The Free Market Ain't Free

So, Marxists are self-deluded utopians, right?   Any Objectivist uber-capitalist will tell you that they are the ones who see the world with clear eyes.

Or do they?  It seems that Objectivism relies on utopian self-delusion (or is that faith?) more than anyone is admitting.

Case in point: an open and freely competitive market will always result in the best products.

Oh really?

Three words: VHS versus Beta.

Three more words: Mac versus PC.

The only possible way you can judge VHS video systems or PC computer systems as superior products is if you consider advertising, market leverage, and distribution as part of product quality - in that sense, these products did prove superior.  A capitalist accounting always takes into consideration the excess detritus that makes up the whole of the thing as it appears in the market (the thing + its production + its marketing + its initial position in the market as determined by the market strength of the entity that owns it), not simply the thing itself.

Since capitalism deals only with the quantitative, not the qualitative, the products cited are judged superior, since they are the ones that took over the market.  This is the destructive reductive central aspect of capitalism: because it does not deal with the qualitative, it can not judge "good" in any meaningful way.

Sometimes the best product takes over the market.  Sometimes it doesn't.  That's a long way from the "cream always rising".  It's a long way from the understanding that the Objectivist publicly projects about the market.

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And what exactly is a "free market" anyway?  Is it a market which is naturally allowed to evolve on its own without interference, or is it a competitive market?

"Unencumbered" markets (markets which are allowed to evolve naturally) tend toward monopolies.  Strong corporations become stronger and more dominant in the market as markets become more complex and difficult to master.  There are, of course, some markets which don't readily lend themselves to monopolies, but wherever monopolies are possible and desirable, they will occur unless there is interference from the outside.

Monopolies per se are not the problem; rather, it is the tyranny of the bottom line that is given primary importance by the capitalist system that causes the problem. Monopolies allow corporations the ability to focus solely on their own bottom lines without having to answer to competitive challenges . . . again, the primacy of the quantitative wins out, and in the case of a monopoly, the qualitative is wholly subservient to the quantitative. Monopolies are built to control markets; the production of goods is secondary.

American professional sports leagues are shining examples of the efficacy of regulated markets.  The fact that amateur drafts are always ordered to place the worst teams first (except for the NBA, which has a [somewhat flawed] formula that theoretically orders the worst teams first without allowing teams to manipulate the system) shows how sports leagues value the outcomes of their systems over the mechanisms.

It can be argued that the competitive limitations leagues put on their teams actually hurts the quality of the product: what if the richest team, the "monopoly" team, were able to bid openly for talent instead of waiting in line for the draft, or dealing with some variation of a salary cap that allows less rich teams to bid for the best players? Theoretically they could buy the very best players at each position, and then stock their benches with the second and third tier players simply to keep them away from other teams.  This team would, by any definition, be the best team available, and it most likely would dominate its league.  In this case, the "monopoly" team would be the best not just in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense.

This is an important point.  Monopolies are not necessarily bad . . . they are as good as their goals.  If your goal is to build a space program that will get you to the moon in a few short years, then a monopoly is not a bad idea.  If your goal is to pool risk to lower the costs of medical coverage for an entire population, then a monopoly is not a bad idea. If your goal is to put together the most insanely talented football team ever, then a monopoly (no draft, no salary cap, just a wide open market) would be good . . . and not just good in a quantitative sense, but in a qualitative sense as well.

But what is the ultimate goal of "quality" in professional sports?  It's not to have the best team, it is to have the best contest . . . and, to that end, the sports leagues have decided to heavily regulate their markets.  It ranges from baseball, who will theoretically let you pay as much for your roster as you wish (but try to make the balance more competitive by taxing the living hell out of you if you spend too much, thereby making it prohibitive to spend above a certain amount), to NASCAR, who essentially makes everyone drive identical cars, who will change rules as soon as one team displays even the most minute of technical advantages, and even aren't afraid of changing rules on a race to race basis*.  In this sense, the market regulations that the leagues have imposed have been successful, since they make the leagues competitive and interesting . . . and, importantly, despite the ebbs and flows of their incomes, wildly successful in the quantitative as well as the qualitative sense.

