The Bell

America is this Correct?

Y'know, say whatever you want about the long-term dysfunctionality of Pakistani politics and civil society, but when was the last time you saw Americans who had anything to lose spontaneously marching in defense of the rule of law in the face of violent reprisals and/or imprisonment? It may be in danger there, but at least it's still valued. People are in the streets and raising a proportionate amount of hell. Meanwhile, our own constitution has been in plenty of danger here at home for quite some time, with scarcely a peep of real public or political opposition. And to top it all off, we're spending billions to prop up the dictator who just did away with theirs.

America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?

Generation Blowhard

And how’re you gonna save the world, when the world ain’t ready? - Ted Leo / Rx

You know what, Tom Friedman? Fuck you. You and your pals were the primary architects and cheerleaders of this mess, and you have the nerve to blame us, who have no real power or influence, for not stopping it?

Millions of people of my generation protested in the lead up to the Iraq War(which, remember, you avidly supported at the time.) This was a movement that came literally out of nowhere, which was sustained over months, and kept growing and growing. The online activism you decry as half-assed and uncommitted did most of that, in a fraction of the time the Vietnam antiwar movement did. However, nobody with any power or influence(like, say, yourself and your pals in the media) paid any attention, and our efforts didn't make a whit of difference. The fix was obviously in. Nothing short of violent revolution was going to make even the slightest impression on the people currently in power in this country, and I don't think that's what you had in mind.

Then we worked like hell to beat Bush in '04, donating millions of dollars and hours, and knocking on millions of doors, again, all facilitated and organized by our online activist world. Still nothing. Nevertheless, we redoubled our efforts and worked again in '06 to help the Democrats take back Congress. We thought we had finally accomplished something there, but you can see how well that has worked out.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We aren't idiots. We've come to see through hard experience that our institutions and culture are just thoroughly broken, and simple protest and anger and the tired activist tropes of the 60's are not going to do the trick. We are a little cynical, but also eminently practical. This is going to be long, slow, difficult, uncertain work, and I think many of us are resigned to this, and scared that we'll never even get in a position to have a crack at it before its too late and the damage to our democracy, environment, and hopes and dreams is irreversible. We have gnawing suspicions that it may already be. Hence, a certain hopelessness.

We're furious about all of this alright, but it's a simmering, swallowed sort of rage, with no really satisfying or constructive outlets. So, despairing of any immediate ways to effectively fight any of this...

We do our best. We pursue careers and seek answers to questions that we believe are important. So many of the young New Yorkers standing around my living room that night were professional activists -- social workers and teachers and nonprofit workers. We discuss the latest current events, send one another links to our favorite blogs or videos on the subjects, grab drinks after work and hash it all out. We study like hell. My generation knows so much about so much. We read everything and anything that we think might point us in the direction of some kind of political enlightenment and psychic relief.

But it's not enough. I know that. We know that. Friedman has, in his own patronizing way, pointed that out once again. He's right that our outrage is "in there somewhere." I just wish he and his intellectual literati were suggesting methods for unearthing it and channeling it into effective projects and processes, instead of shaking their heads at us like a bunch of disappointed schoolmarms for not imitating his heyday.

We can't be you, because we don't live in your time. We don't have the benefit of focus, the cushion of cheap rent, the luxury of not knowing just how complicated the world really is. Instead we have corporate conglomerates, private military contracts, the WTO and the IMF, school debt, and no health insurance. We are savvy and we are saturated and we are scared.

Amen. As she alluded to, we are also far less secure and far more uncertain of our futures than Friedman's generation. We see this overwhelming mass of societal problems looming on the horizon, and that's on top of our own often very precarious personal prospects. This wonderful flat world that he celebrates does have its little drawbacks. I personally have been agonizing for quite some time over how to go out on my own and make a career working freelance on digital divide and civic participation issues. I'm probably going to do it, but it's an enormous risk, and it's very hard to not feel like an idiot for giving up a good situation for a total unknown in the current environment. I have a good, secure, non-evil job with insurance, and a lot of my friends still don't, even 5+ years out of college. It's very easy for you to tell us to stick our asses out over the cliff and go for the gusto, but your generation had a safety net and lots of economic options and little if any debt coming out of school, and we don't. The stakes are much higher for us.

Of course, the stakes are much higher for everyone. But until society at large wakes up to this fact, all we can do is do what little we can on our own. It's unsatisfying and enraging, but I'm not sure what else there is right now. I'd love some suggestions, and more importantly, some money, power, leadership, and commitment from Friedman's generation. Even much worthier members of the cohort than him are increasingly leaving me cold. I went and saw Susan Faludi speak about her new book a couple of weeks ago, and about halfway through I got bored and wandered off to look at remainders. She's a brilliant woman and her analysis of gender's role in our collective response to 9/11 is likely spot-on, but yet another careful exegesis of issues through a familiar conceptual lens is just not doing it for me. I (and probably much of her audience) know the problems all-too-well at this point. Hell, I've been reading Glenn Greenwald and Digby and others talking about this stuff on a daily basis for years. I want solutions, or at least hard thinking about possible solutions from our elders, the people who largely got us into these messes and who will leave us amidst the rubble of the world they built and then allowed to decay. Instead, all I get is sanctimonious lectures from the likes of Tom Friedman. Fuck you unceasingly.

What is a Modern Progressive?

Hillary Clinton's dubious self-identification as a progressive awhile back evidently kicked up quite a storm, and in some ways brought an idea that had been slowly regaining force and currency fully back into the mainstream debate. It has always had its standard bearers, mainly coalescing around the Nation crowd, but the revival of the idea of progressive leftism as a viable political movement has been slowly growing for years, starting in the early 90's with Paul Wellstone, and has been really picking up steam since the advent of the political web and all of the empowering tools it has provided citizens with, to the point that now people like Clinton who are decidedly not progressive feel the need to pander by trying to claim the label as their own. I guess that constitutes, uh, progress, and I find that kind of gratifying, because it indicates that those of us who have been advocating such approaches over the past decade or so have come a long way indeed. Still, since it is suddenly a hot topic, and is already starting to generate some rather shoddy and tendentious backlash, this would be a useful time to look into what distinguishes a modern progressive political worldview from a liberal, neoliberal, or Progressive Era one.

