Jesse responded to my post about the curious squeamishness about patriotism and the flag on the political and cultural left by mentioning that in the 70's the Grateful Dead were big into the idea that they were an American band, and their public personas involved a lot of flag iconography and "mutant patriotism." I responded by saying that this trend had always made me feel a little weird, like they were just pandering to the white baseball cap kids who had put me off the Dead in the first place, but that flags were all over the late 60's / early 70's counterculture: Hendrix's rendition of the anthem, Peter Fonda's helmet, etc.; certainly more than today. Jesse replied that "the more I think about it, the whole 'America is beautiful, man' philosophy was pretty central to Kerouac and Ginsberg (who was way into Whitman)."

Good point. It's interesting to see how unabashedly folks who were, if anything, more radical than many of us middlebrow modern leftists embraced the flag and everything that came with it--or, more accurately, made something new out of it. (This will be the only good thing I'll say about the baby boomers today.) And I can't help but think that this had something to do with their education. Wrongheaded as the mainstream views about America may have been in the 50's, it's clear that just as the ill-gotten prosperity they protested allowed the boomers to have the freedom to engage in political and cultural insurgency, so did the America-is-great conformism of their education nevertheless have an effect--mostly positive, I think--on their thinking. While it doesn't seem all that weird for these paragons of the counterculture to be talking about how great America is and hitting the road, it does seem weird when contrasted with the total lack of America-can-be-kinda-neat attitudes among the kids who were raised by said paragons and their disciples. We'd never wave a flag to save our life, and the only hitting-the-road we do is done out of a weird sense of kitch. And this seems undeniably due to the fact that the boomers decided that educating us with any love of America or the American system would be conservative and repressive and like that (c.f. "The Language Police"). And while I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing ("Why're all them blacks and Mexicans in Jimmy's textbook?"), I do think it's something we should overcome if we desire political efficacy. Rebellion makes it easier to evolve a political consciousness, but it's certainly possible even in the absence of something to rebel against.

For a good example of this contrast and the problems thereof, let's look at the guy who sprung to mind when I read Jesse's response: Willie Nelson. Here's a guy who comes out of Austin (a current HQ of the counterculture) and revolutionizes country music, smokes a lot of pot and is pretty much a bumming-around musician, but he manages to both retain credibility with a large swatch of Americans and the elite while also talking honestly about his love for America and supporting the Democrats. This guy is a model of what we're looking for, patriotism-wise.

But let's contrast him with another noted Austinian, one who revolutionized comedy and was a happy exemplar of the counterculture: Bill Hicks. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Bill, just like I love a lot of cultural heroes who would be way uncomfortable with the flag. (Which flag Hicks has hilariously proposed should be revised to show your parents fucking.) But I don't really like the kneejerk anti-Americanism that seems to be such a part of his act. Bill has an undeniable love for humanity, but the problem with this broadness is that it overlooks the details and he ends up hating a lot of actual people--and yeah, it's hatred. Some people regard this attitude as a brave thing or an honest thing, but to me, the far more brave thing would be to question this attitude among the people who agree with him and find a way to actually bring in the people he hates. I love a lot of his jokes, but his cultural critiques can be pretty shallow and needlessly absolutist. The whole "you people are sheep!" thing. Like, here's a bit from a review:

Hicks scripted a rousing fight song with the intent of impugning everything unholy and dangerous in the world of capitalism. Foremost on the list was the evil known as laziness. Not laziness in the casually procrastinating sense, but rather the much graver error of cultural indolence. Essentially, people who've grown weary of their power to discern submit to the demands of fictional authoritative figures (i.e. media) who dictate their tastes, interests, opinions, and beliefs.

What results from this "dumbing down" is a culture of people who have forgotten how to judge correctly. A group of people-- some of whom are reading this review-- that find themselves on the wet end of a degenerate culture. A culture erected from the cancerous mutation of hype machines, spin, and an elitist social sect designed to capitalize on the acquiescence of its members. These same idle sheep find themselves flocking to inferior merchandise simply to nestle snuggly within an arbitrary hipness quotient, and because of the concomitant satisfaction in rallying behind mediocre products with strong PR.

