The Parallax Spew

Via Ethan at 6th or 7th comes a history of the 20th century by one Jacob Davies, in which almost every cliché of normative, Anglo-American bullshit history is zipped off in a précis that's meant to sound refreshing and informal and instead comes across as simultneously glib and ponderous, an extraordinary combination of qualities, I know, but just read it and see. It begins by suggesting that the British invented the concentration camp. False. It suggests that the Boer War was somehow a proximate cause of World War I. False. And isn't it interesting how not but a few sentences after sneering at the Brits and the Boers (whom he calls the Dutch; false) for their treatment of "brown people," he says, with glorious unselfawareness, shit like, "the War to End All Wars That Doesn't, in which approximately one kerbillion soldiers from every civilized nation on the planet are ordered into an unremarkable area of France . . ." Oh, every civilized nation. Oh, okay. He suggests that the Americans won the war. False. He seems to believe that the Russian revolution took place after the First World War. False. He appears to believe that the Roaring Twenties happened, uh, everywhere. Oy, god, I can't go on. It is a preening performance piece erecting a great pile of incoherent trash, made all the worse by its fantastical concluding thesis that "we" creatures of the twentieth-century , well:

We are the survivors of horror and threatened horror, and we are having a really hard time adjusting to the idea that maybe there won't be any more horror.

Oh, blow it out your ear, you moral dandy.

. . . they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."

These two items at Anti-War more or less sum up the absurdity of the "second fake end to the Iraq War." The remaining American contingent, if you account for the 50,000 soldiers, the State Department and other "civilian" contingent, and the mercenary "contractor" armies is of roughly the same size (about 125,000) as the governing European population of the British Indian Empire, which, bear in mind, had a population of over 120 million people at the turn of the 20th century, or four times as many people as Iraq today.

The Kids Are All Bright

You may recall that a famous blogger recently observed:

Whenever and wherever a human does something of which the Times is not certain it approves, the grey lady turns to psychology, like an eleventh-grader with a collection of Capote stories and a looming term paper deadline. The wounded loner narrative is thus their second most popular plotline, a whisker behind the fake trend story. It is marvelously elastic; I've read it regarding murderers, lefty politicians, preachermen, domestic terrorists, stand-up comedians, indie actors, and small-label musicians.

Add to that list "twenty-somethings." A regular reader emailed me this article, and now a passel of idiots at Slate are chewing on it with the tenacity of My Dog Pippi on a shank bone, and so I suppose the Times is due for another debunking. The story in question in fact embraces both the bogus trend and the the pseudopsychological--doubly damnworthy.

Robin Henig's statistics are obviously and deliberately vague. Consider:

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once.

One-third do what? You mean to say that 33% of the entire cohort of 20-29-year-olds changes residence one time per every 12-month interval for a period of 10 years? Or is this some kind of prorated average of total number of residence changes within the cohort divided by a number of years . . . I mean, what? As for the notion that "forty percent move back home with their parents at least once," well, what percentage of that forty percent make their "at least once" move immediately following a graduation and remain home for less than a calendar year?

It hardly matters. Henig and her editors aren't much interested in establishing any meaningful measures of adulthood or independence; they aren't interested in defining their terms; they haven't the slightest intention of doing anything other than, how would Michiko put it, limning the Zeitgeist and delivering a piece of banal provocation. They immediately depart the statistical shores and throw up a farrago of mental health studies, pop psychology, and crackpot histories of the "discovery" of adolescence. What they conspicuously fail to do is to cast their eyes toward yonder economy, except to make a vaguely Friedmanian observation that iPads mean you have to go to college or else you will never get hired. Hey, maybe decades of downward pressure on real wages, the destruction of even the tissue of socially guaranteed retirement, and the artificial extension of the duration of the working life in response to these pressures has created a paucity of demand for new labor that has made economic independence economically unobtainable for young people. I'm just, you know, throwin' it out there. Maybe the near-total absence of even subsistence-level wages for people without an at-minimum four-year program of educational debt-indenturage is driving the upticking of the age of marriage and the formation of independent households just as much as "social acceptance of premarital sex." I'm just, you know, sayin'. Maybe the general trend of our society at all but the highest levels of class and income, which are principally inherited anyway, is toward debt-and-wage-peonage that is gradually reducing the viability of the independent household to exist at all.

