Cobb

Obligatory Seriousness on Some Rich Racist Commentary

I hear that there are a couple of rich white men with problems. One of them has a problem with the Federal government that has something to do with cows. The other has a problem with a girlfriend who brings black people to his basketball games. 

There's about three things to say here. 

The first is that it doesn't take a genius to realize that America has a pretty good sense of outrage. In fact we have an outrage machine that cranks up the volume and puts such offensive commentary on blast. It also doesn't require black politics. All of this is on autopilot. Nobody is calling on black political leaders and asking for an interpretation of the facts. That is interesting to me because it means a few things that should be obvious but are not. 

1. Americans are sufficiently outraged at racist comments by big shots. Nobody gets away with it.

2. Americans understand that this sort of thing exists. Nobody is pretending that it doesn't.

3. Americans aren't particularly interested in the rarified implications, and are not seeking expert advice on what to do. 

In this regard, racism is treated by the American people like the social outrage that it is. Nothing more and nothing less. So it makes news, it aggrevates the lot of us, it gets replaced by the next big story. 

The second thing is that people are recognizing the difference between the comments of Bundy and the comments of Sterling and they rightly understand that Sterling's comments are much more offensive. Sterling, unlike Bundy is not making theories about the implications of slavery, he's just straight out saying that he doesn't want black people around. 

The third thing is that we all probably would be edified just a bit more if we did look into the rarified implications and expert advice. It's not going to change society and as with all sin, constant vigilance is required. The same thing applies for all the evils of men, including that of war. But we know that a military will sit idle when the deadly consequences of human aggression are not clear, present, drastic and immediate. It always requires wise leadership to muster the appropriate response.  Sterling wasn't lynching anyone and so he shouldn't be lynched. Our useful and correct mob sensibility on these blow-ups require expert perspective, but it doesn't change the fact that it was TMZ that broke the Sterling story. Is this is an opportunity for beer summitry, or a change in NBA ethics rules? We don't know, but somebody will. 

On that last point, we should keep in mind that every racial theorist doesn't actually know what they are talking about. We have a broad variety of experts who are actually experts from whom to draw advice. They will be versed in world history - and this outrage is not of world historical proportions. As it should be clear, there is more than enough common sense to go around.

A Gibbering Horror

Evan Sayet opened up a conversation about American conservatives vs American liberals several years ago with a great story which I paraphrase here. A man and his friend were out to dinner and as usual, the friend was complaining about his wife saying how much he hates her. The man, accustomed to hearing the complaint dismissed the invective and heard the friend out and the dinner continued. Just then, he could see a woman being mugged outside of the restaurant, in a moment of shock he realized it was the wife. He told his friend that his wife was being attacked by a criminal. The husband looked over his shoulder and witnessed the crime saying, "Yeah well, she probably deserved it." The realization came that the husband was very serious about hating his wife. 

 Sayet went on to compare American liberals to the husband over the question of 9/11, which makes it a powerful analogy for the kind of political enmity people often demonstrate over what America ought to be and what Americans ought to do about it. But I think it makes a more interesting distinction when not directed at any particular ideological group. I find it a very apt description about what the 300 millions of us think about each other and what that state of conflict reflects in a democracy. Our jawboning is not about the proper ideas about our nationhood, rather it is about what we feel about each other. The feeling is acrimonious and shallow, and it is self-perpetuating.  

Americans are trying to, in the words of that Army commercial, be all that they can be. We have a sort of addiction to learning, doing and being that promises expansion and growth, riches and wisdom. But we also have a particular intuition that other non-learning, non-doing Americans are getting in our way. Our politics and culture manifest this competition for perfecting ourselves in ways that are counter-productive to the actual creation of policy and maintenance of society. We throw ideas and concepts at each other as if they were bricks, hoping to knock some sense into our opponents' heads and then go about their proper business. We don't do so as if we ultimately wanted to be friends or to actually depend upon one another. We are long past the era in which some collaboration for the sake of national unity was the aim. We want people to go away and sin no more, according to our definitions of sin.