As is probably obvious by now, I identify as a progressive. Why the hell would a child of the '80s identify with a political movement from the beginning of the century? I guess I originally adopted the moniker as a way to differentiate myself from the tepid and timid Neoliberal maundering and social/civic disconnection of the 90's, the self-pitying and listless masturbation of the Chomskyite academic left, and the ultimately counterproductive ideological extremism, fractious, selfish infighting, and eventual self-destructive violence of the 60's New Left. I knew I was some sort of liberal or leftist, but the most recent incarnations thereof just did not appeal to me for those reasons, and so I went looking in my history and ended up with progressivism. The New Deal era would seem more obvious, but it was also a product of very specific and unique conditions that aren't likely to be reproduced, and was more of a top-down thing than a popular movement. To my thinking, the Progressive Era laid the groundwork that allowed the New Deal to happen. I viewed it as a middle-way, driven by a desire to incrementally improve and reform the system without destroying it, and embodied in social and political hope(however tentative and halting) rather than fear and cynicism or destructive revolutionary fervor.

So, what distinguishes progressivism from some of the other current schools of political thought? Classical liberalism(which maps mostly to libertarianism today) spoke almost solely to the individual and to private endeavors, and sought to loosen the coercive restraints that the state and elite power imposed on the rest of us. Modern liberalism addresses the individual or at most the interest-group and speaks in the language of rights, and thinks of the state as the guarantor of those rights and as an arbitrator between conflicting rights-claims and interests. The brand of progressivism I favor addresses the citizen and speaks of both rights and obligations. It asserts that our country is a shared project in which we are all participants, and in which we must all take an active interest and role.

Another important distinction between these schools of thought is the relation of each to power. Classical liberals are very suspicious of concentrated power, and I of course think that history bears them out on this to some extent. The founders had very good reasons for inserting all of those checks, balances, and obstacles into our political process, for example, and we do well to bear that in mind even as we accept and advocate expanding and using the power of the state for the common good. More modern liberals accept the much greater power of the modern state, but want to divert it into narrow channels, and bring it to bear to primarily define and defend the rights and interests of individuals and business, but otherwise they are a bit squeamish about it and tend to ignore many of its more sinister manifestations instead of actively opposing them with power in kind. Again, the first part is a good thing, and it accomplished a lot in the 60's and 70's, and shouldn't be dismissed, but I think it's just not enough right now. The modern Right has no such reservations about power, and have proven time and again that they will give no quarter. They must be met in kind. This is another reason why progressivism is attractive right now, because...

Progressives are a lot more sanguine about the uses of power. This is in large part because we don't view the government and its power as some coercive outside force. We see the government as us, and the citizen(as opposed to the individual, or the consumer, or the entrepreneur, or what have you) as the basic unit of a democratic society. The job of government isn't merely to arbitrate disputes between its citizens, it's to do the bidding of its citizens and do everything feasible that it can to improve their lives and expand their opportunities to fulfill their potential and pursue their happiness. Government is a tool that we collectively use to build better lives and communities than any of us could on our own, and it's also the great deliberative engine that we employ to decide just what "better" means and what the most expedient and just ways of applying power to achieve it are. Progressive government is not a distant and arbitrary power, it is our means of collective redress and protection against the truly dangerous and unaccountable centers of power in the modern world.

There are also objections going around about the dubiousness of trying to reclaim the legacy of a movement that had a dark side to it... eugenics, racism, imperialism, Taylorist determinism, etc. This is mostly nonsense. Those failings and dead ends were products of a particular time and place and intellectual climate. Is anyone proposing we reject the ideas and accomplishments of Madison and Jefferson because they held slaves? Or of any number of other important historical figures and movements because they were racist, sexist, chauvinist, etc? Sure, it would be great if all of the great thinkers and doers of the past had had the foresight to see these things as we do, but that only reinforces the need to work even harder to recognize and right the wrongs of our own time and place, and to constantly question and refine our own assumptions about what is just, moral, and wise.

I obviously disagree violently with the racial views of Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, and the creepy eugenecism of Sanger and Holmes. I wouldn't touch Wilson's foreign policy with a 10 foot pole. The efficiency movement had good ideas in terms of improving the social service, but went a bit too far in the dehumanizing Taylorist direction. The Temperance portion of the movement was terribly misguided and coercive. But guess what? None of those things (with the possible exception of Versailles for Wilson, but he had plenty of help there) are their legacy today. They just aren't relevant, except as cautionary tales and reminders to be skeptical about our own ideas about what progress constitutes and how we should seek to use power. This sort of recognition of and learning from the mistakes of the past is progress in of itself.

The Progressive legacy I identify with is the one that lasted and helped build the New Deal and the modern American liberal state, the legacy of Dewey, Jane Addams, La Follette,  of the Social Gospel and the Muckrakers, of the Suffragettes, of the government being marshalled in the name of the people as a counterforce to the power and recklessness of business run amok. Of the assertion of the public trust vs. the trusts, and of public interest against private interests. Of sensible regulation and the pragmatic use of the power of government to make concrete improvements in the quality of life and the equality of opportunity for the average person. Most of all, what I admire was the desire and ability to democratically and practically overcome and mitigate the upheavals and injustices of the rapid and chaotic industrialization and urbanization of America, without the societal breakdowns or mass revolutionary/reactionary violence that characterized that transition in many other countries. 

Of course, once you declare for "progress," you run into the inevitable debates about "what do you mean by progress?" "does progress even exist?" and "progress towards what?" As I alluded to above, I think the first question is answered in the give and take of democratic discourse. For me, it's something along the lines of "ever-increasing equality of opportunity, personal freedom, and ever-improving tools for the pursuit of happiness and the fulfilling of human potential." Does this exist? I think a broad look at history since the Middle Ages bears this out. For all of the very real horrors that populated the 20th century, they amounted to barely a blip against the trends of ever-increasing life-expectancy and health, personal freedom and equality and security, and economic opportunity in the Western world, and as the century closed, in large swathes of Asia as well. There have been setbacks and regressions, but the overall trends are pretty clear. Lots of terrible things have indeed happened simultaneously with and sometimes as a result of, all of that good, and that's all the more reason to avoid complacency and to continue fighting to make the world more just and free and less violent and coercive, but they in no way invalidate the very real gains of the past 500, and especially the past 200 or so years.

