Feature Creature

Before he became a hack, Michael Chabon wrote two good novels: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, an appealing sentimental education that manages to be lyrical without being too overwrought (although like most first novels it is on occasion), that fnds pathos without becoming mawkish or maudlin, and that features an idiosyncratic cast without succumbing to twee quirkiness; and Wonderboys, a great shaggy-dog novel about weed, misplaced affection, and failure. The former also holds one of my favorite sentences in recent literature: "In Pittsburgh, perhaps more than anywhere else in our languid nation, a barmaid does not care."

This line kept coming back to me as I read that

Even as the United States imposes new sanctions on Iran, one of the biggest gaps in the American strategy is on full display here in Iraq, where hundreds of millions of dollars in crude oil and refined products are smuggled over the scenic mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan every year.

Oh my. Capital doesn' care. If anything belies the West's blithe insistence that it embraces the ideology of trade and capital, especially here in the States, where the demise of a countervailing Soviet "socialism" has only made the Free Marketeers more hysterical, prone to finding the devil, Communism, in the extremely wealthy societies of Western Europe, it is our concurrent evident belief that the State can simply interdict capital's flow. And I suppose you could argue that North Korea is extremely isolated, or that Cuba is kept poor, but of course North Korea doesn't have anything that anyone needs, unlike Iran, which sits atop fine reserves of the most important commodity. And occupies a geographic position of obvious strategic importance. This is not to say that blockades are impossible or that sanctions cannot function to isolate and punish a population, cf. the Gaza Strip. However, when a place possesses something that capital requires, capital will acquire.

Even as the United States imposes new sanctions on Iran, one of the biggest gaps in the American strategy is on full display here in Iraq, where hundreds of millions of dollars in crude oil and refined products are smuggled over the scenic mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan every year.

The assumption that such smuggling represents a "gap" is contradicted by its persistence. If the outcome of a policy is the opposite of the stated objective of the policy, it is equally if not more likely that the outcome, rather than the statement, represents the actual objective. So we return to the fact that the capitalist West appears--appears--to seek to prevent money from flowing into Iran and commodities from flowing out. But the practical effect of Western policy in that part of the world is to greatly enhance the ability of at least one commodity to move unfettered by legal regimes and national borders. Is that simply an unintended consequence of an incompetent foreign policy? Is it just a flaw in the plan? Is it a bug?

Do as I Do Do

Andrew Bacevich is a sober critic of American militarism, and I respect his writing, but this brief essay betrays a troubling--and typical--analytical failure:

The Afghanistan war forms part of that complicated inheritance where good choices are hard to come by. Much as Iraq was Bush’s war, Afghanistan has become Obama’s war. Yet the president clearly wants nothing more than to rid himself of his war. Obama has prolonged and escalated a conflict in which he himself manifestly does not believe. When after months of deliberation (or delay) he unveiled his Afghan “surge” in December 2009, the presidential trumpet blew charge and recall simultaneously. Even as Obama ordered more troops into combat, he announced their planned withdrawal “because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own.”

Why don't we subject this all to a little bit of the old what did he say?/what did he do? analysis. What did Obama say? That he wanted to bring the boys home and end the war and work on building America. Yeah, but what did he do?

It's hard to understand how Bacevich makes such an elementary error, especially in an article where he describes Obama as calculating. There is no evidence that Obama "wants nothing more than to rid himself of his war." There's no evidence that he wants to rid himself of his war at all. And, by the way, we should properly refer to his wars in the plural. His "drawdown" in Iraq leaves several tens of thousands of troops at least to "pursue terrorists" in "non-combat" operations. He is fighting a clandestine war in Pakistan. He has engaged military operations in Yemen. US forces operate directly or through proxies throughout Muslim Africa. And so on.

I think it's curious that Bacevich can conceive of America acting as an aggressively militant, imperial global hegemon and at the same time believe that the principal administrator of that empire must be telling the truth when he regrets the unfortunate necessity of its wars. The only thing that's manifest is that when Obama talks about his desire to conclude the Afghan conflict, he's lying. Near the end of the essay, Bacevich doubles down on his bad hand:

Obama doesn’t want to be in Afghanistan any more than Benjamin Netanyahu wants to be in the West Bank. Yet like the Israeli prime minister, the president lacks the guts to get out. It’s all so complicated. There are risks involved. Things might go wrong. There’s an election to think about.

Bibi doesn't want to be in the West Bank? You could have fucking fooled me. But, if by Obama doesn't want to be in Afghanistan any more than Bibi wants to be in the West Bank, Bacevich means that Obama is committed to a perpetual American presence in Afghanistan just as fully as Bibi is committed to a perpetual Israeli presence in the West Bank, then sure, yeah, I agree.

When Did You Stop Murdering Your Wife and Hiding the Body in the Dumpster behind the 7/11?

