Saturday Morning and All's Not Well

Though it’s less in vogue now than it was around the last election, there’s still a lot of liberal talk about “framing,” which is a clumsy, popularized idea derived largely from the insights of the last fifty years of critical theory, although the fans of framing discussions often speak of the notion as if it were something new under the sun. Meanwhile, those of us who wasted our time pursuing English degrees and suffered the inelastic slings and dull arrows of those ever-practical folks who felt our pretensions to politics were, well, pretensions, we’ve long understood that control and conformity are produced through language. That’s not to denigrate or ignore the power of physical force; states and societies have plenty of effectively coercive tools at their disposal—the power of the military, the power of the police, the power of the mob. But more powerful, pernicious, and omnipresent are the circumscribed discourses that we accept and internalize. Our speech, our writing, and ultimately our thoughts hew to the models we make with words. Beyond even the construction of national narratives and national myths, we abrogate our capacity for free thought by acquiescing—usually unknowingly; at least uncritically—to conventional descriptive parameters, and by extension conventional cognitive ones. Like The Dude said in The Big Lebowski: “Oh, yeah. My thinking about this case had gotten very narrow, man.”

So while Glenn Greenwald does his usual yeoman’s work on leaks, leaking, and leakers, he accepts too willingly the model of the-thing-is-broken. The Republican Party has abandoned its principles. The Democratic Party has lost its principles. The Press has been co-opted. The administration is going after leakers. The leakers are circumventing politicized authority to give information to the people. Whistleblowers act in contravention of authority. Authority punishes them for causing embarrassment. It’s perhaps a depressing narrative, but nonetheless an important one. It’s important because it permits Glenn Greenwald, democratic bloggers, certain libertarians, and a clutch of other groups to believe in an essentially straightforward remedy. While they understand the relationship between power, money, policy, access, and information to be deeply Byzantine, they can persist in thinking that the press, properly independent, can be retrieved and made to monitor the government; they can persist in thinking that the government, properly monitored, will act as it should; they can persist in believing that the people, properly informed, will punish the politicians and the powerful who stray from faithful protection of our essential freedoms.

Good luck with all that.

I wonder if it occurs to Glenn Greenwald, who’s fantastically intelligent, or to the fellows at Digby’s Hullaballo, who’re likewise quite brilliant, that the system (for lack, I admit, of a better or simpler term) is functioning as it should, or at least as it was designed to—or better yet, as it was redesigned to function, circa 1947 and the establishment of the national security state. I wonder if it occurs to them that the whole kabuki of leaks and counter-leaks, of secrets upon secrets, of commissions and congressional inquiries, of press sniping and press silence, in short, of everything that I and every other blogger bitches about daily has been designed and fed to us for the purpose of obscuring the true operations of power. Because the truth is that a society of 300 million people consuming a quarter of the world’s resources probably requires exactly the behaviors we despise in order to go on: the wars, the intrigues, the foreign governments deposed, the brutality, the irrationality, the posturing. I’m not sure that we appreciate just how rapacious a society we possess, and just how much fuel is required to feed the fires of the American Way of Life™.

I don’t claim this is an admirable or acceptable state of affairs. I think it’s reprehensible and unjust. We haven’t the right to sit like a ruling vampire above the other nations of the world. We ought to change ourselves into something more modest, less obsessed with consumption, more local, more decent, and more civil (and more civilized). Putting aside that sort of grand pronouncement, though, we are, at the moment, what we are, and it would do well to recognize that you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist of the “Earth is run by space-alien reptiles” variety to appreciate that behind the interchangeable marionettes of government, behind the petty scandalizing press, there does exist a nexus of moneyed interest that doesn’t give a damn whether the dauphin is at 90% or 30% percent in the polls. George W. Bush is just an instrument; fired CIA whistleblowers are just an instrument. Political squabbling is the instrumental tool through which our discourse is dissipated and diverted. It drives Glenn Greenwald to wonder why the press does what it does. It drives me to write endlessly on the foibles and flaws of the current administration. It distracts from the most frightening knowledge, which many of us possess as an inescapable intuition, which many of us likewise ignore as paranoia: not that everything is broken, but that everything is going according to plan.

Belated 4/20

Someone office drone in the FDA's PR office has got a fantastic sense of humor, because the agency released it's "Fie! Fie upon thee!" dismissal of pretty much every serious medical marijuana study ever undertaken on 4/20. Or else its just the sort of cosmic coincidence that makes this tried-and-true pothead say "Whoooaaa, dude."