So what is this "progress" towards? I don't think the idea of progress need imply a teleological or dialectic view of history. I don't think there is anything inevitable about it. If people stop fighting for some progressive vision of the world and the polity, and lose belief in the ideas and practices that have led to the sorts of gains we have seen over the past few centuries, then progress will stop. If we are foolish enough to grow faster than our resources will allow, and to fail to come up with and execute contingency plans for such possibilities, then progress will stop. I don't believe in any Spirit of History. I believe in human agency, individual and aggregated. Ideas and actualities of progress will remain operative as long as we continue to make choices that allow that to happen. And I don't think there is point where we'd be able to say we're "there" and progress is at and end. We're creative buggers, and I suspect that we'll always be able to invent new needs and new horizons for exploration and improvement. The idea of progress evolves as we and our societies do. It, like life, and democracy itself, is an ongoing experiment, or perhaps better a series of experiments, each trying out new hypotheses gleaned from the results of the previous one, each illuminating a little more of the darkness.

Shame, Shame.

(Image by Greg Peters of Suspect Device)

“What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What's the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?”

More Pragmatism: Life as a Real Fight

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals...  But it feels like a real fight—as if there was something really wild in the universe which we are needed to redeem - Wm. James

Writing up that last post reminded me of another useful consequence of a Pragmatic worldview. The admission that are all of our ideals and institutions are of human origin, and thus mutable, also implies that we can take nothing for granted. I think taking the accomplishments of the New Deal and the 60's for granted is a big part of what allowed our civil society to deteriorate to the level of the current political situation. After 1968, or 1972 at the latest, the American Left in many ways declared victory and went home, ceding the field to the forces of the radical Right, who were willing and increasingly able to move heaven and Earth in attempt to roll back those gains. They needed to be fought tooth and nail the whole way, but really we only began to see some real fight and commitment return to the Left with the Clinton impeachment, and we didn't have anything like what was called for until very recently.

A lot was accomplished in the era from FDR to LBJ, and American liberals could be justifiably proud of that legacy, but to make good on it they needed to stay in the trenches and fight for it. No social or political ideal or arrangement can endure unless there are many people who continue to actively value and embody it, and who are willing to make a lifelong commitment to defend it. Positive social change, though plenty difficult in its own right, may well be the easy part of the equation in comparison to the long slog of consolidating the change and vigilantly defending it from reactionary forces.

I hope we've learned that lesson in the wake of what happened from Nixon through Dubya, but I wish that our country and our world didn't have to be put through all of this hell in the first place. If a large portion of the people who made up the mass social and political movements of the 60's had committed themselves to the long and messy political process of defending what they just had worked so hard to accomplish, instead of moving to the suburbs to have kids, or taking up disco and cocaine, or becoming high-rolling investment bankers, or whatever the fuck they did after they disappeared from the public stage and let the Silent Majority wreck everything they had just built, we wouldn't be in this mess.

And yes, I'm a little bitter. I've got another post brewing about how the 60's and many of the Boomers went wrong. I think a lot of the problems that led to the dissolution of those movements were inherent to their structure, ideology, and culture from the beginning. If things are indeed turning again, I hope we will do better and be wiser and more committed and practical this time around.

Philosophy and Social Hope

To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian. - Joseph Schumpeter

I had meant to write something about Richard Rorty when he died last month, but I wanted to re-read some things and really think about it first, and then other stuff came up, and suddenly weeks had gone by and it was no longer current. Yet another example of why I'm just not quite cut out for the pace of this medium. But, timely or no, it's still worth writing about, so I'll put this out there and see what happens.

It's fitting that when Richard Rorty died, I happened to be reading a book about William James. After all, it was Rorty who turned me on to James, and a host of other thinkers and ideas which ultimately helped to reconcile a lot of contradictions for me. Like him, I was an eager student of philosophy, who, as time went on, became more and more suspicious of the validity and importance of many of the problems that philosophy concerns itself with. It all comes down to questions of aims: is the purpose of philosophy to attempt to solve a lot of interesting, but abstract and likely insoluble problems, or to figure out what the Good Life is and how to live it? Is philosophy(or knowledge in general) an end in itself, or a tool to help human beings to attain their own ends? He and I both fell firmly in the latter camps on those questions, and, well, that's just not what academic philosophy does for the most part these days.

Rorty's ideas came into my life at a pivotal time for me, in my last year of college. A friend in the political science department(naturally) loaned me her copy of Philosophy and Social Hope. At that time, I was trying to reconcile problems of disillusionment with the realities of both academic science(I had similar problems with it... an inability on the part of practicioners to put the work in a larger context and think ethically and practically about it, an at-times blindly dogmatic belief in something that is a human practice and thus subject to human failings, etc) and philosophy with a growing practical political urgency. Rorty, and the thinkers he led me to(James, Dewey, Kuhn, Davidson, West, etc, all of whom we certainly weren't reading in my undergrad philosophy dept.) allowed me to realign all of those competing impulses in a new, flexible framework, and in many ways to get past the disillusionment and move on. Of course, like with him, moving on meant a self-imposed exile of sorts, because it turned out that philosophy and science weren't actually doing what I had thought they were going in. But, I'm very glad I figured that out when I did, instead of halfway into a Ph. D. somewhere.

My journey through academic philosophy and science taught me that what I was really interested in was politics, in one guise or another. Rorty, Dewey, and James' Pragmatism became the vital link between the two. What it does is is basically blow up a lot of those problems of philosophy that I thought were pointless:

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact  - Wm. James

What does it matter if we are brains in vats or if reality is truly "real?" Would either answer to the question change the way we live in practice? Either way we still have to interact with the reality we encounter, and if it's perceptually the same for a human or a brain in a vat, what possible difference can it make? It may be an interesting exercise, but it's meaningless.

Now, there has always been this current throughout the history of philosophy, away from abstraction and towards the human and the living of life. But it has always been sort of a black sheep faction, and lots of people who fall within this tradition, and who I consider to be important philosophers... the ethicists, eclecticists, humanists, romantics, doubters... thinkers like Aurelius, Montaigne, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Camus, Berlin, and Niebuhr, are pretty much dismissed by modern academic philosophy as lacking rigor and systematicness. Some of the Pre-Socratics and Hellenistic philosophers seem to get a pass on this, likely because they are Greek and old, and anything Greek and old has to be taken seriously, but they are still largely sidelined in favor the Platonic and Aristotelian dualities that have dominated Western philosophy since the beginning.

