of millions and the words and curves cut out of stone will stand for generations. It is the solidification of the promise of liberty and it is a symbol that will endure.

I read the other day the acute observation about the low hopes of people who kept saying that they never thought they would see the day when America would have a black president. It puts me in mind of the kind of black I used to be which was that I always wanted some other black people around. I never wanted to be the only black person around, that way I could be myself instead of trying to represent a good model. After some time I didn't care if I was the only black person around or if people who weren't black didn't know a good role model. It took me some time to realize that it wasn't my responsibility to be a symbol. It is only my responsibility to be true. There have always been, and there will always be great black men and women from whom a perfect example can be taken, and when you stop to think about it, they were just being true. It is the presence of truth we require, not the presence of symbols. 

I belong to the fraternity whose efforts initiated this moment, and I made my contribution. So there are multiple ways in which it is personal to me, this dream made real in rock. But I have my life in America and I have the lives of my family and friends as witness to the daily reality of the defense of my liberty. I know what it is to have the security of a society that will rise to the defense of my rights. I always knew the day would come. 

We are called to remember the deeds of a man of courage, who stood up for what was right in the face of a society out of balance - a man whose deeds forced it to realize that it was out of time. A man who grew up in America, the one nation whose very inception contained reason enough to fix whatever it might become to the contrary.

It is not a statue or words that makes liberty real. It is the spirit of a people, the commerce of a society, the discipline of minds, the steadfast expectations of hearts. It is the unswerving dedication of a nation to exemplify its own creed and to fulfill its explicit promise. Every man woman and child who visits that monument or even contemplates its significance should keep that dream alive in their lives by repeating a pledge in their hearts. You know the pledge. 

Put your right hand over your heart. Ready? Begin. 

 

Azn

I grew up in Crenshaw, which was everybody knew, a black and Japanese neighborhood.

Freddie and Keith were my first Asian buddies. Keith was Hawaiian and Freddie was Japanese. I knew Keith in the first grade and Freddie somewhat after. Keith was all smiles and full of energy and popular. Freddie was chubby, shy and laconic. Freddie and I lived on the same street, his was a single mom, and he rode a tricycle a little bit longer than anybody else our age. I never knew where Keith lived, and never saw him after school, but Freddie and I were closer friends. I don't know why and I don't know how long into our friendship, I hit Freddie. He ran home, told his mom, and I never saw him again after school. Well, maybe once or twice, but that was basically the end of it. 

There are probably more short stories like this I could tell end on end, but maybe they have that same theme. The friendship between blacks and Asians in LA is as varied as the number of different types of Asians, and yes everybody hates Koreans. At least, they used to. But on the whole the relationship is genuine and fragile. Whenever you try, you really can't make anything of it. 

I think there is a kind of social capital that black Americans have gained in a completely different way than whatever Asians have gained. When I think of Asian Americans, I almost never think of them as multicultural compatriots in a shared struggle for social capital. That has worked and can continue to work with Latinos, especially those who called themselves Chicano. But there has never been an Asian Chicano. Well, there's Margaret Cho, and that's about it. It's something I have variously found frustratingly disappointing and oddly attractive. But one thing I have long understood is that worse than blacks and worse than browns, Asians have never managed to be the authors of their own social acceptance. Asian culture was and remains all in the eye of the beholder, not in the aim of the creator. It all gets swallowed up in perception.

Here in SoCal, there are so many Asian groups that every place else seems freakily devoid. The idea that I might turn on a radio station and never hear Mandarin, Japanese or Korean on the AM dial seems uncivilized, as does any person who can't tell those languages apart. But let's face it. All us gringos care much more about the food than the people, that is except for the dudes with jungle fever, be they our dudes or their dudes. 

Almost all Asians I have known have attempted to compensate for a lack of social capital via ultra competence. I have never been able to determine, not that I care much, whether this is a personal matter, something that bespeaks a particular tradition, or was merely a reaction to racial stereotypes. It is not an intimation which I have been privy. I have known Keiths and Freddies. They either make it, or they don't, but either way, the intimacy has been lacking. 

I have known Asian men to get riled about banana chicks in their midst. I have known Asian women to find their roles stultifyingly austere. But I cannot know if I get that particular flavor of complaint straight, or through a black man filter.  And of course I have gotten my share of discussion about the 'model minority' role - whether real or imagined. What I haven't gotten much is a sense of Asian Americans to their native countries, if they have anything more than a passing familiarity with them. I notice this much more for the yellow Asians than for the brown Asians. Indians, are a completely different sort with which my experiences are more extensive. I know what Indians act like around Indians. So let me speak in broad general useless terms about that for a moment.

Once upon a time in Las Colinas, I was working for one of the most successful Indian companies in America. It was chock full of Indian nuts, and had some informal claim as the highest per capita PhD in Texas, if not the Fortune 500. So one day we were having a big meeting and one of the project managers was late, and we were sitting around waiting. Somebody asked who was he? And the answer was "oh. some white guy named Bob". It was funny, because that description suddenly made it easy, in this company, to identify him. But what was even more striking to me at this company was the extent to which the Indian social hierarchy, heretofore invisible to me, made itself visible. And since that day, although I have not given it more specific attention in a pattern-matching way, I have noticed how quickly such hierarchies are established stateside. It is my estimation that Indians here in America on work permits, are quite appreciative of the extent to which they are accepted into our creaky meritocracies. But really, I'm not talking about them here and I don't consider them Azn.

The Azn I wish I knew better are my associates from highschool, most of whom tread a fine line between conspicuous invisibility and innoffensiveness. Every once in a while I'll find an Asian dude my age driving a fabulous car, and I get this feeling that he's a cool, competent fellow I might knock back a few drinks with. But he's just on his way somewhere. These men have not become the sports announcer on TV, the over solicitous real estate agent, the friendly guy at the end of the bar. One of them, however is my General Practitioner, a Felix Unger type who wears his gloves and washes his hands a bit too often. But this fete manque doesn't bother me much - it's an empty spot like that trip to Berlin I never made. I was just going to be a tourist anyway, but it would have been nice to know I was welcome to learn the language and make friends. 

