Cobb

The Next Great Republican

The next great Republican will have to be someone we know but haven't seen. I'm imagining that person today.

The thing that the next great Republican will need to know, that quality that will distinguish him most has everything to do with his ability to draw a strong line between the role of morality in life and the use of moral power by the government. It is because this line has been blurred that Republicans have failed the Conservative movement. It is because this line has been blurred that Republicans are making mortal enemies of the center. It is because of this failure that the GOP is currently tearing itself apart.

What Conservative leaders seem to have failed to grasp is the extent to which they draw upon Christian themes and personal morality enables and empowers multiculturalism and the politicization of everyday life. When Conservatives insist that one's personal demeanor is integral to the effective morality of any office, they have breached a wall of modernity. They have broken a rule that is evident but unwritten. A man who swears and drinks may be a fine father, so long as he confines his salty personal behavior to appropriate times and places. But to accept and expect that the strengths of character attach to efficacy of leadership or respect for standards destroys in both directions.

We live in a time of cynicism - we are searching for heroes. This is a consequence of the fact that we have been betrayed. Reagan betrayed us by trading arms for hostages, and Oliver North betrayed us by running rogue operations in Central America. The slack we were willing to give these men because of their otherwise fine public character is exactly what gave them license to do dirt. William Casey's polluted ethos of plausible deniability showed its ultimate limits. What compartmentalization works for spies does not work for public figures. So there is a fine edge that cuts both ways. Too little comparmentalizations makes the personal political and give us license to behave as though a black man cannot know what a white woman knows. Too much compartmentalization gives rise to imbuing too much stake in appearances.

The successful party must seek to inform its constituency better on the proper conduct of the business of government. It is in this regard that the GOP has the advantage, but that advantage has been squantered by its opportunism once in office. Strongarm tactics used for party advantage rather than in fulfillment of a pledge to public service has tarnished whatever reputation the GOP might have had gained from its Contract With America, matters of term limits and its fresh approach to 'throwing the bums out'. That sentiment lies firmly with the Democrats, not because they have shown any brighter, bolder or more innovative ways and means to run government and get it to respond to the needs of the people, but because in the ways that ultimately mattered more, the Democrats appeared to be on the side of transparency whereas the Bush Administration seemed to cover up. In fact, both parties conduct their business in plain view of the public, but the one who can outwit the press and put the attention on dealings that can be roundly condemned will have the upper hand.

Most importantly, the Republicans need to take the Culture Wars in a new direction. At the moment, there is no way they cannot do so without putting a visible minority front and center. That is because the GOP needs the assistance of the major media in putting such issues in front of the people. Only by bringing issues of race, class and gender onto the front burner can Republicans overcome those stereotypes placed at their feet. The inevitable contradictions that will surface, whether they be obvious or of disengenuous faint praise, the boulder will begin rolling downhill. This augments the momentum initiated by what remains its own movement, the energy around Sarah Palin.

The Republican Party itself, in its various leadership councils needs to energize its various constituencies and establish an e pluribus unum around center-right priorities. Whenever the Republican Party can be stereotyped when it is convenient, the Left can rule the soundbites. When Ralph Reed ran the Christian Coalition, his role within the Big Tent was clear and had to be dealt with separately. These days, the coalitions have become ill-defined for their general support of the Bush agenda in various ways. So all Republicans had to be vaguely supportive of Bush, of the War, of pro-Life issues, of Second Amendment rights, against illegal immigration etc. The Republican Party needs individuals out front on each of these issues which appeal broadly to the Right without everyone being responsible for everything. This makes a robust Republican party which handles its own differences better and provides a variety of intelligent dissents which cannot be stereotyped.

That's what I see.

See also Posner.

...In the Republican Party these fall into three main groups: believers in (1) free markets, low taxes, and small government; (2) believers in tough criminal laws and a strong foreign policy; and (3) social (mainly religious) conservatives, who are hostile to abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and gun control. Groups (2) and (3) converge on hostility to illegal immigrants. Groups (1) and (2) are in some tension because a national security state requires big government and therefore high taxes. Group (1) is in tension with (3) because (1) is libertarian and (3) is regulatory.

The Humble Life

We had a double family night last evening with Mr. Jones and his crew. It was very pleasant. We played loud word games with the kids, sizzled up some steaks on the grill and generally had a good old time. It was Jones' birthday. He's an interesting bloke, something of a cowboy out of water. Sometimes I think he wishes he was someplace where people don't ask stupid questions like if a pig is smarter than a chicken, but know from experience. Don't really know though. Like me, he's more comfortable giving comfort rather than asking for it, so our conversations don't get so very comfortable. More often than not, they're interrupted by the requests of our respective families, and so we're off to do something useful.

We tend to talk about the various inversions of the market, he orders of magnitude more familiar than I. He seems calm enough about the whole thing, not showing any particular nerves. He mentioned that being a trader is hardest for engineers because there's never enough time for them to figure it out, but best for ex-pro athletes who are most eager to change tactics and admit they were wrong. Me, I'm a bit shaken about things. It's difficult for me to know what might happen next. I'm unsettled about the chaos which is some evidence that I feel that I haven't got enough granite under my feet. I've dropped Buffett's biography and picked up Niall Ferguson's history of finance. I intend to read myself into confidence.

All of this is due to that nagging middle aged suspicion that I haven't done enough. It's not an objective observation. Rather it is a consequence of boredom. For three days this week, having finished Jonah Goldberg, Corialinus, The Deer Hunter, Silas Marner and a half a dozen blog posts I found myself at a point with nothing new to feed my restless mind. And so I had to engage in the various domesticities, dialing down to kid speed. BD is just finishing up (yay) Anne Frank and Sprite is doing crosswords, and came close to beating me in Boggle. Boy is boy and now on the wrestling team, football done and with a 4.0 GPA at the quarter. Restless. I'm unsatisfied and restless - I can't give comfort when everybody is doing well. So I keep grabbing for achievements in my videogames.

Then just yesterday afternoon prior to going to the Joneses, I eyeballed Bain & Company. It had been creeping into my head earlier this year when I was doing six months of contracting prior to joining another consulting team that I should measure myself up against the global top dogs. So I briefly considered Bain tangential to researching Romney. When I was an undergrad, I used to think about McKinsey. I was there at Xerox as an intern when McKinsey revamped the entire company and the guy I knew whom I thought was going to be the first black president, who did his JD/MBA at Stanford in three years was working at McKinsey. I've always thought of McKinsey and of Bloomberg as the pinnacles of my field, but ain't no dirt on BCG, ATKearney and Bain. Mr. Jones, it turns out, has contacts at BCG. That's good, but unsettling to know.

Baldwin famously says that the price for being a professional insider is to know the extent to which professional ideals are actually corrupted in your industry. That idea was what scared me away from the law, but since then I have grown the kind of thick skin which would have allowed me to deal with it. I very much related to George Clooney in Michael Clayton. But I still think of the scientific and analytical aspects of my profession from a geeks point of view. I'm absolutely committed to integrity. I have the comfortable conceit that 95% of my customers can't push me beyond what I've already done - so I'm patient and don't have to cut corners. It leaves me hungry for challenge, and I've almost grown complacent. I don't know how I would react to having to really learn a bunch of new things in order to be competent at a higher level. Hell, I might even have to quit my blog. Imagine a career that fulfilling!

I don't. And I tell myself that's cool. But I really don't know if I could step up. I really don't know if I should. I kind of like my boredom. It makes me feel that I'm doing everything I need to do and that I have time to spare; time to knockabout in spirited discussions about people and processes I google at leisure; time to bet Nulan a buck and call his speculation bullshit. Time to indulge in the recreation of being a news junkie.

But I think about getting to know pigs and chickens too. I think about sitting on the banks of a slow wide river and watching birds swoop low. I think about laying in a hammock and learning the constellations firsthand. I think about listening for birdcalls and loading up the pickup with 400 bucks of staples from the WalMart 40 miles from my door. I think about paying 1200 bucks a month for my five bedroom on 6 acres. I think about it all the time. I think about time to be free of the foolishness.

Somewhere there is a humble solution to all of this. It must be the only one that works. I am too accustomed to being awestruck, perhaps it is human nature to want to be, to think I will need to manage it all. And I'm trying, on Sunday, to keep that in mind.

A Moment of Levity

"..and then Summers says, 'I thought he was talking about cup sizes, not bond ratings!'"...

Liar's Poker Revisited

From Michael Lewis via DeLong:

No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.’s. I doubt any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.’s to be sold to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit.

No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me or anyone remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between the ability to get in and out of Princeton and a talent for taking financial risk?

Now I asked Gutfreund about his biggest decision. “Yes,” he said. “They—the heads of the other Wall Street firms—all said what an awful thing it was to go public and how could you do such a thing. But when the temptation arose, they all gave in to it.” He agreed that the main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. “When things go wrong, it’s their problem,” he said—and obviously not theirs alone. When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks became the problem of the U.S. government. “It’s laissez-faire until you get in deep shit,” he said, with a half chuckle. He was out of the game.

       

The idea that Wall Street and the system is broken is a bad idea. The fact of the matter is that it has been abused. The system works, and it will work again, as soon as some people of integrity take control. I see this as a perfect example of selling to others what you wouldn't buy yourself. Not because of price, but because of what it is.

The Second to Last Lecture

It just so happened that I was bored and listening to an old audiobook podcast called 'The Last Lecture'. It was rather phenomenal when the author actually died of pancreatic cancer. I know I had listened to half of it before and never finished it for some odd reason. But in the first few minutes of listening again a few things clicked.

The first thing I remember was that I was trying to write in my blog, when I first heard the audiobook was that I wanted it to be something my kids would learn from. And immediately I realized that I have been and continue to take my own life for granted. Although it has happened that I woke up one morning profoundly thankful to God for my very own existence, most of the time I am acting as if I have plenty of time. But implicit in that is a kind of, if I die tomorrow so what? I'm always living my life in a sort of 'this is as good as it gets' mood, and I often take imaginary time-travels back to my former self to brag about what's going on in my life which is objectively better. Nevertheless, I know that I haven't told my kids everything I want them to know. I think I can live with that. I do indeed live in the moment.

But what of my writing? If anything, I know that my writing is always an open kind of exploratory journal of philosophical dimensions. It assumes very little is settled. I've probably written a good 40% of the comments here, which I think is rare for bloggers of my ilk. It's all about 'the fullness of time', which is another way of saying that if I die tomorrow, so what? It doesn't need to be finished. It doesn't need to be definitive. It just needs to continue. And that's what you hear.

Then I came back around to the conceit, tangential to the raging and bloviation that I inevitably have to do in the wake of my understanding of Jonah Goldberg. That is about the general fascination with 'The Last Lecture' itself. You basically have this college professor make peace with death. Why is that so fascinating? It's something every good Christian should have done, and by good Christian I mean John Brown good. So I'm imagining all of my metrosexual, athiest,  nemeses rambling on with their therapists or with their yoga group or in a corner after a Zocalo featuring Villaraigosa at the Skirball over lattes in hushed reverent voices about the courage of that professor.

