PMC Commentary

(Frank's) Q: Can't we all just get along? (My) A: No?

Frank Bruni bodies forth in one of those backward-looking, end-of-the-year, Dickensian pleas for greater civility, everyone, in these, our increasingly uncivil times. It seems we're all suffering from a particularly nasty case of intolerance exacerbated by technological opportunity--chiefly that of hot-tempered Tweetdom and Facebook ferocity and almost comically insensitive comment sections.

On social media, on many blogs and along other byways of the Internet, the person you disagree with isn’t just misinformed but moronic, corrupt, evil. Complaints become rants. Rants become diatribes. And this tendency travels to cable news shows, Congress and statehouses, where combatants shout first and ask questions later.

Horseshit. Congressman Preston Brooks didn't read about Sen. Charles Sumner's insults to family relations on Twitter. And since Satan's expulsion from Bliss, moronically evil corrupt little fucks have demonized their ideological enemies in alehouses, town halls, churches and caves, just as their virtuous enemies have.

It's only human nature, to which I prefer the Shakespearean, as opposed to Dickensian, approach: heaps of detachment and no little acceptance of our unalterable condition. 

That's not to say I reject the potential of human evolution; any way you cut it, we are, fundamentally, I think, a more decent species toward one another than when Carthaginians were breaking POWs' legs and hurling their hacked, broken and still-breathing bodies like cordwood into open tombs, which was something of a world standard, hardly exceptional. Today it is the exception, and we take condemnatory note--indeed global wars have even been waged against such unfathomable evil.

Given that bit of perspective, some assclown losing his temper on Twitter doesn't really chuck me into Brunian depths of despair. What does leave me rather despondent is the collateral intellectual damage of Twitter and the like, which Bruni addresses.

Socio-political debates are, it seems, (and this is only my unverifiable impression), increasingly reduced to 140 characters or less, which means we don't actually debate a damn thing. We simply spit at one another, which is less intellectually taxing and thus, for most folks, a lot more fun. This modus operandi of contemporary debate has so swamped online discussions--i.e., blogs, so this is personal--I detect decreasing readership on virtually a monthly basis. 

Right now this post consists of less than 500 words, and yet most readers, I'd wager, have long since bailed out. They either haven't the time to finish it, or, more likely, they read something 300 words back with which they disagreed, so they clicked off.

But here's the real kicker. A few won't return, because reading anything with which one disagrees is an intolerable online rub. There's plenty of comfortable pandering out there--and I could easily protect and even grow this blog's readership by practicing just that: I could offer, say, unvarying Obama idolatry, or issue endless Democratic hackery, or sidle up to some version of identity politics, and therein would lie a steady readership base. They'd all come back, to be soothed--to be reminded they're right, because they just know I'm right. One big happy family. Otherwise, fuck it.

Anyway, that's my challenge for 2014: building that most exceptional of readerships--thinkers (and engaged commenters) who don't crap temper tantrums and scoop up their toys at the first written signposts of uncomfortable territory. You've made it this far, so you're one of them. I hope you'll invite your like-minded friends and family to join you--to join us, here.  

So there's my Brunian plea. I reject that most of us suffer from some newfound incivility, but finding the civil crowd is no easy task.

 

How to celebrate the new year

I do believe Boo 1 (Boo 2 being Boo-Boo, my human daughter) has every intention of ringing in the new year in pretty much the same fashion as she's closing out this one.

Can you blame her?

(Photo, courtesy Boo 2.)

 

What Dems need is a bombshell awakening

Only in a fact-free, evidence-free, actuality-free, reason-free political environment would "Meet the Press" have opened yesterday with host David Gregory booming about the NY Times' bombshell! of a Benghazi story.

That is to say, the story was never an explosive one--its hints of executive treason and gross incompetence were utter fictions conjured by the right's Goebbelsesque Darrell Issas--and anyone who had followed the facts from the beginning already knew of Benghazi's fabular past. 

Yet here we are, more than a year later--more than a year later--headlining the contours of a long-familiar reality as a bombshell, mostly because the right has been so damned proficient at bamboozling a gullibility-prone populace.

