Declining empire politics

I see that the nation has moved on from Obama's birth certificate and the question of whether he really did kill Bin Laden. Between these two poles of birtherism and deatherism, we're now at adult politics -- the question of whether or not the nation is going to raise a debt limit that is completely meaningless except insofar as it has the capability to cause various forms of self-inflicted catastrophe.

Who usually cares about debt limits? Creditors do, when they're deciding whether to give you another loan. Do the creditors of America care? No, they want to lend more money. The debt limit only functions as a political device by which politicians can pretend to do something about debts that they've already committed to paying. At least, they've already committed to them according to the U.S. Constitution, which majestically declares that the debt shall not be questioned. But everyone in power, not just anarchists like me, agrees that the Constitution is a meaningless piece of paper.

Will the posturing around the debt limit cause U.S. debt to be downgraded? Either way, only the poor will suffer. Rich people, like Congressman Cantor, routinely hedge against this kind of risk. If the debt limit raise goes through, it will probably be because some part of the social safety net has been traded away. If not, it's an opportunity for disaster capitalism. Certainly it's provided a nice show for people who'd otherwise wonder what is being done about jobs.

What else is going on? I predicted back in Jan 2010 that "At the end of Obama's term, we'll still be in a war in Afghanistan. But I'd guess that we'll pick up another war, too. It's the standard response of American Presidents whose domestic policies founder." The Libyan people thank you, Conor Foley!

And lastly, I see that Obama has taken in a record $86 million in campaign contributions, 98% of which were contributions of $250 or less. The Obama administration really is popular among the more or less left-of-center in this country. That pretty much removes the last possible check on our dysfunctional politics. I never really had much hope that Obama would change his tune because he realized that he needed support, but there was some, and he's turned out to be correct that he doesn't need to.

Anarchism now more than ever. If we're going to be ridiculous and futile, it might as well be with some class.

Go Mitt Go

America's politics is particularly bad in the Obama years. In the Bush years, you could at least say that a large minority of the country was engaged with reality, and had a coherent response to the majority. Now?

What would a coherent opposition to Obama look like? It would begin with a concerted attack on his civil liberties policies, war-making, and assumption of executive powers -- in all respects, his policies are worse than Bush's. It would continue with his failure to do anything on critical parts of his agenda, such as global warming, in which his failure makes the U.S. not a leader but one of a few laggard nations that run a real risk of causing global failure to do anything about the problem. It would certainly include his failure to bring the U.S. up to First-World standards for unionization and health care, areas in which he not only failed the citizenry in general but more particularly and directly sabotaged his base in favor of elite interests. And it would conclude with his failure, in the face of those same interests, to bring the country back from sustained mass unemployment.

What does the actual opposition to Obama look like? It begins with questioning his birth certificate. It continues with crudely racist tracts, conspiracy theories in which he didn't really kill the enemies of the state that he said that he killed, and his supposed disinclination to torture people as much as they should be tortured to keep us safe. It claims that the science behind global warming is a fraud and that Obama's watered-down health care scheme is socialism. And it concludes with discredited Hooverite economics that would make unemployment worse -- if the proponents of it didn't succeed in making the crisis worse much more quickly by refusing to pay the government's debts.

I've written many times that Obama has been lucky in his enemies. In a declining empire, there are no good choices. But Obama is certainly preferable to outright racist craziness.

That's why Mitt Romney's candidacy is interesting. He is, as far as I know, the only major GOP candidate who isn't a global warming denier. And I was interested to see this political ad (linked to by Duncan Black). He's actually attacking Obama on unemployment. Who cares that the ad is misleading? He's going there.

The criticisms of Romney tend to be that he flip-flops and says anything that his audience wants to hear -- as far as I'm concerned, that's a necessary quality in a politician. Perhaps if Romney wins the nomination, a more serious criticism of Obama might emerge. I have no illusions about any of his policies, if elected, being any better than Obama's. They'd probably be worse. But if his narrative becomes more of the opposition narrative, instead of birtherism, global warming denialism, and crackpot Hooverism, that'll be good for what remains of the country.