I am actually somewhat sanguine about this latter point, but that is an outgrowth of both my upbringing and my thoughts about anarchism and mutualism; there is a lot to be said for extended, blended familial units and a more clannish system of mutual support--I rather suspect it will pay off badly for our betters, who gained greatly from the anomic "nuclear" family, which is an extremely precarious economic unit, as present circumstances so plainly demonstrate.

That digression aside, even if we concede for argument that "twentysomethings" are doing what the article says they are, then the only sensible, coherent, and correct conclusion is that the kids are rational actors, that even in temporizing they are simply responding to the prevailing social, economic, and political circumstances of their times.

Fun with Figures

The percentage of Americans who think Thoughbama is a moozlim is approximately equal to the percentage of Americans who believe that the shadow government was behind nineleven.

Misdirection

I think my favorite part of the general coverage and discussion of the terrible flooding in Pakistan is the repeated worry that the Taliban, or whichever enemy is currently the enemy, will try to "exploit" the situation, a fear repeated about seventeen times under twenty-six different euphemisms in this single Times article. By exploit we mean help, aid, offer assistance. The worry is that people will be inclined to support those who clothe and feed them rather than those who rain death upon them from 50,000 feet. Seems legit.

This is actually a persistent complaint by Western governments who see their ability to dominate the various lesser peoples of the earth diminished. There's always a visceral undertone of rage when some State Department goon or White House porte-parole is forced to concede that Hamas or Hezbollah or the Taliban or whomever provides material assistance and humanitarian aid to the generally down-and-out people that they each claim to rule, defend, represent, liberate, whatever. The nice American in his made-for-teevee tie and lapel pin stresses the point: they only help to further their own goals; they are buying loyalty with food; the distribution of aid by such groups is purely political. Unlike, by implication, our own, which is distributed out of a deep moral well of universal beneficence. Gurl, pleeze.

In the case of the current catastrophe in Pakistan, there is the added moral degeneracy of Americans complaining that the floods are "distracting" the Pakistani military from its more important task of killing marginal "insurgents" and "terrorists" whose principal offense is resisting Western imperialism. Attempting flood relief instead of murdering tribesman is spoken of almost as if relief efforts in and of themselves represent a kind of corruption, a misapplication and misappropriation of valuable resources.

Darthlisberger

The Real Reality

In a little cri-de-coeur now recieving praise from various corners of the internet, liberal tough-guy Peter Beinart trumpets:

Once upon a time, the “war on terror” was supposed to bring American values to Saudi Arabia. Now Newt Gingrich says we shouldn’t build a mosque in Lower Manhattan until the Saudis build churches and synagogues in Mecca—which is to say, we’re bringing Saudi values to the United States. I wonder how David Petraeus feels about all this. There he is, slogging away in the Hindu Kush, desperately trying to be culturally sensitive, watching GIs get killed because Afghans believe the U.S. is waging a war on Islam, and back home, the super-patriots on Fox News have… declared war on Islam.

This is all embedded in a larger argument that says, in effect, America has lost the "war of ideas" and ceded its believable role as a liberator and beacon of freedom because of a bit of demagogic racism on the part of some mostly-Republicans. Not, mind you, because America aggressively invaded and occupied two major Islamic nations and is currently fighting shadow wars in at least a half-dozen others. Every time I think I have reached the limits of America's titanic self-regard, I hear a sonic boom ahead. Someone has surpassed it.