That--what some fashionably call a "conceptual framework," and others more simply call the Big Lie--is, it seems to me, the least-met challenge that Democrats will face again in 2014. Their pushbacks against the Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, deficit and unemployment fictions (one could go on, and on, of course) have been embarrassingly weak, leaving the field of sensationalism to--and here's a whopper of a paradox for you--their badly wounded yet miraculously unscathed opponents.

The right just stays on offense, no matter what. It's scarcely a complex strategy; nonetheless it's a strategy that Democrats can't seem to grasp--and thus deploy. The aforementioned weakness of their pushbacks lies, ironically, in pushing back much at all, when they should be on unified missions of remorseless assault. 

Republicans' October government shutdown was a stupendously boneheaded play that for Democrats should have been a sensation for a good six-to-twelve months. Yet in less than two it was, as a story, gone--eclipsed and then thoroughly overridden by the right's exploitative offense against a friggin' malfunctioning website.

Which, in the long run, is of greater importance to the nation: the GOP's determined sabotage of the U.S. government, or a bunch of non-ideological computer glitches?

Right. Yet only one of those stories had legitimate staying power. And, at bottom, we can't really blame the feckless Gregorys of the press for the sustained rise of the empty one, and the fall of the legitimate other.

The right knows how to play the press, and Democrats don't; the right knows how to stay on offense, and Democrats don't; and the right knows how to mobilize resentment. Democrats don't.

But they had by God better learn, or 2014 is going to be a very long, very miserable year.

  

The AAA-rated "Wolf of Wall Street"

For political bloggers who can't resist the more glamorous pull of (incompetently) blogging about cinema, the beauty of finding a simpatico film critic is that the blogger can save himself much critical embarrassment by simply blogging: See so-and-so, he or she's an expert, and on this movie I quite agree with the critic, which sort of makes me a critical expert, too--and all without me bumbling my way through an inexpert review.

Hence, as for the "The Wolf of Wall Street," see A.O. Scott. 

Before seeing Martin Scorsese's latest yesterday, I barely skimmed Scott's review, so his take on the film wasn't mentally present as I watched it. This morning I reread his review with more care, and I found it as vitally ambivalent about Scorcese's "message" as I was upon leaving the theatre.  

[T]he movie is likely to be the subject of intense scholarly debate: Does it offer a sustained and compelling diagnosis of the terminal pathology that afflicts us, or is it an especially florid symptom of the disease?

Is this movie satire or propaganda?

Does "The Wolf of Wall Street" condemn or celebrate? Is it meant to provoke disgust or envy?

If you walk away feeling empty and demoralized, worn down by the tackiness and aggression of the spectacle you have just witnessed, perhaps you truly appreciate the film’s critical ambitions. If, on the other hand, you ride out of the theater on a surge of adrenaline, intoxicated by its visual delights and visceral thrills, it’s possible you missed the point. The reverse could also be true.

I had already placed myself in the first of those two camps--not for a moment did I envy any of Jordan Belfort's (Leonardo DiCaprio) excesses--which meant to me, as I left the theatre (and here I emphatically agree with Scott), that it was possible that I had missed the point. Morality plays (and this goes for politics as well as cinema) are not only too easy, they suffer from that most unforgivable of inartistic crimes--they're too obvious. And anyone emptied out by Scorsese's 145 uninterrupted minutes of "Goodfellas"'s human vulgarity, only to find oneself villainously commiserating in the 146th minute--"I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook"--knows that Scorsese doesn't do morality plays.

     

Club for Grotesquerie

There once was a time in Western society when conservatives at least had the decency to cover their indifference to society's assorted cruelties with the fig leaf of noblesse oblige. Throw some alms to those who lacked the good taste to be born at minimum into upper-middle-class circumstances, they would say (and on occasion even do), so that they, the spermatically judicious, could feel godly and compassionate and, above all, splendidly postpone for another few years any sensible, unwashed rebellions. 

It was smart social policy for those who dispensed it; when the others had nothing, something seemed like a blessing, and, by and large, their gratitude was immense. Yet throughout modernity the ratio of gratitude-to-resentment--arm in arm with literacy and the franchise--has steadily flipped. The privileged smugly caressed the fallacy that poverty is due to shiftlessness and inherent class disadvantages are due to God's plan, but the impoverished and disadvantaged reasoned out the logical scam. 

