Dennis Does Democracy

I went to my congressman’s (Rick Larsen, Democrat) “health care forum” yesterday, having been compelled by one of the Moveon-type liberal activist organizations that send me emails (I think it was “BarackObama.com”).

I arrived at the stadium (of the Seattle Mariners’ triple-A baseball team, the Everett Aquasox) two hours early as the email suggested; there was a crowd gathered at the gates. The anti-reform faction had set up a table. A woman with a microphone was reading from a sheet of talking points, her insufficient amplification system being shouted down by the chanting of the pro-reform faction. Whenever someone took the microphone they were drowned out by chants of “Yes We Can” or “Liar, Liar.”

The lefties were outnumbered by about 2 to 1, but appeared to be more the product of a unified organizational effort, with pre-printed signs and many in matching t-shirts (the conservatives all had hand-written impromptu signs). The local Democratic Party affiliate had set up their own booth with petitions and campaign-style paraphernalia. People jostled to block their opponents’ signs with their own, but mostly kept their hands to themselves.

Eventually a group of young men showed up with Obama-as-Hitler posters. One of them positioned himself behind the conservatives’ table as a woman was speaking, holding his sign aloft. He was hustled off by one of the larger conservative men. I later learned this was a contingent of LaRouche supporters. They were all young, with at least one woman in their group, and unexceptional enough in appearance.

At one point an overweight fellow with an effeminate manner showed up with a bullhorn, demanding: “Repeal the Bush tax cuts! Repeal the Bush tax cuts!” He was surrounded by detractors who argued with him for a while; he explained that he was there because the anti-reform protesters were “not welcome” at a “rally for health-care reform.” Whether he was mistaken about the nature of the “town hall meeting” or was referring to the preliminary gathering at the gates I’m not sure. While his bullhorn gave him amplification superiority over the conservatives’ paltry sound system, he gave it a rest after a few minutes.

After about an hour the conservatives shut down and the crowd calmed. People mingled about showing deference to friends and foes alike; debates broke out here and there; a polite Northwestern version of the contentious battles that are going on across the nation.

When they opened the gates people were passing out question forms but once we got inside Rep. Larsen, after speaking briefly, took random questions directly from the crowd. These were mostly challenges to reform, often lacking coherence or taking the form of statements; this went for both sides. Not all challenges were from the right; one citizen asked if Larsen opposed single payer reform because he had taken “half a million dollars from the insurance companies” (Larsen denied this charge). Larsen denied that illegal immigrants would be eligible and the “death boards” charge. Occasionally there were shouts from the audience, boos or applause; one man stormed over to place himself directly in front of me (if you want to find the crank, he’s always right in front of me; it was annoying, but I delighted in pointing myself out to my daughter later on the evening news) and berate the congressman at volume. He shortly relented, sulking off in an exaggerated fashion, muttering that he would “be quiet, for now.” This was the single such incident of “shouting down.”
If what I saw was a typical example of what’s happening at these meetings across the country, then the media is overreacting. But then, as I’ve pointed out above, this is the polite Puget Sound.

Slog Days

I’m out on the back porch because the house just won’t cool down. Tanned and tawny haired from the sun, looking like an aging surf bum and moving like the just plain aged in the oppressive heat, I swear I’ll never complain about the Northwest’s lack of sunshine again.
I have my legs crossed–habitually in what I’ve been taught is acceptable male fashion, ankle on knee and calf not angled too far above the horizontal. Our cat positions himself to look up at me, framed comically by the triangle formed by my propped-up leg. He blinks hello; it goes unacknowledged and he blinks again, more slowly and deliberately. I’m convinced this familiar practice is conscious signalling of affection on his part, born of the circumstance that cats only sleep in the presence of those they trust. He closes his eyes as an expression of this trust. I blink back and he is contented. He stretches languidly before moving on to a shaded spot, where he nearly pants like a dog in the heat. It seems suspiciously overdone, as if he’s playing it up, not necessarily for me but for himself. Such as I am doing here. No work will be done today.