Beinart was a prominent supporter of American aggression, and it's therefore unsurprising that he believes our claims about bringing democracy, whiskey, and sexy to the benighted peoples of the world ever held water. But in the real reality, the conviction of many of the world's Muslims that America is at war with Islam arises not from the intemperate, gauche racism of Newt Gingrich, whom one doubts most Muslims outside of the US have ever heard of, but from the fact that America is at war with Islam. Like, literally. With armies and guns and bombs and shit. What renders the rhetoric of liberation unbelievable is the military policy of the United States, which is its antithesis. The sideshow carnival currently taking place in the haunted, vaunted vicinity of Lower Manhattan has got fuck-all to do with it. Does Beinart really believe that the harangues of some American congresscritters are more dispositive to the question of whether or not America is engaged in an anti-Muslim military campaign than are the killer robots currently buzzing over their countries like so many malarial mosquitoes?

Bleakonomics

Friedman:

Second, America’s solvency inflection point is coinciding with a technological one. Thanks to Internet diffusion, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and the shift from laptops and desktops to hand-held iPads and iPhones, technology is destroying older, less skilled jobs that paid a decent wage at a faster pace than ever while spinning off more new skilled jobs that pay a decent wage but require more education than ever.

Um, so . . . wait, what? iPhones are destroying jobs? How? Why? Where? "I'm sorry, Mr. Jones. With the advent of the iPad, we no longer need a CPA in receivables." Huh? Cloud computing is destroying jobs? Social networking? What is this man talking about?

Don't worry. These are rhetorical questions. The teleology of economic liberalism naturally encompasses an historical narrative arc in which "technology," which could historically be taken as a synonym for automation, displaces manual labor. Some new employment comes from tending the new machines, but the rest comes in the form of, let's see, how wouold a neoliberal put it, "spinning off more new skilled jobs that pay a decent wage but require more education than ever"--in effect, from creating new layers of managerial bureaucracy and engaging the credentialing sector, the colleges and universities and professional associations and job retraining programs and so on, in the great game of gatekeeping. Thus: "skills."

But iPads aren't taking the place of workers on assembly lines; they aren't writing code on their own; their portability doesn't fundamentally alter the amount of human labor required to design a bridge, let alone a, uh, an exotic financial instrument. Cloud computing is a neat phrase, and I am a big fan of Google Docs, but it is hardly the conceptual or practical revolution that our editorialist believes. Do you work in an office? Is your computer networked? You've been "cloud computing" in a fashion since the nineties.

The notion, above-proposed, that the advent of some new consumer electronics, or whatever, renders people economically obsolete is nothing more or less than a program of disinformation designed to wring further concessions from employees. Code words: skills, flexibility, education. Although superficially concerned about a lack of decently remunerative work, Friedman is really pimping for a system whereby work is more volatile, employees more dependent on the "will" of employers, and wholesale deprivations of livelihood can be justified anytime because of the release of a new gamepack for Wii.

Also, this is funny:

You still don’t sense our politicians are saying, “Wait a minute; stop everything; we have got to work together.” Don’t these people have 401k plans of their own and kids worried about jobs?

LOL, no.

Jooze, etc.

Regarding the first question, consider the world (this is what Christians call general revelation). The second law of thermodynamics is entropy, the fact that everything descends into chaos unless there is intelligence behind it to create and maintain order. The way the world works, from the ecosystem down to our own physical bodies, is utterly amazing and more finely complex than any machine or computer ever created. Is this all an accident? I think you have to have more faith to believe in this universe being a huge accident than that there was intelligent design behind it.

-Allen Yeh, Baby Genius

Lord, you’ll pardon the expression, knows, we are all guilty of bowdlerizing science in some of our arguments, and those of us with the misfortune to have attended college and to remember any of it can usually recall that fraught moment in Intro to Soc when some mook in Birks and a beanie started yakking about ant colonies. The world is complex, the perceived explanatory power of science is alluring, and the temptation to misapply the latter to the former is hard to resist.

