PMC Commentary

Chait comes around

Friday, in relation to the serial debate between Jonathan Chait and Ta-Nehisi Coates on race and the "culture of poverty," I criticized them both for neglecting "class as the fundamental struggle in American society."

The United States [I wrote] is indeed a "kleptocracy" [Coates' term]--albeit one with a happy-face--but hardly "in regards to black people" alone. There are poor but "responsible" whites and browns, just as there are "upstanding" middle-class whites and browns; nonetheless their share of the nation's bounty continues to stagnate at best, as the plutocracy walks away with the mother lode....

It's not just or even principally a black problem. It's a problem of class, which both Coates and Chait, rather astonishingly, ignore.

Kudos to Chait for self-correcting. Today, in a follow-up to Coates' increasingly hostile replies, he writes:

[L]et me explain what I do think. The culture of poverty is not solely or even primarily a black problem. It is a problem arising from concentrated poverty, and--as a result of both historic and ongoing racism--concentrated poverty disproportionately afflicts African-American communities.

Class, more than race. Chait sees that. So far, Coates does not, nor do I expect him to.

 

Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower is ...

fucking right.

 

A sickening report: Torture, the Senate, and Bush-Cheney

From the Associated Press:

A hotly disputed Senate torture report concludes that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to congressional aides and outside experts familiar with the investigation.

The "hot dispute," needless to say, comes from U.S. war criminals, whose testimonials are as honorable and valid as any Nuremberg suspect's.

That this nation's in pain is no secret. On the face of things, a sclerotic economy, high and chronically long unemployment, and an utterly dysfunctional capital city explain much of the hurt. But if a collective psyche there be, in Jungian terms, then I can't help but believe the ineradicable stain of the Bush administration's torture program simmers like a poison in the national mind--eating away at us, notwithstanding our past, pragmatic endorsements of whatever it takes to get the bad guys.

If we as Americans ever did possess a genuine "exceptionalism," then unquestionably one its key elements was our refusal of officially sanctioned barbarity in war. That's not to say America's fighting men and intelligence services never committed barbarous acts before the malignantly adventitious rise of Bush-Cheney; warfare is synonymous with blind and ignorant cruelty, and the "secret" histories of America's wars are no different. But never in this republic's history was torture officially blessed, for want of a better--or more accurate--term.  

Historians, poets, novelists and filmmakers have for some time been on a quest to discover the precise and defining event in which America lost its "innocence," which, I think we'd all agree, pretty much everyone agrees we have indeed lost. From the Civil War's self-annihilation to the Spanish-American War's brutal imperial launch and even to Robert Redford's exploration of our 1950s' Quiz Show corruption, many a chronological candidate has been advanced. Maybe much of our innocence simply drained away over the centuries, making pinpointing the loss impossible.

Still, if I had to identify any one, exact moment when the United States joined the global community's unexceptional banalities of evil, that moment would be when Bush-Cheney hatched the torture of war prisoners and detainees as official U.S. policy.

Given the broad absence of public disapprobation of Bush-Cheney's doings, that was a plunge into history's inferno that we'll never entirely live down.

 

Ouch

Last Wednesday, Ronan Farrow's one-month-old daytime show on MSNBC "was 708th among all programming ranked by Nielsen, in both total viewers and the 18-to-49 age group advertisers covet. The midnight airing of 'Baggage' on the Game Show Network came in ahead of it, at No. 707."

 

Your morning cup of gloom

The Monkey Cage goes Nate Silver one better--actually, 20 percent better--with this "preliminary estimate: The GOP could have as much as a 4 in 5 chance of controlling the chamber."

The boldface is original, designed to either boost already boosted GOP spirits or increase Democratic emigration. Don't know which.

As is customary, the Monkey Cage's forecast is heavily caveat-laden (its findings are "preliminary", they're only the analysts' "initial sense," and their sense is "as of today") in a futile attempt to ward off all the destined and really insightful criticism that forecasts are merely forecasts based on contemporary information--and things could change! John Sides, who summarizes the Cage's crunching, tries to get ahead of such insight:

Democrats need 50 seats to control a majority, given Vice President Biden’s tie-breaking vote. This occurs in only 18 percent of simulations. It is most likely that Democrats will control 46 to 49 seats. Indeed, in nearly one-third of simulations, Democrats control 48 or 49 seats, suggesting that if future events break in their favor--for example, President Obama becomes more popular--their chances of controlling a narrow majority could improve.

