bark, bugs, leaves, & lizards

Hello To All That

For a couple years in college I partnered with a friend and we wrote a political column for the school newspaper.  We were the designated liberals–I think we saw our beat as Noam Chomsky and American imperialism.  I distinctly recall editorial meetings when we would shout and point shaky fingers into the face of the conservative columnist.  On better days we would be more playful with the conservative guy, who had a penchant for speaking in cliches, and we would try to invent or mash-up cliches that we hoped would enter his cliche lexicon to later embarrass him (“Tony, I think you’ve got your mistress’ underwear in your closet on this one …”).

We helped to start a student political group that aimed to be a sort of an umbrella organization of the disparate liberal groups on campus.  We handed out condoms (taped to flyers that read, “Condoms not Contras”), protested against Nazis (Cue Blues Brothers: Elwood: Illinois Nazis. Jake: I hate Illinois Nazis), organized an April Fools Day Tribute to Ronald Reagan.  I tried to grow facial hair and scowled.  His girlfriend later became my girlfriend and we drifted apart, then drifted back to being good friends.  Over the years we’ve stayed in irregular contact.  I moved away from political writing, wanting to write something that had more of a shelf life (still working on that).  He went into union organizing.  We both got married and had children.  I moved to the South …

The political fixations we had back then all seem almost quaint now.

In a recent email, he asked,

Can you imagine if we could have magically brought ourselves forward to this point in time from our vantage point back in 1986?  What would we make of the shift in American politics?  And would we be hopeful, or terrified? (Remember when the idea of using American military in foreign countries was unthinkable? We were protesting proxy wars then.)

Ah, proxy wars.  Them was the days.

It’s often assumed a person grows more politically conservative as they grow older.  Personally,  that’s not the case.  Politically I’m pretty much the same, though I’m not quite as in-your-face about it as I once was.  And I like to think I’m wiser, that I have a longer view of things.  I’m less certain and see complexity where I once saw simplicity.  I find meaning in my family and in my writing and other creative endeavors, not in abstract political goings-on.  I’m happier, too.

But lately I’m feeling more and more angst about political matters.  This whole Cordoba House near ground zero controversy has really gotten to me.  But it’s not just that, it’s the whole array of bullshit “issues” the right wing keeps dreaming up.  Oh, how offended people are.  Sometimes it seems like we’re just a nation of outrage junkies.

Over the past year my brother (12 years older) has sent me a slew of ludicrous chain emails, everything from Obama isn’t American to all Muslims cannot be trusted.   Each time I have dutifully fact checked the nonsense (it doesn’t take long to cut and paste into Snopes.com).  All of my adult life I’ve been having these kinds arguments with my brother.  I’ve grown better at avoiding emotional investment in his nonsense, mostly because his political beliefs lack content and are really just feelings, but lately I’ve found myself thinking that I don’t want to have anything to do with him anymore.  And that’s sad.  Yet his home is our designated hurricane evacuation destination, so I suppose I’ll be seeing him sometime in the next month or two.  And that should be fun.  He’s also prone to saying stupid shit about New Orleans.

Could it be that things have actually gotten worse in the past 20-25 years?

I know the culture doesn’t move in a straight line.  There are always backlashes, fits and starts.  In 1986 I would have been shocked that gay marriage would ever seem inevitable.  In 1986 I would not have been shocked that I would someday marry an African American woman and have a child together, but to have a biracial president?  No freaking way would I have seen that one coming.

I think the right wing hyperbole we’re witnessing is essentially the last gasps of a white majority culture not coming to terms with the vast demographic changes our country faces.  Add to the mix the 9/11 attacks, a whacked economy, a brown president, a mid-term election, and here we are.

There’s one other change I didn’t see coming that I really like: Senator Al Franken.  Senator Al yesterday said the conservative attacks against the proposed Cordoba House are “one of the most disgraceful things that I’ve heard.”

Thanks, Al.  I needed that.

A Knife, It Feels Like I Like It

Shocking, I know, but I came across a nearly incoherent quote from Sarah Palin this morning at Politico:

“Nobody argues that that freedom of religion that the Muslims have to build that mosque somewhere,” Palin told Greta Van Susteren. For the mosque to be “so adamant about this exact location just a block or two away from 9/11, again, is that knife, it feels like.”

The first thing that caught my attention was her use of the word “that”–4 times in the first 16 words!  And the last bit, “again, is that knife, it feels like” has an echo of weird Yoda speak about it … let’s see, converting Palin’s sentiment (“Building a Muslim center near ground zero in New York City is like a knife to the heart.”) using a Yoda converter gives us:

Like a knife to the heart, building a Muslim center near ground zero in New York City is.  Yes, hmmm.

But let’s step beyond Palin’s tortured use of language.  She refers to the 9/11 attacks as “that knife.”  Here Palin is trying to scrape the national 9/11 scab, coax out the blood, in the guise of protecting us from the knife aimed at the 9/11 scab by a caricature of Muslims.  I get the feeling that for Palin personally, she couldn’t have been more delighted when she heard about the Muslim Center proposal.  She absolutely loves to nurture anger.  She gets off on it.  She’s an anger junkie.

I’m not breaking ground here by noting that Palin is the vengeful sort.   It’s even part of her self constructed identity.  She is, after all, a Mama Grizzly.

Now, not to get all East Coast about it, but it seems venting one’s anger only serves to sustain it.  Venting keeps the hurt alive.  And it feels good:

If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting.