Though Hume was in many ways a prescient precursor, Utilitarianism and then Pragmatism were the first really concerted and enduring movements that attempted to get beyond the questions of Plato and Aristotle, to find a way to live without appealing to abstract absolutes or replacing God with some other idea as a surrogate-God. To me Pragmatism is postmodernism without all of the gobbledegook and despair. It is a humble admission of the complexity of our reality, the human origin of values and morals and ideas, and the contingency of truth. In place of capital-T truth and eternal, nonhuman certainties, it offers hope, social hope embodied in human empathy and solidarity, the democratic process, and the possibility for change and a better future(in this emphasis, it differs from and improves upon Utilitarianism for me.) In place of the fruitless quest for unity, it offers a celebration of the many, and an attempt to find tools to cope with and thrive among many-ness and complexity. In place of end states, it offers process. It admits that we are on our own in the universe, and that whatever becomes of the human experiment is wholly up to us and what we invent and how we choose. This is both terrifying and liberating. James again:

I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 'no play! ... I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind for ever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.

It is a very American philosophy, in many of the ways that I think America is or was unique and revolutionary and dynamic.

As for Rorty himself, aside from his major role as a gateway to all of those other ideas, I admired him for the unique space he carved out as an American public intellectual in the latter half of the 20th century. He was one of few current intellectual role models I could find who managed to combine the sort of sophisticated and skeptical understanding of truth, ideas, contingency, context, sociocultural phenomena, and so on, that makes the most sense to me philosophically with an old-fashioned and stubborn commitment to progressivism, solidarity, meliorism, democracy, and a solid, moderate, possibly achievable social democratic political vision. He admitted the relative validity of his convictions, and yet stood for them unflinchingly. He was able to be in uncertainty and complexity and yet refuse to be paralyzed or unmanned by it, or to take an easy out to avoid confronting it.

He feels like a rather sad example of a road-not-taken, both in American politics and academics. There aren't many classic old liberal/humanist public intellectuals like him left, and at least from within the academy, I don't see many more on the way. I wish he had won the argument instead of the rejectionist and puritanical Chomsky types politically, and the inwardly focused and disciplinarily narrow types academically, but it was a losing fight from the start, for reasons structural and institutional as much as ideological. I'm very glad and grateful he was still willing to fight it though, and I have great hopes that we on the American left may just be coming back around to his sort of practical, hopeful, incrementalist, and progressive vision of ourselves and our country after all.

Sicko

So, thanks to the magic of the usenet fairy, I caught Sicko last night. It was manipulative, unfair, one-sided, and propagandistic. You know what? Good.        

If any issue deeply needs a little counter-propaganda for the other side of it, it's health care in America. Things as currently arranged are ludicrous and absurd and deeply unjust, and interests with large amounts of cash and influence are doing their utmost to scare people into thinking that nothing better is possible. Well, guess what; it is, and insofar as this movie is propagandistic, it's in service of that very true and long overdue message.

The main thrust of the movie is to counter those irrational and mostly ginned-up fears of socialized medicine by simply showing how it works in other countries. You wouldn't think this would be novel, or that it should be hard for anyone in America to find this out, but you'd largely be wrong. Have you ever seen a newsmagazine special, or even a short segment on how health care actually works for the average person in Canada, or England, or Ghod forbid, France? Insofar as the debate is had at all, it's done in terms of strawmen and what-ifs and silly out-of-context factoids about waits for hip transplants and crap.

So, Moore sets out to basically just show us. He actually goes to hospitals and doctor's offices and what have you in these countries, and shows what they are like and how things work, and how much easier and less stressful and less risky the experience is. And as a counter, he has plenty of heartbreaking and enraging stories about how things here are often the opposite for us. Then he shows people in these other countries waltzing out of hospitals and pharmacies without having to pay a dime or do any paperwork. He shows regular people getting the care they need easily and conveniently, and who are dumbfounded that things could be any other way. He certainly doesn't go out of his way to be fair... he doesn't interview someone rich enough to get the very best care America has to offer, and he doesn't go into whatever flaws the other systems doubtless have, but Christ, that's not the point. The point is; that for the average working person the systems in those countries work vastly better and keep them much healthier and more secure, and ultimately more free to choose the direction of their own life and career than the average working person here is.

He also addresses a few of the popular bogeymen quite well. He asks almost everyone if they are allowed to choose their doctors(of course they are, and probably more freely since there is no in-network / out-of-network BS, and no fear of being denied access to a specialist if you need one.) He talks to doctors in these countries about whether they feel constrained or are underpaid or what have you(They aren't, and most importantly, they don't have to deal with the constraints on their practice of medicine by the whims of insurance adjusters, something they all emphasized heavily.) After showing off the luxurious amenities of the French system ($1 a day daycare! Government-provided nannies! 24-hr doctor house calls! 30 days of vacation a year! Paid sick and maternity leave!) he asks the natural question of "How the hell do they pay for this?"

So then he finds a middle-class Parisien family, and shows off their (comparable to American and pretty damned posh) standard of living, to demonstrate that the tax burden isn't so great that you can't live quite well indeed. I thought this was a little off, because they had a family income of like 96k Euros a year, which is quite a bit, but they were also in Paris, which is probably pretty expensive, so maybe it evens out. Still, again, the point stands. People aren't being taxed into penury in these countries, and they have a lot less individual debt and risk, and thus often a lot more range of choice.

So far, so good. And he even managed to avoid the usual Michael Moore brand of grandstanding and bullying that tends to turn me off on his otherwise very provocative and important work. Well, until the last part, anyway. And then it was just the grandstanding part, and if he had handled it just a bit differently, I think it could have been very effective. What he did was a) talk to a bunch of 9/11 volunteers who have lung problems and can't get care b) contrast their situation with the fact that even detainees in Guantanamo Bay are getting quality medical care c) devise a scheme to take these people(and lots of other victims he interviews throughout the movie) to Gitmo and demand care for them. When d) they are of course denied access to Gitmo, he e) takes them to the Cuban mainland, and gets them what appears to be cheap, quality medical treatment and drugs there.

What I'm afraid of is that he didn't condemn the Cuban government enough. Now, I think our Cuban policy is just ridiculous and terribly counterproductive, and has been for decades, but Castro is just a no-go in our national debate, and I'm afraid that by making Cuba look good, he's made it easy for people to just dismiss the rest of his argument and tar him as a commie. He's bringing an extraneous issue in and making his job more difficult than it needs to be. I also kinda wonder if he didn't unwittingly participate in a propaganda exercise for the Cuban government. Did these people really get the same kind of care that normal, everyday Cubans would get? Who knows? I can't imagine that he took all of these people there without any advance warning to the government, and if they knew, surely they were putting on their best face to get a dig in on us. Fair cop.