Snow Storm

Snow Storm Massachusetts June 2011
(after this radio spot)

1.

You ever imagine shooting a kid? Getting sent to Iraq
for one tour after another and straight up shooting a ten year old?
Ten years old if you're lucky
They've got to slow down at those checkpoints
And if they don't you have to blow them away, those are the rules
And sometimes really young kids get shot up in the car

I heard the ad on the radio, driving down the highway:
Two young men driving in a snow storm, rescuing cars, thrilled
“Ever imagine anything like this would happen when you joined the Guard?”
“Rescuing people – now that's what I imagined when I joined”

Man, you've been driving blind your whole short life if you believe that

2.

Rescuing people – that's what I imagine
Desperate kids, naïve kids
Telling them to slow down
Telling them they're gonna get driven overseas
The Massachusetts Broadcasters Association has a special radio spot for that too
People who tell you to stop are whiny, controlling, female like your mom

3.

Imagining being a rescuer is good, isn't it?
I want the firefighters to be there for the next tornado
And so does everyone and that's why the evil people use it, you can't stop it
Evil is best, purest, when it uses good intentions

We're heading blind down the highway into the storm
And you can't rescue every kid who wants to go fast in snow
So people who know what they can see
Stop, pull over, watch the doomed drive off, hear the crash in the distance

4.

Standing there silently, like a jerk
While a good person listens to an evil voice
And does what's going to destroy them forever
Because you can't do anything else
Isn't that what God does?
Isn't that the closest that we get to God?

More about suckers

As if to prove that my opinions are the exact rehash of an axis loosely defined around Duncan Black and Heather Parton, there's been a recent article about liberals as suckers. Since linkrot will undoubtedly make anything on the Washington Post's web site go away soon, it's by Sally Kohn, and has the unwieldy title "Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant. Are they really just suckers?" Sample quote:

What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength — our deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches.

In a word, no. That misses the point. As does digby's discussion of the article. The problem is not that liberals are being suckers in their negotiations with the Right. The problem is that they are being suckers in their negotiations with their own leadership.

The article assumes that Obama and ordinary progressives/liberals have the same interests, and the same mindset, so that if Obama is mushy in his talks with the GOP, it's just another example of liberals not being firm enough in defending their beliefs. Their mindset is assumed to be the same as his. Or, in a slight variation, Obama isn't firm because ordinary liberals don't want him to be. That may be true, for all I know, but also misses the point. Obama's interests, and Democratic leadership interests more generally, are not the same as those of the people who they purport to speak for.

Obama wants what's good for him. Some leaders might be motivated by loyalty downwards, but it's become abundantly clear that Obama has none. But that's a distraction too. Institutionally, the Democratic Party has to please powerful constituencies that have a lot more leverage than the liberals/progressives, who can be safely written off as having to support the party no matter what. The same isn't true of the banks.

This is a very typical agency problem, and as is typical of our society, which is increasingly dominated by elites, it's handled badly. Look at corporations and their management, say. Are the interests of management really aligned with the interests of shareholders? Or look at the way that high unemployment just isn't a problem for elites in America at all.

The only way that liberals can get Democratic leadership's interests to align with theirs is to credibly threaten to make them lose. It's not hard to understand at all. Liberals have no leverage over the Right, who are going to keep on doing their own crazy thing without asking whether liberals approve of it or not. Ordinary liberals have no way to "get tough" with the Right in a legislative sense, because they aren't legislators. America is a representative democracy, after all, not a direct one. They can only help to choose the people who will do the actual legislative or executive negotiating. And it's that interface between voters and Democratic pols that they've been complete suckers with regard to. All the leadership has to do is utter one more bleat about "look how crazy the GOP is!" And yes, they are crazy, and the Dem leadership has been very lucky to have such crazy opposition. But if the base is always going to blink first, well -- we know how that goes.

