take a load off

all right people, no more post-election bitterness, just settle down with one of these lovely Middle East - War Movies... I recommend this one:

damn those tenured radicals

According to the NY Times , the Republicans want not only to rule the airwaves, dictate our color combinations, fill the airspace with Fox News lies, they want our PATHETIC ACADEMIC jobs too. Well I've got some news for the conservative students' groups and Kelly Coyne in particular, quoted in this article -- conservatives are usually greedier than lefties -- and bizarrely enough, are usually not willing to accept the pathetic pay scale of the professoriate in addition to not being willing to go to graduate school and spend their twenties in PENURY. If you're conservative, some one is going to pay you a lot of money to spout your views --and you'll be recruited straight out of your college years.

I saw this happen in the Literature Major at Yale. The neo-cons took their own in, gave them cushy jobs in finance, consulting, think tanks, whatever, while the Lefties went to graduate school or journalism and activist groups. We were paid badly, but expected to keep up appearances.

You've got the House, the Senate, the Airwaves, the Presidency, -- now you want the University too!

But with the shoot ourselves in the foot skills that my academic brethren usually show, they will probablly cede this institution to the Right wing as well. And with the willingness of the Conservative philanthropists to throw money at fronts the Culture War in their endless battle against critical thinking, they'll probably buy enough brain time in the young to produce a whole crop of Dinesh D'Souzas and Allan Bloom/Milton Friedman clones.

If you think Tenured Radicals share an ideology, think again -- my colleagues at Minnesota hated each other with a primitive intensity I thought went out of style when Zeus replaced his father as the head of the Olympian Gods. I've never seen anyone go at each other like Marxist on Marxist, or post-colonialist on post-colonialist.

Perhaps the Right can keep some of us for gladiatorial spectacles or academic death matches -- where cheering crowds of NASCAR moms and dads watch as we take each other down, Andy Kaufman style.

Playing the Left

Sign up for your roles right now.

the infalllibles

In my day at the big state University where I taught for almost ten years, I once had to read a former's chair's self-assessment. Very revealing document insofar as it chimed in well with Bush's answer to a reporter's question, "Can you think of any mistakes you've made in the past four years?"

Bush said after a moment, "No."

My former chair when asked in his self-assessment if he could name any mistakes or weaknesses replied in the same manner as our President, perhaps a little less tersely.

Well, it must be REALLY fucking nice to be infallible, because I thought that it was only your Christian God who could make such a claim, but I must be WRONG. Silly me. Obviously, I'm not INFALLIBLE.

So now, for our new job description for positions of power in these United States: "Needed: Inflexible son of a bitch who believes in his own infallibility. Will know no self-doubt. Experienced at surrounding himself with "yes-men" and "women." Thin-skinned, self-righteous. Will demand absolute loyalty and ass-kissing from followers.Lies without blinking. Ready to purge dissenters as disloyal."

Have you hugged an authoritarian personality today?

election analysis paralysis

At the risk of dwelling on a topic that was shot down by the election
- the economy and its relation to the people's decision for this or
against that candidate - I took a cursory look at Wall Street
reactions (I mean intelligent comments, not hoorays, guffahs, and
other knee-jerks) to the election. Mostly, analysts have exercised
remarkable restraint - as if to say, so what.

Can this be right? While television spent tens of thousands of
program hours on pre- and post-election analysis, and the nation's
newspapers slaughtered entire forests to ship copious copy of
punditry, talking points, stump phrases and op-ed wisdom, the most
highly paid analysts in the country just shrug?

Indeed. They're not paid to take up airspace - they're looking for
calculable effects. How much influence does any president have on the
things that matter to financial analysis? Consumer debt, home prices
and the trade deficit are largely not within the power of the U.S.
President to solve. You may want to believe that an oil team in the
White House can control oil prices, but the reality is, they may
share that pipe-dream, but they still don't control oil. Does the
choice of president directly influence hiring and firing in the US
job markets? Hard to quantify how and why. Corporate capital
expenditure? About all of these it's easy to speculate how elections
might inflect results - but it's all just hot air.

Welcome to the distraction economy. Unless you're a media analyst
devoted to figuring out how many policy blogs Google can spider
before getting bogged down, or bent on pushing the still barely
tolerable ratio of highly priced advertising to mindlessly repetitive
posturing by talking heads, the election, for now, has nothing to do
with high finance, and to that extent, the voters perhaps correctly
ignored the economy and focused on the horror of dudes kissing.

