The public anger against Congress

The CNN story that prompted this musing is entitled, "Social media: Fiscal cliff deadlock is 'jeopardizing faith in our government'". Josh Levs' story opens thusly:

Across the country, millions are fed up with a Congress that seems unable to get some important things done.

"We need Congress to represent the people, not two arrogant parties that can't see middle ground," Garry Benner says.

"Nowhere else in this country can you get paid for ... years and not do your job," Tom Jeffries says.

There's nothing terribly surprising in or about this story. People want "Washington to put 'partisanship aside'", "to grow up, act like adults, do your jobs or resign immediately".

However, all this nattering, which we've heard before, did finally crystallize an inchoate gripe I've had with all the griping. It helps that I already identified a similar problem involving the NRA:

It's easy, though, to forget all those millions of supporters, and to imagine that groups like the NRA are malevolent creatures with their own lives. "Standing up" to those groups thus conjures the image of St. George fighting the dragon. The reality, though, is that the NRA isn't a malevolent creature: it's a megaphone for millions of people. If elected officials hesitate to resist it it's because those officials know that a lot of their constituents agree with the NRA.

Rhetorically it's highly satisfying to vilify "Congress" in the same way as a malevolent (or at least hopelessly obstructive) beast with its own life. In a related vein, we like to vilify Congresscritters as "children", or villains themselves, petulantly or maliciously preventing the House and the Senate from getting work done.

Reality check: "Congress" isn't alive. Corollary: nobody in Congress gives the least little damn what we, the people, think of Congress.

The people quoted in the CNN article are seriously misdirecting their anger. "Congress" has no independent will or identity that responds to the public at large: it's a body of elected representatives. And a House member does not give a shit what millions of Americans who can't vote for him think.

Our elected Congressfolk do what their constituents want, or they don't represent those constituents very long. Ergo, Congress is dysfunctional because we are dysfunctional. We don't allow for compromises any more out of ideological purity, so of course Congress is deadlocked.

If anybody is being childish, it's the public. We are divided and at cultural war with one another, yet we have an irrational expectation that Congress is supposed to rise above our divisions. What is that but a childish refusal on our part to face up to facts?

"Congress" is not going to fix itself. If we want it to change, we have to change first.

Goodbye 2012

There is no way I'm disciplined enough to do a real retrospective on 2012, so I'll just say this:

To Adam Lanza (the Newtown, CT school shooter) and William Spengler (the Webster, NY murderer of firefighters) — I hope there is a Hell. You both deserve to burn in it forever.

To the rest of you — may 2013 be a happier, more peaceful, less strife-ridden year.

Saving everyday voices

Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times wrote a piece that struck a chord with me: "So Many Snapshots, So Few Voices Saved". We are used to having hundreds or thousands of photos of our loved ones, but we almost never have sound recordings of them except as incidental byproducts of video recordings. Yet our loved ones' voices can be important keys to remembering them. Klinkenborg muses as to why we make so few audio recordings.

Now, it’s every bit as easy to record sound on a smartphone as it is to record images. And yet because sound is always a function of time, most of us still prefer to capture digital snapshots instead of digital audio samples, even in the form of video. There is still a kind of documentary formality in setting out to record the sound of your parents’ voices — a formality that has vanished entirely from photography.

I don't think Klinkenborg quite hit the mark.

It's certainly true that even today, it's more natural for people to take snapshots rather than video snippets. Part of the reason, I expect, is "a function of time", as Klinkenborg says: while we're used to sitting still for the few moments it takes to take a photo, we're not used to remaining "camera ready" for longer periods.

And we do insist, by and large, on making ourselves camera-ready, don't we? I don't agree with Klinkenborg that a sense of "documentary formality" has vanished from photography, at least on the part of the subjects. Photographers, of course, whether amateur or professional, strive to capture "unscripted" or spontaneous moments. Most of us on the other end of the lens are less enamored of spontaneity: all of us have been caught in unflattering poses. We may be primarily visual creatures, but we aren't always ready for our visual selves to be immortalized in photos.

We want to make a good impression in an audio recording, too. The question is, how?

There are two components to our "audio selves", the voice and what we're doing with it (singing or speaking). We don't think much about our voices: they are the way they are and there isn't much we can do to pretty them up. What we say, though, we can control fully — and that can be nerve-racking.

Most video recordings are of an event in which we have natural roles to play, even if we're only spectators. We don't worry about what we do on camera: there generally isn't anything we can do to make ourselves look better in motion anyway. We also don't worry about chattering constantly: conversation is an adjunct to the visuals. By contrast, a pure audio recording is all about the conversation, or even worse, the monologue. Audio-only recordings are especially unnatural because rarely, if ever, is there a reason to make one instead of an audio-visual recording.

Making audio-only recordings even more unnatural is the reality that the usability and fidelity of consumer audio equipment lags consumer video equipment by a lot. Getting a decent snapshot or video requires no work on the part of the subjects; getting a decent audio recording, on the other hand, requires them to be cognizant of the microphone's location and sensitivity, raising or lowering their voices as need dictates.

I've only mentioned the awkwardness of audio-only recording prior to the actual recording. Listening to the result ... that's a different kind of awkward. In my experience, people hate the sound of their own voices. They sound unnatural to themselves. (My guess is that our voices sound a lot warmer in our heads due to bone conduction.) A lot of people never want their voices recorded again, and who can blame them?

All that said, Klinkenborg made a good point: "... the intimate sound of a voice that has gone missing in your own life ... recovers memory and emotion and loss itself". When I think of my long-dead father, I don't just see his face: I hear his voice, especially his chuckle. He wouldn't be alive in my memory without sound.

Of course, he wouldn't be much of a memory without the visual of his face, either, so perhaps I've just made the case for the video as the best archive.

Friedman agrees with me

Just after the presidential election last month I wrote:

The Republican Party could split. If it did, my guess would be that the most uncompromising of its current members, politicians and voters both, would form a new party; let's call it the Conservative Party for lack of a better term. The Republican Party left standing would suddenly be a far more moderate place, though what its political heft would be is unclear.

Or the Republican Party might double down on its current bet, deeming Mitt Romney to have failed because he was insufficiently conservative. ... Over time it would purge itself of even more moderates, a process I imagine would be akin to the "self-deportation" Romney espoused during the campaign. The end result might be a Republican Party very much like the "Conservative Party" I mentioned above.

The New York Times' Tom Friedman essentially has reached the same conclusion.

Republican politicians today have a choice: either change your base by educating and leading G.O.P. voters back to the center-right from the far right, or start a new party that is more inclusive, focused on smaller but smarter government and market-based, fact-based solutions to our biggest problems.

We phrased it differently, but both Friedman and I agree that the truly reality-denying, anti-intellectual, uncompromising (not "principled", but "muleheaded") wing nuts who hold the party in its thrall have to be marginalized. We simply cannot afford to indulge their delusions — about climate change, the economy, job creation, the United Nations, the cost of health care, firearms regulation, the proper role of the judiciary, the deficit, Israel, the use of military force, separation of church and state, you name it — any longer. As Friedman put it, "Because they control the House, this radical Republican base is now holding us all back."

No kidding, Tom. Glad you finally figured it out.

So, who has to be jettisoned from the party in order for some kind of sanity to return? Let's set some conditions:

• If you will fight any form of gun control until you're out of ammo, goodbye and thanks for playing.
• If you are convinced that the only way to address the nation's mounting debt is to cut spending, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
• If you believe the Bible is literally true or that history has been divided into "dispensations" or that "the Rapture" could take place at any moment, your participation is no longer required.
• If you subscribe to the notion that President Obama is a "secret Muslim", was born in Kenya, or plans to turn the United States into a socialist paradise, you are excused.
• If your sole source of information is any or all of (1) Fox News, (2) Rush Limbaugh, (3) Glenn Beck, or (4) the Drudge Report, please proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest emergency exit.
• If you believe "the 1 percent" is the job-creating class, what are you doing here? Immediately find the nearest obscenely well-off person and demand your living-wage job. Don't come back until you've got it.
• If you are more interested in preparing for the imminent collapse of the nation rather than preventing it, repair to your bunker and stay there until the "all clear" signal.
• Convinced that creationism or intelligent design is a "rival theory" to evolution? Here's a fifth-grade science textbook; kindly do not rejoin the conversation until you've mastered its contents and have cultivated the desire to learn more.

Of course, this list is just a start.

The N.R.A. is the problem

Although I recently wrote that focusing on the N.R.A. as a "villain" is counterproductive (I suggested trying to change the minds of acquaintances who espouse its policies instead), it's undeniable that Wayne LaPierre's remarks in the wake of the Newtown, CT shooting rampage added absolutely nothing positive or helpful to the national debate.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

It's not so much the content of this statement as its tone that is so objectionable. "Good guy", "bad guy" — obviously this childish phrasing is intended to evoke "simpler" times when Good Guys Wore White Hats. The N.R.A. wants to dumb down the conversation to bumper-sticker "ideas". This simplistic framing of the problem is insulting to everyone.

“More guns, you’ll claim, are the N.R.A.’s answer to everything,” he said. “Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?”