The problem with Asian Studies is the same problem as with using multiculturalism to solve the Race Problem - fighting fire with fire. There's always some esstialism involved. You always have to invoke some ancient Chinese secret to overcome the 'gaze'. There's always some black magic the Negro must use, some Judo for the Japanese. And for what? To get in the White door, as if it led someplace. There are always a hundred doors and a hundred keys. The problem is the fixation. Well, actually the problem is that the fixation is over-productive. You see Asian Studies, and American Studies and multiculturalism all work. They all work like that pill in the recent movie "Limitless". They work like Robert DiNiro playing a confident, powerful guy with the capacity to get in your face and make you suffer. They work like hammers and nails. 

One of the things you never hear about when these discussions come up is what to make of Asians who are Christian. I have never set foot inside a Korean or Philippino Christian church. But I know they are around. In Gardena, two towns west of where I live, I'm sure I could easily find a dozen Christian churches with Asian congregations. Where is the exchange? What does it mean to all of these racial and cultural signifiers we are trying to make sense of if and when there is that fundamental sameness? One of the favorite project managers I have worked with was a Taiwanese army seargant (boy you could tell) who sent his son to the same private Catholic highschool I attended. I remember so many times he would be shouting at the kid over the phone in Chinese. I felt sorry for the kid, rather the same way I feel sorry for any kid whose parents *and* teachers are Catholic. Where is the forgiveness? Where is the Christian fellowship? I suspect with some conviction that these might as well be different sects, as wholly other as Mennonties and Mormons. Yet I also suspect that there is a great story waiting to be told that will come from Thomas Sowell before it comes from Bill Moyers.

At bottom there will have to be a kind of studied indifference by the keepers of the culture that will inform our best sensibilities. I have found that kind of attitude works best when people get bent about American identity. Until then, we will have to stock our mental inventory with Dat Phans and Margaret Chos and Amy Chuas and a half dozen other riffs to satisfy the idiot level of stereotypes. We have to let all of the seminars take place, and try to reconcile Connie Chung and Tiger Woods. We'll have to have that conversation with the guy at the end of the bar, or commiserate/brag about our idiot/brilliant kids with the dad at the Friday night game.  It will become American, whatever that means, and then we'll talk about the bad old days when it was so difficult to watch the remake of the Green Hornet. And in the end it will all mean exactly what it's supposed to mean, nothing. Until we go to war with China. 

Speaking of which, I am reminded of the bottom line of Dr. Frayser, my dad's old friend. He is one of the kindest individuals I know, a real old school gentleman - the kind of man you expect to meet on a sunny day on Martha's Vineyard with his walking stick, straw hat and dog, knowing he as retired from fixing hundreds of human babies in his hospital. And because he was so absolutely gentle, his dictum was striking in its finality. He said, you know the reason why we respect Japanese and buy all of their products? Because we know they will fight us to the death. In the end, the only way to accept another human is to know that they can and will do anything you think you can and will do. The implications are simple and clear, and reiterate my indictment of Asian Studies. 

If the purpose of any study is to cultivate respect, admiration, acceptance and to break whatever is holding up that glass ceiling, then you enter a particular room with a particular shape and use particular tools to get a particular result. The problem is with the definition. You and I know what an Azn is. But that man is actually nobody in particular. 

 

 

 

 

America Unfinished

The American Revolution was in 1776. The Russian Revolution was in 1917. Was America too early? Were the Founders simply not evolved enough?

CD rants on about the 'special debt' MLK says was owed to the Negro. From my way of thinking, the Negro thought his own way out of the existential beartrap of race, except of course for those who didn't and still cherish the Negro Solutions proposed 50 years ago by the likes of Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph. Those of course were socialists and Rustin's arc proved to be prophetic with regard to the intervention that Progressives believe they are executing on the nation. 

It brings me to some questions about the extent to which various diehards feel that the American experiment is permanent and why exactly they stick it out.

 I'm interested in your outline of the dimensions of that special debt, and exactly how 'America' is supposed to pay it. I say that very idea is socialist. I wonder, in consideration of that, how much you would suggest that the American Left is completely unimpressed with the idea of a completed America - ie that the sort of republic America is supposed to be is so wide of the premises of the Constitution, or of the proper ends of enlightenment that King's experiments as well as those of such activists after him, are just the beginning of an evolutionary process.

That being the case is it nothing more than America's wealth that keeps them here? I mean if the Constitution was nowhere near good enough, why not start fresh elsewhere? What is the special promise of America? Is it perhaps the flexibility of its body politic? Do Progressives believe they can morph America into the shape that Marxists failed to accomplish in Europe and Russia? 

What is the endgame?

I think Progressives beleive that their progress does not end, that there are going to appear more steps in Maslow's hierarchy they will be able to deliver once they eliminate, through the miracles of the scientific method, all traces of the lower needs from the world's populations. In other words, utopia, or at least six or seven more Constitutional Amendments. 

Socialists & Racism

If there is anything true about the epithet 'sell-out' it is that it doesn't take much financial renumeration to pull former comrades heads out of the collective ass of the collective. I prefer the term 'pinche vendida', which is most appropriate to the drama of the petit bourgiosie. 

There is a principle fallacy that I believe most Westerners adhere to and I am investigating it because of its many corruptions. Interestingly, it comes from a gut instinct I learned as a black nationalist in distrusting white liberals. The fallacy is that the middle class via political activism can make the poor into middle class. It ain't true, or at least it cannot be done without the sort of transfer of wealth on the pain of riots or similar legal fiat that I find reprehensible. At least some radicals have the honesty to say thier intent is to afflict the comfortable, another euphemism for "(fuc | soa)+k the rich". Understand that I find such honesty and aim to be an honorable calling, but make no mistake, I'm not on that side. 

