{ ich bin ein oberliner }

The Move

2011-03-30T14:28:00.002-05:00

Here we go, folks! From now on Ich Bin Ein Oberliner is at oberliner.net/blog

See you there!

Lawrence O'Donnell is Wrong

2011-03-30T09:42:00.000-05:00

Look, I like Lawrence O'Donnell. Sure, he's a slow talker and occasionally a bit repetitive, hammering home on issues whose relevance seems dubious at best, but I like him. He reminds me of a grandfather—a grandfather who tells me about the issues of the day and beats up (in very grandfatherly way) on people who generally deserve it. I think I even like him more than Keith Olbermann, with whom I had a very complicated relationship (call me, Keith, you handsome devil).

But last night (or this morning, when I watched the video online), he made the curious pronouncement that Rand Paul's position on Libya was incoherent. In general, when I hear that Republican X's position on issue Y is incoherent, I say something to the effect of, no shit. (Deficits are bad; let's cut taxes! Freedom is good, unless you're a woman, or gay, or me! The middle class is in trouble; let's shovel money into the mouths of corporations and the really, really, really rich! I could do this all day.)

Rand Paul is confused about a lot of things, but his position on Libya—roughly, we should have intervened, but President Obama's action was unconstitutional as it didn't get a declaration or war or authorization of military force from congress—is not only understandable, but true.

(Before I continue, I should probably tell you that Rand Paul is something of an ass, and please God let this be the only time I find myself defending him.)

If you've been reading my blog (hi, mom!), then you know that I've had my doubts about Libya. But despite the thorny issues involved, our intervention there was morally necessary. If you're a deontologist, then to you I say good for you. Also, I say that the principle that the United States should try to prevent massacre is applicable in Libya. If you're a consequentialist, then to you I say good luck with that. Also, I say that the moral mathematics worked out for intervention in Libya.

I say this, and I also say that Congress abdicated its duty, and President Obama abdicated his, when we went to war—and this is a war—limited (relatively) though it may be—in Libya.

Now, Lawrence O'Donnell brought up SR 85, a resolution condemning Gadhfi, advocating regime change, and expressing the hope that someone would intervene, specifically in the form of a No-Fly Zone. And O'Donnell mentioned that Senator Paul voted for SR 85, saying,

He voted for everything—everything—President Obama has said he is in favor of doing, and everything President Obama decided to do. And he voted for it weeks before President Obama decided to do it.

This is the basis for O'Donnell's belief that Paul—and, I'm assuming folks like me—are holding being incoherent. At first blush, that seems like a reasonable critique. We support an objective and a means, but when someone takes those means to achieve that objective, we cry foul.

But, alas, things are not that simple. One of those means, one of the ways in which we would achieve the very noble objective of preventing a massacre in Libya, is that we would do it within the strict confines of the law. Meaning that before the Executive branch takes acts to achieve a good objective, it gets the go-ahead from Congress.

President Obama didn't. Even if you think he didn't have time—if you believe that the weeks he spent getting international support (a good—perhaps even necessary—thing, by the by) didn't afford enough time to get congressional approval—nothing has precluded him from getting approval for continued operations in Libya now.

And by the President's own lights, he didn't even try or think it necessary to do that. He talks about consultation, not approval, as if Congress is a friend you go to when you need advice and not a check on Executive power.

So Senator Paul and I are not being incoherent; our position is clear: Intervene in Libya, and do it the right way.

Perhaps I'm being to hard on the President, though. He did, for the most part, do it the right way. He was prudent and careful; he's got the support of the international community—including the Libyan people. He didn't lie to the public (man, Bush really set that bar low). He's keeping our footprint small. He is, in short, allowing this to by Libya's revolution, not America's occupation.

What's more, it's not as if Congress has been doing its job, either. They haven't been serious about their constitutional obligations regarding military force in decades. Members of congress are too concerned, if I can assign a motive, with keeping their political options open, being able to weasel out of a vote if things go bad, to acutely do their jobs. They fear, I imagine, falling victim to the trap set by Republicans during the 2004 election. Senator Kerry, you'll remember voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, and then, when Bush bungled the job, Kerry attacked the war. And what did Republicans do? They called him a flip-flopper.

(Of course, Iraq is very different then Libya, and though I disagree with Kerry's vote, I don't think he's "flip-flopping" for saying that he supported the objective, but disagreed with the means.)

So, where does this leave us? We have a congress that is afraid the American people are too stupid to tell the difference between means and ends, a President that—like all Presidents—wants to preserve Executive power, and people like Rand Paul and me (did I really just write that?) who aren't all that pleased with the idea that presidents can pretty much do what they want when it comes to war.

So, can we blame Lawrence O'Donnell for being mistaking Rand Paul's nuance for hypocrisy? I think yes, with an important caveat. The modern GOP—pretty much since Nixon, have claimed the mantle of libertarianism while behaving like statists. They've been such hypocrites for so long that when one of them might be principled, it's hard to take it at face value. Further, the "principled" positions of conservative libertarians (all five of them) are so abhorrent that it's easy want to hit them with everything you can.

And, I'm not going to say—as one big-eared Congressman did—that this is an impeachable offense. It's not. It would be if Congress had said no and then the President did it anyway. He didn't. Congress has done such a thorough job of not doing its job that it's almost necessary for Presidents to take that power for themselves—almost.

But as for the critiques of nuance, let's not forget, Mr. O'Donnell, that liberals champion nuance. Let's not forget that, more often then not, complicated and tough problems require complicated and tough thinking, and we considering the utter lack of thought in what passes for today's bawdy politic, we could now use a little nuance more then ever.

Meta Update

2011-03-30T08:33:00.000-05:00

The nearly-completed website for Tanwir, Oberlin's student Middle Eastern studies association.

That, ladies and gents (see above) is why I haven't yet migrated; I've been working to finish up Tanwir's website. 500-ish lines of CSS, twelve template files, and 300 lines of code to extend WordPress later, it's very nearly done.

I should have the new blog up and running later today, god willing. Of course, I'll announce it to all five of my readers once I do...

Station Identification

2011-03-30T08:29:00.000-05:00

"Two Oil Barrels"

From a series of posters for an Oberlin mini-course on oil and the Middle East

It's once again sunny and freezing, but that's all right, because I'll be on true vacation in about 24 hours.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, gearing up to set automatic vacation response to "on" on Gmail.

Big News

2011-03-28T06:28:00.000-05:00

That lovely website is the alpha version of the new and improved Ich Bin Ein Oberliner. I've been working on it for the last couple of days (though, frankly, I've been a looking to have a little more flexibility than what Blogspot allows for quite some time...).

I will, of course, let you know when I'm ready to make the jump so that all two of you who still follow this blog can make it with me.

I just have to get the comments working, then we're ready to go--and of course, deal with the inevitable bugs that pop up when one does these sorts of things (building a template, with some truly beautiful CSS, from scratch, and extending WordPress, with some truly hideous PHP, from staring at the WordPress Codex until your eyes glaze over).

So that should be fun.

In other news, a couple people are wondering what a Mandelbrot Set is, and the Wikipedia page is a little unhelpful. Here's this layman's take on it. The Mandelbrot Set is what helped make the Chaos Theory famous. It's a set of numbers (which aren't really the important part) that can be used to generate a fractal image (which is the important part). Fractal, meaning that the shape of the whole is the shape of its constituent parts. Here's a thought experiment: Imagine a shape. This shape is, roughly, a triangle, but each of its sides have a half-sized triangle sitting on it, and each of those triangle's sides have a half-sized triangle sitting it. Continue ad infinatum. That is a perfect fractal shape.

So when I say that the tea party is a political Mandelbrot Set of masquerade, I mean that the tea party is a masquerade, but if you zoom in you'll see that there is a masquerade inside of that, and if you zoom in you'll see that there's anonther masquerade inside of that...

It's a goofy analogy, I know, but I was feeling fanciful.

Station Identification

2011-03-28T06:16:00.000-05:00

I's a frosty morning here in Obieland, where only the brave, strong, or stupid stay for spring break.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, a little of all three.

Tea and Sympathy

2011-03-25T00:44:00.000-05:00

No! ne'er was mingled such a draughtIn palace, hall, or arbor,As freemen brewed and tyrants quaffedThat night in Boston Harbor!-Oliver Wendell Holmes, “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party”

On December 16, 1773, men got dressed up as Indians and threw tea into Boston Harbor. It’s strange to think that such a weighty moment—a turning point in the birth of our nation—would sound so like a night of drunken, teenage revelry. But it was, I am told, for more than that: It was a matter of principle. Oliver Wendell Holmes, before reading his “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party” proclaimed,

The tax on tea, which was considered so odious … was but a small matter, only twopence in the pound. But it involved a principle of taxation, to which the Colonies would not submit. Their objection was not to the amount, but the claim.

I should have learned that lesson, I suppose, but what stuck with me was a little different.

“I have never gotten over,” writes Garret Keizer in Harper’s, “the notion that the history of the United States begins with an act of masquerade.” Nor have I. I can’t get the image of George Hewes—a Boston shoemaker—out of my head. I see him putting on “the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which [he] and [his] associates denominated the tomahawk.” I see him carefully smearing his “face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith.” I imagine Hewes, and I can’t help but think how much fun it must have been.

I have the same—if somewhat tempered thought—as a new generation of Tea Partiers dons its tricornes and picks up the fife and drum, as the masquerade that began with men in Mohawk costumes finds new life in the trappings of pre-Revolutionary Americana. Tea Partiers flock to historical Williamsburg, the Washington Post reports, to gain insight into the minds of the founders. They cheer as some pretend Patrick Henry cries, “Give me Liberty or give me death!” They pepper the ersatz George Washington with questions about what we ought to do now.

And the dance continues. Like a political Mandelbrot set, the Tea Party creates a fractal structure of masquerade. The billionaire Koch brothers’ groups, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, pour money into—and the ceaselessly self-satirizing, fair and balanced Fox News Network actively promotes—the “grassroots” Tea Party. A rouge and a rodeo clown, leaders of a leaderless movement, paint themselves part-prophets and part-Average Joes—all without, apparently, any sense of self-awareness or shame. That Glenn Beck would dream that he is akin to Martin Luther King, Jr. or that Sarah Palin would make herself up as representative of Real America stretches irony to its breaking point, but the show must go on.

Largely older and male, and overwhelmingly white and Republican, they are, in demographics and ideology, from the same set that wanted austerity in thirties, wrote paeans to the imagined Leave it to Beaver fifties, and hippie-punched their way though the sixties. “We the people,” their manifestos read, yet they speak for but a sliver of the America. ’Twas ever thus.

But the rage is real—real and raw and born of bereavement for a wished-for America, nursed with fear and perceived persecution. That rage brought them to the Washington Mall to hear Beck take up the mantle of the persecuted prophet. It brought them to the polls this last November to vote in the most reactionary, xenophobic, and mean-spirited congress in years. And, they imagine, it brought Hewes and his cohort to Boston Harbor that fateful night, dressed as Mohawks, wielding hatchets.

On September 29, 2010, firefighters watched a man’s home burn to the ground. Gene Cranick, who lived just outside South Fulton, Tennessee, forgot to pay the 75 dollar fee that the South Fulton fire department required for those living outside the city limits. Fireighters arrived at the scene, but not to put out the flames licking from the Cranicks’ house; they arrived to insure the fire didn’t spread to a neighbor’s house—a neighbor who did pay the fee. Cranick offered to pay anything, if they would just put out the fire. They refused, under strict orders to let the Cranick place burn—and burn it did.

Reportedly, some of the firemen became ill. Some wept. The Cranicks’ son, Timothy, was arrested after he attacked the Fulton fire chief.

Glenn Beck had no tears for the Cranicks, having spent them already, weeping for “the voiceless” in America, for those who feel alone, for his fear of the communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi president in the White House. For the Cranicks, Beck had a stern lesson. Behind Beck, as he lectured America about moral hazard and railed against the Cranicks’ attempt to “sponge” off his neighbors, was mounted a picture of Benjamin Franklin, beneath whose face was written, in bold letters, CHARITY.

The policy of the South Fulton Fire Department is that, if one lives outside the city limits, then in order to receive fire protection, one must pay a fee to cover the cost. Otherwise, they are receiving services for which they do not pay. They would be, to use Beck’s word, sponging off their neighbors. (It’s worth noting here that Gene Cranick offered on the spot to pay the fee, a fee that—as he told numerous news outlets—he paid in the past.) And it’s not an altogether uncommon policy: rural towns, without the population densities and tax bases of large cities, can’t afford to pay to extend their fire services to outlying areas—areas that don’t pay taxes. So the Cranick’s house burned.

One might think that another government entity might come into play here. Perhaps the county or state might extend the same protections to its rural citizens that it does to nearly all of us who expect that when we call 911, the men and women who come will do more than stand and watch. One might think that the just as we view charity—just as Ben Franklin and Glenn Beck view charity, apparently—as a noble trait among men, we might view charity in our governments as a good thing, too.

But no, we don’t—or at least the Tea Partiers don’t. If they have a unifying message, it would be that government is doing too much. Government, as Gorver Noquest put it out to be small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And long gone are the days that we might dispute that desire; now we spend most of our time bickering about the size of the bathtub. Too bad Cranick’s home couldn’t fit.

I called my parents a few nights after the Cranick’s home burned, and we talked about their plight. There was, in my father’s voice, a thin strand of pain, “People don’t care about the collective good anymore.” My father cried during the finale of M*A*S*H, my sister told me, and I remember once, as a child, watching a movie—I don’t remember what it was now—and being shocked to see tears in his eyes. That phone call hit me the same way. He told me about the cuts in Minnesota’s—my home state—budgets, that the homeless were dying of exposure, that their deaths were on all our hands. We the people, through our inaction, through our governmental representatives’ inaction, were causing the deaths of men in Minneapolis that night.

It’s hard to square the Cranick’s shell of a home or the exposure deaths of the most vulnerable in Minnesota with the idea that government does too much. Already, when our fellow citizens turn to government, government—the embodiment of we the people—as often as not, stands and watches. And so, when the Tea Partiers get together and dress up as revolutionaries, it’s hard to call that anything other than mere masquerade.

On February 14, 2011, thousands gathered in Wisconsin’s state capitol to stand up for the rights of their fellows. The America for which they were fighting—for which they still fight—is one of safety, security, and agency for its citizens. The America for which a Boston shoemaker struck a blow was one of self-determination for its people. And here’s the kicker: the America for which the Tea Partiers pine and hope is one and the same—safety, security, agency, and reasons to hope. But Glenn Beck called the Wisconsin protesters communist tools.

The greatest masquerade in which the Tea Parties dance has no pageantry—no revolutionary regalia, no drums and fifes. It is a dance so subtle, the dancers do its moves without knowing the tune. These are men and women, patriots and concerned citizens who have been taken in by wolves in sheep’s clothing. Beck and Palin, Bachmann and Walker, they play their populist song and all the while dismantle the very things that Americans—union “thugs” and Tea Partiers alike—want America to be.

I’ve learned my lesson, I think: the tea party had nothing to do with taxes; it was a masquerade.

four mubaraks

2011-03-24T08:24:00.000-05:00

"Four Mubaraks," a poster I'm working on for an upcoming event on the events in Egypt.

Slouching Toward War

2011-03-22T06:16:00.001-05:00

God, I hope that the combined efforts of the United States, France, Britain, and a host of other Western countries are able to do some good in Libya—and thank God I'm not the one who had to make the decision either to allow a brutal, insane megalomaniac to massacre his own people while we sit on our hands or to get the US involved in yet another war in the Middle East. It's an incredibly tough decision, with fair and good arguments for both sides, and if I were in the Oval Office today, I have no idea what I would do.

But there is this, from Et tu, Mr. Destructo?'s article "Slouching from Benghazi" by General Rehavam Ze'evi (note: not actually the assasinated Israeli general who described Palestinians as a "cancer" whom Israelis should deal with "the same way you get rid of lice." Also, please note, Mr. Destructo is not actually run by Mobutu Sese Seko...):

Gaddafi has spent the past fifteen years ingratiating himself with the "good guys," flipping over small-fry terrorist schemers, churning the oil, scrapping his two-bit nuke program. This is a pretty impressive feat for a guy who made his name sponsoring full-throated bloody murder against American and British civilians. Those governments might not give a shit about anyone else in the world, but killing their people is sure as fuck off-limits. Gaddafi nearly killed Margaret Thatcher herself through his IRA support, hit U.S. servicemen several times in Europe, and downed Pan Am Flight 103, at a cost of two hundred and seventy Brits and Yanks.We live in a world where Obama's kaffeeklatch with toothless ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers was a major campaign issue, yet Gaddafi — a man so radically unhinged and pathologically vainglorious that he makes Saddam look like Thomas Pynchon — was embraced by a startling coalition of Western elites. The difference was that he could buy them. These supplicants pocketed blood money ripped from the heart of Libya. The darkest stain, the damn spot that won't come out for decades, came from Gaddafi's billfold, crumpled and stuffed into the pockets of owl-eyed trans-Atlantic mediocrities dispatched to Tripoli with all the dignity of a bachelor party stripper van. Gaddafi has spent the last two decades buying respectability, and my, what a bargain it is when you know the right people. They deserve to be hounded into suicides for this, to never live this down. So let's name names.

Ze'evi then proceeds to detail the reprehensible Western involvement in Gaddafi's kiss-and-make-up tour—or, as Ke'evi puts it, "The Magical Monied Muammar's Comeback Tour, or: 'The Most Disgusting Story Ever Told.'"

And then there's the ever-delightful Republican inability to decide if Obama's a war-monger or a pussy. All the while, their favorite, bloated, fat-assed nephew—and America's very own merchant of death—is about to get another handout from good ol' Uncle Sam. As Andrew Exum notes (via Ezra Klein, in a would-be-funny-because-of-the-understatement titled post, "Bombing people costs money."):

A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles yesterday, which adds up to a cost of around $81 million. That's twice the size of the annual budget of USIP, which the House of Representatives wants to de-fund, and is about 33 times the amount of money National Public Radio receives in grants each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the House of Representatives also wants to de-fund in the name of austerity measures.

Thank god for military contractors! I assume that eighty-one million dollars will be put to good use, like more making more canisters of tear gas that the repressive governments can use on their own citizens or something. Also, this: as Jon Stewart said last night, "You can't simultaneously fire teacher and Tomahawk missiles."

Stewart is wrong, though: a government can, and ours does, which is to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of dollars that we've spent on the great American misadventures in the Middle East (and Africa. and Latin America. etc.) simultaneously in the name of propping up brutal strong-men and for America's watchword, freedom (which is to say, freedom elect governments that will support America's further experimentation Over There).