Maybe since the N.R.A. went batshit crazy?

Of course, we all know the N.R.A. isn't crazy, unless it's crazy like a fox. It pursues strategies that maximize its appeal to its base, just as any other advocacy group does. The trouble is that its base is batshit crazy — and armed.

Seriously, those who lustily cheer LaPierre's remarks are paranoid. Some of them see Armageddon coming. Some see civil war. Some see a tyrannical (and unprecedentedly efficient) government imposing its irresistible will on the nation. In each of these nightmarish visions, only those who have prepared themselves by stockpiling weapons will survive. (I thought Armageddon was supposed to be rather more than anyone could stave off with even a 50-caliber machine gun, but I'm no expert on the end of the world.)

Those who live in fear of the end times are dangerous. Not only do they represent a direct threat to the rest of us (at whom do you think their guns are aimed?), but to the extent these folks participate in the political system, they send equally crazy representatives to Congress to promote crazy legislation and to derail useful legislation.

I'm enough of an optimist (no, really) that I think most gun owners aren't crazy. Still, enough of them are to enable LaPierre and the N.R.A. to wreak havoc on the body politic. "More guns", indeed, is the N.R.A.'s answer to everything! You just said so, Wayne!

However, you knowingly misrepresent what the rest of us think. Contrary to your dismissive, simplistic and self-pitying followup — "Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society" — that's not what most of us believe. In fact, we've been listening to you. We've heard you say, over and over, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." And you're right. Guns don't have artificial intelligences built in; they don't shoot without a finger on the trigger. Guns aren't evil. Guns are tools.

As a society we tolerate a certain amount of injury, and even death, from the use of tools: it's the price we pay for the useful work we accomplish with them. We recognize that most tools are not designed to injure or to kill: death and injury are accidents, often the result of "operator error".

Firearms, however, aren't like most other tools. Their sole purpose is to injure and to kill.

I think it behooves us, as a society, to think long and hard about the conditions under which we want to let firearms float around among us.

Most of us would agree that you have the right to injure or to kill someone breaking into your home. That is eminently fair. It also seems unlikely that you'll hurt your neighbors by accident in the course of defending yourself, your loved ones and your property.

However, does that right to defend yourself, your loved ones and your property extend outside your home? Do you have the absolute right to shoot a pickpocket, or even an armed robber, on a crowded street?

That question, about whether you have the absolute right to defend yourself with a firearm outside your home, is worth discussing. Yet the N.R.A. and its most fanatical supporters refuse to admit that there might not exist such an absolute right. They refuse even to countenance the possibility that society has a legitimate interest in preventing essentially unrestricted gun violence in public spaces, even if the gun bearer has the best of intentions.

Instead, to counter the threat of shootings like the Newtown massacre, LaPierre and the N.R.A. want to unleash an army of "good guys" to counter the "bad guys". LaPierre and the N.R.A. do not admit, perhaps cannot even understand, that the rest of us have no way of knowing whether a guy with a gun is a "good guy" or a "bad guy".

LaPierre would rather have guns bristling everywhere. Sane "bad guys" would have to think twice before pulling their own guns out, not knowing which of those around them might be packing. Lunatics bent on a shooting spree could be taken down from unexpected quarters. Whichever category Adam Lanza fell into, LaPierre insinuates, a "good guy" could have prevented him from killing as many as he did, perhaps from killing anyone at all.

It's pretty bold to assume that untrained gun owners would respond effectively in such a crisis. (Research has suggested that in a crowd, people do not generally take the initiative in a crisis, figuring that someone else will do it. I see no reason to believe an untrained gun owner would behave differently.) Yet that's LaPierre's grand vision. That's the thin, thin premise, and promise, he holds out as the N.R.A.'s best solution to gun violence in this country.

If, as LaPierre thinks, "gun" is now a "bad word", it's not because the rest of us are stupid, as he implies. It's because the N.R.A. and its fellow gun-rights organizations have been fanatically opposed even to meaningful discussion about gun violence, much less any kind of legislation imposing the least restriction on ownership or carrying. Those organizations, in other words, have not been any goddamned help or use to society at large.

Is it any wonder that every time you open your mouth, Wayne, the rest of us don't give a shit what you have to say?

Energy independence is a misleading goal

In Michael A. Levi's op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled "The False Promise of Energy Independence", Levi lists a number of reasons why "energy independence" — specifically, regarding oil and gas — for the U.S., even if it should come to pass (and to my mind it's far from certain), could lead the country to make bad policy choices, notably, bad foreign policy choices.

Levi is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, so I get why he focused on energy independence's possible impact on foreign policy. Yet overriding every other concern is, and should be, this truth:

Reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable.

Fossil fuels are going to run out. That is an inescapable fact that no one, not even the professional reality deniers on the political right, can alter.

Moreover, the consequences of burning fossil fuels will be devastating for humankind. There might be time to reduce the impact on us by sharply reducing our usage of fossil fuels, but I strongly doubt it. That, however, is no reason not to be looking for sustainable alternatives. Remediating the environmental damage we've already done, and coping with the climatic changes we will have triggered, will require a lot of sustainable energy.

So, to reiterate:

Reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable.

More than that:

Not finding sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels is fucking insane.

A good question for the high court

In an otherwise unremarkable column by Nicholas Kristof, a commenter named "Ken" asks a remarkable question:

What I would like to know is why it is illegal to carry a firearm into the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court justices don't seem to have any issues with the rest of us being fodder for automatic weapons, whether we are in schools or universities. Since they believe so strong [sic] in the right to bear arms, maybe they should feel like the rest of us for a change.

Justice Roberts, do you and your colleagues have an answer for the rest of us?

I must disagree with a couple of Kristof's points.

And if you need to enter a code to operate your cellphone, why not to fire your gun?

I'm not a gun rights advocate, but this is an absurd comparison. Unlocking your cell phone is an operation that takes virtually no time relative to using it, no matter what you want to do with the phone. Unlocking a gun, on the other hand, would take an order of magnitude longer than using it. While a lot of people will argue that that's the whole point, it makes a gun useless. For a lot of well-meaning people, a gun is a tool for a crisis: if it cannot be used quickly and without a lot of conscious effort, they might as well not have it. If you're going to go down that route, Mr. Kristof, just admit that you want guns to disappear altogether.

Gun suicides (nearly 19,000 a year in the U.S.) outnumber gun murders (more than 11,000), and a gun in the home increases the risk that someone in the home will commit suicide. The reason is that suicide attempts with pills or razors often fail; with guns, they succeed.

To me, throwing suicide into the discussion muddies the waters. Suicide physically harms only yourself. A shooting spree hurts others. The emotional trauma in either case can be immeasurable, but the emotional trauma isn't the issue, just as suicide isn't the issue (if Adam Lanza had committed suicide, the nation wouldn't be talking about him). I support increased restrictions on gun capability and ownership because of the appalling toll they can take on people other than the shooter.

The Ender's Game sequels talk too much

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is one of the best science fiction novels I've ever read. I'd recommend it wholeheartedly, except that it's a trifle on the harrowing side. The plot is clever and the world Card portrays is both interesting and believable, but it's what he does with, and to, the central character, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, that makes the novel compelling — and what he does with and to Ender is, to quote one of the novel's other characters, "not kind".

Ender's Game has spawned a number of sequels since Card wrote the story back in the early 1980s. The sequels fall into two groups: one set follows Ender's life, and the other follows a number of the characters who surrounded him in the original novel.

I've read or am reading all the sequels. None of them has been as compelling as the original. It took me a while to realize that, and even longer to understand why. It was only an hour ago, as I was reading Ender in Exile, the most recently published sequel, that I put my finger on the difference.

In Ender's Game, Ender's own thoughts form much of the narrative. I love the claustrophobic atmosphere this creates. It puts the reader in Ender's shoes much of the time. The story focuses on what is important to him and lets the reader imagine many of the details that must have formed the totality of his perceptions. Less obviously, there is a straightforwardness that keeps the narrative moving and a nervous tension in Ender's point of view that keeps it gripping. The reader comes to identify with Ender and to care about him.

The sequels lack the intensity and focus of Ender's Game. While the stories they tell are clever and there's a lot more plot, the point of view is more distant. Some of the difference between the first book and its sequels is unavoidable: Ender's Game is Ender's story, while the sequels, even the ones that include him, tell stories that are larger than him. However, the sequels also suffer from a change in Card's writing style.

Dialogue is limited in Ender's Game. Much of it is utilitarian and uninflected: Card doesn't often tell you how to interpret it with adverbs ("he said icily", for example). Also, much of it takes place in passages that open, but are separate from, each chapter. The passages are conversations that put the chapter's events in a larger context for the reader and convey information Ender does not have. In contrast to the conversations between Ender and other characters, these isolated dialogues are often lengthy, and the speakers are sardonic, sarcastic, and otherwise clever. Everyone in the Ender novels is smart, but in Ender's Game only the participants in the chapter opening dialogues are allowed to banter at length. In the sequels, Card abandons the terseness of the bulk of Ender's Game and lets his characters talk. And talk. And talk. And talk. And talk.

