Category Archives: culture

snakes in the temple

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Den of Thieves: Yesterday, The Friends of Jake sent me to this little essay on the current financial crisis by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite. On the present consequences of what supply siders now piously call moral hazard, Thistlethwaite quotes James K. Galbraith.

Deregulation has been the public faith of the financial sector since Reagan. Under Bush II, waves of predatory finance in housing were aggressively promoted by Alan Greenspan, by McCain’s closest economic adviser Phil Gramm, and by so-called regulators who systematically subvert the public interest.

Phil Gramm has recently been in the news with a claim that Americans are a nation of whiners. He was referring to folks like me who didn’t think the economy was booming, having seen their property values and retirement accounts deteriorate and having noticed a steady increase in the cost of goods and services while wages remained flat and jobs were lost forever. With regard to Gramm and others whose faith in the sovereignty of markets knows no bounds, Thistlethwaite adds:

Markets are not ethical instruments; they are not “self-regulating.” Markets are driven by the drive for acquisition. Regulations are designed to limit destruction wrought by greed, while not stifling the productivity of markets.

The moral failure here is that those who were charged with protecting the public interest from runaway greed and unfair lending practices instead have shown that they are the ringleaders of the Den of Thieves.

The Public Interest, what a quaint, old-fashioned phrase! Now the public interest must apparently be served by adding another half trillion dollars to the federal deficit, already bloated with the present cost of the president’s ill-fated wars (this says nothing about what Bush’s adventures will ultimately cost). Still, it’s nice to see the president and his lieutenants return to pragmatism and consultation with congress instead of strutting and proclaiming their patriotism on every hand.

Jezus es kufarok (Jesus and the traders): I have to digress now and say that thinking of the biblical background of Thistlewaite’s essay (the story of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple, told variously in three canonical gospels and the Gopspel of Thomas)* has reminded me of singing Kodály’s great motet based on the New Testament accounts when I was in high school. Here’s just a fragment, part of the central fugue lifted from a performance by The Danish National Radio Choir. You can hear a performance in English here, though it drags a bit for my taste and it’s an abridgement. Of course, we sang the piece in English in my high-school choir.

Memorials: Today’s New York Times carries a review of last Thursday’s Metropolitan Opera performance of the Verdi Requiem as a memorial to Luciano Pavarotti. The reviewer points to Pavarotti’s long-ago recording of the Requiem with Georg Solti as particularly excellent. Here’s a very young Pavarotti singing the Ingemisco with Herbert von Karajan, whom you have to watch a little, unfortunately, but it’s beautifully sung.

The reviewer for last Thursday’s Requiem was Times chief music critic, Anthony Tommasini. Six years or so ago, Tommasini urged Pavarotti to retire, in print. It’s nice that Tommasini’s review of this present concert gives those of us who loved Luciano when he was young an opportunity to remember him at his best.

*I like John Dominic Crossan’s reading of the various accounts. See Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, (New York: 1994), pp. 130ff.

lay that pistol down, babe; don’t shoot that snow snake

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I remember a story, my mother used to tell when we were all younger, and she was still in the world, to the effect that my father would stop and shoot snakes on the roadways in New Mexico because they could get inside your car. Last evening at dinner with friends from North Dakota I learned what snow snakes are and also heard some good stories about canny Norwegians and innocent city folk that it wouldn’t do to tell here, even though this is my blog and I can say anything I please without fear of censorship from Stanley Fish or anybody else.

New Obama ad: Well, my guy is speaking forcefully about the economy, and he has a new two-minute ad that is forthright and direct. I’m grateful to Ben Smith at Politico for the reference.

The comment thread for this ad at Politico is also interesting. Both positive and negative comments echo campaign themes. Read it all here.

Elitism turned: and in what seems like one more chorus of a tired, old song, The Huffington Post is carrying a story today to the effect that Lynn Forester de Rothschild, one of Hilary Clinton’s top fundraisers, is switching her support to McCain. Obama is arrogant, says Rothschild, who is “a member of the DNC’s Democrats Abroad chapter and splits her time living in London and New York.” He (Obama) “has a problem connecting with average Americans.” How would Rothschild know?