So, here's a fun time. Kos, the greater lesser snowy speckled egret who tends the marshes known as DailyKos, in responding to something that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough twaddled on the Tweeters, strongly implied that Scarborough is implicated in the murder of an intern! Scarborough twatted back that he didn't never kill nobody, and Markos responded that he never said Scarborough himself actually killed the girl. This got Kos banned from chirping on the teevee, as the head of the network said, more or less, you can't go around accusing our gasbags of murder.

Fortunately, La Digs is on the case, strongly implying that Joe Scarborough is a murderer!

It's a Sicilian message. It means that these people are fucking idiots.

Sensimilla

George Will supports the full legalization of banned narcotics! No, wait, what?

Alors. As a Randroid Trustafarian Anarchist whiling the long summer hours by twindling political invective onto a World Wide Web Blog from the family yacht, dreaming of a day when every man, woman, and child lives as his own shrugging Atlas in a seasteaded individual fruitopia . . . uh, what was I saying? Oh, oh, yeah. Obviously, I'm sympathetic to any view that we have too much government, that government is too intrusive, and that the illusion of progress through government, human uplift through legislation and regulation, is a dangerous one indeed. Equally obviously, most of the people who espouse such ostensible views don't really believe them. When you discover a man who supposes that a semi-socialized medical industry represents a greater immediate threat to liberty than a vast standing army, a set of decade-long colonial wars, and the most ubiquitous penal system the world has ever known, then you can be reasonably certain that he has no real objection to the power of the state per se, but merely to certain applications of that power insofar as he percieves such applications to nibble away at important class distinctions. (George Will Our hypothetical person would never say "class distinctions" of course.)

As for George Will, he managed to compose an entire column in which the nebulous proposition that Obama is somehow and unprecedentedly tinkering with the traditional social order is propped up with cocktail umbrellas and playing cards as an elaborate, contemporary, metaphorical proxy for Prohibition, the point being more or less that Prohibition begat general lawlessness, ergo semper fidelis ubiquito logo pox tantalus presto Americans are going to, what, burn their health insurance cards? The comparison shatters like an osteopeniac hip hitting the pavement. Meanwhile, there is a perfectly workable contemporary analogue to Prohibition that demonstrates to irrefutable effect the impossibilities of social engineering, the cruelty of arbitrary power, the inequity and iniquity of the law, the way that the language of morality is perverted into policies of oppression, etc., and that analogue is . . . prohibition.

In closing, Will hopes that Americans today prove as ungovernable as they were in the past. This is an awfully tendentious reading of history, especially from a man who wears a bow tie. America likes its tall tales of rugged individualism and wild frontiers, but we have always been one of the most governable of people, deeply conformist, and appallingly respectful of the law. Even the fucking Canadians throw better demonstrations than we do. When we boast of being a nation of laws and not men, we might pause to consider what is implied by the preponderence of the first and the paucity of the latter.

What Do You Need That For, Dude?

People keep asking me why I post about Matthew Yglesias, who isn't exactly a moving target, and the only answer I have is that he is the most consistently ridiculous person in America. That is not to say that he is the most ridiculous--that prize probably goes to Victor/Victoria Perseus Thanatos Upanishad Velocity Hanson--but that he manages, day in and out, to maintain a steady, cruising velocity of Warp 6 on the what-the-fuck-is-he-talking-about scale. We already nabbed him once today.

Now he has returned to write a completely bonkers post called The Arbitrariness of Manufacturing, in which he posits that manufacturing is "not very rigorously defined." Well, okay, I mean, when does a pond become a lake? When is a creek a stream? When is a tree just a bush? He confuses agriculture with manufacturing and then confuses a farmer's market with a farm. He seems to think that the petrochemical companies manqués that produce fast food are not considered manufacturers, whereas he believes that the cooks at McDonald's fabricate the hamburger patties on-site. Thus armed with this quiver of soggy arrows, he suggests that we should not be quite so upset about the decline of manufacturing, because people will just switch to "manufacturing" blogs and McNuggets.

Of course, when people talk about the decline of manufacturing, what they are talking about is the decline of industries that produce durable goods of some enduring value. This is worrisome not because of the inherent desirability of cars and clock-radios and fridges and industrial steel over strawberries, hamburgers, and blawwwwgs, but because no alternate means of providing so large a segment of the population with a substantial, comfortable, long-term, maintainable income has emerged. The lesson of the ongoing cycle of economic busts is that you cannot employ every goddamn American as a middle assistant spend process materials operations director manager, and meanwhile, the absence of a labor-heavy industrial segment in our economy means that people must compete with each other for an ever-narrowing pool of precisely such fantastical job titles or else, uh, manufacture fries for nine bucks an hour and no sick days. Fuck you, Yglesias.