The Business End of Empathy

McClatchy is reporting that liberal advocacy groups are going after the lead plaintiff in the Ricci case, who is expected to be called to testify at this week’s confirmation hearings for supreme court nominee Sonya Sotomayor:

On Friday, citing in an e-mail “Frank Ricci’s troubled and litigious work history,” the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters’ attention to Ricci’s past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.
Specifically, the advocates have zeroed in on an earlier 1995 lawsuit Ricci filed claiming the city of New Haven discriminated against him because he’s dyslexic. The advocates cite other Hartford Courant stories from the same era recounting how Ricci was fired by a fire department in Middletown, Conn., allegedly, Ricci said at the time, because of safety concerns he raised. The Middletown-area fire department was subsequently fined for safety violations, but the Connecticut Department of Labor dismissed Ricci’s retaliation complaint.

Sotomayor’s confirmation is an all but forgone conclusion. The point now is to obscure or discredit, after having failed to bury, Ricci, something Sotomayor attempted as an appellate court judge. Despite the White House’s later attempt to portray Sotomayor’s vote there as admirable judicial restraint, the true nature of that decision–dodging a constitutional question in fear of its consequences–was exposed at the time in Jose Cabranes’ dissenting opinion (PDF). A judicial advocate of a certain interpretation of law welcomes the opportunity to make that interpretation–if it can be made without looking foolish or inept, thus later precluding such as a supreme court nomination. Luckily for Justice Ginsburg, she has no such worries (or shame).

Aside from the fact that Frank Ricci’s history has no bearing on the legal question presented by Ricci v DeStefano, and liberal critiques of the ruling have depended on ignoring or mischaracterizing the actions of New Haven’s mayor (in collusion with–or under threat by–an openly bigoted, convicted felon community organizer), PAW, in its desperation to obscure the corrupt machine politics arising from, and the legally unsustainable basis of, “disparate impact” as a model for anti-discrimination law (indeed, the fundamental conflict between “disparate impact” and “disparate treatment” which this case exposes), wants you to deplore Frank Ricci (and the lawsuit that bears his name) for (1) having the temerity to file a discrimination lawsuit, and (2) having once been fired.

The irony of a “liberal” effort to discredit someone for filing a discrimination lawsuit and losing his job, possibly for “whistleblowing”, is further proof that fiction cannot compete with reality. “Bleeding Heart Liberals”, we hardly knew ye. Whether PAW is oblivious to, or merely takes for granted, the legal reality that who is entitled to legal protection from discrimination is a matter of some discrimination, I cannot decide. But it’s either sublime confidence or sheer nerve, provoking the public’s habitual skepticism toward discrimination litigation in what is ultimately an attempt to preserve its current foundation. That very skepticism is what PAW and others typically identify as racism, reaction, ignorance, etc.

The open disdain of some for certain classes of people, including those who dare challenge quota hiring, is the flip side of a certain philosophy that, in this debate, falls under the shorthand term, empathy. If the word is not merely superfluous twaddle (and we have to assume it is used for some purpose), and has meaning, it must assign relative values of moral worth, holding other values constant, to classes of persons; these values must then bear upon the application of law. Minority trumps majority, female trumps male, poor trumps rich, etc. Of course this is nothing more than current “liberal” convention plainly expressed, which is precisely why some seize on the president’s coded invocation to expose that convention. “Empathy” here is a euphemism for “favor.”

The oblique and muted liberal critiques of Ricci have featured just this sort of reasoning, by people too steeped in their conditioning to recognize it; is it not empathy for the “white firemen” after all, to find in their favor? Categorically, no. They earned the decision by virtue of being right. Why, some have asked, are the Republicans calling Frank Ricci to testify? Is it not because he is sympathetic? Yes–but the confirmation process is a political process. The valid political counter-argument to Ricci’s testimony would be to call Mayor DeStefano, for instance, to testify; this would also be a means of putting our “empathy” to work for us in deciding who deserves it more. It would further be an expression of confidence in the logic and justice of this faction’s position.