With this in mind one must qualify any political program whose honest goal is 'upward mobility' for the masses (read 'deserving poor'). For the socialist program there is that interesting matter of race, and this is where the histogram above comes into play. Notice the particularly long tail of the households doing more than $75k. This is something I believe to be uniquely American, but I'm open to dispute about that. Still the real meat of this graph is the purple part with the 60% of American households doing less than 57K in 2005 dollars. I boldly assert (and here's where you can dispute me again if you care to) that this is where the Left is focused and sniffing up the ass of that Left, the mainstream anti-racists of America. The reason is because it is in this realm that racism has its greatest effect on the fortunes of Americans.

As anyone with a racial agenda will quote you, there is a well-known economic statistic about the fortunes of the white high school grad vs the black collegian with two years of undergraduate studies under their belt. I would be happy to remind you that people with such educational prospects, by and large don't often get past the 60%. I would think it amply fair to say that those people are about average. So when, on average, the white dude with highschool and the black dude with college are compared and this is given as proof of how racist America is, you are likely to get a shrug from me. Why? Because that level of achievement is not something I find particularly inspiring. But let us give the Leftists their due. In fact let us stipulate that this is the core of economic racism in the United States.

Those of you familiar with the film Brazil and Orwell in general should understand quite well how much energy has been spent spelling out the effect of dystopic authoritarianism on the fate of the common man. It is of course reasonable that the Left and Right focus on that meaty part of the histogram in the context of democratic politics. So how much social mobility does the entire program of the socialist program get to the meat of the American public? I'm going to be hugely generous, and say 25% And I'll tell you why I'll say 25% - because it's outrageous to think the American public wouldn't vote themselves a 25% raise if they could, or that socialists would smack down the capitalists among us to foot the bill if they could. While I'm at it, let's take a look at what credit the Left gives itself. If you pile those 150 things on top of each other do they add up to a 25% raise? Go ahead and add them up - it's really a great list. 

But I bet you that if you ask a black partisan how much of that benefit goes to their constituents they will still come back with a demand for the same half dozen things. Better education. Better jobs. Better healthcare. Better housing. Better policing. Better political representation. And they will tell you the bottom line is that right in the meat of that demographic a 25% raise would deliver all of that. Take a poll yourself. Ask a householder at 57K how much of that big list he'd give up for a $14,000 raise.

So what good does all the anti-racist agitation of the Left do their constituents? Very small marginal amounts that can only be measured in pyschic dimensions, which is about all the comfort I think they can give, because any marginal benefit to a middle aged householder in the meat(grinder) of the American economic demographic is good patronage. So if someone can be convinced that racism cost them a $2000 raise, well that's catastrophic economic structural racism - not really but you certainly have the attention of somebody in the the 57K demographic. 

How racist is the American Left? It doesn't matter because it's all relative. Like the hunter who doesn't have to outrun the bear, the American Left only has to be less racist than the American Right, by whatever measure because in the middle it's a game of inches. One notch over on the histogram is world historic for the man in the middle, and it is quite simple to show the operation of simple bigotry as monumental to the man of modest means. Black kids locked out of a country club swimming pool in suburban Philadelphia? Huge for the man in the middle. Monstrous for the poor. Asset forfeiture for stop & frisk in a single corrupt police force. Tragic for the man in the middle. Obscene for the poor.  

It doesn't matter whether the Left or socialists stop this bullcrap. It matters that they draw attention of their potential constituencies to these pint-sized atrocities. It matters that they will attempt to work on behalf of the poor who may not actually be beset by these problems, and that they will proclaim loudly that a $500 beef is RACIST!!! 

It has been a long time since I've been interested in anti-racist activism, and I have despaired of any hope. I recognize that the rhetorical patronage delivered by race hustlers is all that gets delivered. And I also understand what they fear the most, which is that by and large Americans in the middle won't give a damn about race. But it doesn't take much racism at all to keep them in the victimology business.

Kinda makes me yearn for the days of black power.

A Safe Statement

From Allen West:

Congressman Allen West (FL-22) made the following statement tonight on the passage of the revised Budget Control Act of 2011.

"A year ago no one would have thought it was possible that the dominant conversation within the United States Congress would be about cutting spending.

For the first time in American history tonight, the United States House of Representatives raised the debt ceiling with equal to or exceeding spending cuts.  It is imperative now that we alleviate the anxiety of the American people and our capital markets and instill a sense of confidence and certainty regarding our fiscal policy. This will assuredly lead to long term sustainable economic growth and American jobs.

The task before us now is to follow through with a plan that was a 70- 75 % common sense solution,  and execute it to 100 % perfection.  I remain committed to ensuring this is the dawn of a new era in fiscal responsibility in America."

I can live with that statement. So far West has said very little that I can disagree with. 

More Simplicity

Black Class Revisited

Starting back in the late 80s when I decided to allow my intellectual curiosity rule my life rather than settle into the square pegs of upscale, buppie, Talented Tenth modalities, I had already formed some reckoning of the class differences between African Americans. I was quite comfortable back in the day dealing with five classes. It was solidified by my recognition of Oliver & Shapiro and Massey & Denton. 

I was fascinated with the 'geography is destiny' theory of American Apartheid, and I must say that it still holds significant sway on both the positive and negative side. You are where you live, goes the wit. And so since I had begun to consider myself a traveler of some experience in my early 30s, I considered at length where I would ultimately want to live and where, not coincidently were the best places for black Americans to live. According to my simple theories, convinced that there was not one 'black community', I split African America into five classes: projects, ghetto, hood, burb and hill. With data from the 2000 census, I started slicing and dicing the population and came up with my own ranking.

