Amidst the scramble to interpret the results of this week’s elections, a few themes emerge. The Obama administration over-reached. The Republicans’ abiding concern for the deficit resonated. The health-care bill was a political liability. The Tea Party was hugely successful. The only way Democrats can survive is to move to the center. These claims have two principal things in common: 1). they are uttered breathlessly and virtually unanimously by the drones who make up what purports to be the journalistic class in the corporate media, and 2). they’re crap.
The Obama administration, in fact, tried valiantly to deal with the myriad burgeoning disasters left on its plate by Bush the Lesser. But, despite real successes, they utterly failed to accomplish much of the agenda that appeals to the Democratic base, creating the enthusiasm gap we heard so much about this cycle. DADT is still on the books. Guantanamo is still open for business. More troops were sent into Afghanistan than were pulled out of Iraq. Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act were just extended. Executives at bailed-out businesses thanked us for our collective, if involuntary, generosity by pocketing billions of dollars in bonuses: a decent percentage of which found its way back into Republican coffers to help defeat any politician who might even contemplate regulating those industries so that the recent near-calamitous economic mess doesn’t repeat itself. Democrats in general have equivocated on such obvious issues as the Park51 project because otherwise they’d be criticized by the Moron Tabernacle Choir of Beck, Gingrich and Palin. Really?
Republicans’ utter hypocrisy on matters budgetary is manifest. Pick your argument, they’re all true, and any one of them ought to be sufficient to make the point. 1). The only President in a half century to make significant reductions in the national debt as a function of GDP was Bill Clinton; the worst offenders at exploding the deficit: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. 2). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the net cost of the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug plan will exceed that of the health care bill, the stimulus package, and the bailouts combined. 3). I have yet to see a single Republican willing to say, “Here’s what we need to cut.” Don’t give me “across the board cuts in discretionary spending,” especially if you’re blithely claiming the military budget isn’t at least largely discretionary. 4). And don’t tell me that allowing a slight increase, to the level of a decade ago, in the taxes of the people who can afford it most, decreasing the deficit by nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars ($700,000,000,000), is some kind of socialist plot.
The health care bill was actually pretty popular until wild misrepresentations of it went unchallenged. Indeed, a plurality of the citizenry weren’t concerned about over-reach; rather, they thought it didn’t go far enough. Journalistic laziness (or worse) went a long way towards allowing right-wing spin to somehow be regarded as the unquestioned narrative line, but the corporate media were abetted by the Democrats. First, they repeatedly capitulated to the minority, getting literally nothing in return, further watering down what had already been a compromise bill. A single-payer plan was never even on the table, for example, although such a system would be the cheapest, most efficient, and generally best possible structure. I say this, by the way, as someone who actually has some experience with such a plan, unlike those who purport to believe fairy tales because doing so is the only way to repay insurance companies and predatory employers for their continued electoral largess. Then, of course, the Dems, with rare exceptions, ran away from, or apologized for, what should have been their signature achievement.
The Tea Party? Give me a damned break. Really, where did a Tea Party candidate pick up a seat for the Republicans? (Because, let’s face it, they may pretend to be separate entities, but the TPers are a wing of the GOP reserved for those who think the likes of Mitch McConnell and David Vitter are too sane.) There was a legitimate chance of the GOP picking up a Senate seat in Delaware until Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell got the nomination. Harry Reid richly deserved to be defeated, and taking him down would have been a significant symbolic victory for the GOP, but they nominated about the only Nevada Republican who couldn’t beat Reid. Tea Party candidate Ken Buck lost in Colorado (his unguarded description of the TP faithful as “dumbasses” may have been about the only honest statement of his campaign… and it may have lost him the election). Joe Miller may well lose to Lisa Murkowski… whichever way it goes, the seat stays Republican.
Yes, Rand Paul won. But a pompous racist douchebag who skates along the border between idiocy and insanity is different from outgoing Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning exactly how? Kentucky didn’t elect Rand Paul despite his racist frat boy persona; they elected him because of it. (Perhaps you will recall that Hillary Clinton’s virtually last gasp in the primary season two years ago was a huge win in Kentucky, where she campaigned basically as, well, a racist frat boy.)
Ultimately, the sigh of relief you heard on Thursday was from the mainstream GOP (to the extent that’s not a contradiction in terms). Democrat Patty Murray was finally declared re-elected in Washington, making the next Senate Democratic by a 53-47 margin: in other words, nominating Tea Party morons Angle, Buck and O’Donnell didn’t cost the GOP the Senate. The best they could have done was a tie, with Vice President Biden as the deciding vote. Whereas the Senate has devolved to a place where you need 60 votes to order a cup of coffee, that 50th vote does matter in determining committee chairmanships, for example. There may have been a Tea Party candidate who defeated an incumbent Democrat, or even who flipped a seat in a gubernatorial or senatorial race, but I honestly can’t think of one. The four big Tea Party winners, Paul, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley and Mike Lee, all replaced Republicans. Lee, who defeated incumbent Bob Bennett in a primary for senator from Utah, is hardly an outsider: he’s a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Alito and the son of a Reagan Solicitor General.
Much was made of people who voted for Obama and for Republicans this time around. This claim, unlike those above, at least has some validity. After all, someone had to change a party affiliation somewhere, right? Well, sort of. There are a few real trends in midterm elections: the party in the White House gets punished, pretty much whether the country is in good shape at the time or not; there’s a lower voter turnout, especially among certain demographics: minorities, young people… precisely those groups that tend to trend to the left; and there was an abnormally high number of Democratic retirements—it’s much easier to win an open seat than to depose an incumbent. Indeed, only two incumbent Democratic Senators lost. One, who will be missed, was Russ Feingold. The other, who won’t be, is Blanche Lincoln.
And yet we get the drivel spewed forth by the likes of Evan Bayh, who is in a close race with Lincoln for the coveted title of Democrat I’m Least Unhappy to See Out of Office. Bayh, whose highly-respected father actually stood for something, got his gig through the quasi-nepotistic system of party politics, and hasn’t had anything intelligent to say about literally anything in years. Yet he presumes to tell Democrats how to regain the political momentum: by acting like Republicans, of course. You know, like Blanche Lincoln did. For the record, I said in May, when Arkansas Democrats had an opportunity to nominate an actual Democrat, Bill Halter, “I don’t see Lincoln standing a chance against [John] Boozman; Halter would also be an underdog, but he could at least balance the corporate backing Boozman will receive with labor support.”) Lincoln lost by 21 points (!). Show me another incumbent in the last generation to lose by that much without some kind of personal scandal.
Indeed, the numbers don’t support Bayh’s analysis in the slightest. Of the 34 Democrats who voted against health care reform, for example, only 12 were re-elected: barely one in three. And this is why the best comparison for this election isn’t 1994, when the Republicans swept into power in Congress on the promises of the “Contract with America.” This time, there’s another document, a rather flabby screed called the “Pledge to America.” But literally no one really believes the American people like the Republicans this time around, or even think the Republicans have any ideas: they just don’t like where we are, and the Dems are in charge. The fact that they haven’t been for very long, and that the hole dug by President Bush and his minions was very deep and very wide didn’t really matter. T’row da bums out.
The better analogy would be 2004. The Democrats had a chance to nominate a candidate with ideas—a Howard Dean, for example—but they hated George W. Bush so much they were convinced to go with the “more electable” John Kerry. Kerry proceeded to run one of the most gutless and passionless campaigns in history, offering little in the way of real policy and allowing the slanderous Swift Boat ads to go unanswered. That same kind of intellectual lethargy and unwillingness to actually fight in the political trenches characterized the 2010 campaign, as well.
This year’s election was decided by three things: 1). the daft Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court last January (next time you’re contemplating a vote for President, consider whether your candidate would be stupid enough to nominate a Justice who really thinks unlimited and anonymous corporate—or union—spending on political campaigns is a good idea), 2). Democratic cravenness, 3). branding.
Citizens United, of course, opened the floodgates on tens of millions of dollars spent on attack ads which were seldom as much as accurate, often funded either anonymously or by a handful of ridiculously rich folks who see it in their best interest to invest a few million dollars to buy a politician here or there: much cheaper than actually having to, say, pay for the clean-up of the debacle they caused in the Gulf of Mexico, or make their mines safer, or actually provide benefits for their employees.
It looked for a brief moment that the Democrats might actually figure out that the anonymity of donors to all those cobbled-together consortia of hate speech might be a campaign issue for them, especially when it became clear that the Chamber of Commerce was accepting contributions from foreign sources. The CofC leadership was righteously indignant, of course, that anyone would suspect them of wrong-doing: it would be illegal, they screamed, to do what they were accused of doing… as if that made them innocent. Yes, assholes, it would be illegal. That’s the point. You would be committing multiple felonies if your fancy accountants can’t paper over the fact that you are accepting money from foreign corporations and attempting to influence American elections. Does it really matter if you put it into different budget lines? To me, it makes no practical (as opposed, possibly, to legal) difference if you get a $1 million contribution, and use that money to buy attack ads or if you use it to cover your overhead, freeing up $1 million of money that would have had to be spent on overhead to pay for… wait for it… attack ads. But the corporate media didn’t think there was a story there, and Democrats were obediently silent.
Indeed, the Democrats in general were unwilling to engage in the fray. Sure, there were Republicans—Rick Perry, for example—who cravenly ducked out of debating their opponents. But how many Democrats pointed out that the stimulus plan included the largest middle-class tax cut in history? Or that the allegedly budget-busting health care bill is projected by the CBO to reduce the deficit by over $100 billion over the next decade? How many talked about credit card reform? Or reminded the electorate that much-despised (but necessary) bank bailout happened during the Bush administration? How many pointed out that, despite the shrillness of the right, the allegedly “failed” stimulus is credited by every non-partisan analyst with having prevented a far worse disaster? How many, in other words, ran as Democrats? Instead, the best they could muster was “those guys are even worse than we are.”
But tied in with this failure is the notion of branding. Again, the blame is shared by a listless Democratic party and a slothful and compliant corporate media. How many times did we hear about the “Bush tax cuts,” when the only dispute is whether to extend them to people who make over a quarter of a million dollars a year in taxable income: or, rather, on income over that level (Democrats would extend the Bush tax cuts for the first $250,000 of income). By comparison, how many times did we hear about the Bush bank bailout? Or the Obama tax cut? Now, the bailout may have been necessary and the tax cuts bad policy, but there’s no question that most folks like lower taxes (as long as there are no concomitant cuts in services). [For a brilliant rebuttal to this simplistic position, read this.] And the bank bailout was intensely unpopular. The Republicans knew it was something that had to be done. But, because they knew it was going to pass, anyway, they could cynically vote against it, earning them faux populist points.
Of course, the likes of Rachel Maddow have been pointing most of this out for some time. But she never brought, say, NBC’s Chuck Todd onto her show to ask why he was propagating beltway corporate media conventional wisdom as if it had the slightest bit of legitimacy. Because she has too much loyalty to the organization to expose the news director as an utter idiot, perhaps?
Ultimately, the Democrats deserved, based on what they accomplished in Washington, to remain in power. Based on what they did the campaign trail, however, they richly deserved to be defeated… unless, of course, they were running against Republicans.
The reality is that if voters want Republicans, the GOP are better at providing them than the Democrats are. Gazillions of dollars of sleazy campaign money notwithstanding, the Democrats would have done just fine if they’d stood for something. They didn’t, and while the “hurricane” touted by the right didn’t exactly materialize, it was pretty ugly Tuesday night. So, what are the chances the Dems will take precisely the wrong lesson from Tuesday’s results? About the same as that the sun will come up tomorrow.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Antiphon Is Always Welcome at Our Tea Party
I was discussing Oedipus the King with my freshman-level Play Analysis class the other day, and I wanted to talk about how notions of guilt and innocence were different for the Greeks than for us. Today we have all manner of tests of intentionality; for the Greeks, it pretty much boiled down to one thing: what happened? They weren’t much concerned with motivations or similar psychological analysis. The fact that Oedipus tried valiantly to avoid his prophesied fate only to commit his horrible acts in direct consequence of his attempted circumvention of them may have made Oedipus more sympathetic, but it had precious little to do with his guilt, as far as either the Thebans of the fictive world or the Athenians of the real-world audience were concerned.