Everybody is going to die. Get it? Why do people keep acting as if it's not going to happen? Why don't those inevitable gallows focus their minds? I don't know, I don't really care to know. I'm just stuck on serious at that deep level. Damned Jesuits.

So I contented myself with the second conceit which is that every two months or so, I deliver at least four large bags of ex-consumer goods to the Salvation Army. I'm one of those guys with the nice watch who enjoys ambling slowly around to his broad expansive trunk of his car to pull out goods of some value. Although for about 18 months now, I've been wanting to be the guy with a flat stomach pulling something backbreaking out of the back of a Hummer or Avalanche. But, either way, it's all good.

So the as life continues. I do wonder why all the shouting...

Which reminds me of one more thing. I did read some good portion of 'A Christmas Carol' the other day, and I couldn't help but notice how much of the moral import of the story relied on Dickens notion of the (after) life of ghosts. The concept of treading the earth for an eternity, bound by chains built of your sins and able to see all of human suffering without the slightest bit of ability to alleviate it. That is hellish.

Happy Thanksgiving 2008

Some best and basic wishes from me to you. I wanted to get 'BD' into the picture but she wasn't quite Beautiful Daughter and decided not to get in frame.

Black Man in South Dakota

Just to remind you such things actually do happen. Doc picked up some property out yonder.

On Paper

We are in the wedding planning stage of American presidential politics. The race to the engagement is over and the date for the big day the inauguration is set. Everybody is looking forward to a gymnastic honeymoon. Well, mostly everybody. Why? Because of all of the people who have accepted invitations.

On Volker, on Summers, on Geithner, on Blitzen. It looks like all are ready to dash away and circumnavigate the globe at supraluminal speeds bringing economic gifts back to all of us in Whoville before it turns to Hooverville. It all looks good on paper. Then again, so did that Congressional Joint Resolution..

Niall Ferguson has added his name to the pile of folks impressed with the number of people Obama might convince to keep their upper lips stiff through these rocky times. I have no objections to any besides reservations on Holder and on Clinton. But am most impressed with the economic team that Obama has assembled.

A lot of this economic stuff is way over my head. I keep subscribing to more and more learned hands and it doesn't seem to help. The more I read, the more vague the entire picture becomes. I admit that I've been diverted with a somewhat exhausting discussion on gay politics and that Bloomberg is not doing so many Surveillance podcasts as they were. I've worn out the habit, especially given Jonah Goldberg. And at the moment, given the mix, I'm in a bit of an apathetic mood. The answer? Comic.

Elementary

On Complexity & Emergent Behavior

Riffing off Tim Burke:

There is a fundamental problem with building efficiencies into systems. There are essentially, with regard to white collar productivity, two schools of thought, Deming and Hammer. Deming for constant quality improvement and Hammer for business process re-engineering.

The Deming approach requires a certain understanding of the process in which all workers are engaged. From the standpoint of a software designer, it can all be conceptualized in terms of a workflow. Person A has tasks 1,2,3 Person B with function X has tasks 4,5. Task 4 requires 2, etc on down the line. The willingness of software engineers to absorb the details of workflows in business is highly limited - and the ability of managers of such processes to communicate their complexity and possible efficiencies and chokepoints, etc. is also highly limited. Furthermore the willingness for software engineers and business managers to deal with each other on a long-term basis is slight. Both see their time more profitably spent elsewhere. This is especially costly to the Deming scenario, and so what generally happens is a Hammer implementation.

This does damage to the process by obviating some complexity. So you actually have more complex and new systems shoved into a process which is actually dumbed down because of the communications limitations of managers and engineers. Then what ends up happening is that those employees in the process chain make up the difference by partially working with, and partially working around the new system in ways they have no incentive to explain, and often in ways their managers are unaware of. The outputs of these systems as well as their inputs may be manipulated because those processes to which information technology is applied are rarely end to end systems. So there is a complex adaptive dynamism at work and in the end describing these systems are like describing the flow of molecules of water down a stream. They are chaotic, somewhat random, extraordinarily complex, yet at a macro level comprehensible and predictable.

Once a system becomes predictable at a macro level it gets frozen into place as the practice of the business with all of the inefficiencies and mysteries locked in.

And then the boss changes and all of the internal stresses on the system lose particular incentives.

Weird Science

Like most kid of the space age, I grew up watching Johnny Quest. It turns out that these remarkably simple, yet still intriguing Cold War cartoons are available on XBox. Two bucks an episode. They come replete with the secret labs and the basic premise of Big Science, that is, of a government either benevolent or malevolent funding huge laboratories where mad scientists may design and build to their hearts content. Of course the imprint was left on me. If I didn't have to send my kids to college, I'd be building a Batcave myself.

I've recently heard tell that social conservatives have been the enemy of science. I think the charge is overblown. But I'm quite sure that the era of Big Science is behind us. I am completely ignorant of the elaborate sorts of ass kissing one must do in supplication to those agencies who follow White House policy and dole out grants to brainy minions in white lab coats. Yet I am sympathetic to the plight of those minions who think themselves independent minds in service of the frontiers of knowledge. I am rather amused at the indignant complaints of scientists who fight political battles and see them parallel to magisters in the courts of kings, and other sorts of lobbyists.

I say so in the context of the sort of irony that being a geopolitical neoconservative puts me in. I am convinced that the great benefits of science to drive technology are expressed most fully in the benefits available to upper classes of America, and that efforts to push science are ultimately efforts aimed at stuff rich people can buy. Outside of that, how much of the output of the sort of science our government might fund goes to improve the quality of life in worlds other than the First World? Not bloody much I'd think.

There's already a cure for malaria, it's called using DDT to kill mosquitoes. There's already a cure for starvation. It's called agriculture. All of these things are known and yet it is the political systems of other countries that retard the use of technologies and science we have already mastered. So what is the moral point of increasing the state of the art of the most bleeding edge of science in these spoiled United States? Whatever it might be it is marginal in that respect. Thus the complaints of people denied grants to discover things which improve the efficacy of what is only valuable in utopian society falls on my, not deaf, but amused ears.

What science do we really need to know, and how seriously should we take the complaints of those 'geniuses' who ain't clever enough to fund their own? My money, by the way, is on Craig Venter.

The ISI Civics Quiz

I got an 84.85% which ain't bad, but I should have gotten the Sputnik question right but I marked the wrong box. So I know I should have an 87%. I didn't know much about the anti-Federalists or FDR's hijinks and a couple other fine points. Still, it's astonishing that:

The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better? Questions were drawn from past ISI surveys, as well as other nationally recognized exams.

Take the Quiz.

The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter is a very large film of the sort I might think to watch if I wanted to learn something about America. Having never seen it before, it reminds me of what something like "Life is Beautiful" might look to Italians.

It must be a film of profound resonance to a certain class of Americans growing up in a small town rough and tumble 1970s. Today, it's doubtful that there is much steel to be made as it was in those days. Tomorrow there may be no automobiles to be made as they are in these days. The Deer Hunter illustrates that boyish, drunken foolishness all paid for by a day's honest work in a small piece of America not too smart for itself to believe in God and Country through trials and tribulations until the bitter end. It strikes me as a film, at this late date, marking the end of some innocence but also of the permanence of some moral certitude.

I can imagine some looking back at the film and seeing an entirely naive America, one chastened to recognize now what the psychological tribulations of war meet out.  I don't see it that way. What I find admirable about the characters in this film is that they are well adjusted to a certain type of domestic violence contemporary filmgoers would shun. There is no pretense in Cimino's ethnic Pennsylvania town. The people of the town are not simple or plain, they fill out the dimensions of their own lives, merely unburdened with the rest of the world, content to deal with what is directly in front of them. Their loves, hates, jealousies, fears all make them complete, not their comportment to any sort of ideal.

As a war movie, The Deer Hunter does a fine job in describing heroism. The simple and plain courage of De Niro's character is played straight. He never wears his uniform with irony, never mocks the import of the struggle he enjoined. Never tried to make more of his position in all of that than he was. He was always the kind of man he was and at war and proved himself clearly to be the better man. He was true to his friends, to his hometown, to his honor throughout. If war makes fools of many, there remain a few who, even without great intellectual or spiritual gravity, manage through it standing. De Niro's Michael understands 'this is this' as he explains the meaning of the single bullet - there is a time when no excuses matter.

Idiot-Proofing

I haven't thrown my hands up in the air and given up. Ok I did once. OK maybe twice but it hasn't become a bad habit. This is what the progressing news on the bailouts sounds like to me, and there seems to be no end to it.

Now with the mighty mighty Citibank in jeopardy, it's difficult for me to know what to think, which is of course the worst news of all. When everybody says they don't know what to think, that's when emotion takes over and people do what makes them feel good, whether or not it makes any logical sense whatsoever. I'm not talking about panic, I'm talking about excuse-making. It seems to me that we are at that point when the people who ought to know better keep saying "Well, OK but we're going to have to figure out what that means.." when they ought to be saying. NO! HELL NO!

I don't know what it's called in finance and economics but I know what it is in the software business. Let's call it 'refusing to lose'. When a customer refuses to do for themselves what they pay consultants to do for them, especially when they want everything to be easy, it is a surefire way to break the budget.

When you're a software consultant, you're out in the field working with customers who recognize your genius but really don't have much of an idea what you do or how you do it. They just have a budget, a schedule and some desires. Depending on the reasonableness of these three items a project will succeed or fail. There are rather predictable ways in which they fail spectacularly. One of the ways is when they keep asking for something to be made idiot-proof.

When you're an expert, it's often difficult for you to recognize how much you actually know. When you compare yourself to laymen it's difficult to say whether your expectations are reasonable. What's easy and common sense for you seems impossibly difficult for them. For example, I might say to my customer: Hey all you have to do is go to the DOS prompt type in a command line with today's date in it, and then view the log file. But it might be that your customer cannot fathom exactly how to do all of that. So instead, they want you to build a website where they can just push a red button and have the button turn green when the job is done. The difference between the solution you offered and the one they want will cost hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars, but it will be made child's play.

This is how I'm viewing the financial crisis. The egos of the experts are allowing them to present solutions to problems their customers ought to know how to do themselves. Except that the cost of idiot-proofing the system is not borne by either party. It's coming out of the taxpayer's hide.

The experts have to stop pretending to be Oscar Goldman and let Steve Austin die of natural causes.

In Search of Conservative Intelligence

Something I believe goes without saying is that there are particular advantages to be had by myself and all Progressives who seek to understand the principled conflicts between themselves and Conservatives. To the extent that I care much about the particulars of black people, which is possibly all sentimental and chauvinistic, I think there is a good opportunity for African Americans to avail themselves to sound Conservative logic. It also goes without saying that this is a controversial assertion for a black man, but I think much of that controversy is misplaced in a sort of dissonance.