It had always been important to me to be able to say something credible about black Americans that I felt had not been said, or said loudly or properly enough. But I have not been disabused of that concern, and it is because I have recognized over many years of dabbling among the chatting classes, that nobody is disciplining the troops. So splitting matters even further, there are those who believe in race and those who don't. Among the believers there are politically correct and incorrect factions, afrocentrics, race traitors, multiculturalists and racial realists to name a few who are compelled to always color their moral pronouncements, if for not their own justifications than to explain to those they say must be properly schooled. And split mostly on the side of the believers are those who explain race in terms of culture. I say split to give some benefit of a doubt, but I've never heard of anyone who give credence to 'black culture' whose explanations don't center around the very same stereotypes as the most vulgar understanding of black race. IE, blacks run fast because ______. Insert 'cultural' explanation. Nobody cares a whit to explain the black cultural proclivities toward either side of the Bacon vs Shakespeare controversy, but there's always someone making apologies for Basketball. In other words, black cultural commentary rarely goes beyond the immediate concerns of race. 

This is a sad state of affairs that I think owes a great deal to the pretenses of hiphop and the commercial success of the New Jacks, ever in opposition to the great orations of Bill Cosby on the one hand, and the prating of that unctuous class of post-modern academics and their vertiginous phrases. All of them going after the singular prize of 'the' black voice which must ever respond to the ironic and idiotic call: "What do you people want?" It comes as no surprise that nobody knows, because those involved in this cultural production like to keep matters open. Accordingly there is the eternal internal question "Who are we as a people?" and its corrolary "What should we be demanding, as a people?"  That is the core existential dilemma, neatly wrapped around a DuBoisian duality, hidden inside a Woodsonian re-education , expressed quixotically in an MLK oration. The best answer, of course is to question the question. But that only works for perhaps the smallest fraction of all, those who put no stake in race whatsoever. 

It is perhaps ironic that my energy spent in pursuit of being such a vessel of the proper black American cultural voice has so disabused me of having any stake in race. On the one hand, to believe in culture, or to believe in religion, or to believe in any such thing people have reduced their worldviews to over history should squeeze racial reasoning out. One can only conclude that, for all of this cultural babble, that the subject remains racial is the enduring testament to racism in America. Americans are always inventing neologisms for the same tired dynamic while claiming to be beyond race, while admiting that most everyone else is more racist than they. Even this essay falls into that category, technically if not spiritually speaking. But if one truly does find racial reasoning being squeezed out, (which I don't care to claim, having really nothing to try to prove there) one finds a curious lack of attention. In other words, the solution to race has always been to abandon it without any effort to remap it. Americans however, want the impossible which is to redefine race and then somehow claim a racial victory over racism. In the end some race is always on the hook. 

There should always be some fraction of all of us Americans, by the mere fact of any understanding of race that we are bound to it. But for me, to look at class is the simplest solution. Naturally this position betrays my interpretation of the predations of racism. What I would loathe the most of racism would be its ability to eliminate all class distinction between myself and those I would be associated with by race. Or put simply that any class distinction I aspire to in the larger society would always be qualified by my race. Yet this is the same bucket I volunteered into and projected onto black America with my five layer cake of projects, ghetto, hood, burb and hill. I should say that there is a Talented Tenth prerogative buried in that which elevates in class among blacks that is not considered significant to class in the larger society, ie the distictions between black fraternities or black undergraduate schools. What difference does it make to be called King of the Jews in the eyes of crucifying Romans? It matters if you really care to be King of the Jews, and enforce that standing with Jews. So it matters what kind of black American you are if you intend to stand tall as one projecting such status over the rest, as I said - a Talented Tenth prerogative. 

I can recall back in the days when Ron Brown was considered by all to be the most likely first black American President. I went to a conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation where he was the keynote. Around that time, circa 1992, the CBC itself was under attack as not worthy of receiving Congressional funding because of its special interest. Percy Sutton was in attendance among notables, as were personal friends of mine from LA's Black Women's Forum including the recently departed and greatly loved Lilian Mobley - the woman Maxine Waters could have been were she not... well..that's another story. All of those important people were important to black America in that special sense of their figuring in the poltiical calculations that were the vanguard of 'what we as a people should be demanding'. But in the end, the CBC was defunded and all of the politics of the 'digital divide' fell by the wayside. Nobody was disciplining the troops. There might have been true black strategies, but they never materialized.

I happen to believe that is a permanent pattern because sooner or later, black American individuate. The black shroud fails to cover the toes or the nose, and theories fall apart. Race loses its power to corral and define, despite so many hopes and ideas and theories and wishful thoughts. The prerogatives of American class take over. There are the Americans who get it, and those who don't. 

Today is the end of Julyteenth, my attempt at sustaining some conversation about Cobb and race. There hasn't been a headline in The Root that resonated with me quite yet. The writers write and make sure they put 'black' in the headline - the black of self-selection, the black of the audience that becomes something just by being there. Black as the flash mob of something pronounced black, a black ad-hocracy, which becomes self-sustaining merely by repeating the existential questions and never coming up with a satisfying answer.

Anything is black enough. Anything.

So my conclusion is that it all gets diluted, all that blackness. What black people wanted, some black people got - and so satisfied ran out of questions to ask, leaving some ever-diminishing fraction behind.

Simplicity

Our message to the White House over the last several months has been clear: there will be no debt limit hike without restraints on future spending and cuts greater than any hike, and there can be no tax increases. A bill that doesn't meet these tests cannot pass the House. The president has never put forth a plan that can actually pass in Congress. Perhaps he will today.

-- John Boehner

Talkin' 'bout Mama

I know my father. I knew my father's father. I know the name of his father as well although he died in 1918, long before I was born. I have confidence that my resemblance to all of those men is more than genetic. I inherit their character and demeanor, and I have been well served by this.

The other day, reading in The Confusion, I came across a passage that immediately made me think of contemporary black American society.

“These Malabar women are as free with men, as Charles II himself was with women,” Jack explained. “In these parts, a man can never tell which children are his. Or to put it another way, every man knows his mother but hasn’t the faintest idea who his father might be. Consequently, all property passes down the female line.”

