Obama, failed President

When Obama came to office, I predicted that there would be a crisis point right about now. What would happen when Obama tried to be bipartisan and it become clear that his initiatives were going to be blocked by the GOP in the Senate? There were two basic paths that I saw. He could either want to succeed badly enough so that he became an actual, partisan political leader. Or he would refuse to adjust to reality, and fail.

The inaction around the recent hiccup in the health care bill, and the state of the union address, make it clear that it's most probable that he's going to fail. If he can't start to push, one year in, with his biggest initiative on the ropes, he's never going to. And the state of the union address included the amazingly pathetic

"We can't wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side -– a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of -- (applause) -- I'm speaking to both parties now. [...]

And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town -- a supermajority -- then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. So let's show the American people that we can do it together. "

So, the GOP has been obstructing every single bill, because they can. Their strategy is to let Obama do nothing. And it's working. And his response is what? To call on their better nature? It would be comical if so many actual people's lives weren't riding on it. Real leadership, at this point, has to involve shoving them out of the way. Getting rid of the filibuster, using Reconciliation for everything, stripping out their earmarks. Becoming an actual partisan, listening to and rewarding the people who trusted you and brought you to power, not indulging in yet another false equivalence of blaming your own party as much as the GOP. Real leaders are willing to make themselves look bad by actually leading.

But Obama isn't going to. So, most probably, what's going to happen? Well, of course I don't know, but these are my guesses:

1. No major legislation will pass. Neither health care nor something on global warming. A "jobs bill" will pass, but it will turn out to consist of giveaways to multinationals, with a fig leaf of clean energy put over it.

2. Most comparatively minor legislation won't pass. Overrule the Supreme Court on corporate money in politics? Yeah, right. And since Obama is going to leave Don't Ask, Don't Tell to congress and the military, that's not going to happen either.

3. 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.

4. Obama's people are barely competent enough to keep the economy from completely crashing on his watch. But there's going to continue to be 10% unemployment. His use of staggeringly damaging gestures like a spending freeze when more stimulus is needed is going to keep him from doing anything else.

5. As a result, the GOP is going to take the next Presidential election, probably with someone like Jeb Bush. At that point, the economy will crash. What people forget about wingnut policies is that they aren't just morally wrong, they also don't actually work. We'll see a quick return to Hooverism, and all the accumulated damage will come due.

What will we get after that? Who knows. But Obama has systematically destroyed the Democratic Party's credit. How can we, for example, claim to be the party in favor of civilization? Obama has adopted and confirmed Bush's use of torture, black sites, and surveillance. It's no longer a GOP aberration; he's mainstreamed it into something that both parties seemingly agree on.

What consequences does this have for activists? In the short term, it's back to the regulatory agencies. Obama has changed their leadership at the top, though they remain largely captured by industry or constrained. In the long term, the creation of alternative structures within the Democratic Party to hollow it out, since third parties are impractical under U.S. rules, and a shift insofar as possible to non-US politics. Change is still possible, far more than -- let's say -- under Bush. It's just that most of the types of change that are likely just got a lot more negative.

This was always the most likely result for Obama. I voted for him as the lesser evil, and he has been that. Things would have been worse had anyone else won. Still, history is going to look back at him as someone who, in a time of great challenge, failed his country.

What's going on

For the two people who noticed that I haven't been commenting on blogs as was my wont, I've been busy. Rather, the entire local system within which I'm embedded has been busy. Oh, all right, maybe not, but let's pretend for the moment that it isn't just me overcommitting myself.

Most political blogs don't seem to have caught what's going on in the U.S. right now. There are a lot of people in America who wrote about politics in the age of Bush because they were, rightly, very concerned about where the country was going, who don't themselves work in politics. And they seem to have generally treated this administration as more of the same. Current events to keep track of -- Republicans and lunatic, blogging, right-wingers to mock -- damage control to do -- stupid things that politicians say. And it's really not that any more.

Not because Obama is a great progressive, or anything like that. He's not. It's simply that right now, progress is possible. Ever since Reagan, everyone I know at work, often for their entire political lifetimes, has been engaged in a bitter delaying action to keep past gains from being lost. Now the system has shifted to the point where we can win new ground. And that's tremendously different.

Of course, the system I work within isn't really suited to this change. As always, we all fight the last war, using the skills polished in the prior era. For my part, I've been engaged in a flurry of what is probably best described as librarianship. Ever since sometime in July or August, when everyone I regularly work with all called at the same time and asked me to work on some project, I've programmed Web sites that allow public access to data on toxic pollution, chemical accidents, governmental finances, especially around the economic stimulus... And this material has duly been used to help people inform themselves, do activism, write news stories, aid in writing reports that conceivably may influence legislation. I have to believe that it's good work, and of course it's what I'm good at. But librarianship as a response to politics always seemed like a sort of last-ditch gesture. It's "The barbarians are coming, so let's write everything down and send it out so that someone somewhere will find out about it." It's not what is most needed now. But it's what I do.