When I was a performance poet in the early 90s moving to New York, it was an article of faith, especially in the wake of Rodney King and the LA Riot, that news anchors and reporters would seek out uneducated angry black people for a representative opinion. This has become such a cliche that when the reverse happens, as it did famously with an Obama supporter YouTubed in Hollywood, it is seen as quite an unusual phenomenon. It is therefore a bit ironic but then again entirely predictable that when Progressives and liberals choose to find a representative of those people they know nothing about, they tend to find those who most resemble their preconcieved stereotypes. It is with that kind of foolishness I wish to dispatch.

This of course, forces me to do likewise. Fortunately, that's not difficult considering that when I first began blogging I was more Progressive than I am now, and linked to a more liberal set of bloggers. I've gotten rid of that blogroll altogether. Hmm. But since the election of Obama I have started re-reading Yglesias, Drum, Kelley and DeLong. I didn't realize that Kevin Drum left the Washington Monthly and landed at Mother Jones of all places, so I've since dropped him - but that's my prejudice. Still, I've never made much of a point of arguing against Kos, for example. If I had my druthers, and since it's my blog I'll state them, I would have Progressives quoting from The New Republic and Leftists from The Nation. I'd thusly be quite happy quoting from The National Review. What irks me is that I keep hearing about Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and George Will - people I don't take seriously.

Be all that as it may, it's clear that from my own perspective, I am sufficiently grounded in the basics of Conservatism to take my own study up a notch and will continue to heed David Brooks, Victor Davis Hanson, Richard John Neuhaus, Greg Mankiw, Richard Fernandez and Ross Douthat. I'll spend more time hearing out the Powerline guys from the Claremont Center and other Straussians of their ilk. But pointedly, I will be paying stricter attention to those Conservative intellectual writers, historians, economists, and attorneys whose grasp of the finer details is without question.

Since November 4th, I haven't read one thing about Sarah Palin but I did finally come to understand that it was Tina Fey (star of 'Mean Girls', duh) who most famously said in a skit as Palin that she can see Russia from her house. Haha very funny, now I get the joke. But I don't watch Saturday Night Live, and haven't since Eddie Murphy left. I realize that there are all sorts of millions of Americans who inform their political views from parody and satire but you won't find me quoting Stephen Colbert around here.

On talk radio, I still like Hewitt's form of lawyerly gotcha, but it wears thin after a while. Instead I prefer Dennis Miller and Dennis Prager. Miller because he doesn't have an overweening desire to be taken so damned seriously yet remains hilarious and an incredibly prescient judge of character. Prager because in the end, he's probably the most even-handed and philosophical on Right Radio. I probably would listen to Bill Bennett if he weren't on a 3-6AM. I will listen to Rush Limbaugh because he is right on top of the talking points of the day, often establishing them, but I won't hear him out. He's a naked and brilliant propagandist - there to keep the hoi full of it's own polloi. I never ask Limbaugh "why" and nobody ever should, and in that regard he's only useful to spark up a topic.

I've got Chesterton and C.S. Lewis in my back pocket, but I'd probably do well to seek out Oakeshott and other theorists like Edmund Burke, because I'm rather determined through the education I've just gotten from Jonah Goldberg to find out the finer points on the differences between Classic Liberals, Modern Conservatives like Hayek and Libertarians. I'd also like to be able to understand how Christianity in general connect through the Enlightenment and energizes an appreciable amount of morality in Conservative ideology without becoming the parody portrayed in redneck Evangelism. I've broadly placed conservative Christianity in the sole province of Catholicism, but it cannot soley reside there.

All in all, I am satisfied that I won't have to talk about elections for some time and that I'll spend less time defending policies on principles than speaking more directly about those principles.

America the Illiterate

We face difficult times ahead and Americans are under pressure to recognize the singular nature of our society and our interdependence. While the strong will survive, we need to be able to understand and respect what it is that makes one strong. This will require a recognition of a great ill in our society, that of illiteracy - cultural illiteracy.

One of the more difficult things to explain to people is that America is an elite society. It is both elite and redundant. It is an extraordinary combination, and it is one that renders the American way of life very robust. America is an elite society in that there are things that work here in ways they do not work anywhere else. Countries elsewhere struggle to achieve the level of scholarship we possess, the level of technological, scientific and medical achievement we possess, the low level of legal corruption we possess. And we move along pretty much taking such things for granted.

It is the openness of our society, a real functioning and robust meritocracy, that makes such things possible. When we look at the question of illiteracy and the staggering numbers of Americans who ride along naively in the belly of the advanced beast we are. One wonders why we don't simply collapse. We have so many Darwin Award winners, so many examples of idiocy and ignorance in large numbers of our population, that it seems that disaster is just around the corner. How many times have you seen articles like the following:

Herald-Leader
Friday, May 24, 1996

WASHINGTON - Less than half of American adults understand that the Earth orbits the sun yearly, according to a basic science survey. Despite flubbing such questions, there is enthusiasm for research -except in some fields such as genetic engineering and nuclear power that are viewed with suspicion.

Only about 25% of American adults got passing grades in a survey by the National Science Foundation of what people know about basic science and economics. Even fewer of those surveyed felt they were well-informed about technical subjects.

The worst showing came when those surveyed were asked to define scientific terms. Only about 9% knew what a molecule was, and only 21% could define DNA.

But even more fundamental questions stumped man: Less than 1/2 knew that the Earth orbits the sun annually. In a test of environmental understanding, 1/3 of Americans surveyed understood the effects of a thinning ozone layer, 14% could identify locations of ozone holes, and only 5% could give a scientific explanation of acid rain.

Surely we are on a path towards ruin with so many ignorant Americans. No we are not. That is because we are an elite society. Such people never get to touch the switches and shift the gears of America. The very idea of somebody other than an expert running things is unthinkable to most Americans. If there is anything true about American culture it is that we value our meritocracy. We willfully subject ourselves to tests in every aspect of our lives. From our very youth, we are prepared to prove ourselves in competitions, rankings, ratings, questionnaires, surveys and evaluations of all sorts. We immediately toss over our cultural upbringing for 'objective' superiority.  We celebrate winners and berate slackers and loser. We admire overachievers and we all suffer fears of performance anxiety. In sports, at work, in church, at the movies, in the stock market, on our IQs. In these myriad ways Americans generate a thousand ways to tell us whether or not we are getting what we deserve. We discriminate. It keeps the cream rising to the top.

We are also a broad and deep society. We have a strong second string. Surely there are intelligent and capable people who often make foolish or immoral mistakes at the top of our society, but we are as a culture not afraid to kick them out and replace them. Nor are we often at a loss to provide a replacement. That is because we are a redundant society. American redundancy doesn't seem quite obvious but it is the greater of the two strengths.We desire choice, and we decry monopoly. We create communities of interest in parallel. We maintain standards in a decentralized manner, we don't require central control of everything. We enjoy the delight of independent discovery and we take full pride in individual achievement even when it is an achievement that has been accomplished by others many times before.  We have managed to comport ourselves to understand that there will always be another champion - and our willingness to try creates a nearly endless supply. Americans push for redundancy, we build it into our culture's desire for pluralism, for variety.  The more the merrier.

There is much about the very function of redundancy that makes for robust systems of every type. No old man dies with the recipe, there are always alternatives. And because we pride ourselves on individuality we like to see how another kind of style or path leads to first class performance. We feel more confident when we know there are rivals to the throne, yet in redundancy is frustration. Avis is certainly as good a Hertz but remains number two. Many individuals reach a pinnacle of talent yet never merit the spotlight. These are unsung heroes, and many Americans live this way - most in fact, without the recognition of fame and renown yet with equal and sometimes greater skills that those who lead. But there is often uncertainty and doubt. People often feel irrelevant. Are they?

A good deal of what is called 'social injustice' is actually the result of intolerance for our meritocracy, and many people who feel they should be getting more respect fail to recognize that their choices deny them, not injustice.

A lot of attention is given to the political argument that we have greater and greater disparities between the haves and the have-nots in our society. It is true, but I think that it is a mere consequence of this being a larger society than it ever was. Surely peasants in China are far more distant to the leaders of that country than we are to ours. The aim of that argument though is one in support of increased social welfare, but within our culture of achievement we know very well that people do make choices and nobody is compelled to be irrelevant. It remains a matter of 'political incorrectness' to suggest that the marginal play the major role in their failure, but we remain a nation of great educational and social infrastructure much of which is actually irrelevant to the core of our civilization. We endure a sort of cultural pollution - an oversupply of Disneylands and mock-Disneylands, edu-tainments, new age mysticisms, bohunk sensibilities and retrograde 'moralities' filling the American mind with nonsense.

The disparities between the haves and have-nots are not merely income disparities but cultural disparities. We sustain too many alternate cultures. It has fallen out of fashion to suggest that these are subcultures, because of acceptance in the mainstream of the tenets of multiculturalism. What is implied by the social injustice disparity argument is a permanence in the upper classes, that there is no real mobility, as if merit didn't count. What perhaps is more true is that those on the outs tend to resemble themselves more than those on the inside. You don't hear unemployed street youth speaking Latin and Greek at the bodegas of the ghetto. Because having four years of Latin always works to improve the mind. I think it is inescapable that what Allen Bloom wrote to our disbelieving ears was true.

It annoys some folks that we have a single society but not multiple meritocracies. Their expectations are out of sync with reality. To take multiculturalism's premise that all cultures are equally valid is to expect that all every cultural ambition leads to the top of our society. Except that they don't; many are dead ends. This is not an injustice it is a consequence of our society's collective discriminations - those necessary to give our meritocracy teeth. Our understanding of winners and losers cannot be abused for the sake of some vagueries of 'equality'. Equality is equality of deed, it requires the evidence of achievement. It requires the understanding of molecules and knowing the Earth revolves around the Sun. So long as we are to keep our meritocracy in place, this has to be the case.

What's important remains important. It isn't that suddenly all Americans have lost their minds, but that we are exposed to more and more who apparently have no need to use theirs for any significant purpose. And in so doing we have become inured in the main to our own mediocrity. More of our society is given over to frivolity - the reality of competence and excellence seems obscure. In fact it is. Far too many of us get over without understanding what is we're actually supposed to know. We cannot long continue to be an elite and redundant nation if our leaders cannot assert with confidence that our second team, our coming generation doesn't know the same things they know.

This weekend I found myself reading Dickens aloud to my youngest daughter who wondered why it is that I only like to watch old movies. The language of great English literature is on the verge of unrecognizability, and on my iPod is a BBC production of Coriolanus. It is, unfortunately obscure to the ear. I think in the end I will have to read it. (interestingly enough, Google will not correct any approximate misspelling of 'Coriolanus') which only proves further the point of obscurity. We cannot allow those great works which define our civilization to fall on uncomprehending ears, we must insist that a greater number of us recognize what it is that makes us strong.

We should not be hostile to 'diversity'. When we are discussing differences we must distinguish between expression and values. Surely there are different ways of expressing the same value. We don't want conformity of expression, but conformity of values. But if 'diversity' implies a different hierarchy of values then we must discriminate and we will.

I am not particularly satisfied that all of America can survive the dumbing down of its masses. An elite that feels comptemtuously isolated in its acquired knowledge and power will inevitably betray. That is human nature. And so Wall Street millionaires who work incredibly complex yet ultimately corrupt manipulations shouldn't surprise us any more than Senators who work indecipherably dense sinecures into boring legislation. The obsucrity of intelligence will destroy us from the top down if we become an elite nation with no redundancy.