“Including the crown?”

“Including the crown. One peculiarity of this arrangement is that a man, going in to pay a call on a lady, never knows what other man he might discover in her bed. To prevent awkward situations, a gallant therefore leaves his weapon leaning against the door-post when he enters — as a sign to all who pass by that the lady’s attentions are spoken for.” 

Stephenson, Neal (2009). The Confusion (P.S.) (Kindle Locations 11373-11379). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition. 

I don't mean to suggest much more than that there is a well-functioning matriarchy alive and well in black society, and it is significant. Perhaps if it were admitted and understood, then we might find some interesting patterns emerging.

Like most of the Kwaku set, I engaged quite a bit on last week's controversy over who got married in slavery days. And since I wasn't born last week, I have heard all of the generalizations about the greatness and persistence of the African, the legacies of slavery, the refutations of Moynihan, black macho and the myth of the super woman, and my new favorite - the Luther Problem, which is kinda like The Denzel Principle. So let me digress on that a bit.

The Luther Problem is the extraordinary acceptance of black women of the romantic blatherations of gay black men on the reverse DL. IE gay men singing love songs about women. Which is to say there is something profoundly odd about the fact that women fall in love with men who use the romantic proxy of gay Cyranos. A chair is just a chair, even when there's no one sitting there, but a male is not a man and a homo is not a wingman. Unless he is, and Luther was. There is surely something to protest in this point of view, but I won't hear it from anyone who prattles on about Catholic priests. Either love is Platonic or it is not. End of (strange) digression.

So this basically boils down to the fundamental question of whether it is reasonable to make beef about the extraordinary fact of black single parentage. Is it cultural or economic phenomenon? If it is a cultural phenomenon, then the extent to whether it should be considered positive or negative must depend on your view of matriarchy.

What say you? 

I say Moyniahan was right. 

 

Eric, Don't Call My Bluff

Like most Americans, I didn't know Eric Cantor before today. But he stood toe to toe with the President and neither of them blinked. I think we're going to find out what those two men are made of in the next few days. 

As much as I take tax abatement to be a one note drone with the intellect of a stone, I gave it a second thought today as I read the various hearsay over the negotiation showdown. The counter to the argument I've been making presented itself to me as I thought about the size of our numbers. 

When you're spending trillions and you start negotiating between 1.5T and 1.7T, it's easy to forget that how big that T is. Somewhere I read that 2.5T was within the realm of possibility, if the appropriate cuts were made. Now splitting the difference between 1.7 and 2.5 with some mix of tax increases and loophole closings sounds like a deal. Let's say you split it 50/50. You're trying to cut 800Billion. 

So you say OK Mr. President if you cut 400B in spending I'll concede 400B in revenue. Deal. 

Hold up. Wait a minute. What's 800Bilion? 800 Billion is the total cost of the Iraq War to date, with 100 Billion to spare. So you're telling me that to meet the President halfway, you have to raise taxes to the tune of more than half the cost of the Iraq War? Just to get cuts in *discretionary spending*?

Sorry. Didn't I mention that? Non-Defense discretionary spending is about 600 billion per year. Defense is another 600 billion.  The 2011 spending plan is 3.8 and the revenue plan is  2.1T leaving a shortfall of 1.65T except we're so deep in the hole paying interest on the debt that number keeps growing. 

So we spend 1.7 trillion more than we make, we keep raising our credit limit, and to meet the President halfway means we pay 400B more in taxes. Given all that, we break even and we're spending 2.5 Trillion a year.

The temptation here is to keep using the Ts and the Bs and look at 'split the difference' and abstract with percentages. It's very easy to get comfortable doing that, which is exactly why the banking industry failed and has yet to be fixed, recovered or trusted. I kid you not when I tell you that we used to have something called a Savings & Loan industry whose focus was getting people in America mortgages without using leveraged CDOs and hedged tranches of loans who originators were 6 parties removed. America doesn't have a Savings & Loan industry any longer. It's gone. Like the Apollo Program. Like $1 gas with 10x Blue Chip Stamps. They are all uneconomical now. The opportunity to go back does not exist. That's why that temptation is foolish in the extreme.

What the President has now is the bully pulpit, which means a script and some fraction of the American public that still trusts men in blue suits, white shirts and red ties when they speak on that thing called 'prime time television'. But the bully pulpit doesn't make money and I've never seen it make people want to spend money. 

No Mr. President I'm not going to eat my peas because they're not my goddamned peas.  I didn't order the peas. You and your predecessor did while you were out shopping for stuff you thought would be good for me. I'm pushing the plate back and I'm not eating those peas. And I'm not going to scrape them off my plate to the dog, or my kids either. Matter of fact, I'm going on a diet. And I'm going to the cupboard and see what other expensive fatty crap you've been out buying. And we're going to make you take it back.

So this is the standoff. 

It has come to this, and this will end in tears. I'm afraid our President is unprepared to convince the American people that he's the kind of leader who can make us eat our peas and dare us to say something. He's right, this wouldn't have happened to Ronald Reagan because Reagan enjoyed being a cowboy. But Candidate Obama was a healer, a community man. A lover, not a fighter. Which is why Eric will call the bluff, and face what?

One Step Deeper: What Was Bachmann Really Trying to Say?

This controversy is starting to remind me of my defense of Bill Bennett. Let's see if the haters can sustain their smears.

Candidate Bachmann got her sentence about black marriage during slavery times from a 72 page document entitled The Consequences of Marriage for African Americans published in 2005 by The Institute for American Values. 

Here follows the summary of the details. 

Four Major Questions

1. What are the economic, psychosocial, and health-related consequences of marriage for African American men, women, and children?