At any rate, I'm hoping that I've finally caught up to the point where I can write non-work-related things again. Poetry, SF criticism ... blog comments.

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

A piece on Adam Roberts' book Yellow Blue Tibia.




"What do you think, Richard? Have the reviewers written useful things about this book?"

"Not that I've seen. Even Clute seemed to go through the ostensible plot, put in a few graceful adjectives--"

"Don't be so quick to say that you know about what you don't. "

"Not that again, John. OK, if we're going to talk about this, let's assume that anyone reading this knows what the book is about, doesn't care about being 'spoiled', doesn't need a plot summary..."

"All right."

"What struck me, right from the start -- you remember the scene where one of the Soviet SF writers is explaining to another that he's plagiarized all his work from Western European or American SF?"

"Yep."

"One of the titles of his plagiarized works was The Grasshopper Lies Heavy."

"OK, that's amusing. I'd guess that most SF readers would recognize that as the name of the book within a book in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. But so what?"

"So what? At first I thought, funny, so the writer within the book plagiarized PKD and used one of his titles. But he can't have, because the conversation happens when Stalin was alive and PKD didn't publish that until 1962. So the writer can't have copied PKD."

"So it's a little joke by Adam Roberts to the reader."

"No! This is a book in which one of the characters later refers to the page count by which he met one of the other characters. It's steeped in ... in ... casual metatextuality. What's the point of it?"

"I don't know, but I think you're going to tell me. Does it have to have a point?"

"Yes! It's a book about fiction, about fiction creating reality, and it's chock-full of references to famous postmodern books. Later on, there's a cop interview scene, and many reviewers wrote appreciatively about the humor in how the cop keeps turning his tape recorder on during the times when it should be off and vice versa. It's funny, sure. But he introduces himself with 'My name is Zembla'!"

"Hmm. Pale Fire was also published in 1962. But this conversation was taking place in 1986. You'd think the protagonist might have recognized the name of the cop as being something from a famous literary work."

"Maybe Soviet censorship kept it out of Russia. Maybe he didn't read anything since he gave up writing. But yeah, there's a bit too much of that; it risks making the characters look too provincial, as if they don't know about the wide world of literature, yet aren't shown as having countervailing knowledge of their own writing that's really worth knowing."

"Can you get back to the point?"

"All right. Look, I read the book while I had a fever of 101 degrees F."

"Perhaps not the best time --"

"Yeah, yeah. So I missed a lot, I'm sure. But I"m pretty sure that Gravity's Rainbow popped up in a reference to ghost rockets, there was probably something from Borges -- or there should have been -- and there were low-culture references too, in that high/low culture blend that's one of the other postmodern signatures. The male Scientologist character is a safety inspector for nuclear power plants. In other words, he has Homer Simpson's job."

"Overreading a bit, maybe."

"There's an argument a lot like the Monty Python 'How to have an argument' sketch. But all right. The two main drivers of the action are the protagonist and the other surviving one of the original group of SF writers, who has become a KGB agent. The KGB agent keeps coming back to the protagonist and insisting on having this pointless discussion with him about whether the protagonist believes in UFOs. And the protagonist -- despite being called, derisively, an ironist who doesn't believe in anything -- keeps coming back, obsessively, in little bits towards the beginning of chapters, to the idea of binary valuation. That there either are UFOs, or there aren't. And he's pretty clearly skeptical about UFOs."

"So if the KGB guy wants to actually convince him, why not show him convincing evidence?"

"I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want to -- or maybe he can't produce it. The KGB guy is a brutal killer and defender of the fading Communist regime who turns out to be right about everything, by the way. The UFOs turn out to really exist, within the book -- as far as we can trust unreliable narration. But they work by using multiple quantum realities, so binary thinking is inappropriate, so, I guess the KGB guy is right there too. And they seem to be malign, so he's justified in trying to warn and mobilize the world about them, you'd think, even if he thinks that would also work to prop up the regime."

"Justified in causing the deaths of thousands due to Chernobyl?"

"Well, let's not go down that path, either. But here's the problem of the book. The UFO believers are all more or less kooks. The Americans involved are Scientologists, and Scientologists have a special relationship to this subject. There we have a religion created by an SF writer whose most famous supposed quote is 'You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.'"

"Who knows whether he really said it?"

"Yes, who knows? It can be blurred -- everything can be blurred. Have you heard of right-wing postmodernism?"

"Oh, not this again."