I like clever repartée: you can't be a fan of P. G. Wodehouse and not like clever repartée. But Card isn't Wodehouse, and Card's characters aren't caricatures. At least, they're not supposed to be.

What they wind up being is mouthpieces through which Card can be witty. Initially the banter is fun, but over time the sameness of the rhythm is wearying. Worse, the characters never become fully fleshed out. They drive the plot, but they don't come to life: it's impossible to care about them. I kept reading just to see how the plot worked itself out. That's not necessarily a bad reason to read something: The Hunt for Red October is a pure pleasure in that respect, for instance. The trouble is that Card set up certain expectations with Ender's Game, and I was disappointed to find him working different territory, stylistically speaking, in the sequels. Plus, The Hunt for Red October has a much more compelling plot than any of the Ender's Game sequels. Finally, Card wasn't aiming to write tech-driven thrillers: the sequels require that you be emotionally invested in the characters (see, for instance, Miro). Unfortunately, they're too busy talking cleverly to be real.

I haven't read any of Card's works not set in the Enderverse, so I can't say whether the Ender sequels are characteristic of his style. If they are, we have to regard Ender's Game as the luckiest of accidents. In that singular work, Card fused a compelling story and an even more compelling storytelling style to produce a terrific book. Nothing (much) wrong with the sequels ... but nothing so ineffably right, either.

Missing the target

In an op-ed piece by Frank Bruni in the New York Times, an exasperated commenter wrote:

When will our President and Congress stand up to the NRA?

I've read some variant of this sentiment a lot in the last four days, and so have you.

The thing is, it's kind of misdirected.

We citizens have a bad habit of ascribing villainy to powerful interest groups with lots of money who bend our lawmakers to their will. The NRA is today's highlighted villain. The banking industry has filled this role fairly often in the past five years. Name the interest group, and millions of your fellow citizens have vilified it as corrupting our electoral and legislative processes.

Yet all these groups represent the interests of some of us.

Granted, a lot of these groups don't represent a large number of people: lobbyists for various industries (banking, energy, pharmaceuticals, etc.) can only be said to represent those who work in those industries (in general). But what about other lobbyists, like those representing religious or environmental organizations? Those lobbyists are potentially acting on behalf of millions of us who support those organizations with our contributions.

Now, there are groups that appear to represent the interests of a lot of people, but in reality act on behalf of only a handful. The National Rifle Association, though, is not one of them. Although its critics accuse it of advancing the interests of gun manufacturers rather than gun owners, there's no denying that millions of people are paid-up members, and that millions more agree with its positions.

It's easy, though, to forget all those millions of supporters, and to imagine that groups like the NRA are malevolent creatures with their own lives. "Standing up" to those groups thus conjures the image of St. George fighting the dragon. The reality, though, is that the NRA isn't a malevolent creature: it's a megaphone for millions of people. If elected officials hesitate to resist it it's because those officials know that a lot of their constituents agree with the NRA. Those officials can argue that they're just being responsive to those who voted for them.

If you don't like the positions the NRA advocates, stop trying to fight it directly. Instead, work on those you know who agree with it. The NRA will cease to be a political force in this country only when this country's culture changes.

The biggest misconception about guns

In an article about the resistance to gun regulation in Newtown, CT, a man named Scott Ostrosky said:

“Guns are why we’re free in this country, and people lose sight of that when tragedies like this happen.”

I think that's a terrible misconception.

In our society we rely on the free exchange of ideas to push our society in a given direction. When is it legitimate to conclude, "Talking is getting us nowhere. Time to fall back on my AR-15"? Is it ever legitimate?

Is it even true that the right to possess firearms is the source of freedom? I suppose it is, if you mean the freedom to live without restriction of any kind. Yet living in civil society implies accepting some restrictions. If anyone can throw off any restrictions he doesn't like, what kind of society is that?

That's not a totally strawman question, by the way. If the government were to knock on everyone's door to demand a DNA sample, I think most of us would feel it was totally appropriate to resist. We'd like to think we wouldn't let things get to that point, but who knows?

Yet the principle that resistance to injustice is sometimes acceptable doesn't mean that we need to accept unrestricted license to possess and to bear weapons. How many of us would feel comfortable, for instance, living next door to a group that possessed large numbers of automatic weapons and large quantities of explosives? I don't care if you're talking about a drug gang or an extremist cult (I'm thinking David Koresh), I want my government to be able to protect me from that group. After all, the right to possess weapons doesn't imply that the possessors are moral or well-meaning.

You say you don't want the ATF or the police doing the job, because the government can't be trusted? Well then, who can be? You? If you were to acquire the weapons and followers sufficient to defend against an outlaw gang, that would make you as potentially dangerous to the rest of us as the gang.

The government is the only entity that has even a semblance of institutional legitimacy baked into it. Institutional legitimacy, granted by the electorate, is what makes the police the police rather than a large and well-armed bunch of thugs. We rely on police officers to comply with the law themselves so they can act as guardians of our civil society. And for the most part, they do. We hear a lot about corrupt cops, but we forget that the overwhelming number of officers and departments are law-abiding themselves.

If you don't trust the police, if you don't believe that government has any institutional legitimacy, then you don't think our civil society works. At that point, the only "freedom" that is possible is the freedom to live apart from civil society. That's at least a rhetorically defensible stance, though to make it physically true you're going to have to work hard.

We don't enjoy our freedoms today because a little more than half of us have a gun in the house. We're free because the vast majority of us are committed to a shared set of ideals, and to living together in peace. That shared commitment, not pistols and rifles, is what keeps us free.

The Newtown massacre

The last three entries weren't about the shooting itself so much as some of the reactions to it (the really appalling/dumb reactions). In part that was because everybody, and I mean everybody, has been reacting to the story — online, on TV, in restaurants and bars and coffee shops, everywhere. I didn't see the point in adding to the noise, especially since I largely agreed with what everyone was saying.

In the last few hours, though, I've realized something: I am less viscerally troubled by this incident than I thought I would be.

When I saw the headline Friday morning, right after I had woken up, I was aghast. My stomach fell and my heart pounded furiously in shock. It wasn't just a mass shooting: it was a mass shooting of children. As time passed, it became clear that these were young children, too — all of them six or seven years old, as we now know.

It's customary for some people to wonder out loud how such an "evil" act could occur. Strange as it might seem, I didn't think of this as an evil act. It's not that I thought, or think, that it was in any way "good" or "not evil". No: rather, I couldn't fit this incident into my comparatively limited notion of "evil". The enormity of the tragedy transcended my idea of what constitutes evil.

I don't entirely understand why I should feel this way. I am well aware of the butchery of the Nazi regime, and of Stalin's purges. I don't know how many of those who died in those bloody episodes were children, but obviously it was a lot more than the twenty killed in Newtown, CT on Friday.

Yet those twenty weigh far more heavily on my mind than the millions who perished unnecessarily during the twentieth century.

Is it because I watched the terrible story unfold as "news" rather than "history"?

Is it because the shooting was an isolated incident in a country whose soil hasn't known the carnage of war since the nineteenth century? In other words, would it have had the same impact if it had happened during a war being fought on our shores?

Is it because my images of the bloodshed are in vivid color rather than black and white?

Is it because so few grieving relatives of the earlier massacres survived to tell their stories?

All these reasons no doubt play into my feeling that this shooting somehow is more than evil. I think that repeated exposure to documentaries and histories of the terrible slaughters of the twentieth century forced my mind to squeeze them into a mental box marked "evil". The trouble is that this had the effect of making butchery on an unimaginable scale imaginable. Rather than leaving me with a proper understanding of the true scope of those tragedies, I was left with what you might think of as scale representations that would fit neatly into that mental box.

The Newport massacre is life-sized — it doesn't fit into that box. It's not an historical abstraction. It's a warm, bloody, pulsing, raw wound in my psyche.

So how does this conception of the massacre as "more than evil" square with my previous assertion that I'm not as troubled by it as I thought I would be?

Well, I can already feel the story fading into abstraction.

The pictures of the victims are becoming disturbingly similar to the ones I've seen in World War II documentaries. I even understand why. All victims, you see, eventually are reduced to flat and static images in the minds of spectators. Only those who actually knew the victims have a genuine emotional connection to them that keeps them vivid. And the more the victims become flat and static images, the more the incident resembles the "scale representations" that fit into my mental boxes. As it can be mentally filed and pigeonholed, it becomes more distant and less viscerally real.

What I just described, though, is a normal and unavoidable mental process. Someone once said our memories are scars — and like physical scars, they become less vivid over time. We can take some comfort in knowing that the fading is not of our own volition.

My concern, though, is that not that the shooting is fading into memory. No, my concern is that I'm all but completely resigned to the idea that nothing will change as a result of it. I am sorrowful, but not truly angry.

You might be surprised that I'm not angry. After all, the last three entries were fairly bitter in their denunciation of fanatical gun rights advocates and holier-than-thou scolds. (In fairness to Mike Huckabee, by the way, I must admit that on reflection, my insistence that further gun-control laws are obviously the only responsible reaction to this incident is no less strident, and possibly no less irresponsibly opportunistic, than his insistence that not proselytizing the Christian God in schools was a proximate cause of this tragedy.)