2. Do the consequences of marriage differ for Blacks and Whites?

3. If racial differences exist, what explains these differences?

4. What are the policy implications of these findings?

To answer these questions, we conducted a comprehensive review of scholarly articles, reports, and books focusing in part on the consequences of marriage for African Americans published from 1990 through 2004. We also conducted new research specifically for this report, using survey data collected from 1973 through 2002 by the American General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Based on this review of the academic literature and our new research, we present the following ten major findings.

Ten Major Findings

1. Marriage clearly appears to promote the economic, social, familial, and psychological well-being of African American men and women. Even when studies control for a wide range of variables, they consistently find that married Black adults, compared to those who are unmarried, have more income, are less likely to face poverty, and are more likely to be happy. Marriage also appears to promote bet- ter family functioning for African Americans. At the same time, the evidence generally suggests that Black adults derive little benefit from marriage in terms of physical health.

2. While both Black men and Black women receive a marriage premium, this premium in most cases appears to be larger for men. Put a bit differently, Black women overall seem to receive less benefit from marriage than do Black men. This gender gap is especially pronounced in the areas of family life and physical health. In fact, married Black women actually report poorer health than do unmarried Black women. The one exception to this pattern is in the economic domain, where Black men and women appear to benefit comparably from marriage.

3. Economically, marriage appears to benefit Blacks more than Whites. In part because marriage often means an additional wage earner for the family, and in part because marriage typically increases the income and the economic productivity of individuals, married-couple Black families have far more income, and are far less likely to live in poverty, than other Black families. This economic premium stem- ming from marriage is comparably larger for Blacks than for Whites. In general, marriage appears to contribute greatly to the economic well-being of African American families.

4. Overall, Black women appear to benefit from marriage substantially less than do White women. By contrast, the differences in the benefit from marriage between Black men and White men appear in most cases to be minimal.

5. Black-White differences in marital quality seem to constitute an important reason why Black adults, and particularly Black women, typically benefit less from marriage than do Whites. On average, the marriages of Whites appear to be marked by more happiness and less conflict than those of African Americans. The lower average quality of African American marriages, in turn, seems to reduce the benefits to adults that those marriages might otherwise yield. In our analysis of data from the General Social Surveys, we find that controlling for marital quality signifi- cantly reduces the Black-White gap in the estimated benefits of marriage.

6. Parental marriage produces important benefits for African American children. Black children of married parents typically receive better parenting, are less delinquent, have fewer behavioral problems, have higher self-esteem, are more likely to delay sexual activity, and have moderately better educational outcomes. Because many of the relevant studies on child outcomes employ comprehensive controls, there is strong reason to believe that these findings reflect more than mere correlations. Marriage itself appears to be generating strong positive results for African American children. At the same time, marriage may have little or no impact on school dropout and drug use among Black adolescents.

7. Parental marriage appears to be especially important for the well-being of young African American males. In areas including parental support, delinquency, self-esteem, and school performance, having one’s father in the home, and particularly one’s married father, appears to be a crucial determinant of better outcomes for young Black males. When viewed alongside our other finding regarding the larger marriage premium for Black men, as compared to Black women, this finding suggests that mar- riage is particularly important for African American males at all stages of the life cycle.

8. In some areas, Black children seem to benefit more from parental marriage than do White children, whereas in other areas, the reverse is true. Regarding both levels of parental support and the risks of delinquency, African American children seem to benefit more from parental marriage than do White children. Yet regarding educational performance, early sexual activity, substance use, and possibly high school completion, White children appear to derive greater benefits from parental marriage than do their African American peers.

9. The reasons for some apparent racial differences in the consequences of marriage for children are not clear, and further research in this area is needed. One possibility is that studies need more carefully to distinguish the effects of parental non-marriage on Black sons as compared to Black daughters, since the impact on boys appears to be greater than the impact on girls. Another, related possibility is that the institutional contexts and cultural norms affecting African American children are in some respects distinctive, thus making it harder for researchers to tease out the specific effects of marriage and non-marriage when it comes to Black-White differences in child outcomes.

10. For policy makers who care about Black America, marriage matters. Public and private sector policies aimed at increasing marriage rates among African Americans, and particularly policies aimed at increasing the number and proportion of high quality Black marriages, are important strategies for improving the well-being of African Americans and for strengthening civil society.

 

In the end, you might still conclude that Bachmann is a 'flake', but if so, why would she cite this study?

Julyteenth: A Cobb Blackification

Three years ago I won the Aaron Hawkins Award. It was one of those magical moments in life, the unexpected blessing, the honor of being recognized by your peers. I was doing a lot in '07 that got me the 08 award, including a little TV and Radio. But things have changed since then, and having had my fill of populist politics, I began changing direction again.

On Sunday morning, I found myself over at the Sheraton Gateway bogarding into the closing hours of the Blogging While Brown Conference which presented the award for 2011 the previous evening. Having stepped away from the subject of black politics, it was interesting to see the BWB crowd. I've also been paying attention to headlines from The Root as of late. Some of them I want to grab by the lapels and shake, others are actually intriguing. Last night I got a minute to hang out with the orchestra my niece is playing in over in Ladera, one of few remaining America's Talented Tenth strongholds. And last but not least, there's some email going around that the black middle class is shrinking in on itself. 

So I've got a little bit of ground to cover, and even though I've been on vacation for a week, I did so much more meeting and reading than writing that it feels a bit odd to take on what I used to do so often back in 07. So I figure I'll make my own update which I will recontextualize into the 8th, 9th or 10th series of essays on The End of My Blackness. I can't keep up.

On the whole existential front, the answer is that I don't have an answer, which is primarily because there are no niggling questions that get under my skin about race. On the whole, the race thing seems superfluous exactly in the way it should. Which is nothing more or less than me saying, I've succeeded with regard to race in the way I wanted to so I've got no issues.

Nevertheless, I cannot say that I'm up to date on what keeps the audience on their feet. So to that end I'm going to be doing some trackbacks over to Ed Brown and to the Black Snob, as well as a few comments at The Root, just to see what's up. And as usual, I will stick my foot into various tarbaby topics just to spice things up a bit.  

