Friday, June 29, 2007
NEO-RACISM. My favorite line in the Neo-Neocon post about the Supreme Court's resegregation decision:I’m not suggesting we go back to the days of segregation, or that we ban legal immigrants. But... You'll be hearing many such "buts" in days to come. You'll also hear a lot of references to the Robert Putnam study, mentioned by Neo-Neo and in this Rod Dreher post, which is interpreted by them to mean that people are uncomfortable with people who don't look like them and that's a good reason not to integrate.
In fact, the Putnam study may replace The Bell Curve as the Bible of folks who don't like to be around black people but are uncomfortable using the earthier explanations of George Wallace and Bull Connor. They'll take theirs with some social science, thanks.
PS -- Fans of the genre will recognize Neo-Neo's reminiscences of the Black Table in her college dining hall as a classic of the form. Maybe next time she'll touch on the condition of stores in a black neighborhood versus the condition of stores in Beverly Hills.
UPDATE. Rush Limbaugh weighs in:I think the left is trying to destroy the distinct American culture, and I think all the forced busing and the race-based quotas, affirmative action, is designed to create agitation among people... So the idea, the whole premise here that diversity works, that diversity -- and you know that that's a huge liberal premise. They love this, because they love victims, and they love minorities and they want to punish majorities, wherever and whoever they are. And because the majority, they fear has the right to hang with who they want to hang with, buy what they want to buy, to do what they want to do, it's just not right. So they want them to have misery in their lives as well... ..."misery" meaning, it would seem, the presence of black people. One wonders why he neglected to modify "agitation" with "outside."
8:53 AM by roy edroso
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DON'T NOBODY READ CELINE! HE WAS A NAZI, YOU KNOW! In the Reason blog:When [Gunter] Grass won the Nobel Prize in 1999, Slate's Judith Shulevitz said that the real question "is not whether Grass is a Soviet apologist. The question is, is he now or has he ever been a great novelist?" Maybe. But the second question necessitates the first, being that Grass is, more often than not, a political novelist, a Pinter-like political celebrity. Someone will have to explain to me how Libertarianism became consonant with Zhdanovism.
2:12 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, June 28, 2007
RACE WARS. A blow against Mescans, a blow against desegregation -- what's not for conservatives to like?
We'll see how it plays out, but first the immigration bill: there were plenty of problems with it, one of which I pointed out. Now we are thrown back onto the status quo, which will benefit the usual suspects. I wouldn't hold my breath for a wave of enforcement and DeMescanization. The Wall Street Journal crowd, for all their posturing, will yet have their cheap labor, and the rambunctious Right a scalp to play with for a while, till Michael Moore or some other bauble distracts them. Always bet long on the moneyed Right over their yahoo adjuncts.
The judgment on Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, however, is more serious. It signals that affirmative action will soon be a thing of the past, broken by whatever similar new cases come before the Roberts Court (and, rest assured, they will). Some Volokh commenters disagree, based largely on Kennedy's opinion, but keep in mind that Justice Stevens is 87 years old, a Democratic Administration in '08 is far from a sure thing, and the lower courts are packed with Republican appointees for whom the overturn of any desegregation plan is as holy a grail as the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
This may come from too much recent exposure to Rod Dreher, but I judge from the tenor of the conservative blogosphere that the racial component in both these cases pleases them. Take, for one highly-placed and egregious example, Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor (!!!) of National Review Online, who reproduces a picture of presumptive Mescans who are wearing t-shirts and cheap pants instead of suits and declares:I don't blame any American for wondering. Did you see the NYTimes picture of the illegal immigrants immigration-bill proponents brought to the Senate??
As a Senate friend said to me about it: "all they did was remind people what the problem is. These guys aren’t living in the shadows—they’re walking around unabated in the United States Capitol. Why, if you’re trying to make the case for amnesty, would you remind people of the local 7-11, where you sometimes can’t get to your car for all the day laborers? Dumb, dumb move." The formalities require that I make a pithy reference here, but really, words fail me. I can only thank God there were no pictures of African-Americans outside the Supreme Court available for this awful woman to comment on.
