A Web Undone 2

A Little Pessimism

2010-01-31T01:01:12Z

At this juncture, I think a little pessimism is not unhealthy. Health care, even in a watered down form, has not passed. We lost Massachusetts. The banks we bailed out are earning record bonuses. Everyone is nervous about losing one or more houses of Congress. The Justice Department is preparing to whitewash the authors of the torture memos. And our guy is still trying to "engage" the Republicans rather than obliterate them. A little grumbling from the base seems to be in order.

Latest Blow from the Supreme Court

2010-01-22T14:08:34Z

I am still trying to parse the Supreme Court's decision striking down corporate campaign spending limits. A bigger problem than how much money the corporations and unions have is that they are not representative of their constituents. The shareholders and employees have no voice and cannot express their political preferences, instead the officers and board use the corporation's vast wealth to amplify their own voice and silence all other members of the group. There should be less money in politics, but the fundamental problem here is allowing corporate leadership to hijack the voices of the citizenry. There is a reason corporations are called "special interests."

Politically Correct

2010-01-20T19:28:15Z

Once perhaps a witty riposte to liberal excess or hypocrisy, the term "political correctness" has devolved into a reflexive right-wing defense of unmerited privilege. To champion the rights of any but one's own insular clique, to uphold equal opportunity, to oppose the vilification of the weak or sick, to believe that even one's enemies should be treated humanely, to suggest that the government has a positive role to play in the welfare of society, all these are "politically correct."

Those who wield the label "politically correct" ironically represent the dominant strain of political thought in the country. Blame it on John Winthrop and Max Weber, who together gave us the notion that privilege is equivalent to merit. The recent banking crisis should have gone a long way toward shaking this faith, as our generation's "best and brightest" precipitated the country toward financial ruin. But no, neither this nor our bloated, expensive, and inefficient health care system will persuade the American people to express any concern over the fact that the foxes are in charge of the henhouse. After all, the fox is just behaving according to his nature, and suggesting any other fate for the poultry would be hopelessly politically correct.

The politically correct label, with its whiff of the Party and the commissar, is most offensive coming from the highly disciplined, ideologically rigid, and morally sanctimonious American right. They are the one's who would have us all hue to the tenets of their particular superstition (which even they do not observe) and would deny to others the rights they themselves enjoy.

So if we cannot retire the term politically correct, let us at least recognize it as the reflexive tribute privilege pays to virtue.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

They Also Serve

2010-01-18T11:22:11Z

We live in extraordinary times, if only we can lift our eyes from the press of the mundane long enough to see it. As I write, I have just finished reading a series of "tweets" broadcast by a friend in besieged Kabul, one of many friends in the international diplomatic/aid community working to ameliorate conditions in the most desperate places in the world.

Image via Wikipedia

Although I spent two years in the Peace Corps, I was always particularly impressed by my Peace Corps colleagues who went on to make careers of international service. Over the years, I have intermittently followed their careers as they narrowly cheated death from landmines in Zaire, tried to patch up Rwanda after the genocide, stimulated agricultural production in Mozambique, and tried to foster democracy in Afghanistan. And while I am amazed that Google can rescan the Haitian landscape within hours in order to give rescuers a detailed map of the devastation, I recognize that the key element in repairing the frayed edges of the international community is the people on the ground. With their unique blend of courage and compassion, they are my heroes.

John Milton, one of the most prodigious intellects of the seventeenth century, who played an active political part in one of England's greatest political upheavals, spent the latter part of his life confined to comparative inactivity by total blindness. Like Beethoven composing symphonies he could not hear, Milton dictated Paradise Lost from memory. In his sonnet On His Blindness, Milton wrote, "They also serve who only stand and wait." But among the vast majority of us who effectively "stand and wait," at least with respect to the world beyond our borders, let us have a moment's reflection for those who go forth and do, at their peril, and wish them a safe return.

Isaac Newton and the Tyranny of the Trivial

2010-01-17T23:54:16Z

A moment's reflection is enough to reveal that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the universe's longest running cosmic joke. No matter what puny efforts we make, in the end everything falls apart. Some may take comfort in the hope that in the ultimate hereafter the Divine Joker who inflicted the Second Law on us will make everything all right. In the meantime, we are confronted not merely with our eventual disintegration but also with the daily mess.

I hate the daily mess. I have never been good at dealing with it, and my failure to master the petty organizational details of my life has been a lifelong irritant. I am particularly irritated because I am quite aware that the petty organizational details of life can be mastered, at least in the short term on a day to day basis. Going to college really brought this home, since I spent four years rooming with someone who was not only scientifically brilliant (and amused himself in his spare time by picking up Chinese) but also impeccably organized. Since his homework was generally done before dinner, he could relax in the evening reading science fiction before going to bed at 9 p.m., about the time I was sweeping the mess off my desk so I could start working.