The simple fact that discussions occur on the qualitative level, whatever the final outcome may be, makes sports markets superior to financial and commercial markets. It also puts in sharp relief the question: what is a free market - the market which is most free in its mechanics, or the market which is most free in its access?

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And, free or not, who went and made the market the final arbiter of all that is great? Oh, right.  Ayn Rand did.

Please, next time you want to include Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche in the same sentence, remember the following quote:

Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.    -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part, "On the Flies of the Marketplace"

So you can just go to hell, John Galt.
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*  Does anyone else find it ironic that the sport most closely tied to the Tea Party is the most socialist of sports?

"Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right" . . .

So, someone had the bright idea to "correct" Huck Finn by editing the word "nigger" out of the text . . . the idea being that, because the word showed up so frequently in the book, it was being dropped from school reading lists.  Prof. Alan Gribben makes the following defenses of his decision to alter Twain's classic using more racially sensitive language:

–”Far more controversial than this reuniting of Twain’s boy books will be the editor’s decision to eliminate two racial slurs that have increasingly formed a barrier to these works for teachers, students, and general readers. The editor thus hopes to introduce both books to a wider readership than they can currently enjoy.”

–”We may applaud Twain’s ability as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults that bear distinct connotations of permanent inferiority nonetheless repulse modern-day readers.”

–”I believe that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers will welcome the option of an edition of Twain’s fused novels that spares the reader from a racial slur that never seems to lose its vitriol. Despite occasional efforts of rap and hip hop musicians to appropriate the term, and well-meaning but usually futile (from my own experience) endeavors by classroom teachers to inoculate their students against it by using Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to discuss its etymology and cultural history, the n-word remains inarguably the most inflammatory word in the English language.”

Christ, what a bunch of idiots.  Twain is much more than a "prominent American literary realist", and he's up to more than that here.  The language is very specifically a part of that.  Huck Finn is, among other things, about a boy discovering and dealing with his own racism; "nigger" belongs there, and not just because it is an accurate picture of the vernacular.  The word was as dismissive and demeaning then as it is now (even if it didn't face the same approbation), and Twain was very aware of that.  He was a man whose insights and values regarding race are much more in line with our times than with his own: you can be sure if he used the word, he used it for a very specific effect.  And yes, it should make us feel uncomfortable.  It was meant to.

Anyway, I could go on, but my pal Angie's consideration of Huck Finn is much more on point, so you should go there and read it (including the comments).

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"Political correctness" is one of those cudgels that conservatives always beat liberals with - often for good reason, as we see above - so how do they explain away editing their second most sacred text*, the Constitution of the United States of America, during today's ceremonial reading in the House of Representatives?

Oh yeah, that's right, they just skipped over the parts that were later amended . . . you know, cleaning up the mistakes:

“We’re reading the amended version with all amendments that are currently part of the Constitution,” said Kathryn Rexrode, a spokesman for Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who spearheaded the reading. “It will not include any amendments that were in the original but later amended.”

Like the 18th Amendment, which outlawed booze, and was later repealed by the 21st Amendment.  Or, most interestingly, that pesky "3/5ths Solution" in Article I, Section 2, which makes it clear that only free white men are full citizens of the country.

So, asked Jesse Jackson Jr. from the floor of the House, why aren't we reading the whole Constitution?

"The new Republican majority and their redacted Constitutional reading gives little deference to the long history of improving the Constitution and only seeks an interpretation of our Constitution based on the now, not the historic, broad body of law and struggle that it has taken to get there.  It leaves out the need to continue to refine the Constitution so that we have a more perfect union. ...

Or, in other words, how convenient is it that a bunch of idiots who are always babbling about "the original intent of the founding fathers" choose to gloss over the fact that said intent includes the systematic dehumanization of a race of people?

Yes, we eventually "get it right" (or a lot closer to right than it started out being), but censoring the inconvenient bits of the Constitution is specifically meant to preempt the kind of arguments that people like me have been making against "original intent" to begin with: namely, "original intent" is not a useful requisite to judgement because the document had fundamental flaws at its inception.  The Constitution is a starting place, not a goal.