Over the weekend I was reminded that there is something I have in common with some 'little brown people' which is the some measure of paternalistic condescension from a certain class of white liberals. Pops informed me of a Muslim woman who spoke up about being sick to death of hearing American blather on about 'islamophobia'. I do in fact take that term to be something of a political invention of those opposed to President Bush's engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan against AQ and its subsidiary and collateral rabble. I have no idea at present how many people are driven to be jihadis, how many Wahabbists are agitating for the establishment of a Caliphate or how many 'moderate muslims' sit ready to be radicalized for the expansion of Sharia in Western democracies. But I do know these are non-zero numbers and real enemies of justice and peace. I do not fear them, nor would I because I am Christian or American. An enemy is an enemy. 

But what kind of enemies do I really have and what are they going to do? Well, I confess that it's difficult for me to conceive of me being in the specific sights of jihadis. My dead body is just as good as any other American dead body as far as my interpretation of their aims is concerned. Only my domestic political enemies wish me ill in particular. I am, in the words of the immortal cliche, not part of the solution and thus part of the problem. I stand in the way, by dint of my mocking disinterest, of their progress. I stand allied to a different kind of freedom struggle, one that doesn't have at its kernel the gibbering invectives of the chatting class. I take the exceptional nature of America seriously, but I am not so reduced to checking its pulse every moment of the media cycle. 

Rather I am content to continue considering America as an exceptional place to live concerning its non-blood & soil relationship to citizenship, the consequence of which is a kind of permanent tussle over who is a 'proper' American.

 

Social and Ethical Power in America

Having become a Stoic and other things over the past several years, it occurs to me that I am rather mired in a single-minded public-spirited public. They are single-minded in that they find that questions of the Humanities are under all but a few circumstances relegated to the realms of democratic activist politics. Now I may be wrong about this because in certain ways such matters are above my pay grade. But I suspect that the American High Society has been hollowed out. 

My gut feelings tell me that if I were to hang out with Condi Rice, I would find myself in good company 99% of the time. My gut also tells me that the clutch of people in that broad circle are not likely to find much comfort in the public. That is to say that there is a rare breed of American who can reliably be found in Society but find themselves outcast from most of our public institutions, like Brandeis or marginalized to the point of a hand to mouth existence. But I often wonder what kind of club I could belong to if it remained meaningful to belong to a club. I am at a loss. 

As some of my readers know, I was just writing something about gun control advocacy with the following observation: 

..there is a general assumption that more public debate resulting in more regulation can make more sense or people more safe. It is a fundamental assumption of gun control - that there is something you can do with the law through the power and force of the state - that you can change other people's behavior for the better. Notice how this takes the almost singular form of democratic political activism and law, not intellectual persuasion, not social motivation, not religious doctrine, not transcendental discipline.

So I'm wondering where that intellectual persuasion, social motivation, religious doctrine and transcendental discipline might be emanating. OK religious doctrine we can guess, but the others? In fact, the matter struck me in the temple today as I attended the ceremony presenting my daughter into her sorority. Didn't there used to be something called High Society? Weren't there social practices unto which most considerate and ethical Americans submit themselves. Didn't we once have ourselves figured out into some manner of meritocratic social hierarchy? 

People act as if this never really existed. I honestly can't say because I myself am not old enough to have been an adult at the period in American history when it might have. But I look at the Sunday Morning Talk Shows and I am truly staggered by the collegial mendacity. How do they get away with it, and where is a sensible grown up to find comforting respite? 

I guess this is an open question. 

Gun Control, Democratic Hammers & The Marginal Police State

Somebody asked:

In conversations about gun control, some gun control opponents claim that gun control policies will lead America to become a police state. This is generally phrased as a slippery slope to fascism, instead of a plausible explanation for how such a transformation would come about out of our current political environment. I am interested in hearing in concrete terms how gun control regulations would lead to a police state.

This is a difficult one, but one that can be understood in the marginal case. This is not a proof, but an illustration. 

First look to the questions by people here in Quora about various angles on gun control you will find 'Why not' questions about law that is already settled. For example, people are asking, why not make bullets illegal instead of guns (or restrict bullets). People have asked, why not make it illegal to be drunk when using a firearm. Already settled. A big question on many minds are means testing for mental illness.