Nevertheless, perpetual optimist that I am, I spent today picking up, throwing out, and cleaning off in the oft repeated hope that if I established a baseline of tidiness and organization, at little maintenance would preserve order in my life. But I do not really believe it. I am still good at the flash of concentrated effort. (Not as good as I once was, but as good once as I ever was, as Toby Keith put it.) But the daily nit-picky, habit forming, regimen following discipline that maintains daily order, while I long to embrace it with my programs, checklists, reminders, planners, schedules, and calendars is as elusive to me as the glimmering girl to Aengus. Ben Franklin, why has thou forsaken me?

Something Old, Something New

2010-01-16T07:44:16Z

Once again the time has come to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type. As with most software upgrades, this one is more a matter of vanity than practicality. Version 4 was perfectly functional and more than satisfied my modest needs, but as with so much of human life, the restless desire for something new, the itch for the latest thing, invariably impels me toward an upgrade. (To be fair, the new interface is quite elegant and easy to use, although some have suggested that it is an unduly close imitation of rival WordPress.) Naturally, having insisted on upgrading, I fully expect my customizations to be lost, my feeds to break, and my plugins to be obsolete, so that I will be obliged to engage in a new round of creative destruction as I try to restore the meager design elements of my blog. So gentle reader, I ask that you bear with me patiently until we return to the predictable routine of ordinary blogging.

1,000 Ways to Say Nothing

2010-01-15T03:28:10Z

I wish I could remember who first observed that modern life has endowed with thousands of new ways to communicate and nothing more to say. At this moment, however, it seems particularly apropos. I finally decided to integrate my blog pages with the notes feed in my Facebook account. Some weeks ago, I displayed my twitter feed on my blog page. I have four private email accounts -- my own domain, gmail, yahoo, and hotmail -- plus a Google Wave account. I keep a list of public bookmarks on Del.icio.us. I am connected and integrated on my home computer, my laptop, my blog platform, and &mdash God help me — my iPhone, which I tote around from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and not because I am making phone calls. I have word processors, CMS systems, text editors, version control systems, and email clients. True, I get a certain perverse pleasure out of setting all this up and keeping it running; it's a hobby. But to what end? Shakespeare was able to accomplish more with a quill pen in a day than the Internet in all its digital glory will in a lifetime.

Blogging to Happiness

2010-01-14T04:31:49Z

I have been a big fan of Gretchen Rubin ever since reading her slim biography of Winston Churchill and her somewhat less slim biography of John F. Kennedy. At present, I am about half way through her latest book: The Happiness Project, in which she chronicles a year spent thinking and trying ways to live a happier life. One thing which brought Rubin more happiness was starting a blog, also called the Happiness Project. Given that one of Rubin's principles of happiness could be paraphrased as the journey is more important than the destination (though the destination counts!), it is not surprising that one of the ways she found greater happiness was through her blog.

America Launched on a Sea of Words

2010-01-03T02:32:40Z

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ronald Reagan had a great gift for reducing powerful ideas to shallow platitudes. So perhaps it is no surprise that, like some verbal reverse alchemist turning gold into lead, he could debase the Puritan fear of accountability to a stern deity to a bland notion of modern celebrity. When John Winthrop spoke of a City on a Hill, it was equal parts aspiration and admonition. Yes, he intended the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be an example of godliness to others, but he was also firmly persuaded that if the Colony abandoned the the path of righteousness, that God could make it an example of another sort after the fashion of, say, Sodom and Gomorrah. Reagan, in contrast, basically viewed the "City on a Hill" as a variation of the Magic Kingdom. Reagan's platitudes are just one of many ways in which modern America has watered down and caricatured the Puritans' high minded, if sometimes oppressive, ideals.

None of which is to do justice to the bitingly funny and deeply compassionate narrative of life in early America recounted by Sarah Vowell in the Wordy Shipmates. Vowell has a keen understanding both of how radically different the Puritan outlook was from our modern sensibilities and yet how deeply ingrained Puritan notions of their special place in the world are in modern America, with both comic and disastrous consequences. And in the end, some of the characters Vowell is most fond of are the rebels and misfits - Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams -- who were forced out of the Massachusetts to Rhode Island, where they established a precedent for religious tolerance that has been a significant thread in American history ever since.