The linked Times article is particularly depressing because it implicitly confirms UC-Irvine pharmacologist Dr. Daniele Piomelli's statement to the reporter that he'd "never met a scientist who would say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless." Given the Times' much-noted commitment to he-said-she-said-ism, it's frankly unbelievable that reporter Gardiner Harris--or else his editors--didn't go out of his way to find some whacko professor of Cellular Expansion at 700-Club U. to opine that a single toke of mary jane throws open the gates of the soul and the cells to all manner of awfulness. That the best anti-weed lines are just standard, shopworn, drugs-are-bad pablum from an agency spokesperson is pretty indicative that what the researchers say is true: there is simply no evidence that marijuana is toxic, dangerous, addictive, or causative or catalytic of other addictions.

My favorite aspect of the affair is the FDA's ongoing contention that there are no proper, reliable marijuana studies, a contention made concurrently with active discouragement and undermining of every effort to perform exactly such study.

It's funny beacuse it's terrifying.

Via Juan Cole, I came across this item on the Saudi Foreign Minister calling for the de-nuclearization of both Iran and Israel.

I can't wait to see what the boys over at AIPAC come up with in response to that.

If you try any preversions in there, I'll blow your head off.

There are plenty of good reasons to abhor sex offender registries, not the least of which is their further contribution toward the pathologizing of sex in an already pathological society. Of all the behaviors we’ve seen fit to criminalize—and honestly, what the hell is legal anymore?—we’ve determined sex offenderdom as the singular category upon which we universally agree: it’s a sickness. In our inimitable American style, we then take our convictions about perversion’s innateness and use them not to justify greater leniency and understanding, but harsher, longer, and more rigorous punishment.

Now there’s another reason. The linked Post article gets the money quotation:

"We've spent a great deal of public and private energy demonizing these types of offenders," said William Buckman, a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey who said the house of one of his clients was burned down, while garbage was thrown on the lawn of another. "So it's predictable that they will be the victims of violence and vigilantism.”

The article profiles two registered sex offenders killed by some vigilante who found them on Maine’s online, public registry. The older victim sounded like a pretty bad character; he’d abused a 7-year-old child, and that’s far below an age where sexual consent can ever properly be given or withheld.

But the other victim was just a kid himself. Just 24. His crime, the paper reports vaguely, seems to have been sex with his teenaged girlfriend. Consider for a moment the vicious absurdity of making it not only a statutory violation for a person in his early twenties to have sex with a consenting teenager with whom he had a standing relationship, not only an imprisonable offense, but to stipulate that a very young man whose true crime, at worst, was impatience and poor judgment (in a twentysomething, imagine!), should carry the scarlet letter for the rest of his life, registered with and tracked by the state, his entire life and being reduced to “sex offender”, the disease for which there is no cure, the crime for which there is endless punishment.

The wide net catches all manner of fish.

The Black Bridge

So in response to the supposed "intelligence failures" of 9/11, a date that will live in stupidity, Congress creates "another layer of large, unintended and unnecessary bureaucracy," only to conclude, a year later, that it’s created "another layer of large, unintended and unnecessary bureaucracy."

Of course, they did allow John Negroponte to run the thing, and maybe they thought he’d just disappear the middle managers or something, once the fucker got up and going, though I’m not sure even the Butcher of Belize is up for that sort of thing.

Arthur Silber is all over the fatuity of "intelligence failures" anyway, so I needn’t get into the foolish premises underlying the whole debate. Suffice to say that this is yet another instance in which our vast, technocratized elite prove totally incapable of responding to any asymmetrical threat, challenge, or rivalry with a measured, considered, and proportionate response. Low-tech attack that succeeds because it’s low-tech—a standard hijacking with a twist? Create a massive federal bureaucracy. Launch more spy satellites. Data mine the whole freaking internet.

I’ve long believed that the essential characteristic that separates the mind of an adult from that of an adolescent is a sense of proportion. Lord save us from the rule of the overgrown teenagers.

A brief bit on Karl Rove

Robert Penn Warren already wrote this novel, so I'm-a gonna keep it brief. When Lizzie Bumiller writes that the "overhaul of the White House staff continued today as Karl Rove gave up his portfolio as senior policy coordinator to concentrate more on politics and November's midterm Congressional elections," oughtn't she identify at least one "policy" to which he has leant his "senior" "coordination."

Because as far as I can tell, our present governors make policy in the same way that the eight-year-old me used to make rules for the games that I played with my little brother: without foresight, favorable only to me, and infinitely malleable and revisable.

Zacarais Moussaoui, Donald Rumsfeld, et al.