Both sides on the Ricci divide were citing a political factor when describing the plaintiffs as “sympathetic.” The best defense of “empathy” thus lapses into absurdity: it doesn’t mean anything specifically, just that we should be good. When your best defense is irrelevance, it’s time to concede.

A faction laying claim to “empathy” or any other virtue (think “patriotism”, for instance), would make a talisman out of a word. It’s not the enlightenment arising from meaning but the obscurity of emotion they invoke. Otherwise empathy is meaningless, as its defenders here have ably demonstrated.
The law is there to to limit power and just the sort of demagogy that invariably invokes such words as empathy. In the Ricci case the law served just that purpose. Watching the knives come out for Mr. Ricci, we see the ruthlessness upon which an unyielding claim to virtue is dependent. What is the law before virtue itself, after all? Empathy, like the classic liberal ideal, has been distorted by the political reality of modern America into its opposite.

Quantitative Sleazing

From Bloomberg, Johnathan Weil reports a US prosecutor says a stolen Goldman Sachs computer program capable of manipulating global markets may fall into the wrong hands (wrong being other than the world’s most powerful investment bank). About the first of this month Goldman notified authorities that former employee Sergey Aleynikov, not content with post-its and paper clips, ripped off the program in his last week working for the company. He was arrested getting off a plane in Newark on July 3. Arguing against bond, the government’s prosecutor asserted:

It wasn’t just Goldman that faced imminent harm if Aleynikov were to be released, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti told a federal magistrate judge at his July 4 bail hearing in New York. The 34-year-old prosecutor also dropped this bombshell: “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

Publicly Goldman is not going on record, but trying to play down worries:

Goldman isn’t commenting publicly about any of this, though it seems the bank’s bosses want us to believe there’s no need to worry. On July 6, Dow Jones Newswires quoted a “person familiar with the matter” saying this: “The theft has had no impact on our clients and no impact on our business.” Note that this person was so familiar with Goldman that he or she spoke of Goldman’s clients as “our clients” and Goldman’s business as “our business.”

Weil notes:

All this leaves us to wonder: Did Goldman really tell the government its high-speed, high-volume, algorithmic-trading program can be used to manipulate markets in unfair ways, as Facciponti said? And shouldn’t Goldman’s bosses be worried this revelation may cause lots of people to start hypothesizing aloud about whether Goldman itself might misuse this program?

According to his attorney, Aleynikov admits to downloading the software, but denies intending to use it in any “proprietary way.” Aleynikov had left Goldman to work for fellow Russian emigre Mikhail Malyshev’s start-up company, Teza Tech. Malyshev has been sued by former boss Citadel, alleging he’s in violation of a non-compete clause. Malyshev specialized in–what else?–high-frequency trading, and according to the story linked above:

Malyshev, a Russian emigre with a doctorate in astrophysics from Princeton, left Citadel’s quantitative trading unit in February after the funds he helped run returned about 40 percent last year. Their performance stood out at a time when most hedge funds lost money and Citadel’s flagship portfolios tumbled 50 percent.

The quants shall inherit the economy.



Beck, Hell Yes



Autechre, Second Bad Vibe

Looks like one of the performers from the Beck video.



Lemon Jelly, Space Walk

Voice sample: radio transmission of astronaut Alan Bean describing the sunrise during a space walk, Skylab 3 mission, July 1973

Zero Gs and I feel fine

Note how sampling works as metaphor.

Closed for reinvention. Back soon.

update III:
Girlfriend:
“You come home, you order out food…and then you play those stupid Tito Puente albums until 2 in the morning!”
Guy:
“Tito Puente is gonna be dead, and you’ll say: ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years. He’s fabulous.’ “
–Stripes

update II: be sure to check out the beehive to the right of the screen at 0:08. Like a Nascar Nefertiti!

udpate I:
Did somebody say “twang”?