With the franchise and growing resentment, the latter demanded certain progressivities in governance. And bit by bit, beginning in Europe and spreading to North America, those progressivities came; they came in varieties of social insurance, market regulations, progressive taxation, workers' rights, and, in general, in government as a prime mover of the socioeconomic Good.

Some privileged conservatives--the more genuinely conservative ones--have accepted these sociopolitical metamorphoses as tolerable necessities of their own self-preservation. After all, they've been allowed to keep most of the toys, and the natives, through a kind of institutionally routinized noblesse oblige, have been kept reasonably quiet.

Yet still with us are the feckless, oblivious conservatives such as George F. Will, who has long since slipped to the nether-classification of "pseudoconservative," chiefly through writing such self-defeating slop as this:

Now [we conservatives] know that a quicker, surer method [to political dominance] is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society ...

... the cruel spontaneity of which only reminds the inherently disadvantaged that the game has been newly rigged through an unspeakable ruthlessness by those few who benefit from its "order." Thus more progressivity in governance is demanded. And in time it comes--its ever-accumulating layers coming largely from the blind arrogance of pseudoconservatives such as George F. Will.

Thank you, George. Thank you for once again writing that you really, really don't get it. Keep it comin'.

 

The less said, the better

From the Washington Examiner, evidence that the paranoia needle is pegging maximum bonkers: 

A top financial advisor [and Forbes contributor], worried that Obamacare, the NSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a "bug-out bag" that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.

Oh, and don't forget to pack the Thorazine.

 

Pardon thee, then pardon me

This argument among the three proffered by law professor Jonathan Turley for a presidential pardon of Edward Snowden seems, at first blush, the most logical--until one extends it by even the shortest step:

[W]hen the NSA program was raised in public, National Intelligence Director James Clapper appeared before Congress and lied about the program ... a crime for which he could be prosecuted.

But instead of firing Clapper and calling for his arrest, Obama asked him to participate on a task force to review the program.

[Snowden] certainly deserves the same consideration in disclosing abuses that Obama officials received in concealing them from the public.

So if I were guilty of some massive financial "irregularity"--as the Rolex-wearers who engage in such criminality love to euphemize it--would Turley argue that I should be pardoned because scores of depraved Wall Streeters were never indicted? 

What's more, I recall Turley arguing during the unpleasantness of the late 1990s that President Clinton deserved impeachment because of his lie under oath about sex--an exceptionally fastidious legal principle which could potentially make high criminals or misdemeaning louts of a good half of America's adult population. Did the ubiquity of Clinton's offense mitigate Turley's opinion? Nope, not one whit.

Nonetheless, in a more perfect world the fairness of Turley's argument about a pardon for Snowden may be conceded. It won't happen, but that's not to deny the simplicity of fair-is-fair; that if Clapper can lie with impunity to Congress, then Snowden can disclose to the public with same. But until that more perfect world evolves,  Turley is only arguing a legal utopia.

Were I the president, I'd pardon Snowden just to piss off Congress' national security hawks, most of whom enjoy throwing billions at spookology while cutting food stamps for needy mothers. Fuck 'em.

Now that's a political fair-is-fair approach for you, and among the chief arguments as to why it's a good thing I'm not the president.

 

Pseudoconservative pontification

Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, a Catholic, on Pope Francis' biting critique of trickle-down capitalism and supply-side economics: "He's entitled to his opinion, but I think we should look carefully at what he's saying."

Odd. Had this pope stressed instead his opposition to abortion or gay marriage, Sen. Toomey would have embraced the emphasis as that of Christ's vicar. Yet when this pope slams unfettered capitalism of Toomey's Club for Growth variety, it's merely "his opinion."

And then there's Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a Catholic, who offered this typically unthoughtful analysis of Pope Francis' critique: "The guy is from Argentina, they haven't had real capitalism in Argentina."

Well they didn't have real socialism in Soviet Russia or "Red" China, either. Would Ryan therefore argue that socialism is, at least theoretically, desirable? Somehow, I think not.

