et alia

It's a (mostly) friends-only LiveJournal, duh. But rather than the rantings of a spoiled middle-middle/upper-middle class teen, it's the rantings of a spoiled middle-aged middle-middle/upper-middle class American man with Social Democratic leanings, and no political party he trusts (can you blame him? Without descending to sophistries and stupidities, I mean.)

And all those ‘middles’—really, it's just a way of signifying mediocrity without actually copping to it. Wouldn't you?

I'm sure I've written another blog post with that title, but I don't want to be bothered with finding it now. I am fatigued, and I am disgusted, and I may not post for a while. That doesn't mean I have given up blogging writing; I write but am not and have no interest in being a writer. Fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, criticize in the evening, while not being a fisher, hunter, or writer—remember that? As an ideal, it's not been forgotten, it's been repudiated. Another symptom of what's wrong with our culture: the professionalization (and therefore segregation/alienation) of basic creative and cognitive functions.

...a student at of the University of Washington:

I note with puzzlement that three of my daffiest and wackiest detractors—Kirby Olson, Dr. Jacques Albert, and “et alia”—all did their graduate work in literary study at the University of Washington. Something in the water out there?

Michael Bérubé, “Till We Meet Again.”

Not only that, but I have done no graduate work in literature. My highest academic credential is a Bachelor's of Science with a major in Mathematics. I did study traditional harmony at the beginning of my college years in the vain hope of becoming a composer. Also, after 15 years as a software developer in private industry, I almost fulfilled a long standing ambition of learning ancient Greek, but crumbled under the weight of having to translate more than 100 lines of Homer a week and kiss my clueless boss' butt.

These were all at public colleges and universities within a two hour drive of New York.

I am, in sum, a middle-aged dilletante given to explosions of anger in what I thought was an obscure corner of the internet. I would be flattered at being confused with someone with an advanced degree, but maybe those who look up to Professor Bérubé who are also members of hiring commities will look askance at candidates from the University of Washington—could this one, sitting in front of us now, be that wack job? In other words, the misidentification could be deliberate, and the Professor of Danger Studies intends to make somebody in particular pay.

While you dwell on that, here's a updated version of my fractured Christmas carol for the year. It is the unedited rehersal tape of the Lobachsville Community Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Humphrey Ebolamann, Jr. Mr Ebolamann is one of the most underrated community orchestra directors around, and the Lobachsville brass and percussion sections could hold their own with those of many major orchestras. He displays considerable expertise in (finally) drawing a good performance from an extremely disspirited group. Listen and enjoy.

Another year, and another ensemble whose heart really isn't into playing Christmas music. This year, it's a brass quartet of trumpet, french horn, and two trombones with moral support from a marimba, tympani, and harp. They try to play “Saint Louis,” (they American tune for “O Little Town of Bethlehem”), but run out of steam just as they get started. Then they tune up, try to get the holiday hate out of their system with a passage that recalls “Mars, the Bringer of War” from Holst's The Planets, this time to retreat into something out of the slow movement of Beethoven's piano sonata Op. 106 (the so-called Hammerklavier and about as far from holiday merriment as you can get.) After a moment, they decide to toss plans to play the Christmas carol, and instead offer a spirited version of that anti-holiday favorite, “Leaving Town for the Holidays.” (For those who aren't familiar with this ditty, the lyrics can be found here.)

First:

update comments 
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           instr (comment_content, '</h3>') + 5) 
where  comment_content like '<h3>%</h3>%';

update comments 
set    comment_content = replace (comment_content, '&quot;', '"') 
where  comment_content like '%href="%';

But then:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $real_author = "";
my $post_title  = "";
my $in_comment = 0;
my $content_tag_text = "";

open (WXR, "< wordpress.2006-11-29.xml");

while (<WXR>)
{
    if (/^<dc:creator>/)
    {
        $real_author = $_;
        chomp $real_author;
        $real_author =~ s/<[^>]+>//g;
        $real_author =~ s/.$//;
        s/$real_author/blogowner/;
    }
    elsif (/^<content:encoded><!\[CDATA\[/)
    {
        if ($real_author ne "")
        {
            s/^<content:encoded><!\[CDATA\[/
$&<br\/><i>Original Author: $real_author<\/i><br\/><br\/>/;
        }
        else
        {
            s/^<content:encoded><!\[CDATA\[/
$&<br\/><i>Original Author information unavailable<\/i><br\/><br\/>/;
        }
    }
    elsif (/^<wp:comment_content>/)
    {
        $in_comment = 1;
    }
    elsif (/^<\/wp:comment_content>/)
    {
        $in_comment = 0;
    }

    if ($in_comment)
    {
       if (/&#34;/)
       {
           s/&#34;/\"/g;
       }
    }

    print ;
}

This must be what a prostitute feels like when she charms the evil dictator into bed, only to cut his throat and liberate the people...or maybe not. That's pretty damn grandiose, and besides, prostitution is respectable physical labor, unlike what I did for years.