As I exist in a fringe of a highly literate continuum called the blogosphere - we already know that our mainstream media has reached beyond the tipping point. That tipping point in which it becomes more profitable to cater to the relatively weak-minded and pretend to be serving their best interests. I have grown up in the era where this has been the case longer than it has not. I have always been prepared to be part of an energized cadre of social mountain climbers. But that is not enough. If those who know will become an exceedingly small core, then they lose the virtue of belonging to a nation. It is not enough to be informed and correct.

It is upon all of us to connect with our elites, to respect our meritocracy and to address ourselves to a culture of singular values inheriting all which has instructed us before. We must subordinate and discriminate against the relativism that pretends to elevate by declaration. We must be evidence-based in our evaluations and insure a deep redundancy of skills across the country. We must not be afraid to tell the truth.

I have faith that those who seek the elevation and continued strength of our society will make the efforts required to call out right against wrong and that they will do so without shame. It is, in the end, the only thing that will save us.

The Logical Consequences of Being Female

Last year, I kept hearing a number of complaints about American laws. They came from my boss at the time. He was from Norway. Being a European, he knew a great deal about the differences between those questions and policies you can implement in a European business and those you can do here. You can sum up the difference thusly: In Europe you can ask people a million questions before they're hired, but once they're on board, it's hard to fire them. In America you can't ask them much, but it's a bit easier to get rid of them.

One of the things he said he regularly asked women in Europe was whether or not they planned to get married or have a baby in the next three years or so. In the US, you can basically be impaled on a stake for inquiries of this sort. But the implications of the questions are fairly obvious from the perspective of an employer. Women who get married generally have their priorities change. Women who get pregnant are not generally as productive on the job, and need extended periods of time off to have the child.

The problem with the Equal Rights Amendment, which demands equal pay for equal work for females and males, fails to account for this fundamental inequality which is the logical consequence of being female. Women get married and have babies, and these things change their lives more than they change the lives of the men involved in the same process, from an employer's point of view.

The salaries women get in smaller businesses are more likely to be depressed as compared to their male counterparts where duplicate skills are not so readily available. I read the failure of the ERA quite simply as a recognition that businesses have to deal with realities not expressed or accounted for in its simple language.

Playing it Safe

Powerline sez:

..it makes sense for Obama to be reasonably moderate. He makes history simply by being a President with dark skin; what he desperately wants to avoid is for his Presidency to be seen as a disaster or a fiasco. Thus his sudden moderation on foreign policy: Obama is smart enough to understand that it is always possible for things to go wrong, but if the public perceives that an international setback is due to weakness, the President is in trouble. He's Jimmy Carter. If a President is perceived as tough on foreign policy and something goes wrong, voters will say that they're glad we have a hard guy in the White House.

In domestic policy Obama has more latitude, but here too it makes sense for him to play it safe. If he completes a mainstream Presidency successfully, he goes down in history. If he goes out on a limb and is marked down as a failure, it will be a setback for African Americans, more or less forever.

We've got several folks named. Emanuel, Clinton, Richardson, Geithner. All known quantities, none extraordinarily Left. Maybe Powerline is onto something. Is Obama tiptoeing? Moreover, is Zawahiri right? Dare we say?

Conservatism's Modest Adjustments

I'm going to step out on a limb here because I am responding extemporaneously to a suggestion.

The overarching principle of Conservatism as I see it is 'epistemological modesty', which is, as I mentioned within the past few weeks, the basic idea that human society has indeed evolved and established conventions for good reasons. Consequently nobody is capable of re-engineering the world in a grossly better way than it has evolved. All utopian schemes should be regarded with extreme skepticism.

Nevertheless, there are leaps and mutations in the course of human affairs, which when guided by a goodly understanding of history may improve the lot. It is something of an axiom of American Conservative thought that the American Revolution was one such leap and that the frameworks and struggles of the Founders to create a nation outside of the tyrannies of monarchy was a success. Unfortunately, the break with the old order was not simple, it was militant and radical. But part of the great promise of the American experiment was found in the good fortune of the character of Washington who had all the incentives to become a philosopher king but refused.

The premises of liberty as conceived by the Founders were wrought with other real practical contradictions as well, clearly among which was the institution of human bondage - of slavery of the African, a direct slap in the face of the nation it sought to establish and a well-understood problem by those Founders. In their establishment of the Constitution however it was clear that rectification of this matter implied violent conflict in the future of the nation.

I would be so bold as to suggest that no such inherent gross injustices remain in the core premises of our nation and that we are thus very well suited to continue to guarantee, by the separation of powers and other fundamental provision, the protection of liberties for generations to come. Nevertheless, there continue to be people born yesterday and the intent and direction of the premises of liberty as conceived by the Founders will be challenged in every respect. It is therefore the duty of the Conservative, and specifically the Hayekian Conservative to protect the American ideal in light of the great magnification of powers which have accrued to this nation, and thus the greater consequences of those abuses and perversions which might become established. This includes those abuses that were well-understood by the Founders and new types which might arise over time. I say particularly the Hayekian because of the specific types of threats that Hayek identified in his great work 'The Road To Serfdom'.

Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system, the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group, which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal. Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved. Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea. Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”. After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism. For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.

I have mentioned Tytler's Warning just last month and it strikes me as the sort of fundamental wisdom of a conservative sort.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

It is rather difficult for me to suggest what I think the priorities of Conservative movement ought to be. I don't consider myself sufficiently deep yet. But I do think that the role of Conservatism in American politics is not necessarily radical - that rather it is requires only modest adjustments to keep the nation on the straight and narrow. The aforementioned admonitions are quite clear to me - they speak loudly against the encroachments of collectivism and the abuse of the public trust.

To those two I would add that Conservatives should guard against the establishment of the Nanny State, which is the consequence of an overweaning desire to place the locus of morality in the aegis of the State. This is, I think an evolution of the basic injunction "you can't legislate morality". The fact of the matter is one must legislate morally, but one should not do so in ways that make utopian promises and engender dependency. It seems to me that the more you refrain from making such promises, the more that the collective enterprise of democracy focuses on actual maintenance of the Commons.

Fourthly and finally I would admonish Conservatives to clear up confusion and rigorously discipline them to the distinctions between the politics of Evangelists and Evangelist Politics. I invent these terms because I am not aware of the terms which should be applied when conflations are made between the religiously inspired impulse to do the morally correct thing through politics and policy and the proper secular recognition of the moral ends of proper policy. There should not be special rewards for Christians for doing the right thing. There should not be special rewards for Blacks who do the right thing. In a way, I suppose it is a warning away from identity politics. Take the good from the people in a brown paper bag without fawning quid pro quo.

 

Culture War on Whom?

American tradition is wrong, therefore its laws must be changed.

If I were to say something like this, then I would consider myself to be Progressive. But I don't and so I have very specific questions about the nature of such change. I am skeptical. I would have the law shrink and I would have government power restrained and give it less reason to ask me questions. Nulan, in his own twisted way expresses such a conservative sentiment in the following manner:

I'll keep my guns focused on the dangerous demographic that's so concerned about what I have, get, boink, ingest, or think - thank you very much.

It is difficult for me to understand how such a charge could be pointed at the Conservative movement. We are not the authors of political correctness. It is political correctness that is the consciousness-invasive restriction of speech and thought whose agenda is to politicize ever more expansive areas of life in America.

Smoking has been politicized. By the Left.
Gender has been politicized. By the Left.
Food has been politicized. By the Left.

Conservatives like me would rather that you leave politics out of it - that a broad area of life should have no political connotations whatsoever. Conservatives are more interested in defending their way of lives from a political and legal encroachment of activists who seek to use government power to create a new world. It is very simple and clear that Conservatives seek to restrain government power and to keep private matters the province of private enterprise. Laissez Faire, people. Just let it be.

The hazard of the advance of culture wars is to infantilize everyone, I prefer the boldness of the 60s radicals, in which at least they had the courage to go somewhere and create the little world they wished to see. Now radicals insist that the state must impose that world upon all of us. Instead of making their own commune, they want America itself to be their commune.

The point of this message is that there is a political inversion taking place. Americans are free to do much more most people on the planet. But still there are those who take it upon themselves to agitate against traditions as if these traditions were impositions. There is a deeper and dysfunctional error in the assumptions against traditions, but Conservatives like me are content to leave those errors be, so long as they do not become law and policy. And so we resist these attacks on the accumulated wisdom of history and human learning.

Blackfolks & Whitefolks

I'll be damned.

I just realized that I've been using the terms 'blackfolks' and 'whitefolks' for years beyond their invention. I used them to distinguish Americans who considered themselves to be black and white for the purposes of anti-racist activism. This has carried over in my discussions at Cobb, which is not aimed at race in that way at all. Wow.

I will make the change. It has been inappropriate and probably misleading.

Smash Monogamy

Wow and wow.

I've gotten up to the chapter in Liberal Fascism that discusses the links between Alinsky, Hillary Clinton and Michael Lerner. In my half-assed and lazy way I'm not particularly interested in making an extended rant against my presumed enemies in the public on the other side of Prop Eight. Nevertheless I will pay attention to who files amicus briefs, pays for legal defense funds and otherwise stands up on their hind legs. But what is more important to me, as you might have guessed, is to figure out the intellectual provenance of all this activism in first place.

It turns out that 'smash monogamy' was one of the slogans of none other than the Weather Underground. Yep. Dorn and Ayers and all that rotten crew. If you follow Google it lands you into some very interesting sets of commentary. I particularly like this one...

According to the 1989 book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Weatherman trainees underwent grueling rituals of self-abasement and abuse in which their dignity, individuality and even sexual identity was brutally extinguished. On pages 84-87, Collier and Horowitz write;

"[The Weather Underground] initiated a 'smash monogamy' campaign to destroy bourgeois sexual hang-ups: Once monogamy was smashed, couples who in some cases had been together for years were harangued until they admitted their 'political errors' and split apart. "The next logical step was group sex. One of the last taboos was homosexuality, and the Weather command forced itself toward experimentation in this direction, instructing male and female cadres to 'make it' with members of the same sex."

Also note this salient criticism:

It has always been impossible for me to read the manifestoes of the Sex Panic group, some of which have been posted here in the last few days,  without being reminded of that eminently dumb political slogan of the  1960s, 'smash monogamy.' It invokes, for me, the seemingly unlimited  capacity of segments of the American left to position itself in the most  self-destructive, most marginal posture possible. In the name of  "liberation" and "emancipation," an agenda is put forward that tells people  -- straight, gay, lesbian and bisexual -- that the left will invade their  most intimate relationships, with an agenda of breaking them up and  destroying them. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Leaving aside the incredible capacity for deliberate self-marginalization  here, the old 'we are revolutionary, because nobody can stomach our  revolutionary ideas' pose, the political issue at stake is how one changes  for the better societies under the sway of homogenizing sexual disciplines,  in which a singular norm of heterosexual marriage is established and  conformity to it is rigorously policed. One can seek to de-homogenize, to  pluralize the norm, to make the norm more and more heterogeneous as its  reach is expanded to cover more and more diverse types of human  relationships and human beings, thus according a greater and greater number  of people the rights and privileges which are currently reserved for those  within the homogeneous norm; this is the path that the African-American  freedom struggle and the feminist struggle has historically pursued, with  some successes. Or one can disown the very idea of any norms, however  heterogeneous, and insist upon the targeting of relations and individuals  within the norm as the 'enemy'. This is the Sex Panic approach, for which  the expansion and pluralizing of the norm is simply the reconstitution of  'queer' as 'normal.' For them, it is more important that the 'queer' remain  the unassimilated 'queer' than that queers have the full rights and  privileges of other citizens.