Still, if he had just sold it a little differently, in terms of "Look, even this backward quasi-3rd-world country that's been run into the ground by a terrible dictator for decades manages to provide a decent standard of health care and access for everyone. So why the hell can't we?" I think it could have worked. He did the second part of that well(and I really appreciate that he appeals directly to our patriotism and sense of goodwill for our fellow Americans), but he went a bit soft on Cuba, which for a liberal audience is fine and proper, but if he wants to reach across partisan and sectarian lines, it's risky. We'll see how that plays. Hopefully it won't torpedo the substance of the movie, which is solid and which if enough people see it, I feel like it could make a real difference in terms of exploding the myths and tipping public opinion past the point of no return on national healthcare. We can only hope that it does, and soon.

Interviews, Angles, and Trust in the Newsmedia

As an interesting little side-note to the latest whine-fest about how the intarnets are destroying journalism, this article at Newsweek whingeing about how bloggers aren't willing to give interviewers carte-blanche on their terms sure is a treat. Now, Winer is notorious for being touchy and tough to deal with, and Calacanis is not known as the nicest guy on the web either, but still, they have good reason to be suspicious. Most bloggers who have dealt with the media at all do, because they have in many cases learned from hard experience. Now that they have enough power to have some degree of control of how the media represents them, they're certainly justified in using it.

"The interviewer used to be in charge, but that's no longer the case," says media blogger Jeff Jarvis. "I can decide how long the quote is, I can make sure the context is accurate."

All this can be unnerving to someone (like, um, me) who has spent a career conversing with people on the other end of the phone line or lunch table. A live interview allows me not only to follow up quickly but to sense the verbal cues that direct me to more fruitful topics. In e-mail, people talk at you; in conversation I can talk with subjects, and a casual remark can lead to a level of discussion that neither party anticipated from the beginning. I am more likely to learn from someone in a conversation than in an e-mail exchange, which simply does not allow for the serendipity, intensity and give-and-take of real-time interaction.

We in the journalism tribe operate under the belief that when we ask people to talk to us we are not acting out of self-interest but a sense of duty to inform the population. It's an article of our faith that when subjects speak to us, they are engaging in a grand participatory act where everyone benefits. But these lofty views don't impress bloggers like Rosen. "You have to prove [you represent the public]," he says. Yes, we do. But every time we lose the priceless knowledge from those essential, real-time interviews, our stories are impoverished, to the detriment of our readers: you.

There is a reason that bloggers feel like reporters have to prove that they represent the public and are acting in good faith. And that is primarily that almost all of us, or at least someone we know, have at one point or another naively and in good faith given an interview about blogs or online culture to some traditional media outlet, and upon reading the end-product, found it to be a total misrepresentation of the content of the interview given and the terms under which it was given.

Over and over again, I've seen reporters come into stories about blogging and other geeky lifestyle stuff with a pre-written thesis that they're seemingly determined to cram whatever their interview subjects say into, regardless of whether said thesis stands up to the reality of the people they are supposedly trying to learn about. In just the most recent of many, many examples that I know of, a friend of mine was interviewed about fantasy hockey. The reporter pitched it as sort of an expository/anthropological lifestyle piece, and said he just wanted some info on the appeal and mechanics and what have you of online fantasy sports. The finished piece focused almost entirely on gambling and addiction, which scarcely came up in the interview itself, and it had a real "look at the freaks!" feel to it, further reinforced by the picture they published with it, which almost seemed calculated to make him look like a pathetic loner or something, which he(and most of us who are thriving in the online world) is decidedly not.

Seeing this kind of thing play out over and over again has made me increasingly suspicious that this happens constantly on much more serious subjects as well. Some of it may be simple ignorance, but ignorance is no excuse for how some of these things come out. More like incompetence that is in effect indistinguishable from malice, if we are going to be generous about motives here.

Isn't the job of a reporter to go out and find the facts, and then write a story, instead of pre-writing a story and then cherry-picking facts to flesh it out? Sure, to even have the idea of a story you may have to have an angle in mind, just like scientists have to have a hypothesis to work from, but when the facts don't bear your hypothesis out, you're supposed to rethink it. If you're not doing that, you're not seeking the truth, you're creating it from whole cloth. Insofar as their mission is to turn out journalists with the tools and mentality needed to seek the truth, journo schools are not doing their job, if the often laughable coverage of any of the subcultures and technological changes that I've been a part of and am semi-expert on is any indication.

Now, there are plenty of ways to begin to earn back that trust. Some reporters, (but not nearly enough of them) are doing a very good job of using the interactivity of the web to turn these things into a public dialogue, which eventually results in them getting it mostly right by the end of the discussion. Another way to do this would be to use these tools to provide much greater transparency to the whole newsmaking process. Frontline, for example, does a very good thing, in that they still make and edit down their show as they always have, but they then post the full interviews and lots of the other background that went into making it to their website, so anyone who wants the extra context can easily get it, and anyone who feels they have been misrepresented by the finished product can point to the original sources by way of defense and correction.

In the absence of the limitations and costs of print, this should be fairly trivial for newspapers to implement. It would increase trust immensely, and it would allow bloggers and others to dig around in the source material and find new angles and connections, and ultimately help the journalists to do their job and uphold their civic obligations. This is just one of many ways in which newspapers are failing to grok the potential of the new mediums and technologies available to them, and in doing so, endangering their own survival and failing the people they claim to work on behalf of.

On Selling Out

[This is in response to a debate started here, and continued here, here, here, and likely lots of other places.]

As a child of the punk rock and "alternative" era, I do have some mixed feelings about this. I don't think authenticity is the sine qua non for good art, but it does matter sometimes. Perhaps in many cases it is necessary, but not sufficient? You can be as authentic as you like and make terrible art(just go to an open mic night anywhere for ample and excruciating evidence), but even very good art that either springs from an openly crass desire to cash in, or even from an authentic political or social worldview that I abhor, leaves me a bit squicked out. I can never quite get past the fact that Ezra Pound was a fascist. And then of course there is Leni Riefenstahl, but that's a more blatant and understandable case, but both are cases of factors beyond the just aesthetic and entertainment aspects. In a case that's closer to the current debate, the Ramones have been brought up, but well, I admire them a lot less because they weren't satisfied with making great and very influential music and being able to put food on the table doing it... they had to be big fucking rock stars, and felt like they were failures in some way because they never made it to that level. I find that kind of sad and pathetic. It doesn't make me like Blitzkrieg Bop any less, but there are multiple levels on which you can appreciate art and artists, and on the level beyond pure pop bliss, it does diminish them a bit for me.