The Osborne Brothers, Ruby, Are You Mad?

I can only think of two forms of original American folk music, the blues and bluegrass. The blues are subterranean rhythms that strip away all pretense and adornment to allow the unimpeded expression of desire and sorrow. Bluegrass is similarly engaged, yet impelled in the other direction, toward the sky. Where the blues and funk envelop you in the soil of earthen, down-tempo bass chords, bluegrass carries you into the heavens on manic high notes. Blues is earth; bluegrass is sky.
The nearness of nature and its inexorable pull are the common feature. Both evoke the primary and unequivocal realities of desire, family, toil and loss. The unavoidable immediacy of these things in the hungry and desperate experience of the rural poor of the early twentieth century is what gives these forms their inimitable beauty. We are drawn to these as authentic expressions of joy and sorrow no longer possible. The American pastoral.
I was trapped in traffic with nothing but an AM radio to distract me, in LA, when I abandoned the droning obscenity of the OJ trial to land on a non-profit station’s bluegrass hour. What the hell. Random finds are the best finds. That’s when I first heard this song. This piercing, high lonesome lament was like the lunatic ravings of a mental patient. I had “discovered” something that had been there the whole time. Who knew?

Now; leave me alone, I have work to do.

Condescension and Credulity

No matter with what skill the great manage to seem other than they are, they cannot conceal their malignity.
—Jean de la Bruyere, Characters

That implicit credulity is the mark of a feeble mind will not be disputed.
—Sir William Hamilton

After a brief, nominal flirtation with the ideal of objectivity the political press is poised to revert to its roots in factional advocacy, with the larger outlets financed and influenced by corporate, private or foundational sponsors. That is, what of it will be left behind by the receding waters of the economic and cultural deluge. This goes carelessly unlamented by many amid the celebration of a “new media” (see New Economy, 2000). I see no reason to celebrate an order wherein any news organization with significant resources is ultimately funded by one powerful faction or another.

Yes, we’ve never had a truly unbiased, independent press. The ideal is likely impossible. But impossibility is the last reason to abandon a worthy ideal. Impossible ideals are the only ones worth striving for. It’s all in the striving. The old class and regional biases, as exemplified by the world’s most provincial newspaper of selective record, The New York Times (granted, its province constitutes its own city-state, giving its prejudices an imperial reach) aren’t going away after all, and the fall of one order doesn’t necessarily give way to something better. Human nature already ensures that the natural tendency of institutions is toward degradation.

The mayhem of the blogosphere is welcome for, among other things, its popular revolt against Crimethink as mostly determined by the “old media” in its role as a sort of priestly caste. Their monopoly may be gone, but the new advocacy model of journalism only increases their accusatory fervor, as opposing outlets trade accusations, depending on who’s calling out who, of bigotry, anti-Americanism, xenophobia etc. But the stirrings of insurgency should not be mistaken for success (or its inevitability), and the potential for a reaction leaving our discourse more constricted than before remains. The mechanisms of control and panic still being put in place under the ruse of a “war on terror” lend themselves well to the purpose. To say nothing of the fact that once created power travels easily from descending to ascending faction, like a parasite abandoning a dying host for a healthy one. Power is agency; it tends to spill over the confines of its original justification to find new purposes, and is never surrendered by those who have it on mere principle.

An unfortunate consequence of Barack Obama’s unique and slightly perverse appeal, and the rout of a decadent Republican Party, is the conversion of too many from opponents to proponents of power. This includes what remains of the “mainstream media”, whose bias is not toward liberalism or conservatism as much as it is toward cowardice–accepting uncritically on one hand the appeal to consequences upon which current liberal social science and ensuing policy is based, and on the other its (counter-intuitively) natural complement, the nationalism of the Right. The term “political correctness” should be expanded to include American exceptionalism, at the least. What passes for liberalism today is just chauvinism differently expressed. Neither Left nor Right is uniquely corrupted by power. Power itself is the problem. That the exercise of power is an unfortunate necessity of governance makes it not less but more true.