It reminds me of the heated attacks that the Tea Party was making on (long dead and unable to defend himself) Justice Thurgood Marshall during the Kagan confirmation hearings: essentially, they wanted to paint the court in broad brush strokes of good (Antonin Scalia) and evil (Thurgood Marshall) because of the way Marshall supposedly deviated from the "Founding Father's Original Intent".  Marshall, as was the case with almost every famous African American who crossed the color line in some important venue, never rose to the attacks of his critics, and he wouldn't have risen to this one had he been alive . . . but I always wanted to say on his behalf, "So, let me get this straight: I'm supposed to consider as gospel the wisdom of a bunch of crackers who owned my people, who didn't even consider folk like me fully human?  You expect me to honor the intent of those fools?  How about I weight their intent appropriately in my decision, like maybe . . . oh, let's say 3/5ths to their intent, and the other 2/5ths to all the crap they got wrong.  I think thats more than fair, don't you, whitey?"

I swear to the heavens above, I don't know if these people are complete idiots, or if they think we are complete idiots.  Either way, this must end.
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*  Unfortunately, I am not exaggerating here:  there are Christian fundamentalists in the U. S. that consider the Constitution a divinely inspired text, just like the Bible.

Olympia Snowe, Right Wing Operative

"Can't we all just get along?"

Olympia Snowe is cast by the Right as the archetypal RINO - Republican in name only.  Yet, it's people like Snowe, and DINOs like Evan Bayh, the supposedly "sensible center", that are really cementing the gains made by the Right since the days of Ronald Reagan.

At issue is not Snowe's various political stances, and she should be commended for at least appearing to buck the party lines when she thinks it's necessary.  No, the real issue is the idea - found anywhere from Sam Waterston's Unity08 movement to the petty excuses blubbering from Bayh's lips to even The Daily Show - that somehow the polarization in American politics can be blamed on the Left as well as the Right . . . or, as Senator Snowe puts it, "the red states are getting redder and the blue states are getting bluer". 

That is simply not the case.  America is a right wing nation.

I'm not going to get into the machinations of Mitch McConnell here: politics is politics, and Mitch is a master manipulator.  The swing to the right is about more than politics, it's about culture.  McConnell represents a specific set of political skills, Rand Paul represents a world view.  And that world view is right wing.

If there really were the Right/Left equivalence in American politics suggested by the "sensible center", then where are the left-wing analogues of Paul, Palin, Angle, O'Donnell, Bachman, et. al.?  Don't talk to me about Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, Al Franken, Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold, or any of the Congressional Left.  If we want true counterparts to the Tea Party patriots, then we need to be running people who not only think that "big government" has a purpose, who may even go so far as to support national health care (Kucinich; anyone else?), we need candidates who question the very value of private property and the individual versus the collective, among other things.  We need candidates who aren't afraid to quote Marx and Lenin.  We need people we can point to and say "you think Obama is a commie?  Obama's not even really a liberal; now there's a communist!"

And it's not the polarization that's killing the American dialogue.  It's not even the vitriol.  It's the stupidity.

I have theoretical problems with Libertarians, but I have very concrete problems with those who claim to be Libertarians but still want the government all up in someone else's business, just not theirs . . . for example, you can be a Libertarian and a social conservative, but you must know that any laws codifying social conservatism are anti-libertarian (Ron Paul revealed his own Libertarianism as a lie when he caved on the gay marriage issue*).  And hey, if you are hating on the bailout and stimulus package from the laissez-faire capitalist angle, then shut the hell up about the unemployment rate.  That's just the system cleaning itself out.

I could (and often do) go on.  But, even if I am arguing the point from an obvious political position, the argument I'm making is not a directly political one.

The point is that our very speech has been bent into uselessness.  Our words and phrases mean nothing because they have no fidelity to a real idea: they are masks designed to slot into public conversations in a specific way to affect a specific reaction.  Our words and phrases do not reveal, they obfuscate.  If we are getting dumber (and I believe we are), it is because language is at the core of thought, and our language has been beaten into a dull, rusty blade.