Make no mistake, the upshot of the Military-Industrial complex using the Middle East as a playground is that our government gives them a giant wad of blood-drenched money for their even-increasing allowance. And then they call for austerity measures at home. It's regressive redistribution of wealth, and the beneficiaries of it now get to spend their hard-earned government bling on electing ever-more redistributionist elected officials.

As Rachel Maddow might say, it's not about the budget. These calls for austerity? They lead to cuts for teachers and new Tomahawk missiles.

I seem to have lost sight of the point of all of this, which is Libya. Libya, where rebels are fighting and dying. Libya, which has just become the West's next war in the Middle East. Libya, that great exemplar of the ambiguities of a region so long dealt with in absolute terms.

I suppose it will be worth it—the missiles, the money, and most importantly, the bloodshed—if this lets the Libyan people evict the Mad Dog. If we can help stop the inevitable atrocities that would follow if Gaddafi gets his hands on Bengahzi. That would be worth it.

But given our track record in the Middle East, can anyone blame us if we have our doubts?

A Crazy Thought

2011-02-04T10:24:00.000-06:00

If you've been able to tear yourself away from the coverage of the uprising in Egypt (it's been hard for me), then you might have heard about the newly-minted Republican House of Representatives trying to define rape down. From Mother Jones (via Pandagon):

Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.
For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.
With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith's spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)
Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old's parents wouldn't be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn't be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.

That sickening provision was removed, leaving yet another horrible bill that would make it harder for poor women to get access to abortions. Here's Digby on the subject:

[T]he Republicans are saying over and over again that they are just codifying existing practice. Nothing to see here folks. Let's just dot the is and cross the ts. Except, of course, that's a lie. These bills go much further that anything we've seen and have the result of pretty much taking abortion out of the health insurance system altogether. And why in the world should anyone who says they believe in women's rights allow that to happen? This is, until further notice, a constitutional right we're talking about.

How does it go further than the already-odious Hyde Amendment? My understanding is that instead of simply denying direct federal dollars to women seeking abortions, it denies the use of any federal dollars. So, no matter how far down the chain it is from the federal government, that money can't be used. i.e., did your health care provider get a tax break or credit? Then no abortion. (RH Reality Check has more.)

Here's my crazy thought: Democrats fight--not only to defeat this travesty of a bill--but also to make it easier for all people to access to the healthcare they need.

In other words, fuck H.R. 3; let's repeal the Hyde Act.

Station Identification

2011-02-04T08:56:00.000-06:00

Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse, from the New York Times.

I'm watching men being set on fire and being run down by police vans. I'm watching reporters being beaten to the ground and hearing reports of them being stabbed.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, thoughts going out to the Egyptian people and those who would try to tell their story.

Doomed, I say. Doomed.

2011-02-02T10:28:00.001-06:00

Yeah... Bill Ayers and The Weather Underground are responsible for the unrest in Egypt... or something...

I'll let Adam Serwer at the American Prospect take this one:

I tend to think this would be more frightening if it were comprehensible, but it's a symptom of a basic problem which is that several basic heuristics conservatives use for slotting things into "good" and "bad" categories are clashing with each other. So democracy is supposed to be good, but Muslims are bad, liberals are bad, and if Muslims are bad and liberals are bad, then the protests must be some kind of combined Marxist-Islamist conspiracy that will lead to Islamists and Marxists splitting the globe between each other.
This all reminds me somewhat about that old joke about the German Jew reading the Nazi newspaper. His friend asks him why he's reading that anti-Semitic trash, and the guy reading the newspaper responds that he doesn't understand how he could read anything else, since it's all good news: Jews control the banks, Jews control the government...Anyway point is that no one has a higher opinion of their enemies than Beck and the conspiracy-minded conservatives he speaks for. If there are any religious extremists concerned that peaceful resolution of the protests in the Middle East might make their extremism obsolete, they should just watch Fox News, where they're actually on the verge of establishing a modern caliphate that extends from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean.

Station Identification

2011-02-02T10:24:00.000-06:00

Did you know that the 7th Circuit Court has a style guide (h/t Sam Glover at the Lawyerist)? Apparently lawyers have been using sans-sarif fonts as body text, and the 7th Circuit wasn't going to have that. Two questions: (1) Is this a perfect example of judicial activism (first abortion, then school prayer, and now Helvetica!)? (2) Since when did lawyers become graphic designers?

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, snowed in and pondering the typographic tyranny of the courts.

Egypt

2011-01-31T08:16:00.000-06:00

From top to bottom: "Made in USA. Teargas.", January 28, 2011; "Untitled", January 30, 2011; "Untitled", January 30, 2011; "'The people want the regime to fall'", January 30, 2011.

All photographs by Sara Carr, from her Flickr page. Reposted here under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License.

I don't know who Sarah Carr (the woman who took these pictures) is, but I encourage you to check out her photos.

I can't say I'm much of an expert--or even keen observer--of Egyptian politics. So I'll refer you to someone who knows a little more than I. Says one former Obie living in Egypt (though he's not there now):

Much of the organization and mobilization may have taken place on Facebook via the We Are All Khaled Said group (through which 90,000 people said they planned to attend demonstrations), but the turnout seems like it was much more diverse than the usual web-savvy crowd. I’ve been to a number of pro-democracy demonstrations in Cairo and it’s typical to see the same handful of activists at each. Yesterday seemed to attract a different crowd.A friend in Cairo who was in Tahrir Square yesterday, the site of the main protest, put it this way in a Gchat conversation: “you can find cooperation between youth with beard and girls wearing foreign clothes.”

Go, read.

My only real thought is that our support for Mubarak and the unrest in Egypt brings attention to one of the U.S.'s historical problems, viz., our government supporting tyrants and strongmen as a bulwark against (what our government perceives to be) worse tyrants and strongmen.

This is, of course, case in point: the U.S. government supports Mubarak, whom the Egyptian people seem to despise, because it fears that the Egyptian people, if free, might choose to be ruled by those who would threaten the U.S.'s security (or, the security of the U.S.'s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

This is nothing new. The rather sordid history of U.S. involvement in South America springs to mind. We helped to engineer a coup against Chile's Allende, and provided weapons and money for the kidnapping-turned-assination of a pro-constitution Chilean General. Why? Because as Kissinger put it in a meeting shortly after the 1973 coup:

But I think we should understand our policy--that however unpleasant [referring to the thousands of summary executions following the coup], the [Pinochet] government is better for us than Allende was.

But I don't want to dwell on U.S.-backed atrocities in South America; it's enough to know that our government, regardless of party or ideology, has supported ruthless dictators at the expense of the freedoms of the impoverished and downtrodden around the world.

Of course, that's only part of the story. The U.S. supports freedom, too, and on balance, my gut tells me we've done more to help than hinder. But if we want to be known as principled supporters of freedom and liberty, then we have to actually be principled.

Indeed, we might have less to fear from the emergence of Middle Eastern democracies if we were.

Station Identification

2011-01-31T05:39:00.001-06:00

Photograph by Ed Ou for the New York Times.

It's a cold morning in Northeast Ohio, and maybe a cold day in hell; the New York Times headline this morning: Islamists Support Secular Leader

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, wondering if this means the U.S. Government will finally throw its support behind the ousting of Egypt's strongman, Mubarak.

Morning Update XXXV: The Nice Poster Edition

2011-01-16T15:17:00.000-06:00

(1) What with all the big papers getting a little WikiLeaks action, I thought I might too. So here, from WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables on the problem of what to do with the 174 remaining Guantanamo detainees (via the February 2011 issue of Harper's--no link) is proof that politicians can be clever even behind closed doors:

"I've just thought of something," the king [Abdullah of Saudi Arabia] added, and proposed implanting detainees with an electronic hip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth. This was done with horses and falcons, the king said. [White House adviser John] Brennen replied, "Horses don't have good lawyers."]-U.S. Embassy Riyadh

Brennen might have also noted that the Government of the United States of America, should, as a general rule, avoid treating people in its custody like horses and falcons...

(2) And speaking of laughs, let's turn to the Republican National Committee. Though Michael Steele and his off the hook, lesbian bondage fiasco-style politics are gone, there is at least one reason to keep an eye on the RNC: the fascinating intonation of new RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. As Mark Liberman at Language Log notes:

In the tradition of English intonational description that goes back to Henry Sweet, Harold Palmer, and Roger Kingdon, the contours of the tonic syllables of tone-units have come to be called "nuclear tones". There are various inventories and taxonomies of these patterns — thus David Crystal ("The analysis of nuclear tones", in L.R. Waugh & C.H. Van Schooneveld, Eds.,, The melody of language: intonation and prosody, 1979) discusses seven ("Low fall", "High fall", "Low rise", "High rise", "Level", "Rise-fall", and "Fall-rise"), and alludes to others (e.g. "fall-level", "rise-fall-rise").The question of how to characterize these patterns remains a subject for debate: What are the tonal "atoms" that make up these contours, and how do they combine? What are their dimensions of quantitative variation? For example, American linguists since Pike have generally preferred to decompose rises and falls into sequences of level targets. Other recent approaches have decomposed local regions of pitch contours via orthogonal polynomials or functional principal components analysis. In any system, it's natural to wonder whether the "high" and "low" variants of rises and falls are really qualitatively distinct patterns or just parts of a pitch-range continuum.The most important difficulty is the lack of any intonational equivalent of psychological "word constancy". If you promise a class of elementary-school kids that the first one to raise a hand when you next say "chickadee" will get a dollar, you can expect some arguments about whose hand went up first, but not about whether you said the word; in contrast, if you offer a reward for flagging your next "high rising nuclear tone" (of course exemplifying it rather than naming it), you'll get confused looks at first, eventually replaced by plenty of arguments about whether you produced one or not.For similar reasons, it's hard to trust phonetic studies of intonational categories whose data is produced by asking laboratory subjects to pronounce particular contours. But the distribution of English intonational patterns in natural speech seems to be roughly as non-uniform as the distribution of words; and so some contours are less studied than others just because they're usually less common.This is where Mr. Priebus comes in. Judging from his remarks after being elected the new chair of the Republican National Committee, he's a reliable source of the "level" nuclear tone, which is otherwise somewhat difficult to find.

If you know what the hell Liberman is talking about, then I'm sure you're very excited (and smarter than I am). There are examples of Priebus's fascinating intonation at Language Log.

Thank God, I guess, that someone is studying these sorts of things.

(3)The following are excerpts from the forum, "A Super Bowl Spot for Uncle Sam," a transcript of which appeared in the February 2011 issue of Harper's (no link). The premise of the forum is this:

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, polls showed that more than 70 percent of Americans trusted the federal government, purveyor of such beloved products as the interstate highway system, the G.I. Bill, and the Social Security check. Then, abruptly, in 1966, the government's favorability ratings began to fall, and fall. Last September, when pollsters at Gallup asked Americans to "describe the federal government in one word or phrase," 72 percent of the responses were pejorative. ... We may be more politically polarized than ever, but when it comes to the federal government, we stand united in our disgust.One often hears that we should run government like a business. What would a business do if it saw brand loyalty give way to such brand hostility? Wouldn't its executives summon the alchemists of advertising? The day after last November's midterm elections, Harper's Magazine gathered creatives from four ad agencies and assigned them a daunting task: to develop a television spot for the federal government. And not just any television spot. We wanted one both memorable enough and entertaining enough to compete in the most expensive televised-marketing event of the year--the Super Bowl.

So, best. premise. ever. right? Some choice moments:

Perry Fair: The train station I use has a huge sign saying, THIS RENOVATION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE STIMULUS PACKAGE. I'm like, "By who?" There's no branding. I walk away all, like, "Thank you, that's nice." This is the worst print ad I've ever fucking seen.

And,

Thomas Frank: As far as government advertising goes, we're not aiming for anything dishonest. That's what the Soviets did. If the Soviets said it, it was propaganda.
Mark Fitzloff:They had some really nice posters, though.

And,

Fitzloff: Let's mate a donkey and an elephant and have their offspring talk.Perry Fair: A donkephant. A green donkephant.Sobier: Green's to polarizing.Hohn: All the colors are taken!Fitzloff: Purple.Hohn: No, purple's got some problems.

And, from a storyboard of an ad

The Supreme Court justices dance onstage in a Rockettes Kick line. A surprisingly nimble Ruth Bader Ginsburg breaks the line to do a high to-touch jump, landing in a split.

I must say, I like the idea of "branding" the government, but I'm not sure a superbowl ad is necessary. How about better "print ads" for construction problems? How about a receipt for your taxes (Ezra Klein links to a couple of examples)? More effective, I would think--though far less funny.

Station Identification

2011-01-13T09:19:00.000-06:00

Photo by John Moore for Time magazine.

Scripture tells us that, one day, man shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, hoping that day comes soon.

Station Identification

2011-01-04T10:50:00.000-06:00

Photograph by Damon Winter, from the article,
"A Year Later, Haiti Struggles Back," by Deborah Sontag in the New York Times.

It's negative something here in Minneapolis, which is fine as I have about 300 posts to read in my Google Reader.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, in for the long haul.

The Best Line In Wilder Voice

2010-12-21T20:33:00.000-06:00

Speaking of Wilder Voice--and before I delve into a (I hope) nuanced discussion of Julian Assange--I'd like to point out the best line in Wilder Voice, and, perhaps, the best concluding line that I've ever read:

A new mindset is upon us, etc..

The context in which this fantastic line appears is Saul Alpert-Abrams's excellent meditation on evolution of thought, from the oral frameworks of the ancients (e.g., the Homeric epics), to the apotheosis of literate cultural (e.g., the Enlightenment and the Romantics), and finally to today's internet culture and its bizarre amalgamation of orality and literacy.

The preceding sentences:

But imagine having at your command a system of traditional themes and stories which belong so wholeheartedly to a long and meaningful canon that there is comfort in the sound of the words put together; and imagine the creative possibilities of having this at your beck and call! O to be self contained, unreliant, and yet thoroughly connected to the web of human experience!

Something Wicked This Way Comes...

2010-12-21T20:15:00.001-06:00

Photo by Sophie Miles.

Well, Wilder Voice has just hit the shelves. It weighs in at 112 pages, only four fewer than the last behemoth. It contains the result of two--count 'em, two--surveys of the Oberlin student body, and it has a fold-out art section.

Covered in this issue: Freewheeling Guidos, Stuxnet, shaving, postal art, the peak-oil apocalypse, the internet as the apotheosis of oral culture, death and Facebook, a father's escape from Cuba, the ethical dilemmas of non-lethal weapons, Jewish identity and Israel - Palestine at Oberlin, the OCOPE - College labor dispute (in which Wilder Voice pisses off, you know, everyone involved), the rise of the neoliberal arts college, and a healthy dose of fiction, memoir, and poetry.

Suffice it to say, thank god I'm done.

In other news, I intend to blog again. What brought me back? The strange case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Phillipa Foot

2010-10-07T07:54:00.000-05:00

Phillipa Foot passed away earlier this week. Foot was one of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century. She also gave us the trolley problem, but you take the good with the bad.

In all seriousness, the world would be a better place if more people were as incisive and thoughtful as Foot, and her work in moral philosophy--even, yes, the trolley problem--is incredibly important and, more importantly for an undergraduate philosophy student, well written (trust me, that's notable in the world of analytic philosophy).

In honor of her life, here's a nine-year-old discussing the trolley problem. Suck it, consequentialism! (Also, here's some nice trolley problem art.)

Station Identification

2010-10-01T14:28:00.002-05:00

And now for the most despicable thing I've read in a long time (reposting in total a post from Digby's Hullabaloo):

The Closet Is Healthy For Gays And Other Living Things

This speaks for itself:

[I]t was not a juvenile prank that killed the unfortunate Mr. Clementi even though it served as the proximate trigger for his lethal actions. If anyone other than Mr. Clementi should be blamed for his suicide, it is those who repeatedly encouraged him to behave in a way that would fill him with such guilt, remorse, and shame.

And the reason he feels remorse, guilt and shame, of course, is because bigots and bullies torture them for being who they are. But that's the way God intended it, I guess. Stay in the closet where a gay person can feel good about themselves.

The post is called "gay rights killed Clementi" by the way.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, thoroughly disgusted.

In happier news, I have a new post up at Oberlin Blogs, here.

Somehow, though, I'm still utterly disgusted.

Mail Call

2010-09-28T09:42:00.001-05:00

I have to head off to class, and there's little chance that I'll be able to do any serious blogging today. Before I take off though, I just want to revisit the discussion of the five-paragraph essay from a couple days ago. Brian (from Bubblegum Aesthetics) has some fascinating comments to throw into the mix (and I'm not just saying that because of the flattering things he says about me...):

Yes, I absolutely have noticed the tendency, and so have a lot of my friends who teach both here and at other institutions of various sizes and structures (which makes me think that standardized testing, "teaching for the test," etc., plays at least some role in the process--it seems to cut across region, school mission, and so on).

Brian also offers a way forward:

also try to craft assignments that require other kinds of structures (like blogs, multimedia projects, short and long papers that explicitly forbid central thesis/five paragraph forms), because I do think that the new modes of writing/technology that you cite are something to explore rather than worry about or avoid (my friend Jeff speaks to this with far greater knowledge and passion than I could). And I also make jokes about it in class, because I think if I can let them know that avoiding the five-paragraph model is actually a good thing--if, in other words, their anxiety comes from "how will I be graded if I don't do this?"--then (I hope) it lets them know that other kinds of writing are not only ok, but preferred.

I might chime in and point out that one of the advantages of incorporating new technologies into assignments is that it uses a form with which my generation is familiar, while at the same time forcing it into the realm of more analytic thinking. One of the great strengths of new writing technologies is their malleability; that is, it melds the immediacy and agency of oral forms of knowledge-gathering with the more iterative and non-conservative (in Walter Ong's, orality is about conserving, not creating, knowledge) attributes of writing.

Plato has Socrates saying to Phaedurs that

writing is unfortunately like painting, for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should replay, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have to parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Now, I think Plato's critique is mostly wrong in that texts ought to be treated as living things, but he does have a point in that writing is often less of a discussion that speaking.

It seems that the best way to ameliorate the problem that Plato sees here is not to give up on writing (as Plato was advocating), but rather to come up with a technology of writing that allows for the back and forth dialogue of speech.

In this, the sort of assignments for which Brian advocates seem to make the most sense, both because they free students from the well-meaning but often crippling stricture of the five-paragraph essay, and also because they allow for the best of both the oral and written worlds.