The advantage, for instance, in a real, exaggerated, or surmised “right wing terrorist threat” is too tempting, with the potential for discrediting or radicalizing (prodding the fiction into reality) the opposition. Combine this with the impetus for legislation against “hateful” speech increasing along with a Democratic majority and the multi-ethnic populace which it must keep in a state of festering resentment and alarm (just as the Right must do with its base) and the previously mentioned journalists advocating on behalf of a very particular and hostile worldview. More than ever we need those with the resources to do sustained investigative reporting to at least feel chastened by a standard of objectivity. The aforementioned New York Times might seem to deserve its fate (every fate that isn’t the result of natural catastrophe, and even sometimes that, is “deserved,” after all) but the breadth and scope of its daily issue is a wonder, and its loss would be a tragedy.

The new media has also produced the ominous phenomenon of the top-down activist organization, reverse-engineering the model of the grass roots organization to put it directly in the service of the powerful and flooding the arteries of the new telecommunications with creepy, viral efficiency. I’m convinced that if the emails I receive from MoveOn.org came in audio format they would be expressed with a thick Russian accent over a straining analog recording of martial music. No, that would give them too much of a human quality. The “Age of Obama” threatens to become the slogan of our new multicultural tyranny, imposed in part by the political/ideological equivalent of the non-governmental organization.

Alas, what remains of the moneyed press increasingly exists not across an antagonistic divide from from the powerful, but is fragmented by the same factional rifts and insulated by the same elite prejudices. Big Media is an adjunct of the ruling class. This, combined with the inevitable connoisseur’s appreciation of the art and play of politics that develops over time, renders it congenitally incapable of distinguishing political maneuver from statesmanship. Which brings me, finally, to the subject.

It’s become difficult to tell where the President’s political skills leave off and Big Media’s credulity begins. The mistaking of platitude for profundity and condescension for compromise has become downright pathological in the age of the Wonder Brother. Never has so little awed so many so much.

This incapacity increases as our democracy matures, a consequence of age accelerated by the Obama effect, the increasing viability of the Fox News/MSNBC model of advocacy journalism, and the much deserved disrepute into which the Republican Party has fallen. If independence is our measure of health, the fourth estate, having endured a fitful adolescence and the disillusionment of middle age, is entering its dotage. As is the case with the aged, it’s intellect is no longer supple and its biases are irrevocably set; it’s less and less able to control its utterances for the sake of decorum; it grows fonder of sentimental kitsch. The press’ gushing over this or that vaporous issuance from President Obama is the equivalent of the kitten and puppies calendars decorating an old folks’ home. Correct that; the various artistic representations of Obama by acolytes, uncritically admired recently in that same Times, are precisely equivalent.

So when President Obama directly addressed abortion in his speech at Notre Dame, what we witnessed wasn’t the brave magnanimity over which so many gushed–the president made certain there would be no change in his decidedly uncompromising support for taxpayer-funded abortion on demand in every municipality in the country. Offering meaningless, self-congratulatory expressions of compromise unattached to substance in such a way is an act that would typically be described disapprovingly as nerve, not “courage”, as in “it takes nerve.” But you do have to hand it to him.

As is the case with the new president, still, it wasn’t the act but the reception that is remarkable. In this case the complete surrender of a former bastion of opposition to the cruel, calculating expedience of the president’s abortion position, abandoning (to use the president’s favored language) the powerless and voiceless to the powerful and loud. Ralph Ellison’s concept of the inherent oppression of “invisibility”, something the president is sure to have appreciated in the romantic abstract, has never been so applicable. This would be a defining feature of the unborn child (though the president’s insistence on abortion goes beyond unborn and unwanted to inconvenient, as he will not sacrifice the good graces of Planned Parenthood to compromise on behalf of children who survive extraction), along with helplessness and powerlessness. The president’s definition of abortion as a “choice” is an unremarkable commonplace in our low, dishonest age after all.