Here, again, is that anathema to thought we call "common sense": Snowe's contention that the polarization of the right and left is to blame for the devolution of discourse in this country is common, but not true.  Any phrase or masked idea becomes common simply from repetition.  At some point, depending on who's driving the train, it moves from simply being common to common sense . . . Große Lüge, Hitler's "Big Lie", or, per Goebbels, "one should lie big and stick with it", which we can modify to read  "say anything often enough and loud enough, sooner or later it becomes commonly accepted as fact."  Common sense is like that.

 Again, no specific beef with Olympia Snowe, given that even John Stewart makes concessions to the "polarization" conceit**, but it is exactly at this point where the Right has had its biggest cultural success since 1980.  In that sense, Olympia Snowe is a much more effective champion of the right than Rand Paul ever will be.

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*  He could have dodged the whole issue by saying that the government has no business endorsing any kind of marriage, hetero or homo, but he didn't.  He came out squarely against gay marriage.  I think at some point he tossed out some "states rights" bullshit, but decentralized government is not the same as small government (just look at California).  Libertarianism betrays itself if it cannot protect its citizens against the tyranny of the majority.  Of course, at the core of the issue is what Libertarianism can do . . . and the most convincing argument is that a Libertarian government can't do anything, and that's the way its supposed to be.  Do you think all the American Right, with all of its current angry demands, wants a government that does nothing?  Of course not.  They want a government that keeps out illegal aliens, restricts abortion, is tough on crime, keeps us safe from terrorists, cleans up our (whoops!  the petrochemical companies') spills, keeps Muslims from building, etc.  These people aren't Libertarians, they don't want small government, they want government to do what they want it to do and nothing else.
**  When trying to set a polarized equivalence, Stewart always seems to resort to 9/11 conspiracy theory for his example of left-wing extremism.  I think if he were called on it, he would probably say that 9/11 conspiracy is not a right or a left issue in the same way that Illuminati/Trilateral conspiracy is not a left or a right issue, and he would be right.  It's just a bit frustrating that he concedes to this fake parallelism when I don't think he really buys into it.

The Tea Party's Economic Recovery (Already in Progress)

Good news, teabagger!  Your perfect economic recovery is already underway! 

According to the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the September job numbers show a net loss of 95,000 non-farm jobs for September, with the jobless rate holding steady at 9.6%.  How is this good news, you say? 

Well, the private sector actually added 64,000 jobs, while the public sector lost 159,000 jobs . . . which means the number of those suckling the government teat is shrinking, while those bootstrappers out there humpin' it for the good of pure capital is actually growing.  Let's let out a war whoop of celebration!* 

This is so perfect for the Tea Party that Karl Rove couldn't have designed it better if he tried.  In addition to the continued shrinkage of the hated public sector, in addition to the expansion of the private sector (however modest), the unemployment rate remains at a high level . . . all that the average American hears is that the unemployment rate is 9.6%, and the discussion's over.  The economy sucks, and the guy in charge is doing a lousy job.

The right doesn't have to worry about anyone giving credit to Obama for the expansion of jobs in the private sector, because even the people who would parse the more subtle points of the numbers are going to either be upset about the public sector job loss and blame Obama, or they will be happy about the public sector job loss but never be willing to give Obama credit on anything to begin with.

Meanwhile, expert after expert continues to point out that corporate liquidity is growing in the US, but job growth is not keeping pace.  In other words, everyone is lamenting the weak labor market, but not really calling out the people who have the means to fix it (that would be corporate America, in case you're missing the point).  There is money in the economy, it's just under the asses of corporations, who are "sitting on it", as they say.

I will once again repeat that I believe presidents/administrations get too much credit and/or blame when it comes to the economy.  I also don't fully blame corporations who sit on their money in uncertain economic times, although it's really starting to take on a "if you don't do things my way, I'm gonna take my ball and go home" sort of feel to it. I'm not even joining in the "can't we all just get along" choruses of moderate public discourse . . . all I'm asking is a bit of principled ideology and rhetoric in the public sphere.

Apparently, that is much too much to expect.

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In related news, the Dow Jones Industrial index rose 57.90 points (.5%) to close above the 11,000 level (11,006.48) for the first time since May.  All other major stock indices finished up for the day as well.