It should be obvious by now to anyone paying even scant attention to this rolling catastrophe of the midterms that the hitherto Democratic strategy of defense--swathed mostly in ACA happy talk--is the rolling catastrophe. For them, being upbeat is a downer, since quite frankly their optimism in the face of such towering doom just looks goofy.

I don't know what it will take for Democrats and President Obama to shake their despair-cum-false-optimism and recloak themselves in some righteous rage. Perhaps it will never come; maybe it takes more than what the Dems have to give. I don't know. But I do know--and this is of course preliminary, it's only my initial sense, as of today (and yesterday, and the day before, and ...)--that playing defense will be a monstrous loser.

 

Pleading ignorance: a right-wing tradition

The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, in the words of the NY Times, that ...

ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct ... [while] oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants, which is killing some creatures or stunting their growth ... [as o]rganic matter frozen in Arctic soils since before civilization began is now melting, allowing it to decay into greenhouse gases that will cause further warming.

And the worst is yet to come ...

[risking] death or injury on a widespread scale, probable damage to public health, displacement of people and potential mass migrations.

But then there's global-warming denialism, topped only by denial of global-warming denialism: "Now we are at the point where there is so much information, so much evidence, that we can no longer plead ignorance,” said the World Meteorological Organization's secretary general, who has quite obviously never encountered James Inhofe & Associates.

 

A Finnito idea

The International Business Times has an overblown story on a "close ex-adviser" to Vladimir Putin who says the Russian president "ultimately wants to reclaim Finland for Russia" (although the adviser concedes that "Finland is not Putin's primary concern at present," which is what inflates the story to mere sensationalism).

Even if true, Putin might want to rethink this amorphous strategic objective in light of Joe Stalin's bracing introduction to Finnish resolve. Man for man, ain't nobody tougher than Finns; they're the globe's badass honey badgers of guerrilla warfare and dug-in resistance. In one Soviet offensive during the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-1940, 4,000 Russkies went up against 32 Finns. Four Finns survived, after killing 400 Russians.

Of course Russian efficiency was also on display. In one of that winter's campaigns, a wholly ski-less Red Army division received instruction manuals on ... ski tactics.   

Before it was all over, the Soviets had lost upward of a quarter-million men; the Finns, less than 50,000. Stalin settled for only 10 percent of Finnish territory.

   

A Divergent Disaster

Under threat of patricide, I took my daughter to see Divergent this afternoon (because Tobias, the film's male protagonist, is irresistibly hot, I was instructed). If you're a regular reader you may recall my, uh, dismay, let us say, at the abomination of 2012's Hunger Games. Well, I learned something today that expands Einstein's relativity theory from cosmology to the field of aesthetics:

Hunger Games was another Citizen Kane relative to the cinematic atrocity of Divergent--all two hours and 20 agonizing minutes of it. (It may have lasted three hours, or perhaps four, and maybe even five. I'm not sure. I mercifully slipped in and out of consciousness in rather short order.)

The film, I'll call it, opens as a post-apocalyptic dystopia. From there, things get bleak, and then even bleaker. We feared not, however, since the female protagonist is even pluckier and hotter than Tobias, and--spoiler alert!--triumphs in the end, which occurred at some inexorable point during my deepening coma and partial paralysis.  

The story's "narrative" is contradictory, but one isn't likely to notice that much, or much care, since its incoherence compensates for what it lacks in consistency. My supreme objection, however, is that its heroes are plainly heroes and its villains are clearly villains and all this black-and-white simplicity is commercially impressed on young minds as great storytelling. The ambiguities, the uncertainties, the complex and quite complicated humanness of authentically great literature and equally great moviemaking is expunged; Hollywood prefers not to tax any young minds.

Contra film executives, I have confidence in the ability of youth to appreciate complexity and recognize it for what it is--real life. Now if only youth could see some of it on a big screen.

  

Charles Dickens' everlasting decree on "satirising" religion

Ross Douthat has another in his velvety series on religion good, secularism bad. Such is his enduring theme, crudely stated. But I'll give him credit. He's smooth. Seldom does Douthat come right out and declare that only the church-attending faithful are rewarded with "health and happiness [and] upward mobility," which today, for instance, he merely suggests is a "correlation."