There were in fact different punishments for crimes committed intentionally and unintentionally in ancient Greece, but there was no need, for example, to show negligence to convict someone of an accidental crime. Thus, it is all but irrelevant that Oedipus unquestionably believed beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt that his parents were back in Corinth when he killed his biological father in the world’s first recorded incident of road rage, and subsequently became, literally, a BAMF.
To illustrate the point, I mentioned the events enumerated in the Second Tetralogy of the orator Antiphon. What happened was this: a young athlete was practicing javelin-throwing. A little boy ran out onto the field to collect the javelins just as the young man released his next heave. As luck would have it, the spear penetrated the boy’s ribs, and he died on the spot. No one claimed the death was anything but accidental, or indeed that the young javelin-thrower had failed to take proper precautions. Indeed, all agreed that his throw was well within the boundaries, and that he had done nothing wrong in ethical terms. Still, the boy’s father accused the young man with accidental murder, a charge which carried a penalty of a year or more of exile. (The defense in the case seems to argue that the young man is in jeopardy of a death sentence, but this is a wild exaggeration. Go figure: a lawyer who distorts the truth.)
Here’s where Antiphon enters the picture, as an orator (or, more accurately, logographos, or speechwriter) hired by the defense. (The orator wrote the argument, but it was delivered by someone else, in this case the young man’s father.) He can’t argue that accidents happen, and that, in the absence of negligence, there’s no case. In a society that cared about the notion of pollution, with a stain clinging to anyone who kills, even inadvertently, that argument would go nowhere. So what Antiphon argues instead is that his client is in fact the aggrieved party… after all, he didn’t get to see how far his throw was because that pesky kid got in the way:
I didn’t go into class thinking I was going to talk about Antiphon, but the anecdote came into my head in the middle of the discussion. And then, just as quickly, it was returned to the back of my mind, to that intellectual space that occasionally gets dredged for a pertinent tidbit, but basically is just allowed to simmer on the lowest possible heat. Or so I thought. A couple days later, we got the modern challenger to Antiphon’s title of Most Outrageous Case of Blaming the Victim in Recorded History. You see, that was when it became public knowledge Heritage Foundation consultant, Tea Party doyenne, and wife to a US Supreme Court Justice, Virginia Thomas, proved she’s an even bigger idiot than hubby by leaving a voicemail on the office telephone of now-Brandeis professor Anita Hill. To “[extend] an olive branch to her after all these years,” as she subsequently claimed to a reporter who wondered, in effect, what the hell she thought she was doing? Hardly. No, the actual message included this: “I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” I suspect I wasn’t the only middle-aged American to do a spit take at that one.
The request that Ms. Hill should be asked to apologize nearly 20 years after the fact for damaging the reputation of a Supreme Court nominee who was confirmed anyway, and who went on to be one of the biggest disasters and, by objective standards, most activist, judges ever to serve on the SCOTUS is, well, nigh onto mind-boggling. More to the point, the preponderance of the evidence, then and now, suggests that Justice Thomas was at best a creep and at worst a felon. [In the interest of political fairness, I note that the same description would apply to Bill Clinton.] Ms. Hill, was, after all, the alleged victim. I’d make a more direct analogy to running under a javelin, but the Freudian implications of such a linkage would send my laptop metaphorically screaming into the night.
At best, Ms. Thomas’s ill-conceived scheme highlighted the inanity if not insanity of the Tea Party hierarchy, not to mention serving as a reminder of the true Astroturf quality of the movement: nothing says “just folks” like the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice, after all. Nor did it do anything to dispel the developing conflict-of-interest allegations about Justice Thomas (and his more-evil-because-less-stupid sidekick, Antonin Scalia) participating in Koch-funded strategy sessions.
But Virginia Thomas’s inter-personal and political clumsiness quickly paled in comparison to another, even more accomplished, practitioner of Blame the Victim. After all, it is conceivable that Ms. Thomas might have a point. The fact that such likelihood is roughly equal to Louis Gohmert’s losing his seat in Congress this week (his only opposition is a Libertarian, as the Democrats are characteristically too cowardly to field a candidate against one of the most embarrassing Representatives in history) doesn’t change the fact that there’s a possibility that Ms. Hill’s accusations were spurious. There is no definitive proof; one could make a case that one’s conclusions on the case might tell us more about the observer than about the evidence. Besides, it is not unreasonable that a wife would take her husband’s side in such a dispute, even if the majority of the population didn’t concur. The whole demanding an apology thing may be a bit much, but spousal loyalty in general is not to be disparaged.
No such possibilities admit themselves in the case of Tim Profitt, the Rand Paul-supporting goon who is caught on tape literally stomping on the head of a defenseless MoveOn.org operative named Lauren Valle. It doesn’t matter what went before. It doesn’t matter whether she instigated the confrontation. It doesn’t matter that, if so, MoveOn.org was simply taking a page from the FreedomWorks bag of tricks, employed a few months ago by that particular Astroturf cabal to disrupt town meetings on health care reform. What matters is what we see on the tape: a young woman wrestled to the ground by one man (without context, we can’t tell, but this part could have been a legitimate attempt at crowd control), and then having her face stepped on, quite intentionally, by another man, causing a concussion.
In any sane universe, there is only one response to this latter action: immediate arrest on battery charges and an equally immediate repudiation of such thuggery by the candidate. Imagine my surprise that neither happened. Mr. Paul distanced himself from Profitt, one of his county organizers, without really condemning his actions:
And the knuckle-dragging drooler who committed the assault? As far as I can tell, he’s still at large, blaming the police and Ms. Valle, and… wait for it… demanding an apology! How dare the physically restrained Ms. Valle allow her head to interpose itself into the path of Mr. Profitt’s foot? Outrageous!
Antiphon would be so proud.
There were in fact different punishments for crimes committed intentionally and unintentionally in ancient Greece, but there was no need, for example, to show negligence to convict someone of an accidental crime. Thus, it is all but irrelevant that Oedipus unquestionably believed beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt that his parents were back in Corinth when he killed his biological father in the world’s first recorded incident of road rage, and subsequently became, literally, a BAMF.
To illustrate the point, I mentioned the events enumerated in the Second Tetralogy of the orator Antiphon. What happened was this: a young athlete was practicing javelin-throwing. A little boy ran out onto the field to collect the javelins just as the young man released his next heave. As luck would have it, the spear penetrated the boy’s ribs, and he died on the spot. No one claimed the death was anything but accidental, or indeed that the young javelin-thrower had failed to take proper precautions. Indeed, all agreed that his throw was well within the boundaries, and that he had done nothing wrong in ethical terms. Still, the boy’s father accused the young man with accidental murder, a charge which carried a penalty of a year or more of exile. (The defense in the case seems to argue that the young man is in jeopardy of a death sentence, but this is a wild exaggeration. Go figure: a lawyer who distorts the truth.)
Here’s where Antiphon enters the picture, as an orator (or, more accurately, logographos, or speechwriter) hired by the defense. (The orator wrote the argument, but it was delivered by someone else, in this case the young man’s father.) He can’t argue that accidents happen, and that, in the absence of negligence, there’s no case. In a society that cared about the notion of pollution, with a stain clinging to anyone who kills, even inadvertently, that argument would go nowhere. So what Antiphon argues instead is that his client is in fact the aggrieved party… after all, he didn’t get to see how far his throw was because that pesky kid got in the way:
because the boy ran under the trajectory of the javelin and placed his body in its path, one of them was prevented from hitting the target, whereas the other was hit because he ran under the javelin…. Since the young man made no mistake, it would not be fair for him to be punished for someone else’s mistake; it is enough for him to bear the consequences of his own mistakes. But the boy was destroyed by his own mistake, and the moment he erred, he also punished himself. Therefore, the killer is punished and the death is not unavenged.Really, it was damned decent of the young man’s father to allow the boy to escape without further punishment. I mean, interfering with a javelin-thrower’s workout is a serious offense.
I didn’t go into class thinking I was going to talk about Antiphon, but the anecdote came into my head in the middle of the discussion. And then, just as quickly, it was returned to the back of my mind, to that intellectual space that occasionally gets dredged for a pertinent tidbit, but basically is just allowed to simmer on the lowest possible heat. Or so I thought. A couple days later, we got the modern challenger to Antiphon’s title of Most Outrageous Case of Blaming the Victim in Recorded History. You see, that was when it became public knowledge Heritage Foundation consultant, Tea Party doyenne, and wife to a US Supreme Court Justice, Virginia Thomas, proved she’s an even bigger idiot than hubby by leaving a voicemail on the office telephone of now-Brandeis professor Anita Hill. To “[extend] an olive branch to her after all these years,” as she subsequently claimed to a reporter who wondered, in effect, what the hell she thought she was doing? Hardly. No, the actual message included this: “I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” I suspect I wasn’t the only middle-aged American to do a spit take at that one.
The request that Ms. Hill should be asked to apologize nearly 20 years after the fact for damaging the reputation of a Supreme Court nominee who was confirmed anyway, and who went on to be one of the biggest disasters and, by objective standards, most activist, judges ever to serve on the SCOTUS is, well, nigh onto mind-boggling. More to the point, the preponderance of the evidence, then and now, suggests that Justice Thomas was at best a creep and at worst a felon. [In the interest of political fairness, I note that the same description would apply to Bill Clinton.] Ms. Hill, was, after all, the alleged victim. I’d make a more direct analogy to running under a javelin, but the Freudian implications of such a linkage would send my laptop metaphorically screaming into the night.
At best, Ms. Thomas’s ill-conceived scheme highlighted the inanity if not insanity of the Tea Party hierarchy, not to mention serving as a reminder of the true Astroturf quality of the movement: nothing says “just folks” like the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice, after all. Nor did it do anything to dispel the developing conflict-of-interest allegations about Justice Thomas (and his more-evil-because-less-stupid sidekick, Antonin Scalia) participating in Koch-funded strategy sessions.
But Virginia Thomas’s inter-personal and political clumsiness quickly paled in comparison to another, even more accomplished, practitioner of Blame the Victim. After all, it is conceivable that Ms. Thomas might have a point. The fact that such likelihood is roughly equal to Louis Gohmert’s losing his seat in Congress this week (his only opposition is a Libertarian, as the Democrats are characteristically too cowardly to field a candidate against one of the most embarrassing Representatives in history) doesn’t change the fact that there’s a possibility that Ms. Hill’s accusations were spurious. There is no definitive proof; one could make a case that one’s conclusions on the case might tell us more about the observer than about the evidence. Besides, it is not unreasonable that a wife would take her husband’s side in such a dispute, even if the majority of the population didn’t concur. The whole demanding an apology thing may be a bit much, but spousal loyalty in general is not to be disparaged.
No such possibilities admit themselves in the case of Tim Profitt, the Rand Paul-supporting goon who is caught on tape literally stomping on the head of a defenseless MoveOn.org operative named Lauren Valle. It doesn’t matter what went before. It doesn’t matter whether she instigated the confrontation. It doesn’t matter that, if so, MoveOn.org was simply taking a page from the FreedomWorks bag of tricks, employed a few months ago by that particular Astroturf cabal to disrupt town meetings on health care reform. What matters is what we see on the tape: a young woman wrestled to the ground by one man (without context, we can’t tell, but this part could have been a legitimate attempt at crowd control), and then having her face stepped on, quite intentionally, by another man, causing a concussion.
In any sane universe, there is only one response to this latter action: immediate arrest on battery charges and an equally immediate repudiation of such thuggery by the candidate. Imagine my surprise that neither happened. Mr. Paul distanced himself from Profitt, one of his county organizers, without really condemning his actions:
...there was a bit of a crowd control problem. I don't want anybody, though, to be involved in things that aren't civil. I think this should always be about the issues. And it is an unusual situation to have so many people so passionate on both sides jockeying back and forth. And it wasn't something that I liked or anybody liked about that situation. So I hope in the future it is going to be better.The Paul campaign (as opposed to the candidate himself) released a statement condemning “violence of any kind,” but (of course) softening the blow my addressing “supporters on all sides.” They were also “relieved to hear that the woman in question was not injured.” A concussion and a sprained shoulder = “not injured” to the Paul campaign. At least they're consistent: nothing else that comes out of that campaign comports to reality; why should this?