Speculation about the gains centers around today's announced job numbers: it seems they were bad enough that Wall Street expects the Fed to intervene and continue to sweeten the pot, but not bad enough that unemployment will do any real damage to the economy, which is recovering much less slowly for those at the top of the economic scale than it is for those at the bottom.

This is all so wrong I don't know where to start . . . so I won't.  Not now, at least.
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*  Fun fact that you may have forgotten: many of the participants in the original Boston Tea Party disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians.  In case you were wondering, this was not a tribute to the integrity and free spirit of the American Indian.

The Outbox

Another compendium of half-formed ideas . . .


Hit the North! (Redux)


Bonus time up north! Another week of virtually perfect weather up out of the heat. My my!

Nice and quiet this time - just Sharri & I with mom & dad. We spent a little more time cruising the countryside, checking out little places we haven't seen been to before, like Christmas Cove (above), Mission Point, Good Harbor Beach, and a few other places. Dad fired up the party barge and we got most of the way into the southern lake, and at a much more relaxed pace. We also spent a little more time tearing around at full speed in the powerboat.




Not as much reading this time, either. I did pick up Ted Morgan's memoir, My Battle of Algiers.

One of these days, I'll spend more time talking about Up North . . . just not right now.

All in all, a nice mellow end to the summer, especially given how annoying August has been. The summer has a whole has been a tad bit more annoying than I would like, which is kinda a drag, since I spend the whole year looking forward to summer. Oh well, onward and upward.

Here's to an exciting fall.



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In Rotation

Sir Richard Bishop: All Strung Out
Mahler: 9th Symphony
Various: Dirty Dirty (featuring Son House, Charlie Patton, Charlie Poole, Cliff Carlisle, Skip James, Dock Boggs, Yank Rachel, Lottie Kimbrough, Blind Willie McTell, Frank Hutchison, Willie Eason, Memphis Minnie, Washington Phillips, Homer Callahan, and more)
Ennio Morricone: Crime & Dissonance
OST: The Limits of Control
Shostakovich: 5th Symphony
The Milkshakes: Live from Chatham
Various: Psych Funk 101

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Blame the Government

There was a gag order dropped in the Roger Clemens hearings, so we won't be subjected to the annoying media circus as much as we could have been. In the short time that they were allowed to speak, both Clemens and his lawyer made a clear outline of how they were going to run this in the press: it's us against the government. In other words, Clemens wasn't going to try to plead ignorance (a la Barry Bonds), or attack his opponents from his morally superior perch (a la Lance Armstrong), he was going to join the Tea Party in running against Obama.

It's the government, people. They want to take away your guns. They want to build mosques in your backyard. They want to take away your income by taxing you. They want to let everybody in the country. They want the socialists to take over. They want to marginalize and persecute the good Christians.

They want to put Roger Clemens behind bars.

God, guns, and a free Roger Clemens. That's America.

On one level, I do agree with the faithful: we have no business trying Roger Clemens for lying to Congress. Congress had no business wasting their time investigating PEDs in sports. They have much more important things to worry about.

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Summertime Blues

I recently re-read Jack Kerouac's San Francisco Blues. The basic premise is that the series of poems are short bursts ("choruses") of blues, with the final line of one poem leading into the next "chorus". The poems are limited to fitting onto one page of a notebook small enough to fit into Kerouac's pocket.

The poems themselves are a mixed bag, and I have no interest in even approximating Kerouac's voice. I am interested in the notebook schtick, and I like the sharp, jagged rhythms of the best of the blues poems.

I'm going to try to scare up 75 poems or so for next summer. We'll see how that goes.