What of the "most religious areas of the country--the Bible Belt, the deepest South," those devout regions that "struggle mightily with poverty, poor health, political corruption and social disarray"? Ah, the "social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation," observes Douthat (emphasis mine), and "not from affiliation or nominal belief." He offers no statistics on the Bible Belt's "religious participation" (church attendance, one presumes) versus less pious domains; he instead quickly scoots off to "America's 'Christian penumbra'"--"where practice ceases or diminishes ... [and] the remaining residue of religion can be socially damaging."

Thus these two environs are hopelessly intermingled by Douthat, though piety still gets credit for social stability while apostasy receives the debits. Pretty slick.

Charles Dickens, in his preface to the 1857 edition of the stunningly brilliant Pickwick Papers (his first novel), penned a far superior figuration. He marveled at those "who do not perceive the difference ... between religion and the cant of religion, a humble reverence for the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and offensive obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit." Dickens' target: the thumpers--who in England, as in the United States, were particularly obtrusive when he wrote his serialized, religiously satirizing novel in 1836.

[I]t is never out of season to protest against that coarse familiarity with the sacred things which is busy on the lip, and idle in the heart; or against the confounding of Christianity with any class of persons who, in the words of Swift, have just enough religion to make them hate, and not enough to make them love, one another. 

Yes, Mr. Douthat, just look at that other "correlation": "the Bible Belt, the deepest South" and the vile, hateful, uncharitable politicians who spring from it--elected by those who "have just enough religion to make them hate, and not enough to make them love."

I was chatting the other day with a Protestant pastor about my agnosticism--a near perfect 50-50 split between denial and belief in the utterly unknowable--and I think I rather surprised him when I revealed that were I ever to attend a church, it would be The Church, because of Francis, and almost solely for the same secular reasons that Francis has stressed of late. My one insurmountable restraint, I continued, is that I definitely disbelieve in the divinity (but only the divinity) of the world's greatest radical, Jesus, and I refuse to sit hypocritically in a church singularly founded on that very divinity.   

I wish Francis would find me a loophole. Till then, I'm a Dickensian.

 

Dear Vladimir: Das ist inkorrekt

Is Valdimir Putin's Russia so poor that it can't afford a competent English grammarian for even very brief press releases?

Vladimir Putin drew Barack Obama's attention to continued rampage of extremists ...

and,

Vladimir Putin also pointed out that Transnistria is essentially experiencing a blockade, which significantly complicate the living conditions for the region's residents.

Vhile reading, one vants to do so aloud with such guttural, definite-article-less punctuation, after vhich subyect and werb are in diagreement.

Vladimir isn't alone, though. President Kennedy, you'll recall, declared "Ich bin ein Berliner," which rendered him a jam-filled donut of sorts, rather than "Ich bin Berliner," which, with classic Teutonic efficiency, dispatches the English article "a." 

Both sides are heavily nuclear armed. I find this one of those things that really does call for attention to detail. 

(Belated editor's note: That was satire.)

 

Nate Silver: "We're listening and learning"

The fierce and rapid unraveling of FiveThirtyEight's reputation at Nate Silver's new nest will (non-statistically speaking) probably turn out to be a wildly propitious consequence of unintent. All the incoming fire has, I'm sure, boosted Silver's embryonic readership beyond his most extravagant estimations; but more than that, Silver is inching close to publicly conceding error--a generally unthinkable act in the universe of infallible opinion journalism, even the data-driven kind--which improves (non-statistically speaking) the likelihood of his getting things right, or at least more right, the next time.

In short, Silver is learning. To wit, "[W]e see value in running a rebuttal to Roger [Pielke's] article.... We appreciate your patience.... [W]e want to get this right.... We’re listening and learning."

In what seems like a flanking maneuver to heave Pielke overboard (and thus, as you can see, provide me the opportunity to flagrantly mix metaphors), FiveThirtyEight contacted HuffPost's Michael Calderone to offer "an apology for what they characterized as unacceptable behavior by Pielke," who had sent a vaguely "threatening" email to a climate scientist critical of Pielke's work. Further, Silver has transcended his earlier sarcasm against criticism of FiveThirtyEight's stumbles; he now promises to balance his site's climate-science record with a rebuttal from, well, somebody who doesn't play selective games with statistics.

