Friday, September 12, 2003
MY KARMA IS 0. At Hit & Run Nick Gillespie praises Plastic: "It may not have made money," he says, "but it's great that it's around."
I can't tell you how refreshing it is to hear a libertarian praise something that hasn't been rewarded by the market. It was also a pleasure to be reminded that Plastic is still going, if not going strong, and still good. And the current edition of Plastic contains this bit:
A national survey by Oxford Health plans found that one out of six Americans who receive paid vacation are unable to use it, nearly one-third of employees work through lunch and 19 percent reported feeling obligated to work even when sick or injured. Whether such numbers reflect workers' anxiety or a stronger work ethic, experts worry about the physical and psychological ramifications while policymakers argue over proposed solutions.
Hands up -- who here believes (will you wait till I've asked the question first, please, Mr. Kudlow?) that these numbers reflect a "a stronger work ethic" among American drones? While anecdotal evidence is notoriously shaky, I think it's pretty damn universally observable that most workers don't love their work, and do it primarily if not solely to get paid. Despite what TV commercials tell us, this is not, for most of us, a world of endless options. Kids get born, houses get mortgaged, and before you know it that dream of being a pro skateboarder soon's you raise enough seed money temping is nothing but a rueful memory. And that's speaking of the folks who had a dream in the first place. So you go to work.
Again, this seems self-evident -- a life lesson, not an economic hypothesis. So it's remarkable how gullible (well, willfully self-deceiving is probably more like it) the Wall Street Journal was on the same issue this past Labor Day, taking workers' mildly positive responses to survey questions about their jobs as proof that Americans are work-lovin' happyfaces. Look: how comfortable would you be telling complete strangers that you spend a third of your week doing something with which you feel no connection and, best case, hope to get out of someday or, worst case, have learned to endure by running the theme music from Monday Night Football in your head every time you feel like screaming? Are you the kind of person who will share his private griefs and disappointments with a guy on line at the RiteAid? Most of us aren't. So if Mr. Clipboard asks me how I like my job, I won't say I despise it even if I do (and I don't! Really! I love my job, folks! And you know me, I wouldn't lie about that to swell folks like you!).
No, we don't like to work, and if we don't avail every opportunity to do less of it, it's because we're either politicking our way to a promotion or scared shitless we'll be fired -- which, in our current "jobless recovery," is not an unreasonable fear.
11:36 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, September 11, 2003
A BAD DAY MADE WORSE. This morning I perused several 9/11 tributes online, and so far every single one of them has been crap -- unfocused, incoherent, alternately maudlin and belligerent. This is not surprising. The topic is huge, and might defeat even a real writer, not to speak of the special-pleading pygmies who pass for geniuses on the Web.
Many of these pieces start out as tributes to the fallen and the heroic of two years back, but wind up (sooner than later in most cases) as assessments of the current War effort. There is anger but, interestingly, outside those few reliable stokeholes of rage that ever and always spew naught but cinders and ash (and you have to hand it to Misha: it takes a special talent to devise a layout that makes Free Republic look like GQ), most of the anger is not directed at the guys who flew the planes into the WTC, or at Osama "Forgotten But Not Gone" Bin Laden, but at Americans insufficiently on-board with the Bush program. Three excellent cases come conveniently packaged in today's New York Post.
"There are unmistakable signs that many in the nation's elite are forgetting," says John Podhoretz. ("Elite" apparently refers not to children of famous writers who mysteriously wind up with plush editorial gigs, but to people who don't believe what Podhoretz believes.) Brookhiser bitches about the "carpers" and "self-haters" who "have been a feature of New York life for decades." (He dreams, one guesses, of a City stripped of its Mailers and malcontents, and a day when unelite Podhoretzes and Kristols will run the works.)
But my favorite is Ralph "That's Colonel Peters to You, Maggot!" Peters. "In the War Against Terror, no other power or organization can defeat America," barks the Colonel. "But America remains dangerously capable of defeating itself." Some sissy-marys would "like a nicely wrapped-up Hollywood ending, thanks," but "Wars do not necessarily conform to the victor's desires. Outcomes surprise." (Who knew, for example, that Saddam's WMD were not sitting on a launch-pad ready and waiting for the dictator's go-code?) And "we shall never see a final victory over terror in our lifetimes." (At last: our no-exit strategy!) So all you "intellectual classes," "'opinion-makers,'" and "Democrats," suck it up. We're in this to the finish -- literally!
It's obvious why these memorialists' targets are Americans, not residents of a hostile state. This is a War on Terror, or on Militant Islam, or on Islamofascists, or, to put it more succinctly, "a pathological ideology that still holds a whole region of the world in its grip." But those aren't people, they're abstractions. Our leaders occasionally stick to a face on them -- now Bin Laden's, now Saddam's. But currently there is no credible Public Enemy #1.