Icky. That puts me off way more than a guy waving a flag right now. I dunno. I guess Hicks' attitude is better than that of folks who agree with Toby Keith, but it still seems like it's missing something important.

A good patriotism, to me--one that looks past all the current signifiers of the flag toward what it could become--is not unlike a good Christianity, a Voeglin-esque one. Hicks, like a lot of lefty activists and cultural heroes, have a kind of idealistic utopianism that regards anything less than utopia as debased, and anything debased as bad and not worth bothering with. But if a true Christianity would contend with the now because paradise has not come yet, then a good patriotism would recognize the good in the American system and the way that mostly-shared set of beliefs unites us, even if we look like dumb rednecks or whatever. It would be able to look past all the things other people say about it and make something new.

(incidentally, Salon published my letter about that, along with some pretty giggle-worthy activist griping about the Gitlin interview)
posted by Mike B. at 12:24 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Newsweek's cover story on California this week absolutely nails it. I've got to give a lot of respect to them and the authors for writing a piece firmly grounded, for once, not in conventional wisdom but in strongly established public policy scholarship--although in this case, the two may finally have dovetailed. Here are the key paragraphs, which I think I might have cheered out loud at, following an analysis of how fucked Gov. Davis is:

Davis isn’t entirely to blame. He is the perfect distillation of the dysfunctional California political system that produced him—a system that itself is a laboratory specimen of the iron law of unintended consequences. For a quarter century (since Prop 13 [which put a cap on property taxes and is regarded as the start of the "tax revolt"]) California voters, following a tradition that stretches back to Hiram Johnson, have been trying (or so they thought) to place more power directly in the hands of the people. Through the increasingly obsessive use of ballot initiatives, they have imposed strict term limits and rigid budgetary-spending caps, and have written rules on everything from the rights of crime victims to the use of state pension funds to the legal rights of immigrants.

The ironic result, however, hasn’t been more democracy, but less; not more trust in government and leadership, but less. The elected legislature and the governor are often bystanders in a system on “autopilot,” says author Peter Schrag. When they run for office they face spending limits. But initiatives do not, which of course makes them a lucrative source of income for consultants who dream them up...Ballot measures are where the real action is—except that the governor and the legislature still have responsibility for fashioning a budget.

And the legislature, observers say, is composed of people who often, quite literally, don’t know what they are doing. Under the state’s strict term-limits law, none can amass the experience necessary to understand even the rudiments of governing a state with an economy bigger than that of France. “It’s frightening how little these people know,” says GOP consultant Sal Russo...

All the ignorance and churn leaves someone else with all the power: not the people, not the pols, but the consultants and lobbyists who fill the plush office buildings that surround Capitol Park in Sacramento, or who work out of San Francisco or L.A. Amid the coming and going, they are the immutable ones, plucking candidates from obscurity (as long as they have cash upfront or rich friends); lobbying for or against legislation (usually the latter); hauling in their rake-off from placing TV ads in a state where media are everything and door-to-door campaigning is impossible.

(snip)

As a result, the activist fringes are in control, since they can turn out the vote in low-turnout elections. The result is even more apathy, even lower turnout—and even more power for the unelected powers that be. Predictably, Davis blames the budget mess and his own problems on antitax Republicans. The GOP, for its part, blames greedy public-employee unions. The voters despise them all. “I’m afraid the whole political system here has lost its credibility,” says Dr. Gloria Duffy, head of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

I hate referendums. They're the political equivalent of letting a five-year-old make the rules for professional baseball. "There should be lasers! And trampolines!" Sure, they make the political process more exciting, but they don't really result in greater control by the people; studies show that something like 95% of referendums are won by whatever side spends more money. And referendums are often financed--as many California ones were--by one or two rich individuals. And the rich overriding the political system is not my idea of democracy.

