PMC Commentary

Can we ever get Huckabee beyond sermons?

Mike Huckabee was at it again last night, telling the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference that "Somebody's got to be willing to take on the institutions [read: the Supreme Court] that challenge and threaten our ability to believe as we believe, because when religious liberty is lost, all liberty is lost."

In Huckabee's demagogic formulations, Ted Cruz has a real competitor. Never has Huckabee even remotely explained how the constitutionality of same-sex marriage either challenges or threatens his ability to believe as he believes, or how it in any way offends or assaults the principle of religious liberty. Never. Not once. Yet he thumps his Scripture and rattles his tambourine and frightens the bejesus out of childlike audiences who seem incapable of understanding that betwixt A and C there must be a connecting B.

It has been observed many times, by many others, that same-sex marriage merely enhances the concept of, duh, marriage. Yet I wouldn't argue or emphasize that point with Huckabee, for he would only respond with formulaic, preprogrammed mumbo-jumbo about one man and one woman as the only sanctified union. And I've no problem with that, if that's what Huckabee really believes, which he obviously does, and of course has every right to believe. He might not have noticed, but religious liberty in America is alive and well, as he himself demonstrates daily with all his thumping and rattling and religious demagoguing.

The point I would love to take up with him, however, is why his religious beliefs in this secular society should trump the civil law of the U.S. Constitution. That no one religion should eclipse the rights and free beliefs of other religions is a principle I am reasonably sure Huckabee would agree with. Why, then, under a federal constitution that makes no reference (except for its "in the Year our Lord" dating) to a Christian God — let alone a Baptist, Methodist or Pentecostal one — should his religious beliefs be allowed to trump secular law? To reverse the question, why does Huckabee presume public law to be inherently inferior to his private religion?

Indeed this was the very reason the founders omitted anyone's God from the federal republic's founding words: permit any religion a superiority among equals, or any privileged status in governance, and either a theocracy or chaos will most assuredly ensue. In an honest, Socratic conversation, it wouldn't take long to lead Huckabee into agreement with the founders, whose wisdom he seems to presently deplore.

 

Another lost hour with corporate America

I just spent an agonizing hour on the phone with Verizon Wireless, which, at the end of the call, thanked me for being "a loyal Verizon Wireless customer." The purpose of my call? To cancel — by paying an early termination charge — the very last, excruciatingly costly and painful vestige of Verizon's services. The irreconcilability of its saccharine thanks and my fragrantly disloyal cancellation was only the final example of two ghastly years of Verizon's corporate incomprehensibility, which began, I should note, with Verizon's two-year inability to even recognize the cell number — its assigned number — of my daughter's phone.

The next time some right-wing free-market apologist croons to me about the delightful efficiencies of corporate America and the gross inefficiencies and detestability of big guvment, I shall reflect on, and promptly vomit, my recent experience with Verizon. And Mediacom (which took at least eight months to identify and fix a faulty cable line that regularly cut into my cable service, for which I was often expected to pay full boat). And assorted other corporate run-ins and sloppy services and deficient products and inexcusable fuckups that by now have racked up into the countlessly unmemorable.

We are often assured by many of these distinguished apologists that nothing beats the glories of private enterprise. It's of no little coincidence that many of them work for, are paid by, and receive the associated benefits of, the detestable federal guvment. They know better, I suspect, and they ain't about to leave a good thing.

 

Huh?

I'm trying to square Politico's headline — "Baltimore braces for results of Freddie Gray inquiry" — with its penultimate paragraph:

City officials, religious leaders and the Gray family’s lawyer have stressed … that the public should not expect to know any more details about what happened on Friday. There are fears that any revelations could spark new unrest.

In the reported absence of any "results" tomorrow, what is it that Baltimore is bracing for? What am I missing here?

 

If this is any sign of Cruz's debating skills …

A moment after posting my preceding piece on Ted Cruz's fanciful talk yesterday at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, I unmuted CNN, and there sat Dana Bash, who had attended the talk. She was practically chortling at Cruz's "lack of specifics" in his accusations of Obama's program of racial divisiveness, and in a near state of unqualified wonder at Cruz's instant diversion back to Obama when she asked him what he would do about Baltimore.