My bitterness and anger, though, were and are directed at The Usual Idiots who advocate what I consider to be borderline insane positions. I'm angry at egregious stupidity and arrogance.

Where, you might ask, is my anger at the shooter, Adam Lanza?

I've certainly been asking myself that.

We know so little about Lanza, and so much of it is frankly of dubious reliability. All of it comes from people who claim to have known him, yet all of them acknowledge that he was difficult to know. How much can we trust their recollections and impressions, especially after the information has been filtered through the warped glass of the media? (I would like to know, for instance, whether the New York Times' frequent assertion that Lanza had a "flat affect" is a direct quotation of someone claiming to know Lanza, or an interpretation made by a reporter or editor. I consider "flat affect" to be a clinical description that is trustworthy only if provided by a mental health professional.)

Was Lanza a conscienceless monster? Was he a deluded madman? We will probably never know.

Should that matter to me? After all, he slaughtered innocent women and children. It could scarcely harm anyone to hate him, even if he was not in his right mind: he's dead and can't be hurt.

Yet I don't hate him. He's dead and gone. What good would it do me to hate him? He's not around to feel my wrath, and that's the only satisfaction I could take from getting mad at him. I would want him to feel my anger and sorrow.

Anyway, I'm still baffled: what on earth was going through his head to make him do this? My extreme puzzlement trumps my righteous anger, at least for now.

If I'm not angry at Lanza, shouldn't I be angry at those who have lobbied so hard for our permissive gun ownership regime? Shouldn't it have been a hell of a lot harder for Lanza to get his hands on so many weapons of such great lethality?

I can't muster up such anger.

Right now, my feeling is, "This is the way people want it, apparently." A majority seems to want the broadest possible right to own and to bear weapons. A tragedy like this shooting is, as far as I'm concerned, a foreseeable and inevitable byproduct of a society that esteems the Second Amendment as all but sacred. A pox on the gun-rights zealots, is my feeling. Let them bleed in the house they made for all of us.

It is probably true that I would feel differently if I had kids, or if I were younger. Since neither of those conditions holds true, I'm a lot less concerned about gun violence than most. If I fall victim to it, it will affect no one but me, and I'm not all that fussed about dying.

The arguments on both sides of the gun debate are so stale, and the possibility gun-rights advocates will experience an epiphany is so remote, it's impossible to imagine any sensible change coming out of even this atrocity. Just as I can feel this shooting starting to fit into my mental boxes, losing its ability to fill me with consuming shock and sorrow and anger, so I can feel the shooting being digested by the body politic and turning into mere fuel for the gun debate. The Newtown shooting all too soon will be no more than another data point in people's mental spreadsheets, and we have so many such data points already that even this one won't make a difference to anyone's mental calculus.

So I don't care for myself and I doubt society will care enough to do anything constructive, even though we're talking about the most primal of dichotomies: life versus death.

That's a troubling resignation to terrible circumstances. And yet, I'm not that troubled.

I suppose it's a good thing I'm but one passing stranger in this world.

Huckabee on Newtown shooting

On his Daily Show appearances, Mike Huckabee has seemed a nice enough fellow.

Remarks like the following have done a lot to destroy that reputation.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Fear of God, after all, did so much to stop the violence of the Crusades, and the Inquisition, and the witch burnings in Salem, and the massacres of nonbelieving peoples in South America by the conquistadores.

If, as early reports have suggested (and I hasten to add that early reports are so often incomplete, misleading, or flat-out wrong), shooter Adam Lanza was mentally disturbed, pray tell us, Gov. Huckabee, how would talking about the Christian God in school have helped?

For that matter, mightn't it have been just as or even more helpful to have taught Adam Lanza meditation techniques used in non-Christian religions like Taoism or Sufism? By teaching students ways to calm their minds and achieve a sense of peace, these techniques might have prevented Lanza's attack. That's at least as plausible an idea as Gov. Huckabee's unproven assertion. Would such religious teachings have the governor's equally full-throated (and ill-timed) support?

Nobody yet knows why Adam Lanza committed this atrocity. It is therefore grotesquely opportunistic for Gov. Huckabee to be pushing his pro-Christian agenda in the wake of these killings, as if pushing Christianity into the public schools would have been a panacea. Shame on you, Governor. Your hucksterism is repugnant.

Firmin DeBrabander, "The Freedom of an Armed Society"

DeBrabander wrote a thoughtful essay in the New York Times about the kind of "freedom" that is embodied in the ideal of an armed society.

The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.

As our Constitution provides, however, liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld our right to experiment in offensive language and ideas, and in some cases, offensive action and speech. Such experimentation is inherent to our freedom as such. But guns by their nature do not mix with this experiment — they don’t mix with taking offense. They are combustible ingredients in assembly and speech.

The gun rights advocates who call for arming ourselves to an even greater degree, like Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX), however, are immune to such arguments. They simply don't accept that there is any justifiable restriction on gun ownership.

Would blowhards like Gohmert be so arrogant if their children had been massacred? For that matter, would they be the ones to preempt such killings, heroically (and accurately) taking out the would-be killer without harming others?

More to the point, do we want to live in a society where everyone is packing? Do we, in other words, want to return to the Old West, where might (and only might) made right?

This is why we can't let libertarians run things

In an article on Talking Points Memo about the Newtown, CT, school shooting, the comments raged — and I use the term advisedly.

One of the commenters, "John Pidaras", is a strong advocate of gun ownership as the only cure for shooting rampages. To another poster asking whether teachers should be armed (itself an exasperated response to multiple back-and-forths with Pidaras), Pidaras replied:

To answer your question, one for every teacher should suffice. Make it a requirement for teaching. The same standards that you want to impose on gun owners should be imposed on teachers, rigorous background and psychological tests as well as firearms competency and safety training. That is, only if we are interested in preventing school shootings, which of course is not the goal here. The goal here is to ban guns, not make schools safer. If it was to make schools safer then you would overwhelmingly support my idea.

Elsewhere Pidaras claims to oppose "pretty much all wars including the drug war and all forms of corporatism", so I'd say that puts him in the libertarian camp. There's something appealing about libertarianism to a nation weaned on the romance of the Western; even I, who dislike Westerns thoroughly and am convinced this country could stand a lot more consideration for the community in its politics, have been seduced on occasion by the individualist's siren song.

The thing is, libertarianism allows only the barest outline of a civil society to exist. Libertarianism requires the greatest self-sufficiency of any philosophy of governing, and a populace accustomed to fending for itself for the most part isn't going to be easy to unify, or to keep unified. Libertarians insist that no government should dictate how they should live their lives, and that's admirable in principle, but what if a group of like-minded folks decides to impose its views on a smaller group? What is the smaller group's recourse?

In a society in which "individual defense" was the watchword — a society in which, for instance, teachers were armed to protect their students (and in some places, I'm sure, to protect themselves from their students) — what would civil society be like? Could you even call it civil society? Wouldn't it simply be an atomized aggregation of millions of mutually suspicious people, or a collection of fiefdoms created by local strongmen who aggregated power by opportunistically creating the biggest gang first?

A libertarian society, it seems to me, could only survive if the populace was extraordinarily moral. Otherwise, the inclination to dominate would eventually leave everyone under the thumb of the most aggressive.

In such a society it might be the norm for teachers to be armed, as much in their own interest as in the putative interest of their students' safety. However, this is not a norm I want to see. It comes from a gun enthusiast who cannot understand that some restrictions on gun ownership and gun capability are rational and not the first stumbling steps down a slippery slope. It comes, in other words, from a raging ideologue who doesn't live in the real world. Kind of like a lot of libertarians, really.

Pranks r us

A lot of people seem pretty stirred up about the death of a nurse that seems to be connected to her very recent public humiliation at the hands of a pair of DJs in Sydney, Australia. The nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, accepted a prank call by the DJs, who were pretending to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, and connected them to the duty nurse attending the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge. The call became a minor sensation around the world, presumably because no one could believe how easily Saldanha had been taken in: even the DJs were surprised their stunt succeeded.

Saldanha was found dead on Friday by what the New York Times is calling "an apparent suicide". Suddenly no one is all that amused by the prank any more.

Yet be honest: how many of you laughed when you first heard the story, before Saldanha was found dead?

Not to be holier than thou, but I've never found prank calls funny. Not even a little. I've never understood where the humor is to be found in making someone else look, sound, or feel foolish.

I'm evidently very much in the minority, though. From Candid Camera onward, the audience seems to have rewarded producers who have figured out how to make ordinary folks look ridiculous.

Even two of my favorite TV shows, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, do this on a regular basis. I hate those bits. It's one thing to deflate the hypocrisy of politicians. It's quite another to humiliate ordinary people just going about their business.

At least in the DS and CR bits, people know they're on camera: they are willing (if seemingly oblivious) conspirators. What seems to make prank calling so appealing to so many in the audience is that the victims don't realize anything is amiss.

Apparently nobody stops to wonder how he or she would feel if the tables were turned. Nobody stops to wonder if there might be consequences to these little pranks, either.