Let's take that last item. But first recall that what we see are the basic energies of political activism. People ask not only because they want answers but they believe, and reasonably so, all things that aren't settled in their minds might become part of a change in policy and in law. In other words, there is a general assumption that more public debate resulting in more regulation can make more sense or people more safe. It is a fundamental assumption of gun control - that there is something you can do with the law through the power and force of the state - that you can change other people's behavior for the better. Notice how this takes the almost singular form of democratic political activism and law, not intellectual persuasion, not social motivation, not religious doctrine, not transcendental discipline.

In other words, those people who want a safer world see democratic political activism and the force of law through the aegis of government as their hammer. And let's not kid ourselves, they don't intend to deregulate, but to add regulations and beef up enforcement of new laws. It's obviously not the best way to deal with your fellow humans, but that's their choice. 

Now read those two paragraphs once again and substitute the concept of drugs instead of guns. Let's be honest. This is about prohibition. And people who use 'gun free' countries as their models are in fact the zero-tolerance contingent. 

It should be trivially easy to look at something like a War on Guns as just another proxying off of our human abilities to change onto Washington power brokers. But people still need it spelled out. If YOU personally are not going to do the gun control, then you are giving consent to the STATE to do the gun control. 

Let's look specifically at the rights of the minority of Americans who are shooters. The first thing lots of people are agitating about now is whether citizens should prove themselves to be mentally competent to own firearms. I suppose that would be like mandatory drug testing, huh? Exactly who is going to do this mental health screening? Gun shop owners? By what standard is this competency going to be assessed? Sounds like a new government sponsored research grants are going to have to go out, and then a new civil service bureaucracy will have to be created -  The Ministry of Mental Health. Then when I get my government stamp, I can present it to an authorized dealer who now knows my official, government certified mental classification. 

That's not a police state. But it's marginally closer to one than what we have now. What we have now is the social bond and trust by society that the gun owning minority aren't psychopaths. But obviously to the zero-tolerance crew that social bond must be politicized, means-tested, crafted into new law, and administered by the government to be applied to YOU, you gun-loving freak. 

..and if it saves just one comrade, it will all be worth it..

Eighty Two

I just assume that it's all about 1982, so I put on a white shirt, skinny black tie and my clubmans Falling Down style and headed to the bar EightyTwo in DTLA. 

I got the high score on PacMan and three replays on Centaur. I had an Oban. I puffed a little vapor and I sorta dug the music which was and was not retro, but it was certainly loud. I met my brothers and Pops and for the time we weren't somewhat peeved that nobody in the joint cared a whit about putting the UConn game on, we had a ball at EightyTwo, the new 'barcade'. 

What's strange at this moment is that although I feel like I could talk for hours about pinball and arcade videogames, I really don't feel like it. I mean basically the chick who owns the pinball machines kinda put me right in my place. I know I'm never going to step up and buy a pinball machine, even my favorite of all time, Bow & Arrow. And I know I'm never going to know more than 80% of what's worth knowing about what I kinda know. Like I eyeballed a machine that was built circa 1977 and I nailed that, but as she said, I was mostly right but wrong on the details. When I was 20 years old, I could have written a disertation of electromechanical pinball and arcade video games. I'm sure that I have spent something on the order of $2500 a year in quarters when I was in my Virtua Fighter championship form. But.. 

I'm out of joint and feeling somewhat weird about my relationships to the machines now that it has come around to this upscale hip joint that looks like it could have fallen off the back porch of the Standard Hotel. I popped at a million points on Centaur and turned to say, "At least machines have paid me more than I've paid them", which is true. Computers have been very very good to me. But I had several of those unbelievably low scoring balls and my typical movement of disgust was all there in muscle memory - never striking the glass, spinning around in place with my arms flailing in agony, but not wide enough to strike the next pinballer over, and never tilting in anger. It was the familiar frustration made unfamiliar by the whiskey. I never used to drink and game.

I'm all ready to drink and game if I can find the right friend to come with me. But I never have. I've always been, with very few exceptions, the lone gamer, the pickup gamer. It was never me and my crew, it was always me meeting the regulars at the arcade. Young men like myself known only by first name, if that, and their reputations as foosballers, or fighters. Whether it was Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw or Mr. Motos right across the street, or Sega Center at the Fox Hills Mall. Maybe it was Shatto Bowl or the legendary on Woody's on Figueroa. Midtown Bowl had a pretty good lineup but there was a great arcade across the street from LACC. Down on Broadway, I dropped a lot of quads, especially on Defender, yike. 