But the ideas that “the ecosystem” and our “physical bodies” violate the second law of thermodynamics, that the second law of thermodynamics is entropy, and that entropy is “the fact that everything descends into chaos unless there is intelligence behind it to create and maintain order” are a nested set of cosmic, comical misapprehensions. Someone build this man a perpetual motion machine already. What’s really sad here is that the fellow seems to be arguing in, you’ll pardon the expression, good faith. That is: he isn’t engaged in casuistry; he’s just a dummy. Of course there are no truly closed systems, but taking our divinely maintained, intelligently designed bodies as a rough approximation, and seeing as we are not subject to those crude physical laws that govern mere dumb matter, I encourage Mr. Yeh to take up fasting. Forever. He should be fine.

Later in the same article he constructs an almost--but not quite--equally hilarious argument regarding why, once one concedes the existence of divinity and discards the possibility of polytheism, Christianity is the clear way to go:

Finally, the third question: if monotheism, then why Christianity (rather than Islam or Judaism)? One answer is that it’s the most egalitarian religion in the world. It is the only religion which says that your salvation is not predicated on what you do, but only by faith. If works is the basis for your salvation, then of course some people have greater knowledge or ability or tenacity or strength, and access to God ends up being inherently unequal. But anybody can have faith! This levels the playing field. In addition, Christianity is the most widespread religion in the world; it is not localized in one place, unlike all the other religions (Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, Hinduism in India, Buddhism in SE and East Asia, Judaism in Israel). If there is truly a God up there, and he truly loves the world, I think he would give everyone the best chance to know him, namely a worldwide geographical spread combined with the “easiest” access to him. (Of course this is a very crude way in which to put Christianity, but we’re working with their starting assumptions for the moment; you can’t get more refined until they have accepted certain other premises first). Christianity is the most egalitarian religion in the world, it is the most widespread religion in the world, and it is the most accessible religion in the world. As people mature and go further in discipleship, they will find that the road is not easy, but the initial entry into the community of faith is more open than any other religion on earth.

This is all fairly hilarious. The most populous Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, which is a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Middle East. There are almost as many Muslims in Hindu India as there are in all of North Africa. The Muslim population of Bangladesh is six or seven times the population of Saudi Arabia. There are as many Muslims in China as there are in Morocco. There are as many Jews in the United States as in Israel. It is still fair to say that Christianity is the most geographically widespread religion, and it is surely the world's most-adhered-to, nominally speaking anyway, but regardless, I think we can dismiss a man who thinks that "SE and East Asia" constitutes a geography of sufficiently small dimensions as to merit the adjective, localized.

As for the argument from popularity, an odd conceit of a man plainly much-steeped in democracy, that Truth proceeds from the number of voters pulling the Yes lever, it would certainly dismay the early Christians scratching their little fishies in the sand. It did remind me of a good story the rabbi at my parents' synagogue told when I recently joined them at services for my brother's Yahrtzeit. Two orthodox rebbeim are debating the coming of the Moshiach. The first says, "I believe we must study Torah and observe the laws and traditions of our ancestors and not think too much of worldly things, for after all, when the Moshiach comes, many worldly things will pass away."

The second rebbe says, "I agree, we must read Torah and observe the laws and traditions, but should we not also work and pray for a better world for ourselves and our children and grandchildren? For after all, we do not know when the Moshiach will come. We do not even know if the Moshiach will come!"

"My friend!" cries the first rebbe. "How can you say such a thing? Does not Hashem promise that our Moshiach will come? Do you doubt the word of the Lord?"

"Hmmm," muses the first Rebbe. "Perhaps, perhaps."

"Aha!" the first rebbe calls out. "Then you do not believe in God!"

"Oh," the second replies. "Nonsense. I am a Jew. I believe in God. I just don't trust him."

Dear Jurisprudence, Won't You Come out to Play

Here, Ed Meese contends that District Judge Vaughn Walker was derelict in his judicial office because he failed to make the defense's case for the defense. I like it! I think we should apply this principle to criminal court.