Uh huh. This rabbit hole gets fairly deep. This is your introduction. I'm not making any hard connections here, but the loose associations speak towards exactly what liberal fascism is all about, a fanatic desire to redefine human life and associations in order to serve Progress. What Progress must be made by redefining all of human sexuality? Why does this kind of thinking even enter into our politics? 

Gay Groupthink & Sex Worth Dying For

In doing some research about the sexual revolution and a 1997 conference called Sex Panic, I found this interesting bit on the web. I excerpt:

YOU'RE going to want to slap me after a few paragraphs, so let me acknowledge even before I start that I grew up in the South, and that Southerners rarely abandon a cultural assumption that is almost hard-wired into us: That there must be limits to tolerance, and that there are times when we simply must tell people that they are wrong and that their ideas are dangerous.

Still, that does not mean that we Southerners are necessarily fascist. Some of us have read a little Locke. We strongly uphold individual freedom, the right to speak out and the right to pursue happiness. Nevertheless, I've been hearing a new idea lately that is both wrong and dangerous. That is the idea that higher quality sex is worth dying for, and that life after 40 is so worthless that one might as well have better sex and die young.

and...

James is 21. He's a senior at UC-Berkeley who has struggled greatly with his sexuality, with his self-esteem, with promiscuity, with insecurities about living up to the gay ideal of beauty, with fears about whether he can succeed in the world he'll face when he gets out of school.

I invited James to lunch to talk. I showed him Lisa's story, and then we set out across Buena Vista Park, walking west. The gay logo was all over the sky that day - rainbows - and I was enjoying life, despite my advanced age and the fact that I haven't had much sex lately. I asked James, Is sex worth dying for?

He didn't think for long. It depends, he said, on whether the person you're having sex with is a one-night stand or whether he'll stay with you. And it depends on when you die. If you don't die until you're in your 40s, then yes, he said, sex is worth dying for.

I was stunned and kept silent. I waited for a few neurons to fire in his head so he'd realize that he'd pretty much said that my life doesn't have much value because of my age.

That's deep.

Liberal Fascism: Halfway Mark

I am about halfway through Jonah Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism', and it's truly a fascinating set of ideas. Goldberg has given me quite a bit to think about considering what I did and did not know about American history. But in many ways this is exactly the book I have been needing to know.

As I mentioned before, or probably never said it this way before, the most difficult think about being a black conservative is that you haven't inherited it. Which means, like any bounder on the ascent, you know very well what you don't like but you're not sure exactly if getting what you do like gets you into. We are all aware of the rhetorical catfights that certain conservatives like to get into and there is a great risk of falling into blatant demogoguery. It is difficult to unlearn progressivism without being slavish.

What is not said often enough is that blackfolks who bother to do battle as conservative specifically with progressive blackfolks are often motivated by the same premises as progressives - that some intellectual vanguard pointing in the proper direction is going to lift all boats. I think that in divesting myself of the prerogatives of the Talented Tenth, that I have avoided that trap - but it does consequently leave me wondering why I talk to or about blackfolks at all.

These are some of the interesting consequences of transcribing my journey as I get through towards more contemporary histories in Goldberg, especially with regard to the role of the Black Panthers and the Black Power Movement. You see in assigning the dichotomy necessary to make his point clear, there is no question but that black politics in significant components lie directly in the scheme of fascism. For what it's worth, a great deal of American politics does, but I suppose that I will have some responsibility to deal with the black part. In some ways that will be quite easy as my record on the Fifty Page Book Men and the Coalition of the Damned is fairly clear. But the premises of unity and collectivism, very deeply imbedded in Progressivism and in black identity itself - well, smacking that with a stick is going to be costly in terms of the noise I will have to suffer for doing so.

Be all that as it may, this book is the antidote to Howard Zinn. It is absolute required reading for anyone who cares to understand what conservatives are NOT. That is because it makes for the first honest accounting of how exactly to view that period in world history when the context of the evil of the 20th century can be explained in American terms.

Goldberg does a damning good job, but perhaps not as persuasive as possible (yet the first time I've heard it) accounting for the intellectual tenor of the 20th century with regard to the reconception of government. Although his book is complete with a fairly robust accounting of the intellectual leaders and concepts of the century, he decides rather to concentrate his focus on the great men. That is the single weakness of the book aside from some variously scattershot factoids that are often thrown in for effect. (For example, Malcolm X is only mentioned once for 'by any means necessary') which he paints as nihilist, and then left alone. I suspect that as he loads down his book with such references it becomes overwrought with nitpicky and debatable talking points rather than tracing a smooth inevitable arc and consequences of the philosophical ends of Progressivism. The difficulty is thus with justifications of cramming everything under fascism which is not the sum of all evils that in my view totalitarianism actually is.  The question I think would be better answered is how to rescue the world from dictatorship through the application of classic liberalism and the separation of powers inherent in the American system. But maybe that's just me.

But what remains the unquestionable strength of the book is how Goldberg illustrates what the Left has done to spin treachery of its own design onto the shoulders of the Right. He demonstrates case after case of how liberalisms of the 'third way' are drawn to fascistic themes.

It should be instructive to understand the very basics of fascism which have basically everything to do with the origin of the word from the Roman fasces in which a set of slim, individually weak sticks, are bound tightly together to form a weapon. The premises of fascism always subordinate the individual towards a nationalist scheme of group identity and meaning. Goldberg sees fascism as essentially an organizing methodology with consistent themes in Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy and Wilson's warsocialist America. He then traces these themes through FDR's New Deal, and Progressives on the Left from Dewey to current thinkers and politicians on the Left from Hillary Clinton to Michael Lerner. 

The book is an armory of ammo showing the excesses of the Left and their efforts to conceal their errors, and it essentially breaks the stranglehold liberals claim to the moral high ground. Extraordinary book.

NXE - All That

It took me about six hits of the (X) button on my controller asking for a display of more avatars to realize that my XBox 360 was generating a random set every time. But I kept pressing it because it was so cool to watch the crowd of them run up to center stage and make gestures like 'hey over here, pick me!'.

I'm talking about the New XBox Experience, the new menuing and operating system for the XBox 360. It's actually very, very cool.

Feature-wise, the big fat hairy deal is streaming HD video on demand. XBox Live has obviated my need for AppleTV. I should say my desire for it because I don't need any of this - it's just another way to see the same 200 movies currently in rotation which I could get from FIOS.

But the real coup is that Microsoft has, in a fairly successful fashion now created a UI that I'm much more willing and likely to use in getting my content. I can tell you this right now, the new XBox 360 with the NXE has bridged the gap. Anybody who games on XBox Live will tell you that the gaming experience is excellent, but with regard to watching DVDs - meh. I'm really at the point at which I feel comfortable using it as a DVR. I know MSFT is dying to hear me say so, but I'm now actually looking at the reasonableness of getting a second box instead of going Blu-Ray. But there is no question whatsoever that I appreciate the speed and ease of use of NXE on the 360 much better than that for FIOS on Motorola DVR.

I went ahead and signed up for the Netflix free trial - which is my third go round with Netflix which we cut off when Blockbuster added their mail service. The "Instant" feature is the only one I'd really care about but the assumption was that I'd have a bigger library at Netflix than I do on FIOS. Not the case at all. Only about 7 of the top 100 rentals on Netflix are available for streaming to NXE. So big whoop on that. What I want is the big library.

Advances in this direction make me think moreso than ever that I really don't want to own half of the DVDs that are in my library. I'm really anticipating the ability to manage my clouds because I have own a hell of a lot of data, but nobody is coming close to that  - except perhaps Carbonite. In the meantime, I'm still going to depend on DVD Planet for the depth of their library. Apple still rubs me the wrong way with their small perfections that don't scale. Yeah that's right MobileMe still doesn't work, and I'm buying all of my MP3s from Amazon nowadays. Apple still rules in podcasts.

If Amazon gets into NXE, it's all over for Netflix. I do wonder how it is that MSFT didn't consider that deal or try to make it happen. Speaking of which, does WalMart still sell MP3s for 83 cents? I'll be damned. 74 cents! And LaBelle has a new album out.

Anyway, I do want to now get the nextgen XBox with the big drive and HDMI connectors. That's the other big feature is that you can run games fully off the drive. Yes this software can sell hardware and move content. Nice job Microsoft.

Race Matters - Cornel West

Michael Hicks just recently dropped by. He's one of the folks who has known me online for at least a decade. As I was dealing with Uptown Steve's one liner on blackfolks and economics, it came to mind that I should switch up a bit and see what he or others might consider to be thoughtful ideas from blacks to blacks. IE books. And so when I started to deal with his response to my critique about black left academics I wanted to go straight to Cornel West.

West was, most notably, one of those dude who had a sophisticated excuse for blackfolks that seemed perfectly plausible to me back in the day. I know a lot more about West and the Left now than I did then but basically his deal, that I accepted went a little something like this:

Q. If blackfolks are poor and their material conditions in America are under par, why don't they just do what other people do? That is to say what is wrong with black people using enlightened self interest and work the system of America like everybody else? Why must blackfolks resist the class system seeing how it worked for other ethnic minorities?

(this is essentially beating (progressive) West over the head with (conservative) Sowell, who explicitly calls for black Americans to read America and play the game like a player)

A. (xxxxx)
I'm going to find my copy of Race Matters and find his exact quote and I don't want to do it any injustice. But what I recall agreeing with is the nut of his answer. Black people don't want to be like other people. They want America to change. They don't want to get any respect from playing the system, they have other existential needs that go beyond material prosperity. In other words blacks play America like millenialist Christians play the world: In it but not of it. America is only real and moral when it works like xxx, xxx being the realized soulful black agenda perfect world blah blah. See? That's why I have to get the quote, because at this distance of 15 years I'm choking on the smell of remembered manure.

But hey, I freely admit that I was smoking West's crackpipe.

(from the archives May 1993)

Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: BOOK CLUB: Cornel West - 'Race Matters'

Keywords: race economics politics culture relations
I. Nihilism in Black America
II. The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning
III. The Crisis of Black Leadership
IV. Demystifying the New Black Conservatism
V. Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity
VI. On Black-Jewish Relations
VII. Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject
VIII. Malcolm X and Black Rage

Well, y'all don't have to listen to me any more. All you have to do is go out and buy this book, and other than the discussion of the practical politics, strategies and tactics of black cultural production and political activism in computer mediated fora, I will be completely redundant. It is the sad truth that 80% of the time West speaks my mind better than I do. I don't know how I forgot to put 'culture' in the keyword list. Anyway, each and every chapter is mostly on target with me.