Station Identification

2010-09-28T09:13:00.000-05:00

It's a pretty hellish day here in Oberlin. I'm dealing with the cold that will not die, and the rain and cold is doing nothing to help.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, wishing I didn't have to leave my warm and comfy apartment.

Morning Update XXXIV: The "Tu Croque" Edition

2010-09-26T11:19:00.001-05:00

Meena Hasan, here.

(1) It's Sunday, blah-blah Sunday here in Oberlin; sounds like a good day for a morning update!

From a post entitled "Modern conservative debate strategies, such as they are" by Scott Kaufmann over at Acephalous:

As you know, the classic tu quoque works like this:
Person X: It should be illegal to put babies on spikes.
Person Y: But I just saw you put a baby on a spike!
In this example, Person Y tries to undermine the argument of Person X by calling him a hypocrite. This is, obviously, a fallacy. But in a world in which people stand by SASQUATCH ISRAEL, the only way to improve a fallacious argument is, it seems, to double down on it. The reverse tu quoque, then, goes something like this:
Person X: It should be illegal to put babies on spikes.
Person Y: (putting a baby on a spike) But I just saw you put a baby on a spike!

Here's the example made more concrete (by me!)

(Some) Democrats: We should decrease the deficit.
Republicans: (railing about the need to extend the Bush tax cuts on the top income bracket) But in the past, you've supported things that would increase the deficit!

It would be funny if, you know, they weren't serious.

(2) Apparently, no one really like unions anymore--especially teachers' unions. Indeed, even many on the left have soured on unions in general and, to a greater degree, teachers' unions.

Now there are, I suppose, a number of good and interesting debates that one could have about teachers' unions, but there's something odd about people on the technocratic left--who believe, by and large, that merit pay would be a good way of increasing student test scores--beating up on teachers' unions, whose express purpose is to provide increased pay and benefits for teachers.

Ezra Klein half makes this point:

A lot of the people who think money is important for teachers also hate teacher's unions. Those unions, of course, make teaching a more attractive job with better wages and conditions, and that should increase the quality of the talent. Now, it so happens that teaching isn't incredibly lucrative, but that's a question that more about the pay level than about whether unions impose too much pay equality.

If I'm reading that right, then Ezra Klein--a member of the technocratic left if ever there was one--is making my point for me. Ad to this Mayor Fenty's (who, by the by, was an Oberlin grad) crushing defeat in D.C., and maybe there's something of a sea change coming.

Or maybe not. And even though I'm deeply skeptical of the sort of reforms pushed by the technocratic left, I'm equally wary of doing nothing.

I'll let Nicholas Lemann (who wrote the "comment" on school reform in the latest New Yorker take me out:

Large-scale, decentralized democratic societies are not very adept at generating neat, rational solutions to messy situations. The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah's Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true--especially before acting on it.

(3) This semester, I'm the Writing Associate for a First-Year Seminar (an FYSP in the Oberlin parlance). It's fun. I've been a writing tutor for the last three years, but before now, I've always worked in the Writing Center. This is the first time I've spent my time working for just one class, which has certain advantages (and disadvantages).

One of the advantages this time around is that I've been able to see firsthand the obsession that first-years seem to have with the driest kind of five paragraph essay: a fractal structure in which each paragraph includes five sentences that follow the same structure as the essay itself.

This group of freshmen seem to care--at the expense of most anything else--about the structure of the paragraph. You end up with a disjointed essay with five very discrete and unconnected units.

What's more, the theses themselves are timid, and the essays that follow aren't so much arguing something as pointing something out. When pressed, my first-years have claimed that this is what college-level academic essays should be, something that, in my experience, just isn't true.

In contrast, their informal essays are fearless and flowing; the ease with which they talk about themselves and their feelings on a given subject is amazing.

Questions: @Bubblegum Aesthetics: Am I crazy, or have you noticed this too? @Word Savvy: Can I blame standardized tests? @No One In Particular: Might the perceived yawning gap between informal and formal essays--and the facility with the former and the difficulty with the latter--come from the rise of "informal" modes of writing (viz. blogs, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, emails, etc.), modes of writing that used to fall under the providence of orality?

Of course, I should note that I do it too. That is: I blog. I email. I often write fractal and dry essays.

This is, I suppose, the "Tu Croque" Edition.

Station Identification

2010-09-22T07:03:00.000-05:00

From Caldwell Tanner's "What if Superheroes Were Hipsters?" (here)

A rainy morning looks to be turning into a beautiful day. Did I mention I'm an ObieTalk hero (note: not mentioned by name and just made fun of). Suck it, ObieTalk, you'll pry my coffee mugs from my cold, dead hands.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, defiant till the end.

Station Identification

2010-09-18T10:16:00.001-05:00

You're looking at the day's to do list (note: I redacted a few things). Everything looks fine until you get over to MHST 235, where you see listening assignments spread across ten different CDs. Two questions: (1) Why does the Con Library only let you take out two of these CDs at a time? (2) Is it really that hard to put these up online?

Look, I'm all for doing lots of listening in Music History; seriously, I'm more than happy to pull out a score and dig into listening assignments. But only being able to take out two at a time because you and everyone you know is trying to do the same assignment while you sit in the Con Library listening booth, wishing you were someplace less loud and with fewer people bro-fiving their bffs.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, waiting for the day that professors just put damn their assignments online.

Reasons I'm a Capitalist

2010-09-17T14:11:00.000-05:00

In the most recent issue of Harper's (October 2010), Patrick Symmes writes about the thirty days he spent in Cuba. Thirty days he spent living on the wages of an official Cuban intellectual--$15 a month.

Now, here are some illustrative quotes and reasons I'm a capitalist: (1)

"Some money?"

"I don't have any."

"But foreigners always have so much money."

"Yes, in my country I have money. But here, I live like a Cuban."

"Give me a peso?"

I can't. I'm playing a game, my dear. I'm pretending to be broke. I'm living like your parents for a while. I haven't eaten in nine hours. In the past eleven days I've missed 12,000 calories of my normal diet. My teeth hurt so badly.

Or, in Spanish, "No."

(2)

This was no island for amateur thieves.

(3)

Unlike most Cuban functionaries, Leal [Spengler, the city historian] had actually made a difference in people's lives. He rebuilt the old hotels; my friends took 540 pounds of cement for their new tourist bungalow. He restored a museum; they looted tin sheeting for roofs. He sent trucks of lumber into the neighborhood; they made half the wood vanish.

The State owned all. The people appropriated all. A ration system in reverse.

(4)

I used to say that 10 percent of everything was stolen in Cuba, to be resold or repurposed. Now I think the real figure is 50 percent. Crime is the system.

(5)

I worked hard and often at my own projects--I hauled cement and shoveled gravel for food, and wrote a lot--but it was not state labor, not the kind of work that is counted in the columns of official Cuba, where more than 90 percent of people are state employees. Why should I get a job? Nobody else took theirs seriously, and the oldest joke in Havana is still the best: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.

(6)

"It's impossible," she said of my attempt to be officially Cuban. For survival, everyone had to have "an extra," some income outside the system. Her husband rented a room to a Norwegian sex tourist. Her neighbor sold lunches to the workers who'd recently lost their canteen meals. Her own mother wandered the streets with pitchers of coffee and a cup, selling jots of caffeine. Her friend around the corner stole the cooking oil and resold it for 20 pesos a pint. Another neighbor stole the ground chicken and resold it for 15 pesos a pound. ("Good quality, a very good price, you should get some," and I did.)

(7)

[Says Oswaldo Paya, "one of Cuba's most important dissidents"] We're all worse off than the guy who sells dogs in the gas station on the corner" ... "I don't say everything in Cuba is bad, or terrible. That's because we have distribution schemes to feed the poor, to give benefits. But that's another way of domination, keeping peiple eternally poor. Free my hands, I'll start a business and feed myself."

There it is. I'm reading this not in the way that conservatives in the Senate do. That is, I'm not reading this as "feeding the poor makes them lazy," but, rather as, "look at these people; they are already running businesses. Let's let them actually do it."

It's important to note, the "capitalism" I'm talking about here is about as close to that dream of Americana capitalism: small businesses, family businesses, entrepreneurship; I'm not talking about bloated multinationals.

Indeed, the current system of Cuban rationing and State labor seems little different than the almost-feudal system of massive corporations and company towns.

Well, let's remember that I said this next time someone calls me a socialist. And let's not remember that I said this next time I'm talking to an OSCA-ite Obie.

Station Identification

2010-09-17T13:39:00.000-05:00

Elephant (2010)

Meena Hasan (here)

You know who's a kick-ass artist? Meena Hasan, that's who. She used to run art and design for Wilder Voice. Now, she's a friggin' artist. Send her some love, here.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, supporting the arts since 2007.

Station Identification

2010-09-16T07:34:00.001-05:00

Meena Hasan

Tiger (2010)

Ink and Acrylic on Fabric, 18" x 45"

From her website, here.

It's a miserable day here in Oberlin. Fortunately, I'll be too busy filling out forms to notice.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, trying to navigate the labyrinthine passages of Oberlin's bureaucracy.

The Industrial Revolution, Mk. n+1

2010-09-15T15:20:00.000-05:00

Corn. Here [public domain].

Well, after my blistering but eloquent tirade yesterday, Ezra Klein acquiesces:

He's right that I shouldn't have endorsed Jay Rayner's post, which wasn't particularly tightly argued.

It's worth pointing out that he didn't acquiesce (or even mention) so much to me as to Tom Philpott over at Grist. But, as Colbert says, I accept your apology.

The Industrial Revolution, Mk. n

2010-09-14T08:54:00.000-05:00

Ezra Klein, in a post titled "Industrial Farms are the Future" links and approvingly quotes The Guardian's Jay Rayner's facile and straw-manning argument in defense of industrial agriculture:

Jay Rayner offers some real talk on food production:

If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming. We need to abandon the mythologies around agriculture, which take the wholesome marketing of high-end food brands at face value – farmer in smock, ear of corn, happy pig – and recognise that farming really is an industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale, but which can still be managed sustainably.

Despite the dreams of many foodies, I can't think of a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again. Are there any examples I'm missing? Maybe so. But for now, I think of the preference for farmers markets and small producers as being mainly important in sending certain signals about production methods and branding preferences to Big Ag than in actually creating some sort of viable alternative.

Oh, Ezra, it's true; you hurt the ones you love.

There are a number of things very wrong about Klein and Rayner's argument here. To begin with is the dismissive straw-manning of opponents of industrial agriculture.

Look, I like hippie-punching as much as the next guy, and Raynor gets in some good hits. In addition to the knock that opponents of industrial agriculture are in the thrall of a "mythology" of "the wholesome marketing of high-end food brands at face value – farmer in smock, ear of corn, happy pig," a beautiful turn of phrase, by the by. He adds to this:

Any consumer of gastroporn in print, online and on our TV screens would imagine we were already having this debate. Words such as local, seasonal and organic have become a holy trinity. But these are merely lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes, a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues. [emphasis mine]

And,

An elitist, belly-obsessed minority, the ones who think the colour plates in the Sunday supplements are a true reflection of real lives if only we all made the effort, may rage against big agriculture and refuse to engage with it. [emphasis mine]

It's all delightfully well written, and it mirrors a lot of the complaints I have with particular people at Oberlin. That said, it's beyond ridiculous to claim that the driving force behind the anti-industrial agriculture movement are "elitist" and concerned only with "lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes" and are fighting over "a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues."

The argument isn't aesthetic. In general, the argument is health and culture-related. I'm not going to rehash the health arguments here, granting that some of them are unproven (and understanding that many of them are very well documented). I will point out that the culture-related arguments are, in general, not related to aesthetics; they're things like a heightened interest in food can lead to more family meals [a social good, despite what I tell my parents]. And let's not forget the environmental implications of a more holistic agriculture. In addition to, as I understand it, a general reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, non-industrial agriculture puts out fewer toxins and does not sap farmland of nutrients.

That last paragraph--inartfully stated as it may be--is what Rayner should be arguing against. Instead, he casts opponents as a bunch of rich hippies who want to their corn to sing a pastor song as they are gently plucked. Or something.

Fortunately, Rayner doesn't only bitch-slap hippies; he also provides a more substative argument, and while it's still flawed, it isn't mean-spirited (congrats!):

[Britain] need[s] to look seriously at how we produce our food and how we eat it. Our self-sufficiency has dropped in the past decade from north of 70% to around 60%, according to official figures. Many experts think it may actually be nearer to just 50%. We import 60% of our vegetables. If this drift continues, we will be left exposed to the sort of events that triggered the riots in Africa. We need to make difficult decisions which a lot of people who regard themselves as serious foodies may find deeply unappetising. And we need to make them fast. ...

If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming.

No obvious fallacies here, just the tacit (and facile) premise that nonindustrial agrigculture cannot, in any substantive way, provide enough food for the future.

Frankly, I don't know if it can. But it's awfully easy to assume 'no,' and just move on. It's a positive, not a normative question, and it's one that deserves a close examination. Certainly it's the case that many people could spend more on food then they do now. As Raynar himself points out,

In the early 90s, we spent roughly 20% of our wages on our shopping bill. Today, it's nearer 10%, even allowing for recent inflation, and we assume these low prices to be a right.

To be clear, I'm all for inexpensive food. Seriously. I'm not going to say that people who can't afford to should be spending $4 a carton on eggs. I will, however, say that I can spend $4 on eggs, if I'm willing to go without one of the X-Men titles I read. So, there's that.

All of this, though, does little to support or undermine the claim that we have enough land and farmers to support a large nonindustrial agriculture. I don't have much in the way of empirical data for either argument. I can say that, in the case of farmers, perhaps more people would be willing to farm if they didn't have to do it in dark, shit-filled enclosures (literally), where industrial-like monotony is encouraged. I know of many Oberlin students who have taken their $200,000 piece of paper and gone to work on organic farms, some of whom are actually starting farms. Anecdotal though it may be, I think it's an interesting fact that people of my generation and cultural cohort would become farmers--when farming isn't limited to spraying petrochemicals on swaths of corn.

The point of all of this is that Rayner is going to have to do a lot more to support his argument then point to food riots and say "see, we need industrialization! [or in his case, industrialisation!]" Nothing in his column supports the tacit, and essential premise, that nonindustrial agriculture is unsupportable.

I hesitate to point to this again, but there is an interesting, if problematic, argument out there that the intervention of Wall Street in food markets was and is responsible (at least in part) for the rising food prices. From Fredrick Kaufman's "The Food Bubble" in October's Harper's:

Grain trading was not always brainless. Joseph parsed Pharaoh’s dream of cattle and crops, discerned that drought loomed, and diligently went about storing immense amounts of grain. By the time famine descended, Joseph had cornered the market—an accomplishment that brought nations to their knees and made Joseph an extremely rich man.

In 1730, enlightened bureaucrats of Japan’s Edo shogunate perceived that a stable rice price would protect those who produced their country’s sacred grain. Up to that time, all the farmers in Japan would bring their rice to market after the September harvest, at which point warehouses would overflow, prices would plummet, and, for all their hard work, Japan’s rice farmers would remain impoverished. Instead of suffering through the Osaka market’s perennial volatility, the bureaucrats preferred to set a price that would ensure a living for farmers, grain warehousemen, the samurai (who were paid in rice), and the general population—a price not at the mercy of the annual cycle of scarcity and plenty but a smooth line, gently fluctuating within a reasonable range.

While Japan had relied on the authority of the government to avoid deadly volatility, the United States trusted in free enterprise. After the combined credit crunch, real estate wreck, and stock-market meltdown now known as the Panic of 1857, U.S. grain merchants conceived a new stabilizing force: In return for a cash commitment today, farmers would sign a forward contract to deliver grain a few months down the line, on the expiration date of the contract. Since buyers could never be certain what the price of wheat would be on the date of delivery, the price of a future bushel of wheat was usually a few cents less than that of a present bushel of wheat. And while farmers had to accept less for future wheat than for real and present wheat, the guaranteed future sale protected them from plummeting prices and enabled them to use the promised payment as, say, collateral for a bank loan. These contracts let both producers and consumers hedge their risks, and in so doing reduced volatility.

But the forward contract was a primitive financial tool, and when demand for wheat exploded after the Civil War, and ever more grain merchants took to reselling and trading these agreements on a fast-growing secondary market, it became impossible to figure out who owed whom what and when. At which point the great grain merchants of Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis set about creating a new kind of institution less like a medieval county fair and more like a modern clearinghouse. In place of myriad individually negotiated and fulfilled forward contracts, the merchants established exchanges that would regulate both the quality of grain and the expiration dates of all forward contracts—eventually limiting those dates to five each year, in March, May, July, September, and December. Whereas under the old system each buyer and each seller vetted whoever might stand at the opposite end of each deal, the grain exchange now served as the counterparty for everyone.

...

The decline of volatility, good news for the rest of us, drove bankers up the wall. I put in a call to Steven Rothbart, who traded commodities for Cargill way back in the 1980s. I asked him what he knew about the birth of commodity index funds, and he began to laugh. “Commodities had died,” he told me. “We sat there every day and the market wouldn’t move. People left. They couldn’t make a living anymore.”

Clearly, some innovation was in order. In the midst of this dead market, Goldman Sachs envisioned a new form of commodities investment, a product for investors who had no taste for the complexities of corn or soy or wheat, no interest in weather and weevils, and no desire for getting into and out of shorts and longs—investors who wanted nothing more than to park a great deal of money somewhere, then sit back and watch that pile grow. The managers of this new product would acquire and hold long positions, and nothing but long positions, on a range of commodities futures. They would not hedge their futures with the actual sale or purchase of real wheat (like a bona-fide hedger), nor would they cover their positions by buying low and selling high (in the grand old fashion of commodities speculators). In fact, the structure of commodity index funds ran counter to our normal understanding of economic theory, requiring that index-fund managers not buy low and sell high but buy at any price and keep buying at any price. No matter what lofty highs long wheat futures might attain, the managers would transfer their long positions into the next long futures contract, due to expire a few months later, and repeat the roll when that contract, in turn, was about to expire—thus accumulating an everlasting, ever-growing long position, unremittingly regenerated.

It's important to note that Rayner's claim is a little more extreme then Klein's. Rayner is making the normative argument that we should embrace the industrialization of agriculture. Klein is saying, positively, there will be greater industrialization of agriculture.

Rayner's is clearly problematic; Klein's is less so. It isn't a fait accompli, at least not yet. The fact that I got turned around on this (only a few years ago, I was saying the same thing as Rayner) is important in that people like me can be turned around on this. That is, it isn't just white guys with dreads who don't like Monsanto.