No; contrary to the adulatory response from the president’s vast amen corner, what we witnessed wasn’t a marvel of rhetoric or magnanimity, not a bold offer of common ground, but a condescending expression of power. Condescension is a form of disdain. The president brandished his position on abortion, a position the church once insisted was unconscionable, and planted it like a flag in the heart of what was once one of its grandest institutions. To the cheers of its children. This was not lost on him, even if it was lost on the press.
Some things aren’t open to compromise–rather, this used to be true. “Common ground”, here offered by the unmoving and unmoved, is the field of surrender. Compromise is the murder of principle by expedience, and “unity“, another favorite of the president, is a prerequisite of tyranny. Meanwhile, what remains of the mainstream press has become so intoxicated by the expression of power that it cannot recognize it as such.

Voices, Violence and Vocations

Impelled by religious zeal, a man commits an act of terrorist murder, targeting an individual he deems responsible for the slaughter of innocents. The charge follows: through the use of extreme language activist organizations, news outlets–the very opinions and beliefs they espouse–provoked the violence. By implication (or direct inference) these beliefs are discredited not by logic, fact or argument, but by an act of violence. Not content with the widely held view that the violent act should not be allowed to advance its ends, those with opposing ends determine it should advance theirs. Opportunism attaches to outrage. The shock of an act of violence magnified by social effect and media ubiquity becomes transformative after all, defining the limits of speech and, as necessarily follows, thought and action.

This process played out yesterday regarding the murder of an abortion doctor, as the sustained smirk occasionally punctuated by conspicuous displays of sanctimony that is MSNBC‘s typical news block gave way to sustained sanctimony occasionally punctuated by conspicuous displays of smirking. Whether or not this outrage is authentic is beside the point; when the personal outrage of the primped and powdered set of the nightly newscast became operative our society and its discourse became a measure more juvenile (it is not the authenticity of individual emotion that determines whether or not it is unseemly, it is the venue). It was the first indication I’ve had yet that Rachel Maddow (who’s been otherwise exemplary in, for instance, holding the Obama administration accountable for its promises) was capable of anything other than her standard expression of vapid, self-satisfied ridicule (is this some Alinsky-ite strategy?). I’m not being facetious when I say it was touching; nonetheless, it was entirely inappropriate. It would be progress of a sort, however, if she retained a trace of that solemnity for her on-air persona in the future.

The act described in the first sentence above has happened not once but twice in the past two days. Will FoxNews, for one, follow reports of today’s lone Islamic terrorist with a similar display of accusatory outrage? I think I haven’t the stomach for any more cultivated outrage (Fox‘s daily, default level of bombast already beats even yesterday’s orgy of righteous anger from MSNBC). I’m certain many have already pointed out the similarities between the two murders. I’m less confident many will draw the right conclusion–that speech must be defended above all, and violence can’t be allowed to determine our laws or morals. Whether or not the murderers were right about the injustice they perceived is irrelevant. How one reacts to these crimes seems determined above all by point of view; but when murder or violence is the case, there can be only one point of view.

But this much too must be acknowledged: enough violence will determine the measure of our liberty whether we like it or not. Popular will, and panic, will ensure that. The decade has taught us nothing less. We’ve only had a taste of the repressive measures the consenting governed will be willing to impose upon itself. Violence works, and sometimes in very small, highly focused applications. Not to achieve the ends of its actors, for these questions will still be determined by the competition of popular and factional wills and that cruelest factor of all, expedience; no, violence works to degrade our freedom generally. It works to limit our very thoughts. Enough of it, enough of the terror it inspires, enough of the attendant opportunistic outrage of the politically engaged, and the limits will come, in gradually increasing severity. They’re already at the border.