Few such voices have been so full-throated on Parents yet. The Wall Street Journal, as in the Mescan case, follows the money ("Leave aside also the evidence that the best way to achieve greater racial diversity in schools is through the freedom to choose either public or private schools with vouchers, scholarships or tax credits"), while some of our better known racial obsessives ("lays claim to a more 'nuanced' view of the desirability of racial 'diversity' that will serve to keep alive its use as a compelling interest in some narrow cases [despite, I should add, recent research that shows the use of 'diversity' in social engineering schemes has had a decidedly unhealthy social impact...]) follow their own, exceedingly particular demons.
Maybe there's no need to make it obvious, or rather, a very deep need to keep it on the downlow. The brown folk, being more recent arrivals, get open contempt, while the black folk, having been imported for cheap labor centuries earlier, get a quieter kind of treatment. Still, I expect our conservative brethren cannot help themselves, and will respond with all deliberate speed.
11:08 PM by roy edroso
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SHORTER ANN ALTHOUSE: Ridiculous. Oh, please. Ridiculous.
(I apologize: it's not that much shorter. I mainly removed the quotes, the citation, and a paragraph of the sort of irrelevant huh-what that distinguishes Althouse's work. The commenters, with greater clarity, explain that Democrats are evil geniuses.)
8:45 AM by roy edroso
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SHORTER DAVID ADESNIK: The true purpose of film criticism is the making of Unpersons.
SHORTER GLENN REYNOLDS: I agree. Michael Moore is fat!
UPDATE. "I think the challenge is to ensure that liberals are the ones who are bashing Moore... You could say that it's mean-spirited to strategize about how to marginalize anyone..." Jesus. These people are like the morons in movie theatres yelling instructions to the characters on the screen. In fact, they probably would be those morons if they ever left their Barcoloungers.
P.S. The "shorter" format was invented by some guy a big long time ago and like who cares.
8:42 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
 SHORTER ROD DREHER: But you've got to admit that a man, right or wrong, has the right to want to have the neighborhood he lives in a certain kind of way. And at the moment the overwhelming majority of our people out there feel that people get along better, take more of a common interest in the life of the community, when they share a common background. I want you to believe me when I tell you that race prejudice simply doesn't enter into it. It is a matter of the people of Clybourne Park believing, rightly or wrongly, as I say, that for the happiness of all concerned that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities.
UPDATE. In comments, Dreher says he's afraid that homosexuals (aka the lavender jackboots mob) will take it wrong if he teases them about their homosexuality. The world is just full of perils, isn't it?
8:01 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, June 26, 2007
IF I CAN DREAM. Ross Douthat defends Amity Shlaes' new book That Commie Bastard FDR from John Updike. Douthat says:But one of the implications of Shlaes' book, which Updike is supposed to be reviewing, is that FDR could have given us the fireside chats and the rhetoric of government action and yes, even the stronger safety net without the counterproductive attempts at centralized planning and the relentless scapegoating of business... "Even this stronger safety net"? Surely, in the ideal Depression of rightwing alternative history, nothing stronger than a free cup of joe on the way to the workhouse would have been offered.
That leaves the fireside chats, which would probably have gone something like, "We have nothing to fear but Stalin himself. So don't ask your government for a handout -- we're saving our few tax revenues for an invasion of Russia. Now I'm off to Warm Springs for my fifteenth vacation of the year. Work or starve, parasites!"
I look forward to Shlaes' next book, said to expose Thomas Jefferson as a syphilis-crazed Jacobin who should have listened to his wise Federalist opposition and retained the Alien and Sedition Acts, the loss of which caused 9/11.
The more obvious their failure and collapse becomes, the greater, it seems, their need for fantasy.
8:30 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, June 25, 2007
WHAT DO THE DRUMS SAY, RODNEY? Ho hum, another God Versus Fornicators post at Crunchy Rod Dreher's Beliefnet Blog and Traveling Medicine Show. But answering a charge in the comments that Winger Jesus doesn't seem to care about greed as much as sex, Rod drops this:I perceive sexual disorder in society to be a more proximate threat to my family, for a variety of reasons, not least because we live in a part of the city in which the violence of fatherless, lawless males and the sex-mad culture from which they come is a direct threat to the civil order... Who knew that suburban Dallas was like Mad Max? (Or perhaps an college athletic fraternity.)
Elsewhere Brother Crunchy writes:People -- black, white, brown, rich, middle-class, poor, Christian, secular, etc. -- naturally want to be around people like themselves. Why is that such a bad thing? In five years I expect Dreher will be living in a gated community called Alabaster Acres or Ivory Towers or something, and writing about which semiautomatic weapons models are the most environmentally friendly.