...is back on line after prolonged technical problems. Pointing your browser at http://ufobreakfast.com should redirect to http://ufobreakfast.wordpress.com/, where all UFOB's bloggy goodness of yore is available once again, and new goodness will soon appear. I'm proud to say I did some of the tech part of the migration, which was actually fun—you don't look at SQL for over a year and discover you still know how to write an UPDATE statement, it shows you don't have senile dementia.

Yet.

Context.


Note that the shoes are honest, not innocent. Innocent shoes, like the lady in the play Hamlet puts before his mother and step-father, doth protest too much. They would show wear and be ill-made. The defendant wouldn't have a chance; it would be like wearing a hair-shirt to court.

These shoes, on the other hand, were never stylish but carry their years of use with grace, for they were well made. The firm that makes them has perhaps gone out of business, but there's someone in town who can still repair them.

Finally, they were made in America. Nothing shreiks guilt and hubris like Italian loafers.

Trying to think through the current political situation in America is a bit like trying to swim through a flood of molasses: you'll probably be sucked under and drowned before you make any headway. Something terrible has happened, and you can't even run with it, much less try to change it or hold it back; best to wait for it to pass, and take steps to ensure no catastrophe like it happens again. Any and all sane policies and projects are excluded from the realm of possibility before the discussion gets underway—universal health coverage, withdrawl from Iraq, re-examination of the US/Israel relationship, progressive taxation . . . shall I go on? For any given problem we face, if you want to know ahead of time what won't happen, just try to think of whatever might be just and reasonable, and you're done. Trust me on this.

I realize there's a difference of opinion on what constitutes what's just and what isn't: for example, there are people who think that denying health care to the sick on the basis of their ability to pay or conform to certain corporate cultures is a just way to allocate health care. There are also people who persist in beliving the earth is flat, but their rantings don't get much credence from sensible people, much less published in reputable scientific journals. Flat-earth and geocentric theories are simply shunned because even to entertain their possibility is destructive to a scientific mindset. And so it should be with all the toxic bits of moral idiocy that, ours being a nation in decline, are taken seriously: market-based solutions for social problems, the sine qua non of freedom being the right of its enemies to speak against it, war as a perogative of power, etc. At this point in my life, I have no interest more interest in trying to convince such people as these that their positions are vile than I would in trying to convince a serial rapist of the error of his ways—and I have every confidence that in time Social Darwinism and laissez-faire approaches to the general welfare will be properly regarded as the equivalent of mass rape and worse. No dialogue with moral degenerates.

As Turbulent Velvet said some time ago, there are layers to giving up hope. I've found that past a certain point, I've actually become more sanguine. Partly it's from being less emotionally involved in the current political process, but it's also from feeling freer to imagine what a humane, decent society would be like—not ‘the world we want,’ of those helplessly bound to structures and institutions that are part of the infrastructure of immorality, but the products of reflection undisturbed by hostile assholes with an insider mentality. Thus, the question: what precepts will we have to build on once the cretins choke on their own bile? Not even a list but a few random thoughts towards such a list:

• The welfare of society is not opposed to the welfare of the individual, and vice versa. The Rawlsian original position/veil of ignorance thought experiment shows pretty dramatically how this is so. The opposition of liberties (negative freedoms) and entitlements (positive freedoms) is a doctrine that has no basis in fact or reason and belongs in the trashcan of history right above the divine right of Kings.
• Capital is a social good and should be treated as such. Although I don't talk to moral degenerates, there are plenty of people with sound morals who are victims of propaganda (and 70+ years of insanity in the Eastern bloc) and who therefore think this means their meagre personal property will be at risk. Let me reassure these people: your house and personal property are not means of production. Large shareholders in utilities, manufacturing concerns, etc., and the overpaid upper management of such firms had better be prepared to justify their stewardship, however.
  • Yes, I am talking about expropriation and redistribution, but I'm not an absolute egalitarian. In Theory of Justice, Rawls proposes what I think is an excellent “smell test” for material inequality (or personal accumulation over and above the norm): does a person's production benefit all society, especially those most disadvantaged? I don't know if this made it into Justice as Fairness unscathed, but I have to confess I don't lose sleep over it.
• Our political leaders would be subject to the rule of law. Clinton or Bush the lesser in the dock for capital crimes would be sufficient to encourage the others.
• A subject for a later post: brain-toxic behaviors would be felonies and no different from physical assault.

I don't expect to see any of these in place in my lifetime, but that doesn't matter. I hope to see myself and others who share these modern mores to associate, expand on them, try to create real cultural/institutional support to transmit them. Turbulent Velvet again:

What's at stake is liberal complicity in the destruction of a lifeworld that would produce qualities of character that would make sustenance and resistance possible, not just for the next electoral brouhaha but for generations to come, and not just in news-junkie blog discussions but in all the rockbottom ethical domains in which we get by from day to day...I'm not arguing "strategy." I'm arguing "how must we then live," for the long duration, down here in the nonwonk nonacademic lifeworld--maybe with a bit of traison des clercs thrown in, a finger given to those I think got us here now that there's nothing we can do about it. We're going to need a lot of courage and a lot of ground-level integrity for what's coming precisely because it now can't be stopped and because there will be no reward for doing the right thing.
“Response to Scruggs,” 19 Feb 2006

For the time being—and this time will be measured in decades and generations—we must accept that we are off the reservation, and the most and most important things we can do are provide material and institutional support for these ideas. Right now, nothing is more important that speaking openly and with an eye to action among ourselves. Towns and locales where in some modest way these notions have taken hold—become part of the “lifeworld”—will be very important, as will be practices to defend them.

And as for the fall elections? I'm not going to insist that people vote Green or 3rd party; in fact, for those who share these ideals but for whom not voting Democrat induces deep cognitive dissonance, I'd say vote the way you always have, and then keep an eye on the successful candidates you've supported. Are they doing anything to assist / maintain / sustain the way of life you want? Meanwhile, there are other things to be done.

—OK, now we need to talk about the, hrm, project for R—, and especially one of the, hrm, sorry, requirements that the branch slipped into the contract.

—Again?

—I swear, those jerks writing checks with their mouths that their asses can't cash...

—Yeah, it's one of, hrm, those situations again. But I just want to, hrm, discuss the, hrm, feasibility of one requirement in particular. I mean, you guys are the tech people so I'd, hrm, figure I'd at least run it past you to see if this was something we could actually do.

—Why are we even talking about this? I swear, it doesn't matter if it's trivial to do, it's the goddamn principle of the thing—

—Shhhh! You're here to provide the engineering perspective, OK.

—OK, but I swear, I don't know why you guys can't discuss the other stuff without me...

—Hrm, as I was saying, R— contracted with us to fabricate a ball of shit that doesn't stink and glows in the dark—

—What? That's an off-the-shelf component, what's the big deal? I swear—

—OK, OK, I know you're chomping at the bit to, hrm, talk about the technical details there, but, hrm—

—But there are no technical details—this is straight out of the catalogue—

—Well, hrm, it's not actually the same as the SBNSG product because...well, the details are in the contract and since the branch handled it, it was written in Frisian, so we had to have it translated, and...OK, here it is—why don't you look at that and tell me if we can, hrm, do that item that's highlighted there.

—...accelerate when dropped...greater than 15 meters per second squared?!?! No, of course we can't do it! I swear, this is nonsense—

—Hold on, don't be so negative—

—No, that's OK, we wanted, hrm, I wanted the engineering perspective on this and, hrm, so you're saying that it'd require some pretty extensive research and development work before we could put it in production and we'd have some trouble meeting the delivery date, right?

—No! I'm saying it's impossible! I swear—

—OK, hrm, I mean, you're saying we'd have to get some outside expertise or fabrication equipment we, hrm, don't currently have?

—Yes, I think that's what he means—

—No, it's not what I mean! I mean it's impossible, plain and simple.

—OK, so I'm hearing that, hrm, on top of everything else, there'd be some regulatory hurdles then?