The recent bickering over Grandpappy Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Pre-Senile Dementia illustrates perfectly how received opinion trumps observation just about every time when it comes to the wise men—or mouths—of Washington politics. I suppose that there’s a charitable reading of their yammering. Perhaps the Mad Mouthpiece Club secretly hews to some doctrine of Humian uncertainty, wherein no matter how many times you watch the sun rise, you’re still a sort of fool if you pronounce, like Annie, that it will come up tomorrow. Past observed precedent is no guarantor of future occurrence. And so forth.

How else do you explain the press’ endless capacity to ask the same damn question, each time hearing the same reply, each time expecting a different answer?

Similarly, though not identically, there’s the strange case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Zeppo Marx of international terrorism. The press breathlessly reports on his callousness, his glee in the death of Americans, his proclamations on the imminent demise of America, and on and on through the litany of terrorist transgressions on the imaginary etiquette of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. Implicit is the expectation of repentance. Not long ago I compared Moussaoui’s late-coming, loquacious embrace of his rôle in the drama to that of Timothy “Others Unknown” McVeigh. And here’s another parallel. Recall how McVeigh’s stone-faced appraisal of the dead as “collateral damage”—his ironic cooptation of our government’s preferred euphemism—drove the families who witnessed his execution, not to mention the media, into fits of doubt concealed as rage. “He wasn’t even sorry,” or so it goes. Now the so-called 9-11 families, lionized and sanctified by grace of their relation to our—let’s face it—national martyrs, play the same role in the morality play.

I’m just saying that I’m not certain it’s a good idea to reintroduce recantation to our already fucked-up, national sense of justice.

Good Question

Huh? indeed. Belle Waring sensibly asks what precisely it means when the Partial President and His Merry Men sound out phrases like "civilizational danger" In Re: the Matter of Us v. Them.

A hint comes mid-conversation over at the George Stephanopoulos show. Joe Klein posits that while use of force against Iran would be counterproductive, use of force, up to and including so-called tactical nuclear weapons, should not be "taken off the table." Word to your mother:

I think that when you're dealing in a negotiation you can't take stuff off the table before it starts.

I, admittedly, have never negotiated with a nuclear power, nor yet an Islamic state, but I am now a veteran of labor negotiations, which is a damn sight more than anyone can say about Joe Klein and most of the rest of the beltway boys, all comfortably passing their dues to AFTRA so they don't have to worry about that sorta thing. Of course you "take stuff off the table before it starts." The apparently common belief otherwise is exactly the sort of rancid bien-pensant bon-bon that passes for smarts in our nation's, ahem, capital, as if negotiators, let alone ambassadors and special envoys, walk into white rooms with tabulae rasi, ready to build the fucker from the ground up, anything goes.

None of this is to say that you never ask your negotiating counterparts for terms you know you'll never get. It's common for parties to start at far-opposing positions and gradually work their way toward some sort of mutually agreeable center. Hence "negotiation."

But while you might ask your union for a three-year wage freeze, or hell, even a give-back of some sort or other, you don't say to the President of the Local, "Well, buddy, what we're looking for is for you guys to work for free for the term of this CBA." That's off the table. You don't propose to fuck his sister on Tuesday in exchange for lower copays on the health package. That's off the table. You don't ask him to dissolve the union, turn over the welfare fund, and spend his uncompensated early retirement writing panegyrics to your totally awesome management style. That's off the table.

So this notion that we can't "take it off the table" because the negotiating hasn't started yet is what the boys over in the hiring hall would call world-fucking-class bullshit.

But I digress. After telling Klein that using nukes is insane, Stephanopoulos says that we (who?) know Iran might have 40,000 suicide bombers. Is this number meant to represent some kind of inventory? Are they warehoused? It's indicative of the insurmountable vacuity of our discourse in this country that we even talk this way, as if a suicide bomber is a piece of military hardware like a tank or a plane, possessed by a nation, able to be mobilized by some chain of command, useful as long as the barrel doesn't overheat, etc. The implication, clearly, is that should we do something crazy like, say, lobbing a megaton bomb at an Iranian bunker in the vain hope of destroying the thing, then President Kill-the-Jews and Ayatollah Hates-America will launch wave after wave of mad suicide bombers, so fearsome they'll massacre us all, like a page ripped from David Lynch's lame Dune screenplay. How will all those suicide bombers get here? Who cares!

Suppose they did get here, all 40,000 of them, and all successfully detonated their dynamite sportcoats, and all managed to kill--let's pick a high number--100 people each. By my calculations, that still leaves well upward of 290 million Americans to overeat, overdrive, and underthink well into the foreseeable future. That's not to say losing 4 million citizens would be good, easy, or forgettable. But conquest? Come on, you pussies. Man up.

Failure

Steve Soto asks, and is probably not alone in asking, "Will Democrats do another 'ostrich' routine on Iran?"

The short reply is: Yes.