Contrary to today's secularists, Roger Williams was not concerned with limiting the state's power in matters of conscience because he was irreligious. Rather, he was, if anything, too religious, so scrupulous about his own salvation that at times he would refuse to pray even in the company of his wife and children less they tarnish the purity of his thoughts. Williams recognized, however, that the tyranny of the state in religious matters corrupts both religion and government. False doctrines can be imposed by force, but more importantly religion comes to serve secular ends.

No account of early New England would be complete without confronting the colonists' encounters with the Native Americans. Vowell acknowledges that the early epidemics that wiped out huge numbers of the native population were inevitable once initial contact was made between Indians and Europeans. However, she also observes that the subsequent genocide was not, and she vividly describes the incineration of virtually the entire Pequot tribe - men, women, and children - in one monstrous conflagration as a horrifying precedent for the centuries of massacres to come.

For any person willing to take a lighthearted look at early America, and its underside, the Wordy Shipmates is a volume not to be missed.

View all my reviews >>

Ripeness is All: Zorba the Greek

2009-12-16T03:57:54Z

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The only universal experiences are pain and death. Those of
us who are lucky experience a minimum of the former and put off the
latter as long as possible. Sadly, our chances of escaping pain and
evading death are not solely determined by the caprices of an
indifferent nature but are also subject to the folly and more
significantly the cruelty of our own verminous little species. At the
outside, the Marquis de Sade was so convinced of the universality of
cruelty that he made it a principle that cruelty was not only the
shortest route to pleasure, power, fortune, and fame, but itself and
inherently sensual and gratifying exercise. Though in our sunnier
moments we may doubt the wisdom of the Good Marquis' observations, the
dismal history of the past century alone -- an unparalleled
century of mass murder, global conflict, and exquisite torture that
would make a medieval inquisitor blush -- is enough to bolster
the arguments of even the most faint-hearted pessimist. The recent
folly in Iraq, followed by the embrace of torture, secret prisons, and
extraordinary rendition, while it may be a peccadillo compared to the
monstrous crimes of the mid-century past, nevertheless should quiet
any Pollyanna who would exempt us from the general disease of human
cruelty. So is there a reason, as Monte Python so memorably put it,
to "always look on the bright side of life."

Zorba the Greek is an extraordinarily life-affirming story. It
also has an rich appreciation for human folly, cruelty, and
narrow-mindedness. Amidst frigid aristocrats, mad monks, brutish
villagers, and vain adventurers, Zorba stands like a rock of conjoined
masculine power and compassion. A former soldier, he has had his
fill of killing. (An inveterate serial romantic, he has certainly
not lost his interest in women.) As a mine boss, he is first to
share the danger of the miners; as a man, he is the first to stand
against the village on behalf of a persecuted woman. Along with his
backer, a mine owner tormented by a bookish vision of Eastern
mysticism, Zorba cheerfully runs one enterprise after another into the
ground with great gusto and joie de vivre, literally extracting every
ounce of pleasure from wine, women and song, for he is a master of the
Greek instrument the Santuri and is enthralled by dance. Even as the
shadow of the First World War looms, Zorba is undaunted. Better than
his bookish companion or the cloddish villagers, Zorba understands not
only pain and death but life, pleasure, and love. For this, he towers
above the Lilliputians who surround him.

View all my reviews >>

Stranger Things . . .

2009-11-23T05:47:51Z

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sex, Space, and Salvation

For ECD.

Jubal Harshaw is a grumpy old man who surrounds himself with beautiful women and an electric fence in an Edenic retreat in the Poconos in
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. This is a good thing,
since he has an uncanny talent for irritating almost anybody, redeemed
by a keen wit and a nose for the sweet spot in a bargain. When there
is blood in the water, Harshaw smells it. The key clue, among quite a
few, that this balding contrarian is a stand in for author Heinlein
himself is that he largely makes his living by spontaneously dictating
short stories. Although his periodic pontifications on the nature and
history of almost anything gives the game away almost as easily.
Harshaw, among other roles, serves as the chorus expounding upon the
themes of sex, freedom, stories, and salvation that comprise the major
themes of the book. The book is technologically uninspired but
conceptually bold; the space motif liberates the author by allowing
him to imagine a radically asexual Apollonian immortal consciousness
from Mars with which to contrast short-lived, sex-crazed humanity.

The criticism of a classic, even in such a typically underrated genre
as science fiction, is not to be undertaken without trepidation. In
this case, Heinlein's magnum opus wears rather better than perhaps his
second best-known book, Starship Troopers, in which hyperactive
soldiers in futuristic body armor combat giant "bugs" for mastery of
the universe after taking control of the earth. Much science fiction,
and Heinlein's work is no exception, is rather glandular, driven by
the kind of testosterone soaked combination of lust and aggression
most typical of young men in late adolescence. The question is
whether there is anything more.