"Come on, one more time. At the historical time and place in which I'm writing this -- U.S.A., 2009 -- we've just emerged from the Bush years, a time of unbridled right-wing postmodernism. One of the core elements of those years were that it didn't matter whether anything was true as long as people believed it to be true. Their belief created reality. And -- here is the particularly right-wing part -- since people in power controlled belief through mass media, people in power thought that they controlled reality."

"We saw how well that worked."

"Yes. You go along nicely until you slam into a wall."

"So what does that have to do with Yellow Blue Tibia?"

"It makes it -- difficult, I think -- to read the book for its strengths, for me, at this place, at this time. Perhaps this is an English/American difference? Look, this is a very good book in many ways. The excellent, wry dialogue, for instance, that I've clumsily copied the form but not the feel or the style of. The characterization. The initial conceit. But its ending -- love is what's important, uncertainty doesn't really have to be resolved -- just feels wrong for this time."

"But uncertainty of that sort is a tool of the aliens, who are depicted as malign."

"I guess so. But the people against them are so hopelessly doomed by history on the Soviet side, or representative of what I see as a bad part of American culture -- the disbelievers in whatever they don't want to believe, whether that's consensus history about Waco or UFOs or 9/11 or global warming or the Holocaust --"

"Hey! Godwin!"

"I guess it works if you talk to yourself long enough, too."

"Hmm. But aren't there hints the aliens are really supporting the KGB guy with their technology? He takes a fall of four stories, lands on his head, and lives, though with brain damage. Isn't that really only possible if they saved his life in the same way that they saved the protagonist's from being shot? That would mean that the aliens want there to be people against them who are unsympathetic, perhaps so that people won't believe them."

"Maybe so. I don't know. Or maybe it's some kind of reference to "major character protection" -- the way the main villain in a fiction can't ever just die. But let me get back to the thread, if anyone is still following it. Look, this is a good book. But it's the wrong book for me, right now. I suspect that what I need -- what SF needs, if I'm going to generalize my preferences -- is something like what the younger Iain Banks wrote (and hey, may write again). Something from China Mieville in a more confident mood about whether he can depict society after the revolution. Something that overreaches, because the author believes. Where they make all the appropriate writerly gestures towards there maybe being two sides to the story, or more, but in the end you know there really isn't."

"Isn't that a rather childish desire? Getting back to the grandiose, triumphialist SF that Roberts identifies with Stalin (and see The Iron Dream, etc.)?"

"It depends what it's in service of. A sort of leftist humanism? I don't see how that really goes along with genocide... of course, some might differ. But basically, I think that *literary* postmodernism took a big hit from the Bush years, at least in the U.S. Those references start to seem as dated as the Soviet culture in the book. SF, now, has to reawaken to post-post-modernism. Maybe that's what the book means."

"And you missed it because of your fever? You've gone on a really long time nevertheless."

"Oh well. What do you have to say about the book?"

"That it's an amusing book that people should read."

"That's it?"

"And it's also kind of funny that Jodi Dean, someone who parenthetically used to take a generally opposing view on literary-theoretical matters from those on The Valve, a site that Adam Roberts writes on, wrote a book about exactly this subject. Her book was called Aliens in America and it examined belief in UFOs from a postmodern viewpoint without (as far as I know) taking a position on whether the belief was really 'true' or not. Adam Roberts doesn't show any sign of knowledge of the existence of this book within Yellow Blue Tibia, so it's probably a coincidence."

"Huh."
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2007 TRI released

The latest version of the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) came out on the 19th, with RTK Net's version open a day later. This year, RTK NET's version also supplies RSEI risk screening numbers -- for the first time, an at least partial answer to the question "How important is this particular release of pollution, anyways?"

EPA continued its recent trend of downplaying the data release. I don't think that they announced they'd be releasing it far in advance -- I had to find out about it through the grapevine after it was already up. I didn't see much news about it, and the news there was was unspecific. For instance, the overall release trend was down, but PCB releases jumped 40%. Why? According to this story, for one example, "EPA said that the jump was probably due to disposal of old equipment or clean up at industrial sites." Probably? The vast majority of the increase seems to be due to one site, Chemical Waste Management in Emelle, Alabama. Why not call that facility and get the actual cause for the jump? That's one of the things that would change this from a contextless, uninvestigated number into a story that people could begin to understand.

An Open Letter to the DNC's "Organizing for America"

Dear DNC:

Why should I participate in "Organizing for America?"

That isn't a rhetorical question. My spouse received an Organizing for America pitch in the mail today, and I've read it. It tells me that the organization's mission will be to advance President Obama's legislative agenda, and to continue building the grassroots organization started during the Obama campaign.

But Obama's legislative agenda appears to be on its way towards success or failure without me. Specifically, health care reform and global climate change have both had a small group of "centrist" Democratic Senators write that they are unwilling to let them be attached to vehicles that require only 50 votes, and instead wish to let them be filibustered. If so, that means that they are almost certain not to become law. Is "Organizing for America" going to be a vehicle towards enforcing party discipline on those Senators? If not, what good is it?