Today the anniversary of a living nightmare stirs our rage. But on whom can we turn it? Some people in situations like this meditate and pray for peace. Some people smash chairs and punch walls. And some grab hold someone they never much liked anyway and scream, "This is all your fault!"
10:38 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003
HALF A ROLL IS BETTER THAN NONE. People ask why I don't have comments, or a blogroll. Well, for one thing, I figure if you want to tell me what you think, you'll take the trouble to write to me (just like in the good old days of wax seals, quills, and pistols at dawn!) or scathe me in your own blog. Let my little fame be spread widely if not thickly. Anyway, why should I support your squawks with my hard-earned web hosting fees? That's the sort of Bullshit Libertarian I am!
Also: I think even my most communitarian readers will admit that most on-premises commentary either starts as crap or devolves to it. Interestingly (and remember, you didn't hear this from me), some of the group gripes at Free Republic are more interesting than what you see in the usual vaccs or ratemymusic daughter windows. Within the winger community there are many cadres and schismatics, and their internecine slugfests can turn into donnybrooks a la Donovan's Reef, crashing through walls of logic and spilling into tide pools of paranoid conspiracy.
The only problem with those exhilirating spectacles is, those people are nuts -- starking, staring splitters of insanely fine and even insubstantial hairs. If you want to see sane people talking, you may find that at sites like CalPundit, where the topics are always meaty and draw an intellectually appetitive and often eloquent crowd. That's where the old dream of web community yet lives, and I salute its enablers.
But whom does Alicublog draw? I don't know. Never put in a Counter -- prefer to write as if no one is reading; question of epistolary discipline. I do know that what winds up on these pages is mostly dark mutterings, sometimes sardonic, on occasion comedic, and seldom general enough to facilitate roundtable discussion. I like to think I follow my subjects down rabbit-holes of extrapolative logic too narrow and winding for crowds to comfortably follow. Is that selfish? Should I not instead lay the floor open for a massive Maoist group criticism? ("Comrade Edroso is guilty of the crime of obscurantism! The Dixie Chicks are a topic great enough for all workers to share, yet Edroso would pound it into a nugget that would not last one hour in the furnace of the Collective Waste Processing Plant!") Sorry, comrade. Though I care what you think (do correspond! I shall read your letters in the light of the piazza!), I can't bring myself to lay the doors of my mansion wide open just yet.
(As to the second reason: I'm just hella lazy. Me and my 98-pound sidekick, Dial-Up Modem, muscle our way into Blogger, lay the incendiaries, and vamoose -- not leaving much time for redesign.)
That said, I will commend you to some spiffy weblogists who give me some fun and edification, and might do as well for you:
Roger Ailes. The Hunting and the Snark. Possessed of an attitude shittier (in the best sense) than mine, and more sharply on point.
Very Very Happy. Ailes pointed me here, to a superb post at a generally very keen site. And it's all good. Sample quote: "Holy hell, I can hear Luskin's erection. And I'm half a continent away from him."
Busy Busy Busy. Custodians of the "Shorter" format. My only complaint is that they should post more frequently. So many fools be blogging!
Fables of the Reconstruction. A reliable pisser. Nota bene: I give any poster of Victorian porn ten extra points.
Cursor. Not commentary (much) -- links. A pointer site, in the old pre-bust jargon. And chances are they'll be here, pointing powerlessness to truth, after the bust has gone nationwide (ETA: a coupla months).
Eschaton. Because he's/she's there.
Jesus' General. Super spotty posting -- but if you've never gone, go. He is especially eloquent on how Clinton damaged his "little soldier."
Orcinus. Prisoners incarcerated with G. Gordon "Will" Liddy used to say, "Better not mess with Liddy -- he knows something!" Orcinus knows quite a bit. Former Black Ops, or just an especially keen observer? I bow to his compound sentence structure.
Like Father Like Sun. He has spent his days capering with fools at the New York Sun when he should have been shaking all East Anglia with the thunder of his genius. But 'sokay. Plenty more where that came from.
Sasha Castel. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong BUT: sometimes capable of very sound advice.
9:59 PM by roy edroso
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A GREAT COUNTRY OR WHAT? (CORRECT ANSWER: WHAT?) "Already, actors Tom Hanks, Cybill Shepherd and Martin Sheen have spoken out against Arnie [Schwarzenegger]'s campaign," reports WOKR-TV in Rochester. But now it's serious, the station reports: Arnold has been dissed by The Dixie Chicks.
"He is a great film star," admitted DC Emily Robinson. "But I find his idea to run for governor absolutely insane. America should be governed by people who have a clue."