For all his vaunted conservatism in other matters, Heinlein's Stranger
in a Strange land is an unqualified endorsement of free love, at
least, ahem, so long as it takes place between men and women, in fact,
the more women the better. Big busted, round hipped, conventionally
sexy women, mind you, although there is the occasional deviation, such
as the carnival woman who is tattooed with religious imagery from head
to toe. She becomes one of the central female figures in the book, a
kind of sideshow earth mother who heads up the cult of Mars.

And why not, after all, since the carnival is also one of the central
themes of the book? Not the Mardi Gras, but the fairground sideshow.
The book is clear that it regards all organized religion as variations
on the sideshow, scams run for suckers. The twist is that the book's
hero, Michael Valentine Smith, may be expropriating religion's carny
methods to lead mankind to a higher truth. Smith, abandoned on Mars
as a baby and reared by Martians, possesses uncanny telekinetic
powers, bodily self control, and mental discipline beyond the wildest
aspirations of an Eastern mystic. In addition, the Martian culture he
comes from is one in which communitarianism is so advanced, indeed so
intrinsic, that notions of money and property do not exist and radical
self-sacrifice is as normal as self-preservation in our society. On
the parched surface of Mars, interdependence and intimacy is
symbolized through the sharing of water; offering a stranger a drink
makes him (or her) a lifelong blood-brother, or rather, water brother.

But the root of the power of the Man from Mars lies in a total
comprehension and mental assimilation of ideas and matter under the
rubric of "grokking". "Grok," which at least among the readers of
science fiction has passed into the common vocabulary, signifies
variously completely understanding an idea, experiencing a feeling,
assimilating an object. When the Man from Mars reads an
encyclopedia as part of his early education, he "groks" it by
simultaneously memorizing, understanding, and expounding upon it
within days. He "groks" objects so thoroughly that he can either move
or disintegrate them at will, thus making him an unusually difficult
target for those who wish him ill, to no avail since he is also able
to "grok" their intentions while they are well out of range.

In the end, it is no wonder that Stranger in a Strange Land became a
kind of "Hippie Bible" (See Wikipedia) when it came out in the
sixties: organized religion is revealed as a con game; free love is
the order of the day; property is a primitive evil; self-discipline
and self-sacrifice are the paramount values. For all its tang of
adolescent sexuality, Stranger in a Strange Land leaves one with the
sense that humans need to be more loving, giving, and tolerant toward
one another, because no one else is going to do it for us. In the
end, there are worse words to live by than Jubal Harshaw's favorite
toast, "To our noble selves, damned few of us left."

View all my reviews >>

Law and the Long War: The Subversion of Democracy

2009-11-08T05:26:09Z

It is a shibboleth of the Right that anyone more liberal than Rush Limbaugh is a "traitor" to his country; the egregious Ann Coulter even wrote an entire book about liberal "Treason." The shrill rhetoric and exaggerated alarums over the bogeymen of the Left betray a deep-seated unease about American democracy, however. Modern American democracy is committed above all to the orderly transfer of power through stable institutions designed to express the will of the People. Secondarily, American democracy is committed to the proposition, familiar to every student who ever dipped into the Federalist Papers, that no one locus of power is ever to be trusted completely. A government of limited powers can best be preserved by encouraging each of the three branches of government to jealously guard its prerogatives and ensure that no other branch overstepped its authority.

In contrast, modern American conservatism, as repeatedly expressed in the eras of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Younger, is infatuated with the cult of the man on the white horse, the strong central executive who will put all to rights because he is not bound by the petty considerations of law or morals that bind lesser mortals. (See Bombing of Cambodia, Watergate, Iran-Contra, War on Terror.) The Party panders in the pursuit of power to the racaille of the American South, who have historically been the pillar of slavery, segregation, States Rights, Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy and who now form the electoral core of the rump of the party of Lincoln, (Teddy) Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Rockefeller, but the Republican Party does not fundamentally believe in fulfilling the will of the people. Rather, theirs is the paternalism of the plantation owner and the corporate executive, the "Quality" who will ensure that the teeming swarthy masses do not threaten white privilege in America, endowed upon the white man by grace of God, the gun, and the smallpox. The alternative would be to recognize equality and welcome participation in the political process by all Americans. (Anyone who doubts the overtly exclusionary tendency of the contemporary, conservative American South need only review the disproportionately anti-Obama vote of white southerners compared to the overall vote in their own states and to whites in other parts of the country, or anecdotally the interview footage of white Southerners in Kentucky before the election.)