In brief, Bash stripped Cruz's appearance of its intended depth; she exposed it for what it was — an immensely shallow and indeed utterly absurd assault on the president's imaginary political malpractice.

I mention this news segment not because Dana Bash was on to something of which we were unaware, but because she was only highlighting the monumentally conspicuous: that Ted Cruz is a consummate blowhard whose reputation for mordant debating skills is without merit.

Artful debaters provide, you know, facts, evidence, some sort of support for their arguments. Sen. Cruz, on the other hand, is a timeshare salesman; he struts and bluffs and weaves tall tales, all of which can be easily refuted and simply exposed — on the spot. So easily and so simply, I'll predict that the upcoming GOP presidential debates will act as a negative on his campaign. Even a Jeb Bush could blow him out of the water, and leave him dripping in humiliation.

 

The politics of disunity

"I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Hispanic panhandler," said Ted Cruz to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce yesterday. "And the reason is, in our community it would be shameful to be begging on the street." I guess stages don't count. (Neither does implied, ethnic superiority.)

Nor, to our Princeton debater, does even the faintest of scrupulous arguments. "President Obama … could have chosen to be a leader on race relations and bring us together," continued Cruz. "And he hasn’t done that, he’s made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions that have divided us rather than bringing us together." Against Obama's well-known Howard Bealean rants and infamous ethnic favoritisms, Cruz, as president, would instead opt for the Priebusian charade of softer "tone and language and rhetoric," he said. He would also strive to "appeal to our shared values" — a strategy, once again, wholly rejected by Obama's divisive playbook, according to Cruz.

And then there's the real world, the world in which Obama once intoned "that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."

That's from presidential candidate Obama's historic Philadelphia race speech, whose cardinal theme of national unity he has, as president, repeated time and again. But his speech, we should never forget, was also contemplatively historical and forbiddingly proleptic:

Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism….

We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

And nothing has. Why? Largely because, as sociologists and anthropologists tell us, our racial disunity is "structural." But also because the party of Lincoln has chosen to squeeze every last white vote from its monitory rhetoric about the shiftless takers among us, the welfare whores, the terror of affirmative action, black crime, political correctness, reverse racism, and any other distraction it can think of. The GOP has no actual political program, but it does have racial disunity going for it — and the party exploits it for all it is worth.

In fact, "we [need not] speculate on whether white men will all flock to [whatever Republican] in the general election regardless of his policies." That, gentle reader, is a given. 

 

Two GOP presidential wannabes threaten the Supreme Court

An absolutely astonishing letter to the Supreme Court from, among others, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham:

We stand together in defense of marriage and the family and society founded upon them….

Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they manufacture a right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage….

As citizens united together, we will not stand by while the destruction of the institution of marriage unfolds in this nation we love….

Experience and history have shown us that if the government redefines marriage to grant a legal equivalency to same-sex couples, that same government will then enforce such an action with the police power of the State…. We cannot and will not allow this to occur on our watch….

We will view any decision by the Supreme Court or any court the same way history views the Dred Scott and Buck v. Bell decisions. Our highest respect for the rule of law requires that we not respect an unjust law that directly conflicts with higher law…. We respectfully warn the Supreme Court not to cross this line….

The Supreme Court was wrong when it denied Dred Scott his rights and said, "blacks are inferior human beings." And the Court was wrong when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell, "three generations of imbeciles are enough."

What the Dred Scott case has to do with marriage equality escapes me — the former involved the denial of human rights; the latter, the conferment of rights — and even the signatories make no real attempt to tie the two together. But in citing Buck v. Bell of 1927, they at least got that last part mostly right. Six generations of imbeciles are enough.