UPDATE. Also, Brother Rod hates fags, which hatred he expresses in a typical passive-aggressive mode, fretting that the "lavender jackboots mob" threatens his Jesusosity.
I would advise you wash this garbage out of your brain with some hardcore pornography, but your work computer filters may not allow it, so use Faithmouse instead -- the guy is every bit as bigoted as Dreher, but clinically insane, which is much more entertaining.
8:50 AM by roy edroso
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BLOOD BROTHERS. Professional fist-shaker Stanley Kurtz usually hates him a bunch of Islamicism, but in a recent Corner post he shows great sympathy toward one Ali A. Mazrui, author of a piece (pdf) that condemns Salman Rushdie and essentially approves (despite mild demurrers) the fatwa against him:When Britain’s first Muslim peer, Lord Ahmed, recently accused Rushdie of having "blood on his hands, sort of" it seemed a clumsy and ill-thought-out indictment. That it was. But if you want to see the Cadillac version of Ahmed’s accusation, consult the section of Mazrui’s article titled "On Literature and Chaos." There are huge problems with the argument of that section: false moral equivalences, and the notion that books kill people. But... There's always a "but" with these guys....I do think Rushdie’s book feeds directly into the honor complex. In a sense, the Rushdie fatwa is the license for an "honor killing" (a point I made in a different way when I discussed the Rushdie Affair at the end of "Marriage and the Terror War, Part II"). I also found Mazrui’s opening comparisons between Western notions of treason and Rushdi’s "cultural treason" very much on target. If you read the Mazrui, you will find his argument is, from beginning to end, that of a religious maniac and a thug, and unworthy of engagement by any civilized person. Which I guess lets out Kurtz.
Culture warriors such as Kurtz have clearly decided that, however obliged they feel by duty or loyalty to keep beating the drum for the War on Whatchamacallit, their greater battle is against evil blasphemo-pornographers. Well, hopefully I can get my Second Amendment rights restored before that battle begins in earnest.
8:41 AM by roy edroso
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HEY RUBE. Prairie content provider James Lileks says Woody Allen isn't so great with his snobby Manhattan:Listen, give me Gordon Willis as my cinematographer and Susan Morse as my editor, and I’ll give you an opening montage of Fargo that will make people weep. "Chapter one. He adored Fargo. He idolized it all out of proportion." No, make that: "He tolerated it all out of proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in sepia-toned postcards that he bought by the carload at nerdfests, and pulsated to the great tunes of Lawrence Welk..."
I would love to see Lileks make the film, but I suspect it would look less like Manhattan and more like Stranger Than Paradise.
UPDATE. You want Manhattan? James Wolcott will give you Manhattan.
8:17 AM by roy edroso
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FURTHER ARTS REVIEWS. I have been Netflixing my way through the final episodes of Deadwood. I have only seen the show in bits and pieces, which is fine, as it is regrettably an unfinished epic, and because it has given me sufficient distance to sometimes find it silly. Would ye agree, bein' a sober fuckin' judge of the lively arts, that the complex sentences of Al Swearingen, him bein' a wordy cunt with all the verbal appurtenances of a fuckin' Cambridge professer yet slathered with the mud of authentic pioneer argot, sing most sweetly when some doxy is suckin' his prick? For fair, I do.
I wonder how well it would work if they all talked like John Ford characters. Ford trod this ground, too -- the tension between ripe, untrammeled individualism and the need for community -- and though I give him him the nod over Milch, I admit that Deadwood's modern advantages -- the richly meticulous physical reconstruction of the camp, the shocking cruelty, and the long, profane speeches -- are pleasing. Milch can get too pleased with himself after expending his vital energy breaching perceived limits; NYPD Blue got tiresome very soon after he succeeded in exploding the boundaries of the cop show. But though some secondary characters were left hanging -- it was sad to see Calamity Jane reduced to a mascot -- Deadwood still showed jam enough when the tap was shut off. I am content.