And the knuckle-dragging drooler who committed the assault? As far as I can tell, he’s still at large, blaming the police and Ms. Valle, and… wait for it… demanding an apology! How dare the physically restrained Ms. Valle allow her head to interpose itself into the path of Mr. Profitt’s foot? Outrageous!
Antiphon would be so proud.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
The link, alas, is cowardice
One of the things any scholar does is to seek patterns other people might have missed. It becomes, in a sense, a variation on the theme of the $10K/25K/100K Pyramid. If you’d like to play along at home, here are the clues:
• a screed by Michael Moore about what Democrats need to do to maintain their control of Congress
• a story a couple of weeks ago that Senate Democrats would postpone until after the election a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone except the over-a-quarter-million-a-year-crowd
• a recent story week about how the Obama administration is issuing waivers to employers and insurance companies alike “to maintain even minimal coverage far below the new [health-care legislation’s] standards.”
• a travel advisory from the State Department about a potential terrorist attack in Europe
• a photograph of the statue of Oliver Goldsmith in front of Trinity College Dublin that came around on one of those annoying Facebook feeds
Okay… what do they have in common? The answer: Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman and philosopher. For the Goldsmith statue, the connection is that a statue of Burke is the other famous memorial at the front gates of TCD. For the others, it’s Burke’s best-known line, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Another way of putting that famous aphorism: “Have some damned balls, good guys.” With me, now?
I start with a point Moore sort of buries in his piece, but which would make a huge difference: “announce that you will force the Republican senators (who until now simply have had to say they ‘intended’ to filibuster in order to kill a bill) to have to actually filibuster! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and read from the phone book 24/7. They won't last a day. And America will see them for who they really are.” I’ve been saying this for a long time: make them do the Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” thing.
Conventional Wisdom and the New York Times story (if there’s a difference), say the reason Harry Reid is parading his signature brand of cowardice with respect to the Bush tax cuts is to “[spare] some politically vulnerable incumbents from casting a potentially difficult vote to let taxes rise for the rich.” The polls show a pretty much divided electorate, with different results apparently (to me, at least) a function of how the question is asked. Thus, a CBS News poll from late August showed that by 20 points (!) Americans believe “the tax cuts should expire for households earning over $250,000 per year.” And while a subsequent poll by CNBC seems to suggest an opposite finding, I’d argue that the difference comes in large part from the phrasing: “increasing taxes on any Americans will slow the economy and kill jobs.” (Note the italics!) Or so it would appear the question was—I pulled that phrasing from the story; the alleged “complete poll results” are, to be polite, incomplete.
By the way, lest you think that the change is better explained by when the respective polls were conducted, there’s another one from Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion, taken essentially contemporaneously with the CNBC poll. It shows a slight preference for continuing the Bush tax cuts for the middle class but not for those in the $250K income bracket. Interestingly, 54% of Republicans don’t think that income level qualifies as “wealthy.” Really. I’m a tenured faculty member at an accredited university; my wife is the Financial Aid Director at a community college. We’d need about a 150% increase in our family income to reach that threshold. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d suggest pretty damned strongly that bringing in a quarter million dollars a year would qualify a family as well off. Certainly, they’d be doing well enough to be able to afford a modest tax increase on income over $250,000 a year.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter. The nation is, at worst, divided. And this after an onslaught of post-Citizens United decision, anonymously-funded, misrepresentations of reality. The Republicans and their minions at Fox News (or is it the other way around?) have consistently mis-defined “small business,” fiddled with statistics, and pretended that they’re interested in the deficit while making sure their fat-cat friends continue to profit from the policies that are largely responsible for creating the size and scope of the deficit to begin with.
Even more to the point: you’re supposed to be Democrats. Stand for something, dammit! Remind people of why they voted you into office to begin with. Give them a reason to re-elect you, not just to prevent that lunatic you’re running against from getting into office. You’re going to be smeared by RepubliCorp anyway, so don’t worry about them. Put together a bill that extends the tax cuts for 98+% of the country. Vote down the inevitable amendment to extend the cut for the terminally-entitled rich.
And make the sons of bitches filibuster the bill! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and, in full view of the American people, argue against a bill that would prevent a tax increase for the overwhelming majority of us. Or, alternatively, to “read from the phone bill 24/7,” demonstrating such contempt for the middle class they pretend to care about that they’ll do anything to thwart a bill that would help the 98% at the expense of the 2%. Do this before the mid-term elections and run on your attempts to help regular people, contrasted with Republicans’ petulance, arrogance, disrespect for the Senate and the citizenry alike. The chances of this happening, of course, are precisely zero, because the only thing in American political life as certain as Republican mendacity is Democratic cravenness.
We see this phenomenon again in the Obama administration’s unconscionable capitulation on healthcare. It wasn’t enough, apparently, to bargain away anything that looked like real reform (in exchange for what? and with the upside of how many Republican votes?). No, they’ve got to grant waivers to everyone with a lawyer and a lobbyist. Come on, who honestly believes that McDonald’s can’t afford to provide the very fundamental level of health-care dictated by so-called Obamacare? Or that insurance companies can’t make money except by extortion? Give me a damned break. If some company says they’ll pull out of a market, let ‘em, because they are passing up an opportunity to make money.
Indeed, there is something to be said for the claims that President Obama is a socialist. Not for the reasons the professional prevaricators of the right are claiming, of course. But the President doesn’t seem to have a lot of faith in the free enterprise system. Even in this economy, companies need to compete for good employees. Cutting insurance coverage isn’t going to help do that. And executives who choose to make no profit instead of some tend not to endear themselves to investors. There are times to regulate markets and times to butt out. This is the latter, especially if the rationale is somehow to avoid criticism. As Mr. Obama has repeatedly pointed out in recent days, the GOP is going to complain, regardless. So do what’s right.
A different kind of cowardice is at play in the “terrorism” nervousness. Of course there’s going to be a terrorist attack somewhere in Europe, sometime in the not-too-distant future. There’s also going to be some crazy with a gun on an American university campus, soon. (A week after the fatal incident at the University of Texas, for example, an “armed and dangerous” murder suspect was spotted on my own campus.) The chances that someone will be driving while drunk, stoned, texting, making calls on a cell phone, or otherwise not paying attention at any given moment in my small town: metaphysical certitude. I’m driving to work tomorrow. I’m also going to London over the holidays. This isn’t reckless behavior. I may be peculiar, but I’m not crazy.
I confess to being somewhat at a loss to explain the State Department’s curious warning. There doesn’t appear to be any specific new information that precipitated the announcement, and the advice is remarkable in its uselessness: “U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.” Exactly what “appropriate safety measures” might constitute, we’re left to guess. Well, pretty much so, anyway: in a telephone briefing, State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy argues for “common sense precautions” like avoiding unattended parcels, knowing how to use pay telephones, having contact information for the American Embassy, etc. Wow. Has the nanny state really reached the point at which we need a government edict to not be freaking stupid?
More to the point, if “we’re not recommending, that American citizens of any kind–business, tourism, study abroad–we are not–we are not, not, not saying that they should defer travel to Europe at this time, absolutely not,” then what the hell is the point? What is gained from this bizarre release? If this were the Bush administration, I’d be looking for a wag-the-dog moment, and I’m not so naïve that I believe Democratic administrations incapable of such chicanery. But there’s no reason for it: no particularly bad news to try to bury, no scandals to cover up. And, if anything, the Dems have been making inroads into the presumed GOP landslide in next month’s elections.
The best I’ve got as an explanation is pure, unadulterated cowardice. Two terms of Bush/Cheney fear-mongering apparently took their toll. Democrats are running from their own good work, avoiding confrontation instead of standing on principle (with the result that they’re beginning to look like they in fact have no principles). Americans in general are supposed to cower at the prospect of a specter which will almost certainly affect someone, but which is extremely unlikely to directly affect any particular individual. The post-9/11 bumper sticker of the American flag with the cutline “These colors don’t run” is looking increasingly fanciful.
• a screed by Michael Moore about what Democrats need to do to maintain their control of Congress
• a story a couple of weeks ago that Senate Democrats would postpone until after the election a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone except the over-a-quarter-million-a-year-crowd
• a recent story week about how the Obama administration is issuing waivers to employers and insurance companies alike “to maintain even minimal coverage far below the new [health-care legislation’s] standards.”
• a travel advisory from the State Department about a potential terrorist attack in Europe
• a photograph of the statue of Oliver Goldsmith in front of Trinity College Dublin that came around on one of those annoying Facebook feeds
Okay… what do they have in common? The answer: Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman and philosopher. For the Goldsmith statue, the connection is that a statue of Burke is the other famous memorial at the front gates of TCD. For the others, it’s Burke’s best-known line, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Another way of putting that famous aphorism: “Have some damned balls, good guys.” With me, now?
I start with a point Moore sort of buries in his piece, but which would make a huge difference: “announce that you will force the Republican senators (who until now simply have had to say they ‘intended’ to filibuster in order to kill a bill) to have to actually filibuster! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and read from the phone book 24/7. They won't last a day. And America will see them for who they really are.” I’ve been saying this for a long time: make them do the Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” thing.
Conventional Wisdom and the New York Times story (if there’s a difference), say the reason Harry Reid is parading his signature brand of cowardice with respect to the Bush tax cuts is to “[spare] some politically vulnerable incumbents from casting a potentially difficult vote to let taxes rise for the rich.” The polls show a pretty much divided electorate, with different results apparently (to me, at least) a function of how the question is asked. Thus, a CBS News poll from late August showed that by 20 points (!) Americans believe “the tax cuts should expire for households earning over $250,000 per year.” And while a subsequent poll by CNBC seems to suggest an opposite finding, I’d argue that the difference comes in large part from the phrasing: “increasing taxes on any Americans will slow the economy and kill jobs.” (Note the italics!) Or so it would appear the question was—I pulled that phrasing from the story; the alleged “complete poll results” are, to be polite, incomplete.
By the way, lest you think that the change is better explained by when the respective polls were conducted, there’s another one from Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion, taken essentially contemporaneously with the CNBC poll. It shows a slight preference for continuing the Bush tax cuts for the middle class but not for those in the $250K income bracket. Interestingly, 54% of Republicans don’t think that income level qualifies as “wealthy.” Really. I’m a tenured faculty member at an accredited university; my wife is the Financial Aid Director at a community college. We’d need about a 150% increase in our family income to reach that threshold. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d suggest pretty damned strongly that bringing in a quarter million dollars a year would qualify a family as well off. Certainly, they’d be doing well enough to be able to afford a modest tax increase on income over $250,000 a year.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter. The nation is, at worst, divided. And this after an onslaught of post-Citizens United decision, anonymously-funded, misrepresentations of reality. The Republicans and their minions at Fox News (or is it the other way around?) have consistently mis-defined “small business,” fiddled with statistics, and pretended that they’re interested in the deficit while making sure their fat-cat friends continue to profit from the policies that are largely responsible for creating the size and scope of the deficit to begin with.
Even more to the point: you’re supposed to be Democrats. Stand for something, dammit! Remind people of why they voted you into office to begin with. Give them a reason to re-elect you, not just to prevent that lunatic you’re running against from getting into office. You’re going to be smeared by RepubliCorp anyway, so don’t worry about them. Put together a bill that extends the tax cuts for 98+% of the country. Vote down the inevitable amendment to extend the cut for the terminally-entitled rich.