It just reveals an absolute inability to tell the difference between democracy as a kneejerk concept and American democracy, which is inevitably placed in the context of the Republic. Look, the founding fathers were smart guys. They didn't create the Senate or the Supreme Court in order to protect their riches or to oppress the working class. They did it because they had a justified fear of the mob. The collective will of the people can be pretty dumb sometimes. For an easy example, think about a referendum that said the tax rate would have to be lowered to 0%. I bet that would pass, because who wants to pay taxes? But then the state would have zero money, and they wouldn't be able to pay for...well, anything. And sure, I guess we could all organize our own private police forces and drive our garbage to the nearest cliff and dump it off, but we don't really want to, nor should we. America is founded on the idea of collective governance, and if you don't like that, well, why don't you move to Russia, you goddamn post-capitalist. If you don't understand that one of the purposes of government is to make responsible decisions for the good of the republic that the people wouldn't make given pure individual self-interest, well, then you probably shouldn't be voting.

And I hate term limits. Yeah, it sounds like a good idea at first, because it can be so hard to get bad incumbents out, but there are better ways around that. Because then you think about it for a second. And you think: hmm, well, government can't really function if it has to completely reinvent itself every, oh, 4 years. That's not gonna work; programs and initiatives and departments have to be continuous to be effective. So if we're kicking out the elected bastards every four years, who is going to govern? Well, obviously, the unelected bastards. And me, I'd rather have the power rest with someone I can oust. I'm glad that movement seems to have lost momentum, but it sucks that it's so firmly implanted in some states.

Look, I'm not arguing this from a leftist perspective. I'm arguing this from the perspective of someone who believes in the American system. And I'll admit it: these measures have become popular and effective because the system itself seems to have some major blockages in it (much like how litigation seems to have superceded legislation as a means of forcing social change because the legislative process itself seems far less responsive to a sense of justice). Hell, you can see all the leftist/libertarian medical marijuana initiatives as a good sign that most of us have decided that pot should be legal and we'd really like the legislatures to get on that, please. But, like so many neo-conservative ideas (c.f. "drown it in the bathtub"), the supposedly "populist" combo of initiatives and term limits is a deeply cynical one that only makes the system worse. Want to argue with me? Well, then tell me what else fucked up California besides cynical systemic demagoguery.

So I'm glad to see this idea get some mainstream traction: "The ironic result, however, hasn’t been more democracy, but less; not more trust in government and leadership, but less." If we can start with debasing initiatives, then maybe we can move on to a greater understanding of how the system should work, and really make it better instead of just wrecking it.

posted by Mike B. at 12:14 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Speaking of patriotism, Paul Krugman has a great column summarizing some of the latest administration bullshit and bringing up the whole "She's a spy! Oops, did we just say she's a spy?" thing.

More on patriotism shortly...

posted by Mike B. at 11:22 AM 0 comments

Harm'll appreciate this one. In reference to the forged yellow cake evidence:

“Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries,” one IAEA official told NEWSWEEK. How did they do it? “Google,” said the official. The IAEA ran the name of the Niger foreign minister through the Internet search engine and discovered that he was not in office at the time the document was signed.

Google: useful for intelligence agencies and mailing list members alike...

posted by Mike B. at 11:20 AM 0 comments

Monday, July 21, 2003

QV points us to a new Jonathan Lethem story, which is actually an excerpt from his upcoming novel, The Fortress of Solitude. It's on the new Yorker site, so it'll be gone in a week.

It is, as Mike Reynolds promised, about race. Much more on this later.

Beginning of one section:

The last thing Dylan Ebdus’s mother, Rachel, had taught him, before she left Dylan’s father and vanished from their home, was the word “gentrification.”

End of same section:

Dylan Ebdus, one-man integration unit.

Very very exciting. Go read.

posted by Mike B. at 6:30 PM 0 comments

Hey, I'm kind of Gitlin-y, aren't I?

