Category Archives: culture

Anger management, anyone?

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It’s a bird! it’s a plane! No, it’s the new Dodge Challenger, flags a-flying, mowing down a column of hapless redcoats as Americans in powdered wigs get cars and freedom right. You Betcha!

And to think it was only yesterday the American taxpayer, via the despised American government, bailed Chrysler out of the hole its enlightened free-enterpriser managers had dug for it. Chrysler ought to be a poster child for the economic failures of the past thirty years, sleaze upon sleaze. And now here’s more.

But it isn’t just Chrysler. There’s a trend, and where there’s a trend there’s an advertiser trying to take advantage of it. It’s the American way. According to a Washington Post story today,

Spokeswoman Dianna Gutierrez declined to say whether the Challenger commercial — which the company timed to appear during the World Cup soccer match between the United States and England — was aimed at buyers who are sore about the bailout.

But, sensitive to the fact that taxpayers helped pay for the slick new ad, she said Chrysler saved money by using costumes left over from an old Mel Gibson movie.

The same story puts the amount American taxpayers have paid Chrysler at “more than $7 billion.” A recent ABC News story under Diane Sawyer’s byline puts the figure at $22 billion. That’s a lot of “more than.” How interesting that management at Chrysler now seeks to exploit free-floating anger. Maybe the next thing will be pre-installed gun racks as standard equipment in Dodge pickups or other exploitation of more targeted forms of rage. There’s plenty of good stuff in Mel Gibson’s trash, after all, real tea party stuff.

the snake’s the thing . . .

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This is another “Let’s talk about snakes” post in honor of one of my graduate school professors who had a favorite schtick that began with that expression. I’ve written only fifteen of these in the three-year history of this blog, and it’s been a year since the last one. I should likely do better than that, especially since my habit of using the word, snakes, in a figure of speech that bears on some part of the post’s content is always a challenge to my ingenuity. So here goes:

Summer entertainments: We’ve been making the rounds of community arts events in the city this summer more than in some past years. A “Jungle Boogie” concert at the St. Louis Zoo was wonderful fun back at the end of May and introduced us to the Ralph Butler Band. At the Shakespeare Festival in Forest Park, we saw an excellent Hamlet, with no gimmicks other than Shakespeare’s own. We also took in two summer operas, The Marriage of Figaro and Eugene Onegin at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In spite of a few sublime musical moments, Figaro is a silly opera. Some performances try to recapture some of the social satire lost in Da Ponte’s adaptation of Beaumarchais, but the Opera Theatre’s productiom leaned pretty heavily on soubrette and buffo clichés and stage business that did little to distract one’s attention from the silliness, and vocally the performance was pretty lackluster. The Onegin was better. The cast’s powerful voices and Tchaikovski’s music almost lent credence to Pushkin’s poetic melodrama. The performance of Russian-American soprano, Dina Kuznetsova as Tatiana, was exceptional among fine performances by all the lead singers.

The Biden Leaks: Ben Smith at Politico passes on information about how Vice Preaident Biden’s views on the Afghan war were leaked recently. So—if you’re an administration operative and you don’t like some policy your bosses are pursuing, all you have to do is leak information that among your bosses somebody is disagreeing. I’m not always in favor of punishing leakers, but this is a time when I think somebody (maybe more than one somebody) should be fired.

Old time religion: It’s fitting to remember as we celebrate Independence Day that Jefferson’s ringing claim of god-given rights didn’t extend even to all men, in his own time and afterwards for generations, even for generations after we fought a bloody civil war over slavery. And if we needed reminding, the posting of portions of Samuel Seabuty’s infamous defense of slavery over at Episcopal Café should do the trick. I think it is the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other theological conservatives that the gospel as understood by past ages is sufficient in the present. That view doesn’t survive much inspection of the past, when Christian churches and theologians justified slavery and the vilest anti-Semitism, and that’s only a part of the foreground. Friends have recently returned from President Obama’s home state of Hawaii, where they saw striking reminders of the inequality nourished and fostered there by an iniquitous cabal of missionaries and planters—not exactly the home of the brave, to quote Justice Scalia in another context.

A purloined letter: Over a year ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In light of recent events that I may write about one of these days, I took a look at an old blog post that linked to that letter the other day. Imagine my distress when I discovered that the link turned up this. Talk about dead letters! But today I’m happy to report that my letter is still accessible at the Post, though it is now in a different place. Indeed the listing of my letter amongst regular articles in the paper makes me feel less snake bit.

—though I didn’t exactly get a byline . . .

missing limbs

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An email exchange has reminded me that much of today’s news seems to be saying something about the limits of power. Tim Burke has a good piece about this on his blog today, entitled “The Gods that Underachieved.”

The peculiarity of our time is that people all around the planet know that the high modernist state failed to live up to its promises of the perfected management of human societies through technocracy. Those who live in democratic societies know that their progress towards being fairer, more just or more open is at best stalled. Those who live in authoritarian societies must increasingly wonder at whether change can ever come, as the one area where the capacity of the contemporary nation-state continues to show improvement is its ability to mobilize violence against its own citizens and to manage their dissent.