 

Bubbles, Part II

Adding to the post below, there's this, from the NYT's Nick Corasaniti:

With the presidential race heating up, a torrent of politically charged commentary has flooded Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, with some users deploying their "unfollow" buttons like a television remote to silence distasteful political views. Coupled with the algorithm now powering Facebook’s news feed, the unfollowing is creating a more homogenized political experience of like-minded users, resulting in the kind of polarization more often associated with MSNBC or Fox News. And it may ultimately deflate a central promise of the Internet: Instead of offering people a diverse marketplace of challenging ideas, the web is becoming just another self-perpetuating echo chamber.

 

We're somewhat familiar with what we already agree upon

This post's title is the cleanest synopsis of Journalism.org's findings that I could think of.

According to its parent organization, Pew Research, "At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers" — suggesting, at best, only cursory readings of important news stories. It's hard to get deep in the weeds on an iPhone, while on the move and between other distractions.

Perhaps just as disturbing, "Some of [Pew's] 2014 research revealed that nearly half of Web-using adults report getting news about politics and government in the past week on Facebook alone, a platform where influence is driven to a strong degree by friends and algorithms." One of today's more important stories is that of political polarization and intransigent tribalism, which is scarcely surprising, since we're augmenting both sociopolitical trends in our miscellaneous bubbles.

Consider yourself a freak if you read the conservative press; and indeed, I'd wager that most of you are freaks, since the political literacy among readers of this site seems abnormally high. Emphasis on "abnormally," and my sincere thanks. If nearly half of the (other) politically interested are receiving all their political news and information from the likeminded coziness of Facebook friends, and the other rough half are scanning only headlines and maybe ledes between donuts and stoplights, then the American electorate's level of politically sophisticated thought lies somewhere above utter ignorance but well below actual usefulness.

It worries me almost as much as the extreme obscenity of modern political finance — which exploits "it."

 

When protectionism was honest

National Journal has put up some memorable presidential campaign posters. I like the bluntness of this one (from another — and nearly forgotten — political dynasty, the Harrisons): 

Second among my favorites is this. "Civilization" is a nice touch.

Notice that Gov. McKinley is atop gold, which, along with tariffs, was the issue of the day. The gold coin represented opposition to the silverite ravings of William Jennings Bryan, about whom Mencken observed: "If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum." Also notice who's hefting the coin: the industrial working class, the monied class, and middle-class shopkeepers. Quite a coalition. At any rate, the one in the middle flooded McKinley's campaign with cash — which is why, to this day, McKinley's political operation is Karl Rove's favorite.    

 

Bernie Sanders' announcement, and my tweaks

That Hillary's first official Democratic challenger is not a Democrat says something about the farcical nature of this Democratic presidential primary season, but at least it is, finally, something said. On the downside for Sanders, he is a trifle behind Clinton in polling, lagging by 57 points. On the upside, he's a staggering 250% ahead of both O'Malley and Webb. (I'm practicing my statistical flimflammery. 'Tis the season, as noted.)

Another upside for Sanders is that he can demagogue the proposed Asian-Pacific trade agreement with the furious abandon of a Have-you-stopped-beating-your-husband? argument, and indeed he's wasting no time. At an anti-TPP rally last week, the Vermont senator howled that "[Hillary is] going to have to be clear…. Are you on the side of working people who would suffer as a result of this disastrous trade agreement, and seeing their jobs go to China or Mexico, or are you on the side of corporate America?"

In my opinion, Sanders diluted his argumentum ad populum by needlessly adding that Hillary's choice is "not a very difficult" one. I myself would let the sonorous question hang, so that the rallying throng could ponder the exquisite nuance of it all and thus arrive at the virtuous answer on their own. Adventures in demagogic discovery, that sort of thing. But I confess I'm terribly old school about these things; woe to the pol who succumbs to Obama's affliction of giving the electorate credit and the freedom to think for itself.