 

I Remember That Sarah

The Undefeated Teaser Trailer from Dain Valverde on Vimeo.

Today Means

Today means small things in practice, and great ideas in theory. Great ideas that a large number of us do not fully understand. We pursue without really grasping the ideal of happiness. But we are happy enough.

I used to spend a great deal of time puzzling over what America is, how it operates, what it means. But it was only when I started to read more philosophy and history that I came to a reasonable conclusion. That conclusion is that we are a people more wed to our history than we know, and that history is of a more elevated character than we say. So we complain. We are people who have time to complain, meaning we are not defeated and we expect better for ourselves. 

This morning I picked out a paragraph from The Root, a publication of constant complaint. In The Root's consistency, they have re-published an article from one year ago today saying that it is just as relevant:

What, to a black American in the age of Barack Obama, is the Fourth of July? I answer: the day that reveals to him, more than any other, how much America owes to blacks and their struggle for freedom. If it hadn't been for people like Frederick Douglass, this would not be a country worth living in. The lofty ideals of the Founding Fathers would have been no more than stirring but empty rhetoric.

What I understand about this is the rigor with which my generation of black Americans view the world through the lens of inherited Struggle. We have aggregated every pain and triumph into an existential philosophy of lure and loathing. America. What does it mean for *us*? That is the question we love to endlessly turn in our heads. To settle for an answer that does not result in some strain of complaint is to admit a false comfort. We have in America, a permanent home as symbols of man's inhumanity to man, and it is such a powerful symbol that it is unlikely to ever be eclipsed. Except of course that our Spartacus has become Ceasar. 

We might have spent an eternity, were it not for Obama, speaking of Martin Luther King, Louis Armstrong, and Sojourner Truth. We might have spent 10 political seasons, were it not for Obama, speaking of Michael Steele, Colin Powell and Ward Connerly. All these proxies of fate, will in time, fade from significance, because of what America actually is, and who we actually are in it. Americans are only believers in the creed of liberty. That is all we ever were and it is all we ever will be. We are devotees, no matter where our location, to a set of clear ideas that we uphold like a flag in the wind only pointed with fleeting accuracy at its North Star. Whenever we tire, someone else picks it up, and the march continues. 

It has been a long time since I've listened to Premature Autopsies. But I never forget its observation that nobility can come from anywhere. 

Some people might ask, "What is this man doing talking about nobility? Doesn’t he know that this is a dragon-spawned and blood-encrusted century? Doesn’t he know that the dragon breath of our time is breathing down the neck of the year 2000? Doesn’t he know that this is the era of flash and cash?" I will say to them that the interwoven labyrinths of greed and manipulation are as old as the FIRST lie, When you lie you are trying to manipulate; and when you try to manipulate for false profit, you reveal your greed; and when you swallow that dragon dust cooperatively you reveal yourself as a chump, a sucker, one of those folks Barnum said was born every minute. But I will answer them also by saying that nobility is always born somewhere out there in the world, and when you live in a democratic nation you have to face the mysterious fact that nobility has no permanent address, you hove to face the fact that nobody has nobility’s private phone number. Nobility is not listed in the phone book. Nobility is not listed in the society column, nobility shows up where it feels like showing up, and where it feels like showing up might be just about anywhere. If it could rise like a mighty light from among the human livestock of the plantation, you know it can come from anywhere it wants to. You see, nobility is listed though. Yes, it is listed. Nobility lists itself in the human spirit, and its purpose is to enlist the ears of the listeners in the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns.

That doesn't sound like a complaint when you read it, but when you hear it played to the accompanyment of the New Orleans dirge in the cadence and accents of the black minister then you know - it is the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns. 

I am constantly reminded of the irony of those backhanded compliments such as the Root constantly replays when speaking of the Founders. You don't often hear many such complaining African Americans speak of their duties to lead with love the ever benighted white boys. The word 'us' is not often enough broadly employed. What does today mean to all of us? That is the question that should be turning constantly in our heads. If we were to forget all of the foolish self-serving rhetoric of identity, then we might recognize how many of the world's people believe in the creed of liberty.

I have brought my family to reside at the coast of the Pacific. When I was climbing my mountain, my throat was dry. When I reached the peak and saw the promised land, the waters of justice were still frozen in the snow. I recognized them for what they were and did not resent their color. Soon I saw the trickle, the stream, the mighty river, and I joined with all to find the mighty sea. I remember when I was parched and climbing, but I was destined as are all men, to rest here.  We are not truly Americans until we believe in liberty and justice for all. 

An Anonymous Democratic Reckoning

Government will be hacked.

It will only be a matter of time before some anonymous cabal of hackers with the sort of philosophical bearing that lends itself to Rebublican morality will hack various parts of the American government. There will be a reckoning. It will work to our advantage on one condition. That its perpetrators stand up after the deed is done and submit themselves to the inevitable trial.

Like most sensible people, I believe that Julian Assange is a cad and that Bradley Manning is a dupe, and that both of them are, for different reasons, criminals. Similarly, I believed that the Unabomber was a crackpot terrorist. But there are uses, in the hands of the capable good, for the excesses of those capable of obscene acts. And of course, man's passions will not be restrained. In other words, it's still possible to win a war.

I find it difficult to believe that our government, run as it is by some of the most conniving snakes ever, could be unassailable by those capable of stealing millions of credit cards. The vulnerabilities are surely well known. But I would offer that few of these hackers have ever considered the political applications of their skills at length, or those that have to date have been hopelessly naive. 

So I speculate that there must be some clever schemes incubating yet unhatched which would expose the duplicity of those public servants we despise and that in time one of these schemes will spark a political uprising. We can only hope that what they expose will be significantly damning and of serious import, moreso than the emails of Sarah Palin or the the little black book of John Edwards.

 

Whose Life Is It Anyhow?