What the hell is wrong with you people? And by "you people", I mean not just the producers and (using the term loosely) talent, but the audience, too. Are you totally incapable of empathy? Does it take a death to wake you up to the cruelty that has always been at the very heart of your insipid "comedy"?

You say all comedy is cruel? Maybe so. But the cruelty of a stand-up tends to be aimed at groups, or at people who have willingly placed themselves in the public eye. Prank calls aim right at one person, someone who is just trying to live his or her life. When you focus the cruelty so tightly and make it public, you have stopped being funny. You've become merely the sorriest of assholes.

If you reward such assholes by listening to them and laughing along, you're a sorry asshole too.

The phony skills gap

Adam Davidson's 20 November 2012 piece, "Skills Don't Pay the Bills", debunks the myth, promulgated by both major parties in the recent presidential race, of a "skills gap".

“It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

The problem is that manufacturers, behaving with complete economic rationality, have peered into the near future of their industries, and they don't see higher wages (above $18 an hour, according to the article) allowing them to remain economically competitive.

During the campaign it was good rhetoric to promise job training for displaced manufacturing workers, since we all assumed that if these workers had the new skills required, they'd happily fill the hundreds of thousands of job openings about which we kept hearing. The reality, though, is that even with retraining, most of these workers are not going to rush to take positions that start at $10 an hour, which is in the neighborhood of what some workers make at fast-food outlets.

Last month I wrote about the trouble that part-time retail and hospitality workers have making ends meet. As a practical matter, employers are taking advantage of the fact that they can attract enough workers paying ridiculously low wages. Moreover, if you accept the wisdom of the free market, there's nothing wrong with that. In a free market, the employer has no moral obligation to ensure its workers can sustain body and soul on the wages it pays.

And yet, I spotted a flaw in the grand logic of the free market:

If you look beyond the tip of your nose, though, a bigger question presents itself. Is the U.S. economy able to provide enough jobs that pay livable wages to support a robust consumer sector?

If enough people are working at jobs that don't pay them enough to cover their cost of living, that means these people can't be good consumers, right? What happens to the U.S. economy then? Hell, what happens to the United States as a whole?

(By the way, I'm aware that that's not a moral argument, either. For the sake of this discussion, I'm staying within the parameters of the free market.)

I'm not the only one who has spotted this obvious shortcoming in our economy, of course. From Davidson's 28 November piece:

Manufacturers, who face increasing competition from low-wage countries, feel they can’t afford to pay higher wages. Potential workers choose more promising career paths. “It’s individually rational,” says Howard Wial, an economist at the Brookings Institution who specializes in manufacturing employment. “But it’s not socially optimal.”

Not socially optimal, indeed.

It's worth noting that the oft-cited father of the free market, Adam Smith, did not believe we should surrender ourselves completely to it. I wrote about the modern misunderstanding of Smith's "invisible hand" earlier this month.

You could argue that the confluence of these pieces shows that the New York Times' editors are conspiring to undermine our confidence in the remarkable power of the free market — but you wouldn't convince me. That these articles were published in the last month or two simply means that we're finally coming to understand the limits of the free market, having allowed it to run without significant impediments over parts of our economy.

While it's easy to caricature (or to demonize) market oversight as "socialism", as many Republicans have done over the last decade and especially during the last four years, free-market advocates are going to have to address the socially suboptimal effects of the untrammeled market if they expect to reach people like me. For I don't see some governmental intervention in the market as socialism: I see it as civic and personal self-defense.

The free market has been the best compromise humanity has discovered to permit our society — in which individual liberties are treated as paramount — to flourish. I don't see an attractive competing philosophy on the horizon. However, people need food, clothing, shelter, and rest, too. If the free market's advocates can't figure out how the market can satisfy those needs, people are going to look for alternative solutions, the market be damned.

Alton Brown on Mythbusters

I suppose it was inevitable that the only guy talking about food science on TV, Alton Brown, would cross paths with the Mythbusters crew. With the metastasis of antiscientific nonsense on the dial, it's probably a good idea for the forces of light to join up whenever they can.

Brown is on tonight's new episode of Mythbusters; you can also catch clips from the episode on discovery.com/mythbusters/. Beware that the clip I saw contained spoilers.

Advice for the Republican Party

It might seem the height of presumption for a confirmed non-Republican to be offering the party advice, but since everyone else is jumping on this particular bandwagon ...

Everything I've read about the Republican Party's search for answers to its defeats on the presidential and senatorial fronts says the discussion is taking place along two lines: "we need to reach out to minorities", and/or "we picked lousy candidates".

This tells me the party doesn't understand people like me, and I daresay I'm not as far from the mainstream as usual.

Yes, the party put forward lousy candidates (Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, anyone?). The subtext of "lousy candidate" that folks bandying about that excuse want to convey is, "These people did not truly represent the party." The thing is, people like me believe those "lousy candidates" did truly represent the party. Those candidates weren't thrown into the race haphazardly. By and large, they were put forward, after due consideration, as the best representatives and standard-bearers of the party's values (that the party could convince to run, anyway).

Put another way, voters can accept one bad apple as a fluke. If there's more than one, and the rot in them all smells the same, we're going to wonder whether there's something wrong with the orchard. So far, the Republican Party seems unwilling to accept that its orchard is tainted, deeply so.

As for the "we need to reach out to minorities" argument, that's not so much a flaw as a strategy to compensate for a flaw. It might be a good strategy to pursue with some, but people like me are going to see it as a deeply hypocritical and cynical endeavor. We aren't going to reward the party for making the right noises when it hasn't had a change of heart.

The Republican Party, as all the demographic analysis I've read shows, is essentially white and male. There would be nothing wrong with that except that the reason it's white and male is that its policies repel the majority of women and racial minorities, who can see that the policies enshrine the prejudices of conservative white men. Whether the subject is rape, immigration, or entitlement reform, the Republican Party ends up favoring white men at everyone else's expense. That's the elephant in the room that this election lit up in a spotlight.

If the Republican Party wants to turn its fortunes around, it's going to have to talk about that elephant. I'm not sure that will happen anytime soon. Many of the voters who make up the party are not willing to admit the elephant is there. To do so would call into question those voters' own values and characters. They would have to confront the possibility that they are not heroic underdogs fighting to save the nation, but rather are ... well, a lot less than heroic.

Before it reaches out to constituencies its number-crunchers identify as crucial to its future, the Republican Party must search its soul. A majority of its members, average citizens and politicians alike, need to understand just how intolerant, mean-spirited, and flat-out ignorant some of its policies are.

It's the nature of conservatism to value what was. A healthy society needs conservatives to ground itself, to promulgate values and ideas and traditions that have proven their worth over their time. The trouble with today's extreme conservatives, the ones who control the Republican Party, is that they've lost sight of why certain values and ideas and traditions are worth cherishing. Instead, they simply focus on holding onto the trappings of the past without regard for whether those trappings actually reflect values worth cherishing.

What, for instance, is the reason to oppose gay marriage? (For the record, I'm neutral on the subject: I genuinely neither support nor oppose the movement.) If Republicans could make cogent arguments for why it harms others, that would be one thing — but they can't. Instead, all their arguments come back to "our parents' generation didn't do it", "I just don't feel comfortable with the idea", and "my religion forbids making homosexuals feel welcome". Lost in all that noise is the question, "Isn't it a good idea to celebrate the love of two human beings?"

What exactly are Republicans fighting to preserve on the gay marriage front, and is it worth preserving? They certainly have not found an argument that makes any sense to me, and I think I'm in the majority on that score.

Other issues are more contentious; there's genuine room for argument and disagreement on abortion, on the role of religion in the public square, and probably on other issues about which I haven't thought. The problem is that taken in toto, the world view Republicans espouse isn't an especially welcoming place: there's a tendency on economic issues to say "anything business wants is okay" and on social issues to say "if you deviate from the norm we define, we're coming after you". These positions aren't backed up by arguments that induce the rest of us to embrace these positions, to cherish them as valuable. Instead it seems to be the Republican view that their way of looking at the world is obviously the only way and opposition to that viewpoint is meritless.

Republicans aren't interested in persuading. They simply want to dominate.

Republicans were rebuffed on the national level because they no longer promote values a majority of the rest of us respect. Until the party comes to grips with that truth and genuinely embraces different values, or finds a way to convince the rest of us its values are worth embracing, it won't find better candidates, and its efforts to reach out to other constituencies simply won't work.

How to choose a president

Gary Gutting's Opinionator piece in the New York Times is actually entitled "How Not to Choose a President" because he goes through a lot of the bad criteria we use to pick the one for whom we're going to vote. However, the useful prescription is simple.

How, then, should we choose our president? Typically, I propose, by voting for the party rather than the person.

Frankly, this isn't much of an insight to me: I'm pretty sure this is how a lot of people pick their candidate these days, because ever since Reagan the presidents have been all but hostages to their parties. If you haven't been following this practice, read Gutting's piece to find out why you should.

"The invisible hand" isn't what we think

Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that the well-worn phrase "the invisible hand" doesn't quite have the meaning we all assume. That's John Paul Rollert's contention, anyway.

The "invisible hand" refers to the tendency, in a "free market" (that is, one not regulated by a sovereign), for the players in that market to find its own equilibrium, and for that equilibrium to accrue to the net benefit of society.