7.

hotcha! State Fair time in the old town
the natives are out
  flashing displaced graphics
  and hysterical edge
  life during wartime's perpetual state

  one dimensional
eyes of jungle cats
"look, she's gonna pop right fuckin' here!"
off to the side
rivers & tributaries
gently swirling backwaters
there's a pickaninny in that case, over there
Kentucky detritus collecting in puddles
  & eddies off to the side
filtering into the rivers
throbbing thick blood behind the temples
anger just below the
hysterical above


9.

hello, then!
the grass grows thinner, browns out
sandy, sandy pine
gone white
clarity in the air

who knows
what runs in the clear pines
"Take to the mountains," he said,
"if the government is a problem.
Make them come get you
& then shoot down on them
from high rocks."
          not the same, perhaps
but mixed oak, maple, birch
pine
provide cover

white nation, white nation
curtain drawn, it's here
it's down the street
"no one gets my gun"


13.

edge of town used to be
Wendy's & The Flap Jack Shack
up over the hill
from sandy orchard & sparse grain

corn's imperative barely met here
by narrow wizened farmers
Eastern European Catholic features
sharpened by wind & struggle
         up north
         isolation subtext
growing's a struggle waged alone
wheat not corn
cherries and apples not grapes

the damn wineries came in
grapes a spreading fungus
cherry trees displaced, brittle, dead, cracking
new tasting rooms run by old farmers
first the corn, now the grapes
in Gills Pier
Polish saints protect us
from the modern world

Once again, effing Blogger wipes out all my typographical stunts, so you'll have to wait until it gets published to see the final versions. [UPDATE: the new Blogger editor allows different kinds of indents, so the poems above are in their actual forms]

And by the way, did you know Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay also owns the original scroll from Kerouac's On the Road? Gotta love Wikipedia.

Oh, and more on the state fair in an upcoming post.

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The Reds? Are You Kidding Me?

Well, my Tigers drained all the drama out of the AL Central by collapsing around All Star break instead of at the end of the season. They're playing okay baseball right now, but at ten back, they're not catching the Twins because, unlike the Tigers last year, the Twins won't fold. For the record, I don't see the Sox catching the Twins either, Manny or not.

But, what's this? The Reds in first place? Sure didn't see that coming.

As they say, stay tuned. I would love to see the Reds deep into the post season.

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USA! USA! USA!

If you are sleeping on the world basketball championships, wake up. "America's B Team" is playing some of the most fun basketball you're going to see for quite a while.

Basketball traditionally breaks down its starting five into specialized roles, and anyone who recruits an all-star team generally defines the roles, and then finds the best players to fill those roles. This version of the US National team went with the best players, regardless of position. As a result, it's a team full of guards and small forwards, with Tyson Chandler and Kevin Love being the only big men on the team. As a result, you've got Lamar Odom, normally a 2-3 even though he's 6' 10", playing center, as well as Andre Iguodala, Rudy Gay, and Danny Granger, all muscular 2-3's, playing power forward.

I see the mark of Kryzewski on this team: he's trying to really establish himself as a basketball genius, not just a motivator of young men. He's trying to go to the logical extension of the Bob Knight defense-first school, pumped up Nolan Richardson-style. This is an amazing chance to see just how exciting defense can be.

It's too bad that Rajon Rondo didn't work out for this team, but if you turn the rock over and can't hit jumpers, the international game punishes you even more than the American game does. On the other hand, I'm glad they gave Eric Gordon a chance, because his inside/outside game goes well internationally, and his lack of a mid-range game doesn't get exposed like it occasionally does stateside. Kevin Love also does well in this set up, since he's more than happy to mix it up physically with anyone you can throw at him.

Overall, the defense is breathtaking, but the offense will make or break this team. They are currently undefeated, but now they're playing for real in the one-and-done round. Catch it if you can.

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Uh, Starfish?

So, I'm thinking of creating an animal metaphor to represent my truly enviable attributes to the world at large. Let's see, I could be a strong, soaring eagle, or a powerful bear, or a graceful deer. I could be a sage owl, a proud lion, a faithful hound, or an inscrutable cat. I could be a showy peacock, a bizarre giraffe, a timeless elephant. I could be a slimy lizard, an indestructible cockroach. Or I could be a starfish.

A freaking starfish.

To be fair, the Tea Party didn't choose this metaphor for themselves. It comes from a book written by Rod Beckstrom called The Starfish and the Spider. The idea, in short, is that decentralized organizations are stronger because you can't kill them by cutting off the head - hence, the spider v. the starfish metaphor. This idea could probably as easily applied to Al Qaeda . . . and it does make sense.