—I don't see what the problem is there. If it's for export, we can get a waiver.

—I swear, are you guys listening to me? I said it's impossible and that's what I mean: it's impossible, period, end of story. It can't be done. We can't do it, nobody can do it.

—Look, you can't say ‘we can't do it!’ This is R— we're talking about, they're a big customer, and there's been enough ups and downs with the account recently.

—I have to second that although, hrm, I wanted you in here for the engineering, hrm, view on this. I can appreciate, hrm, that this may end up costing us more than the revenue it'll generate and we certainly, hrm, don't want to get into a situation like that, but we have to make a business case why R— doesn't want this.

—You don't have to make a business case! It's impossible to do! I swear, didn't you guys take physics?

—Hell, I was always the last guy picked for volleyball in high school, but come spring, did the same guys pick me first for the baseball team!

—Ha ha, hrm, same here, but it was football in the fall...just couldn't stand being cooped up in the gym and having to rotate around...

—Yeah, such a pointless sport...but these girls they have playing competition volleyball on the beach, damn!

—Did I, hrm, tell you we're getting a sponsorship deal with...hrm, what's her name again? She's going to be wearing a cap with the materials division logo on it...but, let's, hrm, get back to the subject. So there are plenty of engineering roadblocks that'll make this a losing proposition for us...

—Actually—

—And we don't want to go down that road and that's, hrm, fine, and I want to thank you for your input so we, hrm, could avoid getting ourselves into another money pit. But I need a business reason to give R— as to why they, hrm, I mean why they themselves don't want this feature, right?

—Look, it's not that they don't want it, it's that you just can't make anything accelerate faster than 10 meters per second squared as it falls.

—Why not?

—Why not? Because! Because it's a physical fact that objects dropped accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared, period! I swear—

—What if we added some extra ballast to the ball of shit?

—No, that's, hrm, that's a no-go because of the new cost guidelines for all the SB product lines...

—It doesn't matter if you make the shit ball weigh more! The rate at which something accelerates has nothing to do with weight—

—Oh, come on—see this piece of paper? Now I let it go...I don't need a high speed camera and digital analysis to see that's not accelerating at 10 meters per second, it's a lot slower than that—

—Meters per second squared, I swear...

—And I mean, it weighs less so it falls more slowly—

—They're talking about the acceleration as it falls, not the velocity—

—Hey, don't interrupt, OK? So if something fall more slowly because it weighs less, then something that weighs more must fall faster—

—No, no, he's got a point about adding ballast, hrm, just can't do it with the new cost guidelines, and, heh, funny thing is we drew those up after R— was complaining about other cost overruns on another project, so basically, they can't have it because of their own rules, Ha ha!

—Typical customer thinking. What were the guys in at the field office thinking?

—Look, it doesn't matter even if you did put more ballast in, I swear...

—Well, I'm glad we're able to close out this, hrm, issue. I tell you, I can't wait for the conference call, hrm, because I want to tell them myself that their own guidelines prevent them from the ball of shit having this extra feature. Hrm, wish I could see their faces...

—But it's not that, I swear—

—Shhhh! Look, you got what you wanted, right? Let him translate it into the business-speak, OK?

A little while back, I tried to create a soundbite version of Marx's critique of capitalism called the lump of capital fallacy. (Actually, it should properly be called my critique of the lump of capital fallacy, but I was tired and out of cigarettes.) As I was cleaning up my browser bookmarks, I found a link to a post by the very-often-amusing-and-unfortunately-of-late-mistaken-for-a-winger-by-some-Kossack-fuckwit Daniel Davies:

( Read more... )

J. Alva Scruggs on why more and more the worst rise to the top in higher education in the humanities:

The obsessive monetization turns learning into a race to the bottom for acquiring qualifications and place, with a harshly limited outlook for being able to pursue it full time. Able people start to look elsewhere, and acquire skills, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but they are not going to be replaced by people who have decades of experience and the teaching they can still manage is impromptu. I read a lot of blogs that are a close equivalent to hedge schools, published by people who have everything it takes to teach, except for a marketable quality.

from “Killing the Culture.”

True literacy is a lifetime occupation, and it isn't just a matter of plowing one's way through the five foot shelf but revisiting the works one lacked the background to properly understand the first time through, while remaining open to new creators and thinkers. It is a daunting thing; one's efforts are repaid with an increasing sense of ignorance, for an understanding of any work becomes less certain with greater knowledge of its context, creator, predecessors, and progeny. Real aesthetic and intellectual experience destroys received ideas and hallowed reputations.