Insofar as the "punk ethic" matters, I think it does because it was a leap of imagination that created a space and a community where you could make your art and have an audience for it, without having to contend with a need to be a big fucking rockstar or to otherwise succeed in the larger capitalist system. It opened up a closed system to dedicated amateurism, in much the same way as blogging has opened up journalism and opinion. Abandoning the idea that the measure of good work was fame or money or a corporate imprimatur was important, and it allowed a lot of voices that would have never seen the light of day otherwise to be heard and in some cases to have a broad influence.

There are a lot of people who can make great art who don't have an aptitude for or desire for selling it and themselves, and the system of popular art at that time just didn't have a space for them. I think that context had more to do with Kurt Cobain's demise than anything. He just wasn't prepared to be famous, and really had no desire for fame, but he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a small scene small blew up into a global phenomenon.

Others handled it far better and more pragmatically. Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips have used their status very well to explore opportunities that they might not have been able to without the resources of a major label. Pearl Jam, though at this point their music bores the heck out of me, are really great about remembering where they came from and helping smaller bands to get heard and get paid, and of course their doomed battle against Ticketmaster was one well worth fighting. Bands like Bad Religion, Jawbox, and the Poster Children who went into the major label world with their eyes wide open and with a plan came out very well, ploughing the money from their major deal right back into their own label or studio to assure their future artistic independence and their ability to help other worthy voices to be heard. Just like with the political tension between radicalism with purity/integrity and messy, pragmatic progressivism that works within the system, the latter is a tough balance to maintain, and the temptations of money and power can easily lead you astray if you start viewing them as ends instead of means, but the upside of the attempt is much greater than the ascetic and lonely way of the radical.

Now, I love a lot of popular art, and indeed a big motivation for a lot of popular art is making money, so there is a tension there. I think much depends on what kind of art you make. If a significant element of it is politically or socially conscious, then selling out is a relevant concept. It's hard for say, the Shins to sell out, because their music doesn't mean anything (aside: This is a big part of why Garden State is so cringeworthy. "The Shins changed my life?" Puhleeze.) aside from the personal meaning and the emotional resonance that individual people find in it. So, selling out is relevant for Fugazi, but not so much for the Shins. Authenticity and independence is really important for socially and politically relevant or critical art. I'm not saying it's totally impossible to critique the system from inside it, but there is a reason beyond just aesthetics why Fugazi are relevant and Rage Against the Machine are laughable. I don't care if I hear Mogwai or the Shins backing a commercial, because it has no real bearing on the meaning of their music. However, when I hear the first two lines of "Fortunate Son" ripped out of context to sell all-American blue jeans, well, that's a bit more problematic, because that song meant something, and could still mean something in a larger cultural and political sense, and that use of it is a total distortion of said meaning.

However, perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that the punk/DIY movement and ethic and associated worries about selling out were a product of a specific cultural time and place, defined by a certain corporate media structure. Insofar as those values seem less relevant to this generation of artists, it may be a result of the changing media landscape. Post WWII, a corporate-owned, broadcast-based monoculture dominated American life. As I went into above, punk rock was so revolutionary because it was one of the first revivals of amateurism and folk culture in the face of that, and one of the first significant post-broadcast movements that reminded ordinary people that they could make art on their own terms in a way that was integral to the rest of their lives.

Now that the net has come along and communities for creation and channels for distribution of those things are ascendant and ubiquitous, the oppositional stance of punk as a throughgoing artistic ethic doesn't quite make as much sense anymore. I think some of it does still make sense somewhat as a political and social ethic, and I'm a bit disappointed to see very little in the way of political and social consciousness or questioning of corporate/captalist values on the part this new generation of indie musicians and artists, but that's probably an issue for another post entirely.

Dems and the Media: Still a Long Way to Go

What about sending the same bill back to the President? According to our staffer, the perceived problem here is that House Dems have loudly proclaimed that a measure to fund the troops will have been created by Memorial Day. Recent polls suggest that Dems haven't done a good enough job explaining to the public that the Presidential veto -- not Congress -- is what's to blame for the lack of troop funding. So a repeat of the veto scenario is thus seeen as politically very risky, our staffer says.

This is what I just don't get. If the Dems were really committed to this(and I think they were, at least on the leadership level, as it involved quite a bit of neck-out-sticking and vote wrangling and other real commitments) then why the flipping fuck were they not out ahead of this in the media. How could they not realize that this would come down to a media battle between them and the president over who was obstructing the funding? It seems dead obvious. 1. The Dems pass a bill with benchmarks and withdrawal dates, which Bush has repeatedly said he would veto. 2. Bush vetoes it, and gives no quarter. They never give quarter. Surely you have learned this by now? 3. We fight it out in the media, and whoever loses the perception battle vis a vis the troops and national defense has to back down.

So, the real fight on this was always going to be in the media. Where was the message? Where was the all-points blitz? Every available Dem/Liberal mouthpiece should have been screaming from the rooftops for the past two months that Bush's petulance and incompetence was endangering our troops and our security, that he has no plan, that a veto would be evidence that he has no plan to even look for a plan. That, look, we have a plan and accountability and the beginnings of a path forward here, and we're offering it, and we're willing to work with him to set this right, and that he's being a baby and taking his toys and going home, and endangering our security and our army in the process. This is not rocket science. So why the hell didn't they follow through? I know we're supposedly at a great natural disadvantage on these issues, but the landscape has fundamentally changed in the past 6 months, and there was an opportunity there to seize and redefine the debate. An opportunity sadly not taken, from the looks of it. In a situation as grave as this one, we can't afford such silly mistakes. There is just too much at stake right now to keep bumblefucking along with our thumbs up our asses. Can they not grasp this? Feh.

Summarize Proust...

Q: There’s been some very dramatic testimony before the Senate this week from one of your former top Justice Department officials who describes a scene that some Senators called stunning, about a time when the warrantless wiretap program was being reviewed. Sir, did you send your then chief of staff and White House counsel to the bedside of John Ashcroft while he was ill to get him to approve that program, and do you believe that kind of conduct from White House officials is appropriate?