And make the sons of bitches filibuster the bill! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and, in full view of the American people, argue against a bill that would prevent a tax increase for the overwhelming majority of us. Or, alternatively, to “read from the phone bill 24/7,” demonstrating such contempt for the middle class they pretend to care about that they’ll do anything to thwart a bill that would help the 98% at the expense of the 2%. Do this before the mid-term elections and run on your attempts to help regular people, contrasted with Republicans’ petulance, arrogance, disrespect for the Senate and the citizenry alike. The chances of this happening, of course, are precisely zero, because the only thing in American political life as certain as Republican mendacity is Democratic cravenness.
We see this phenomenon again in the Obama administration’s unconscionable capitulation on healthcare. It wasn’t enough, apparently, to bargain away anything that looked like real reform (in exchange for what? and with the upside of how many Republican votes?). No, they’ve got to grant waivers to everyone with a lawyer and a lobbyist. Come on, who honestly believes that McDonald’s can’t afford to provide the very fundamental level of health-care dictated by so-called Obamacare? Or that insurance companies can’t make money except by extortion? Give me a damned break. If some company says they’ll pull out of a market, let ‘em, because they are passing up an opportunity to make money.
Indeed, there is something to be said for the claims that President Obama is a socialist. Not for the reasons the professional prevaricators of the right are claiming, of course. But the President doesn’t seem to have a lot of faith in the free enterprise system. Even in this economy, companies need to compete for good employees. Cutting insurance coverage isn’t going to help do that. And executives who choose to make no profit instead of some tend not to endear themselves to investors. There are times to regulate markets and times to butt out. This is the latter, especially if the rationale is somehow to avoid criticism. As Mr. Obama has repeatedly pointed out in recent days, the GOP is going to complain, regardless. So do what’s right.
A different kind of cowardice is at play in the “terrorism” nervousness. Of course there’s going to be a terrorist attack somewhere in Europe, sometime in the not-too-distant future. There’s also going to be some crazy with a gun on an American university campus, soon. (A week after the fatal incident at the University of Texas, for example, an “armed and dangerous” murder suspect was spotted on my own campus.) The chances that someone will be driving while drunk, stoned, texting, making calls on a cell phone, or otherwise not paying attention at any given moment in my small town: metaphysical certitude. I’m driving to work tomorrow. I’m also going to London over the holidays. This isn’t reckless behavior. I may be peculiar, but I’m not crazy.
I confess to being somewhat at a loss to explain the State Department’s curious warning. There doesn’t appear to be any specific new information that precipitated the announcement, and the advice is remarkable in its uselessness: “U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.” Exactly what “appropriate safety measures” might constitute, we’re left to guess. Well, pretty much so, anyway: in a telephone briefing, State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy argues for “common sense precautions” like avoiding unattended parcels, knowing how to use pay telephones, having contact information for the American Embassy, etc. Wow. Has the nanny state really reached the point at which we need a government edict to not be freaking stupid?
More to the point, if “we’re not recommending, that American citizens of any kind–business, tourism, study abroad–we are not–we are not, not, not saying that they should defer travel to Europe at this time, absolutely not,” then what the hell is the point? What is gained from this bizarre release? If this were the Bush administration, I’d be looking for a wag-the-dog moment, and I’m not so naïve that I believe Democratic administrations incapable of such chicanery. But there’s no reason for it: no particularly bad news to try to bury, no scandals to cover up. And, if anything, the Dems have been making inroads into the presumed GOP landslide in next month’s elections.
The best I’ve got as an explanation is pure, unadulterated cowardice. Two terms of Bush/Cheney fear-mongering apparently took their toll. Democrats are running from their own good work, avoiding confrontation instead of standing on principle (with the result that they’re beginning to look like they in fact have no principles). Americans in general are supposed to cower at the prospect of a specter which will almost certainly affect someone, but which is extremely unlikely to directly affect any particular individual. The post-9/11 bumper sticker of the American flag with the cutline “These colors don’t run” is looking increasingly fanciful.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
I didn't ace this survey because I'm agnostic; I aced it because I'm educated
The recently-released Pew Research Center U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey yields some fascinating results, most notably the most headline-grabbing finding, that “Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.”
Still, it’s difficult to be surprised, for two reasons. First, those whose belief systems are outside the boundaries of normative cultural Christianity are more likely to know why they occupy that space than do those who are content to worship as their parents did, without much need for evidence or argumentation. Second, and probably more importantly, while the survey does ask a few questions about specific theological matters, it seems much more designed to test respondents’ general knowledge about religious elements in historical and cultural contexts.
To be sure, it’s pretty embarrassing that over half of Christians and nearly half of Catholics got wrong what amounts to a true-false question about transubstantiation, or that 81% of Protestants and 91% of Catholics don’t know that the former but not the latter believe that salvation is achieved through faith alone. And that fewer than half of Protestants could identify Martin Luther from a list of three choices (the others being Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley) as the driving force of the Reformation is pretty sad. Even stuff any 2nd-grader should know seems to boggle the minds of a lot of people: on a multiple-choice question (!), over a quarter of Christians couldn’t identify the town where Jesus was born. Apparently they sang “O, Little Town of Jerusalem” in Sunday School.
Still, on questions about Christianity, Christians (barely) outscored the general population, averaging 6.2 correct answers out of 12 questions. White evangelicals averaged 7.3, beaten only by Mormons (7.9). But both Atheists/Agnostics (6.7) and Jews outperformed Christians in general on questions relating directly to Christian teachings, history, and world view.
It’s on the questions about world religions, especially those with relatively few US adherents, where Christians in particular fared poorly. Whereas Jews (7.9) and Atheists/Agnostics (7.5) both got over two-thirds of the 11 world religions questions correct, Protestants and Catholics alike managed well under half, both averaging 4.7. Similarly, the leaders in understanding of the role of religion in American public life (1st Amendment provisions, for example) were once again Atheists/Agnostics and Jews, at 2.8 and 2.7, respectively, out of 4 questions; Protestants and Catholics both averaged 2.1, or over 20% lower.
Overall, the bottom line here isn’t that there’s really a huge difference. To the extent that we can generalize at all, the conclusion is that American self-identified Christians know slightly more about the tenets and historical figures of their own religion than do non-believers, whereas those same Christians under-perform the norm by an even wider margin in areas like basic knowledge of world religions and the relationship between religion and, for example, free expression. Importantly, the level of sophistication required here is pretty low. Respondents are asked some pretty easy stuff: the Dalai Lama’s religion, the name of Islam’s holy book, the basic text of the 1st Amendment. In fact, anyone who gets more than a handful of wrong answers is either really stupid or purposefully ignorant… alas, that’s a whole lot of folks.
Indeed, for all the fact that the Pew folks themselves lead with the whole atheists-know-more-about-religion-than-religious-people-do thing, the real bottom line here is the stolidity and/or downright laziness of the average respondent. OK, so I’m probably not the typical American on this—whereas the average score was 16 out of 32, I got them all right (I confess that I wasn’t entirely confident of two responses). Of course, I fit a good deal of the profile of someone who, according to Pew’s analysis, would get a high score: I’m white, male, US-born, well-educated (including a single college-level religion course some 36 years ago), middle-aged and childless (why a couple of these criteria matter, I have no idea, but there you go). I have an on-line identity named for a bodhisattva. And, of course, I’m agnostic. I’ve also taught elements of both Hinduism and Buddhism in Asian theatre courses, so questions about who Vishnu and Shiva are, or what religion espouses the concept of nirvana aren’t likely to trip me up. But, of course, I knew the answers to those questions long before I contemplated taking, let alone teaching, anything about Asian culture.
There are some interesting seeming contradictions—for example, Republicans outscore Democrats in raw numbers but, all other criteria being equal, it’s the other way around. In other words, the Republicans polled may have been, for example, better educated than the Democratic respondents. Thus the average Republican score was higher, whereas college-educated Dems did marginally better than college-educated GOPsters, etc.
And that distinction is really the one that matters. It doesn’t make headlines because it’s simply to be expected: education makes a difference. Respondents who participated in religious education as children scored marginally better than those who didn’t (and we can assume the difference came in questions about their own religion). Those who have a high level of commitment to their own religion score slightly better than those who don’t. Those who discuss religion with family and friends do a little better than those who don’t. But the big distinction is also the most predictable: people with graduate degrees got over twice as many answers correct as those who didn’t finish high school (22.2 to 10.7). Those who took a religion course in college average more than four more correct answers than college-attendees who didn’t take a religion course, who in turn got five more right than those who never went to college. Well, duh.
In short, while there are some intriguing “gotchas” here, the most fundamental lesson is remarkably simple: if you want to learn about a topic—any topic—you’ll gain a little knowledge from someone trying to influence your opinion. You’ll learn more, though, from someone who wants to provide you with the facts with which to make up your own mind. Religious instruction vs. religious studies courses. My blog vs. my classroom. Fox News vs. real journalism.
But something else is clear, too. These scores are awful. Any reasonably intelligent, reasonably curious, and reasonably attentive high school graduate ought to be able to get a score in the mid-20s on this test. I’m frankly a little embarrassed that I knew only 30 answers with absolute confidence. And yet a 26, or a little over 81% (a B- in my grade book), qualifies as “top 10%.” A 23, less than 72%, i.e., a C-, would be better than the mean for people with graduate degrees. The average Christian got fewer than half of the questions right (I started to write “more than half the questions wrong,” which would have been inaccurate: “I don’t know” accounted for about half of the responses that weren’t the correct answer. If this were Jeopardy, those folks would have kept their money on those questions; they just wouldn’t have won any. So we could presumably add another couple of points onto lower scores if we wanted to give people credit for good guesses and not penalize them for incorrect answers—the way most Scantron tests work today, for example.)
Any way you slice it, though, these scores are deplorable, especially given how easy most of these questions are. Americans are consciously, unabashedly, willfully ignorant. And it’s getting worse. That’s how Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Sharron Angle have any suasion in our public life. It’s why the modern GOP is fast modeling itself on the Know Nothing Party of the mid-19th century: secretive (e.g. major funding of the Tea Party by the just-folks billionaire Koch brothers), rabidly chauvinistic (in the 19th century, the enemy was Catholics; now it’s Mexicans/gays/Muslims/blacks/single parents/teachers/unions/fill-in-the-damned-blank), and ultimately driven more by paranoia than by evidence. They probably think I’m equating their transcendent quest for ignorance with the phrase “know nothing.” That’s because they don’t know American history any better than they know the religion they purport to espouse.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Musings on an Under-Reported Story
My father was President of one of the colleges in the State University of New York system for a decade beginning in 1968, so I spent most of my adolescence literally on a college campus: the view out my bedroom window was of a dormitory and a dining hall. Those were, needless to say, tumultuous times. So it was that one night, close to midnight, we heard a crash downstairs. When we investigated, we found that someone had thrown a rock through the dining room window. As it happened, a campus policeman had actually seen the event, and in a matter of minutes, he showed up on the doorstep with the offender in tow.
My father asked the obvious question: why? The vandal turned out to be a student, who took issue with my Dad’s position on the in loco parentis issues then current. “This,” he said, “was to show you we demand 24-hour visitation in the dorms.” “And if you hadn’t been caught, how would we have known that?” This question was met with a classic deer-caught-in-the-headlights stare, and the great message-sender was left to admit he didn’t know.
I’ve been reminded of this moment from long ago by this year’s curious uptick in Marching Season violence in Northern Ireland. I get it—something is bothering someone. But what? And why?
Of course, even knowing what’s going on in Northern Ireland over the past few weeks has been difficult from this side of the pond. I hope that it is reasonably clear that I make a fairly concerted effort to keep up with the news. So when I haven’t heard about something, there’s a pretty good chance the media haven’t seen fit to cover it. Indeed, having heard about the most recent bombing—the one on Saturday in Lurgan that injured three children—not directly from my scrutiny of various news outlets, but from a message from a student, I did a little checking. My first stop for such news is The Irish Times of Dublin: they tend to be both thorough and less given to the partisanship one finds in the Northern Irish press, either Unionist or Nationalist, or in such British media as Reuters, the BBC, or the Times, which seem capable of objective reporting on all topics but this one.