However, once you remember that the Bush program - self-directed
social security funding, combined with lower income taxes for the
investor class, a low dividend tax rate and encouragements for
dividends - should spell out future demand for investments, you
realize that of course the election has economic consequences. Where
is the analysis? Not on the blogs; not in the papers; not on
television. - But enough already about the election. This is not a
policy blog, after all...

cold civil war

because you asked, anon, lemme tellya, if you don't go over 80 mph, the continuity becomes evident from tennessee to texas. what do they drink, you ask? they are drinking weak, but sugary brew in the day ("want mo' sweet tea, hon?") and weak hops at night ("beer built this body"). they like meat. for about 2000 miles, a staggering number of cattle are the big roadside attraction along the I-40. forget the old route 66, which tries to hide its wrinkly face alongside much of the same geography. once you get to arkansas, people show that girth is nothing: you gotta have heft. oklahoma and texas even look red: the very soil is ocher. I was glad to see snow in new mexico, just because it added a new color to the windshield panorama. everything yellows in arizona, as if entering a retro-technicolor movie scene. some awesome sights along the way are memphis, the pyramid by the river; and the rio grande at albuquerque, an amazing descent from the mountains. but everything in between was mostly toothless gas station attendants [ed: naw you cain't tawk like that 'bout them people, the PC police will object] erm, differently abled, differently bodied, happy creatures talking (as best I understood) about keggers the night before, and supersized boors yelling over their complimentary breakfasts about how malpractice law is a conspiracy, insurance a fraud, people should let people alone, let's kick some butt in iraq, and have the guvment really fix the guvment for good this time. really, it is spectacularly empty in the middle of the country, and very flat, both out there and in people's heads. nobody likes to listen to anyone, the daily papers all spout the same opinions, local coverage crowds out any mention of this week's war crimes or other (inter-) national affairs, AM radio is a reliably monotone rant across the spectrum, and even on FM radio it seems there are ten bible-thumpers for each lone NPR station, encroaching on the frequency so you can't quite make out the news from the state college because of the pro-life arguments shrieking from a local broadcaster. I was thankful for the kitschy sunsets, the tawdry tourist mementos, and the sad dying elephant congregations of RVs and fifth wheels near the cities, near the lakes, near Mexico, near the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Lake Havasu - at least some people somewhere engage in something other than culture war. oh yes, the red middle has its own culture. no, I don't wish there hadn't been that civil war. but you know what: this is a new cold civil war, and no end in sight.

Red vs Blue

Pundits can talk about uniters and dividers until they are, well, red, blue, or purple in their faces - I just crossed the United States by car, and if you're that close to the ground, it's obvious that the facts remain: this is a very divided country. Yes, statistics can be finely ground until it is no longer so easily discerned what's blue and and what's red - but what is going to be achieved with such weaponized relativism? It is decidedly NOT a purple country. Those triumphantly red states that look so great on the TV screen maps? They are yawningly empty... go to this site to see the true balance of red and blue. Or if you can't stand it any more, go to this excellent site : two full seasons of the (deliciously political) machinima sit-com, Red vs Blue!

justice

Yes, we need to make a bridge between the the two Americas , not red and blue, but rich and poor, but who am I to tell anyone how to do it? Read American Prospect.

Didn't I write something about the f-f-f's right after the elections? (Apologies to Beverly's mother about that one, but you're the only one I'm apologizing to.)

In the meantime, Tania and Liza have sent this link of apologies to the world. Say you're sorry -- add your own.

I'm disoriented, depressed by the power struggles in the Democratic Party, and wondering -- what the hell is this I'm not a political blog!

These are dark dark times, but the good folks blessed cause are spreading the good new. Jesus cares. Just remember, I'm on the no pray list.

revenge of the red states

People have been pointing out that former slave-owning states are "red" states and the abolitionist states are "blue" states -- sending around a map meant to fan our outrage at red staters.

But let's not forget that the blue states, with the exception of the Upper MidWest are almost all states that profited from Hi Tech -- from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, tech revived the ailing states of Massachussetts, Oregon and Washington, which was known when I was growing up for ruined factories and angry Red Sox fans and even angrier lumberjacks (respectively).

In the 1980s and 90s, the Dems, who having traditionally represented the interests of the working people against the Republicans, began to favor the new money of telecom and hi tech -- the urban and working poor, the middle class were in effect abandoned by the one party that throughout the past century put the brakes on the accumulation of wealth by overseeing a redistribution of wealth through taxes and government programs. But both Carter and increasingly Clinton, served the interests of a new constituency -- a high tech, media, and advertising elite -- whose fortunes were carved out of silicon rather than coal, oil or railroads.

In this climate, the Dems have focused on what Kevin Phillips in his book Wealth and Democracy calls, after Jeffrey Berry in The New Liberalism postmaterialist "quality of life" interests-- Abortion rights, Gay marriage, Gays in the Military, giving up the ground of economic outrage that fueled progressive insurgencies against the Money Power - to whom? to Ralgh Nader, perhaps. Postmaterialism was according to Phillips, both "premature and exaggerated" --

Is it a case of poor red staters cutting off their noses too spite their faces? Yes, but it is revenge by any other name as well and it is fueled by a class war in which we are all held hostage to big money.