The long reply is that Democrats' pathological hatred of Ralph Nader for "losing" the 2000 presidential election blinds them to the institutional failure of their party. And let's be clear about the totality of that failure. Having weathered the Boy Prince's brief period of fear-catalyzed popularity, the institutional Democratic Party is now in as enviable a position as an opposition party can find itself in an election year. George W. Bush is one of the most unpopular presidents in history, and even many of those who continue to express support in opinion polls will be unmotivated to vote given his terrible numbers across the board. The current Republican Congress is one of the most unpopular congresses in history, and Democrats now far out-poll them in generic congressional races. Despite the best efforts of government propagandists, there's no plugging the drip-drip of terrible news from Iraq, the continued upheavals in Israel and the Occupied Territories, the sectarian violence now spilling into places like India, the mess that is our "victory" in Afghanistan, the potential devolution of the political and military situation in Pakistan, the (understandable) intransigence of the Iranian government, the continually exploding debts and deficits, the uncooperative Chinese and Russians, the bungled immigration plans, ad infinitum. The GOP has virtually nothing to commend itself to the voting public: no program, no plans, no issues. Reactionary laws in places like South Dakota haven't galvanized the public against abortion, and recent stories like the New York Times Magazine piece on outlawed abortion in El Salvador (complete with Forensic Vagina Specialists, or some such Atwoodian nonsense) will have the opposite effect in all likelihood. Gay marriage is a loser issue; you'll pardon the expression, but they shot their wad on that one the last time around. Species Plebiscitic referenda is ultimately of limited utility; it won't drive people to the polls forever. Nothing is going well for the Republican Party.

Against this, the Democrats likewise have absolutely nothing.

On the level of detail, many self-professed Democrats make the same damned critiques of their party as the much-hated Nader: that it is too in a thrall to corporate interests and money; that it is too willing to parrot the GOP's hollow jingoism; that it is too timid on environmental and social issues, where it has a natural advantage; that it willfully and willingingly colludes on such horrors as recent credit-industry-written bankruptcy legislation, on the PATRIOT Act, on medievalist Court nominees; that it can't get it's goddamn act together on meaningfully opposing the Iraq war.

But the sythesis of all this indicates a non-representational party totally invested in the institutional goals of corporate-military-industrial interests, which are the government. In the absence of any true centralizing authority, the various independent imperatives of the military and its contractors, of transnational energy firms, of other immense corporate entities, filter piecemeal to bought policymakers, who enact legislations and regulations willy-nilly, with no particular thought of or interest in any kind of big picture. Into this mix add the apocalyptic ineptitude of the dauphin and his various Richelieus. Then add the further meddling of a series of mind-numbingly backwards Christian sectarians whose devotion to a 2,000-year-old syncretic messiah cult impels them to advocate for a semi-demi-quasi theocracy, in fact if not name, in which the whole nation must devote the same endless time and energy to the impossible divination of which Levitical proscritions are and are not in force on any given Monday morning.

Politics, in other words, won't save us, certainly not from war with Iran. Now, I remain somewhat skeptical about any actual intent to make war on that country. I still suspect that, unlike Iraq (at which point, recall, our military capacity was both untested and intact), this current jingoism is in the service of PR, a bone thrown to the bloodthirsty GOP base, a bogeyman pushed on everyone else. That said, I do not discount the eminent plausibility of such a war, given the character of the men involved. They are not good men, nor trustworthy, and least of all wise. But should they choose to prosecute another aggressive war, appeals to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton will not help any more than they did the last time around. These are people who have been coopted by forces more powerful and, of course, much better funded than you and me.

Depending on the Democratic Party to stop a war is like depending on the driver of the getaway car to take the guy who just burgled you to the police.

SLOB

Via Juan Cole at Informed Comment, I see that we plan to liberate Baghdad. Again.

Like Jim Henley, I'm somewhat heartened by the movie-sequel-subtitle sound of the thing: Iraq II: The Second Liberation of Baghdad. Personally, I think Bruce Willis has gotten a little long in the tooth for this sort of role, but I'm sympathetic to the need for a little bit of dishevelled gravitas in the male military lead.

The infelicitously acronym'd TSLOB looks to be a bloody nightmare, though. Needless to say, the public line emphasizes the Mommy-Wow!-I'm-a-big-kid-now! aspect of the plan, as in: "Iraqi forces [will] take the lead." I eagerly anticpate the salutatory and reconciliatory national consequences of that brilliant plan.

I haven't got anything terribly insightful to say, otherwise, except to reflect that there's something of a . . . disjuncture in hearing the pom-pom squad talk about V-I Day, or some such, while the capital city remains enemy territory . . . or some such.