I blush to admit I'd missed John Huston's Fat City before this weekend. I love late Huston -- well, pretty much all Huston -- and this one is top shelf. It doesn't look like he had much money for it, but the old genius knew he didn't need it. I love Raging Bull but the fight scenes in Fat City make Scorsese's look precious and mannered. I know Scorsese's fights are supposed to be mannered, but Huston's makes you ask why someone would bother. He had maybe three camera set-ups, and the fighters, broken-down and hungry, get quickly lost in the violence; so do we, and their outcomes are always a shock that makes sense. Speaking of set-ups, see what Huston does when Tully (Stacy Keach) goes back to see Oma (Susan Tyrell) and finds her old old man (Curtis Cokes) has moved back in: the two men have their stand-off, and Oma only appears momentarily as a head -- drunk, dishevelled, mocking -- from Tully's point of view. I can't think of a better, more heartbreaking way to show it.
The Stockton locations have great, rotted flavor, and a Bukowski spirit of noble failure pervades throughout. Huston came from New York theatre royalty, but every facet of the human condition he was called upon to examine he looked square in the eye, and figured out how to make it play. They don't make too many like him. They never did.
1:32 AM by roy edroso
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ANOTHER APPROACH TO REASON. Al Gore's The Assault on Reason means well, and does well by several topics, most of them having to do with the Bush Administration's mismanagement of the country, on the one hand, and its ingenious management of ass-covering techniques on the other. Being a detail-oriented fellow, Gore lines up a good bill of particulars; many of these are familiar to people who get their news elsewhere than rightwing blogs, but they have a salutarily disturbing effect when seen in a bunch.
The problem is the prescription. Gore is very concerned with the "one-way" nature of political communications in our era which in his view causes citizens to "disconnect from the democratic process." He sees TV as the main culprit, so naturally he is convinced that we should attack the problem by using recent innovations to circumvent television's power -- he has, alas, a modish faith in blogs -- and by legislation on the order of the old Fairness Doctrine. He talks about Attachment Theory and the amygdala and the hippocampus as if explaining the psychological and physiological roots of our enthrallment by the idiot box will shake us from it.
This allows an opening for unsympathetic operatives like David Brooks to dismiss Gore as a "radical technological determinist," which, in addition to being a slander, is a shame. Because there is an earthier explanation of the problem.
First, rich people with a strong interest in distorting the truth use their financial advantages in every communications outlet -- not just on TV, but in newspapers, magazines, and even on the blessed internet. Gore is clearly aware of this, especially when it comes to environmental matters, but I think his faith in governmental solutions misleads him -- if, as he suggests at one point, we achieved "full transparency in the funding of nonprofit organizations" (including the ones sponsored by oil and gas companies), the villains would simply find a new way to disseminate lies. If Fairness Doctrine II came to be, they would use all their considerable powers to override it.
Second, while the multiplicity of lying opportunities cannot be pared down, we can yet equip our citizens to better apprehend the difference between their asses and a hole in the ground. Gore actually says that "education alone... is necessary but insufficient" without a way of "catalyzing the formation of a critical mass of opinion supporting their ideas." I say, let's take it one step at a time. If, as Gore admits, our people have had their heads stuffed full of nonsensical ideas, would it not be wise to teach them how to think? It is rather shocking that, in a book that includes "reason" in the title, Gore would say of the Enlightenment thatThe Enlightenment, for all its liberating qualities... also had a dark side... abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the learning experiences of everyday life. Q.E. fucking D., of course, but when the problem at hand is a proliferation of gibberish, can we afford to be so worried about the threat of sophomoric reasoning that we disdain reason altogether at the user end? With public education itself increasingly under siege, it would seem that any progressive attempt to fight the tsunami of propaganda would have to include, if not start with, a serious effort to teach young people how to reason.
No Child Left Behind is in place, but for obvious reasons a boondoggle; if we are to have Federal education standards -- and though in the main I am against them, let us for the moment argue on Gore's statist grounds -- why not use the structure to require meaningful education in critical thinking? Get middle school kids to use Google to formulate arguments for both sides of issues suggested by current events. Hell, throw in rhetoric while you're at it. In the ensuing years of political argument over the efficacy of this plan, millions of schoolchildren will have at least seen that the necessary information is available to them, and perhaps learn to do something useful with it.
I like Big Al well enough, and would happily vote for him again, but I really think he's got this thing by the wrong end. The Assault on Reason and David Brooks' disingenuous rebuttal are both out there to be read, but for most of our citizens, they're currently just free-floating bits of intellectual jibber-jabber: give 'em a chance to properly engage both, and they may get something out of them. Or they may revert to their original assessment, which would be a sign of real progress.
12:58 AM by roy edroso
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