The first two chapters of Benjamin Wittes' Law and the Long War starkly illustrate this modern tendency in the modern politics of the Republican Party. Proceeding under a theory of the "unitary executive," the Bush Administration sought to consolidate the emergency powers it had assumed immediately after the crisis of 9/11 on a permanent "wartime" basis. In his first chapter, "The Law of September 10," Wittes seeks to show not only that there was some continuity between the anti-terrorism efforts of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, but also that there were some theoretical precedents dating from World War II (or earlier) for the Bush Administration's insistence that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and that it needed no authorization from Congress to regulate its treatment of those captured in the wake of 9/11. In particular, Wittes points out that Guantanamo had been used prior to 9/11 for the indefinite preventive detention of HIV positive illegal immigrants, and that the Clinton administration had pioneered on a limited scale the practice of extraordinary rendition, or "outsourced torture," that later became a staple of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." Wittes concedes that the Bush Administration was totally lacking in legal justification for its actions in only one area: its decision to disregard the jurisdiction of the FISA Court over the conduct of electronic surveillance.

Wittes explains the readiness of the Bush Administration to disregard legal and moral norms in pursuit of the so-called "War on Terror" precisely in terms of the Bush Administration's public insistence on casting the conflict almost entirely in wartime terms and its concomitant contempt for any argument that legal guidance or Congressional authority was relevant to prosecuting the conflict.

While Wittes' attempts to show legal continuity and at least theoretical justification for the Bush Administration's disregard of legal and moral norms in its prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" seem a little strained, he is quite persuasive on the legislative and political dynamics that guided the Administration's actions. Wittes' formulation has almost the ring of a Greek tragedy. Persuaded in their hubris that any request for legislative authorization from the Congress would diminish the inherent power of the "unitary executive," the (Vice) President's men, particularly David Addington, strongly resisted any suggestion that they ask the Congress for legislation to regulate the custody of terror suspects and adjudication of their cases. Wittes identifies three important consequences of the Administration's arrogance. First, they failed to recognize that whatever small quantum of executive authority might be lost to the Congress, the authority of the executive is vastly magnified when bolstered by statute, as Justice Jackson long ago pointed out. Second, they failed to recognize that the supine Congress — Republican or Democrat — was ready to give them anything they requested. Third, they underestimated the willingness of the Supreme Court to step in and fill the vacuum left when the Administration bypassed the Congress, resulting in a series of highly embarrassing Supreme Court decisions that in fact undermined executive prerogative and enhanced the reach of the Court.

In Wittes' view, the normal dynamic of American democracy should be that the President proposes, the Congress legislates, the President executes, and the Courts, if necessary, adjudicate. The Bush Administration turned this dynamic on its head. The President, recognizing no limit on his authority, was brought up short by the Court, and then sought to control the damage by seeking legislation from the Congress to limit or overturn the Court's rulings. Such a course of action is not only woefully inefficient, but it drastically undermines the Administration's moral authority for any action it might take, particularly when the rebuke comes from a notoriously conservative Supreme Court. It is one thing to take action with the full endorsement of the nation's deliberative and legislative bodies; it is quite another to suffer public rebuke from the nation's highest court and then to be seen frantically manipulating a rubber-stamp Congress in order to proceed with a course of action that has been roundly condemned. Moreover, proceeding in such a manner is a course of action that, once the immediate fires had been extinguished, could only be undertaken by men with a fundamental contempt for representative democracy and a complete lack of concern for the damage they might do to our institutions and our freedom.

Software Find of the Week

2009-11-02T02:19:41Z

Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani's todo.txt-cli, which I learned about via hunch. com is a very cool LInux command-line utility that allows one to quickly write, update, and maintain a todo list on the command-line of a terminal. With small adaptations, it can be displayed on your desktop using Conky and accessed by iPhone via a webserver.

The Promise of Infocard

2009-10-28T05:23:02Z

Information Cards, also referred to by the moniker InfoCards or the Microsoft brand name Cardspace, have been a long-promised (and little implemented) addition to the identity and security landscape for some time now. The idea is essentially that they would work like a personal digital ID card that would securely sign you in to any site you to which you belong. Rather than memorizing dozens of usernames and passwords, you could just plug in your handy digital ID and 'Open Sesame." In general, Infocards are touted as being more secure than passwords because they are highly encrypted. To keep your card safe, you would only need to know one password, stored locally on your computer or thumb drive, so that your co-worker or other random person couldn't pirate your card. The piece of software used to store and deploy InfoCards is known as an Identity Selector; there is a new one available that works with Linux and Firefox 3.5 called openinfocard.

Don't Miss the Showdown in Chicago!

2009-10-26T04:57:47Z