BUSH: Kelly, there’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen. I’m not going to talk about it. It’s a very sensitive program. I will tell you that one, the program was necessary to protect the American people and it’s still necessary, because there’s still an enemy that wants to do us harm, and therefore I have an obligation to put in place programs that honor the civil liberties of the American people — a program that was, in this case, constantly reviewed, and briefed to the United States Congress. And the program, as I say, is an essential part of protecting this country, and so there will be all kinds of talk about it. As i say, I’m not going to move the issue forward by talking about something as highly classified subject. I will tell you, however, that the program was necessary.

Q: Was it on your order, sir?

BUSH: As I said, the program is a necessary program that was constantly reviewed and constantly briefed to the Congress. It’s an important part of protecting the United States, and it’s still an important part of our protection, because there’s still an enemy that would like to attack us, no matter how calm it may seem in America, an enemy lurks and they would like to strike. They would like to do harm to the American people, because they have an agenda. They want to impose an ideology. They want us to retreat from the world. They want to find safe haven, and these just aren’t empty words. These are the words of al Qaeda themselves, and so we will put in place programs to protect the American people that honor the civil liberties of our people and programs that we constantly brief to Congress.

Summary: Yes.

Thank you for playing Summarize Proust! Insert coin to play again.

Power and the Pundits

There comes a point when the minimum integrity necessary to the bare functioning of the artist is destroyed by social evil unless he arise and denounce it. - Kenneth Rexroth

In reading the back and forth over Jonathan Chait's concern-trollish article on the liberal blogosphere, something lurking beneath the surface of this whole mess has slowly revealed itself to me. Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber pointed out very aptly that the elephant in the room in all of this is the Iraq war. Until "disinterested, above-the fray" intellectuals such as Chait can explain how they could have been swindled into supporting something this monstrous, and not just supporting it, but in many cases dismissing or mocking those who opposed it on what turned out to be very solid grounds, then they have no bridge to shelter themselves under while accosting innocent passersby with speculative concerns over the fidelity of the blogging rabble to the pure and chaste Goddess of Truth. Simply put, that troll don't hunt right now.

So, how could they have been suckered so? I think, aside from more mundane psychological and professional explanations about wanting to be on the winning side and wanting to build bonafides in the face of the Wurlitzer's constant accusations of liberal bias, it comes down to one thing: a squeamishness about and at times shocking obliviousness of the reality of power, and their relation to it. Their pose of intellectual disinterestedness is an abdication of the responsibility to grapple with the problem of power, and a failure to recognize that they live and think firmly within a system in which power is the ultimate arbiter.

They're supposed to be political thinkers, for Chrissake. If you're going to have political ideas, and you mean anything at all by them, don't you have to contend with power? In a positive sense, if you think about these things as your vocation, surely you come to firmly believe in at least some of your ideas and want to see them act upon the real world, right? If so, then at some point power is going to have to be acquired and used to make that so. If you have favored political ends, then power is the unavoidable means to those ends. This is why politics exist to begin with, and I don't see how you can be a relevant political pundit or thinker and work under the assumption that that's not so. There's nothing wrong with power and the judicious use of power to accomplish your political ends. Things don't get done any other way. It's when power becomes your political end that problems arise. And indeed here we are, and have been for some time, but in their cloister, meditating on the Eternal Forms of Trade Policy or some shit, the Chait class of political intellectual has somehow failed to notice that they are in the midst of a game, and that right now that game's for keeps.

In an environment such as this, if your ideas touch at all on the world of politics, eventually power will get around to contending with you, whether you want it or not. I've spent the past few years working with scientists who thought of themselves mostly as disinterested intellectuals too, pursuing politically neutral knowledge for its own sake. Suffice to say that not many of them think that way anymore. When power comes for you, you had better be prepared to answer in kind. If you aren't, at best you'll be used as a pawn, as the liberal hawks who provided cover on Iraq did. At worst, you end up dead or maimed, like several thousand Americans and untold tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, so far. That is what power does when ignored and allowed to run unchecked. People are crushed beneath the wheels. This is deadly fucking serious business. This is what we are on about, and this is why we have, often with great reluctance, taken the gloves off and taken our stand.

They just don't seem to get that. And so we have to keep repeating it ad infinitum until it finally gets through the hermetic chamber the beltway class has so carefully erected around itself. I don't think people like Glenn Greenwald are finding it necessary to repeat over and over and over again how wrong people like Chait were in the leadup to the war simply to gloat over how right they were by comparison. That's awfully cold comfort for anyone who takes this as seriously as it should be taken. But that's the problem, they still refuse to do so and face up to the magnitude of what they helped unleash. They have just moved on, water under the bridge, and done no serious soul-searching or re-examination, or at least none in public where it could make a difference.

So, Greenwald et al have to keep belaboring it, hoping that it will eventually sink in, that lessons will be learned that might prevent such tragedies and farces from playing out in the future, or, in the case of Iran, right now. I doubt it will happen, since there are no consequences even for being catastrophically, unrepentantly wrong for people in the Beltway pundit / political intellectual world(in that ever so convenient way at least, they are completely insulated from power), and they still seem to think that their ideas and stands operate in some kind of disinterested vacuum that doesn't affect and isn't affected by the world of power politics. Well, as certain political enemies of me and mine like to smugly intone, "Ideas have consequences." For me but not for thee, apparently. Welcome to Political Science 101.

John Wayne was a Fag

A short riff on the distinctions between fantasy and reality: One would think that you wouldn't have to remind responsible adults who write for magazines and run for political office of such things, but here we are.

Exhibit A: John McCain. After his disgusting and irresponsble little "Bomb Iran" ditty, he then justified himself with this tripe:

Iran is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That alone should concern us but now they are trying for nuclear capabilities. I totally support the President when he says we will not allow Iran to destroy Israel.

And I'm dedicated to the destruction of the Moon. Bastard thing hangs there in the sky all gibbously, mocking me. I refuse to acknowledge its right to exist!

By the logic of McCain and most of the rest of the GOP, clearly I am an existential threat to the Moon and must be bombed.