What's more, I don't think Rayner is making this argument in bad faith. There are genuine empirical questions here, not only about our agricultural capabilities but also about negative upshots of industrialization, be they environmental (i.e. runoff and greenhouse), health (i.e. nutrition and mass recalls) or cultural (a massive shift in how we think of food).

Now ask yourself, whose nicer to the other side, me or Rayner?

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, always magnanimous (except when I'm not).

Station Identification

2010-09-14T07:31:00.000-05:00

As a certified* writing associate for a first-year seminar, I have to dress up for class today.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, wearing a tie.

*Well, I took a course.

Michael Cera vs. The World

2010-09-12T09:15:00.001-05:00

YET ANOTHER SCOTT PILGRIM REVIEW WITH A "[BLANK] vs. the [BLANK]" SNOWCLONE

Panel from Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim.

IIt’s a universal truth that the movie is always worse than the comic on which it was based, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World—the latest and greatest Michael Cera vehicle—is no exception. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Oni Press cult hit Scott Pilgrim is superior by far. Fortunately, however, O’Malley’s comic is terrific enough that SPVTW still manages to be a decent, if sometimes facile, film.

I know, I know. Any self-respecting, young-ish cultural critic is supposed to have long ago turned against Michael Cera and, by extension, any film in which he appears. Maybe it was Juno; maybe it was the rumors (unsubstantiated though they may be) that his holding out for more money is the cause of death of the Arrested Development movie. I think Gawker, however, put it best: Cera has “reveal[ed] the hipster machinery a little too openly for any self-respecting hipster to admit to be fooled by.” And as the swarm of fixie-riding, grandma glasses-wearing, Brooklyn-worshiping twenty-somethings go, so goes the nation. And so, SPVTW has shared the same cruel fate as the very-watchable Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, the nearly unwatchable Paper Heart, and the simply unwatched Youth in Revolt; viz., no one went and saw the poor thing.

But if there’s a movie to showcase Cera’s, let’s say unique, talents, it’s SPVTW. Sure, Cera is the Coldplay of actors: His songs sound exactly the same, but the song he plays over and over again isn’t that bad. And in the case of SPVTW, the eponymous character is a half-assholic, half-hapless twenty-something whose main redeeming trait is a sort of detached, if winning, awkwardness. I think someone’s playing Cera’s song.

Even better: One of the distinguishing—indeed, noteworthy—traits of SPVTW (and the comic by the same name) is that the arc of the protagonist moves not from awkward-but-hapless to awkward-but-brave, but rather awkward-but-assholic to awkward-but-less-assholic. Let me put it another way: Michael Cera is no Zach Braff, and SPVTW is no Garden State.

Even better-er: The main female protagonist of the film, Ramona Flowers (sadly, the only mis-casting in an otherwise perfectly-cast movie), is no Natalie Portman. Of course, compared to the comic, the Flowers of the film is little more than a hollow shell of her comic book counterpart, but compared with other Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Flowers is frackin’ Shakespearean.

It’s worth pointing out that, unlike the comic, the movie doesn’t past the Bechdel Test—a test made famous by Alison Bechdel’s comic Dykes to Watch Out For. (For the uninitiated, the Bechdel Test is this: One should only see a movie that has (1) at least two women in it (2) who talk to each other (3) about something other than a man.) The female characters suffered the most from the inevitable cuts to and Hollywoodization of the comic, which is a travesty considering O’Malley’s nuanced depictions. Indeed, SPVTW’s failure to pass the Bechdel Test is representative of the main problem with the film: O’Malley’s comic spanned over 1,200 pages and three years, while SPVTW sliced that down to an hour and change and three weeks.

But despite the sometimes-brutal cuts and basterdizations, SPVTW still managed to shine. It helps that the dialogue is largely taken verbatim from the comic and that Beck wrote half of the music. Plus, if the movie had a face, it would kiss the casting director on the lips.

The real triumph of SPVTW is that it manages to take the tropes and trappings of hipsterdom and fill that nihilism with earnestness. Indeed, the final boss (Jason Schwartzman at his best—excepting Rushmore) gets his ass kicked after proclaiming his allegiance to cutting-edge taste, declaring, “I’m hip; I’m what’s happening; I’m what’s blowing up now.” That’s right, the movie’s penultimate scene is Michael Cera beating up the biggest hipster ever.

Self-aware without being self-conscious, refreshingly fun but not vapid, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is worth seeing on the silver screen—even if, as a character in the movie admits, the comic’s much better.

Station Identification

2010-09-07T08:19:00.000-05:00

It's the first day of classes, which is something on which I'm choosing not to focus. Instead, let me point to the always funny Bill in Portland Maine:

I'll take a sizable amount of outrage at the ban-enacters and modern-day DADT supporters with me to my grave. If they had allowed me to serve, I would've killed 500 Taliban assholes with nothing more than a sharp stick, captured Osama bin Laden with a rolled-up newspaper, and peeled potatoes faster than any other corporal in the U.S. military's history. I say this with 98% certainty.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, firmly ignoring impending doom.

Station Identification

2010-08-25T08:14:00.000-05:00

I've got some things to say, I'm just not sure how to say them yet.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, at a loss for words.

Station Identification

2010-08-23T06:11:00.000-05:00

Eliza Koch

here

I'm back in Oberlin, which means summer is almost over.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, and that name is once again true.

Morning Update XXXIII: The Last Word Edition

2010-08-18T08:16:00.000-05:00

Zak Smith

"...Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle..." (page 39 of Gravity's Rainbow

here

(1) First things first. There's something off with the numbering of the "morning updates." I believe that this is correctly numbered XXXIII, and I've adjusted the others to follow suit. Here's the thing: Including this one, only 29 are tagged, which means I'm missing two. It's a puzzler. If any enterprising reader wants a free Ich Bin Ein Oberliner mug, then go through the archive and see if you can't figure out what's going on. First (correct) one wins.

The last word? Unless someone gets back to me with the correct answer and documentation on the number of "morning update" posts, then I will never ever speak of this again. How's that for a tie in!?

(2) Second things second. I didn't really want to write or deal with the controversy over the proposed Islamic cultural center in New York. I really didn't. But, like a moth to a flame, I am drawn to teh stupid.

I know that most--if not all--who regularly read this blog probably think the conservative hubbub over the "Ground Zero Mosque" is not only stupid but bigoted and crazy to boot. I feel the same way. What more is there to say?

Well, a few things, I guess. Here we go, and may I never write about this again.

(3) Ezra Klein on the evolution of the controversy:

You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either. The test I try to use is this: Could I imagine a world in which this thing was happening but no one ever thought to comment on it?

Well, yes. I can't imagine that world for unemployment, or financial-regulation reform, or the Afghanistan Wikileaks. But it absolutely could've been the case that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf decided to build an Islamic community center and no one really noticed, or cared, and maybe a few local politicians from both parties showed up to help cut the ribbon. As it happened, a few opportunists went after it, which brought it to the attention of a few sensationalistic media outlets, and then some opportunistic politicians jumped on board, and then their colleagues felt compelled to comment, and then more legitimate media outlets had something to cover, and on and on. The story is a story because of the incentives of the people making it a story, not because there's something about an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero that just screams out for national attention.

(4) It's fair to say that few of the actors involved in this mess have any self-awareness at all. Glenn Beck never did, and that's no surprise; the media often doesn't, which somehow still surprises me; and the Democrats can't seem to understand why no one takes them seriously when they go around to the base and claim to have anything resembling a back bone.

Klein is close to something, but a little too dismissive. He's correct, of course, that:

You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either.

But his test isn't doesn't catch 'em all. There's something about this story and the way in which it arrived that's important. It's important, not only because it encapsulates what's wrong with both parties (one's crazy, and one's spineless), but also because it's emblematic of an ailing media (and I don't just mean that it's susceptible to right-wing pollutants).

Consider the headline in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune:

POLITICS OF THE MOSQUE DEBATE

First, while it is a debate over a "mosque," it really should be a debate over a community center that includes prayer space. But I guess that really isn't the point now is it.

The truth is that the "politics" of this debate are shaped by the media coverage of this debate, which seems to be lost (or at least only tacitly recognized) by the media actors involved. One of the upshots of the entwining of commentary and journalism is that you end up with journalism that can masquerade as commentary and commentary that can masquerade as journalism.

That, all too often, is happening here. And of course, Fox News practically invented the modern incarnation of this effect, but that normative wolf in positive clothing is not limited to Fox. When Newt Gingrich says that we wouldn't allow the Nazis to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum, and the "journalist" merely nods and asks some Democrat to respond, that journalist is (1) creating false equivalence and (2) ignoring the facts--Nazis are perfectly within their rights to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum.

By acting as though this is just another two-sided debate--like always--the media is endorsing the idea that both sides have equal standing. But they don't, and the media shouldn't act like they do. After all, it's not the "Ground Zero Mosque," despite what it has been dubbed; you can't see Ground Zero from the damn community center. The hubbub over the "radical" imam is ginned up; President Bush and he worked together. I could go on.

And so, with the media's blessing, the story floats along in this strange context-less bubble, and instead of popping the damn thing, they report on it, and it grows ever-larger and swallows up ever-more of the already small space American's have that isn't devoted to watching people lose weight and sing shitty pop songs.

I'm reminded of what Roger Hodge wrote in Harper's:

The disease manifested itself almost everywhere at once, but the superficial effects were most spectacular in our national mirror: the Media, which absorbed and digested the once proud opposition of the Press and made of it a mere legitimizer of horrors. The self-refuting absurdity of the Bush presidency, with its pretensions to manufacture an imperial reality, parallels the rise of the aggressively oxymoronic genre of “Reality Television,” with all its unintentional ironies. Among so-called news programming, Fox’s “Fair and Balanced: We Report, You Decide” is of a piece with Anderson Cooper’s “Keeping Them Honest” and, to give an extreme and perhaps gratuitous example, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. More perniciously, the self-importance with which the quality newspapers fawned on George W. Bush and his retainers in the decisive years after September 11, 2001, particularly in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, bears comparison with the bitter satires of G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh.

The disorder from which we suffer—known among its close observers as Self-Satirizing Syndrome, or SSS—is a cruel one. Not only have we been made to witness the betrayal of almost every promise made by our Founding Fathers, and seen their direst prophesies confirmed, we must also suffer the indignity of seeing our constitutional ideal turned into a shabby mockery of itself. Somehow, by a trick of dialectical cunning, the United States of America has vaulted over the tragic phase of history in favor of a relentless pursuit of historical farce.

It's endlessly fascinating--though perhaps not all that surprising--that The Daily Show's takedown of both the controversy itself and the media's reaction to it remains one of the best I've seen.

Fascinating because The Daily Show is in a sense utterly ajournalistic and yet on occasion it gets at the truth--an ever more elusive specter in these times--better than journalists. Not surprising because what the media lacks, self-awareness, The Daily Show has in spades--albeit in the form of a healthy dose of ironic distance.

I'll let Hodge play me out:

The medicinal literature I have in mind is not fiction, though fiction can serve in this role as well, but the literature of fact, a variety of narrative journalism (of a provenance far too ancient to be called “new”) that has long sought to place a strong bulwark of wit between the reader and history’s perpetual invitation to despair. Today that protective coating has become a medical necessity. In times such as these, healthy citizenship requires the insertion of a human proxy into the stream of historical happenstance. What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction.

Station Identification

2010-08-18T06:47:00.001-05:00

"The Earth together with the Moon, as seen from the Messenger spacecraft to Mercury, May 2010."

Via Warren Ellis, via Bruce Sterling

I feel old (via Daily Kos):

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- For students entering college this fall, e-mail is too slow, phones have never had cords and the computers they played with as kids are now in museums.

The Class of 2014 thinks of Clint Eastwood more as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry urging punks to "go ahead, make my day." Few incoming freshmen know how to write in cursive or have ever worn a wristwatch.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, discovering gray hairs.

On the docket: A Morning Update, Scott Pilgrem, and much, much more.

Station Identification

2010-08-17T08:24:00.000-05:00

Don't touch that dial, Oberliner promises to be the place to be all day today.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner comin' at you from temperate Murderopolis.

Station Identification

2010-08-16T07:21:00.000-05:00

Robert Hass was on to something when he said (and I paraphrased), "In this, all the old thinking resembled the new thinking." Apparently, in 1910, Robert Slass predicted a device called "the wireless telegraph" that would serve as a telephone, ring or vibrate, allow people to see images of things far away, and send music and images to each other, among other things (h/t Tyler Cowen)."

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, and the future is now.

Movie Review, In Brief

2010-08-14T06:09:00.004-05:00

It's funny because Will Ferrell's character is verbally abusive to his wife!

Seriously though, this movie is little more than sexism and machismo poorly disguised as comedy. It would be a pretty good parody if it weren't, you know, just serious.

I found two things funny: (1) the action scenes with a Prius and (2) Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock's characters.

Here's a better review.

Station Identification

2010-08-14T06:02:00.000-05:00

Did you know that John Steinbeck wrote a "translation" of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur? I didn't, but it sure is good.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, surprised that John Steinbeck could have been a great fantasy writer.

NB: There's a new post up at Oberlin Blogs. It's long, has no pictures, is about Oberlin newspapers, and is therefore exactly the opposite of what my bosses encourage me to write. Sorry guys. Also, it's kind of maudlin. Enjoy!

The Freebooters

2010-08-07T14:38:00.000-05:00

"(The word “filibuster” comes from vrijbuiter—old Dutch for 'looter.')"

George Packer for The New Yorker, here

Since all the cool kids are linking to George Packer's article on the myriad maladies of the senate, I thought that I would too.

It's a fascinating look at the Senate, and Packer manages to find every synonym for the word opaque out there (labyrinthine, byzantine, etc.).

The first takeaway is that the filibuster, despite its notoriety, is not really the biggest problem with senate procedures. Republicans have been experts in using holds--secret or otherwise--and the constant need for unanimous consent to undertake even the most basic housekeeping measures to slow the pace of governing to a crawl. As Packer writes,

Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction. [...]

“The Senate, by its nature, is a place where consensus reigns and personal relationships are paramount,” Lamar Alexander said. “And that’s not changed.” Which is exactly the problem: it’s a self-governing body that depends on the reasonableness of its members to function. Sarah Binder, a congressional scholar at George Washington University, said, “To have a chamber that rules by unanimous consent—it’s nutty! Especially when you’ve got Jim Bunning to please.”

Of course, the Senate has both had these rules and been able to function. The new ingredient in the mix is ever-growing crazy faction within te Republican caucus.

You have Senator McCain, who championed the idea of "cap and trade," turning around, and deriding it as the second coming of Marx and calling it "cap and tax." You have Senator Grassley, who put forward a number of the proposals in the Obamacare bill saying that it would "pull the plug on grandma." You've got a world in which ideas that are moderate at best and conservative at worst are being called socialism by members of the Senate. You want to see socialism? Give me single-payer and nationalize the banks. But, no, any regulation is now a "takeover," any tax is now a "shakedown," and stimulus is a "bailout," and everything--everything--is somehow not only a socialist plot, but a communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi plot as well--never mind that those last three are mutually exclusive.

And the problems with the crazy caucus don't stop there. There's something deeply unsettling about having people who actually hate government--who want to "drown it in a bathtub," to use Grover Norquist's now-infamous phrase--in positions of power in government. After all, the Tea people aren't the "I just want goverment to be smaller" Republicans; they're the "all government is tyranny people." (Of course, they're also the "government should be big enough to urine test all welfare recipients" people, which is just a little bizarre, but I digress...)

As much as I wish it, I don't think that all those obstructionist Republican senators will be either voted out or have a change of heart, which leaves finding the root cause of the problems in the Senate. The one I like the most is the never-ending need to fund-raise, and, thus, the absenteeism in the Senate.

First, let's be glib; Packer writes:

[T]he goal was to finish the bill by the end of the evening, so that senators wouldn’t miss a day of their spring recess—apparently, the only thing worse than a government takeover of the health-care system.

And then the serious:

While senators are in Washington, their days are scheduled in fifteen-minute intervals: staff meetings, interviews, visits from lobbyists and home-state groups, caucus lunches, committee hearings, briefing books, floor votes, fund-raisers. Each senator sits on three or four committees and even more subcommittees, most of which meet during the same morning hours, which helps explain why committee tables are often nearly empty, and why senators drifting into a hearing can barely sustain a coherent line of questioning. All this activity is crammed into a three-day week, for it’s an unwritten rule of the modern Senate that votes are almost never scheduled for Mondays or Fridays, which allows senators to spend four days away from the capital. Senators now, unlike those of several decades ago, often keep their families in their home states, where they return most weekends, even if it’s to Alaska or Idaho—a concession to endless fund-raising, and to the populist anti-Washington mood of recent years. (When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, in 1995, he told new Republican members not to move their families to the capital.) Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader, said, “When we scheduled votes, the only day where we could be absolutely certain we had all one hundred senators there was Wednesday afternoon.”

Nothing dominates the life of a senator more than raising money. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, said, “Of any free time you have, I would say fifty per cent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising. In addition to financing their own campaigns, senators participate at least once a week in the Power Hour, during which they make obligatory calls on behalf of the Party (in the Democrats’ case, from a three-story town house across Constitution Avenue from the Senate office buildings, since they’re barred from using their own offices to raise money). Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican, insisted that the donations are never sufficient to actually buy a vote, but he added, “It sucks up time that a senator ought to be spending getting to know other senators, working on issues.”

Holds could be broken, things could get out of committee, if senators were actually in the Senate. Perhaps real debates could take place on the floor of the Senate. Perhaps more could get done if, instead of a three-day senate week, we had a five- (or even six- or seven-) day week. Perhaps some of the comity and camaraderie (or whatever) could return if Senators were forced to actually spend time talking.

Plus all of this could lead to the civic bonus of actual discussion of issues, actual debates of problems--substance and not just process.

The trouble is, there's no easy way to get this done. You can't wave a magic wand and make term limits disappear (unpopular and potentially quality-killing, plus there's no guarantee that they won't just end up running for something else...); you can't just snap your fingers and make a constitutional amendment for purely public financing; you can't--and who would want to?--revert the world back to when state legislatures just appointed people.

Packer ends on a rather depressing, but probably true, note:

The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

Of course, the consiquence of this, as Ezra Klein has pointed out again and again, is that the legislative branch becomes less and less relevant, as the executive and judicial branches actually do things.

Station Identification

2010-08-07T10:42:00.000-05:00

It's a wonderful day here in rural Wisconsin. My nephews are currently dancing to the dulcet tones of my father's metronome.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, steadfastly refusing to be distracted.