But what else should we expect from a Catholic congressman who refers to the pope as "the guy"?

 

I'd bet you didn't know that ...

In National Review's Christmas interview of Sarah Palin, the latter, once again, stands athwart knowledge, yelling Stop. I give her much credit. Her determined crusade against enlightenment and self-awareness has been vastly more successful than was Buckley's against history, and while this may be a peculiar comparison for NR to implicitly feature, the magazine features it nonetheless.  

In the interview there are, of course, many Palinesque misapprehensions to enjoy, and if you really want to feel superior--fast--I'd recommend reading them all in their native habitat. This one, though, deserves some outside attention: "The morality of atheism rests on individual choice," says Palin, "with each person doing what’s right in his or her own eyes."

I highlight that "insight" not because it's a cheap and easy thrill to ridicule the stunning simple-mindedness of Ms. Palin's opinions, but because that opinion would, I'd wager, find broad sympathy in this, our essentially Believing culture.  

The paradox of Palin's assessment loops back to her utter lack of self-awareness or any self-examination whatsoever. When asked toward the end of NR's interview if she regrets some of her past acts--say, resigning her governorship--Palin responds, to no one's surprise, that "In each case, I made the right decision after a great deal of prayer and reflection."

Now that's the morality of a theism resting on individual choice. I have yet to meet a Believer of Palin's ilk who doesn't first ponder an intensely preferred act, and then prays on it, and then discovers, mirabile dictu, that God concurs with the Believer's choice. From the Crusades to contemporary sectarian slaughter to personally profitable exploitations of invented wars on Christmas, it seems God is forever sanctioning humankind's basest instincts.

One could go on objectively about the actual "morality of atheism" being an honorably constructed social ethos as far removed from the ignorance of Palin's definition as Palin is from self-awareness, but such a disquisition would only be read by educated readers such as yourself, who thus have no need to read it--which, speaking of earthly paradoxes, is perhaps the greatest one of the blogosphere.

 

A merry Christmas to all you Christians, and a happy holiday, or holidays, as the greeting fits, to all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Taoists, Zenists, Shintoists, Confucianists, agnostics, atheists, assorted pagans and infidels, Voodooers, Epicureans, Platonists, Zoroastrians, Odinites, Baalists, and, what the hell, Satanists and Osteenarians.   

 

Francis vs. Edward

Given the calendar, I hadn't intended to post anything today. But Eugene Robinson's latest, in which he reshuffles the outcome of that second-most dreadful event of the year--Time magazine's anointment of person of the year--compelled some brief thoughts, even if no one reads them, given the calendar. (By the way, the most dreadful event of the year still stalks us: those seemingly endless unnewsy reviews of the "Top Stories of the Year," as though we didn't just live through them, and in more cases than not, would just as soon forget them.)    

Writes Robinson: "I want to say Pope Francis, but I’ve got to go with Edward Snowden," since "We now know how technology is destroying privacy," and we know that because Snowden "became disillusioned--and then incensed," continues Robinson, "at what he considered outrageous violations of individual privacy by a surveillance apparatus that was out of control."

I sympathize (which you may recall from my miscellaneous posts when Snowden's revelations broke), but Robinson's assessment is more of a loaded polemic than an argument, and as an argument it's flawed.

First, our awareness of privacy-destruction unquestionably antedated anything Snowden revealed, and further, Robinson tends merely to reinforce tribal antipathies when he rightly observes that Snowden "considered" certain surveillance operations both "outrageous" and "out of control." That's a not very subtle conflation by Robinson of Snowden's sentiment as the singularly virtuous sentiment--and perhaps it is, although the opposing camp is scarcely the black-hatted wicked one here; the "outrage" to date is mostly a mass of impersonal, untouched data whose potential misuse is what's conceivably outrageous; and "out of control" suggests a situation that is, well, uncontrollable, which clearly this one isn't.

So there, on the one hand, is Snowden's contribution. On the other lies that of a spiritual leader: a pope who has for the first time in this agnostic's lifetime inspired genuine hope of a global unification of the incurably skeptical and the deeply devoted, whose intellectual differences make no difference, since secular justice is the goal. This pope seems to "get it"; he seems to get that sanctified theology isn't worth spit if temporal goodness is only secondarily pursued.