Would a re-run of the Bush years be bad? Yes, it would. Would it be worse than the Obama years -- which codify everything that Bush did wrong, make it bipartisan, and ensure that liberals can never win even with the best possible electoral result, in exchange for a few token victories? No, I'm not sure if they would. Before Obama, liberals at least had hope in the electoral process. Now there is none.

Edited to add: obligatory Greenwald. Obama really is a con man who is systematically doing everything that he promised differentiated him from Bush. But so what? In our culture, con men are admirable. The people who we have contempt for are the suckers who let the con men get away with it. See, for instance, any movie about cons.

Suckers are a bore

Looks like Greenwald agrees with me, instead of vice versa! No, not really. But what he writes here is what I (and other people of course) have been writing since Year One of Obama. There is nowhere for the loyal progressive to go. Obama will not only not listen to them, he will actively work against them in order to gain credibility as a moderate.

I've already listed the consequences for the upcoming Presidential election. There is now nothing that progressives in the U.S. can do, at the national level, that will not hurt them in the near term. Oppose Obama, and they get blamed if he loses, derided as of no account if he wins. Support him, and get less than nothing if he loses, and he returns to hippie punching nonstop if he wins. "Hippie punching" is a good descriptive phrase, but in more serious terms this means starting wars, killing and torturing people, and generally shredding civil liberties, as well as completely failing to do anything about global warming.

A lot of Greenwald's article is well-worn themes (to me, anyways) about how the GOP didn't force Obama into this, and how Congress didn't force Obama into this. When he e.g. refuses to close Guantanimo, it's because he doesn't want to, not because he can't. He's a failure as a President both on the principled and pragmatic levels. Where I disagree with Greenwald is where Greenwald writes that a rational politician would of course kick his base when it brings a benefit and no cost. I know that Greenwald is writing rhetorically, but that is "rational" in the same way as a lot of short-term economic thinking is rational. Politicians don't obtain long-term success for their policies by alienating their base.

What can progressives do at this point? Well, the two readers of my blog know what I did -- I became some kind of anarchist. (I'll write more about that sometime, after delicate spousal negotiations about what we can do with our joint resources towards what is essentially a side interest of mine.) This does as much nothing as continuing to be a progressive does, but it at least does not involve being a sucker.

I've seen some progressives come up with various Rube Goldberg plans -- support Obama later, but not now, or do electoral politics only at the state and local level. I know of precisely one jurisdiction, Wisconsin, where state politics seems worthwhile at the moment because of its ability to send a general message. Otherwise? Well, maybe.

A lot of the discussions that progressives and the left generally are having strike me as the same "failure is not an option" nonsense that (digby, was it?) criticized so trenchantly around the Iraq War. Failure is certainly an option. "Failure is not an option" is one thing that people who suffer from terminal diseases say on their way to acceptance. The U.S. in particular is well on its way to failure on a variety of levels, a failure that Obama has only exacerbated by failing to provide a real choice.

If failure looks likely, then really all you can do is hope for a lucky break. If that break comes, do you want it to be wasted by absorbing whatever energy there is right back into the support of some other Democratic pol, who will use it to maintain the same failed system? Or, if we're reduced to hoping for a break, why not hope for a larger one?

The title of this post is from one of my poems, written during the Bush era, but even more relevant now. Don't blame Obama, enablers. Of course people look up to a successful con. Just decide to not be a sucker next time.

No use to blame the con men
We're heard it all before
Everybody loves a con
But suckers are a bore

On learning to read Adam Roberts

I should write at the outset that I don't pretend to have a handy guide to how to read Adam Roberts. This is mostly a response to Paul Kincaid's blog post here.

Paul Kincaid describes an interpretive tool that may work for his own reading: Roberts writes Menippean satire. There's something to be said for that. Certain elements of the satire are there: fragmented narrative, the rapid movement between styles, the use of the picaresque, satirical commentary. Kincaid seems to me to be certainly right that many of Roberts' books work as satires of SF. (See, e.g., my piece here on Splinter.) But. The concept of the Menippean satire comes with a lot of baggage that doesn't seem to apply, and doesn't include a good deal of what I see as being there. The concept may work perfectly well for Paul Kincaid, who states upfront that he has trouble reading Roberts, but as a fan writer who's written a good deal about Roberts' work, it's not how I think he is best read.

