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David Bromwich: The Character of Barack Obama
He has always had a reputation for being fair-minded -- a strength only attainable by someone who is (to begin with) fair-minded. But the cautiousness of his first six months as president shows a pattern of accommodation that often lands him on the far side of actual prudence.
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Alongside Obama's reticence sits a curiously incompatible trait, a certain grandiosity. This showed recently in his second statement about the Cambridge police. Offered a chance to concede that matters of local law were ultimately outside his province, he replied that in his view such things were "part of my portfolio." Psychologically, this may be so. But Obama is mistaken if he thinks many Americans want to see that portfolio carried into many other towns and cities. People like to think a president is too important for that. He stands at the very head of the dignified part of government (as Walter Bagehot called it). He can't at the same time enter into the efficient part of government at the level of the city police.
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His characteristic way of handling confusion in the audience is to come back and give good answers to questions. That is very well, but no substitute for an early explanation. Mopping up in question-period is an academic skill: the points you failed to clinch in lecture you recover when the hands go up. But this presumes that everyone signed up for the lectures and everyone already knows something. Here, Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.
Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.
Nomic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules, usually beginning through a system of democratic voting.
The Pragmatist
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If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days,
"ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted
logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the
blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the
slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.
But privileging pragmatism over ideology, while perhaps understandable
in the wake of the Bush years, misses the point. For one thing, as Glenn
Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead
decision-makers to ignore facts, it is also what sets the limiting
conditions for any pragmatic calculation of interests. -
Principle is often pragmatism's guardian.
Particularly at times of crisis, when a polity succumbs to collective
madness or delusion, it is only the obstinate ideologues who refuse to
go along. Expediency may be a virtue in virtuous times, but it's a vice
in vicious ones.
There's another problem with the fetishization of the pragmatic, which
is the brute fact that, at some level, ideology is inescapable. Obama
may have told Steve Kroft that he's solely interested in "what works,"
but what constitutes "working" is not self-evident and, indeed, is
impossible to detach from some worldview and set of principles. Alan
Greenspan, of all people, made this point deftly while testifying before
Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee. Waxman asked Greenspan, "Do
you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish
you had not made?" To which Greenspan responded, "Well, remember that
what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal
with reality. Everyone has one. You have to--to exist, you need an
ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not." - 1 more annotations...
Dana Blankenhorn: Free to Lie
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But the closest analogue we have to our own time, in terms of a willingness to call white-black and black-white, of pure ideological upside-downism, has to be the Confederacy.Southerners had already spent a generation engaged in small-scale terrorism before Fort Sumter, starting in the early 1830s. And their arguments -- still etched in places like the Confederate Monument in downtown Decatur a mile from my home -- attest to this.
What was this "covenant," and this fealty to the "original intent" of the Constitution? Nothing but a series of excuses to treat men like horses, to rape women and force them to bear the resulting children, then to treat those children as property, never mind how much they looked like master.
That's what this covenant was, and that's what this new covenant is. It is racism, it is privilege willing to kill to maintain itself. It is not a coincidence that the strongest support for Dick Armey's nonsense is among southern whites, or among western whites descended from those who committed genocide against the Indians and then romanticized it.
Joe Bageant: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings
Cognitive capitalism -- just when we thought there were no new ways to get screwed
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Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?
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Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.
Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.
Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!
Joe Bageant: A Yard Sale in Chernobyl
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President Obama understands the featureless not-so-new American aesthetic. So well that he had the world's most politically correct, authority sanctioned, but absolutely worst poet, Elizabeth Alexander, read at his inauguration. ("We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider") Like the soothing, ambiguous language of the Super Corporate State, it sounds as if it means something. Which is close enough for government work. More importantly, she has been vetted by proper authorities and is credentialed and licensed by Yale University to practice poetry. The marketing theme of the event was Obama's s alleged blackness. Alexander is a sorta black too, but not black enough to scare away business. Welcome to the domination of the business aesthetic. Literate people all over the world found Alexander's reading to be like one of those eye watering farts you just wait through until it blows away. Still, millions of Americans listened and cried, in accordance with the marketing theme almost on command, "happy to be born in America, where a black man can be elected president." Personally, I was sorry as hell I'd sworn off bourbon for the month.
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But seldom to never do we get news and information as to the global scale of the genuine emergency facing humankind. Bad news is bad for business, therefore said to be bad for you and me. We all accept that consumer confidence is the foundation of the whole shebang, the confidence game that is capitalism. Thus confidence and cheery optimism is mandatory among the citizen consumer-producer marks. Willingly we self-police our behavior, shunning, criticizing or mocking what we perceive as "negative people." We drive past the empty parking lots, abandoned housing developments, through networks of cameras and cops with radar guns, stun guns and real guns every few blocks, numb to it all, listening to government commercial propaganda officialized by Katie Couric and Ben Bernanke.
- 1 more annotations...
Open Left:: The Political Broadcast Spectrum
If people are content to have a politics based on image and identity, without giving a rats ass about actual policies, then yes, indeed, we are living in a center-right nation. If people are primarily concerned with broad platitudes and abstract principles, then welcome to Barack Obama's center-dominated bipartisan world. But if people actually want something done, well, then, welcome to progressive America, because that's what people want when it comes down to brass tacks.
Open Left:: Obama Quandry Comes Into Sharper Focus: Part One, Political Process
Paul Rosenberg analyzes and interpolates the David Bromwich essay from Huffington Post "The Character of Barack Obama"
Open Left:: Projection Marches On!
it's a whole lot easier to document the projection involved. That's because the dynamic of wealthy special interests supporting street thuggery against "the left" is exactly how both Mussolini and Hitler came to power.
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The corporate role in orchestrating this thuggery is not just an allegation, or an observation. It's been confirmed by the perpetrators themselves, as Greg Sargent reports:
Orcinus - Are Republicans and their thugs killing off the Town Hall as a democratic forum?
When someone's entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren't just expressing their opinions -- they are actively shutting down democracy.
And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.
Boston Review - Andrew Gelman and John Sides: Stories and Stats
The truth about Obama's victory wasn't in the papers
Smart Politics - Franken's (Apparent) Victory Is 4th Weakest U.S. Senate Performance in DFL History
A Smart Politics analysis of Minnesota's historical U.S. Senate election returns finds Franken's performance to be the 4th worst out of the 22 DFL nominees on the ballot in general elections since the DFL merger in 1944, when measured against the performance of DFLers at the top of the ticket in presidential and gubernatorial elections held that year.
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