How weird this country has become. Political protests against a film that hasn't even opened. An actor running for California Governor on a platform so free of substance (and crammed with happythink pronouncements like "I want to become an expert in all education") that it tramples the already low bar for candidate accountability into the dirt. And now performers from nowhere near the state that candidate intends to govern making headlines by weighing in.
We're fighting in Iraq to ensure the "triumph of democracy," the President says. Well, maybe the Iraqis will make a better job of it than we have.
4:08 PM by roy edroso
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NINE-ELEVENMANIA! This comes, predictably, from the New York Post, but, less predictably (indeed, almost refreshingly for students of advanced inanity), in a restaurant review:
Church & Dey, with a knockout third-floor view over Ground Zero, would be a disgrace anywhere. But at a site indelibly scored by horror and heroism, it borders on scandal...
Church & Dey's disregard for even minimal standards demeans all who have given their best at the World Trade Center site -- from the 9/11 rescuers to those striving to create something new and inspiring there...
It is a blemish on the Millenium Hilton, whose owners and staff are due all credit for the hotel's rebirth. It's an insult to the restaurant's own hard-working employees, some of whom worked there on 9/11 and whose return was fraught with anguished memories...
See, it's not just pinko Democrats who soil the memory of 9/11. It's also those who poorly prepare wild mushroom compote mere yards away from the site of an upcoming Republican photo opportunity!
I'm gonna spend tomorrow night at the fucking movies.
10:00 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, September 09, 2003
TREMORS. I guess 9/11 is getting close, because the gibberish vendors are hauling out the industrial-grade traitor bait.
Tacitus, for example, tells us how "domestic opposition can lend moral support to America's enemies," in that charming, I'm-just-sayin' manner that has made him a beloved figure in American letters. By the way, spot the motif in this passage:
Remember the pro-French Jeffersonians and their, er, staunch patriotism as whipped up by Citizen Genet back in the 1790s? Remember the Confederate hopes for a Democratic victory in the 1864 election? Remember Aguinaldo's hopes for a Democratic victory in the 1900 election? Remember the Vietnamese communists' expressed appreciation for the antiwar movement in the 1960s? Remember the Soviet endorsement of Western movements for nuclear freeze and disarmament? Remember Saddam Hussein's statement of support for the 18 January ANSWER protests this year?
Democrats! Democrats all -- including the filthy Francophile Jefferson! (No mention, interestingly, of the America Firsters.)
One hardly needs to read Brendan Miniter's OpinionJournal peroration any further than its grand title, "Where Were You? And where do you stand two years after Sept. 11?" Sounds like a HUAC Chairman grilling a witness. The body copy is more poetic (well... are there any such words as "poetastic" or "poetasterrific?"). "Someday someone will ask you that perennial question of historical events," Miniter sententiously starts, and one's ears perk -- what might that perennial question be? Hope it's the Riddle of the Sphinx -- I know that one!
But it turns out this "someone," who sounds suspiciously like Raymond Massey in "Things to Come," has more than one question to ask from his lonely promontory in the Asgardian wastes of the future: "Were you willing to control your fear and make the sacrifices necessary to defeat the terrorists and their murderous ideology?" Moreover, "Were you willing to leave the United Nations in its moral confusion and confront the enemy in his sanctuaries?" Yes to a, no to b? Depart from me, ye wicked, into everlasting darkness!
Here, too, Democrats are pictured as out of step with regular Americans: "Howard Dean says the Iraq war was based on a lie and that there are now more terrorists there than when Saddam ruled. Wesley Clark claims America is failing in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Other Democrats running for president have launched similar attacks. These are the words of those who would offer us the middle ground between good and evil." [emphasis mine] In this bad-editorial-cartoon world Miniter has created, we may picture this middle ground as an alley, behind the church and abutting a speakeasy, where truant Dems loiter, deaf to the entreaties of the Preacher, and thus drift into ruinous contact with libertine dictators and scarlet anchorwomen.
Fear not, there are prescriptions: "...we must also move toward rebuilding the civil institutions that ensure the strength of our republic. In the schools we must rescue civics from the social-studies teachers who teach anti-Americanism." (That again?) "In the public square we must fight to preserve the right of religious expression. Within our churches we must demand that our religious leaders lead..."
Demand that our religious leaders lead! One envisions Miniter hauling Father Flotsky up the nave for pulpit-pounding lessons. "Shake your fist thus, priest," instructs the columnist, "for he leads best that maketh a baleful noise unto the Lord."
It'll just get worse, I'm sure. But I do note that the hooey-meter has gone up and down in off-season, so perhaps it were best to batten down the hatches till the patriots (is there such a word as "patriotaster"?) have blown their respective wads.