... every merchant would pursue the most profitable trade available to him, making the most efficient use of his own time and money. Granted, he would act with an eye only toward his personal “security” and “gain,” but in so doing, he would “render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can.” He would be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention,” namely, to benefit society and the broader welfare of its citizens.

So far, so good. What's the catch?

The wealthy, says Smith, spend their days establishing an “economy of greatness,” one founded on “luxury and caprice” and fueled by “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires.” Any broader benefit that accrues from their striving is not the consequence of foresight or benevolence, but “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity.” They don’t do good, they are led to it.

The moral paradox of the invisible hand often seems lost on those who speak loudest in its favor. Take the stubborn rhetoric of the “jobs creators.” Insofar as it portrays a conspicuous group of people who act with conscious moral purpose, it bears no resemblance to the phenomenon Smith describes. We might as well call this vision of development the “visible hand” of capitalism, for it has the original theory backward.

Worse for "small government" advocates, Smith didn't believe "the invisible hand" could replace many government functions, including those that seem eminently privatizable to those advocates today.

Smith held that the sovereign had a role supporting education, building infrastructure and public institutions, and providing security from foreign and domestic threats — initiatives that should be paid for, in part, by a progressive tax code and duties on luxury goods. He even believed the government had a “duty” to protect citizens from “oppression,” the inevitable tendency of the strong to take advantage of the ignorance and necessity of the weak.

In other words, the invisible hand did not solve the problem of politics by making politics altogether unnecessary.

This is an excellent piece that has more insights than I've quoted here. Check it out.

Representative, except when they're not

Remember how Republicans during the George W. Bush years would smugly admonish Democrats to stop complaining about Republican policies, because Republicans won the election(s) and therefore "the people" clearly wanted Republican policies to be enacted?

Evidently, turnabout's not fair play.

Representative John Fleming, Republican of Louisiana, conceded that some moderate Republicans are ready to give in to Mr. Obama on tax increases for the rich, but he said conservatives are not.

“A majority of Americans thought it was just fine to raise taxes on higher income people, but that’s more of an emotional response, more ’I’m in pain, I want someone else to pay,’” he conceded in an interview. But, he added, “how does that solve America’s problems? That’s counterproductive to go down that road.”

How does that solve America's problems?

Is he kidding?

Let me put it in a nutshell for you, John: the rich haven't been paying their fair share for the services government provides and which we all share.

Before you start whining about people having to pay for programs they don't use, we all pay for programs we don't use because we all use different programs. (Yeah, you really do, whether or not you believe it.)

More importantly, you know what one of America's biggest problems is right now, John? The insane debt we accumulated due to two unfunded wars shoved down our throats by the last Republican president and his Republican enablers in Congress (and yeah, a lot of Democrats too). Paying down that unplanned mountain of debt would help quite a bit. If the well-heeled could pony up $400 million to Karl Rove this last election cycle, they can damned well pony up a little more to help the nation. The marginal effect of those dollars on their lives is just that: marginal. A family getting by on $30,000 a year just can't afford to be slammed equivalently. We're in a crisis. How about the well-off show a little patriotism? Hell, how about just a little compassion?

Isn't it funny. how Republicans who decry "judicial activism" supposedly trumping "the will of the people" again and again are suddenly trying to play the wise, temperate adults in the room?

It doesn't wash. They haven't been wise, temperate, or in a lot of cases even adult over the last twenty years. They've pandered to their supporters' basest instincts on a host of issues and they're in no position to claim the moral or intellectual high ground now.

The people spoke on 6 November, John. You got reelected, but your would-be standard bearer, Mitt Romney, didn't, and your party lost seats in the Senate. Your party has bleated endlessly about respecting the will of the people. Well guess what? Their will has been expressed loudly and clearly, not just in this most recent election but in the last one as well. We're tired of subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of our national well-being. And as we've said again and again, it's not resentment against being rich that animates us: it's resentment against the clear reality that the wealthy have stacked the legislative deck in their favor for decades. When we were less indebted and the economy was chugging along at a faster clip, that was tolerable (though still immoral). Now? Not so much.

Yeah, there's waste that can be trimmed from the federal budget. It's going to be a mountain of a task identifying it, because the larding of governmental budgets isn't confined to discrete programs but rather permeates the bureaucracy (cutting funding wholesale to PBS wouldn't fix $700 wrenches and other procurement fraud in the defense budget, for instance).

But to take the obstinate position that spending cuts are the only solution on the table, and that marginal tax rates on the wealthiest citizens and businesses shouldn't rise a few percentage points ... that doesn't just defy the popular will. That defies good sense.

Conservative vs. mainstream media

Conor Friedersdorf's recent piece in The Atlantic, "How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File", is pretty much exactly what its title promises.

On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.

Sooner or later, ignoring reality comes back to haunt you.

The world on U.S. election

A piece on the world's reaction to Obama's reelection in Buzzfeed didn't sound too promising. I expected a dry article quoting newspaper articles from around the world.

What I actually got was a snapshot — many of them — of the articles in those newspapers. Many of the articles were featured on the papers' front page. For one who has a healthy skepticism of the United States' oft-mentioned exceptionalism, this was a jolting reminder that whether or not the U.S. is exceptional in the way that American exceptionalists would like to believe, the U.S. unquestionably is a big enough factor in world affairs to be worth people's attention worldwide.

One thing that caught my eye was the electoral maps accompanying a few of the articles. Can you imagine a general-readership U.S. paper, even the New York Times, breaking down the national vote of Russia, or Switzerland, or even Canada along administrative boundaries?

I can't help wondering, does the color scheme on the map of the U.S. — the red-and-blue familiar to U.S. readers, denoting the disposition of each state's electoral votes — mean anything to Singaporeans? Do Malaysians understand why the Electoral College vote totals they quote (not to mention the donkey and elephant symbols next to each number) are significant? Is the U.S. election so big a deal to Kiwis that the electoral map and the breakdown by party of the Senate, House of Representatives and state governorships should all be displayed prominently on the front page of The Press (New Zealand)?

It's incredibly humbling to suspect that yes, these things are meaningful to at least some of these papers' readers. (I can't claim an equivalent familiarity even with Canada, and geopolitically they don't get any easier to know than the English-speaking country next door.)

Republicans and conservatives: the aftermath

I broke a recently adopted rule of mine and checked out the 24-hour cable news outlets for their election coverage Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Tuesday coverage, which was reasonably cogent and on point. By Wednesday morning, things had returned to the status quo, which is to say the usual blather that is so depressingly bad that it drove me away from these outlets. I maintain that the only time to check out the cable news channels is when news is breaking; otherwise they seem to have no idea how to fill time.

The Wednesday morning blather was largely of the "what do Republicans do now" variety, with a little bit of "the people want divided government" thrown in for good measure.

"The people want divided government"? What crap.

"The people" don't want divided government: the people want a functioning government. Unfortunately, we, the people, have incredibly divergent views of what constitutes a functioning government. That's why the House of Representatives looks the way it does. It's a collection of polarized and polarizing politicians because that's what we look like as a nation.

With that out of the way, what do Republicans do now?

The party that loses the election does a self-examination to figure out what went wrong. I don't know what that process was like before 1980, but in my political lifetime the losing party is wont to recalibrate itself and its message, sometimes drastically. It took a while for Democrats to figure out how to nominate someone electable after Reagan swamped Carter, but eventually they did. Clinton wasn't exactly my favorite politician: he bent with the political wind and drove me nuts with his habit of unfailing accommodation. Others, though, would call that reasonable compromising, the hallmark of a well-regarded and successful politician of any party.

Democrats, whether politicians or voters, are used to having to compromise in the wake of the vaunted Reagan Revolution. They're used to having to hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils (John Kerry for president, or the flawed Affordable Care Act, for instance).

The controlling plurality of Republican voters, though, is locked into a mindset of "no compromise". Some of them feel like they've been denigrated and abused by the rest of the country and they're not taking it any more. Some of them are appalled by how the rest of the country thinks and are indignant enough to take their stand here, metaphorically speaking. Some of them are scared enough by The State Of Things Today that they feel they have no choice but to rise up and take back the country from those that would otherwise destroy it.

Longtime politicians of any party are, well, politicians, who generally understand the need to compromise. Their motivations may be pure ("this is what's best for the country", or at least "this is the best we can do for the country") or not ("if I vote my conscience I'll be voted out of office, so the hell with my conscience"), but the net effect is the same. Without trivializing them or their beliefs, they act as if politics were a game with two objectives: get themselves reelected, and get as many like-minded souls elected as they can.

So while Republican politicians — those who predate the Tea Party movement, anyway — might be ready to modify the party's positions on various issues in order to get something done, the controlling plurality of Republican voters isn't ready. These voters are fighting for what they think is right, and they see themselves as the only heroes in the country. Moreover, they have an entire media ecosystem to feed their sense of self-righteousness.

Longtime Democrats should understand this bunker mentality, because they — we — have felt this way about certain issues for ages. Climate change, anyone? I've been worried about it since I was a kid in the 1970s. A lot of us feel pretty damned self-righteous about it, too.