Kitchen Sink

I didn't think too much of Anis Shivani's most overrated writers list. I mean, Mary Oliver? Sure, she absolutely sucks; she represents better than anyone the descent of American poetry into utter banality and irrelevance, but that fact alone mitigates against a "most overrated" nomination. She is hardly "rated" at all, except by other unread poets and university types. However, his note on Michiko Kakutani is uncanny:

Not a writer, by any stretch of even my novelistic imagination, but I include her here as the enabler-in-chief for the preceding mediocrities. Simply the worst book critic on the planet. Possesses only one criterion to judge fiction--does it fit her notions of the mid-twentieth century realist novel? No postmodern experiments for her, nothing radical that doesn't fit her naive realist mold. If she loves a book, avoid it like hell (it's bound to be banal). If she dislikes it, consider buying it. If she really hates it, run to the bookstore and get it, right now! Every good book is Chekhovian or Jamesian or Forsterian or Updikean--she has mastered the technique of saying nothing in a review by comparing books to an author's previous books and to classics which have nothing to do with the book at hand. Judges books as if the entire modernist and postmodernist canon had never existed. One of the world's great purveyors of mindless philistinism--it's divine justice that she would be the New York Times's chief book critic (and soon to go behind the pay wall).

And here, today, is Kakutani on Jonathan Franzen's new novel, inhabiting Shivani's caricature like a T-girl in a booty skirt:

Jonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, “Freedom,” showcases his impressive literary toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters.

Shivani even makes fun of her for her stilted vocabulary ("I limn you, Michiko, lapidarily!"), and lo:

Writing in prose that is at once visceral and lapidary, Mr. Franzen shows us how his characters strive to navigate a world of technological gadgetry and ever-shifting mores, how they struggle to balance the equation between their expectations of life and dull reality, their political ideals and mercenary personal urges. He proves himself as adept at adolescent comedy (what happens to Joey after he accidentally swallows his wedding ring right before a vacation with his dream girl) as he is at grown-up tragedy (what happens to Walter’s assistant and new beloved when she sets off alone on a trip to West Virginia coal country); as skilled at holding a mirror to the world his people inhabit day by dreary day as he is at limning their messy inner lives.

It seems almost impossibly coincidental. Is that you, Michiko, attempting a sly response to your critics through deliberate self-parody?

No. I think she really is that bad. "[H]is David Foster Wallace-esque ability to capture the absurdities of contemporary life . . ." David Foster Wallace-esque!?

Here you have the far limits of the American novel as perceived by the chief critic of the Times. It must be "realistic," by which she means written in conservative prose in a semi-omniscient, third-person, past tense voice. Flashbacks are permissible, especially if they provide anecdotal bric-a-brac to establish character. Plot should solely be a means of moving characters, preferably families, more preferably families suffering from the quotidian domestic anxieties that pass for "dysfunction" among the petit bourgeois: wayward teenage children, minor marital infidelity, mild economic satire ("people use credit cards to buy a pack of gum or a single hot dog"), small brushes with alcoholism or addiction, etc. Vague political discontentment is acceptable, even encouraged, but actual political convictions are not. Clichéd musings on the swiftness of modern life, the distemper of discourse in the internet age, and the "dislocation" of contemporary American rootlessness are taken as novel insights; however, no suggestions of root causes, historical context, or political economy are appropriate. The "middle-class" (by which is usually meant pretty well-to-do) American family is the template; it is to Kakutani's conception of the proper form of the novel what 14 lines are to the sonnet, not merely indispensable, but utterly integral--the very definition of the thing itself.