Jonah Flames

(copied whole cloth)
From yesterday's National Review

Quit It Kathleen   [Jonah Goldberg]

To my friend Kathleen Parker — This act is getting really old.

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I'm bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we're setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

But they need those votes!

So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners.

Short break as writer ties blindfold and smokes her last cigarette.

Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

Me: I don't know what's more grating, the quasi-bigotry that has you calling religious Christians low brows, gorillas and oogedy-boogedy types or the bravery-on-the-cheap as you salute — in that winsome way — your own courage for saying what (according to you) needs to be said. Please stop bragging about how courageous you are for weathering a storm of nasty email you invite on yourself by dancing to a liberal tune. You aren't special for getting nasty email, from the right or the left. You aren't a martyr smoking your last cigarette. You're just another columnist, talented and charming to be sure, but just another columnist. You are not Joan of the Op-Ed Page. Perhaps the typical Washington Post reader (or editor) doesn't understand that. But you should, and most conservatives familiar with these issues can see through what you're doing.

For the record, I have no problem with arguments about how the GOP has become too religious. I ended my book with pretty much that argument. I opposed Mike Huckabee vociferously because he seemed the quintessential rightwing progressive imbued with a rightwing social gospel. These are all good arguments to make and they have good responses to them. But please drop the nonsense about how the G-O-D people  or the Palin people are low brows and beasts. There are low brows and beasts everywhere, on every side of the ideological spectrum. Maybe if you got more ecumenical hate email you'd realize that.

Gears of War 2

Gears of War 2 is such an excellent game that I find myself surprised at how much fun it is. It is by far one of the grisliest and bloodiest shooters out there but it works so much better than its predecessor.

I have spent a lot of time working towards a rank of 30 in Halo 3 for the past month, and I have significantly improved my game. I was a 19 when I started to take the game more seriously back in September. Now I'm a 28. So I cannot really tell whether that exercise in improving my reaction time and thinking on the fly has helped my control in Gears2 but by every measure, Gears 2 feels much more controlled and precise than the first installment. On the other hand, maybe it's my new HD bigscreen.

Be all that as it may, there are several enhancements to the franchise that like with Halo2 and Halo3 embrace, extend and enhance the Gears experience. More weapons, more vehicles, more stunning and varied venues, more subtle music, more creepy uses of darkness, more character revelations, more well thought out battle spaces, more dialog and more moves. Did I mention more enemies? And how.

The biggest change in gameplay in Gears2 is that there are a larger number of battle situations in which you are shooting from a moving platform. The original was walk and shoot, run and shoot, shoot from cover and flank the enemy. Good enough. But shooting from huge moving vehicles over rough terrain, or barges or dirigibles or trams - that's different. As well, Gears2 has avoided over reliance on boss battles. Instead, it's all about trying not to be overrun by hordes of foes of all shapes, sizes, speeds and strengths. A great battle in Gears2 will have you in an area where the cover moves, and you have some one-shot-kill enemies running up quickly to you and exploding nearby like suicide bombers, some enemies moving very slowly with large weapons that require two direct headshots to kill. All the while the standard grunts are changing positions and laying down suppressing fire and then a mounted enemy is zig-zagging his way to you and you have to decide to kill him or his mount first then deal with the other. Sometimes you have one assistant, sometimes you have three.  All very varied.

The multiplayer and menu system which was very bare bones in the first go round has gained a lot of sophistication in the new version. It makes for a more convivial lobby experience.

How Government Regulation Screws The Little Guy

One of the things we're undoubtedly going to here in the upcoming administration is how it's always the conservatives who are for in the pockets of the capitalist pigs. Yadda yadda. I'm here to tell you different. And why don't we start with one of my favorite fishbrain schemes, greening?

So BO picks his new EPA chief, the one who's going to put all of the coal plants out of business, and finds that he's also got some controversy over, hmm say Hotels. Let's say we discover that most mattresses in the beds of most hotels in America are not quite as 'green' as they should be. Why, I dunno. The average hotel mattress is 6 years old, and having been sprayed with non-biodegradable disnfectants on a daily basis retains dangerously high levels of the carcinogen 'PRx7'. You here this kind of envirospeak all the time. Today we have let's say 15 major hotel chains that control about 70% of the industry...

"President Obama and Nancy Pelosi announce today that they have come up with a groundbreaking announcement that in a bi-partisan agreement working with the leaders of the hospitality industry that they will reduce the number of toxic chemicals used to clean hotel rooms and drastically reduce the number of toxic hotel mattresses..."

So what does that mean?

It means that mom and pop, in order not to be shut down by OSHA and the EPA are going to have to trash all of their mattresses and change to use the newly approved and much more expensive type of disinfectant. Easy for all of the hotel chains that have flat panel TVs in their rooms, not so easy for the smaller ones.

Three years later, you have only 10 major hotel chains and now they control 85% of the industry. But the beds are greener.

This is called progress. It is what Progressives pursue. It is not a Conservative priority. We Conservatives are not generally looking to find ways to declare the status quo untenable. This is the restless energy and bias for action and change that is the hallmark of Progressives, that illustrates how it screws the little guy.

The Case Against Holder

National Review executes the first slaps:

There’s more. In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote.

Equally noxious were the stealthy pardons of Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans — Weather Underground terrorists associated with Obama’s friends Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn — issued on the same day as the Rich pardon. Rosenberg and Evans had been serving decades-long sentences for bombings targeting American government facilities. With Holder again helping to circumvent the pardon process and to evade objections from prosecutors, the terrorists’ jail terms were commuted just weeks after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Good luck on that one.

LGBT, Queer Theory & The Sexual Revolution

What does it all mean?

Casting Off Radical Ideas

Part and parcel of tossing one's hat into political philosophy's ring of fire of is the sheer weight of un-learning and assigning alternate values to the accumulation of ideas that shape one from youth. In my father's house were shelves and shelves of books - the natural direction of my intellectual curiosity went there. As a matter of pride I have often considered my inheritance of this library, the province of my black cultural nationalist father and upbringing. Further, it has often been my naive assumption that anyone not responding to the term 'negro' was at least partially invested in understanding the intellectual connotations of the Black revolution. These days, I become more convinced that blackness *is* a simple herrenvolk term. We are the tribal people of us, created very simply, in native alienation and considered impervious to intellectual distinction. The very idea of debating Booker T. Washington vs WEB DuBois itself seems parochial and out of touch, if not childish.

In that regard, there is no black intellectual future. Black intellect serves at the foot of an old master, whose imperative was 'race raising' which in the end is a futile if not tyrannical exercise for any man. Alas we must deal with greater struggles.

On the way there, I think there is some baggage which I must disabuse myself of, some of which has been useful, others not. I look at my own bookshelf and wonder if there is anything there that gave me any insight as to the size of my intellectual prison of the Left. What instinct in me caused me to distrust finally what I had figured was good for my black soul. In many ways, I am just as speechless as any black man on the other side of the aisle. We have a black president in America and Franz Fanon had nothing to do with it. So why did I waste my time learning Franz Fanon?

This is the question a great number of blackfolks are going to be faced with - what to do with the sort of symbol he is vs what to do with the sort of power he has. Remember how I laughed until milk came out my nose when people were saying great things about Howard Dean's declarations about race. I remember how the implications of Obama's distance from Black Liberation Theology were so very significant, as well as his dismissal of Tavis Smiley. In every way, every popular song about painting the White House black, has been wrong and now is the time to deal with what didn't happen. The Left *is* Barack Obama, for a time, and the black Left is most definitely Barack Obama. So what is left of the Left that is not? 

But the armament on my left side must be shed a bit more rapidly. In fact, I need to understand what aspects of my Talented Tenth inheritance falls dangerously close the the tyranny of liberal fascism. I need to find out what explicit political and cultural experiments I felt held promise in my passion for race raising before I understood the Right, and finally weigh the consequences of their realization on the whole of humanity. The thing I must make perfectly clear is that as an actualized man accepting of myself fully as an individual within the world context I am firstly made aware of the ethnocentrism of my political upbringing. I held it axiomatically that anything that could have objective benefits for black people was demonstrably good. Period. End of discussion. If I percieved that white people got welfare, then I would say black people should get welfare, and the more welfare black people got, the better.

I understand that it is premature to suggest that everything blackfolks generated politically that is not deeply centered in Obama's philosophy is worthless. But that does not change the fact that Obama is *our* president, meaning the American president, not just black people's president. And what the Obama administration is going to mean and how it's going to be remembered will not be a function of what black people feel about him or his expression of what black politics has been until now. Like everything else in American life, the mainstream story will survive, the alternative and 'authentic' black story will live only in dimly remember legend, and books by blacks.

There's one other thing that I'm going to throw into this bucket before I dash off, which is something I remember about a performance of my son's middle school band at the local mall. There were a couple of middle aged black men who were proctoring a field trip of mentally handicapped kids, and in what I can only call characteristic defiance, they refused to stand for the national anthem. I'm sure they had their reasons. Similarly, I recall a lecture in my mind delivered to black college students about racism in the real world. I suggested that I had found the cure to white privilege and that if they made this particular gesture that it would guarantee that the negative of being black in first impressions would immediately be transformed into a positive. I asked how many people would employ this method of black pride. All hands raised. Then I handed out American flag lapel pins. Some refused to accept them.

Today, do those blacks who refused to wear the pin with pride, do those who quoted some post-modern intellectual to defend their refusal to salute the American flag or sing the national anthem now do the right, proper and patriotic thing? Who else is casting off radical ideas?

Claiming Mo Better Blues

These days, my insomnia is under control, but I can tell that I'm about to have another bout. I was up until 1 in the morning Sunday night watching that old Spike Lee joint.

I cannot, cannot look at that film without thinking of the fact of that world which was my young adulthood. As one of the last big black cast films, the love story that is Mo Better Blues puts me right back to the immediacy of yearning for success in all ways. Trying to get the moola and the strain it puts on associations. The need to be loved. Bleek Gilliam was the lead dog protagonist in a way I could very much identify.

There was something I rediscovered in the scene in which Bleek looses both of his lovers. The blank expression on his face is absolutely perfect - the very vision of a man being lectured about something he simply doesn't want to hear. It makes sense in its own way, but does all that crap actually apply to me? And he's stuck because it does It's classic.

The bonhomie of the players at the club, the ribbing and joking with Robin Harris retained all of the spontaneity I recall from such days. The haircuts, the clothing, the music are all period perfect. I think this is becoming one of my favorite films - I'm going to have to watch it from the beginning.

Braces

My niece on the right is a student at one of our better private schools here in Southern California. Pops sent me something from their brochure - this scanned photo. We are naturally all very proud of our kids, and I would take this moment to remind ourselves that there are a lot of extraordinarily good things in our society that we have been getting right for a long time. I am reminded of the very fact that I too attended private school in Southern California. That was over 30 years ago.