My love affair with the arcades of the city is bittersweet of course. The social rules and rewards of arcade fighting games like Mortal Combat was a later phenomenon. I already was bathed in the solitude of pinball and of the digital cabinet games. It matters to get a high score on PacMan and there is that retro cinematic moment when you could stand back and have a few admirers, but as sad and lonely as it seemed in the movie Tron it was more desolate in life. We are the Tron generation and it is not entirely a happy thing to see the popularity of our old obsessions brought to life. It's a little bit shameful, at least for someone my age. There's no such baggage for the XBox generation, and I hope they enjoy and discover what joy we knew from those moments of finding treasure in Gauntlet, dodging sprites in Robotron or jumping that bridge correctly in Dragon's Lair. The social experience of an arcade has changed with the advent of Dave & Busters and now these new upscale hip joints. It's a lot less depressing than it used to be when arcades were on the outskirts of society.

Gaming is now a huge industry beyond the dreams of us older kids. I am amazed. EightyTwo. I'll be back.

Advice for the Hollywood Greenhorn

#1. It’s a business just like every other business except the people tend to be half as industrious and twice as flaky.

#2. Nobody really knows what the public wants.  Sometimes the public wants talent and sometimes it doesn’t care jack for talent. You can’t predict when. (Therefore the only way to succeed is to keep producing a mix of talent and shit over the long term, and wait for a hit.)

#3. If you succeed in Hollywood, you’ll never need to work anywhere else. Then again, Hollywood success doesn’t translate anywhere else. That’s why successful people in Hollywood break all the rules for normal human beings. They understand it’s all about what they think of themselves. 

#4. Watch your back.

#5. Protect your soul.

My International Emergent Middle Class

I don't blog so much here at Cobb as I used to. That may or may not change. I've been going through some nasty stuff. Maybe more on that later, probably not. It's personal.

I have been spending less time on Facebook and more time on Quora. Quora is that social artifact that comes closest to my design of XRepublic. I am much closer to the ability to build XRepublic than at any time in my life, but here's what I'm thinking today. You see, a lot of the new followers to my comments at Quora have Asian names, both East Asian and Indian. It is reminding me about something I used to talk more about - The Emergent.

I am very close to taking for granted that there will be no global catastrophe in my lifetime. But even if there is, I have a high degree of confidence that a lot our current knowledge will be preserved. Perhaps not instantiated in a sustainably real society, but preserved. So my worst case scenario predicts monastic life Anathem-style.

As we are not faced with any global crisis at the moment, but crawling out of a financial depression in life's rocky road (we meaning the West, not including Greece so much), there remains an ample amount of hope. And humanity's good graces upon itself are sufficient to inspire the proper people to keep working in the proper direction. Good guys persist. And so lots of economists and others are predicting that in 50 years there will be a global middle class. There is one now but it's rather disjointed and just finding its feet like a newborn colt. But we will become connected and we will find our footing. We will emerge healthy, literate and able. 

I expect very much that the next billion will follow, more or less in the footsteps of we, the Emergent of America. America's definition of the West, I think, will ultimately succeed and prosper. In that I guess I need to speak more about North America and a bit less about the chatting class of the US. I accept that a great swath of them have lost touch with reality. They'll find it under duress, so I won't belabor the point. But for those of us in the Emergent middle class, those of us who have found within the past two generations an adequate amount of higher education and profitable employment, we remain close enough to duress to not lose touch. That means a great deal. And so now I will presume to communicate my lessons at that level as I have finally met, in my early 50s, that amount of confidence that allows me to consider more than just my community, state and nation, but the world itself. 

Cobb now speaks to The Next Billion as a stoic survivor in the United States. Hopefully with wisdom appropriate to the peacetime in which I have lived my life. I know something worth preserving, that is the good life one can attain in today's global infrastructure at the level of the middle class effort. It's a good place to be and I would like to continue to discuss its ethics, values, pleasures and dangers.