UPDATE 9/10: Tactitus says, "Roy Edroso is annoyed that all the examples I give of domestic opposition lending support to the enemy are of Democrats. Well. So they are." Yes, the record is clear: Democrats have been aiding and abetting the enemy since the 18th Century. How is it that the heads of Jefferson, Jackson, FDR et alia didn't end up on spikes overlooking the Potomac? Must be an eternal-evil, LOTR thing.
While I appreciate and indeed often share T's Hatfield/McCoy approach to American politics, this is probably a good time to say out loud that just because a foreign power, even a belligerent, sees some gain for themselves in an American policy development does not mean that such a development constitutes "support to the enemy" in any but the most uselessly pedantic sense. This country currently engages in trade with China -- evil, evil China! -- and is probably the only force preventing the Palestinians from obliteration. Is Bush then guilty of giving aid and comfort to Wen Jiabao and Yasser Arafat? (Well, some people probably think so, but...)
Disregard this if T is joking. And he well be, for all I know. I am notoriously bereft of a sense of humor.
11:40 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, September 08, 2003
GODWIN'S LAW BE DAMNED. CalPundit links to Quaker in a Basement (o roll dem blogs!) on Republican legislators' plans to enforce "intellectual diversity" in Colorado schools via gummint action. These plans were allegedly inspired by David "Tell the Black People to Stop Staring at Me" Horowitz.
As I noted back in ought-two (scroll down to November 14), Daniel Pipes has floated a similar plan, by which "outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others)" would "take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements by faculty and broaden the range of campus discourse." This, Pipes reasoned, is made necessary by a preponderance of "American Academics Who Hate America" -- and the need is made more pressing because "we are at war."
CalPundit and the Quaker are good on the legal problems with this approach (not to mention its rank hypocracy), but a strong word should be raised about the moral issue of sending flying squads of "outsiders" to monitor and correct ideological balance in colleges and universities. I know we've been cautioned by various Basil Fawltys not to mention the War but this really is perilously close to Nazi shit:
The first indications of an emerging cultural policy in Germany were barely noticed by the general public. On April 13, 1933 the German Student Association posted a twelve point "Proclamation" at the entrance doors of the Univerity of Berlin, demanding from the universities a greater sense of responsibility toward the German race, the German language, and German literature...
And:
The Nazification of Germany in the 1930s did not happen overnight. A key part of this Nazification process was the campaign called "Gleichschaltung" -- which means "getting everyone in step." The Nazis announced that a proud, new, patriotic Germany was being born out of pain and danger... For a decade from the late '20s to the late '30s, communists, radicals, progressives and Jews were targeted in the universities and other institutions -- and so were many who defended them. The emergence of a "new normalcy" in the late '30s was a prelude to wider war and greater horrors.
Bringing up the bad boys of Berlin is a blogger no-no, a blowing of one's cool in a hypercool medium. And of course the Nazis weren't asking for diversity, while Pipes and Horowitz seek only a limited outside intervention in the affairs of academia. And it's not the Student Affairs Bureau that would administer the plan between concert bookings and theme nights in the cafeteria. Besides, there's speech codes, and that was the other side. And Horowitz is Jewish, etc.
But fuck it. I say it's fascist and I say the hell with it.
8:34 PM by roy edroso
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FAT CATS. "U.S. Report: 1 in 4 Pets Obese." -- CNN. At first I thought it said, "1 in 4 Pets Obsess," and I thought, so now it's come to this.
Actually I still feel that way. This is the sort of headline that drives some of us crazy. Oh boy, we think, next they're be providing obstetric service to snakes, and they we realize, they already do.
Well, to echo the warden in A Clockwork Orange, these new, ridiculous ideas have come at last. But this rope is a little easier to let go of than some. No doubt in the near future most people will consider paunchy pooches a newsworthy outrage nearly equal to those is-your-child-safe scare stories on the local news. Lead paint chips today, tabby treadmills tomorrow! And maybe it's a good thing. Not many years ago, as was pointed on in the aforereferenced New Yorker story (which is quite good, but I can't find it online -- it's by Burkhard Bilger in last week's issue, find it if you can), animals were left to sicken and starve, and gradually we came to feel sufficiently for our animal friends to provide them medicine and shelters. Animal wellness is already a common theme on boxes of Purina Cat Chow, and now it's a big media story. Maybe this is the next step in our evolution.
We are told that it is right and noble to stand athwart history, yelling "Stop!" but the future is rushing in from all directions and we have to pick our shots. It is a strange thought for an old liberal, but this story may be a sign that the new breed (of people, I mean) is becoming more humane, so to speak, than ever we thought to be, and as long as no multibillion dollar government plan is in the offing (cut to some future President holding up a dog tag and announcing veterinary coverage that is yours at whelping and can never be taken away, while a translator goes "Woof, woof, woof, woof"), I guess I can let this one slide.
6:59 PM by roy edroso
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