The thing is, a bunker mentality can close your mind to reality. And while I've met my share of Democrats and progressives who are divorced from reality, the majority I know are heavily invested in facts, the kind of facts that are reported in, say, scientific journals and reputable periodicals that don't have an avowed axe to grind.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said of that aforementioned plurality of Republican voters. So while the rest of us consider what steps to take to keep the country functioning and to ameliorate what's bad, that Republican plurality is listening to a self-congratulatory echo chamber that also, to keep its ranks closed, promotes paranoia about Democrats and liberals in general, and Barack Obama in particular.

It's a toxic brew (and the fact that MSNBC engages in similar tactics on the political left is disgraceful). It keeps millions of my fellow citizens from looking at the same facts the rest of us see, and discussing them in a reasonable way. It keeps those same millions fearful (or contemptuous) of science and knowledge generally, making them unwilling to support the best tools we have for understanding ourselves and our problems.

So where does this leave the Republican Party?

No one knows. And the fact that none of the bloviating commentators on cable news yesterday was willing to acknowledge that fact reinforced my belief that giving up on cable news was the right thing to do.

The Republican Party could split. If it did, my guess would be that the most uncompromising of its current members, politicians and voters both, would form a new party; let's call it the Conservative Party for lack of a better term. The Republican Party left standing would suddenly be a far more moderate place, though what its political heft would be is unclear.

Or the Republican Party might double down on its current bet, deeming Mitt Romney to have failed because he was insufficiently conservative. (I hate using that term, by the way, for reasons I mentioned the other day.) Over time it would purge itself of even more moderates, a process I imagine would be akin to the "self-deportation" Romney espoused during the campaign. The end result might be a Republican Party very much like the "Conservative Party" I mentioned above.

And then, of course, there's the long shot: those voters in the controlling plurality of the Republican party could, slowly, awaken to their isolation from the rest of the country, and wonder if, just maybe, they should take a hard look at themselves and their beliefs.

I hope for the long shot to come off, because frankly I think the voters who are what one might call the Tea Party base are right that something is wrong with the country, just as those who are part of the Occupy base are right that something is wrong with the country. I want both groups to join the rest of us in figuring out what the something is and in fixing it, rather than humming self-congratulatory nonsense to themselves.

A genuine conservative

As I understood it when I was growing up, the term "conservative" meant an inclination to preserve what is, rather than embracing the new for its own sake. I've felt for a while that many self-identified conservatives today don't match my understanding of the term. My impression, though I admit I haven't thought too hard about it, is that while they claim to be trying to restore some kind of lost glory to the nation, they are in fact indulging in radical social reengineering to create the nation of their fantasies. The nation of low taxes and infinite freedoms that they imagine simply never existed. The actual country once may have been simoly too spread-out and thinly populated for the federal government to exercise more than token control, but that is simply no longer the case. Nor should it be, since in our densely populated society, a myriad of powerful technologies and economies of scale make it altogether too easy for our neighbors — businesses as well as people — to affect us adversely without some sort of referee acting to support our individual right to well-being.

Therefore it was with some relief that I read Maurice Manning's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, "My Old Kentucky Conservatism".

... I don’t see how a man who has multiple homes around the country, whose business has been to serve investors seeking purely monetary gains — that is, people with no interest in local preservation or local well-being, and those who do not live side by side the community into which they are invested — can be considered conservative.

That kind of extravagance has not been good for our country or anywhere else; it places making money ahead of making sense.

Mr. Manning is referring to Mitt Romney in this passage, but Mr. Manning recognizes that Romney is simply embodying his party's inclinations.

The freedom to make money doesn't trump every other value we might have. Mr. Manning's piece does a good job of reminding us what some of those other values are: a reverence for the land, concern for our neighbors' well-being, a desire to "enhance our shared prosperity". Republican politicians pay lip service to these values, but the policies they put into place undercut them.

The conservatism espoused by most Republican politicians, in fact, places a greater emphasis on freedom than responsibility. Mr. Manning's is the kind of conservatism I can respect and even embrace: it's a balanced and thoughtful response to novelty rather than an excuse to indulge greed and intolerance.

Ironing

Earlier today, as I finished ironing the last of several shirts, it occurred to me that I like ironing more than anyone who knows my slovenly habits would suspect. I mean, I am reluctant to throw my clothes into the washer, a remarkable device that does ninety-five percent of the work for me. You would think ironing would be a foreign concept to me, or even something of a curse word. Instead, though, it brings me a great deal of satisfaction.

For me, the trouble with washing clothes isn't the washing or drying: it's the folding and putting away afterwards. It's tedious and unrewarding work to my way of thinking, even though without this work all the washing would be wasted effort.

Ironing, though even more work than folding, is immensely rewarding. You start with a shirt that might as well have been lying in a crumpled heap in an alley, wrinkled seemingly beyond repair. You run a marvelously simple device over it. Suddenly, those ineradicable wrinkles are gone. You even have a split-screen effect: in front of your iron is crumpled fabric, behind it is a smooth, flat expanse. It's kind of magical. The humble iron is a kind of wand.

Running a hot iron over an article of clothing brings order to chaos. Ironing, like life itself, fights entropy. To my mind, that's a cause for quiet celebration.

Diagnosing a sales slump

I ran across a fascinating set of blog entries by Paul Downs, who owns a cabinet-making (and now, conference table-making) business near Philadelphia. Earlier this year he discovered his sales were decreasing quarter by quarter, often month by month. It took him five months to figure out what was going wrong and to reverse the trend. The first entry sets the stage; each entry links to the next in the series.

Downs provided a great explanation not only of Google's AdWords product, but also of his own thought processes as he analyzed his business's problem. He offhandedly mentioned that the story of everything he tried to turn his slumping sales around would take a book; if he writes it, I predict it will be well worth reading.

(If you want a quick list of all his entries on this subject, here's a search link.)

Sandy bears down

Good luck to my friends and acquaintances on the eastern seaboard, especially those of you in the mid-Atlantic states. Sandy looks like it's going to be a beast.

The New York Times' Lede blog has ongoing coverage broken down state by state. Of course, that's only going to be useful to you if you have power and WiFi or functioning cell phone towers and the odds of either in the affected areas are low, but ... think good thoughts.

Stay safe.

The cost of profit

The New York Times has a piece about part-time workers by Steven Greenhouse. The picture it paints isn't rosy for the workers. Perhaps the most straightforwardly harrowing anecdote comes from Desmond Anthony, who described his experience working for Express:

At first, he usually worked five days a week, often racking up 30 hours. But after several months, he said, he and many co-workers had their weekly hours cut to 12 or 15 and occasionally none at all.

“I’d go to the managers and say, ‘What is the issue? Am I not pulling my weight?’ ” he said. “And they’d say, ‘We just don’t have enough money.’ ”

“ ‘So how am I supposed to support myself? ’ I asked, and they said that was not their problem.”

Mr. Anthony said it was hard to survive. At $8.25 an hour, 15 hours a week equaled about $500 a month. His share of the monthly rent was $800, with several hundred more for utilities, phone and subway fares. Some days he went hungry, he acknowledged, and he repeatedly turned to his parents for help.

He and his co-workers held out hope that, come the holiday season, their hours would pick up. “But then they hired 15 more workers,” he said.

Perhaps the companies who provide such jobs would retort that their jobs are only intended to provide extra cash, not to provide a living wage.

What's clear is that the companies that have chosen to make so much of their workforce part-time have their eyes on the bottom line. Jamba Juice, for instance, has turned to specialized software to optimize its scheduling of staff at its stores.

Karen Luey, Jamba’s chief financial officer, said the scheduling software “helped us take 400, 500 basis points out of our labor costs,” or 4 to 5 percentage points, a savings of millions of dollars a year.

And:

Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said companies benefited from using many part-timers. “It’s almost like sharecropping — if you have a lot of farmers with small plots of land, they work very hard to produce in that limited amount of land,” he said. “Many part-time workers feel a real competition to work hard during their limited hours because they want to impress managers to give them more hours.”

I can't believe he used "sharecropping" as if it were a praiseworthy idea.

There is a vast, unbridgeable gulf between what these employers want and what these employees want. The employers clearly don't think it's their problem to ensure their employees can earn a living wage. And frankly, in a free-market economy, that's a permissible attitude. It can even be considered a praiseworthy one.

At least some of the employees, though, are looking for a way to make a real living. They can't understand why their hard work doesn't impress their employers enough to make that happen.

The employees and employers have an irreconcilable conflict. Unfortunately for the employees, the employers very much have the upper hand in this economy.

Now, if you're a free-market advocate, that's okay. The fact that retailers are able to cut costs to the bone results in lower prices for consumers. That's a win as far as it goes.

If you look beyond the tip of your nose, though, a bigger question presents itself. Is the U.S. economy able to provide enough jobs that pay livable wages to support a robust consumer sector?

If enough people are working at jobs that don't pay them enough to cover their cost of living, that means these people can't be good consumers, right? What happens to the U.S. economy then? Hell, what happens to the United States as a whole?