Cynicism and sarcasm aside, how would I as a democratic socialist approach a Democratic presidential campaign? I'd start by putting immediate issues such as the TPP on my very own Obamian "Fucket It" list, openly conceding that today there is a global abundance of change that cannot be stopped. But tomorrow, at home, is another matter. I'd fold the race issue into a class issue, where, as every good socialist knows, it properly belongs; I'd argue wealth redistribution through an aggressively progressive tax structure; I'd hustle single-payer as the evolutionary successor to the ACA; and I'd pound, emphasize and stress that a first-rate education for all our children — paid for by equitable redistribution — is the only possible road to actual equal opportunity in this global life, and thus America's keenest salvation.

I mean, what the hell. I know I'd lose anyway, so why not tell some larger truths?

 

A final thought on escaping platitudes

Back, as an afterthought, to the assorted reflections of Ta-Nehisi Coates …

I am of the instinctive as well as anthropological opinion that I am a racist, just as Coates is a racist. We are are both but the latest links in a short chain of humanity that only recently crawled out of the muck and from its caves, which is to say, we're tribal to the core. In this formulation of my opinion, there is no value judgment implied. We are racists in that we are the natural products of a not unreasonably wary species that sees "others" — those outside the tribe — as a potential peril; as fellow savages who may very well be hellbent on grabbing our turf, stealing our women and enslaving our children. As NYU professor of philosophy and law Kwame Anthony Appiah put it in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs (and whose essay is, for some reason, unavailable online, otherwise I'd link to it):

Essentialism — the idea that human groups have core properties in common that explain not just their shared superficial appearances but also the deep tendencies of their moral and cultural lives — [is] not new. In fact, it is nearly universal, because the inclination to suppose that people who look alike have deep properties in common is built into human cognition, appearing early in life without much prompting [emphasis mine]…. It can be found as far back as Herodotus' Histories or the Hebrew Bible, which portrayed Ethiopians, Persians, and scores of other peoples as fundamentally other.

Thus the human condition — by now, the human scourge — of racism is a hard-wired one; it's an evolutionary holdover that will be a long time atrophying. Lord knows that our racial demagogues foolishly feed it, but recognizing that a certain and indeed innocent degree of racism is, like the appendix, only natural, rather helps to cope with it, or so it seems to me. Posters of protest that demand we "End Racism Now!" strike me as well meaning, of course, but also naïve. They demand that we suppress our primitive urges in toto, even though those very urges are what make us human.

Perhaps I'm too clinical, or even dangerously dismissive. But in Mr. Coates, I find excessive moralizing — and that, to my mind, is the worse intellectual sin. As a species we are what we are, and in some instances what we are cannot be changed — not overnight. Thundering sermons, personal superiority lectures and morality tales don't help. Not to my mind. But I also admit I find talk of social "morality" rather offputting; I lean toward Eastern philosophies of personal ethics instead. So there's that, too, and maybe that's what really gripes me about Mr. Coates.

 

Rand Paul is better when he's needling

The pinwheels of McCain-Graham's eyes are, doubtless, enlarging and spinning with unprecedented fury:

Speaking at the headquarters of the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools, [Rand] Paul was unambiguous in arguing that Tehran had only become more powerful since the fall of Mr. Hussein, who he said had been a "bulwark" against Iran’s influence in the region. "It was a mistake to topple Hussein," the senator said.

And he called the 2011 overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi — which he labeled "Hillary’s war," referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state at the time — an "utter disaster."

Said a talk-show Republican who was there: "Telling this audience that the Middle East was better off with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi in power shocked me. It was a rambling and incoherent expression of foreign policy that puts him closer to Bernie Sanders than anyone in the G.O.P."

I'm a trifle unclear on how realist Paul's straightforward assessment of the Middle East's post-Saddam wreckage "was a rambling and incoherent expression of foreign policy," but then again I dwell not in the neoconservative world of fantasy qua logic.

As for Paul's presidential politics, the Republican game talk show host may have a point. The senator is having some trouble landing on a consistent, coherent approach to his campaign's message; one day he's talking noninterventionist common sense, and the next day he's appeasing the hawks — or rather trying to — by "completing an about-face on a longstanding pledge to curb the growth in defense spending." On foreign policy, Paul's campaign began idealistically, and it will either finish that way, or it will finish in shambles.