Have they just totally lost the ability to distinguish between rhetoric and bluster and actual capabilities? Is there a General Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics that I didn't know about, in addition to the existing US-specific Special one? Also, we will not allow Iran to destroy Israel? For starters, I would think that Israel would have a thing or two to say about it before we were even necessary, considering that they have nuclear weapons in their own right and their military is stronger than most of their immediate rivals put together. We're not talking about the Sisters of the Poor here. Plus there is the minor inconvenient fact that Iran is utterly incapable of destroying Israel, and even if sometime way off in the future they acquired enough nuclear weapons to theoretically do so, they could only do it by committing national suicide. I don't think any rational policy or intelligence expert thinks they're that crazy. Of course, the people in charge aren't listening to any rational policy or intelligence experts, which is why we are in the sort of Crazytown where I have to write posts like this.

Exhibit B: The handwringing over the "failure" of those emasculated pantywaists at Virginia Tech to do their manly duty and run directly into a hail of bullets to disarm their attacker.

College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut. Meanwhile, an old man hurled his body at the shooter to save others.

Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.

I mean really, imagine this frightful scenario: You're fighting to stay awake in your first class of the day, in an environment where you have no reason to be on guard, and suddenly a madman opens the door and starts spraying the room with gunfire. Those who were shot probably didn't even have time to react, let alone fight, and those who somehow escaped were probably in such shock that they couldn't react either. We're talking about an extraordinarily chaotic situation with no advance warning or preparation. Heroism or courage isn't even a valid standard of judgement to apply here. There are no heroes in a slaughterhouse.

And in the other rooms, even if they heard the commotion, they probably lost quite a bit of time trying to figure out what the hell was going on. As I said, this was not an environment where you would expect something like this, and context matters a whole lot in evaluating a situation and making quick decisions. But even if they had figured out what was going on immediately, and they were amazingly resourceful and alert, and capable of coming up with a plan to fight this guy within like 30 seconds, what they hell would they fight him with? Especially trapped in an enclosed area. They're coming up with all kinds of outlandish scenarios wherein people should have counted the number of shots fired and tried to figure out when he was reloading, and jumped him then, but he was basically just running down the hall, opening doors, spraying rooms with gunfire, and moving on, and he had two guns. Of course, they would say that the kids should have been allowed to have concealed weapons, but does a lot of panicked amateurs running around in absolute bedlam with loaded guns sound like a good bet to reduce casualties? Even trained soldiers would have a hell of a time not firing indiscriminately if such a situation broke out in their midst. 

So, obviously, this is feminism's fault. If not for the Pussification of the American Male, some strapping young properly masculine lad would have disarmed that ruffian forthwith, and doubtless thrown his coat down over the pooled blood so the ladies wouldn't have to get their shoes wet. Puh-leeze. Somebody's been watching too many action movies and is mistaking them with real life. In real life, the bullets don't hit everywhere but where Our Hero happens to be, and the merciless killers don't always do stupid things that can be easily exploited to defeat them. I thought this comment  from the thread on that post was revealing:

The men in my generation are so feminized I can imagine some surfer-haired panzy(sic) who just got a pedicure cowering and afraid to do anything.

John Wayne would not be proud.

They do realize that John Wayne was an actor, who was playing fictional characters, don't they? I'm pretty sure he wore makeup in his movies. Please tell me they realize this. Not to mention that John Wayne, that supposed all-American man's-man, the ultimate macho archetype, spent World War II in Hollywood. Acting. Some hero. Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, and many other celebrities actually refused to take the easy out their status could have afforded them, and in many cases saw major combat, and  fucking John Wayne's the standard of masculine heroism and virtue? That tells me all I need to know.

Also, uh, that title is a quote from Repo Man, not me. I'm not usually wont to be throwing around the F-word casually on my own, but the reference was just too damned apt not to use it.

More on Why Vonnegut Mattered

Amanda of Pandagon's Vonnegut tribute post reminded me of another reason why he, and the literature of WWII in general, was very important.

what I find interesting about Slaughterhouse Five is that it’s an angry protest against the historical revisionism that casts WWII as the “good” war.

This is vital, especially in light of what happened in the 90's with the ridiculously over the top mythologization of the Greatest Generation. It confused me a lot at the time, because all of the literature and history of WWII I had read up to then was nothing like that. And most of it wasn't written by professional intellectuals or mythmakers, but by people like Vonnegut and Heller who were working or middle class, and actually fought and saw what it was really like. None of them seemed to have any illusions that WWII was anything but a senseless bloodbath and a tragedy for humanity in general. Nobody "won" that war. The very fact that it happened to begin with, and that humanity got to a point where things like London, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, and the Holocaust could occur was such an immeasurable tragedy and loss that no amount of heroism and courage could begin to overcome it. Pynchon, who was too young to actually fight in WWII, but who definitely understood it in the same way as Heller and Vonnegut, put it this way:

Yet the continuity, flesh to kindred metals, home to hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death that separates these incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fuhrer - it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity... Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness- not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life.

He saw the war as some sort of inhuman, irresistable force; machines and systems that we had unconsciously or inadvertently created had broken out of our control. From the literature that came out of it, to the countless grandparents who were not at all eager to even talk about what they had seen and done, let alone cast themselves as heroes, it's clear that many of the people who participated in it and saw the real price on all sides seem to have seen it similarly, and taken the same sorts of lessons from it that Vonnegut and the others who wrote the literature of the war did.

Failing to grasp those lessons is a lot of what got us into the mess that we're currently in. I think the 90's revisionism about WWII was really pernicious, in that it put forth this ideal of a great crusading struggle against evil, with America at its head. That was attractive to lots of people looking for meaning in post-post-everything life. They wanted to be part of a Great Unambiguous Struggle like their parents and grandparents were, to be swaggering heroes like their mythical forebears. That's a significant piece of how we got from a limited fight against a bunch of dudes in caves in Afghanistan to a full blown Holy War. The only reason people can think it's plausible that Islamic Fundamentalism is an existential threat to our way of life is that they're looking at it through the lens of WWII. They wanted a Nazi Germany of their own to overcome, and, since no such thing existed, it had to be invented. Vonnegut and most of the voices of his generation knew that you should never wish for something like that. After all, they saw what that really meant, and what the true cost was.

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. - KV

So it Goes...

And I say to Sam now: 'Sam-here's the book.'

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like Poo-tee-weet?

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Kurt Vonnegut died today at 84. I've found his work very uneven, but at his best he was the closest we had to a modern heir to Mark Twain. I fear he might have been one of America's last great humanists. America has badly needed, and largely lacked voices like his in the past 10-15 years. It's too bad we didn't have him at the height of his powers to (cheerfully, and without much hope) struggle against the rampant bad faith and profound lack of imagination we've suffered from as a culture and a polity. He will be missed.