It follows that except for a fortunate few who grew up in an environment of true intellectual and cultural stimulation, most of the people with substantial and individual perspectives on culture will not be young. One of Mr. Scruggs' correspondents notes that age is a liability in the American academic job market, and he's not the first person I recall noting this. I know that, contra the dreadful Jane Galt (does she still blog for the nutso-pseudo-libertarian wingnut fringe? I don't have the stomach to look.), the plural of anecdote is not data, but I'm confident that real numbers would support this (read: I want someone to do the demographic spade work for me.) The older humanities professoriate, whatever shape it is in (age being a necessary but not sufficient condition for true literacy), is being replaced by a cohort unqualified to impart culture to young people. The best that can be hoped for is that they are a cadre of brutally hazed grinds. Some, maybe even the overwhelming majority, of these people may go on to teachers with some true depth of culture. But if there's anything a freshly minted Ph.D. is, it's a blinkered specialist. As my 4th semester Greek prof once gassed, “Everyone fresh out of grad school thinks their dissertation topic is the most interesting thing in the world.” What I should have said—but didn't, feckless, feckless me—was what, if anything, had he done to correct that?

There are numerous faults in this essay that mark me as part of the problem I'm trying to criticize, starting with the title, but I'll post it as it stands. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself and those around you is simply 'fess up that you're a fuck-up. It may not absolve you of your shortcomings, but at least you're not being an enabler.

From time to time, I'd like to give this weblog over to distinguished guest columnists who are experts in various subjects. This is not one of those times. 'Bud' Morans is a reader I had offended without cause in a previous post, and as a condition of there being no action taken against me, I agreed that he could post here on occasion. So with no further ado, here's Bud.

A sordid tale in support of the proposition that SUV owners are financially irresponsible moral cretins.

Choice tidbit:

At the root of the problem: People pay too much for a vehicle they really can't afford.

"Because of the way the economy has gone, the gas prices skyrocketing the way they have, we started to see a peak" (in arsons), Rowe said. "People that had the gas-guzzlers that got eight miles per gallon, they started to get hit hard. They didn't want those cars anymore."

Faced with rising gas prices, people who are trapped in a high-payment lease have no easy way to escape without a stiff penalty.

"People will lease a car for 84 months with zero down and they have some outrageous payment," said Rowe. "They start to realize they are living beyond their means."

I say we stop wasting time on these obvious reprobates and just criminalize SUV ownership. We cannot stand idle while the soft-on-SUV crowd depletes our precious insurance reserves. To paraphase a great journalist, now dead in a foreign conflict:

How many SUV owners would be willing to accept the logical outcome of their creed of insurance fraud even in face of defaulting underwriters—life as a people unprotected from risk? Not many, I would think. How many want the men and women of the United States to continue paying premiums so that they may enjoy luxuries they could not otherwise afford? Nearly all, I would think.

Liars. Frauds. Hypocrites.

Strong comments, no doubt, to follow.

New Scientist Tech reports that the NSA is funding research to mine so-called “social networking” sites:

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

<snippage />

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.

Complete article

It's hard to imagine a stupider use of technology by the US government, unless our information overlords are simply looking to hook-up with comely youngsters. (Don't laugh—anything's possible these days.) Indeed, when the closest intimates of known terrorists are shocked by to discover the affiliations of their loved ones, it's difficult to imagine that similarly indoctrinated potential terrorists would throw caution to the winds in on-line venues. Probably someone who stopped using a social networking site after a religious experience they can only vaguely describe to their loved ones might be a better candidate for surveillance than someone who writes “0MG! I so totally <3 Osama & wanna wear a burka for this real cute guy at my Madrassa!!” in their Friendster profile.

If, on the other hand, the goals of such are simply to profile parts of the population in close and constant contact with each other—as determined activists and dissenters are likely to be—while spreading government largesse to connected technology firms, then it makes perfect sense. The government is not interested in winning the Global War on Terror; management of it is a prize sought by not only the nominal opposition but even alleged insurrectionary elements thereof. This illusory war is an excellent excuse for clamping down on dissent, and should we ever reach the stage where something like the Sedition Act of 1918 is in force (supported and signed, let it not be forgotten, by that member of the Democratic pantheon, Woodrow Wilson) whatever party is in power will have their lists of undesirables ready. Of course, the systems to produce such lists will be delivered late and there will be cost overruns, but the cost of ordered liberty is high; for such a noble goal, so much of a part of our history and closely connected with our greatest leaders, no expense should be spared.