 

Capitalism lectures a very confused pope

Odd, it seems, that when Pope Francis extols a fundamental Judeo-Christian sentiment — in this instance, that we might want to think twice or thrice about pooping in our own nests, befouling Mother Earth, and in general defiling God's little blue-and-green planet — right wingers, who are forever urging us to return to theological truths, dump all over him and portray his Christian convictions as just so much hocus-pocus:

As Francis prepares to deliver what is likely to be a highly influential encyclical this summer on environmental degradation and the effects of human-caused climate change on the poor, he is alarming some conservatives in the United States who are loath to see the Catholic Church reposition itself as a mighty voice in a cause they do not believe in….

Maureen Mullarkey, a painter and writer, said in the conservative journal First Things that "Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda."

And God bless 'em, the Koch brothers, speaking through their climatologically hostile and theologically clueless Heartland Institute, believe "The Holy Father is being misled by 'experts' at the United Nations," and "Though [his] heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate."

The Koch brothers, with a camel so overloaded it can't even crawl to the bloody needle, are now lecturing perhaps the finest human example of Christian virtue on "moral authority." But of course this is nothing new, and therefore nothing particularly odd, I suppose. Just read Max Weber.

 

Baltimore begs an answer, not evasions and platitudes

Ta-Nehisi Coates' conclusion begins with a dubious evasion itself: "When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself."

Is this why nonviolence was exhorted last night by community leaders, politicians and city officials? To "evade" the repercussions of political brutality? Or did they preach nonviolence because the damage being done was to the city's victims of mob violence?

Coates continues: "When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse."

But who, precisely, was "the aggressor"? Was it, as Coates suggests, "the Baltimore police, and the society that superintends them?" That's one helluva huge swath; so immense, it renders the aggressor utterly unidentifiable. Like those who will condemn the riots out of racial animus, Coates seeks refuge in an empty generalization. This explains nothing, answers nothing, offers nothing.

He goes on: "When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con."

The "politicians" Coates saw "calling for young people in Baltimore to remain peaceful and 'nonviolent,'" were they somehow "conning" the young when they reprehended the arsonist destruction of "a large senior center under construction," or stores being looted at innocents' expense, or city property being "set ablaze"; when they censured the "heaps of violence" that a few citizens were inflicting on all others? When citizen "Joe Lewis, 41, of Cherry Hill, said he and his brother tried to stop the rioters and urged them to move on," was he joining "The Man" in his official con?

Coates ends: "None of this can mean that rioting or violence is 'correct' or 'wise,' any more than a forest fire can be 'correct' or 'wise.' Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves."

Riotous mobs and irresponsible hordes, then, are as blameless and lacking in human agency as forest fires? Is Coates himself "wise" in thus dehumanizing group behavior — especially when one could just as conveniently excuse other group behaviors? — say, that of large, bureaucratic organizations such as urban police departments? And if wisdom isn't the point, and disrespect is — a disrespect that merely exacerbates "hollow law and failed order" — then God help us. Wisdom should always be cardinal; indeed, it might have informed the rioters that their disrespect, as rolled out last night, would translate into only self-destruction.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has an excellent mind. I wish he'd use it by transcending the platitudes and easy evasions of textbook sociology, for they have gotten us nowhere.

 

Baltimore

Watching the live coverage of West Baltimore's lawlessness, violence, looting, stone-throwing and general chaos, about all I can think of is the smile on Rush Limbaugh's face. This is perfect for the haters — on both sides. It accomplishes nothing but greater social divisions; it dishonors the memory of, and family of, Freddie Gray on the day of his funeral; it wounds the innocent and reinforces stupid prejudices; it's a minority disgrace that the vast majority of the minority in no way condones — and yet tomorrow, the Limbaughs of America, possessed by their aggravated cases of borderline personality disorder, will report on it in black and white terms: "There they — the blacks — go again." And no doubt Obama egged them on, right?