Unoriginal, Nearly-deep Thoughts

2010-08-05T17:19:00.000-05:00

Because I'm lazy, and because I haven't thought through most of these things, here are some unoriginal, nearly-deep thoughts.

Let's go.

(1) This is epistemic closure:

Most of us think we can always enlarge our knowledge base by accepting things that are entailed by (or logically implied by) things we know. The set of things we know is closed under entailment (or under deduction or logical implication), which means that we know that a given claim is true upon recognizing, and accepting thereby, that it follows from what we know. However, some theorists deny that knowledge is closed under entailment, and the issue remains controversial.

This is not epistemic closure:

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase “epistemic closure” has been ricocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.

Also, New York Times:

(Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

Sure, except it has a technical term in epistemology.

Seriously, guys, skepticism about closure has serious implications for ability to know. That's scary. Let's not trivialize it by using it as an overwrought term for conservative intellectual suckage.

In the end, I expect this term to go the way of "begging the question," which means the next generation of philosophy students will have yet another thing about which they can be smug.

Now, to be fair, I've only read some of Lowell's letter, and though I find them fascinating, that's one long-ass book, and I doubt I'll ever finish the beast.

Similarly, I haven't finished The Archivist, though for entirely different reasons. It started well, but the middle is dragging on, and I may have to abandon it. The reason I put it here is that the plot revolves around a number of T.S. Elliot's letter, which, in the fictional universe, have yet to be read.

I had a thought while reading this: If any contemporary writers make it into the canon 100 years from now, scholars probably won't find any letters to read. Everything moves faster now, so the Lowell-Bishop (or Jefferson-Adams, if you prefer) kind of correspondence has fallen by the wayside.

And I don't know about your emails, but mine tend to lack any kind of brilliance; I can't imagine I'd--or anyone else--would want them read.

Here's the question: What will future scholars use to get into the minds of contemporary writers/thinkers/whatever? Blogs and twitter? Facebook updates? Anyone? Beuller?

Station Identification

2010-08-05T16:10:00.000-05:00

Power went down in scattered blocks around the city. It's called a "brownout." We live in the end of days.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner.

Station Identification

2010-08-03T08:56:00.000-05:00

Speaking of good books, here's another Sherman Alexie; this time a it's collection of short stories (with a couple of poems), War Dances.

A representative passage:

A bonnethead shark in Omaha, Nebraska, conceived and gave birth to a baby that soon died. But this mother shark had never shared water with a male. Scientists were puzzled. So they performed a DNA test and discovered the dead baby only had its mother's DNA. Yes, that bonnethead shark had given virgin birth. Do you think this is amazing? Well, it's not. Dozens of species of insects give virgin birth. And Komodo dragons--yeah, those big lizards give virgin birth, too. Jeez, one human gives virgin birth and that jump-starts one of the world's great religions. But when a Komodo dragon gives virgin birth, do you know what it's thinking? It's thinking, This is Tuesday, right? I think this is Tuesday. What am I going to do on Wednesday?

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner.

Books That Should Have Been Assigned in High School, Part 1 of n

2010-07-31T15:37:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks back, I read Sherman Alexie's Flight. High school English teachers take note: This is the kind of book I wished I had been assigned in High School. It's at once funny and heartbreaking, irreverent and deeply serious, easy to read but with ample thematic meat. Plus, it's not too long (about 180 pages of big print), there's no actual sex, and the protagonist is a teenager.

Representative passage:

I think of the great Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, who was given his name after he battled heroically against other Indians. [...]

I think of how Crazy Horse was speared in the stomach by a U.S. Cavalry oldier while his best friend, Little Big Man, held his arms. I think of the millions of dead and dying Indians.

"Do you know about the Ghost Dance?" I ask.

"No," Justice says. "Teach me."

"It was a ceremony created by the Paiute holy man Wovoka, back in the eighteen-seventies. He said, if the Indians danced this long enough, all the dead Indians would return and the white people would disappear."

"Sounds like my kind of dance," Justice said.

"Yeah, but it didn't work. All of the Ghost Dancers were slaughtered."

"Maybe they didn't have the right kind of music."

"Yeah, they should have had Metallica."

Station Identification

2010-07-31T15:20:00.000-05:00

I finished Louise Erdrich's The Beet Queen last night. It was pretty frackin' fantastic:

What the breeze made do next was almost frightening. Something happened, I turned in a slow circle. I tossed my hands out and waved them. I swayed as if I heard music from below. Quicker, and then wilder, I lifted my feet. I began to tap them down, and then I was dancing on their graves.

And,

Ghostly, rank in their own sweat and travel dust, they saw me as a pure black flame. They could not resist me. I always knew that if I kept my eyes moving strictly down the page of print, if I paused in the darkest corners of the landscape, if I closed my eyes as if in communion with someone greater, they would come. The would force me to worship them like and animal. I would fall. I would burn and burn until by grace I was consumed.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, where we never dance on graves, but read a lot about it.

There really will be a new post up at Oberlin Blogs.

Enhancing the Land

2010-07-30T14:11:00.001-05:00

Rand Paul, who's running for Senate in Kentucky, has no problem with Mountaintop Removal, the most devastating form of strip mining. From a profile in Details (via TPM):

Rules, control—just what Rand Paul abhors most, what chafes him about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and about environmentalists taking aim at Appalachia's coal industry for a practice known as mountaintop removal. The process involves blasting off the tops of mountains to get at the coal seams inside, then filling stream valleys with the resulting rubble and debris. Scientists and environmentalists say its effects are devastating, that it buries feeder streams, razes ecosystems, leaves toxic sludge pits and decapitated, denuded forests in its wake. "Mountaintop-removal coal mining," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief prosecuting attorney for the eco-watchdog group Riverkeeper, recently wrote, "is the greatest environmental tragedy ever to befall our nation."

Paul believes mountaintop removal just needs a little rebranding. "I think they should name it something better," he says. "The top ends up flatter, but we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here. And I've seen the reclaimed lands. One of them is 800 acres, with a sports complex on it, elk roaming, covered in grass." Most people, he continues, "would say the land is of enhanced value, because now you can build on it."

"Let's let you decide what to do with your land," he says. "Really, it's a private-property issue." This is a gentler, more academic variation on a line he used the evening before, during his speech at the Harlan Center: "If you don't live here, it's none of your business."

Sure.

The top of Kayford Mountain. Photo by Mike McGee, from Wilder Voice, vol. 5, iss. 9., here.

Station Identification

2010-07-30T13:38:00.000-05:00

On top of Kayford Mountain.

Need. More. Coffee.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, getting very sleepy.

Anatomy of a WTF

2010-07-29T14:05:00.000-05:00

Well, Greater Wingnuttia is in an uproar over the revelation that there was an private email list, “JournoList,” of 400-or-so liberal bloggers, reporters, writers, editors, and academics. I’m in an uproar, too. Surely, I’m an important media figure, what with a blog that reaches about ten people a day and an editor at two news outfits in Collegeville Bumfuck, Ohio.

So, what gives? Seriously, Ezra Klein started the damn thing, and I link to him ALL THE TIME. JournoList is gone now, but surely JournoList’s new incarnation “CabaList” (great name, btw) could include me. I await your email, Mr. Klein.

In all seriousness, though, I feel like Will Ferrel’s character in Zoolander. Have I been taking crazy pills? I honestly don’t understand the hubbub over this list, which, if you’ve been reading conservative blogs (and why would you do that?), you’d think is a cross a Marxist political rally and the cabal from The X-Files. Says Jonathan Strong at The Daily Caller:

In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded Journolist, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.

But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents
revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.

In a key episode, Journolist members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Conservative critics of Washington’s journalistic establishment have long charged the media with a striking liberal bias. But those critics have also said the problem was mostly unintentional, the result of a press corps made up mostly of Democratic-leaning scribes.

Yet Journolist’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.

Journolist’s members included dozens of straight-news reporters from major news organizations, including Time, Newsweek, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, PBS and a large NPR affiliate in California.

I guess that's supposed to be shocking and/or freightening. It's certainly supposed to be evidence for Strong's claim that "an influential left-wing faction of the media [is] participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias."

Of course, it's none of those things. It's Spencer Ackerman, who is a liberal blogger, bitching about the Jerimiah Wright coverage to a bunch of other liberal bloggers and reporters, which isn't that strange.

And as best I can tell, the "open plotting" and "collusion" involved a few (not all 400, not even close) bitching about how they would like to change the coverage of the Wright scandal. Indeed, by Strong's own lights, we're talking about, at most a dozen-or-so well-known liberal columnists and bloggers discussing ways to change the narrative.

What does Strong think? Does he honestly believe that Ezra frickin' Klein is giving marching orders to 400 journalists? that after hearing Ackerman's master strategy, the entire media changed course? I've yet to see a shred of evidence indicating that it went any further than a few people bitching.

And then there's the charge that JournoList is somehow in cahoots with the Obama administration, even though there is--by these guys' own lights!--no indication that anyone actually employed by the Obama administration was active in the list at the time they were employed--one of Klein's rules for JournoList.

There are, I guess, a number of emails on the list that included strident defenses of Obama, and urged others to defend him too--which is exactly what a lot of liberals do all the time. Indeed, Obama sends me emails encouraging me to support him. It's a conspiracy I suppose. Think of all those press releases! Finally, proof of a liberal media conspiracy!

All the hubbub, all the utterly bizarre demands that all JournoList members and their associates ought to be named and shamed is really, at it's core, incredulity on the part of conservatives that liberals talk to each other and bitch to each other like normal people.

Indeed, it seems to me that, even if the "straight" journalists (i.e. people whose writing is actually supposed to be neutral) were writing about their support for Obama--and there's no evidence that they were--that's not exactly a big deal. Except for the inevitable question-raising, I haven't seen--despite a couple hours of paging through the swamp that is the conservative blogosphere--any evidence that their journalism was actually affected by their evil email list.

Are we supposed to somehow prevent journalists from having and discussing their private opinions? Perhaps they should be required to publicly post their dinner-time conversations, so that we are sure that they're not saying mean things and discussing politics with their families.

Amanda Marcotte agrees it's high time that we ensure liberals have no opinions:

The fundamental argument justifying the fit is that liberal journalists don’t have a right to speak to each other in confidence, a right that conservatives apparently get to enjoy on the grounds that they’re specialer than us. I imagine that if this all works out for them, they’ll be delighted to know they have a new line of attack on liberals. It’s way more than listservs, after all. Liberals communicate with each other in private in all sorts of ways. Now that they’ve managed to make this fact controversial, there’s no end to the possible scandals. I’ve made a list of what we can expect next, in terms of created controversy.

Scandal will erupt when it’s discovered:

*Many liberals are married to or dating other liberals, which often includes actual sexual congress going on behind closed doors.
*Liberal homes are often installed with telephones, and most phones made from them go unrecorded.
*To make this worse, most liberals nowadays carry their phones with them. At any point in time, they have access to confidential conversations with other people who are often also liberal. And just to add to the wickedness of it all, many also employ text messaging.
*Liberals are permitted to enter restaurants that serve dinner to people without recording their conversations. No doubt many of these liberal take advantage of this to discuss politics over dinner with other liberals.
*Did you know there’s no law against liberals having cocktail parties?
*To make it even worse, many liberals working in media or politics have offices where they work with other liberals, and therefore have unfettered access to unrecorded conversations with each other.
*But it turns out even those who don’t work in physical proximity with other liberals often use instant messaging services to conduct conversations with each other as if they worked together. Not only does instant messaging create a scandalous veil of privacy over these communications, but it’s also rumored that they use improper grammar and spelling.
*Liberals are permitted to both purchase books written by other liberals or check them out of the library. Either way, they brazenly read those books quietly, and enjoy thoughts about them that they aren’t forced to share with other people.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the only form of communication we’ll be allowed is blogging, but only if every reader reports their thoughts straightaway in comments. Maybe also Facebook, but only if all the privacy controls are turned off. And then they’ll have to create new rules to explain why it’s scandalous to allow us even this.

I'm not sure why I'm writing so much about this. The only thing I can think of is that it's just so fucking crazy that I can't take my eyes off of it.

I mean here's a list of the "known JournoListas" and their associations. Including links that demonstrate that some of them are work for "maoist" publications (the evidence? A House Committee on Unamerican Activities report that calls The Guardian an arm of the Soviet Union. Of course that would make the communists or maybe even Marxists, but certainly not Maoists. Whatever.)

Then there's the utterly bizarre, quasi-anti-semetic stuff:

What’s so funny, in a sick, sad way, is that, looking at the Journolist, it really does seem as if there is Jewish domination of the media — except that the Jews doing the so-called domination are completely in sync politically with Oliver Stone. They’re all left, left and more left. They’re just all too dumb to realize that, when you get as far Left as Stone, the antisemitism stops being coy little references to capitalism, Israeli imperialism and Palestinian victimhood. Instead, it becomes the active antisemitism that travels from Chavez’s attacks on Jewish businesses, to Stalin’s periodic kangaroo court purges and suppression of religion, to Hitler’s final solution. (And I mention those three Leftist antisemites here because Stone specifically speaks of them as either admirable or misunderstood, or both.)

If you want to get away from “Jewish domination” and get into a more balanced media, with representatives of all sectors in American society you have to go to the conservative media. There, you’ll find as mixed a bunch of people as you can ever hope for: Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim (a few), male, female, gay, straight, and some I know I’ve forgotten or haven’t even imagined.

I do analytic philosophy. I'm supposed to be able to parse arguments, and I have no idea what this guy's point is.

Of course, the whole thing is ludicrously hypocritical. The conservative media is well-known for their "collusion," which is really just message discipline. It's not that nefarious; it's just that conservatives are really good at hammering on certain issues and talking points at the same time. If you want to read more about that, read this of this.

One conservative actually calls this bullshit out, which is nice to see:

Everyone who has reason to be embarrassed by a direct quote in the Daily Caller's series on Journolist is an openly opinionated commentator. (The one partial exception is Jeffrey Toobin, who presents himself as a middle-of-the-road analyst on CNN, but his weaselly nature has always been pretty obvious.) Everyone who has been shown to have their work influenced by conversations on Journolist is, likewise, a commentator. That Chris Hayes tries to get perspective from other liberals before he goes on TV to opine on a topic, or that Joe Klein incorporates ideas from off-the-record exchanges into his blog posts, is not exactly earthshaking news. Commentators on the right do exactly the same thing -- it's just our emails don't get leaked because we're smart enough not to conduct these exchanges on listservs where we let the audience expand to include 400 people. This practice is a double-edged sword -- you get the benefit of idea-sharing, but you have to be careful not to get sucked into groupthink. Liberals seem more prone to the latter failing, but that's more a problem for them than for anyone else, and it's not much of a scandal.

The straight-news reporters who were on Journolist are being accused of being complicit in the partisan hackery they observed (even if they didn't participate in the discussions), but the charge doesn't really wash unless you can look at their work and point out how it is skewed by exposure to liberal conversations. Orrin Judd provides some useful perspective:

[O]ur friend Rick Perlstein was on the list and, in the meantime, he also had his own list of pet conservatives from whom he'd gather the opposing viewpoints. So there's nothing wrong with the list per se. Nor does this seem like a conspiracy to shape the news, no matter how much a few participants might have wished it to be one.

I guess I'll take the knocks in here, as long as I get to take the fact that all the "hyperventilating" on the right is just hypocritical, logic-free, nonsense, which, I suppose, is a pretty good description of the conservative blogosphere.

Station Identification

2010-07-29T10:45:00.000-05:00

I just had a cinnamon roll so full of sugary goodness, I can barely function.

On the docket: War Dances reviewed, the anatomy of stupidity, a new post up at Oberlin Blogs, and much, much more.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, shakin' like a Polaroid picture.

Links with Little to No Annotation, Part 1 of n

2010-07-28T13:21:00.000-05:00

Because I recently went through a week's worth of unread posts in my RSS reader, I now have 20 or so starred items. Starred items mean, I should write about this. Well, instead of writing about them, why don't I just link to them and start to get my diigo (yeah, I didn't know what it was either) skills a-workin'.

Ready, set, go!

Links!

(1) Ta-Nehisi Coates says:

The more I think about this, the more I am faced with the kind of question I feel naive and stupid for asking--What kind of human being writes a 4,000 word article to prove that someone's long-dead relative wasn't lynched because he was beaten to death? Callousness is scary. Stupidity is scary. When you combine the two....I mean seriously, What the fuck? It's the worst of everything.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(2) Via Digby at Hullabaloo, this (from Pew) is great journalism. Awesome job, guys!

Thirty-seven governorships are up for grabs in November, along with all 435 seats in the House and 37 in the Senate. And only a handful of the more hotly contested races will get significant national media coverage from now through Election Day.

So it’s a little surprising that the national press is now lavishing the most attention on a candidate who cable pundits and political analysts expect to lose big in November: Alvin Greene.

The South Carolina Democrat has been the lead newsmaker in 2010 coverage since coming out of nowhere to win the June 8 Senate primary. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism crunched the numbers and provided The Upshot with its internal analysis of media coverage across 52 major news outlets, from South Carolina’s primary day through July 18.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(3) There's a new model of the universe that doesn't include the big bang--or dark energy. Can I have just the latter and not the former? Don't worry; it's still preliminary (via Tyler Cowan)

Intrigued? Go, read.

(4) Sara Mayeux says:

A professor of mine, asked why he teaches history, replied that he wants his students, whatever profession they go into, not to be "prisoners of the present." That is, to understand (not just abstractly to know) that the way we live now is not the only way humans can live, or ever have. That's a lesson you don't have to go very far back in time to learn—in a sense, I wonder if Ta-Nehisi's frustration that America "is too ignorant of itself" doesn't have something to do with the tendency of Americans to imprison themselves in the present. Thus race has always been the subject of mere "conversations," marriage has been a man and a woman in love for time eternal.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(5) But I say to Ben Zimmer of Language Log, "what the hell is an obscenicon, and where can I get one?"

Intrigued? Go, read.

Station Identification

2010-07-28T12:48:00.000-05:00

Wilder Voice scooped The New Yorker. Suck it, world (h/t to my friend Mike).

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner.

Not This Book But The Next

2010-07-27T16:45:00.000-05:00

Don't let the pretty cover, good title, and laudatory quotations on the back cover fool you: Lydia Peelle's Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing is little more than a really depressing, flawed--if promising--collection of almost-atmospheric short stories.