- "But it's a huge failure of imagination if someone can't imagine why someone would support Bush. Since roughly half the population did...everybody on the left should go listen to Republicans and try to figure out what makes them tick. This is across-the-board advice. I would tell people, "Good God, most people are not like you!"...Parochialism is never a platform for understanding, and this is another kind of parochialism. One can understand and not understand.

"This also requires understanding people who don't make sense: to understand, for example, how 50 percent of the population could be convinced that there was Iraqi involvement in 9/11. That's rationalist heresy. "

- "ANSWER is a cult. It's a tightly organized sect that operates in the shadows and tries to bull its way into power."

- "It's obviously a lot harder now to make the case that there's no difference between the parties. I think it was a foolish case in the first place, but today all you have to do is say the words "John Ashcroft," "war in Iraq," to make it very, very difficult to make the claim that this is exactly what Al Gore would have done or even close to it. But there is a phenomenon in politics -- and the left isn't any more exempt from it than the right -- of cognitive dissonance, in which you bend the world, you hypnotize yourself into seeing the world in such a way as to make it unnecessary for you to rethink your first premises.

"So just as George Bush may well think that he found weapons of mass destruction, and most Americans think that there were Iraqis involved in 9/11, you'll find Greens who desperately cling to a falsehood about political reality which makes it unnecessary to rethink their premises."

- "If you shudder at the thought of power, you don't belong in politics. You can't emote your way to power, you can't moralize your way, you have to strategize your way to power."

- "The left is always ready for carnivorous action against one of its leaders. They're always ready to shred a standard-bearer if he or she fails to deliver the maximum. They're very quick to send somebody out the safe house of sainthood, because they've let them down."

One particular thing I'd like to take off on, though, is this:

The post-Nader left needs to be a patriotic left, and should be indignant at the thought that the corporate rich who are lining their pockets and keeping their kids out of the armed service are the real patriots and we're the outsiders. I think they're the outsiders, and we're the patriots, and we should be proud of it.

Walking around DC in November of 2001, when people went a little flag-crazy, I kept seeing American flags that had fallen off a truck or a pole, and I would pick them up and put them in my pocket and take them home and put them up somewhere, because that's what you're supposed to do with a flag--you're not supposed to let them touch the ground. And my companions thought this was deeply weird and not a little creepy; after all, it's the flag, and we leftists get a little uncomfortable around the flag (and prayer, but that's a different matter). Which is unfortunate. Gitlin's right: we do need to reclaim the idea that we're patriots just as much, if not more, than the right is, because it gives us the confidence in our actions and the acceptability of our ideas that the left so desperately needs. And that particular ickiness about the flag--which afflicts even practical leftists who have no qualms about power or working within the system--is a big part of what's holding us back from that goal.

The process we've engaged in over the last 40 years or so of reexamining our history and kind of collectively confirming in the intellectual community that said history is kinda fucked up has been a good thing, but it's unfortunate that it's led to such widespread anti-Americanism on the left. It seems like one of those "failures of imagination" that Gitlin talks about--a failure to separate a justifiable distrust of American nationalism and the authoritarians that exploit it from a justifiable love of the Republic and the American experiment. The hallmarks of the left--anti-authoritarianism, prioritizing civil liberties, localism, an intellectual approach to politics--are far more deeply rooted in American thought and government than in the Europeans who have made highbrow anti-Americanism so fashionable. We need to remember that: to remember that, despite the way the right twists American thought into American nationalism, and despite the horrible things that American nationalism has done throughout the history of the nation, expressing a leftist point of view is to express the point of view of not only a great number of living Americans, but a great number of our best and brightest. We must have confidence, and we must learn to love the things we know we love without guilt or distrust, and we must use that to kick those nationalist fuckers out of the seat of power of this great government of ours.

(n.b. I have written about Gitlin before)

posted by Mike B. at 6:12 PM 0 comments