What I found there was a story likening the strategy employed in the Lurgan incident with that of one of the most horrific episodes of the Troubles, the 1998 bombing in Omagh that killed 29 people, including a number of children and a woman pregnant with twins. Specifically, the fact that “police received a warning saying the bomb was placed in one area and that it then detonated in another ‘bore similarities’ to the Omagh bombing.” According to SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) representative Dolores Kelly,
In this time and place, however, police nervousness is fully comprehensible. True, the “just like Omagh” rhetoric is both over-heated and to some degree the product of prophecy-fulfillment—similar to those who would have us believe that the so-called “underwear bomber” is proof of some sort of escalation of global terrorism. That said, it hasn’t been a good few weeks to be a member of security forces in Northern Ireland.
Just looking at stories from July and August, we get this:
Police were attacked in a Belfast riot on July 2. Six officers were hurt the next night, as they “came under attack from stones, fireworks, petrol bombs, paint, masonry and, on one occasion, an axe.”
A week later, a bomb exploded on a bridge in Armagh; “Police Chief Superintendent Alisdair Robinson said the explosion was ‘a totally reckless act that could easily have led to loss of life if anybody had been driving past at the time. However I believe at this stage the real target was my officers. This was an attempt to lure police into the area to injure or kill them.’” PSNI Superintendent Pauline Shields subsequently described the attack as “‘a blatant and callous attempt’ to kill and injure police officers.”
On the 12th of July—the anniversary of Protestant William of Orange’s victory over Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne, and therefore the center-piece of Marching Season—some 82 police officers were reported injured (some, apparently, from a night or two earlier). According to PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott, “police were attacked with blast bombs, petrol bombs, bricks, stones, golf balls and other missiles. A number of people attacked police lines at close quarters with metal bars. There were also occasions when police took urgent cover as if they feared gun attacks.”
The next night, when under normal circumstances tensions would have begun to settle, there were gunshots. The night after that, petrol bombs were thrown at officers.
On July 28, the Irish Times ran a story by Gerry Moriarty which stated that the new leadership of the Continuity IRA, another splinter group founded in the aftermath of the IRA’s first provisional cease-fire in 1994, declared their own recently-deposed “old guard” insufficiently pro-active, and promised to continue to target police: “Police are legitimate targets because they are members of the British security forces.” There is, of course, much of the flavor of sour grapes about the CIRA complaints. Much as those on the left in this country couldn’t fathom how Bush/Cheney could be re-elected, or those on the right rejected the easy victory of Barack Obama, the radical republicans dismiss the Belfast Agreement of 1998, declaring:
The following day, a bomb was found under the car of a British soldier stationed in County Down. A couple days after that, another unexploded bomb was discovered, this one under the car of a PSNI officer.
Yes, we can’t blame the PSNI in particular for being more than a little apprehensive. Two questions present themselves: 1). why haven’t we heard more about this west of the Atlantic? and 2). what is going on in the peace process in Northern Ireland that would precipitate such acts?
As for question 1, I really don’t know. Looking on the MSNBC site on Sunday for more information about the Lurgan incident, I found literally nothing but a day-old, well-buried AP release. There was everything I might want to know about Zsa Zsa Gabor’s medical status, however. (Quick, anyone under 50 [gay men in the arts excepted], who the hell is Zsa Zsa Gabor? And no, she wasn’t on “Green Acres”; that was her sister, Eva.) CNN’s site wasn’t any better.
Plug the words “Northern Ireland” and a “last 30 days” time-frame into a search at the New York Times site and you’ll find this: a single Reuters story about the bomb under the soldier's car; a generic article, well over a year old, about the IRA; a couple other off-hand references to Northern Ireland in stories that don’t actually fall within the time-frame; and a couple of stories that mention Northern Irish golfers. Oh, and on the second page, there’s a story about the death of a former Northern Irish snooker champion. Really. Durgan, which the PSNI would have us believe would have been another Omagh but for the grace of God? Not a word. The car-bomb in Derry? Nope. Worst rioting in Belfast since the Good Friday accord? Well, that’s a little before the 30-day window. Turns out there was a story by John F. Burns about that. One. Follow-up is for sissies.
I despair.
But the unwillingness or inability of professional journalists to do their damned jobs, the emphasis on the transcendently trivial at the expense of what thinking people might actually care about… that’s a rant for another day. What’s more relevant at the moment is that most damning and difficult of queries: why? Why all this violence now?
Obviously, “why now?” in terms of timing within the calendar year doesn’t take a lot of thought. It’s marching season. July 12 and the weeks immediately prior and after are especially likely to lead to problems. The Orange Order’s recent attempt to re-brand their triumphalist marches as “Orangefest” is a particularly curious phenomenon, and one which for all its media-savvy marketing has a huge potential for disaster. That the Orange Order would want to do this makes some sense; that the Tourist Board would go along boggles the mind. After all, nothing says “family fun” like planning a parade route intentionally to pass through Catholic neighborhoods with the sole intention of sparking a response, playing music louder there than elsewhere on the route, and similar manifestations of good cheer.
I don’t care what you call it, I have difficulty imagining a lot of Catholic families in Ardoyne or Armagh, regardless of their position on political issues, packing up the sammies and crisps and taking the kids on a picnic, hoping to catch a glimpse of those laugh-a-minute Orangemen. All the re-branding does is to attempt to legitimize that which has long since outlived whatever usefulness it might once have had. It would make as much sense to parade through downtown Atlanta to celebrate the anniversary of the election of Lester Maddox.
On the other hand, the Catholic community can pretty much always be counted on to rise to the bait. Moreover, while I wouldn’t impose American free speech laws on other countries (at least on those countries where there is a recognized and protected right to dissent), the one political attribution I will freely allow others to impose on me is civil libertarian. I let my membership in the ACLU lapse a few years ago when, to my mind, they went Miranda-rights crazy, but if I can support the right of Nazis to march in Skokie or of Fred Phelps to picket military funerals, then I can support the right of the Orange Order to march through Portadown. N.B. this doesn’t mean I don’t think that all of the above are assholes. In other words, what I think of Orange Order marches is what I would think of the “Ground Zero Mosque” if a). it were at Ground Zero, b). it were a mosque, and c). the Imam at the head of the Cordoba Initiative bore any resemblance to the caricaturized version presented by idiots like Newt Gingrich or Glenn Beck.
But surely this re-branding, which may have been escalated this year but wasn’t in fact a new phenomenon (the roll-out was two years ago), couldn’t account for this year's rise in violence, especially that directed specifically against police. My best guess—and it is a guess—is that the extension of the power-sharing agreement, drafted in February and implemented in April, is at the center of the unrest.
Central to those negotiations were, according to the Telegraph’s website, the demands of republicans, notably but not exclusively Sinn Féin, to devolve policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont (the site of the provincial government in Belfast). Conversely, the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party), wanted concessions about the overseeing of loyal order parades, including of course the best-known examples, those of the Orange Order.
Remember, when two Northern Irish politicians, David Trimble and John Hume, won the Nobel Peace Prize 1998, they represented the UUP (Ulster Unionist Party) and the SDLP, respectively. These were the moderates. At the extremes, and in the minority, were the DUP, under the leadership of intransigent firebrand Ian Paisley, and Sinn Féin, traditionally if perhaps erroneously described as the “political wing of the IRA.” But by the time the power-sharing agreement took shape in 2007, however, the more radical parties had both increased in power relative to the moderates, and, indeed, had mellowed somewhat. Seeing Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness together, let alone hearing them express what sure sounded like a shared vision three years ago was little short of a miracle.
But now there’s some real stress. The speeches in February were very fine indeed, but from the perspective of a zealot on either side of the political divide—and let there be no doubt, there is a yawning chasm there, whatever the public faces of the principals—those two issues that led to the February compromise are very problematic indeed. We need only look at the interview with the quartet of CIRA leaders linked above to underscore this point: they speak of “betrayal” by McGuinness and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, and they still perceive the police as instruments of British imperialism, irrespective of to whom they may officially answer. And making concessions about Orange Order marches! That was seen, if I might use an expression ironic in its etymology, as simply beyond the Pale. Police and the marches… yes, it’s all there. Throw in McGuinness’s assertion that the Irish and UK governments are in secret negotiations with IRA dissidents, and what’s a self-respecting homicidal revolutionary to do?
Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of the Northern Irish people, regardless of religious denomination or political persuasion, just want to go about their lives. There may be less intermingling between Catholics and Protestants than there might be, but there’s more than there was. And, in general, the animosity is waning. But, alas, there are exceptions.
Still, in a strange way, this might just be good news. The people and the government are moving forward. Bomb-throwers on both sides might just be becoming irrelevant. The violence of the last few weeks could, of course, be the beginning of a new cycle of violence that extends the Troubles into the next generation. Or it might be the death rattle of a puerile and reactionary ideology whose time has long since passed, if indeed it ever existed at all. Everyone worthy of the title of Christian—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Coptic—is praying for the latter.
My father asked the obvious question: why? The vandal turned out to be a student, who took issue with my Dad’s position on the in loco parentis issues then current. “This,” he said, “was to show you we demand 24-hour visitation in the dorms.” “And if you hadn’t been caught, how would we have known that?” This question was met with a classic deer-caught-in-the-headlights stare, and the great message-sender was left to admit he didn’t know.
I’ve been reminded of this moment from long ago by this year’s curious uptick in Marching Season violence in Northern Ireland. I get it—something is bothering someone. But what? And why?
Of course, even knowing what’s going on in Northern Ireland over the past few weeks has been difficult from this side of the pond. I hope that it is reasonably clear that I make a fairly concerted effort to keep up with the news. So when I haven’t heard about something, there’s a pretty good chance the media haven’t seen fit to cover it. Indeed, having heard about the most recent bombing—the one on Saturday in Lurgan that injured three children—not directly from my scrutiny of various news outlets, but from a message from a student, I did a little checking. My first stop for such news is The Irish Times of Dublin: they tend to be both thorough and less given to the partisanship one finds in the Northern Irish press, either Unionist or Nationalist, or in such British media as Reuters, the BBC, or the Times, which seem capable of objective reporting on all topics but this one.
What I found there was a story likening the strategy employed in the Lurgan incident with that of one of the most horrific episodes of the Troubles, the 1998 bombing in Omagh that killed 29 people, including a number of children and a woman pregnant with twins. Specifically, the fact that “police received a warning saying the bomb was placed in one area and that it then detonated in another ‘bore similarities’ to the Omagh bombing.” According to SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) representative Dolores Kelly,
A call came in to the Samaritans saying a device had been placed near the Model School, but there was no mention of what town. So police all over the north were out checking around all Model Schools when the bomb went off without further warning at Kilmaine Street, just where the police would have needed to put a cordon around the school.The PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) believe that the bomb was intended to target the police themselves in “an attempt to kill or injure police officers after the warning… was phoned to the Samaritans.” Under normal circumstances, I’d take this as typical police paranoia—not that they don’t often have a right to be skittish, but police in general and those in Northern Ireland in particular, do tend to see themselves as targets more often than is warranted.
This was a despicable attempt to draw police in and then set off a bomb precisely where they would have been trying to keep other people back out of danger, and that is why the children were injured by debris from the explosion.
In this time and place, however, police nervousness is fully comprehensible. True, the “just like Omagh” rhetoric is both over-heated and to some degree the product of prophecy-fulfillment—similar to those who would have us believe that the so-called “underwear bomber” is proof of some sort of escalation of global terrorism. That said, it hasn’t been a good few weeks to be a member of security forces in Northern Ireland.
Just looking at stories from July and August, we get this:
Police were attacked in a Belfast riot on July 2. Six officers were hurt the next night, as they “came under attack from stones, fireworks, petrol bombs, paint, masonry and, on one occasion, an axe.”
A week later, a bomb exploded on a bridge in Armagh; “Police Chief Superintendent Alisdair Robinson said the explosion was ‘a totally reckless act that could easily have led to loss of life if anybody had been driving past at the time. However I believe at this stage the real target was my officers. This was an attempt to lure police into the area to injure or kill them.’” PSNI Superintendent Pauline Shields subsequently described the attack as “‘a blatant and callous attempt’ to kill and injure police officers.”