Pre-rebuttal in FiveThirtyEight, Silver graciously links to climate scientists John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli. Abraham is stern--"[Pielke's] inexact phrases, extensions of his own work beyond their application, and inclusion of non-weather-related disasters are some of the reasons his conclusions are not taken seriously by myself and other climate scientists"--but Nuccitelli is devastating:

Pielke isn't criticized because of a lack of "purity," he's criticized because he consistently provides a skewed representation of the body of peer-reviewed science.... On FiveThirtyEight he's done even worse, making a number of false claims, including about his own research. That's why those who care about accurately representing the scientific literature criticize Pielke, and why people are concerned about the direction in which FiveThirtyEight is moving. Looking for counter-intuitive results in the data doesn't work well in areas like climate science, where the experts have already done a better and more thorough job of analyzing the data.

There's an important lesson for FiveThirtyEight to learn here--sometimes conclusions are counter-intuitive because they're wrong.

It seems Silver "gets" that, which means he is learning.

 

Chait, Coates, and the pink elephant

Jonathan Chait and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been hammering each other in a fascinating series of posts and ripostes over American blackness and its "culture of poverty," which Andrew Sullivan has helpfully collected here. There's no need to recap all their arguments, since you can read their posts yourself, but I will synopsize them as briefly as I can. Chait:

We have several points of disagreement, the most important of which is that Coates now maintains that there is no such thing as a culture of poverty. [And] Coates initially made the provocative claim that Barack Obama’s views about the relationship between culture and poverty are not only wrong but essentially identical to those of Paul Ryan. In his follow-up, he concedes that they are not identical, but maintains nonetheless that they are wrong.

Coates:

In regards to black people, America's heritage is kleptocracy.... There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself.

I can agree with both Chait and Coates, notwithstanding their disagreements, which may seem like a contradiction but is, rather, a synthesis of sorts--because both Chait and Coates neglect class as the fundamental struggle in American society. 

The United States is indeed a "kleptocracy"--albeit one with a happy-face--but hardly "in regards to black people" alone. There are poor but "responsible" whites and browns, just as there are "upstanding" middle-class whites and browns; nonetheless their share of the nation's bounty continues to stagnate at best, as the plutocracy walks away with the mother lode. And because the plutocracy owns the U.S. Congress as well as a fair number of state legislatures, I wouldn't look for a deluge of remedial redistributionism anytime soon.

Not to get too historically and analytically Marxist on you, but class has always dictated our national contours. Whence American racism? From wealthy plantationists who tired of the expense of white indentured servitude and the troubles wrought by unruly native Americans (the late Edmund Morgan was most brilliant on this), thus the "inherent inferiority" of the imported and darker skinned was invented. Reconstruction? In the end, plutocratic weariness of sociopolitical reform; time to move on with rapid industrialization and the concentration of wealth. Jim Crow? A political as much as a social movement, orchestrated, again, by wealthy whites desperate to split poor whites from even poorer blacks in the vote; and, once the latter's vote was negated altogether, to keep poor whites content in their impoverishment by convincing them of their inherent racial superiority.

The predominantly white upper class self-perpetuates through Ivy league networks just as "the ghetto"--I recall as a teenager helping my Hispanic friends hurl beer bottles at police cars attempting to patrol KC's West Side--is self-perpetuating in multicolored ignorance. At the secondary level the educational "system" is rigged through its chief funding mechanism: the property tax. Poor white schools and poor brown schools obey black schools' law of physics--absent proper upkeep, they deteriorate at the same rate.

Coates is right: "there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself." What he omits is that "itself" includes the same irresponsibility etc. for whites and browns and native Americans. It's not just or even principally a black problem. It's a problem of class, which both Coates and Chait, rather astonishingly, ignore.

 

The Fournier syndrome

Every time I read Ron Fournier I feel my IQ slipping, my reading comprehension fading, and my respect for non-peevish journalism soaring.

What a clown, what a petty, persnickety, sanctimonious clown. About Obama he's got a bug up his anal-retentive temperament the size of a Buick, which, merely as political prejudice, is perfectly understandable, since for instance my bug about W. was the size of a T-35 tank. But at least I always offered, I think, intelligible reasons for loathing George W. Bush. Fournier on President Obama? It's all something of a fog.