My family could never afford orthodontics for us kids when we were growing up. I can recall knowing from the time I was in the sixth grade that the cost of braces were as much as 5 months of mortgage payments on the house I grew up in. It seemed to me an extraordinarily rich thing to do. Today it seems that everybody uses seven dollar toothbrushes, whiteners and cetera. I think I'll always think of advanced dentistry as a luxury and the mark of affluence and I suppose now that I've written about it, I'll take that as one more sign that we've made progress as a family.

Next week is Thanksgiving. I'm grateful already.

The Average Black Conservative

I've been discussing the progress of the state of political advocacy and communications in the Right section of the black blogosphere. I recognize that most of us in the Conservative Brotherhood are un-ordinary. You can't be out here representing all this political stuff without being able to dish it and take it. But what about the average Joe?

I think everybody knows that Denzel is Republican, and it's easy for the extraordinary guy. I've always been a big fan, and there's that part of me that really finds it difficult to understand how it is that DW doesn't catch the flack that we do. I think the answer is that we have seen him do all sorts of things in his roles, but we don't see average black conservatives.

I've been thinking about some of the veterans and pros like Joe Hicks, Shannon Reeves, Bob Parks, Herman Cain and Michael King. These are people that have a tight network, know each other and know operatives in the Republican Party. They've been around and surely have their war stories. But it's not about them. Then I think there are folks like me and other black conservative bloggers who have been around a relatively short period of time - less than 7 years on the scene. We are starting to be influential in the public. But it still requires a little bit of an extraordinary initiative. That initiative has the appearance of being offset by the particular rarity of Republicans who happen to be black, and it is rather true what Spence says:

In an election like this there are no black independents. There are blacks who are predisposed to vote for McCain/Palin either for ideological reasons or because the GOP line is much shorter–blacks in the DNC are a dime a dozen, while blacks in the GOP are as rare as….well did you watch the Republican National Convention?

But most of us are not operatives on a mission to deliver pork back to the home base, nor lobbyists with legislative axes to grind, nor opportunists trying to make a buck or get some airtime for our own aggrandizement. Most black conservatives are merely center-right to right wing, but not interested in doing much more than speaking our minds and voting without being hounded into submission by accusations of self-hatred and worse.

I'm not going to pretend to be an average black conservative. I am a sucker for political philosophy and I can talk about it forever, even when I know it makes me appear much stranger than I actually am. But why is it that a black man cannot be a political philosopher without appearing strange? But more importantly, why is free thinking considered inimical to the black political agenda. Perhaps it is the very term 'black political agenda' that we've made a great deal of assumptions about and it's time for those assumptions to be unpacked. That's part of what I, and others, have been trying to accomplish all these years online.

It goes without saying that being a black conservative and consistently voting as an ideological Republican requires some independent thinking. After all, the great success of our forbears' political activism resulted in great changes in both parties and the national political landscape. The beneficiary of that has been the Democrats, by far. Nevertheless it often doesn't occur to people to think of Malcolm X as a religious conservative who wanted to pay no taxes, believed very strongly in the sanctity of marriage and held a high burden of proof for the Government. These are attributes largely associated with Republicans today. I happen to think this congruence is not ironic nor coincidental. They come from the same place in the souls of people. When you are fiercely independent and don't trust bureacracies to have your best interests at heart...well let me not go on. My point is that there are plenty of people who easily identify with Malcolm X as a strong black man who should have no problem identifying with Denzel, those professionals like Michael King and bloggers like me.

In the end, I say it should not be a matter of controversy at all

Obama Gonna What?: Part 2 - Education

National Union for Social Justice

Continuing on Obama & Social Justice I am getting closer to some key features and values. 

from Charles Coughlin, November 11, 1934 (emphasis mine)

Establishing my principles upon upon this preamble, namely, that we are all creatures of a beneficent God, made to love and serve Him in this world and to enjoy Him forever in the next; and that all this world's wealth of field and forest, of mine and river has been bestowed upon us by a kind Father, therefore, I believe that wealth as we know it originates from the natural resources and from the labor which the sons of God expend upon these resources. It is all ours except for the harsh, cruel and grasping ways of wicked men who first concentrated wealth into the hands of a few, then dominated states and finally commenced to pit state against state in the frightful catastrophes of commercial warfare.

With this as a preamble, then, these following shall be the principles of social justice towards whose realization we must strive.

1. I believe in the right of liberty of conscience and liberty of education, not permitting the state to dictate either my worship to my God or my chosen avocation in life.

2.1 believe that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency.

3. I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals. By these I mean banking, credit and currency, power, light, oil and natural gas and our God-given natural resources.

4. I believe in private ownership of all other property.

5. I believe in upholding the right to private property yet in controlling it for the public good.

6. I believe in the abolition of the privately owned Federal Reserve Banking system and in the establishment of a Government owned Central Bank.

7. I believe in rescuing from the hands of private owners the right to coin and regulate the value of money, which right must be restored to Congress where it belongs.

8. I believe that one of the chief duties of this Government owned Central Bank is to maintain the cost of living on an even keel and the repayment of dollar debts with equal value dollars.

9. I believe in the cost of production plus a fair profit for the farmer.

10. I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to facilitate and to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.

11 . I believe in the recall of all non-productive bonds and thereby in the alleviation of taxation.

12. I believe in the abolition of tax-exempt bonds.

13. I believe in the broadening of the base of taxation founded upon the ownership of wealth and the capacity to pay.

14. I believe in the simplification of government, and the further lifting of crushing taxation from the slender revenues of the laboring class.

15. I believe that in the event of a war for the defense of our nation and its liberties, there shall be a conscription of wealth as well as a conscription of men.

16. I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor because, as it is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.

These are my beliefs. These are the fundamentals of the organization which I present to you under the name of the NATIONAL UNION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. It is your privilege to reject or accept my beliefs; to follow me or repudiate me.

Chapter 11

Now is the time for all broke men to file for the aid of their country.

It has come to my attention that a certain company in New England has made moves to purchase a small, broke bank in such a way as to be eligible for TARP funds. It has come to this. And clearly as transition happens in Washington, many slick operators will take advantage of the new trough the government has funded.

While there are dozens of political arguments as well as deep theories of economics that are brought to bear in this time of unprecedented chaos, it seems to me that the most certain way that we can avoid any excess of moral hazard in this entire bailout business, is for those companies most desperate to get at those funds should simply take the route of bankruptcy. If this economy has bankrupted you, then go bankrupt.

We could then fund TARP to give us more bankruptcy courts and officers.

DOMA Facts

From Wikipedia

The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, is the short title of a federal law of the United States passed on September 21, 1996 as Public Law No. 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419. Its provisions are codified at 1 U.S.C. § 7 and 28 U.S.C. § 1738C. The law has two effects:

1. No state (or other political subdivision within the United States) need treat a relationship between persons of the same sex as a marriage, even if the relationship is considered a marriage in another state.
2. The Federal Government may not treat same-sex relationships as marriages for any purpose, even if concluded or recognized by one of the states.

The bill was passed by Congress by a vote of 85-14 in the Senate^[1] and a vote of 342-67 in the House of Representatives^[2], and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996.

At the time of passage, it was expected that at least one state would soon legalize same-sex marriage, whether by legislation or judicial interpretation of either the state or federal constitution. Opponents of such recognition feared (and many proponents hoped) that the other states would then be required to recognize such marriages under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution.

Including the results of the 2008 general elections, two states (Massachusetts and Connecticut) allow same-sex marriage, five states recognize some alternative form of same-sex union, twelve states ban any recognition of any form of same-sex unions including civil union, twenty-eight states have adopted amendments to their state constitution prohibiting same sex marriage, and another twenty states have enacted statutory DOMAs.

I've Seen The Future And It Blows

The year is 2068 and this is GenX.

The Engineered Scenario

I will attempt to make the following argument and represent myself as a Catholic. I stand in a 2000 year tradition of marriage, which the state has determined to hijack through the following language: 'The State of California recognizes a marriage as between any two people of any gender'. The Catholic Church's position is that 'A marriage is between one man and one woman'.

A homosexual couple in the State of California desires to be married and Catholic. They are already registered domestic partners in civil union, and they have one singular gripe, which is that they wish the state to compel the Catholic Church to recognize them as married. The Church refuses and threatens to excommunicate them should they press their case. In every other way, they are members in good standing with the Church. They press their case. They are expelled from the Church.

What legal recourse should this couple have given the state's stated position? Why?

I am attempting to make this really about that one singular issue - the Church says they can be a civil union and remain Catholic. But they will not marry them, nor will they recognize them as married in the Church should they be married anywhere else. What should the state be able to do and on what grounds?

The Real Estate Downfall

Funniest thing I've seen this entire quarter.

A Small Reminder

There is Marriage and there is everything else.

Communities of Strength

I haven't wearied of the rhetorical battle that has engaged me over the past several days. I feel that I have come close to expressing the full sentiment and logic of my position, but I find that each exchange brings out more nuance and that in each challenge to my position or assumptions about my position yields even further insight. And so I offer, in the spirit of understanding, a excerpt from a brief private correspondence begun earlier this year.

In the context of America, I have come to the conclusion that there is some good and equilibrium to be found in keeping such struggles at a low roar - to keep them from becoming lethal. To the extent that we must suffer a lack of perfect understanding and domestic tranquility, it seems we are bound to thicken our skins and take hits for our tribes. It can be a rough trade even in a robust society such as ours. But we also have the fortunate option of relative solitude. We can carve some space in this great and free country where we might have peace from the great social machinations of the day and satisfy ourselves with our own ability to find comfort and strength in our families, neighbors and communities of faith.

Yet some communities of faith gain strength from pure hatred and bigotry. The franchise of those who are incapable of empathy of any sort cannot be revoked. It seems to me that we ought to find a way to reverse their strengths in the larger society by setting a better example and as you say, constantly pressing our cases against intolerance and injustice. The line between intolerance and injustice is one I am trying to brighten because the law is the most powerful and compelling tool we possess. The better part of my dog in the fight over gay marriage is precisely over where that line ought to be drawn. You see I think we should fight immorality such as bigotry and intolerance in our private lives with all the social power and conviction we possess. I think we should fight injustice with the full strengths of legal and government powers at the disposal of the state. These fights exist along a continuum of severity - not all immorality leads to injustice but all injustice is certainly immoral. As I see the law, it does not respect the differences we do in our communities of faith. And so we must be extremely careful not to give it license to suppress them based upon various definitions of immorality, especially those that don't constitute injustice.

As you may have concluded, I do not consider the discriminations of marriage of the traditional sort to comprise immorality or injustice. But it certainly is more than an inconvenience for many homosexuals to stand unrecognized in their exclusive and devoted loving relationships, and so I support civil unions to grant and defend all rights, privileges and immunities of marriage on an equivalent basis for same-sex couples. I am convinced that there is a component of the advocates in support of gay marriage that are less interested in those actual injustices inflicted upon same-sex couples to to be legally proscribed than they are in attempting to use the law to destroy intolerance. This not only goes against my political principles, but I think any reasonable person can see that it is impractical if not impossible. Beaten over the head with the law, certain extremist opponents will only retire to their own families, neighbors and communities of faith where their intolerance and even their immoral hatreds will find comfort and strength. How many of these people and institutions should be destroyed for the sake of that particular activist dream of destroying intolerance?