Roberts' works seem to me to be best described as experimental novels. They would be avant-garde if there was now any literary garde to be in the avant of. Kincaid writes at the start of his post that "I don’t believe the set up, I don’t believe the characters, the plots seem an exercise in artificiality." Well, yes, sometimes they do. Adam Roberts, if I can resort to biographical criticism, is a professor and historian of SF who has read a tremendous number of SF works. The Ideal Author of his books, to revert to how they appear to me to be written, is not someone who wants to write a seamless set-up, believable characters, and realistic plots. Those elements of writerly technique have long since been turned into routine. Although I admire the craftsperson who can successfully carry out this routine, I'm really more interested in attempts to do something else.

What is the "something else" that Roberts attempts? His novels seem to me to be characterized by a high degree of formal structure coupled with underdetermination of what that structure means.

In Swiftly, in another passage that Kincaid had trouble with, we see Eleanor before and after a big gap in her described life, and she appears to be almost two different people in the two sections of the book. One could write a middle section of the book that explains the transition from one Eleanor to the other. But that would remove what Roberts is calling attention to: the gap itself, which the reader can and must fill in with their own narrative. "Blood in the gutter" is a comic-book critical phrase referring to the space between one comic book panel and the next, which the reader must fill in out of their imagination. By making the gaps in action small enough so that readers ideally never notice them, authors create "realistic characters". But what they are doing is pretending that they are doing the work that they are actually trying to get the reader to do. Swiftly is a formal balance with a beginning and an afterwards around a gap, and wouldn't work without it.

Does this kind of thing always work? No. Sometimes Roberts may attempt a bit too much at once. Yellow Blue Tibia might have had a bit less of the (yes, distracting) pseudo-Aspergers sidekick character if it hadn't been "how about a metafiction about Soviet SF coming true" mixed with "what would an action movie hero look like if he was old and plunked into a pseudorealistic setting". But experiments are experiments: some work and some don't. Literary experiments are better than scientific ones because literary experiments work for some people and don't work for others. Jonathan McCalmont wrote some excellent criticism of New Model Army that takes the same changes in viewpoint that Paul Kincaid notes and turns them into a sort of satire of SF yet again, "a cultural blueprint for the entire genre."

Do I think that Roberts intended to write the book that McCalmont read? No, not exactly. They are, to repeat myself, books with strong formal elements coupled with underdetermination of what those elements mean. In other words, they're wonderful toys, full of moving parts that don't do obvious things, made to order for a critic to play with and come up with a reading. I can understand why a bit of puzzlement is common when reading Roberts. If New Model Army is supposed to sit on the bookshelf shelves next to, oh, Lois Bujold, or Vernor Vinge, then why doesn't it keep the same viewpoint throughout? Why the scene "which feels like an intrusion from a different work altogether," to quote Kincaid? Write the thing in an accepted military-SF style throughout and then it'll be normal. But it's really supposed to sit on the shelves that hold, say, Aldiss' Report on Probability A.

Kincaid comes close to picking up on what I find interesting about Roberts' work. But a satire of the kind that Kincaid envisions is organized around a purpose. That purpose doesn't seem to me to be at the heart of these works. These are writerly artifacts, and while some of them work as satires -- Roberts writes what he knows, and what he knows is SF -- they do not seem to me to pick out a direction and then set out to guide the reader along it.

Progress

With the repeal of DADT, gay and lesbian people can now proudly and openly murder civilians along with the rest of our armed forces. Equality and civil rights!

However, since the DREAM act was defeated, illegal brown people can not become citizens through their military service. They have to be tracked down and deported as soon as they're done shooting other brown people. But the long arc of the sniper's bullet bends towards justice, and we can all hope that soon everyone who serves in our imperial legions will gain full citizenship.