His latest seething is that Obama cares nothing about Vladimir Putin's "motivations"--of which Putin himself has made no secret whatsoever; he seeks a return to superpower greatness and Mother Russian glory--and furthermore Obama's "handling of leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, [and] China ... exposes a lack of empathy and sophistication." Fournier's implication: If only Obama understood the foreign soul as Fournier so obviously does, Iraqis would stop blowing up one another, Karzai would welcome a permanent occupation, Assad would take a long vacation on the Black Sea's beaches, China would just by God behave itself throughout the Pacific and of course Vladimir would drop to his knees and beg Western forgiveness.  

Hey, my reading of Fournier is as valid as Fournier's writing, since at no time does he tell us exactly what wonders Obamian "empathy" would globally unfold. (To wit, "In the case of Putin, knowing and caring about the Russian's point of view might not have prevented the Ukraine crisis, but it would have kept Obama a step ahead of it." So that Obama could do ... what? Fournier is silent on this.)

Jammed awkwardly into his musings on foreign policy, Fournier returns--he just can't help himself--to his old bugbear of Obama's lack of schmoozing (or something) Republicans. "[C]aring little about the motivation of his rivals seems to be a trait of Obama's leadership that has hurt him in Congress, where the opposition party is stubbornly opposed to his agenda. Rather than understanding why the GOP is moving rightward, helping its leadership tame party extremists (as he must do with the Left), and finding issues that help both sides claim victories, Obama surrendered to polarization and gridlock."

Leaves you a trifle speechless, doesn't it? If only Obama hadn't "surrendered" to the GOP's absolutely inextinguishable polarization and gridlock, if only he had understood why Republicans had gone fucking bananas, then somehow, somehow bipartisan harmony could have reigned.

I really must stop reading the Fourniers of this world. Their every column subtracts not only from the sum of opinionated decency, but from my already quite limited patience.

 

Mike Rogers self-slates heavenly absorption

I've read some awesome retirement announcements in my time, but that of Michigan's Mike Rogers--chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Sunday talk-show hobbyist, and diviner of proofless foreign conspiracies--is unquestionably the awesomest yet.

Rogers is moving on and up to the fluffy, remunerative frequencies of Cumulus talk radio, but he wants us to know that ... 

As I close this chapter ... I am not finished with the effort to bring back American 'exceptionalism.' Not in the sense of a great notion, but in the sense of impacting the hopes and dreams of a great nation and her people.

Wow, that's no retirement--it's a freaking metamorphosis, indeed a preternatural transcendence to the either Godly or unGodly work (depending on how Calvinistic one's spiritual views are) of demanding national grace from the heavenly powers that be.

This imminently former Republican congressman will take to the air and, in disembodied voice, labor Noah-like to "bring back" our sacred covenant of American exceptionalism. Such blessings have conventionally been thought to be granted through good and gentle works rather than aggressively grabbed, but it seems Rogers has discovered a shortcut, via a lucrative radio contract.

Whither exceptionalism went, no one knows. But for damn sure Rogers's congregation will know who took it, and our budding radio host will have only two years left to exploit some of that old-time, antediluvian self-righteousness.

How will Rogers restore our national consecration? Well, as he said in his semi-retirement announcement, he plans on "impacting" our hopes and dreams--not, mind you, "in the sense of a great notion, but in the sense" of impact.    

Anybody out there know just what in God's name that incoherent jambalaya means?  

 

A delightful twofer today

As Gov. Christie's pricey pettifogger was rambling on today about his million-dollar benefactor's innocence, I raced in wheezing anticipation to see how Fox News was covering this laughably meaningless story. I was not disappointed. There, in the lower third, was the Breaking News brief: "GOV CHRISTIE CLEARED OF ANY WRONGDOING."

Even better was the NY Times' coverage. The aforementioned pettifogger, reported the Times, revealed that "Mr. Wildstein and Ms. Kelly evidently had 'an ulterior motive' [for closing the GWB lanes], but the investigation could not determine what it was."

Indeed, had Gov. Christie handed me a million bucks to not determine mysterious motives in an empty investigation of no legal weight whatsoever, I suspect I would have been unofficially baffled, too.