There is, needless to add, real potential here--one with vast implications for politics, economics, international relations, earthly reformers, interfaith movements, and in general humanity's reawakening to what actually matters in this world.

And on this Christmas eve, especially, I favor that over tweaking FISA--and I see that as more worthy of our however-dubious Person of the Year Award.

 

McCain, the Tea Party, Goldwater, and the New Right

In Mark Leibovich's NYT Magazine profile of John McCain, which perhaps unintentionally portrays the senator as shockingly shallow (that was my reading of it, anyway), there is nonetheless one passage of historical interest:  

McCain ... finds himself in the thick of the latest "fight for the soul of the G.O.P." against the Tea Party right, a cohort that arguably would not have the influence it has if McCain had not chosen Palin as his running mate.

Last March I noted the ultimate irony of Barry Goldwater's '64 campaign, which was as fecklessly opportunistic as McCain's '08 lurch at the presidency--and rendered roughly the same result:

Goldwater's social conservatism of 1964 was, for him, a deeply distasteful political expedience. As an Old West libertarian he never believed religion and politics should mix; yet, his reluctance notwithstanding, he accepted advisers' exhortations to assault LBJ on the 1960s' cultural upheavals from an offensive position of "social morality." And Goldwater regretted the hell out of it: "Perhaps I'm one of the reasons this place [Washington, D.C.] is so redneck," he confessed years later.

In a big way, McCain was merely honoring a well-worn tradition of contemporary Republicanism: do anything, say anything, embrace anyone, no matter how distasteful they may be, if it means another Republican vote.

  

The warmth of a Fox Christmas

Ah, it's Christmastime, that season of cheer, of brotherly love, of miracles on city streets and rejections of rural Pottervilles, of sleigh bells jingle-ing and ring ting tingle-ing, of bright-eyed toddlers, of snowflakes on noses, of brilliant lights, of glistening landscapes, of festive adornments, of decked halls and global joy and spiritual peace, of delighted children everywhere and ...

... of bemused elders beholding the one Christmas-devoted and Christmas-defending cable network as it debates, during primetime, whether or not "cocksucking faggot" is a homophobic slur.

Gather 'round, precious children. Gather, my innocents, and be witness to a Fox News Christmas, a rather hellish concoction of haters, harpies and hypocrites who morbidly war on Christmas like no holiday humanist ever dreamed of. 

 

Yes there is something worse

This comes from the New York Post, so ... but, at any rate:

[NBC News chief Deborah] Turness has been trying to figure out the future for David Gregory’s “Meet the Press,” with options including bringing in MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski for a Sunday show, or blowing up the entire franchise and trying something completely different.

Well I'll be damned. So there is a hosting choice actually worse than David Gregory. And NBC News' top executive is considering it. I don't can't watch "Morning Joe," for my blood pressure is normal and I very much need to keep my matutinal prostate pill down; yet the sight of, nay, even the idea of watching Mika gaze adoringly for, what, two hours or three hours? at that pompous panhandler of a 10-cent political philosopher puts both of my somatic necessities at risk.

As for "blowing up the entire franchise," that seems somewhat redundant, given Gregory's presence.

 

I can't see the difference

Sam Youngman, a former Hill reporter who splashily departed the Beltway's sewers to find self-reflected virtue in Lexington, Ky.--or, as Jonathan Chait described Youngman's self-promotional metamorphosis, "[from] his descent into a state of moral turpitude ... [he] has become a morally superior human being"--reports from said virtuous bluegrassroots that Sen. Rand Paul's allies in the state legislature are laboring to change the state's horribly unvirtuous law that prohibits said U.S. senator from pursuing reelection as senator while pursuing the presidency as well, although, or so Youngman further reports, Paul's state political allies have said they have chatted with Paul about the proposed statutory change "only in passing" (emphasis mine).

Yeah I know, that's a really long opening sentence. But I couldn't imagine consuming more than one sentence to convey to Mr. Youngman this simplest of truisms: If he's actually searching for virtue, he's in the wrong racket, whether it's national, state, or local.