You can follow the metaphor out to its logical conclusion. A starfish is capable of surviving and regenerating lost limbs, which makes it a uniquely durable organism. But if these "decentralized" organisms have superior survival characteristics, then why hasn't evolution determined that more of these types of organisms would end up higher on the evolutionary ladder? It seems that maybe nature prefers centralized biological systems after all.

Not trying to make a specific political point here, just pointing out the obvious.

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More Rhetorical Genius Courtesy the Commonwealth

“Many of these mandates affect small business owners who don’t have the resources to hire an army of lawyers and accountants to comply with all these burdensome regulations. The more time small business owners spend pushing paper, the less time they have to focus on creating jobs.

That would be the representative of Kentucky's fourth, Geoff Davis.

'Cause, you know, if it weren't for all that paperwork, these people would be out there pulling jobs out of their asses.

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Chamber of Horrors

So, this is old news, but I've been avoiding talking about the Chamber of Commerce because they make me crazy.

What's with this "crisis of confidence" bullshit anyway?

There has been a lot of chatter in the news about how the recovery has not translated into more jobs. The Chamber of Commerce essentially says that business owners are sitting on their money because of a "crisis of confidence" . . . which, of course, they explicitly blame on the Obama administration.

Now, "crisis of confidence" the kind of talk that should drive the stereotypical self-sufficient American superman completely nuts. If you have a "crisis of confidence", then whose fault is that? What kind of wimpy psychobabble is that?

There are obvious alliances between NGOs and political parties - unions and Democrats, the Chamber and Republicans. Ostensibly these NGOs will align with the party that will do them the most good, and it is understandable that they would be semi-permanent alignments given the philosophical underpinnings of the parties. Of course, these NGOs will campaign for the political parties that they are aligned with. Maybe I'm projecting here, but it seems to me that the Chamber has become more of an advocacy group for Republicans than an advocacy group for businessmen. Unions always seem to work for the best interests of their constituents, and to the degree that those interests are addressed by Democrats, unions work for Democrats. The Chamber seems to be working for the best interests of Republicans, and to the degree that those interests match the interests of businessmen, The Chamber works for businessmen. That may seem to be a subtle distinction, but it's not. The fact that their stated primary purpose is actually a secondary purpose makes them untrustworthy. Sort of like Fox News, if you know what I mean.

And besides, the real businessmen know that the best time to make your move is when your competition is suffering a "crisis of confidence".

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That's it for now. I'll do the Kentucky State Fair art post next.

Buck the Narrative (Part One)

Left and Right, Liberals and Conservatives, Libertarians and Socialists, Republicans and Democrats, Teabaggers and Coffee achievers . . . it's all bullshit. We are bipolar nation.

Here's one that has to have occurred to you: the narrative is the problem.

For a couple weeks it was all about Rand Paul: Rand Paul is the new Republican, Rand Paul took on Washington and won, Rand Paul has energized the conservative base, and on and on and on . . .

First of all, every non-incumbent runs against the evil of Washington as they define it. Every one. What are you going to do? "The government is doing a great job." Why the hell are you running then, putz? No, this always-running-against-the-government has been going on for years - probably since the dawn of the republic - and both sides do it, no matter who is in power. Sometimes even incumbents try to do it. It's ridiculous. It's meaningless. It demonstrates a stultifying poverty of imagination. And, like nationalism (with which its opposition is only on the surface), it is often the refuge of scoundrels.

Then there is the idea that Rand Paul is somehow a "new Republican" born of the Tea Party movement. Wrong. He's the garden variety Reagan Republican. He's the male Sara Palin, less annoying, more boring. No big deal. He's not the new libertarian savior for the right, he's not the new Satan for the left. Hell, I don't know why all the left wingers are acting like he's a sign of the apocalypse - fantastic dullard though he may be, he's probably less of a whackjob than Jim Bunning, the guy he's favored to replace. He's no worse than many with whom we are dealing with now.