On the 12th of July—the anniversary of Protestant William of Orange’s victory over Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne, and therefore the center-piece of Marching Season—some 82 police officers were reported injured (some, apparently, from a night or two earlier). According to PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott, “police were attacked with blast bombs, petrol bombs, bricks, stones, golf balls and other missiles. A number of people attacked police lines at close quarters with metal bars. There were also occasions when police took urgent cover as if they feared gun attacks.”
The next night, when under normal circumstances tensions would have begun to settle, there were gunshots. The night after that, petrol bombs were thrown at officers.
On July 28, the Irish Times ran a story by Gerry Moriarty which stated that the new leadership of the Continuity IRA, another splinter group founded in the aftermath of the IRA’s first provisional cease-fire in 1994, declared their own recently-deposed “old guard” insufficiently pro-active, and promised to continue to target police: “Police are legitimate targets because they are members of the British security forces.” There is, of course, much of the flavor of sour grapes about the CIRA complaints. Much as those on the left in this country couldn’t fathom how Bush/Cheney could be re-elected, or those on the right rejected the easy victory of Barack Obama, the radical republicans dismiss the Belfast Agreement of 1998, declaring:
People were corralled into voting for something they knew nothing about; there is an agreement but it can be overruled at any time by the Westminster government…. The existence of the Northern Executive is in the gift of the British government; they would take it away if it was in their interests to do so… it is now in the interests of Britain to have that junta at Stormont.A car bomb exploded outside police headquarters in Derry, Northern Ireland’s second-largest city and far-and-away its most significant Catholic-majority municipality, on August 3. In that instance, according to follow-up reporting by George Jackson and Dan Keenan, “The 100kg bomb exploded 22 minutes after a caller using a recognised Real IRA code word said the device would explode in 45 minutes.” The Real IRA is the organization responsible for the Omagh bombing.
The following day, a bomb was found under the car of a British soldier stationed in County Down. A couple days after that, another unexploded bomb was discovered, this one under the car of a PSNI officer.
Yes, we can’t blame the PSNI in particular for being more than a little apprehensive. Two questions present themselves: 1). why haven’t we heard more about this west of the Atlantic? and 2). what is going on in the peace process in Northern Ireland that would precipitate such acts?
As for question 1, I really don’t know. Looking on the MSNBC site on Sunday for more information about the Lurgan incident, I found literally nothing but a day-old, well-buried AP release. There was everything I might want to know about Zsa Zsa Gabor’s medical status, however. (Quick, anyone under 50 [gay men in the arts excepted], who the hell is Zsa Zsa Gabor? And no, she wasn’t on “Green Acres”; that was her sister, Eva.) CNN’s site wasn’t any better.
Plug the words “Northern Ireland” and a “last 30 days” time-frame into a search at the New York Times site and you’ll find this: a single Reuters story about the bomb under the soldier's car; a generic article, well over a year old, about the IRA; a couple other off-hand references to Northern Ireland in stories that don’t actually fall within the time-frame; and a couple of stories that mention Northern Irish golfers. Oh, and on the second page, there’s a story about the death of a former Northern Irish snooker champion. Really. Durgan, which the PSNI would have us believe would have been another Omagh but for the grace of God? Not a word. The car-bomb in Derry? Nope. Worst rioting in Belfast since the Good Friday accord? Well, that’s a little before the 30-day window. Turns out there was a story by John F. Burns about that. One. Follow-up is for sissies.
I despair.
But the unwillingness or inability of professional journalists to do their damned jobs, the emphasis on the transcendently trivial at the expense of what thinking people might actually care about… that’s a rant for another day. What’s more relevant at the moment is that most damning and difficult of queries: why? Why all this violence now?
Obviously, “why now?” in terms of timing within the calendar year doesn’t take a lot of thought. It’s marching season. July 12 and the weeks immediately prior and after are especially likely to lead to problems. The Orange Order’s recent attempt to re-brand their triumphalist marches as “Orangefest” is a particularly curious phenomenon, and one which for all its media-savvy marketing has a huge potential for disaster. That the Orange Order would want to do this makes some sense; that the Tourist Board would go along boggles the mind. After all, nothing says “family fun” like planning a parade route intentionally to pass through Catholic neighborhoods with the sole intention of sparking a response, playing music louder there than elsewhere on the route, and similar manifestations of good cheer.
I don’t care what you call it, I have difficulty imagining a lot of Catholic families in Ardoyne or Armagh, regardless of their position on political issues, packing up the sammies and crisps and taking the kids on a picnic, hoping to catch a glimpse of those laugh-a-minute Orangemen. All the re-branding does is to attempt to legitimize that which has long since outlived whatever usefulness it might once have had. It would make as much sense to parade through downtown Atlanta to celebrate the anniversary of the election of Lester Maddox.
On the other hand, the Catholic community can pretty much always be counted on to rise to the bait. Moreover, while I wouldn’t impose American free speech laws on other countries (at least on those countries where there is a recognized and protected right to dissent), the one political attribution I will freely allow others to impose on me is civil libertarian. I let my membership in the ACLU lapse a few years ago when, to my mind, they went Miranda-rights crazy, but if I can support the right of Nazis to march in Skokie or of Fred Phelps to picket military funerals, then I can support the right of the Orange Order to march through Portadown. N.B. this doesn’t mean I don’t think that all of the above are assholes. In other words, what I think of Orange Order marches is what I would think of the “Ground Zero Mosque” if a). it were at Ground Zero, b). it were a mosque, and c). the Imam at the head of the Cordoba Initiative bore any resemblance to the caricaturized version presented by idiots like Newt Gingrich or Glenn Beck.
But surely this re-branding, which may have been escalated this year but wasn’t in fact a new phenomenon (the roll-out was two years ago), couldn’t account for this year's rise in violence, especially that directed specifically against police. My best guess—and it is a guess—is that the extension of the power-sharing agreement, drafted in February and implemented in April, is at the center of the unrest.
Central to those negotiations were, according to the Telegraph’s website, the demands of republicans, notably but not exclusively Sinn Féin, to devolve policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont (the site of the provincial government in Belfast). Conversely, the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party), wanted concessions about the overseeing of loyal order parades, including of course the best-known examples, those of the Orange Order.
Remember, when two Northern Irish politicians, David Trimble and John Hume, won the Nobel Peace Prize 1998, they represented the UUP (Ulster Unionist Party) and the SDLP, respectively. These were the moderates. At the extremes, and in the minority, were the DUP, under the leadership of intransigent firebrand Ian Paisley, and Sinn Féin, traditionally if perhaps erroneously described as the “political wing of the IRA.” But by the time the power-sharing agreement took shape in 2007, however, the more radical parties had both increased in power relative to the moderates, and, indeed, had mellowed somewhat. Seeing Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness together, let alone hearing them express what sure sounded like a shared vision three years ago was little short of a miracle.
But now there’s some real stress. The speeches in February were very fine indeed, but from the perspective of a zealot on either side of the political divide—and let there be no doubt, there is a yawning chasm there, whatever the public faces of the principals—those two issues that led to the February compromise are very problematic indeed. We need only look at the interview with the quartet of CIRA leaders linked above to underscore this point: they speak of “betrayal” by McGuinness and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, and they still perceive the police as instruments of British imperialism, irrespective of to whom they may officially answer. And making concessions about Orange Order marches! That was seen, if I might use an expression ironic in its etymology, as simply beyond the Pale. Police and the marches… yes, it’s all there. Throw in McGuinness’s assertion that the Irish and UK governments are in secret negotiations with IRA dissidents, and what’s a self-respecting homicidal revolutionary to do?
Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of the Northern Irish people, regardless of religious denomination or political persuasion, just want to go about their lives. There may be less intermingling between Catholics and Protestants than there might be, but there’s more than there was. And, in general, the animosity is waning. But, alas, there are exceptions.
Still, in a strange way, this might just be good news. The people and the government are moving forward. Bomb-throwers on both sides might just be becoming irrelevant. The violence of the last few weeks could, of course, be the beginning of a new cycle of violence that extends the Troubles into the next generation. Or it might be the death rattle of a puerile and reactionary ideology whose time has long since passed, if indeed it ever existed at all. Everyone worthy of the title of Christian—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Coptic—is praying for the latter.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
With Arrogance Comes Stupidity
We have been over-run lately with stories of corporate malfeasance. Bank bonuses to the very slimebags who made it necessary to rescue the industry to begin with are actually expected to go up by as much as 15% this year. Everyone’s least-favorite corporation (this week), BP, just got hit with the largest fine in OSHA history—over $50 million—not for their casual disregard for employee welfare on the Deepwater Horizon well where 11 men died, not for the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured nearly 200, but because after the Texas City catastrophe they couldn’t be bothered to improve safety at the plant.
A Mine Safety and Health Administration official has pretty much stated that Massey Energy is once again lying about the causes of the disaster that killed 29 miners in West Virginia. Target and Best Buy have both come under fire for taking advantage of the outrageous Citizens United Supreme Court ruling and sending pots of money to MN Forward, an ostensibly pro-business group that oh-so-curiously seems to support almost exclusively Republicans, and virulently anti-gay ones, at that. Honestly, if I boycotted every company that richly deserves it, I’d have to become a hermit.
What all these stories have in common is the signature legacy of a generation of Reaganomics and the wrong kind of libertarianism: arrogance. BP and Massey don’t care about safety because even if they have to pay the occasional fine, it’s still—in their judgment—cost-effective to cut corners. BP made $14 billion in 2009; the huge—to us—fine imposed by OSHA works out to less than a fortnight’s profits: not income, profits. Target may think its pious proclamations or support for gay rights will immunize them against a boycott, but it’s more likely that they believe, probably correctly, that consumers really have no options: where are they going to take their business, Wal-Mart?
Besides, they’re all worth gazillions. Massey Energy, far and away the smallest of the corporations mentioned by name here, had a stockholder equity of over a billion dollars in 2009. And rich people just think differently than the rest of us: they think they’re entitled, they’re actually less likely to be generous, and they are often proud of what the rest of us would call character flaws (wonderful parody of this phenomenon here).
All of which brings us to the Pillsbury Douchebag Doughboy, who is throwing his pudgy weight around, issuing a cease-and-desist order to a small Salt Lake City cookie bakery called My Dough Girl: change your name or we’ll sue you. The case has been around for several months—there’s discussion on the my dough girl vs pillsbury corporation Facebook page (not to be confused with the store’s own Facebook page) from as early as May—but the case has really gone viral in the last couple of weeks, highlighted, perhaps by a great piece on Fox News’s Shepard Smith’s video blog on Wednesday, in which he asserts that “middle fingers are in order for this big company.” (What’s this guy doing on Fox instead of a real network?)
Poor General Mills (owners of Pillsbury). This corporation, with a mere $23.3 billion in market value, is threatened by a Utah bakery with an owner and a handful of part-time employees. “Unfortunately, we needed to protect our trademarks—and we did,” sniffs the corporate minion on Pillsbury’s own Facebook site. The MSM has dutifully fallen into line behind Goliath in this battle. Note the spin in ABC’s story:
Even though it may seem as if these massive corporations are frivolously bullying relatively insignificant competitors, all companies, large or small, have to protect their trademarks at every turn, lest they lose them, said James Rittinger, an intellectual property attorney with the New York City law firm of Satterlee Stephens Burke & Burke.“Trademark law, unlike copyright law, where you can pick and choose who you want to sue, requires the trademark holder to police its mark,” Rittinger said. “Otherwise, the mark can become weakened—diluted, in trademark parlance—or even lost.”Large companies are often criticized for picking on mom-and-pop shops, but really they have no choice, Rittinger said.“If they do not take action, they severely jeopardize the strength of their valuable trademarks,” he said.Added White Plains, N.Y.-based trademark attorney Thomas Wilentz, “Anyone starting a new business or coming out with a new product has to do an extensive trademark search…. You wouldn't buy a house without doing a title search.”