Kevorkian is dead. Jimmy crack corn. I don't care.

But I suppose I would a bit more if I thought that many lives depended on those things that Kevorkian did. In an indirect way, we're all better off because his ethics forced us to think about the nature of things. But directly speaking, I don't miss him. 

There is a lot of that kind of attenuated concern for the elderly, and I think it is natural and appropriate for us to consider the death of the aged as less than tragic. And let us also consider the dead. I mean the billions and billions of humans who are already dead. What do we really care about them? Not much. The last time I thought about the dead billions was when the nutcase said the end of the world was near and that the dead would be raised from their graves. Dead children haunt our dreams. Dead babies wreck our lives. Dead fetuses power political movements for decades. 

So there are a couple of problems, the way I look at it. One is hard edged, the other is squishy. The hard edge question is as it ever was: do human beings have the right to make life and death decisions. Since that one is hard, let it be easy. Yes. OK fine.

The squishy problem is navigating the moral gradient of society's valuation of life. IE it's definition of tragedy. Suicide is immoral to the extent that it is a tragic waste of human life. And so it is by degrees. A heroin addict, aside from their possible predations, is tragic because they are wasting their life away. It is only when we start aggregating the statistics of waste that we get involved in our civil religion and start passing statutes and propositions. We do it for the children. Don't we always?

So I am not so inclined to determine the particular merit of any ethos' stenuous arguments for or against suicide other than their basic consistency and force of conviction. But I do say that the question of the morality of suicide begs the question of who is a proper authority to choose the value of life.

 

Obama & The Law

VDH lobs several bombs in the direction of the Obama Administration. They are ideological, but more importantly they are significant legal questions. You need to read the whole thing. Here is a salient passage:

Here the question is not the usual Obama hypocrisy that has seen him demagogue and damn Guantamo, preventative detention, tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act (just signed by a former critic via computerized autopen from the UK no less) and Predators—only to expand or embrace them all. Rather, the problem is a question of legality itself.

Is the War Powers Resolution the law of the land or not? Or are we to assume a progressive president is complying with both UN resolutions and an Arab League mandate, and therefore, as the good internationalist and Nobel Laureate, sees no reason to consult, as American law requires, his own elected U.S. Congress—the latter a more suspect and reactionary body that does not enjoy the moral stature of the UN or the Arab League?

Hmm. 

The Atheists' Burial Ground

..from these honored dead we take increased devotion...

My new favorite TV show is River Monsters. Now that I have a new DVR that can hold 70 hours of HD, I might just get more episodes of everything. So I'm recording the marathon for this weekend. In the last episode I watched, I watched him listen to the tale of a busload of people drowned in a plunge into a river teeming with piranas. He winced in the company of the eyewitness. He doesn't appear to be the sort of fellow, who would merely do that for the camera. In fact, one of the things I like most about the host Jeremy Wade is that he's quite genuine. Not a guy for the cameras, or for the fakery. I admire his salt.

I'm considering ignoring most of the gnu atheists and their arguments but I can't help but jab every once in a while. I probably confuse atheists with humanists because essentially the loud ones keep explaining how much more savage religious people are. I percieve loud atheists to be the ones spitting on graves and mocking the hallows. So I wonder if any bother to draw logical lines. 

I Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond movie, Bond's seeming best pal is an ex-agent named Mathis. When he is killed, and after Bond kills the killers, Bond unceremoniously shoves his body into a dumpster. Bond's horrified date makes a remark to which Bond replies, "He wouldn't care." And his real name wasn't Mathis. I imagine atheists wouldn't care where their carbon atoms go, but I wonder how disciplined that particular lack of care would be. 

Why not desecrate atheist bodies, or better yet bury them under a Star of David for spite? Why not leave them in the open air at the crossroads for the ravens to pick? How about dumping their body overboard in the dead of night and never producing any evidence of their death outside of a hasty press release? 

I don't know how long a buried body has a right to its peace. The law is subject to regionalisms, but it is an interesting part of the law which is probably largely unexamined in perhaps the same way marriage law was before the homoactive began their plotting. There is certainly ample low hanging fruit for the Dawkins' dorks to deconstruct. 

I'm having second thoughts about criticizing the amorality of legal positivism. For all the Godless, cultureless, and clueless need some edifice upon which to justify their grubby self-interests; it might as well have the imprimatur of law. Call whatever statutory mumbo that comes out of the political sausage machine jumbo and the peasantry will salute. It creates order and passes for civilization. 

The stupid little atheist whipping boy in my head is confused about honoring the dead because he belongs to the cult of youth and  school of libertarian hands-off good will toward men. There is nothing in his universe worth sacrificing a life for, except perhaps the 'reproductive freedom' of his zipless galaxy of doable chicks. But he should know that nobody will come to his funeral if it coincides with some frothy secular event, like turn off your cell phone for an hour to save the planet day and his friends miss the tweet. His mother, poor blighter, is Eleanor Rigby. 

An EGBOK Moment

There is still something in me that refuses to believe that America will suddenly and dramatically collapse, despite the signs all around. We'll have to go through another civil war first is my guess. So with that far on the horizon I'm going to take a breath for a moment and remember how far we can indeed fall without breaking. 

Somebody thinks that I will pay three days of third world pay for foaming shampoo for pets. Is that sustainable? No. But it does mean a fool and his money will soon be parted and there's plenty of partying yet left to do in the Slice. 

I asked my colleague Don about figures and he gave me the ones I have decided to remember. They are all about new car sales. We hit a peak in 2000 of just over 19 million units on an annual basis. And we hit bottom in 2009 to somewhere around 10.5 million. Now Japan Inc is suffering and perhaps even fewer cars will be built and sold this year for America. But what do we really need new cars for? There's a post-industrial generation coming of age. Will they care about automobiles as much as I do. I wouldn't bet a cent on that. They'll spend 300 bucks a month for broadband though. Think about that.

We will survive the transition.