It’s drug-like, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it.

The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove. Let it go from a boil to a simmer to a lukewarm state where you no longer want to sink your teeth into the side of buffalo.

[Psychologist Brad] Bushman’s work also debunks the idea of redirecting your anger into exercise or something similar. He says it will only maintain your state or increase your arousal level, and afterward you may be even more aggressive than if you had cooled off.

Still, cooling off is not the same thing as not dealing with your anger at all. Bushman suggests you delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity totally incompatible with aggression.

h/t Lifehacker

Parlor Games [Updated x2]

Rand Paul’s current controversy about whether or not he supports the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (he thinks private businesses should be able to discriminate based on race) is a good illustration of what I always find confounding about libertarianism.  It’s a vanity political philosophy and not much more.  Look no further than that idiot college professor in town who, after the federal levees breached, said New Orleans should not be given–or, rather, should not accept–any federal assistance in its recovery.  Or when he argued that libertarians should support a form of voluntary slavery (yeah, I don’t know how that works either) so that libertarianism is “more internally consistent.”  Likewise, Paul’s stance on the Civil Rights Act seems to be an attempt to be “internally consistent” as well.  Because, you know, an ideology’s abstract internal consistency matters far more than basic decency and justice.

All we have to do is check out how British Petroleum has handled the Macando oil gusher in the Gulf to see the divine effectiveness of private industry.  There’s your libertarian utopia.

Update: As I was saying … TPM:

Walter Block, a libertarian professor of economics at Loyola University, and a senior fellow with the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute, went further. “I think anyone who doesn’t believe that isn’t a libertarian,” he said, calling Paul’s comment “a very mainstream libertarianism.”

“I’m delighted that Rand Paul said that,” an enthusiastic Block added. “I think it’s magnificent. I didn’t realize that he was that good.”

“The spirit of non-discrimination,” said Block “ends you right up in compulsory bisexuality.”

Update 2: Gabriel Winant @ Salon:

It’s not just that he screwed up and said something stupid because he’s so committed to a purist fancy. No, it’s worse than that. Libertarianism itself is what’s stupid here, not just Paul. We should stop tip-toeing around this belief system like its adherents are the noble last remnants of a dying breed, still clinging to their ancient, proud ways.

Abe Lincoln, the Tax & Spender

Here’s a good illustration of why it’s important to get history right: some teabaggers think believe the War Between the States Civil War was really all about Big Government and “heavy taxation” and that slavery was just sort of incidentally “interwoven into the cause.”  This is, of course, total bullshit.

People know what they know and they often don’t want to be bothered with facts or historical context or really anything that might contradict what they’re certain they know.

Historical accuracy sucks, I know.

De-Jackassing–Or, Good Luck With That

TNC:

It’s possible that if the Tea Partiers cleaned up their ranks–purged the birthers, publicly rebuked people like this guy, banned Hitler signs, loudly rejected any instances of racism–that they simply wouldn’t have much of a movement left. Martin Luther King was trying to lead a black community that was demonstrably patriotic, and had, in the main, rejected political violence as a strategy. He could afford to be picky. In the case of the Tea Parties, it’s possible that once you subtract the jackasses, you just don’t have enough energy left.

Armageddon Schmarmageddon

When you’ve exhausted all of the bad names you can all a piece of legislation, and time’s running out, you’re about to be revealed as the ass you are when the legislation gets enacted into law and people, your very constituents, increasingly discover–beginning almost immediately, and spread over years–that you were just bullshitting with all those bad names you’ve been tossing around for 17 months, what’s your Hail Mary pass as time expires?  If you’re House Minority Leader John Boehner, you say:

… passage of the Democratic plan for health reform would constitute “Armageddon” that would “ruin our country.”

Step Away From The Bark [Updated]

To justify his probable ‘no’ vote on health care reform, Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao continues to insist the Senate bill doesn’t do enough to restrict funding for abortion.   It’s mostly a question of semantics, and Cao is acting like it’s not.  That’s infuriating enough.  But add to his justification this flimflam:

“Unless they change the abortion language in the Senate bill, I cannot, based on my conscience as a strong anti-abortion representative representing a district that is also strongly anti-abortion, I cannot support the Senate bill,” Cao said.

Strongly anti-abortion?  Is this district so strongly anti-abortion that it would vote against health care reform?

Hell no.

Update: National Catholic Reporter disagrees with Cao (via Matthew Yglesias):

Bottom line: The current legislation is not “pro-abortion,” and there is no, repeat no, federal funding of abortion in the bill.

Yeah You Right

Nancy Pelosi answers a question about healthcare reform I once asked Congressman Anh Cao:

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that peope could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk, but not job loss because of a child with asthma or someone in the family is bipolar–you name it, any condition–is job locking.

The Hitch Is On It

Put Down That Bark

A leading progressive, Rep. Raul Grijalva, says he’s inclined to vote against health care reform because a few Republican ideas will likely be added to legislation using the reconciliation process.  He adds:

And a public option that enjoys great support in the House and up to 30 senators gets left out. That’s something I just don’t understand.

It’s not hard to understand, Raul.  Only “up to 30 senators” support the public option.   If, say, up to 60 senators supported the public option …  but they don’t, at least not yet, so let’s pass what’s on the table and get on with immigration reform, environmental legislation, etc.