Thematically, I'm pretty wild about her stories. The best way I can think of to put it is that she captures her characters at the edge of one thing, poised to jump into the rest, and she just lets them sit there. In "Mule Killers," there are the farmers getting their first tractors and lamenting the killing of the last mules. In "Phantom Pain," a town is held in the thrawl of an urban legend, its denizens allowing themselves hope that its true--that it might change everything:

Tanya looks up at him, her pen in her mouth, and doesn't say a word. She is writing a poem about the panther. All her life, one thing has been sure: nothing ever happens in Highland City. Now this. She believes it is some sort of sign.

There's "Sweethearts of the Rodeo," perhaps my favorite of the stories, which paints a portrait of young adolescence:

It was the summer we smoked our first cigarettes, the summer you broke your arm. It was the last summer, the last one before boys.

In "This is Not a Love Story," Peelle gives us one of the a decent portrait of the South:

When people talk about the South being haunted, it's true. But it's not the places that are haunted, it's the people. They are trapped by all the stories of the past, wandering a long hallway lined with locked doors, knocking and knocking, with no one ever answering. No one ever will. That's the thing about the past. The closest you can get to it is stories, and stories don't even come close.

But despite her thematic efficacy and her gift for metaphor, these stories all fall short of their potential.

Some of it is structural: The titular story, "Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing" is paced strangely--too fast to be truly atmospheric, but with characters too weak and a pace too slow and too short to really move. "The Still Point" almost works, but it should be in third- not first-person. You get the idea.

It is her first book, and god knows I couldn't do any better. Plus, she's been published all over the damn place, so I guess I'm in the minority on this. And, if you buy her books through me, I get money.

The Almost Meta-post

2010-07-27T16:08:00.000-05:00

Who has two thumbs and doesn't deserve a column? This guy! Public Domain image courtesy of Wikipedia, here.

I'm thinking of adding a new tag to this blog, viz., "David Brooks Doesn't Deserve a Column." God knows I've written enough about David Brooks.

Some might think that petty, or call me jealous. I suppose would be fair critiques. It is a cheap shot, and I am a little jealous that someone who pretty much just vomits out 500-odd words of bullshit gets a job at The Times. I do that all the time, and the best I get is a position with the Oberlin Communications Dept. (for which, of course, I'm very grateful).

I'm not going to talk about the most recent column, which was not only wrongheaded but obnoxiously written (repetition is fine when it serves a purpose, but all that "green jacket" shit was just a patently transparent, and ineffective, framing device that did little except add column inches to what was essentially a two-paragraph and inane collection of faux-centrist talking points).

I'm going, instead, to give you this gem from a bit back:

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era–when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute to the have-nots…. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

Eric, over at The Edge of the American West (which I believe is written by a group of professors at some college or other) has this to say in response.

So to be clear, according to Brooks, the progressive era, which saw Congress and the state legislatures adopt constitutional amendments for the direct election of senators, an income tax, and the enfranchisement of women, wasn’t a time when government redistributed wealth and power to the have-nots. This seems obviously wrong in a way that would earn an undergraduate an F.

Eric, more charitable than I, goes on to say something almost nice about Brooks, which is sweet.

Intrigued? Go, read.

Station Identification

2010-07-27T15:35:00.000-05:00

The new and much improved Wilder Voice website. If you're using IE to look at it, then stop that! Go get Firefox, Chrome, or, hell, even Opera for all I care. Just stop using Internet Explorer.

It's so muggy in Minneapolis that I walked outside and nearly drown.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, sweating like a pig.

This Bee Can Sting

2010-07-24T15:36:00.001-05:00

I asked a friend of mine for a book recommendation, and, recommendation in hand, I trucked down to Birchbark Books (a local bookstore in Minneapolis, owned by Louise Erdrich--and if you're ever in the Lakes area in Minneapolis, you ought to stop in for a visit) and picked up Little Bee, the sophomore novel by Chris Cleave.

Written with all the contemporary bells and whistles (shifting narrators, thematic obsession, etc.), Little Bee tracks the its titular character's (Little Bee) struggle to find asylum in the U.K., and the life of a recently widowed reporter-turned-Cosmo smut peddler. They meet, of course, and they share a past, of course, and the result is a wonderful tragedy (in the broad sense). There's even a stand-in for a Greek Chorus; what's not to love?

It's heartbreaking at time: What else would you expect from a book about a 16-year-old Nigerian undocumented immigrant fleeing machete-wielding death? Fortunately, Cleave's wit and black humor is some of the best I've seen:

I have never been one of those happy women who insist that disaster strikes from a clear blue sky. For me, there were countless foretellings, innumerable small breaks with normalcy. Andrew's chin unshaved, a second bottle uncorked on a weekday night, the use of passive voice on deadline Friday. Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have left this commentator a little lost. That was the very last sentence my husband wrote. In his Times column, he was always so precise with the written word. From a layperson, lost would be a synonym for bewildered. From my husband, it was a measured good-bye.

Witty? yes. A disarming love of (obsession with?)language befitting a contemporary novelist? yes. Not black humor though, so here's this, from the mouth of Little Bee:

There are things the men can do to you in this life, I promise you, it would be much better to kill yourself first. Once you have this knowledge, your eyes are always flickering from this place to that, watching for the moment when the men will come. [...]

One day the detention officers gave all of us a copy of a book called LIFE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. It explains the history of your country and how to fit in. I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth). I worked out how to kill myself under Labour and Conservative governments, and why it was not important to have a plan for suicide under the Liberal Democrats. I began to understand how your country worked.

I laughed out loud, and before I could feel bad about laguhing at suicide plans, I dove back in. A good trick: make 'em laugh but feel bad for laughing. The only thing to do is read on.

Another:

"I think I shall teach you the names of all of the English flowers," said Sarah. "This is fuchsia, and this is a rose, and this is honeysuckle. What? What are you smiling about?"

"There are no goats. That is why you have all these beautiful flowers."

"There were goats, in your villiage?"

"Yes, and they ate all the flowers."

"I'm sorry."

"Do not be sorry. We ate all the goats."

Another:

I mean look," he said. "There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization."

Also, keep your eyes peeled for a delicious--but too long--joke about a taxi driver, David Bowie, and the multiple meanings of the word 'cock.' I haven't laughed so hard in ages.

Of course, the book isn't all black comedy. And though it uses pomo literary techniques, it falls prey to none of the masturbatory vanity on display in many of those works. Indeed, Little Bee stays grounded because despite all the language games textual awareness, it contains an emotional and thematic core to strong to be caught up in the shifting currents of Theory.

In an interview (helpfully, and obnoxiously included at the end of this book. I'm fairly certain I dislike the practice of including, generally useless, information in the back of books. It makes me feel as though I'm being talked down to by the publishers, but I digress...), Cleave says:

[H]ere's the true story that inspired me to write Little Bee. In 2001, an Angolan man named Manuel Bravo fled to England and claimed asylum on the grounds that he and his family would be persecuted and killed if they were returned to Angola. He lived in a state of uncertainty for four years pending a decision on his application. Then, without warning, in September 2005, Manuel Bravo and his thirteen-year-old son were seized in a dawn raid and interned at an Immigration Removal Centre in southern England. They were told that they would be forcibly deported to Angola the next morning. That night, Manuel Bravo took his own life by hanging himself in a stairwell. His son was awakened in his cell and told the news. What had happened was that Manuel Bravo, aware of a rule under which unaccompanied minors cannot be deported from the UK, had taken his own life in order to save the life of his son. His last words to his child were: "Be brave. Work hard. Do well at school."

This may be unfair, but, as a general rule, it is easy to play language games and call it a day when you're writing about your own existential crises; it's much harder to base a book on some foundation-less, ever-shifting mire of words when you're writing about a man who kills himself to save his son.

(And not to be glib, but I find in horrible and hilarious that the very next question in the interview is "What can we expect next from you?" I honestly can't fathom hearing about the plight of Manuel Bravo, and then asking about "What's next?" Let's hope the interview is heavily edited.)

If you're interested, I do recommend the book. It's all of those adjectives you read on the back of books. It's also a perfect example of how to use the devices of pomo lit for good. Huzzah!

A reminder: I get paid if you buy a copy by clicking on the link up top. Rest assured, I dislike a great deal of what I read, though I probably won't write about those, so I'm not just talking up Little Bee to make a quick buck (keeping in mind that my checks include fractions of pennies). If you have the good fortune of living near a small bookstore like Birchbark, then don't buy Little Bee (or books in general) from Amazon/Me; buy your books from the corner shop, and make the world a better place.

The Trouble with Consequentialism

2010-07-10T18:42:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting back-and-forth going on between Tyler Cowan over at Marginal Revolution and Robin Hason at Overcoming Bias.

It all started with this post by Cowan on cryonics; after quoting a piece in The New York Times one couple's martial disputes over whether or not to freeze themselves to prevent their deaths, he writes:

My question is: why not save someone else's life instead?

He later elaborates on that rather glib pronouncement:

A few of my lunch compadres have asked why I compare cryonics (unfavorably) to acts of charity, rather than comparing other acts of personal consumption (I enjoy the gelato here in Berlin) to charity. My view is this: the decision to have one's head frozen is not primarily instrumental but rather expressive. Look at the skewed demographics of the people who do it, namely highly intelligent male readers of science fiction, often with tech jobs. Is it that they love their lives especially much? Unlikely. Instead it's a chance to stand for something and in a way which sets them apart from many others. It's a chance to stand for instrumental rationality, for Science, for attitudes which go beyond traditional religion, for the conquering of limits, for probabilistic reasoning, and for the notion that the subject sees hidden possibilities and resources which more traditional observers do not. [...]

I believe the world would be better off, and the relative status of the virtuous nerds higher, if instead the cryonics customers sent more signals which were perceived as running contrary to type. Ignoring cryonics, and promoting charity, would do more to raise the status of intelligence and analytical thinking than does cryonics.

On the practical side, while I am a non-believer, I also think that charity has a greater chance of bringing a longer life to one's self -- or immortality -- than does signing a cryonics contract. That's an even stronger triumph for probabilistic thinking than what the cryonics customers have on tap.

Robin Hanson responds:

Tyler’s argument is hard to follow here. Is he merely saying the world is better if anyone acts more contrary to type, expresses less relative to instrumenting, or donates more to charity? If so, why pick on cryonics and tech nerds in particular, why not just rail in general against all expressing, typed-acts, and non-charity? If the argument is that the world gains unusually more from tech nerds acting against type, expressing less, and giving to charity, then we need to hear an argument for that. It certainly seems odd to complain that tech nerds, usually critiqued for being overly practical, are actually overly expressive.

Let’s be concrete. Tyler goes way out of his way to be, and call attention to his being, a “foodie” – his eating a gelato in Berlin, and then mentioning on his blog, clearly has a big expressive component. Being a foodie lets Tyler join a high status community and stand for art, culture, etc. in a way that sets him apart and supports the notion he can see hidden food quality that the rest of us do not see. (I like “great” food, but honestly not much more than ordinary food.) Does Tyler think the world would be equally better off if foodies were to act contrary to type, express less via buying less fancy food, and give the difference to charity? If so, why has he never mentioned it in his hundreds of food posts?

Could it be Tyler knows that tech nerds are low status in our society and fair game for criticism? Is this really any different than rich folks complaining about inner city kids who buy $100 sneakers instead of saving their money or giving it to charity, even while they buy $1000 suits and dresses instead of saving their money or giving it to charity?

Finally, Cowan makes this rather half-assed response:

This is not essential to the points under discussion, but I should add that I consider tech nerds to be a relatively high status group in American society, at least above the age of thirty.

Time for my rather half-assed gloss.

First of all, I agree with Cowan in that Hanson's bitching about tech nerds' low status is a lot of bitching over nothing. That said, I think that Cowan's elaboration on his first pronouncement does little to change the fact that's difficult to read

My question is: why not save someone else's life instead?

as anything other than an unfriendly moral evaluation on freezing oneself.

Cowan's argument that the decision to freeze oneself is somehow expressive, and therefore subject to a greater moral burden than merely instrumental places a lot of weight on a distinction that can't take much weight at all.

I'm not sure that one can say any decision regarding consumption isn't in a way expressive. You don't have to be a fan of Pomo to read actions as identity forming, and therefore, in some sense expressive.

I agree with Hanson that Cowan's decision to eat gelato is different only in scale than some nerd's decision to freeze oneself.

At the end of the day, all of this back-and-forth is a consequence, if you'll pardon the pun, of consequentialism. If you're only real moral objective is to maximize good, then you're going to wind up with constant problems of resource allocations--in a trivial sense (obviously there are plenty of serious moral resource allocation problems, but I'm not sure the decision to eat gelato counts).

One of the classical problems with consequentialism is that if one is trying to maximize good, one can always do more. Why is it that we don't all do only what one can to subsist and give the rest to charity?

Station Identification

2010-07-05T05:00:00.000-05:00

Illustration by Eliza Koch. From Wilder Voice Volume 5, Issue 9 : Spring 2010.

It's a muggy and hot fifth of July. I'm fairly certain that some of this "fog" is really the smokey remains of last night's festivities.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, wishing you a happy 4th, and reminding you not to inhale to deeply.

The Big Sell Out 3

2010-07-04T07:26:00.000-05:00

You may remember the first big sell out, when Oberliner had Google Ads. Of course, that didn't end up being nearly as lucrative as I had hoped. Then there was my foray into professional blogging over at Oberlin Blogs, in which I may have gone pro but kept it real (expect a new post later today, by the way).

But now, I've discovered another way to sell my integrity for negligible amounts of money: Amazon Associates.

Basically, whenever I review a book, I can put a link to its Amazon page. If you click on the link and buy it, then I get a bit of money. Sweet!

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, trading in hard-earned integrity for unearned money.

Station Identification

2010-07-04T06:02:00.000-05:00

Keegan Wenkman, here.

All my friends are getting head shots. I'm thinking of getting mine Warholized.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, not suffering from any kind of insecurity.

The Annals of Journalism

2010-07-03T06:00:00.000-05:00

Sunset over Wheat Fields -- Coffin Road, photo by Scott Butner, used under a CC License, here.

I recently came to the decision that everyone should read Harper's. The article that solidified this pronouncement is "The Food Bubble" by Frederick Kaufman in the most recent issue (July 2010).

The short version of the article is that Kaufman is giving an unorthodox explanation for the 2007-8 Food Crisis, which was a dizzying and sudden increase in food prices around the world--a rise that led to political instability in the third world and economic insecurity in the first, not to mention starvation.

The villain of Kaufman's story is familiar, though unexpected: Goldman Sachs and Wall Street.

The brilliance of the article, however, isn't in the astute and compelling reportage, but in the way it is framed:

Grain trading was not always brainless. Joseph parsed Pharaoh’s dream of cattle and crops, discerned that drought loomed, and diligently went about storing immense amounts of grain. By the time famine descended, Joseph had cornered the market—an accomplishment that brought nations to their knees and made Joseph an extremely rich man.

In 1730, enlightened bureaucrats of Japan’s Edo shogunate perceived that a stable rice price would protect those who produced their country’s sacred grain. Up to that time, all the farmers in Japan would bring their rice to market after the September harvest, at which point warehouses would overflow, prices would plummet, and, for all their hard work, Japan’s rice farmers would remain impoverished. Instead of suffering through the Osaka market’s perennial volatility, the bureaucrats preferred to set a price that would ensure a living for farmers, grain warehousemen, the samurai (who were paid in rice), and the general population—a price not at the mercy of the annual cycle of scarcity and plenty but a smooth line, gently fluctuating within a reasonable range.

While Japan had relied on the authority of the government to avoid deadly volatility, the United States trusted in free enterprise. After the combined credit crunch, real estate wreck, and stock-market meltdown now known as the Panic of 1857, U.S. grain merchants conceived a new stabilizing force: In return for a cash commitment today, farmers would sign a forward contract to deliver grain a few months down the line, on the expiration date of the contract. Since buyers could never be certain what the price of wheat would be on the date of delivery, the price of a future bushel of wheat was usually a few cents less than that of a present bushel of wheat. And while farmers had to accept less for future wheat than for real and present wheat, the guaranteed future sale protected them from plummeting prices and enabled them to use the promised payment as, say, collateral for a bank loan. These contracts let both producers and consumers hedge their risks, and in so doing reduced volatility.

But the forward contract was a primitive financial tool, and when demand for wheat exploded after the Civil War, and ever more grain merchants took to reselling and trading these agreements on a fast-growing secondary market, it became impossible to figure out who owed whom what and when. At which point the great grain merchants of Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis set about creating a new kind of institution less like a medieval county fair and more like a modern clearinghouse. In place of myriad individually negotiated and fulfilled forward contracts, the merchants established exchanges that would regulate both the quality of grain and the expiration dates of all forward contracts—eventually limiting those dates to five each year, in March, May, July, September, and December. Whereas under the old system each buyer and each seller vetted whoever might stand at the opposite end of each deal, the grain exchange now served as the counterparty for everyone.

...

The decline of volatility, good news for the rest of us, drove bankers up the wall. I put in a call to Steven Rothbart, who traded commodities for Cargill way back in the 1980s. I asked him what he knew about the birth of commodity index funds, and he began to laugh. “Commodities had died,” he told me. “We sat there every day and the market wouldn’t move. People left. They couldn’t make a living anymore.”

Clearly, some innovation was in order. In the midst of this dead market, Goldman Sachs envisioned a new form of commodities investment, a product for investors who had no taste for the complexities of corn or soy or wheat, no interest in weather and weevils, and no desire for getting into and out of shorts and longs—investors who wanted nothing more than to park a great deal of money somewhere, then sit back and watch that pile grow. The managers of this new product would acquire and hold long positions, and nothing but long positions, on a range of commodities futures. They would not hedge their futures with the actual sale or purchase of real wheat (like a bona-fide hedger), nor would they cover their positions by buying low and selling high (in the grand old fashion of commodities speculators). In fact, the structure of commodity index funds ran counter to our normal understanding of economic theory, requiring that index-fund managers not buy low and sell high but buy at any price and keep buying at any price. No matter what lofty highs long wheat futures might attain, the managers would transfer their long positions into the next long futures contract, due to expire a few months later, and repeat the roll when that contract, in turn, was about to expire—thus accumulating an everlasting, ever-growing long position, unremittingly regenerated.

Intruiged? Go, read.

Station Identification

2010-07-03T05:39:00.000-05:00

I awoke this morning fat and happy; there's something about eating grilled chicken, corn, and sausage with homemade sweet-potato French fries and baguette with your neighbors that brings out the summer spirit in us all.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, reveling in the summer sun.

