Month: August 2010

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

Edward M. Kennedy, in an undelivered paragraph written for his RFK eulogy. Print out and post in the White House if you please because we are not on drugs. We have judged the evidence and find you timid and fearful in the face of old ideas and positively cowering in the face of anything like a new idea.
We were not deceived by the idiotic rhetoric of the far right. We knew you were a centrist and a pragmatist from the get-go. We are inherently sympathetic to the cause and appreciate the moments of progress, no matter how diminished or incremental they may be, when those moments have stumbled and sputtered into being. Unlike the people you classify as not on drugs, we actually give you credit for them. And but so we’re getting awfully tired of being portrayed as a villain by the same group that treats FOXnews as a thoroughly impartial and purely journalistic concern.
As was noted on the crazed liberal outlet msnbc the other night, right now in China people are commuting on a spanking-new ~200mph MagLev train. In America, we’re un-paving roads because we can’t afford them anymore. Precisely where in that sentence can you find the “great enterprises of American Society,” Mr. Gibbs? That’s what makes us uneasy. That’s why we’re crying out for some leadership, especially if it’s just tilting at windmills. Because that’s a part of leading: taking up an important cause, no matter how unpopular or unheralded, and fighting for it, whatever may come. Yes: even if you lose.
And, not coincidentally, that is precisely what we have never seen out of this administration. Must be all the drugs.

In that spirit, let me end by saying I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face, and I look forward to periodic conversations with all of you in the months and years to come. I trust that you will continue to let me and other Democrats know when you believe we are screwing up. And I, in turn, will always try and show you the respect and candor one owes his friends and allies.

Barack Obama sounding oh so 2005 on the Great Orange Devil, and apparently Gibbs would agree: that was all a bunch of meaningless horseshit aimed primarily at the center-right that is so desperately underserved by American “politics.”
Abandon those that put you there and then blame them when you’re not there anymore. That’s change we can believe in, all right.

Nothing that Does Matter

So good:

It does not matter where presidents or their wives go on vacation. IT DOES NOT MATTER. Presidential approval, election outcomes, support in Congress — nothing that does matter depends on where presidents go on vacation. It did not matter when Clinton apparently polled to figure out where he should go. It did not matter when Bush decamped to Crawford. It did not matter when the Obamas went to Martha’s Vineyard. It does not matter now.

Dowd writes:

In politics and pop culture, optics are all.

By that she means, “In politics and pop culture, optics are all that matters to me.”

You could not ask for a better distillation of why so much political commentary is so completely and utterly detached from what actually affects political outcomes. War and peace, economic prosperity and hard times, real scandals — these things pale beside the fact that the Obamas once went to New York City on a date!

Nothing that Does Matter

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.