NB: I found out about this through a webcast of the Randi Rhodes show. Rhodes, true to form, was shrieking that “the government is trolling MySpace!” and mentioned this article, which only describes research towards this end. I suppose a wingnut radio personality will pick this up and cast aspersions on Rhodes, rallying their respective faithfuls around each, and so boosting the Arbitron ratings of both. Someone with a knolwedge of media promotion could write something on this, calling it “New Horizons in Logrolling.” I lack the specialized knowledge, but I hope someone out there who does have a grasp of such things takes up the challenge.

Now that Ferdinand has crawled out from under his rock, I'm . . . I don't want to say I'm ending a hiatus, because I never intended to go on one. However, I intend to pollute the internets more frequently now.

Orwell's 1984 is a cultural touchstone in our current climate of increased surveillance, eroding rights, and propaganda. Perhaps I haven't read widely enough, but one feature of the book's world has escaped contemporary commentary, and that's the constant string of victories Oceania racks up against Eastasia/Eurasia. Scratch a reasonably informed person, and she'll say the war is going badly, and the sources of information that confirm that estimation are a measure of how far perception management has to go before America and Oceania coincide. But the administration's preferred narrative for Iraq is one of a string of victories. Looking back at it, the “Mission Accomplished” ceremony was likely never intended to mark the end of the conflict, but the first of a series of celebrations making victory in the so-called Global War on Terror.

So the administration and their trained lapdogs can now gloat about the death of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, and the strategists for the nominal opposition are going to start fretting about an “October Surprise,” and relatively few of us are going to question the notion of a Global War on Terror that underwrites both positions equally. Again, perhaps this is only the result of limited reading, but while I've read many criticizing the notion of a war on a tactic, no one has come down and drawn the logical conclusion: there is no getting rid of terrorism.

If that makes you, gentle reader, uncomfortable, then perhaps you better stop because what follows isn't going to make you feel any better.

If memory serves, even Noam Chomsky has said that the United States can stop terrorism by not engaging in it. While I agree with his assessment of US policy and his desire that such policy be changed drastically, I don't think that will stop terrorism. To top it off, I don't think one should argue for a moral imperative on the grounds of its practical benefits. Policies that suppport torture, murder, violent social destablization, and environmental despoilation (I won't provide links—if you can't think of examples off the top of your head, you are, I'm afraid, part of the problem) simply ought not to be. It's certainly reasonable to expect that stopping these things will result in a decrease in international tension and anti-US sentiment (certainly more reasonable than to think that escalating them will make us loved, which is the hardcore wingnut position), but it can't eliminate them.

The default worldview of many in the US, unfortunately, is what The Onion memorably called “a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie.” Evil, plain and simple, is the cause of our ills, and once eliminated, all will be well. Sorry, but that's just not so. We live in an unsafe world. As the vicious nutters like to say, GET OVER IT!

As I've done in the past, I'd like to give this weblog over to distinguished guest columnists who are experts in various subjects. My guest columnist today is Dr. Ferdinand Bardamu, proctologist and merdrétricien. Dr. Bardamu has his MD from the École Normale Inférieur, is physician to the court of King Ubu Roi Le Premier, in exile.

The esteemed Mr. J. Alva Scruggs on medical ethics in a time of market-based scarcity:

Sam Smith pointed out, a while ago, that in utilitarian social terms the people least worthy of immunization and heroic efforts at medical treatment are legislators, members of the judiciary and members of the executive branch. They are all highly replaceable, as the democratic process regularly attests. The principle of elections and appointments has its core an understanding people come and go while institutions endure. I feel I'm on safe intellectual ground adding two bioethicists to that lot.

from ‘Eugenics Nastiness’

I would go further; I call on every elected official to show her or his faith in our democratic institutions by signing a binding pledge that in case of a bird flu pandemic they will not take vaccines or seek treatment. Anything less indicates nostalgia at least for feudal entitlements coupled with an unhealthy sense of self-importance.