Great Moments in One-Liners

2010-07-02T11:10:00.000-05:00

From Tad Friend's profile of Steve Carell, "First Banana" in the most recent New Yorker (July 5, 2010):

Bucket Brigade[1] movies are usually ensemble affairs in which every character is funny, as opposed to an Eddie Murphy movie, in which Eddie Murphy is sometimes funny.

Of course, the Bucket Brigade also made Pinapple Express and Funny People, both of which felt as though they had been designed by a committee. And while the latter was at least occasionally funny, the former was just idiotic. Also, Beverly Hills Cop.

The point: Despite Friend's wit, that a movie is created by the "Bucket Brigade" is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for humor.

[1] As Friend explains it:

Nowadays in the comedy industry, a Bucket Brigade of actors, writers, and directors pitches in to punch up one anther's films; the nearly all-male group includes Roach, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Nicholas Stroller, Jason Segel, John Hamburg, Garry Shandling, Sacha Baron Cohen, Robert Smigel, Adam McKay, and Will Ferrell.

Basically, it's the family resemblance category that links nearly every popular comedy in the last few years.

Station Identification

2010-07-01T06:16:00.000-05:00

Jennifer Davis, Storytime, here.

It's a beautiful morning, and it's shaping up to be a beautiful day. I'm torn: should everyone ensure that he or she treats "everyone" as singular, or should everyone ensure that they treat everyone in a fluid manner?

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, torn between prescriptivism and the real world.

Station Identification

2010-06-30T09:33:00.000-05:00

The new Wilder Voice website, coming soon to an internet near you.

It's a beautiful day in Oberlin, and I've been up for a while, an early recorder lesson with my student.

On the docket : utopias/dystopias in all shapes and sizes, from Dollhouse to the Low Countries, and everything in between.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, enjoying another beautiful day in Oberlin.

The Not-So-Dead Dead Tree Magazine

2010-06-28T09:36:00.000-05:00

Everyone's looking for a way to save print. Generally--and counterintuitively--we've turned to the internet. I have two pieces of anecdotal evidence that suggest a different way out--viz. be better.

First, from Jeremy Peters's piece on Rolling Stone in today's The New York Times (here):

But no more. Those same subversive tendencies that led Jann Wenner to help found the magazine in 1967 were reawakened under the presidency of George W. Bush. And now, rather unexpectedly, Mr. Wenner’s magazine is hitting its journalistic stride — aggressively tackling the American government on financial regulation, the environment and the war in Afghanistan — with a Democrat in the White House, one that Mr. Wenner supported. ...

Rolling Stone’s explosive piece “The Runaway General,” which last week brought a disgraceful end to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s career, was just the latest in a string of articles resonating in the nation’s corridors of power.

Its excoriating takedown of Goldman Sachs last summer was one of the most provocative and widely debated pieces of journalism to come out of the financial crisis. In the article, the writer Matt Taibbi described the investment bank as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

And this month, the magazine published a critical take on the Obama administration’s regulation of the oil industry, which started a firestorm on cable news and in the blogosphere. (The current issue contains a follow-up on BP’s plans to drill in the Arctic.)

And the result of this journalistic renaissance?

As many of his peers in the magazine world have gathered moss, Mr. Wenner has pushed Rolling Stone back uphill. While its single copy sales for the first three months of 2010 were down slightly from 2009, it has attracted enormous attention for its political coverage and consistently draws a young readership, with an average age of 30.

Over all, the biweekly magazine’s circulation has grown to about 1.5 million copies an issue from about 1.4 million in 2008.

That's right; the magazine grew! The point? Let your writers run. In the era of blogs and twitter and texts and everything else bemoaned by curmudgeons and worshiped by technophiles, perhaps there's a space--a need--for the kind of long-form, adversarial, and deep work championed by Rolling Stone.

And, dare I say it, Wilder Voice.

As Krugman Goes...

2010-06-28T09:08:00.000-05:00

Well, poop:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

I've added a new tag: "dispatches from the apocalypse." Enjoy.

Station Identification

2010-06-28T08:52:00.000-05:00

Bread! I made this.

It's raining in Oberlin. Again. On the bright side, this gives me a chance to finish watching the seventh season of Buffy.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, thanking Netflix for streaming shit.

In the Margins

2010-06-25T12:32:00.001-05:00

From "Marginal," a short article by Ian Frazier in the most recent (June 28, 2010) New Yorker on the "marginalia" exhibit in the New York Public Library:

As a marginalia scribbler, Mark Twain was perhaps the most entertaining and voluminous of all, with comments that bloomed from space breaks and chapter heading and end pages, sometimes turning corners and continuing upside down. In Twain's remarks as he made his way through "The Heavenly Twins," a now forgotten novel by Sarah Grand, you could see his good-heartedness. He tried to like it, he really did. But finally he just threw up his hands and wrote, at the end of an unusually exasperating chapter, "A cat could do better literature than this."

One of the tidbits of wisdom from my high school nemesis (and one of my English teachers), Mr. ___, was that "you're not reading unless you have a pen in hand" (I'm paraphrasing). I still tend to muddy up the edges of pages--even in magazines.

There's something charmingly mimetic about the fact that I was reading an article about marginalia with a pen in hand. I don't know if "mimetic" is the right word, but it's something.

A thought: until eReaders and PDF readers allow for the easy convenient of margin notes, I'll continue buying dead-tree books and printing out PDF copies of class readings.

Station Identification

2010-06-25T11:56:00.000-05:00

The edge of Oberlin.

My account is overdrawn. Apparently someone to whom I wrote a check several months ago decided that now is the time to cash the check.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, vowing to others' checks immediately.

I Forgot to Mention...

2010-06-24T19:56:00.001-05:00

The cover of the latest Wilder Voice. Image by Allie Takahashi.

I think that I forgot to mention that Wilder Voice, volume 5, issue 9 came out about a month ago. It weighed in at a whopping 116 pages, with over 75,000 words (that's a 200-page book). It'll be up on the web relatively soon. I feel like a proud papa.

Adventures is Profiles

2010-06-24T19:27:00.000-05:00

From Ariel Levy's unusually blunt (if surprisingly charming) profile of Governor Mike Huckabee, "Prodigal Son," in the most recent (June 28, 2010) New Yorker (here):

Huckabee does not like to be thought of as a homophobe. “I’ve had people who worked for me who are homosexuals,” he insists. “And I don’t walk around thinking, Oh, I pity them so much. I accept them as who they are! It’s not like somehow their sin is so much worse than mine.”

In a recent interview, Katie Couric told him that the Arkansas state representative Kathy Webb, a lesbian from Little Rock, had said, “Huckabee doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of tolerance and good will for gay people.” Huckabee seemed surprised. “It’s not personal,” he replied. “I could argue that people who want to change marriage are angry at me for wanting to keep it like it is!”

But Huckabee doesn’t just want to leave things the way they are; he wants to change the Constitution to specifically prohibit gay people from getting married. He has called homosexuality “sinful and unnatural” and is fond of amusing audiences with the witticism “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

One afternoon in Jerusalem, while Huckabee was eating a chocolate croissant in the lounge of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, I asked him to explain his rationale for opposing gay rights. “I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” he said. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.”

I asked him if he had any arguments that didn’t have to do with God or ickiness. “There are some pretty startling studies that show if you want to end poverty it’s not education and race, it’s monogamous marriage,” he said. “Many studies show that children who grow up in a healthy environment where they have both a mother and a father figure have both a healthier outlook and a different perspective from kids who don’t have the presence of both.”

In fact, a twenty-five-year study recently published by the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that children brought up by lesbians were better adjusted than their peers. And, of course, nobody has been able to study how kids fare with married gay parents. “You know why?” Huckabee said. “Because no culture in the history of mankind has ever tried to redefine marriage.”

But in the Old Testament polygamy was commonplace. The early Christians considered marriage an arrangement for those without the self-discipline to live in chastity, as Christ did. Marriage was not deemed a sacrament by the Church until the twelfth century. And, before 1967, marriage was defined in much of the United States as a relationship between a man and a woman of the same race.

Regardless of the past, wouldn’t Huckabee be curious to know whether allowing gay people to marry had a positive or negative effect on children and society?

“No, not really. Why would I be?” he said, and laughed.

Because saying that something ought to be a certain way simply because that’s the way it supposedly has always been is an awful lot like saying “because we said so.” And Huckabee is supposed to be the guy who questions everything.

I told you it was blunt.

Intruiged? Go, read.

Station identification

2010-06-24T18:16:00.000-05:00

It is a beautiful day in Oberlin. You know what I did? Made homemade French fries, that's what. A little salt, a little oregano, and a whole lot of olive oil--delicious.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, eating well, but probably not good.

Good News/Bad News--But Mostly Bad News

2010-06-23T17:42:00.001-05:00

here

Since I've already linked to Ezra Klein a few times today, I might as well make it an Ezra Klein kind of day.

Let's start with the graph. As it should make clear, not all stimulus is created equal, and, despite the hooting and hollering from the right wing, tax cuts are an enormously inefficient way of delivering stimulus.

I'll let Ezra take it from here:

One of the failures of the stimulus was that it included an enormous amount of tax breaks. Roughly a third of the total, in fact. And some of those breaks, like the $70 billion AMT patch, were not effective stimulus under any definition of the term. But they were there to get votes, and to show Obama was being bipartisan in his construction (though in Jon Alter's book "The Promise," Obama says that giving these breaks up-front rather than negotiating with the Republicans for them was a massive mistake). The problem is that they made the stimulus less effective than it could've been, and that made it easier for Republicans to attack down the road.

All of this is background to the fact that the Senate and the House are currently trying, and failing, to pass Medicaid aid to the states. So far as stimulus goes, nothing makes more sense than Medicaid funding for the states (Tyler Cowen even suggests federalizing the program, and I couldn't agree with him more). That Medicaid money would be spent, and quick, as it's replacing money that is already needed. It would also be buying something of value, at least if you believe that health care for poorer people makes sense. So on both the saved/spent spectrum and the waste/not-waste spectrum, it's good policy. Much better, in fact, than policy Congress has already passed.

But, as you know, the serious and responsible thing to do is tighten our belt...

Intrigued? Go, read.

Speaking of taxes, the number-crunching, research-master intern Dylan Matthews, over at Ezra Klein answers the question Do millionaires flee high-tax states?:

[I]t would be going too far to say that state tax rates have no effect on cross-state migration. However, you have to balance that against evidence that the revenue generated by state tax increases on high earners overwhelms that lost from taxpayers' leaving.

Presumably, there's a point at which tax increases would push people away faster than the increase in revenue could bear; nevertheless, I think it's fair to say that, if these number hold, republican governors who wring their hands because they're afraid of pissing off the rich.

I might point out that the rich generally lead lives with a great deal less friction than, say, the poor. That is, it's easier for someone with money to move in order to avoid x than it is for someone without money. So, if those who can move don't, then those face a great deal more friction, when faced with an increase in taxes or cuts in services, how can they possibly hope to do something about it?

There's the often-tacit assumption, implicit in many right-wing arguments, that people live frictionless lives--that, if the poor live in an area without access to a certain service, they can simply move to an area that does. Clearly, if this doesn't apply to those who live lives with much less friction, then there's definitely going to be something amiss with arguments about how the people who live in food ghettos should just go somewhere else.

Intrigued? Go, read.

In other news, David Brooks is wrong. Again. Here's Brooks in his column at The New York Times, making some noise:

In times like these, deficit spending to pump up the economy doesn’t make consumers feel more confident; it makes them feel more insecure because they see a political system out of control. Deficit spending doesn’t induce small businesspeople to hire and expand. It scares them because they conclude the growth isn’t real and they know big tax increases are on the horizon. It doesn’t make political leaders feel better either. Lacking faith that they can wisely cut the debt in some magically virtuous future, they see their nations careening to fiscal ruin.

Ezra Klein responds:

Small businesspeople might be unnerved by deficits, but they're also unnerved by GDP contraction. A small coffee shop might not like government spending in the abstract, but they really don't like closing because there are no more construction workers around to buy coffee, and so they may quite like the effect of deficit-financed tax credits for home buyers. Consumers might not like the idea of deficits, but nor do they like hearing that their kid is in a class that's twice as large this year, or that the construction on the road they take to work is going to simply stop for a while while the local government waits out the recession.

The question, in other words, is not whether anyone likes deficits. it's whether they like what would happen in the absence of countercyclical deficit spending even less.

I, too, am skeptical of Brooks's claim, both for the reason Klein laid out, but for another reason as well. How does Brooks purport to know that "deficit spending doesn't make consumers feel more confidant"? How does he know that "Deficit spending doen't induce small businesspeople to hire and expand"? Brooks makes these claims and doesn't bother to provide anything close to empirical evidence for them.

Indeed, the rest of the column was spent pointing out that "there’s a general acknowledgment that we know relatively little about the relationship between fiscal policy and job creation." Granting that, Brooks seems to think, means that we should focus on the psychology of how people react to deficit spending.

It seems to me that much of economics is spent trying to detail the relationship between fiscal policy and job creation. I know of very few disciplines concerned with the way small business owners feel about deficits. Brooks, in his attempt to move past the epistemological difficulties with economics has stumbled into the even murkier swamp of psychology--and he doesn't even bother to present evidence (though, any evidence put forward would be tenuous at best) for his claims.

Granting the myriad problems with evidence, allow me to give you a tidbit from Bloomberg (via Ezra Klien, of course): Consumer confidence just hit a two-year high. It's true, of course, that Brooks could be right, and consumer confidence could be sagging as a result of the deficit. That would mean that there's some other cause for the heightened consumer confidence. The causal relationships between economic factors are complicated, and I'm trying to claim that the Bloomberg report is some kind of take-down argument against Brooks.

That said, it's weak evidence against Brooks's claim--which is, by Brooks's own lights, unsupported.

Intruiged? Go, read.

Lastly, it seems that things are looking good--for some people anyway. First off, Ezra Klein shows that the super-rich are recovering nicely. No one else is though; inequality is back to record highs.

And, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the silver lining from the oil spill (from Ezra Klein:

Annie Lowrey notes a J.P. Morgan Chase analysis suggesting the BP spill will actually raise the country's GDP, at least in the short term. "Cleaning up the spill will likely be enough to slightly offset the negative impact of all this on GDP, J.P. Morgan said," summarizes Luca Di Leo. "The bank cites estimates of 4,000 unemployed people hired for the cleanup efforts, which some reports have said could be worth between $3 and $6 billion."

This is a nice object lesson in the inadequacy of GDP as a measurement of societal well-being. I could blow up the biggest building in every city in the country and the resulting reconstruction effort could mean a big temporary increase in GDP. But blowing up buildings is not a sustainable way to grow your economy. GDP, of course, has its uses, and as Bruce Bartlett points out, it provides a rich source of historical data and we wouldn't want to abandon it completely. But there's no reason we couldn't also use more comprehensive measures, and this Urban Institute report (pdf) gives a nice overview of what they would look like.

Irony

2010-06-23T14:57:00.000-05:00

Ezra Klein gives us "how a bill becomes a ironic" (here):

House Democrats are now saying that the rules would also exempt the AARP and Humane Society, though it doesn't seem like anyone knew that this morning (and it doesn't appear that either group asked for the exemption). To make the obvious point, there's really no reason that any of these interest groups should be exempt from the new disclosure requirements. The only reason that they're getting this consideration is, well, that they're powerful interest groups and powerful interest groups receive undue consideration from lawmakers. Which is exactly what the DISCLOSE Act is supposed to prevent. And that, kids, is how a bill becomes an irony.

Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like a Duck, not a Duck

2010-06-23T13:34:00.000-05:00

Looks like big government, quacks like big government, but, strangely, it's a Republican's idea, so it's actually small government.

From Annie Lowery at The Washington Independent, here, via Ezra Klein, here:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has proposed an amendment to the jobs bill requiring that recipients of unemployment insurance or welfare benefits get drug tested before they get their checks.

As Ezra Klein put it, "How many urine samples can a small government process?"

Of course, Senator Hatch doesn't want to drug test other groups of people who receive federal money, like, say, recipients of corporate welfare. Or, maybe, we could make the perks holding office contingent on drug tests--though I imagine that Hatch might take umbradge at that."

But these people are above reproach; it's the poor who are less-than, and it's the poor for whom suspicion is the norm.

Station Identification

2010-06-23T12:52:00.000-05:00

There's a new coffee shop here in Oberlin. Does anyone have an egg timer? We'll see how long it takes for the old coffee shop (whose name rhymes with 'Fava Hone') to get run out of town.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, enjoying the taste of well-made cappuccinos.

On the docket: an Oberliner style guide, a new post at Oberlin Blogs, and much, much more.

Metapost

2010-06-22T13:17:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed a few changes in the layout around here. I'm futzing with the CSS code. If something doesn't work, just let me know.

Station Identification

2010-06-22T13:12:00.000-05:00

Panel from PHONOGRAM, vol. 2, issue 4. Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie

You know who was a badass? AJ Ayer, that's who. From Wikipedia via Tyler Cowan:

He taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men." Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, in awe of AJ Ayer's badassitude, even if his verificationist philosophy is hogwash.

Late-Afternoon Update XXXII: The Easier-Said-Than-Done Edition

2010-06-20T16:13:00.014-05:00

"This is Joan Trumpauer Mulholland's mugshot. She is the woman below whose sitting at the Woolworth counter with canister full of sugar emptied all over her. I got this photo from the website for the book Breach of Peace, which is itself an arresting and stunning artistic feat. It is the work of photojournalist Eric Etheridge who took it upon himself to track down as many of the freedom riders as possible, and pair their mugshots with present photos. I urge you to both check out the blog, and cop the book."
-Ta-Nehisi Coates (here)

(1) In light of Rand Paul's "principled stance" (note the scare quotes) on the Civil Rights Act, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an excellent point:

I've got the movement in my blood, but no way can I imagine being white, nineteen, violating the law, and being sent off to jail. In Mississippi. As I understand Mulholland went on to transfer from Duke to historically black Tugaloo.

We need to be careful about talking up what we "would have done." It's easy to talk that shit now.

I, like, Paul (God, I hope I never write that again) would like to believe that I would have done what I could to oppose the sin of segregation. But it's worth remembering that it's easier to say you'd do x than actually do it.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(2) Doctors are complicit in the torture of detainees at Gitmo. Says the New York Times:

Doctors, psychologists and other professionals assigned to monitor the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques gathered and collected data on the impact of the interrogations on the detainees in order to refine those techniques and ensure that they stayed within the limits established by the Bush administration’s lawyers, the report found. But, by doing so, the medical professionals turned the detainees into research subjects, according to the report, which is scheduled to be published on Monday by Physicians for Human Rights.

