Day: August 9, 2010

Saying to a senator, ‘You can’t bring up your amendment,’ is like saying to your 5-year-old son, ‘OK, Johnny, whatever you do, don’t touch the stove.’ Johnny’s going to spend the whole week trying to figure out a way to touch the stove.

Lamar Alexander, trying to explain Republican obstructionism in the Senate.
Close, but no cigar. It’s actually that The Democrat warned of the painful repercussions of touching this hot stove, but GOP Johnny, upon touching the stove and finding it not only cool and delightful, but even refreshing to the touch, then began to spend the whole week figuring out ways to get back onto the stove.
Threats made, no matter how ominous or ill advised they may have been, had better have consequences. Democrats in the Senate apparently do not understand this. The GOP does.

Obama’s Watergate

This paragraph from Yglesias got me thinking:

This is the oddity of American politics in 2010. To simply appropriate funds to give to poor foreigners (”foreign aid”) is hideously unpopular and politically unthinkable. To appropriate funds to give to state governments to keep the public sector operating is also politically untenable. But to appropriate the funds to build facilities for Americans but located in Afghanistan is easy.

In a nutshell: while we’re turning out the streetlights in Colorado and chopping up paved roads that states can no longer manage to pay up-keep on (and etc…), the Congress can always find plenty of money for our overseas adventures.

So: whoever Obama’s edition of Oliver North is, that person should build up some kind of sufficiently large yet sufficiently innocuous project that just needs doing over to Afghanistan. Money in hand, said North should then redirect that money to secret infrastructure improvements in this country. We can call it the Tuttle Initiative. Tuttlegate inevitably follows.

That this seems not only doable but probably the only way such a project gets done says a lot about our collapsing empire. Tap tap tap.

Douthat’s piece makes clear [that] the status quo is really a cop out. Instead of holding heterosexuals up to a rigorous standard of conduct—no divorce, harsh & unforgiving attitude toward infidelity—we’re going to discriminate against the gay and lesbian minority and then congratulate ourselves on what a good job we’re doing of upholding our ideals.

Matthew Yglesias, on the marriage double standard.

Tough lesson for Obama team: trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Better to fight for a set of principles & let chips fall

Peter Daou, pretty much defining leadership.
And, win lose or draw, I feel like if the Obama administration had taken hard stands on something, anything, the excitement gap yawning between the Tea Party and the progressives simply would not exist; the simple fact is that the Democratic majority over in Congress is flatly afraid to lead. Anywhere. On anything. Too little time in the wilderness, apparently. I wouldn’t mind so much if the GOP leadership-in-waiting had even one good idea in its collective head. Rest assured: they do not.
Keep hammering away at that flag, Tashtego.

Summer of Dick

This post contains Moby-Dick related spoilers, I suppose, but they’re getting on towards 200 years old and are as such almost indistinguishable from common knowledge. Read on at own risk.

For unclear reasons, this summer I decided to read Moby-Dick, or The Whale by the very late Herman Melville. Like many of its 19th century compatriots, it’s (at times) beautifully written and but so also drifts off into long tangents on the whaling industry as it was in the mid 1800s, the nature of whales, the etymology of the term whale, a comparison and literary criticism of different stories about whales, and, of course, an entire taxonomic system devoted to the phylogeny of the fishy leviathan. I suspect that, boiled down to its essence (having been sent through the try-works we’d find it to be the story of Ishamel taking a rather floridly symbolic whaling voyage under the command of one Ahab) it’d be utterly required reading of everyone; instead, Billy Budd seems to be the Melvillian placeholder in the canon. As it is, I’d say Moby-Dick stands as one of those books everyone thinks they probably should read, but ultimately doesn’t.
Anyhwo, it can be taken in several ways, amongst them as pure and timeless allegory informing the human condition.
So let’s consider these passages, which come late in the book, when the Pequod has (actually, finally) engaged Moby-Dick; Ahab and some of the crew are off on the only remaining smaller boat (that actually does the harpooning of the whale), everybody else is standing off a bit onboard the Pequod (Tashtego and several others are high up in the rigging performing various jobs)… suddenly Ahab realizes that the whale is going to attack the Pequod, and the summary costs of all his recent decisions are made painfully clear to him, that his occasional efforts to (more or less) leave his crew (and, specifically, his first mate Starbuck) out of it while he, Ahab, goes off to seemingly certain (and preordained) death will be for naught:

Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. I grow blind; hands! stretch out
before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night? The whale! The ship!
cried the cringing oarsmen. Oars! oars Slope downwards to thy depths, O
sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time
upon his mark; I see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not
save my ship? But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst
through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly
level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop
the gap and bale out the pouring water. Meantime, for that one beholding
instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the
red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out
from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb,
standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster
just as soon as he. The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye
sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he
must, in a woman’s fainting fit. Up helm, I say –ye fools, the jaw! the
jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?

The whale strikes the Pequod and damages it beyond repair; it is rapidly sinking. Remarkably, Ahab takes all this in, realizes what he’s caused, but almost immediately returns to his own agenda. We’ve seen this several times in the book. To Ahab, the actual whaling mission of the Pequod is an unfortunate distraction. Many, many times, Starbuck implores him to simply do the whaling: if we happen upon Moby-Dick, so be it, but first the whaling should be prosecuted as quickly as possible such that we can get home sooner. Ahab repeatedly shows no interest in such a course, often obstructing or directly undermining the whaling side of the operation. The Pequod sinks:

Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume. […] Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent. I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! Let me hear thy hammer.

[…]

The ship? Great God, where is the ship? Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight. But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian [Tashtego] at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched; –at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Let’s just say that, had I read the above a few days previous, it would have been the context of this post’s closing sentence.
As it is, let’s just (busy, busy, busy) tack that conclusion onto last summer’s:

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

We’ll Always Have Venice

Anthony Gottleib reports on the electoral process of the Venetian Republic:

Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.

And yet I feel like that would still work better than today’s Senate.

And now, they’re coming for your Social Security money – they want your fucking retirement money – they want it back – so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later. Because they own this fucking place. It’s a Big Club: and you’re not in it.

George Carlin

Pause

unsolicitedanalysis:

I’m a fucking nihilist, because the thought of saving all of this evil from itself makes me shudder.  Let’s hasten our own demise, for the good of the rest of the world.  Stop listening to people like Paul [Krugman] who can’t seem to get it through their thick skulls that a functioning American economy is no more likely to serve the poor than it ever has been, but it’s certain to oppress the planet.  And that just isn’t acceptable to me, even considering the alternatives.

[…]

Bye.

Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos…
And: goodbye, Unsolicited Analysis. Your writings and general willingness to engage issues on the merits using the facts at hand were appreciated; here’s hoping this is ultimately more of a pause than an end.