If analysis—or satire, or venting, or alternative proposals—could solve problems, the Bush administration would have been impeached and shipped off to the international court at the Hague long ago, which is the only reasonable response that a healthy society with true representative government would have to such a pack of miserable felons. Yet for all the lies, scandals, and actual law-breaking, the best that can be done is Senator Feingold's motion to censure, a slap on the wrist for someone literally guilty of mass murder, and even this is considered extreme by his feckless cohorts and the lapdog media.

While I'm not here to suggest what could be done—although a general strike, especially at the major container ports, could likely bring the government to heel in a few days—I do want to comment on our political paralysis and accompanying logorrhea.

Excessive analysis is a symptom of objective powerlessness. That's right, I used the dreaded “o-word,” and I'm not fucking sorry. If we could change our political situation, we could, but we can't—so to preserve the illusion of agency, we analyze (What, you think I'm claiming I'm any different? Why do you think I'm writing this?) Analysis is only one of numerous agency-preserving illusions we have recourse to in this situation; there's the stern-commitment-to-take-back-the-party, peaceful protest (which crowd sizes are always revised downwards by the media), toeing-the-Dem-line (Hillary in '08!), hopes for a third party, hopes for Democratic collapse, and so on. These aren't mutually exclusive options, and some might hold real promise—I'm inclined to think that a melt-down of the Senate DLC Dems after losses in the mid-term elections would be a real step forward—but unless you're plugged into the Dem machine, there isn't much you can do besides open your wallet to every appeal from the DSCC, DCCC, DNC, or whatever. And if you are plugged into the Dem machine, then you're just part of the problem, period.

Unless one decides to leave the country (which is likely a real possibility only for people of means or those with families abroad), there's not much to be done on the large scale. That's not to say there's no hope or that nothing can be done: there a great deal that needs to be done. Hope, however, might be part of the problem rather than the solution:

 . . . you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . 

From Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Sure it's an old book and it speaks of a time and temperment long gone. But placing one's hopes (and cash) in opaque institutions and processes (such as the various Dem campaign funding organizations) is the tempermental descendant of “riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave” Righteous indignation has replaced hippie/freak optimism, but it's the modulation of the same tune into the minor, not a different one altogether. To paraphrase Turbulent Velvet, the 60's weren't the defining moment that determined all subsequent history in America, but the history we're living now that's going to determine our futures. Defending or criticizing actions and strategy for the perspective of that time traps us there.

I'm in the process of moving from one very blue area in a very blue state to another very blue area in another very blue state. There's a lot to be done at the local levels to hold back reactionary forces in both places; there needs to be areas in this country where social welfare, abortion rights, and the other hallmarks of a humane society have to be preserved if there's to be any possibility of those practices taking hold generally. There's a great deal we have to learn about our enemy at all levels; we need more study and less polemics. It's a long term project.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of capitalist ideology has been to disguise the nature of capitalism itself. If memory serves, one of Thomas Pynchon's Proverbs for Paranoids in Gravity's Rainbow was “if they get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers,” and so identifying capitalism with global markets, instantaneous transactions, a recrudescence of Social Darwinism, consumerism, etc., all make the question of how to fight or at least mitigate capitalism an ill-posed one.

I'd tried playing whack-a-mole with misconceptions about the Marxian critique of capitalism from the beginning of this blog, starting with “Is Complaining About Capitalism Like Complaining About the Weather?” and then the truly futile “The Fetishism of the Term "Commodity Fetishism" and the Secret Thereof.” There's no worse pedant than an autodidact, and these are truly bad pieces of pedantry. The problem with these pieces and all subsequent ones was that I was trying to write cheat-sheets for parts of volume 1 of Capital. The only readers interested in such cheat-sheets would be people already interested in Marx and the analysis in volume 1 of Capital. Everybody else's eyes would just glaze over.

If the Marxian analysis and critique of the capitalist mode of production is right, as I think it is, then what matters is not introducing people to Marx, but conveying the ideas of his analysis and critique. Recently it came to me that several core concepts of Marx's analysis and critique might be summed up as a widely held fallacy that, ironically enough, resembles the notorious (and specious) lump of labor fallacy. Since everyone, especially bloggers, loves being able to spot and accuse others of logical fallacies, I figured this was a good way to go. So with fingers crossed, I present what I hope is a modest contribution to the critique of political economy: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Lump of Capital Fallacy.

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