Then there's the idea that he "energized the base". Well, Republicans better hope that's not the case, because there wasn't a hell of a lot of energy there: there were four major candidates running in the two Kentucky primaries on May 4th, and Paul was third in the vote count. That's right, two contested primaries, and both the Democrats out polled Paul. It's not that the Republican primary was uncontested, though Paul won handily . . . as late as a week and a half before the primary, the Republican race was closer than the Democratic race. Does this mean anything? No, it doesn't. It doesn't mean that Paul energized the base, and it doesn't mean his campaign is in trouble. It doesn't mean anything . . . just facts waiting to be twisted into a narrative.

Paul did the right thing by ducking Meet the Press. He figured out his place in the landscape, even if the narrative isn't ready to let him go just yet. Meet the Press is a no-win for Paul: he would be exposed as a Palinesque lightweight or, even at best, would drop a couple sound bite bombs to cause the petit-bourgeois Republican pause. And almost nobody in Kentucky (that is, the people he has to impress to win the election) gives a shit about Meet the Press . . . me included. I've met them, and they annoy me. And I was really annoyed by the chest puffing that followed: only the third guest to cancel in 62 years!! No, Ms. Executive Producer Betsy Fischer, that is not "a big deal", because your contribution to the cultural scrap heap is not a big deal.

And now, courtesy of one of my favorite radio shows, On the Media, there's another wrinkle to the whole "outing" of Rand Paul: the idea that Paul won the primary because he was getting a "free ride" because of a "diminished local press corps". Bob Garfield called out the Courier-Journal's Keith Runyon for not giving the story its proper push, but the point of the whole interview was never clear: the CJ were the ones that teased out the whole Paul "I don't support the Civil Rights Act in its entirety" story line, and they did report it, and they did comment on it in their editorial pages. Garfield himself pointed that out, while implying that the CJ somehow soft pedaled the story. Runyon simply pointed out that the story was out there because of the CJ, not in spite of the CJ, and that if the story was under reported, that had nothing to do with the editorial department of the paper, who traditionally does not try to influence the coverage of the news.

In the whole six plus minutes of the piece, I could never figure out where Garfield was headed. Closest I can figure, he was upset that there wasn't more outrage over Paul's beliefs during the Kentucky primaries, and that somehow the professionals like Rachel Maddow and Robert Siegel were able to give the story it's proper due (even going so far to call Maddow's interview a "gentle vivesection" . . . yuck!) when the CJ dropped the ball. What that means, of course, is that according to the "liberal" media, the CJ didn't slot the story solidly enough into THE NARRATIVE.

The real story over this incident is indeed the lack of outrage over Paul's comments, but it doesn't have anything to do with the traditional way of seeing things as articulated by OTM. The fact is that this kind of speech is common in American political and cultural dialogue, and if there isn't more of an outrage, it's because people are used to it. The bigger story is that a large percentage of Kentucky's population believes as Paul does, and it doesn't break down cleanly over socio-economic, political, or even racial lines. The Tea Party had become media shorthand long before they were analyzed and understood (which has yet to happen). Garfield is right that the media isn't doing their job - he's just looking in the wrong place for the wrong reasons.

There are no good guys here: we are constantly assaulted by broad-band political vulgarity. Every media outlet from every ideological corner handicaps politics as if it were a sporting event. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the minutiae of sports: the self-referential narrative, the self-important subtext. But nobody dies when the Yankees win.* Political pundits have devolved from intellectuals (philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, etc.) to being handicappers. Forget Cornell West, you may as well have Beano Cook on your weekend news show for all the ideas that those talking heads dredge up.

If it seems that I am not properly outraged over Rand Paul, it's because I'm not. Rand Paul isn't the problem: all politicians have been focus-grouped to death, including Rand Paul. They are not guiding lights. They are never ahead of the curve. The politicians will never change. They are the symptoms of our nation, of the narrative that defines our consciousness. The very language of our political discourse is corrupt and bankrupt, devoid of any real meaning. It's time to, as they say, flip the script.

Buck the narrative.

Oh yeah, and screw the Coffee Party. I hate reactionary bullshit.
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* No one dies, but every time the Yankees win, an angel loses its wings. Only the heroic efforts of the Twins have kept us from a heaven devoid of angels.