At any rate I have rambled on without a satisfactory close. I suppose this indicates that I don't find the matter resolved to either of our satisfactions. And yet I trust that we, as defenders of morality, justice and domestic tranquility will maintain what we must to see our ways through this. I sincerely hope that we find a way of securing blessings and standing for our same-sex fellows without doing injury to all communities of faith through the sorts of laws that seek to impose a specific consciousness upon the public. It remains our duty as members of society to see that all due respect is afforded such upstanding couples who would declare their undying love and commitment, one to the other, before God and man. Perhaps conversations such as ours may be a small beginning.

I hope I don't offend my correspondent by publishing this piece of our private conversation here, but I think it illustrative of the sort of thinking that can go on when the right tone of mutual respect is struck, something I often struggle with as a blogger and on-air personality. There is so much we in the demanding public want delivered to us conveniently. I am coming to recognize how little our abbreviated exchanges communicate.

Love Thy Gay Neighbor

The Myth of Easy Conversion

I think it is very important to observe the sort of intolerance of activists for the gay cause in its hipocrisy which has been reduced to name calling. Like many personal convictions, there is some smug satisfaction to be had in saying that you are a friend to the oppressed, and a lot of reaction to the passage of Proposition Eight in California reeks of this hubris. But the paradox remains that the stories of gay liberation by gays themselves are deeply emotional and personal and difficult. Part and parcel of buying into the narrative is accepting what a triumph it is for gays to figure out how to get on speaking terms with their own parents and friends. Coming out of the closet is enormously difficult and for years and years we in the het community have been regaled with the drama and weight of this transformation. So it is a huge insult to see how suddenly all straights are supposed to turn on a dime and change our hearts and minds about homosexuality, rewrite constitutions and bless everything gay and lesbian as if it were simple and easy.

Black Gay Marriage: Oxymoron

There is a reason that blacks don't support gay marriage. You might think that it's because of homophobia but you'd only be half right, if that. What a lot of conservatives don't know about progressive blacks (or ex-progressives like myself) is that we appreciate black lesbians and gays because they are transgressive in the extreme. Or at least we like to think so.

Any black man in my generation who didn't love Bruce Lee or Malcolm X was a faggot. Wearing short pants for any reason except playing basketball or swimming (real black men wore cutoffs, not trunks) was for fags. Black macho was the rule until approximately the era of Michael Franks and Al Jarreau. Then we realized that women dug sensitive dudes and adjusted appropriately. And while all of us brothers wondered out loud what was up with Al and those pink sweaters, we were also coming into contact with some genuine homosexuals.

I understand that it is considered rude and a bunch of other things to talk about 'fags', but I'm just keeping it real because that's what our attitude was. And if you were a good looking black man, chances are you would encounter a forward brother telling you in no uncertain terms that he was a black homosexual who could turn your head around. The gauntlet was thrown, were you man enough to love a black man?

My experience with the brazen courage of such men was tinged with a certain admiration. I would say on any number of occasions that if I was a homo, then I would most definitely be the sort out there in everybody's face. But it wasn't until the early 90s that I came to a political appreciation for how deep that sentiment could be held in the minds of black progressives. It was then that I was introduced to the films and life of Marlon Riggs and to the poetry and life of Audre Lorde. Black fags had gone beyond gay towards queer, and the black queers of all different varieties tended to take black power to new heights. Lorde's book 'Sister Outsider' rather encapsulated it all - If you think being black is hard, try being black and lesbian and crippled. Lorde was superbad.

[M]any white feminists were angered by Lorde's brand of feminism. In her essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" Lorde attacked the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argued that, by denying difference in the category of women, feminists merely passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any real, lasting change. Her argument aligned white feminists with white male slave-masters, describing both as "agents of oppression"

Marlon Riggs had a similar message. If you think being a black man is hard, try being a black man who is already a primitive sex symbol where your sexuality is the reverse of what's expected and not only are you oppressed by white men, sometimes you really physically want to love them but not as a sex symbol. All of that was a lot to take, but what I understood was how the personal struggles of black queers  fueled passionate rebellion in the spirit of black power. This very interesting and exciting transgressive passionate dynamic energizes Progressives and the politics of difference, and it augers potential for revolutionary change. The double and treble and quadruple minority status of black queers is political dynamite - a genuine extension of black cultural nationalism. If freedom could be created by politicizing black pride with music, dress, dance and speech in the 60, imagine how much more freedom could be created by legitimizing the queer life. So long as black gays and lesbians can be angry, radical political revolutionaries, they can be used in the mainstream of black protest politics. You'll still hear the 'masters tools' argument in angry black political circles. This is how black gays got respect.

But most homosexuals and certainly most black homosexuals are not trying to be political. They are trying to get through life with a minimum of hassle, like all of us. Gay sex isn't easy. Straight sex isn't easy. Sex is complicated and difficult and we all have hangups about it and we wrestle with those hangups all our lives. There's no single political direction sexual liberation points people and the attempt to politicize sex, especially given this dynamic is the province of the few, not the many.

So there is a gap between the reality of gay black life, and the political reality black progressives wished to portray through the politics of difference. I find a very great paradox between the personal lives of gay black men I knew in the every day business of living a closeted life and the hyper difference of the angry black queer man who would overtly politicize his sexuality. When stories about ordinary black men 'on the DL' came out, it was a disturbing story for many blackfolks because these young men were not so interested in standing out and using themselves as black power symbols. They just wanted to get their desires fulfilled without drawing too much undue attention. Instead of being a treble minority, some young black men adopted gangsta misogyny to cover for their indifference to sex with women. It made things easy. Whether it was a gangsta style or not, the bottom line was to be incognito, not vocal, not politicized.

I am of the opinion that it is the minority of black political activists who seek to exploit the politics of difference. It's one thing to be demanding of black liberation (and not all blackfolks are keen on such revolutionary matters such as Afrocentrism or issues like reparations), but it's another to place transgressive black queer energy into your politics, to be out there blazing with tongues untied. The majority would rather leave the matter with King like rhetoric about the content of one's character, than use the rhetoric of Audre Lorde. While it's true that many black people believe that white antagonism to black culture is and should be a matter of political concern, not many wish to create space for black freedom by putting our queers in white faces. Some do, most have got issues.

And so Gay Marriage doesn't appeal to blacks because black politics and culture has not evolved a place for it. Black queers have a place in revolutionary black politics, but ordinary gays do not. In a culture where the role of men and family is always found in shifting sands, the black gay man who wants something as simple, respectable and middle class as marriage with another man is on very shaky ground. Black women have a very difficult time accepting that the rare 'good black man' might be gay, or interested in white women, and this is a powerful force in black opinion. The exception is for the black queer who is used by black progressives in a radical chic fashion exactly in the same way that white liberals used angry ghetto blacks to further their agenda. Black gays themselves may be unwitting victims of a new blaxploitation in such a way that their actual modest goals of acceptance in marriage is all but ignored.

Is that homophobia? Undoubtedly that is part of the equation, but it is also the success of the political exploitation of a black queer revolution that makes gay marriage an oxymoron to black people.

Walter Lippmann - First Note

Walter Lippmann - From Wikipedia

Lippmann saw the purpose of journalism as "intelligence work." Within this role, journalists are a link between policymakers and the public. A journalist seeks facts from policymakers which he then transmits to citizens who form a public opinion. In this model, the information may be used to hold policymakers accountable to citizens. This theory was spawned by the industrial era and some critics argue the model needs rethinking in post-industrial societies.

Though a journalist himself, he held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. For him the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” A journalist’s version of the truth is subjective and limited to how he constructs his reality. The news, therefore, is “imperfectly recorded” and too fragile to bear the charge as “an organ of direct democracy.”

Herbert Croly - First Note

Herbert Croly - founder of The New Republic - from Wikipedia

As Croly wrote, "the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth." He argued for a national government that was more rather than less powerful than it had been, as a bulwark against overbearing self-interest, greed, corruption and unchecked power. At the same time, Croly valued the individual motivated by civic virtue and "constructive individualism" and urged all to pursue this objective.

The Legal Difference

I heard on Dennis Miller last evening that a group of homosexual activists spit in the face of an 80 year old grandmother for defying their crusade. I think she was a Mormon, but it hardly matters. This radicalism has gone too far.

It is surprising how useful reading Jonah Goldberg's 'Liberal Fascism' has been in understanding matters of conflict between Left and Right. Following his example I am going to reduce political complexity that I have previously used from three schools to two. I had previously talked about Liberals, Progressives and Conservatives. I will now talk only about Progressives and Conservatives. Primarily this is about who has the upper hand in the intellectual direction of the parties. Progressives, encompassing Pragmatists, the followers of William James are the leaders of the Left. Barack Obama is squarely there. Conservatives took over the Right with Ronald Reagan in 1980 who branched off from Goldwater. The Rockefeller Republicans are essentially dead.

I will also however talk more about Classic Liberalism as the home of Conservatism whose values we may all be trying to get back to - depending.

At any rate, I have suffered through a great deal of bickering about who's a bigot in all of this noise about Proposition Eight, which is rather odd considering that California merely joins the other 41 states in outrightly banning gay marriage. What nobody has done in any of these flamewars is detail any of the 'rights' that are supposedly being denied gay couples. It has, in the most logical case, boiled down to 'the right to call themselves married', with no reference to what exactly being married gives straights other than social recognition. I think that the social recognition is an important part of the cast that advocates for gay marriage should emphasize, but that they should not pursue this matter in the scortched earth manner they have done, and thus they are destroying their own case by claiming all of their opponents are bigots. Here is the applicable case law that nobody has been referring to. Actually very easy to find if anyone cared.

An honest evaluation of all of the differences will recognize that 99% of these differences are benefits not rights, and a case that any of these benefits are Constitutional rights is easily debatable. This is the distinction I make for inheritance of property - however I don't see how any gay partner's unwillingness or inability to execute a proper will is a responsibility of the state. Probate can be ugly for anyone.

A second look at the substantial list of benefits would show that almost none of them existed before the New Deal.

It is to be expected that Progressives will expand upon Rousseau's concept of the General Will as the proper driver of state activity. Similarly we can expect Progressives to demonize their opposition, especially conservatives who wish to limit the scope and influence of state granted status and definitions of social institutions.

This is a sterling example of my tried and true definition of the difference between left and right. The left wants to use the power of the state to make up for the dysfunctions of their families. The right wants to use the strength of their families to protect against the excess and abuses of the state. In that regard it makes perfect sense that advocates for gay marriage cannot and do not expect the benefits of gay and lesbian relationships to meaningful or fulfilling without the assistance and support of the all encompassing nanny state.

Everything in the State. Nothing outside of the State. Nothing against the State. Establish the General Will through the apparatus of the State.

That's Mussolini by the way.