President Obama has often said that he wants bipartisan solutions. I am a partisan. I do not want bipartisan solutions, not when one side is still fully committed to the failed beliefs of the Bush years. Why should I participate?

Or, to put it another way, President Obama made all sorts of concessions to the right and to the center on the recent stimulus bill. These concessions weakened the bill to the point where it will probably be ineffective as stimulus, and did not succeed politically in getting any GOP votes in the House, and only three in the Senate. Would my work be wasted and go towards similarly ineffective concessions?

If so, bluntly, what's in it for the liberals and the left? The centrists and the right held up laws that would be good for the country in order to pursue their own petty interests. As a result, their concerns were not ignored. The liberals and the left went along, and were ignored. What is President Obama going to do for his base? Is he going to announce an investigation into Bush-era war crimes? Go ahead and nationalize AIG? Perhaps reverse his shameful opinion that detainees at Bagram have no right to challenge their detention? Stop allowing his deputies to try to preserve the existing, dysfunctional banking system? Support a stronger push against climate change, rather than a relatively ineffective and easily gamed market-ideology cap-and-trade scheme?

And why is the pitch so one-way in an organizational sense? The mail that I saw didn't try to pull people into any genuinely netroots-style peer-to-peer effort. There was a pro forma URL listed -- www.democrats.org -- and a request for an Email address. The program mentioned was one of house meetings and gathering stories -- the sort of thing easily controlled centrally by the DNC. The materials repeat the false, Republican-framed claim that "Change doesn't come from Washington"': if people are supposed to take that seriously, why is this being controlled from Washington?

I invite anyone to answer. There's not much at stake: only a hundred or so dollars from me, and whatever volunteer efforts I can muster. But that's proportionally more than I've seen I've seen the DNC or the Obama administration put into this effort. Why does this deserve my support?

Regards,

Rich Puchalsky
...Read more

So much for TRI's expanded Form A

As mentioned in an article here, the return of the Toxic Release Inventory's Form A to its older reporting levels -- back to 500 pounds instead of 2000 pounds of releases, if you don't want to get technical about it -- was attached to the spending bill and signed into law. It was pretty much a race between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches to see who would get this one first after Bush left.

If you do want to get technical about it, then this particular Post article, like almost all news articles that I know something about, is misleading. A sentence reads "The legislation restores the standard established by law in 1986, compelling all facilities to inform the public of any chemical releases that total 500 pounds a year or more, lowering the 2,000-pound threshold Bush had adopted." I could see not mentioning that it was actually two thresholds that were affected (one for releases and the other for waste generated). But the standard was never set by law, in 1986 or anytime else. The law leaves it up to EPA to set a reasonable standard. That's why the threshold can change in the first place. The older Form A level, which is what we're returning to, didn't even exist at all within the law as passed in 1986 -- it was added to TRI for 1995.

Pink Triangle

Listening to a classical-strings cover of Weezer's song Pink Triangle -- used as a perfect life-stages-going-by tune -- I looked back at the lyrics to the original. It's a song in which the narrator sees a girl, falls in love, imagines marrying her, and oh noes sees she has a pink triangle on. The narrator apparently isn't able to recognize that his interest in her was as an anima figure. (The guy who wrote the song mentioned, in an interview, that this actually happened to him and he found out later that she was just wearing the triangle to show support. But of course, as he didn't say in the interview, he didn't really care about her as an actual person.)

So, that's the background for what follows. The poetry group that I read to thought it was funny, anyways. This is the second recent poem in which Silliman figures as symbol of "real poetry"; reading through his link lists must be a good carrier for his aesthetics.


Pink Triangle


When I'm filled with what I've heard
I start looking around for words
Time to pay poetic rent
Maybe I'll read The New Sentence
But when I start to feel that pull
I'm just pulling off myself
My inspiration's left unsaid
Though she lives inside my head

My muse is a lesbian
Arrangements didn't go like they should
She and I are married in my mind
But poems in my mind are no good

At least we can still be friends
Though she'll sit down and pretend
Wishing she had Patti Smith
But muses don't choose who they're with
When we're feeling bad and down
Then we'll laugh and joke around
Sometimes she'll smile and touch my hand
It's all that she can really stand

My muse is a lesbian
My poetry is always third-rate
Every poem that I like is queer
Why can I only write them straight?

Knew the day was coming that
I'd get middle-aged and fat
You need youth to be emo
Going on is how it goes
I'd rather be like Bowie
Sam Pickwick's the guy I see
Since I can't be inspired
I'll do parodies until I'm tired

My muse is a lesbian
And when we have to pass on
We'll kiss and have one final sing
Of Mr. Toad's Last Little Song
...Read more