Tim compares the modern technocratic state to a phantom limb. We know it’s gone, but we keep expecting it to be there and to serve our needs. Unscrupulous politicians manipulate our expectations by demanding results they know are impossible in a crisis and blaming the crisis on alleged inaction that would have produced those results, all the while claiming they themselves would have resolved the crisis had it been their job to do so and charging the state with government overreach however it acts. One can read the outlines of this analysis in the orchestrated Republican arguments about the Gulf Coast oil spill, the current and continuing financial crisis, and the Arizona immigration furor, to name a few sites of contention.

I’ve been thinking with respect to the oil spill and the financial crisis that we may be up against a twenty-first century phenomenon. If the technocratic state failed us in the last century, this century seems to be unfolding as a time when our knowledge will fail us. Of course, if knowledge is power, as the truism has held at least since Bacon, we may be in the second phase of the emptying out of our age’s popular faith in technology. But it’s frightening to think that we don’t know the extent of the Gulf Coast oil spill or whether we possess technology adequate to cope with it. And it’s even more frightening to think that we don’t know the extent of the present financial crisis worldwide, or whether we understand how to deal with it, let alone fix it.

who cannot emote?

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Representative Joe Barton has now apologized for his apology, but his original charge of a shakedown of innocent BP management by a bullying Obama administration still stands as a marker of the hypocrisy of present-day conservatism. I’ve never bought the right’s claim to support limited government. Big government is fine with the right as long as it fights wars, restricts civil liberties, and skews the tax system to benefit entrenched privilege.

Actions, as my grandmother was fond of saying, speak louder than words. From health care legislation to recent supreme court decisions, right wing politicians in both parties have forced continuation of the dysfunctional marriage between the state and established wealth that has characterized US public policy throughout our history. This marriage, exemplified now for us in a series of public disasters wrought by corporate malfeasance, has currently produced greater inequality in this country than obtains anywhere in Europe; and it is this marriage, together with the various political and social inequalities it supports and maintains, that present-day conservatism seeks to preserve against the advance of cultural change exemplified by the election of Barack Obama.

In 2004 the American Political Science Association (APSA) issued a report entitled American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality that concluded in part:

Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequalities. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations, and gaps between races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed.

In this week’s issue of The Nation, a poignant letter to the editor underlines the point. Alice Skirtz, a casework supervisor at the Family Shelter Partnership in Cincinnati points to the growth of populations for whom “homeless shelters are lifesaving.”

If things proceed as they did in the 1980s, when the masses of Ronald Reagan’s “new poor” exploded, we can next expect the “basement dwellers,” followed by people from suburbia with foreclosures of their own. They will compete for precious shelter beds with the post-PRWORA [Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996] families stranded for lack of affordable housing.

The Moynihan Report, that influenced PRWORA, “the end of welfare as we know it” during the Clinton era, is now widely regarded as racist, its consequent greater isolation and enslavement of the poor yet another accomplishment of the US marriage between wealth and the state. But right-wing supporters of the document continue to condemn its feminist critics. Here’s the final paragraph of a recent diatribe by Rich Lowry in the National Review:

“There is one unmistakable lesson in American history,” Moynihan wrote, “a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.” It’s a statement just as true and nearly as unwelcome as it was four decades ago.

 

Voices on the left sometimes reflect a failure to understand the tensions and dilemmas of present-day political animus. Today, Richard Cohen added some words to the growing chorus of demands that President Obama get mad at something. Cohen will give the president his choice among several objects of anger, including China and Russia—Cohen is an old cold warrior and Israel hawk—but he mostly thinks the president’s putative coolness prevents the rest of us from knowing “who he is.” As far as I”m aware, this particular critique of the president was first offered by Shelby Steele back before the 2008 election. Steele’s little book about then candidate Obama was entitled in part, A Bound Man . . . . Though I didn’t accept its conclusion, I thought its title suggestive. It reminded me of a short story by Ilse Aichinger in which the protagonist learns to function within constraint and finds great freedom in his condition. I said of candidate Obama then, that I thought his individuality consisted “in a complex and dynamic adaptation to the constraints imposed by a particular situatedness.” As my friend Tim Burke put it in a paragraph I quoted:

This is what politics is, what politics has to be. This is what transformation needs. Otherwise, the best you can hope for are momentary, transient achievements that are destined to be reversed almost as soon as they are accomplished. There isn’t enough power in the greatest political mobilization imaginable to abolish significant groups of people who experience history and society differently than you and people like you experience it.

And even if there were that much power, as from time to time in modern history there has been, I wouldn’t want it to be exercised. Cohen gratuitously and condescendingly gives the president a pedigree right out of the Moynihan Report and suggests that both the president’s situatedness and his intellect are weaknesses. I profoundly disagree with this claim.

Actions speak louder than words. Richard Cohen and the perhaps liberal savoyards around him in the chorus implore the president to lose his cool and smite the wicked whilst conservatives sound another theme accusing him of shaking down BP. That the conservative accusation didn’t play very well tells me more than the accusation did. While others see a president who needs to “emote,” as Cohen puts it, I see a president battling entrenched privilege with a cool pragmatism that seeks to coopt its concerns and transform them.