Notice anything missing there? Like the fact that General Mills doesn’t have a freaking case, for example? Or the fact that Mr. Rittinger and Mr. Wilentz are full of crap? Both assume facts not in evidence, to use what may or may not be actual legal terminology (but if it’s good enough for generations of TV lawyer shows, it’s good enough for me). Tami Cromar, the owner of My Dough Girl, did indeed do the appropriate searches, but no doubt determined that since no rational person would confuse her company with Pillsbury, she was on safe legal footing. And indeed she would be in a just universe. Does this look like a just universe to you?
I’m not a lawyer, but, as was once said of me in a different context by one of my favorite professors, I know something and I can read. I understand that copyright law and trademark law work differently, and that the owner of a trademark must actively protect that mark's exclusivity. This doesn’t mean, however that Pillsbury controls every variation on the word “dough.”
A blog called The IPKat concentrates on copyrights, trademarks, patents, and similar issues. True, it’s headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic, but they seem to know whereof they speak. One of their most interesting observations really cuts to the heart of the matter: “in common American nomenclature, the Doughboy is only ever referred to with the ‘Pillsbury’ precursor.” That is, there’s some question about whether Dough Creatures of any gender are actually covered by the trademark.
IPKat continues:
Further it seems impossible to envisage a scenario where a consumer gets in their car to drive to the grocery store to pick up a can of Pillsbury croissants, drives past My Dough Girl in Salt Lake City, gets confused, stops and purchases their products instead. Economically speaking, as well, if you are in the market for a Pillsbury Doughboy product it is highly unlikely you will be stopping at a gourmet cookie shop instead.
Since, according to a Harvard Law website, “the standard [for trademark infringement] is ‘likelihood of confusion,’” IPKat’s delightfully snarky scenario would seem to apply. The Harvard site also lists the kinds of factors generally employed in such cases: “(1) the strength of the mark; (2) the proximity of the goods; (3) the similarity of the marks; (4) evidence of actual confusion; (5) the similarity of marketing channels used; (6) the degree of caution exercised by the typical purchaser; (7) the defendant's intent.” I’m not sure what is meant by “the strength of the mark,” but apart from “the proximity of the goods,” there doesn’t seem to be much of a case here.
The “marks” bear literally nothing in common. My Dough Girl may have a punning name, but Ms. Cromar says that the name actually derives from a term for World War II era pin-up girls. The cookies themselves are named for the pin-ups—Virginia, Trudy, Penelope—and the store’s logo, prominently displayed on their website, bears as much resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy as a picture of a cake would. There is precisely zero evidence of actual confusion, I’m guessing relatively few people order their Poppin’ Fresh products on the web or by phone or by dropping by the plant, and even the Pillsbury people don’t seem to want to try to make the case that Ms. Cromar has any intent to deceive the population. In other words, Pillsbury has no case. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. They’d have as good a complaint against Homer Simpson for saying “Doh.”
But they’ll get their way, because it’s easier and cheaper for Ms. Cromar to capitulate than to fight against a corporation willing to waste tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing frivolous lawsuits. General Mills and their goons know that, of course. We can but hope that someday they'll accidentally pick on someone who can fight back. And, indeed, Ms. Cromar already has a history of losing in court when she has the better case. Friday she posted this on My Dough Girl’s Facebook page:
I am a cyclist, another passion of mine. A few years ago I was hit by a car, the driver admitted to making a wrong turn and was cited. I spent 18 months recovering, his lawyers were fantastic! They won, the lawyers took all the money, I was left with medical bills, a broken heart, a broken bike, and a broken spirit.
[I’m taking on faith that she’s better at baking than at punctuation, but you get the idea.]
No one can blame her that she has apparently decided not to fight, even though the estimated costs of the rebranding run into the tens of thousands of dollars. [EDIT: according to a post by an admin at the my dough girl vs pillsbury corporation Facebook page, a settlement has been signed.] It’s a lot easier to urge others to stand up to The Man than it is to do so oneself. Not everyone can be Nelson Mandela or Václav Havel, or even Shirley Sherrod (who, it will be remembered, did in fact resign her position before coming out swinging after someone else demonstrated that she wasn’t the racist that Andrew Breitbart and the whores at Fox News portrayed her as being).
When we get right down to it, Pillsbury/General Mills is pursuing this course of action not because they have to to protect their trademark, but because they can. No sentient being could possibly confuse Pillsbury with My Dough Girl. The people at General Mills know that as well as anyone. But they just can’t help themselves. To a certain personality type, strutting around bullying the little guy is a show of manliness. To me, it’s a pretty sure sign that someone is compensating for something. [Insert vulgar anatomical reference here.]
What separates what Pillsbury is doing in this case from what other arrogant corporate Leviathans have done recently, however, is significant: there is literally no rationale for their actions. In all those other cases mentioned above, it’s possible to at least see the thinking: if we cut these safety corners, we’ll improve our bottom line; if we give ridiculous bonuses to our executives, they won’t be tempted to move to a different firm; if we throw money at political candidates, we might get a friend in high places. The rest of us might find those reasons unethical, but at least we understand them. Pillsbury, however, even if they “win,” won’t have eliminated a real threat to their trademark; they’ll simply have created a shit-storm of negative publicity. Certainly if I were a General Mills stockholder, I’d be pretty upset that management is wasting money on lawyers and generating bad press to eliminate a phantom threat rather than—hell, I don’t know—developing new products, or improving employees’ job satisfaction, or (best of all) increasing my dividends.
Boycotts seldom work. People have short attention spans, and before long they’ll start missing those crescent rolls. I doubt that I account for $20 a year worth of profit for General Mills. If I brought every one of my Facebook friends with me, and they all contributed that same amount to General Mills’s profit margin, and we all kept up the boycott for a full year, we’d cost the corporation about 6 ½ minutes’ worth of profit. On the other hand, sometimes you just do things to make yourself feel good. We’re getting low on cereal. The next box won’t be Wheaties or Cheerios.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Alfred Hitchcock and Knowingly Knowing
Alfred Hitchcock knew what he was doing. His films terrify us for two reasons. The first is the quotidian quality of his characters and situations—there’s nothing exotic at all about the heroes of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” or “North by Northwest.” Nor did Hitch need creepy old houses or dense woods to create his worlds: a concert hall or an open field in bright sunshine will do just fine, thanks—but I defy anyone who’s seen “North by Northwest” to ever look at crop-dusters quite the same again.
Hitchcock’s other insight was just as simple: he understood that the human imagination produces horrors far more vivid than any film-maker could possibly create in a studio. The scariest moments in “The Birds” don’t come when the… erm… title characters actually attack, but rather when, seemingly innocuously at first, they begin to gather on the telephone wires. Similarly, we don’t know what’s waiting at the bottom of those stairs in “Psycho,” but we know to be afraid of it. This is why there is more horror, in any legitimate use of that term, in any of a half dozen of Hitchcock’s scariest films than in all the Dead Teenager flicks ever made put together. We are, in short, hard-wired to be afraid of the unknown. Hitchcock knew it, and used that knowledge to make great films. Alas, today’s right wing knows it, too, and they play on that fear to attempt to legitimize their own prejudices and paranoia.
It was probably sometime in the late 1980s, a decade or so after I graduated from college, that I first heard the term “knowingly know,” a term that refers to not simply the fact that one’s acquaintance is a member of some group, but that one recognizes that they are. I’ve heard the phrase most often with respect to homosexuality. Even if only 2% of the population is gay, if you know 35 people, the chances are better than even you know someone gay. If I recall correctly, there were 306 people in my high school graduating class: even at the 2% figure (certainly at the low end of estimates), the mathematical chances we were all heterosexual would be about 1 in 500 (.98 ^ 306th). Still, I didn’t know any of my classmates to be gay—a very different thing from whether they actually were or not.
In college, I had one gay friend and a couple of acquaintances—or so I thought until years later, when I learned that another of my closest college friends was in fact gay. When, at some point in the early 1990s, my friend and colleague told me that she and her partner had traveled from Iowa to Wisconsin the previous weekend to be “married” in a Quaker ceremony, it took me a little by surprise—not because I didn’t know of their relationship, or because I disapproved in the slightest: I simply hadn’t given the concept of gay marriage any thought. I am pleased to say, in retrospect, that it took me less than two seconds to move from confusion to congratulations. It was, in short, a no-brainer: of course Karen and Penny should be able to marry each other. The fact that I’d hitherto never considered the possibility said something about the time, something about the small-town world I had always inhabited, and something about my own egocentric but perhaps understandable conflation of my own lived experience and the normative.
I will, of course, never know if my reaction would have been any different had the concept of gay marriage been presented to me in the abstract, especially if I’d never “knowingly known” any gays or lesbians. And this is the essence of the “knowingly know” phenomenon: being presented with an impersonal, generic concept is a fundamentally different experience than choosing whether to endorse a policy designed to better the life experience of one’s friends.
Anyway, that college friend I didn’t know was gay until years later? I was privileged to attend his wedding—complete with two plastic grooms atop the cake—in the early summer of 1994. Now, of course, practically everyone not merely knows someone gay, but knowingly knows. And poll numbers reflect that change in cognition. A CNN poll released Wednesday shows, for the first time, that the majority of those polled said that “gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married and to have their marriage recognized by law as valid.” While that’s good news from my perspective, other results from the same poll were more troubling. And that’s why this blog piece isn’t really about gay marriage at all.
What saddened me in particular was this question: “As you may know, a group of Muslims in the U.S. plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand. Do you favor or oppose this plan?” Over two-thirds of respondents, alas, opposed. True, there has been considerable fanfare about the opposition, not merely from the usual demagogues like Gingrich, Beck, and Palin, but also—chillingly—from the Anti-Defamation League, which issued what Salon.com’s Alex Pareene aptly describes as a “shameful, mealy-mouthed statement” about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”: touting religious freedom in one breath and then suggesting that because of “understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site,” the proposed site should be abandoned because “building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.”
Give me a damned break. First off, this is precisely the kind of namby-pambyism that used to give liberals a bad name. Someone might get upset? That’s a reason to suddenly forget the 1st Amendment? And who, exactly, would be “cause[d] pain”? In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush, hardly a hard-core Islamophile, said this:
These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race. America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.
Whatever may have happened later, and indeed whatever his motives may have been at the time—political calculation, geo-strategic positioning, or deeply-held personal belief—Mr. Bush, then if never else, said and did what was right, and it seems that most people listened. True, there were some isolated incidents of violence against Muslims, vandalism against mosques, and the like, but it could have been far worse than it was, and President Bush deserves credit for his calming influence.
Unfortunately, that dose of reality seems to have worn off, and there are far too many today who appear incapable of distinguishing Islam from a tiny group of radicalized adherents (if, indeed, the hijackers can be said to be Islamic at all, any more than Fred Phelps can be described as Christian). These, then, are the pain-afflicted victims cited by the ADL: people who can endure the empty chair at the dinner table or the hole in the ground where colossal buildings once stood, but not an expression of the religious freedom central to this country’s identity for well over 200 years.
But then I got to thinking about knowingly knowing. The CNN poll is national; The Wall Street Journal commissioned one last month of just New Yorkers. The headline reads: “Poll: Majority of New Yorkers Oppose Ground Zero Mosque.” If one didn’t know that the WSJ is now another Rupert Murdoch mullet-wrapper instead of the corporatist but reputable newspaper it once was, one might be tempted to stop there and conclude that the people of the area have a real aversion to the completion of the Cordoba Initiative, as the project is called.
But read a little further. Manhattanites actually approve of the construction: “support for the $100 million project appeared to be strongest in Manhattan, where 46% of poll respondents said they were in favor of it, compared to 36% who said they were opposed.” Now, I realize that there was a time gap between the WSJ and CNN polls, but surely the real difference between them is the demographic profile of those surveyed: most especially where they’re from.
Lost in the rhetoric is the fact that a major impetus for the “Ground Zero Mosque” (which isn’t a mosque per se, and which is two full city blocks from Ground Zero) is simply this: it’s needed. According to a WSJ blog by Aaron Rutkoff, “The project is driven in part by the needs of a growing Muslim population in Lower Manhattan. The nearest existing Islamic prayer space, the Tribeca Mosque, has been holding three evening prayer services on Fridays to keep up with demand.” In other words, there are a lot of Muslims in Lower Manhattan. People there know them, interact with them, in many cases are them. In other words, they knowingly know.