The codification, the bureaucratization of torture is one of the most chilling aspects of our government's torture regime. The presence of doctors to "refine" and "ensure" that these techniques (stress positions, waterboarding, forced nudity, etc.) fell within the proper gray area is simply abhorrent--not only in the general moral sense, but in the fact that it represents a dereliction of duty on the part of the doctors involved. That is, one of the burdens of a doctor is help her patients; for someone with this duty, it is morally worse for her to use her talent in order to harm her patients.

(3) Apparently, conservatives can read really, really fast. Ezra Klein writes:

At about 1 p.m. today, the Clinton library released more than 45,000 pages of documents relating to Elena Kagan's service in the Clinton administration. You can read them here. At about 1:45 p.m., I got this news release from the Concerned Women for America:
Thousands of pages of documents were released today about Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. As Concerned Women for America suspected, Kagan is the socially liberal nominee they thought she was.

I'm inclined to take their word for it, as anyone who can read that fast must be really, really smart.

This Is Comics Criticism

2010-06-20T12:56:00.004-05:00

I just wrapped up reading Phonogram: The Singles Club, a seven-issue miniseries by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. The Singles Club is the second volume to bare the Phonogram name. I haven't read the first.

By some stroke of blog-happenstance, right after I finished Phonogram, I decided to start to make my way though the 500-odd unread posts on my RSS reader to which I had yet to get. Well, I'm here to tell you, Brian over at Bubblegum Aesthetics is back in a big way with a wonderful post on the first, six-issue run of Phonogram:

Originally published by Image as a six-issue, black-and-white miniseries in 2006 (with a follow-up miniseries"sequel"--actually individual stories set in the same magical universe--released last year), Phonogram opens with quick glances at a set of signifiers--reflecting dark-rimmed glasses, just-so haircut, leather jacket, and the all-important lighter-'n'-cigarettes--whose fetish qualities are enhanced by their capture in individual, unconnected frames. This is our lovable anti-hero David Kohl (in his own self-description, "Toxic and male. Utterly noxious. Totally perfect") getting ready for the evening, and these early panels immediately keys into the ways pop music can both deconstruct our identities as commodified consumers (we are what we wear), and rarify those same impulses (we are, simultaneously & gloriously, both stand-out individual and blissed-out member of a community).

...

There have been many times in this post when I've accidentally typed "writer" instead of "reader," and I think that's McKelvie and Gillen's great magic trick: in the more active use spaces of pop music, DJing, comics and blogging, the reader is invited to be both creator and receiver of meaning, to remix and simulate the groove of the song on the comic book page and in his head. As we read, our pleasure becomes blurred.

There's something banal, I suppose, for me to say that comics are, in some sense, emblematic of this generation. Comics break down the sticky artistic dichotomies between image and text, form and content, high and low art so efficiently; it's hard not to see comics as the easiest vehicle for the kind cultural themes we've created for ouselves.

The Vertigo "meta" lineup (viz., Air, Fables, House of Mystery, The Unwritten) has, perhaps more than any other group of contemporary comics, thrust the medium into the realm of artistic self-reflection. What makes Phonogram different is the way in which it gets to that place: pop music. (It's worth noting that Blue Monday and Scooter Girl took stabs at something like this, but with much less sophistication.)

For the record, Phonogram has a history on this blog. Said Marc a few months back:

We need more comics like PHONOGRAM or CASANOVA. We need more comics that hold up under scrutiny, but still get in your blood and make it fucking move.

...

And that’s precisely the point of PHONOGRAM: It explores the ways in which music shapes our lives, the ways in which we live inside music, process it, and parse that out in our everyday interactions.

I'd go further: It's explores the ways in which we inhabit the "pop" forms in general; as Brian says, "In the more active use spaces of pop music, DJing, comics and blogging, the reader is invited to be both creator and receiver of meaning, to remix and simulate the groove of the song on the comic book page and in his head."

I might go even further, and point out that the act of writing about comics is a sort of engagement in the cultural processes with which Phonogram deals. I'll let Brian take us out (from his article in Wilder Voice a few years back):

And perhaps the ultimate coming together of comics, Truffautian manifestos, and technology is the Internet, where hundreds of comics blogs are re-imagining the rules of fandom, criticism and creativity for a post-Cold War age. In contrast to the detailed history of Hadju or the remembrance-bordering-on-hagiography of Evanier’s Kirby book, the comics blog surfs, providing a mix of snark, social commentary, short and long forms, and often dazzling plays with image/text mixing. Sturgeon’s Law states that “ninety percent of everything is crap,” and more than any other contemporary media, blogging seems to be perceived this way. I wouldn’t deny the odds (although I might lower them to, say, fifty percent), nor exclude blogs from them. But such complaints do feel like something of an arrière garde action, an attempt to defend old (and perhaps timeworn) discourses in the face of the new technology. Rather than dismiss it out-of-hand, it feels far more interesting to think about what possibilities it presents (just as Truffaut and Kirby’s challenges did so many years ago). Rather than comic book as criticism, we might begin to imagine the blog space as reversing that equation: in its third form of writing, imagery and video, it can become criticism as a comic book.

Station Identification

2010-06-20T12:52:00.003-05:00

The new Oberliner mug, with a quote from the ever-funny Marc.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, wishing all fathers and everyone who knows a father or who has had a father a happy Father's Day.

Oberliner: The Father's Day Edition

2010-06-20T12:24:00.005-05:00

To my dad and my brother, both of whom are fathers, happy Father's Day!
[pictured here, my father and my mother]

It seems to me that 'Father's Day' should really be 'Father's Day,' but on this holiest of days, who am I to nitpick? At any rate, my dad's persistent and prolific blogging has gotten me thinking that I should probably restart blogging.

In the meantime, here's a charming Father's(s') Day story from Geoffrey Pullum over at Language Log:

"I don't really believe anything any more," said my dad, reflecting on the increasing skepticism to which his old age was leading him.

"Hold on, dad," I said, "you can't be right there."

"If you think your claim is true — and I assume you must, if you were sincere in stating it — then it's definitely false, because you do have at least one belief: the belief that you have no beliefs. A false belief, as it turns out, but a belief nonetheless."

"Oh," said my dad, looking at me thoughtfully, ruminating perhaps on how odd it is that a skeptical thought can feel perfectly plausible despite being so readily refutable.

Or alternatively (though I hope not — it's Father's Day) he may have been ruminating on the fact that there really is a down side to having a son who's a theoretical linguist married to an analytic philosopher.

Have a good Father's Day, dad. And keep believing.

A Thought

2010-05-05T19:45:00.002-05:00

I haven't posted much recently, for reasons I'll get into later. But I think I need to comment on this:

"Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about."
-John McCain

Under virtually any understanding of rights, they are not something given to a person; they are something a person already has. All of this talk of how we should have "withheld" the Miranda rights of Faisal Shahzad is incoherent. You can't withhold that which someone already has.

Governments can, of course, violate someone's rights. And if our government had--instead of respecting Shahzad's rights--taken him to Gitmo and waterboarded him (or implemented whatever torture-filled scheme our so-called conservatives had in mind for him), our government would have done just that: violated the rights of one its citizens.

It's worth pointing out, I think, that rights are not selective; indeed, they are, in some sense of the word, collective. We all have them, and if one person's rights are abridged, then all of rights are abridged.

That goes for you too, Arizona State Legislature.

Assorted Links

2010-04-17T12:06:00.003-05:00

For your reading pleasure.

(1) Ezra Klein answers the questions of "Why Americans are Angry". A representative quotes:

Meanwhile, when creative destruction came at a white-collar industry like journalism, people in the field justified their terror because journalism plays a more important function than simply giving people jobs... Elites are much better at being afraid of job losses in their world, but that hasn't contributed to a broader sympathy or -- dare I say it? -- sense of solidarity. Meanwhile, the game in Washington proved itself rigged in favor of powerful interests when Wall Street cracked and the banks got bailed out. So the economy can batter the working class and it's all part of the natural order of things, but the rich seem to get saved when things don't go their way. Why shouldn't people be angry?"

(2) Over at A Tiny Revolution is the best idea I've heard in a long time:

Starting today, every Friday I'm going to give five dollars to someone who's produced something funny/interesting/worthwhile and is giving it away on the internet(s).

Obviously the internet is the greatest distribution technology ever created for music and writing and video and journalism. But it's also obvious it generally makes it more difficult for people producing such things to earn a living.

Even cooler?

I'm convinced the answer is something like Dean Baker's Artistic Freedom Vouchers. Baker's proposal is that the government give every adult a $100 voucher each year that they could in turn give to anyone producing anything creative.

Of course, there are significant problems with this, but since I'm feeling so darn optimistic about the world, I'll just ignore them for now.

(3) Marc Ambinder over at Atlantic has a terrific piece on obesity. Problematically, there's a bit of straw-manning. To wit:

And the debate on how to deal with obesity remains frozen. On one side are the proponents of individual responsibility, who believe that fat people suffer from a surplus of self-indulgence and a shortage of willpower. On the other are people who believe that Americans are getting fatter because of powerful environmental factors like cheap corn, fast food, and unscrupulous advertising. Each side is held in political check by the other, and both have advocated unrealistic solutions: diets and exercise programs and miracle drugs that don’t work versus massive, and in many cases punitive, government interventions that are politically impossible.

Ezra Klein responds:

Obesity is much more structural than it is personal. That's why it's so depressingly predictable. It afflicts certain communities, with certain socioeconomic characteristics, and it has only really emerged across a certain time period. Those communities contain a lot of different individuals, but their environments and their time and money stresses and their transportation and grocery options and their street safety and exercise opportunities are broadly similar. How we live has changed much more quickly than who we are, and no effort to turn back the tide on obesity will succeed without an accurate understanding of what's made us obese.

(4) Lastly, a friend of Oberliner, Bubblegum Aesthetics's, brother-in-law has a piece up at HuffPo. Send some love: go, read.

Tears of Laughter

2010-04-17T11:57:00.002-05:00

I'm with Digby:

I'm sure all 18% of Americans who identify as teabaggers are moved beyond words. The rest of the country is crying with laughter.

I'm not sure if this is for real or not. To be honest, I'm not sure I want to know; it's one of life little mysteries--those mysteries that make life worth living.

Station Identification

2010-04-12T16:45:00.002-05:00

Well, I'm pretty sure that I lost this blogging challenge. Also, I got sprayed by a skunk. Three days and about 100,000 showers later, I smell somewhat less like skunk.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, smellier than ever.

Hysterical Fiction

2010-04-04T14:19:00.002-05:00

Since this is a literacy challenge, I think I'll talk about an upcoming book. It's going, I think, to redefine how we view fiction and how we view the way in which we see the world. The book is The Overton Windown, and it's written by one of America's great thinkers, Glenn Beck. Says Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News:

An early hint may come in June, when Beck publishes his book The Overton Window, which he described as "a story of America in a time much like today where the people are confused," with a government in crisis and the rise of a citizens' group called the Founders Keepers, which "leads to a battle and a civil war, and life is upside-down planetwide."

The book is fictional, Beck said.

I know I'm looking forward to it.

Digby is calling the book, Atlas Cried. Perfect.

Station Identification

2010-04-03T14:09:00.003-05:00

Susan Homer
In the Darkness, detail
Here

Spring break has nearly broken: weep, weep, my friends, for the restart of classes, but cheer, cheer, my friends, for the return of blogging.

There's a new post up at Oberlin Blogs.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, beginning day two of the blogging literacy challenge.

Where I've Been

2010-04-02T20:53:00.002-05:00

The editor-in-chief of Wilder Voice (me, on the left) and the managing editor (on the right) hard at work in a motel room in coal country West Virginia. I'm interviewing someone (I think a state trooper, but I can't be sure). Photo by Mike McGee. We're doing a three-part piece on the mountaintop removal mining debate in southern West Virginia; look for it in the upcoming issue of Wilder Voice (vol. 5 : iss. 9, winter 2010--appearing in the next month or so).

The Big Read

2010-04-02T19:56:00.004-05:00

Tracks
Louise Erdrich
Here (though, if you're in the big 612, I'd recommend heading down to Birchbark Books, which is owned by Erdrich.)

It's worth noting that I've been away from blogging for the last few weeks and what brought be back is a challenge (of sorts). My sister-in-law (Word Savvy) in conjunction with my brother (Pronto Pup) and some of their friends (A Little Leeway among others) has started a blogging challenge. In short:

The deal is we're going to be writing about reading. But it's not going to be boring. It's going to be fascinating and hilarious, as usual.

Though it's no longer the first, I'd still like to through my hat into the ring. Really, I'm just looking for an excuse to get me blogging again.

I'll start with Tracks, a book by Louise Erdrich. Though it isn't her first published book, it is the first in a Erdrich's super-novel, which includes at least five novels (Tracks,, Four Souls, Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, and The Beet Queen).

Now, I'm a sucker for super-novels, particularly when they're, you know, well done. But there are plenty of reasons to love Tracks above and beyond the fact that Erdrich is creating such an ambitious web of characters and sub-plots, (reminiscent, I might point out, of other serialized wide-scope forms, such as comics).

Erdrich hits a number of high-points in contemporary American fiction (relationship between story and fact, the effects of pomo on culture, etc.), but she does so from a distinctly different angle; that is, we're all used to white dudes from Brooklyn writing contemporary fiction (Jonathan Letham, et al.), but I'm not that used to reading these themes from the angle of a American Indian woman.

Some representative quotes:

The Girl is bold, smiling in her sleep, as if she knows what people wonder, as if she hears the old men talk, turning the story over.

It comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning. They get the middle wrong too. They only know they don't know anything.

And...

I've seen too much go by--unturned grass below my feet, and overhead, the great white cranes flung south forever. I know this. Land is the only thing that lasts life to life. Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier.

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm pretty out of shape when it comes to blogging. I have one last point. Sorry. When it's pulled off well, these super-novels can be, in some sense, more effective than any single novel ever could be. Consider Bolano's 2666. Each one of the five parts stood alone as an excellent novel, but when put together, we received a greater thematic breadth and depth than is really possible in a reasonably-sized novel. Tracks and it's sister novels work the same way. I'll leave it to Marc, though, to tell us more about living the episodic life is worth doing...

Station Identification

2010-03-06T11:46:00.002-06:00

Yes, I just rewatched The Breakfast Club.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner reminding you not to forget about me.

Oh, Puh-leze

2010-02-26T08:40:00.002-06:00

From The Washington Post (here):

The blogosphere is abuzz over conservatives' charges that a logo being used by the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency looks very much like a fusion of the Muslim crescent moon and star and the Obama campaign logo. Some folks even detected a similarity to the Iranian Space Agency logo.

"New Missile Defense Agency Logo Causes Online Commotion," said the headline on Drudge. Indeed it did. Our pal Frank Gaffney, writing on his blog, expressed alarm. "The Obama administration's determined effort to reduce America's missile defense capabilities initially seemed to be just standard Leftist fare," wrote Gaffney, a senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration. But "a just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot."

Yep, it's all a devious plan on the part of Obama to make us more familiar with Islamic icons so that when he declares Islam the national religion, we'll all be more accepting.

Thank God for conservative bloggers.

Caprica

2010-02-24T21:05:00.002-06:00

It’s hard to understate the importance of Battlestar Galactica to science fiction. It’s equally hard for people who don’t like science fiction to understand why Galactica was so damn important.

Galactica’s 4-season, 6 year run ended a few months ago—much to the dismay of its fans and pretty much every TV critic ever. Its premise wasn’t original; it’s a remake of a high-camp suck-fest of the same name from the 70s. It suffered from the same problems that plague any sci-fi show: plot gaps you could pilot a starship through, indecipherable techno-babble (though Galactica managed it better than most), and improbable and cheesy futuristic flights of fancy (in the future, people don’t say fuck; they say frack—or fracking, motherfracking, let’s frack, etc.).

But Battlestar was special—not because the writing, directing, and acting were better than most sci fi (though they were). It was special because of its scope. It was about religion, politics, and how they intertwine. It was about mysticism and rationalism and how they conflict. It was about fate and myth and how we deal with both. It was about sex and love and what we’re capable of when we’re backed into a corner.

Of course, it was also about sexy, alien robots and giant explosions in space. That’s the way it goes when you watch space operas. And, so, for people who don’t like space operas, it was a bit of a dud.

Goodbye Battlestar Galactica, hello Caprica.

Caprica, which premiered in January, is a prequel that is set 50-odd years before Galactica. There aren’t fights in space; humanity isn’t at war with robots. And instead of a rusty old spaceship, the show is set on the sprawling urban planet of Caprica, the most important of the feuding Twelve Colonies.

And where the mash-ups of space opera are old hat, the hodge-podge mise-en-scene of Caprica is built-from-scratch and uncannily brilliant. The cars and clothing seem straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novel, the architecture is modernist, the technology is out of a futurist’s wet dream.

We’re treated to a thinly veiled Jewish Mob circa 1900s New York contrasted with an artificial reality world in which your avatar can have crazy sex, engage in ritual human sacrifice, and generally par-tay. It’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union crossed with Warren Ellis.

And if you thought Galactica had scope, Caprica’s thematic range will blow your fracking mind. The central question: how do the characters (Jewish mobsters and WASPy technology developers) deal with culture driven mad by its own runaway success? Some become monotheistic terrorists (in the future, nearly everyone worships the classical Greek gods); some try to develop robotic killing machines (the birth of the cylons); some lose themselves in artificial reality; some become mob enforcers—trying desperately to hold on to the last vestiges of their heritage.

It’s science fiction that’s good in the way science fiction should be good. It’s relevant without being allegorical (there is a Jon Stewart stand-in, but that’s mostly funny), prescient without being preachy, and, most importantly entertaining without being stupid.

Considering how fast our own culture is moving (faster than a late-model Toyota), considering how fracked-up our body politic is, considering how our histories and traditions are being swept up in the rising tide of technological advancement, Caprica has the potential for greatness.

You can watch Caprica Fridays at 9:00 PM on SyFy or for free on Hulu. There have only been four episodes, so you have no excuse not to start watching.

Station Identification

2010-02-23T10:53:00.003-06:00

"Blackberries"
Susan Homer
oil on canvas (11" x 12") 2008
Here.

Speaking of blackberries, says Robert Hass (in his excellent book Praise):

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you, and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boad,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner; we read poetry--sometimes.

Oh. My. God.

2010-02-22T11:35:00.000-06:00

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world's largest economy.

...

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"

Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.

Yeah, that sounds about right.