I haven't read Franzen's new novel. Personally, I find his writing insufferable, or more accurately I found The Corrections to be almost unreadable and the handful of his essays and reviews that I've seen to be insufferable. The fact that Kakutani recommends this book discredits it even more thoroughly than its authorial pedigree. That having been said, and regardless of the merits of the book, here is what the review fails utterly to say: what the book is about. I mean, what is the book about? By this, I do not mean that Kakutani must, uh, limn the plot as if reviewing a Tom Clancy thriller. I mean, she must give us a sense of what transpires, of how the book is structured, of what it actually says about its, uh, um, euh, dysfunctional family. Even the great tomes of high modernism offer themselves up to a little paraphrasis. The seventeen million pages of A la recherche... can be profitably summarized in just a few sentences. Try it. A friend says, "I've been thinking about reading In Search of Lost Time, but you know, I realize, I have no idea what it's about." You reply, "Well, it's got a huge cast of characters and about a million different plots, but basically, a character named Marcel, who is an authorial stand-in, takes a bite of a cookie, and in the weird way that the smallest sense memories are sometimes the most profound, it casues him to intensely recall his childhood, and from there he proceeds to tell us a sprawling story about France around the turn of the century, and through the process of remembering, about the nature of memory and time itself."

Kakutani would probably tell you that it was about families. What about them? Like other hated American critics, she insists on domesticity. Updike is obviously the nec plus ultra here, and I feel I ought to defend Updike, who I really don't care for. He was not nearly so domesticated as Kakutani appears to believe; his concerns not so tightly bounded; his characters not so narrowly conceived. In these critics' hands, no novel is safe from diminishment. She'd probably tell you that The Brothers Karamazov was about a dysfunctional family, too.

Heard It All Before

I guess this has been floating around the internet for a few days. "Help us fill the hole. Help us fill the hole, Anderson." Hawt.

Gaol

Charlie Davis hits a point that I make every third Tuesday, which is that self-obsessed liberals will forever decry as racists men who offend their delicate racial sensibilities and reified mythology of Civil Rights "victories," even as their own precious liberal candidates propose and enact policies that are objectively worse for black people.

The Plans for a Future War

The Yemen operation has raised a broader question: who should be running the shadow war?

Oh, phew. Because for a moment there, I thought the Yemen operation raised the broader question of whether or not the United States should be fighting "shadow" wars. Or any wars.

Recently, a liberal friend of mine lamented the stigmata of poor martyr, LBJ. "It's a shame," she said, "that all anyone remembers is Vietnam." I was a bit agog. She said something about "domestic programs." It's the classic Mussolini defense. Well, he made the trains run on time. It is both gloriously untrue on the factual merits and colossally morally obtuse. I suggested to her that the shame is quite the opposite: that some lingering and mostly false sense that the old hound dog did something good for the station of black folk in America fudges a fair accounting of just what a monster he was.

This is what I find infuriating, uh, outrageous, about managerial liberal twits like Matt Ygs. In addition to pimping for wars to be conducted more responsibly with a more frugal allocation of resources, as if the wholesale killing of innocents were analogous to the zero-based budgeting process for your half-mil-a-year, save-the-children 501(c)3, they persistently approach the American death machine as an unfortunate distraction. Oh, isn't it a shame that Obama has to kill dozens of Yemeni civilians for no reason at all whatsoever when he should be fighting to save Social Security. Isn't it too bad that he's got to worry about his escalating Asian land war when America is going dark. How will it affect his legacy? We report, you decide.

If Mistress History offers consolation, it is that Obama will not be remembered for "saving" GM, bailing out Wall Street, or "historically" mandating that Americans not currently covered by their employers' piece-of-shit healthcare plans purchase piece-of-shit healthcare plans of their own, but rather for all the bombing and killing, the publicly acknowledged and publicly undenied wars that he's fighting. Not that this consolation counts for much to the dead and their families, and not that it will in any way constrain future asshole presidents from killing the fuck out of everyone on earth, so long as they are still able, but at very least, forty years hence, liberal dickheads can lament that Barry O. is remembered mostly for killing the fuck out of people, his half-assed efforts to put people to work through six-month highway construction gigs long since laughed off and forgotten.