Palin and Pegler: Robert Kennedy, Jr. notes Sarah Palin’s now infamous quotation from Westbrook Pegler as follows:

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.

But I wonder if Palin knew that she was quoting Pegler or even who Pegler was. I suspect she didn’t.

David Brooks, again: The Huffington Post reports David Brooks to have written that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be Vice President. Well, maybe. But Brooks still can’t give up on the theme that those of us on the left who don’t think Palin is qualified are snobs. “Sarah Palin has many virtues,” Brooks writes:

If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Sounds like a claim that Palin isn’t qualified because she lacks experience and prudence, Brooks’s main themes. But here’s Brooks’s final paragraph, which seems to take the edge off the critique.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

Now that could be a swipe at Obama as much as at Palin, it seems to me. Brooks is no democrat (note the small d); and however elegant his reasoning in most of this piece, and it is (mostly) elegant, he can’t credit the negative reaction to Palin from the left with any validity. “The idea that ‘the people’ will take on and destroy ‘the establishment’ is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right.” How droll. I sometimes think Brooks never met a stereotype he didn’t like.

“If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman.” No sh*t! as my ex mother-in-law used to say. Palin’s actual performance in office doesn’t justify Brooks’s enthusiasm — I suspect he knows it. And in spite of today’s reports of a lawsuit attempting to stop the Alaska trooper investigation, Palin’s own administrations in both Wasilla and Juneau are beginning to look a lot like corrupt establishments, themselves.

Brooks should realize that the candidate whose prudence he should question is John McCain.

Dukakis replayed?

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I’m grateful to Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith at Politico for putting me onto this video.

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a piece by Shankar Vedantem reporting on some recent research into the power of political misinformation.

But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people’s minds after it has been debunked — even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.

It’s worth reading — I find myself wanting to see the whole study. And I also find myself wondering what it says about a democratic system such as ours that people not may not take the trouble to become informed about the facts of a matter, but may actually prefer to be misinformed.

and as if Tina Fey weren’t enough for your average Monday,

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Garrison Keillor has a wonderful Salon column today about how the Republicans are running against themselves. I especially like this couple of paragraphs, in light of all the sneering and hand-wringing about elitism I’ve encountered lately.

. . . [A] former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, “I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you.”

In school, you couldn’t get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don’t uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

Right on!

And while I’m at it, here’s David Brooks scolding my guy for failing to correct the manners of vicious liberals.

. . . [Obama] needs to attack the snobs who are savaging Sarah Palin’s faith and family. Many liberals claim to love working-class families, but the moment they glimpse a hunter with an uneven college record, they hop on chairs and call for disinfectant. Obama needs to attack Bill Maher for calling her a stewardess and the rest of the coastal condescenders.

As a former hunter (in my childhood and youth) with an uneven college record, I can testify that no liberal has ever sprayed me with disinfectant. Nor has Bill Maher ever called me a stewardess. My neck is as red as the next man’s, but I am a proud liberal and member of the religious left, though I don’t believe in God in a creedal sense. In my checquered life I have managed to read a few books and perhaps learned a thing or two. My beloved, who is a real professor, tells me that I am an intellectual (though she may agree with Margaret Soltan that few professors are such). If this is true I got to be an intellectual over a long time and as a result of some honest labor. I don’t share most fashionable contempt for the professorial class (of which I am generically a member, having spent most of my adult life teaching and working in universities), though I do think the concerns of many academics are pretty parochial.

I’m thinking of writing something about the reconstituted culture wars here, and may do so soon. Today, I merely observe that Brooks’s comment about “coastal condescenders” is a self-indulgent piece of stereotyping to which Michael Kinsley quite rightly objects. Soltan doesn’t like Kinsley’s argument, but I rather do. And about the culture wars, Tim Burke has been writing some good posts recently. You can read a couple of them here and here.