But, outside a couple of major cities and a smattering of other areas, how many Americans knowingly know anyone of the Islamic faith? How many folks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, site of another backlash against Islam in general, actually have had a conversation with someone named Farooq or Mohammed or Amir?
Let’s leave aside the compelling arguments that the right’s outlandish rhetoric plays directly into the hands of radical Muslims by actually making the case that American foreign policy is indeed a “war on Islam,” when it plainly is not. Let’s also pass over the fact that dozens of Muslims died in the 9/11 attacks, that it was a Muslim man who alerted authorities to the bomb in Times Square in early May, that one of the prime movers of the Cordoba project is quoted as saying, “We decided we wanted to look at the legacy of 9/11 and do something positive,” and that she hopes “to reverse the trend of extremism and the kind of ideology that the extremists are spreading.”
Let’s just look at the numbers based on knowingly knowing, or, looked at differently, in terms of how much the respondent’s life would actually be affected by the completion or non-completion of the project:
General U.S. Population: Opposed by 39 pointsNew Yorkers (all five boroughs): Opposed by 21 pointsManhattanites: In favor by 10 points
If I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a pretty clear correlation between knowingly knowing and supporting the Cordoba Initiative. Perhaps the right, erstwhile champions of local control, ought to STFU?
There will be anti-Muslim bias in some circles for a long time to come, just as there still is in some places against African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, gays… But there is an antidote to this poison. It’s called education: not the teach-to-the-test crap advocated by many on the right (and some, truth to tell, on the left), but areas like critical thinking, argument formation, written and oral communication, multi-cultural experience. Ignorance doesn’t merely breed fear: it is the very essence of fear. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock.
This is a battle, but one that must be won. That’s why I’m still in the trenches. Unafraid.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
What If the Government Really Did Budget Like Families Do?
There was an interesting story on the HuffPo site by Johann Hari site a couple of days ago about the decision of Moody’s, the leading credit agency, to downgrade Ireland’s bond rating from Aa1 to Aa2. No, I don’t pretend to be economist enough to understand all the implications and repercussions (it would be nice if a few folks in Congress admitted similar ignorance), but the story caught my eye because of my affection for that country and because of Hari’s discussion of the implications of the Irish situation for the US:
A couple things intrigue me about this. One is the manifest hypocrisy of the Republicans, who exploded the deficit with their pet projects (read: tax cuts for fat-cats) but now fret about it with deep and abiding concern. Isn’t it about time somebody called “bullshit” on this tactic? Here are the facts for the last 50 years, based on figures posted on the usgovernmentspending.com website: From 1961-69, i.e. the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, federal debt as a percentage of GDP fell from 53.04% to 35.93%, a reduction of nearly a third. The Nixon/Ford years produced little change, as the percentage dropped slightly to 34.42% in 1977. The much-maligned Carter administration further reduced the rate to 31.91% in four years. By 1993, Reagan and Bush the elder had more than doubled that number to 66.17%, all the while yammering about fiscal responsibility. Then came Bill Clinton, who lowered the rate to 56.46% by 2001. Then, guess what? Along comes Bush the Lesser and the percentage shoots up to 83.29% by 2009.
In summary, then: every Democratic president in the last 50 years except Barack Obama, who inherited an economy in free-fall, has reduced the federal debt as a function of GDP. Every Republican president since (and including) the sainted Reagan has increased that debt percentage significantly. So this isn’t at all about Republicans caring a whit (or something that rhymes with “whit”) about the deficit. It’s all about budgetary priorities. If they’d admit that, I’d still disagree, but I might be able to muster a little respect (or at least less contempt) for their position.
But the other element of the Republican talking points that catches my attention is the whole conflation of government economic policy with family finances. In these difficult times, the argument goes, everyday people are being forced to tighten their belts; the government should do the same. Let’s leave aside the fallacy of considering these two fundamentally independent concepts as if they were the same thing. Let’s pretend, in other words, that the parallels are legitimate.
What, then, would the Republican strategy mean to a household? Well, they’d spend less (or they'd say they would, which isn't quite the same thing). In the world of family budgets, it probably is a good idea to put off buying the big-screen TV or the new Jacuzzi when times are tough. You might go out to eat less often, watch Netflix instead of going to the movies, keep your house a little cooler in the winter and warmer in the summer.
But there are some expenses you just can’t forgo. If you’re looking for work, cutting off your internet service might save you a few dollars in the short term, but it will also inhibit your ability to find out about job opportunities or to apply for those that do exist. If you live several miles from your place of employment, you could save money by not driving to work, but you run the risk of losing your job. If you’re a contractor, turning off your cell phone will save you perhaps $1000 a year, but prospective customers (or your telephone service) can’t contact you, and your business losses will outpace the savings. Cutting expenditures on clothes might be an option… unless you go for an interview at a place where dressing well is a job requirement. And on and on.
Similarly, fiscal responsibility in government is a good thing. Cutting back on unnecessary spending—say, a pair of bright shiny wars that have already cost nine years, over a trillion dollars (that’s $1,000,000,000,000) and over 5,000 Americans’ lives (not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani civilians who have also perished in the conflict)—might be a good idea. But refusing to spend money to stimulate job growth, to provide a safety net for those put out of work through no fault of their own, to provide short-term support for an automobile industry that directly or indirectly provides literally millions of jobs: that’s the equivalent of refusing to take your flu-ridden kid to the doctor because the credit-card bills are already kind of high.
And then, of course, there’s the income side. We don’t want any more than we’ve already got. Yes, we’re having trouble paying the bills, but collecting over half a trillion dollars (an estimated $564,000,000,000) just by allowing tax cuts on people making over $200,000 a year to expire—well, that, in Republicania, is simply beyond the Pale. Imagine if households really operated the way the Republicans say the federal government should: “No, that pay cut I took a few years ago, don’t worry about taking me back to my old income; we’ll just eat less, and my friend says sending your kids to college is over-rated, anyway.”
Don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of pork in every budget, and probably a considerable amount of our old friends Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, too. Nor does either party have a monopoly on self-righteous posturing or on prioritizing re-election over the common weal. That said, even if we buy the Republican talking point analogizing from federal spending to household budgeting, their argument just doesn’t make sense.
The Republicans want to bring this vision from Ireland… to the US. They say–yes, this is rough, yes, it hurts, but it is for a necessary purpose. If we don't do it, the bond markets will downgrade our debt and we will be even worse off. Only austerity can hold off the prospect of a debt crisis.If nothing else, I rather appreciate the phrasing of Stiglitz’s “cautionary note against deficit fetishism.” Hari also argues that:
So let's return to the truth buried in that little story on the financial pages. Ireland has been doing exactly what the Republicans urge, with a two year headstart. What are the results? Last week, a study by the International Monetary Fund nobody's idea of a left-wing pressure group—found that country’s economic collapse now “exceeds that being faced by any other advanced economy, and matches episodes of the most severe economic distress [anywhere] in post-World War Two history.”
Why? During a recession, ordinary consumers quite sensibly cut back and spend less. But if the government does the same, it means nobody is spending. This is bad enough for all the people who suffer immediately: the swelling army of the unemployed, the repossessed, the abandoned. But it turns out it makes its original goal—paying off the debt—impossible too. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains: “If you introduce austerity measures, the amount you can raise in tax falls, and welfare payments go up—so you don't have enough money to pay your debts anyway.”
When consumer spending collapses, governments need to borrow and spend to prevent a depression—and then pay off the debt from the proceeds of growth once we have brought the good times back. It's revealing that the countries that have done this hardest and fastest—like South Korea, which spent a fortune on employing people to green the country's infrastructure -- have been the first to pull out of this recession, while the countries glugging Republican-juice have sunk deeper into the gloop.Needless to say, Hari goes on to assert that “the choice today is between a deficit and a depression. It is immoral not to borrow and spend when it could revive the economy and prevent all these lives being written off.”
A couple things intrigue me about this. One is the manifest hypocrisy of the Republicans, who exploded the deficit with their pet projects (read: tax cuts for fat-cats) but now fret about it with deep and abiding concern. Isn’t it about time somebody called “bullshit” on this tactic? Here are the facts for the last 50 years, based on figures posted on the usgovernmentspending.com website: From 1961-69, i.e. the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, federal debt as a percentage of GDP fell from 53.04% to 35.93%, a reduction of nearly a third. The Nixon/Ford years produced little change, as the percentage dropped slightly to 34.42% in 1977. The much-maligned Carter administration further reduced the rate to 31.91% in four years. By 1993, Reagan and Bush the elder had more than doubled that number to 66.17%, all the while yammering about fiscal responsibility. Then came Bill Clinton, who lowered the rate to 56.46% by 2001. Then, guess what? Along comes Bush the Lesser and the percentage shoots up to 83.29% by 2009.
In summary, then: every Democratic president in the last 50 years except Barack Obama, who inherited an economy in free-fall, has reduced the federal debt as a function of GDP. Every Republican president since (and including) the sainted Reagan has increased that debt percentage significantly. So this isn’t at all about Republicans caring a whit (or something that rhymes with “whit”) about the deficit. It’s all about budgetary priorities. If they’d admit that, I’d still disagree, but I might be able to muster a little respect (or at least less contempt) for their position.
But the other element of the Republican talking points that catches my attention is the whole conflation of government economic policy with family finances. In these difficult times, the argument goes, everyday people are being forced to tighten their belts; the government should do the same. Let’s leave aside the fallacy of considering these two fundamentally independent concepts as if they were the same thing. Let’s pretend, in other words, that the parallels are legitimate.
What, then, would the Republican strategy mean to a household? Well, they’d spend less (or they'd say they would, which isn't quite the same thing). In the world of family budgets, it probably is a good idea to put off buying the big-screen TV or the new Jacuzzi when times are tough. You might go out to eat less often, watch Netflix instead of going to the movies, keep your house a little cooler in the winter and warmer in the summer.
But there are some expenses you just can’t forgo. If you’re looking for work, cutting off your internet service might save you a few dollars in the short term, but it will also inhibit your ability to find out about job opportunities or to apply for those that do exist. If you live several miles from your place of employment, you could save money by not driving to work, but you run the risk of losing your job. If you’re a contractor, turning off your cell phone will save you perhaps $1000 a year, but prospective customers (or your telephone service) can’t contact you, and your business losses will outpace the savings. Cutting expenditures on clothes might be an option… unless you go for an interview at a place where dressing well is a job requirement. And on and on.
Similarly, fiscal responsibility in government is a good thing. Cutting back on unnecessary spending—say, a pair of bright shiny wars that have already cost nine years, over a trillion dollars (that’s $1,000,000,000,000) and over 5,000 Americans’ lives (not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani civilians who have also perished in the conflict)—might be a good idea. But refusing to spend money to stimulate job growth, to provide a safety net for those put out of work through no fault of their own, to provide short-term support for an automobile industry that directly or indirectly provides literally millions of jobs: that’s the equivalent of refusing to take your flu-ridden kid to the doctor because the credit-card bills are already kind of high.
And then, of course, there’s the income side. We don’t want any more than we’ve already got. Yes, we’re having trouble paying the bills, but collecting over half a trillion dollars (an estimated $564,000,000,000) just by allowing tax cuts on people making over $200,000 a year to expire—well, that, in Republicania, is simply beyond the Pale. Imagine if households really operated the way the Republicans say the federal government should: “No, that pay cut I took a few years ago, don’t worry about taking me back to my old income; we’ll just eat less, and my friend says sending your kids to college is over-rated, anyway.”
Don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of pork in every budget, and probably a considerable amount of our old friends Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, too. Nor does either party have a monopoly on self-righteous posturing or on prioritizing re-election over the common weal. That said, even if we buy the Republican talking point analogizing from federal spending to household budgeting, their argument just doesn’t make sense.
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