All these jobs numbers that economists and politicians keep throwing around: how many of them represent good jobs, the kind needed to support the much-discussed (and, I increasingly fear, mythical) middle class?

Lower costs at restaurants and retailers are a boon to the customers of those establishments. To the extent that these businesses flourish, it's expected that the investors in these businesses will prosper, too. If those companies are publicly held, the investors are shareholders, and potentially could include any of us. Those points are the upside that free-market advocates love to discuss.

What free-market advocates never discuss is what the economy as a whole looks like in their glossy vision. It's an article of faith that if you simply let businesses follow free-market principles of lowering costs and competing furiously with minimal or no interference, something beautiful will result.

But will it?

What happens if the market fails to provide enough jobs for workers to earn a living? What if too many jobs are what an earlier generation called "pin money" jobs? Is there a free-market solution to such a situation?

One immediate consequence would be that some businesses, maybe a lot of them, would fold. But what then?

I can imagine that the businesses that remain open will try to cut their costs even further. That, however, will do nothing to boost the number of people who have any money to spend. In fact, if you follow this line of thinking to its absurd end, the population starves to death.

I'd like to believe that the reductio ad absurdum consequences won't come to pass, but to ensure it doesn't there has to be an alternative. So again I ask: how does the free market fix an economy that doesn't provide enough jobs to support a robust middle class? We may not be at that point yet, but the Times article suggests we're heading in that direction. So what the hell is the answer?

Might we have to rethink our national obsession with the totally free market? Might we have to acknowledge that a free market is all well and good, but that the free market might not be entirely compatible with our overall national well-being?

SF Giants 2012 World Series champs!

Congratulations!

Religion and politics are immiscible

George Mourdock, Indiana Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, was quoted in the New York Times thusly:

“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,” Mr. Mourdock said. “And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

This is about as straightforward a statement of the candidate's, and his party's, priorities as has ever been made.

What's troubling is not just the party's unyielding insistence on the primacy of the rights of the unborn over the rights of the mother. Pregnancy can trigger tremendously fraught ethical issues pitting the health and even the survival of the unborn child against that of the mother. Well-meaning people can disagree on which of them should be given greater protection by society.

Republicans, though, don't give even short shrift to the possibility that a pregnant woman's health or survival might take precedence under some circumstances. That possibility doesn't even seem to merit discussion.

However, let's put aside the Republican Party's inflexible dogmatism on that subject, and turn instead to a different kind of orthodoxy that Mourdock's remarks embody.

After getting hammered for his comments, made during a debate, the candidate clarified his position:

“God creates life, and that was my point,” Mr. Mourdock said. “God does not want rape, and by no means was I suggesting that he does.”

His original remarks don't support the "God wants rape" misinterpretation, though it is tiresomely predictable that the remarks would be misinterpreted in that way. I take Mourdock's clarification at face value. It is entirely consistent with his debate comments.

And therein lies the problem.

What no one is willing to point out is just how disempowering Mourdock's position is.

The corollary to "something that God intended to happen" is "something that man has no business affecting, or even power to affect".

Mourdock, by the way, is hardly alone in espousing this belief that God is the ultimate decision-maker. This belief isn't even the sole property of the Republican party: millions of U.S. citizens of both major parties hold it.

They don't care, unfortunately, that this belief is profoundly irresponsible. What it amounts to is throwing all problems into God's hands.

I hardly think that any conception of God since at least the time of Jesus lends itself to the kind of thoroughgoing passivity and helplessness that Mourdock's position mandates. Making God imponderable and dictatorial is hardly flattering to any deity worthy of the name.

What kind of God do you worship, Mr. Mourdock?

More to the point, is your conception of God compatible with a pluralistic society in which freedom of and from religion is guaranteed?

You see, your conception of God calls into question whether you can possibly be trusted to craft legislation meant to address problems that the rest of us don't believe God will address. Even any number of people who believe God exists are uncomfortable leaving mundane Earthly matters in His hands: they believe that they must take responsibility for their own lives and the effect those lives have on the world.

The only way of life that is consistent with Mourdock's point of view is one that makes human beings absolutely subordinate to God, and that threatens Old Testament-style judgment on humanity if it does not elect such subordination.

Even if you agree with Mourdock, you have a problem in that the United States was not established to be that kind of nation. The United States was founded on a bet that no faith had a monopoly on truth (or salvation). That's a concept embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and what no one I've seen has noticed — or at least has been willing to point out — is that Mourdock's vision is completely incompatible with that concept.

Ergo, I claim that Mourdock is philosophically unfit to serve in the federal government in any capacity. His conception of existence, making God a primary actor in all aspects of existence, means he would be unwilling, maybe even unable, to make the best efforts necessary to craft workable solutions to our nation's problems. His fatalism would be fatal to us.

Either humanity takes responsibility for its fate, or it doesn't.

The United States cannot afford to keep electing people to public office who don't believe that our fate rests in our own hands.

The banality of our news

I read with great interest a piece by Adam B. Ellick entitled "My 'Small Video Star' Fights for Her Life". It's about Malala Yousafzai, the fourteen-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot by Taliban troglodytes for the effrontery of seeking an education.

It's maddening to contemplate people whose mindset is so warped that seeking an education is blasphemous. The kind of world to which such fanatics would deliver us is unthinkably repugnant. If we, as a species, give in to these proudly bigoted men who embrace ignorance and murder in the name of their religious "devotion", we as a species deserve to go extinct — and we will.

But that's not why I'm writing this. No, the reason for this piece is that once I was done reading Ellick's touching remembrance of his experiences interviewing Yousafzai and her father in 2009, I meandered back up the Web page to see if there were links to related articles. What I found was that the Times' Lede blog was focusing heavily on the Lance Armstrong doping scandal.

Apparently something happened today in connection with Armstrong, I don't know what. After reading Ellick's piece, I don't care. In fact, I find it impossible imagining ever caring about Armstrong's travails again.

On the one hand, we have the story of a courageous young woman who symbolizes the hopes of who knows how many young women in Pakistan, and probably around the world, who can only dream of being educated, who can only dream of the chance at improving their lot. On the other hand, we have a guy who, until recently, rode a bike for a living.

Nothing against Armstrong or his vocation, but the fact that his woes dominate the headlines is sad. We are more interested in a sports figure whose immediate relevance to the lot of mankind is nil, than in a girl whose personal struggle encapsulates one of the most basic and most important conflicts humanity faces: the battle between intolerant reactionaries who believe their cherished world-view is under siege from modernity, and the rest of us.

Where the hell are our priorities?

Live music

I used to go to live music shows all the time. It wasn't a regular thing with me: I didn't go just to go out. But whenever an artist I liked, or even one I only sort of liked, or even one about which I was curious, came to town, I'd generally head out to wherever he/she/they were playing — nearly always a small club, and almost never anyplace that held more than a thousand people — and enjoy the night out.

As the years went by and I got busier at work, I went out less, but I never stopped altogether. In the last few years, though, I can count the number of times I've seen live music on one hand.

Every so often I've wondered what changed. Certainly a contributing factor has been age: I'm more easily worn out, I'm more jaded than I was when I was twenty-five or thirty. An unexpected but not unwelcome shift in my interests toward reading has also taken its toll. I'm also a lot less connected to the music scene than I was (though I was never an insider or even an exceptionally well-informed music maven) — again, due to changing circumstances. And frankly, straitened financial circumstances have played an outsized role in my entertainment decisions.

Yet none of these explains my reluctance to attend the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, the amazing and free three-day open-air music festival sponsored by an astonishingly generous philanthropist, the late Warren Hellman, that is chock-full of musicians I love. It took my abortive attempt to catch Conor Oberst this afternoon to make me understand the change in my habits.

For me, music is a communion. It's a means of releasing emotional energy that otherwise is inexpressible. The thing is, as I've gotten older, I've gotten more sensitive to the intrusions represented by other people. And those intrusions disrupt the communion.

It's not that people, by and large, are trying to ruin my enjoyment. They can't help that their polite request for me to move aside so they can get through the crowd shatters the delicate sense of contentment the band had managed to induce in me. They don't mean for their (generally insipid) conversations to keep me from losing myself in my favorite song. It's not their fault that I listen harder than they do to music.

The people jamming the Rooster Stage (I think) this afternoon were enjoying Oberst, I don't doubt. It's just that all the things they were doing while they were enjoying his performance were driving me insane. The incessant chatter (can you really be listening to the music while you're jawing away?), the choking cigarette smoke, the jostling — it all made any effort to sink myself into Oberst's music a bad joke. And if I couldn't lose myself in his music, why was I there? I own his albums. I don't need to see him (especially as a tiny dot hundreds of yards away) to enjoy listening to him. My attempt to enjoy his performance amounted to standing on the grass with sore feet and a burgeoning cough from the damned smoking all around me. And the same story holds true, in slightly different form, at an indoor performance at a club.

I'm old enough that I will no longer suffer a mediocre experience at a live show (however stellar the actual performance is) simply to be able to say that I was there. And my definition of a mediocre experience is, the music didn't transport me to a happier, more exhilarating place. That won't happen if other people keep intruding on my attention, making me notice them rather than the performer(s).

At last, I understand why I hardly see live music any more.