In the immediately preceeding post, entitled, Where Obama's Gone Wrong, Yggie writes:

But to give Obama critics their due, there’s a whole range of other topics on which I really do think the administration has been screwing up and where he’s largely been let off the hook. First and foremost in my mind has been the unaccountable delays in filling the vacant seats on the Federal Reserve Board.

You know, I would've picked blowing up thousands of people with killer flying robots or expanding the global gulag of black prisons or conducting clandestine warfare throughout the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Indian Subcontinent, or further hammering away at Habeas, or basically in general broadly speaking being the fucking Angel of Death itself in an earthly guise as a motivational seminar speaker, now available for YOUR corporate event. But, yeah, sure, you know, unaccountable delays in filling the vacant seats on the Federal Reserve Board, within the city limits . . . that ain't legal either.

The Next in a Long Line of Nexts

Oh, fuck it. I say that Yemen is the next Turkmenistan. No, the next Eritrea. Uh, the next Hanseatic League. The next Achaemenid Persepolis. The next Mohenjo-Daro.

Meanwhile:

By 2007, it was clear that a new and more dangerous generation of Al Qaeda militants was emerging. Unlike their predecessors, these men aimed openly to overthrow the Yemeni state and refused all dialogue with it.

Oh, boy, that sounds bad. The aimed to overthrow the state. They refused dialogue. Who refuses dialogue?

Many later claimed that they suffered torture in Yemeni prisons during long terms - usually without formal charges.

Oooooohhhhhhhhh.

I encourage you to read to the end, where the reporter wonders how the "remote" al Qaeda gang can produce a "slick" magazine. Yeah, man, like, how did they afford the mimeograph. Fuck.

The Literary Offenses of Matthew Yglesias

To my eye, the argument that the United States has a moral obligation to not abandon Afghans who want our help fighting the Taliban is quite strong.

-Yggie

Let's see. I'd remove as inaccurate, incorrect, dishonest, and euphemistic, the following: argument, moral, obligation, abandon, Afghans, want, our, help, fighting, Taliban, quite, and strong. That leaves Yglesias' eyes, tranforming the sentiment from retarded to merely romantic.

I guess this is what remains of the edifice of Liberalism--wishy-washy imperialism masquerading as callow moral sentimentalism dressed up in the tattered, vaguely Sovietique drag of Realpolitik. "I don't think there is a strategic interest in invading and occupying foreign nations, but I do think there is compelling case for remaining in nations we've already invaded and occupied so long as there is a nebulous civil conflict in which we can pretend to take sides."

In the neighbourhood of any equilibrium state of a thermodynamic system, there are equilibrium states that are adiabatically inaccessible

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But why wouldn't reporters want to tell a story like this?

CHARLES BOWDEN: There’s two hindrances to the U.S. press. One, there can be an element of danger messing around the border. Secondly, it is far easier to take in a statement from an agency or a public official than to go investigate it. They take the easy way out.

I mean, I have been baffled for over 20 years why one of the biggest stories in my country is underreported, both the explosion of drug money and the explosion of human beings. Mexico is collapsing. This is an exodus of human beings. This is a far more significant event for the future of the United States than the war in Iraq.

-from On the Media

Charles Bowden is a very interesting if occasionally florid and overwrought author [ed. look who's fuckin talkin], but it is seriously worth pondering his inarguable point: "This is a far more significant event for the future of the United States than the war in Iraq." Or in Afghanistan.

I thought of this after reading a Will Wilkinson post in which he tries to make it plain to our friend our friend, Yggie, that the popular perception that birthright citizenship constitutes a kind of loophole in the legal immigration régime fuels anti-immigrant and anti-immigration sentiment. I don't really think this is debatable. I spend a lot of time listening to Doc Savage, and although there is certainly a loud constituency propounding the belief that all "illegals" are criminals and drug-dealers, the most persistent refrain is that immigrants use public services. Savage, for instance, is particularly incensed about non-native English speakers using hospitals. They come here, they have families, they use schools and hospitals for free . . . they're freeloaders.

Will explicitly doesn't share this view, but, he says, "many Americans reasonably find the current system unfair." He then writes:

I think most Americans believe that the immigration rate ought to be under democratic control, and they are frustrated by the fact that it isn’t really. I also think most Americans believe that the distribution of citizenship ought to be under democratic control.

There is of course a degree to which the flow of Mexicans into America is under political control. At its most fundamental, the slow-motion disintegration of Mexican society is the direct and proximate result of the conjoined American policies of prohibition and the Drug War, and it is true that the pressurized outflux of humans from Mexico in particular and Latin America in general would be greatly reduced by the simple act of making drugs legal.

That having been said, the idea that the migration of human populations can be controlled through some legislative process or other is as preposterous, as impossible, as fully absurd as the idea that the second law of thermodynamics can be repealed by an act of Congress.

Lemme Hit It

Ain't seen many white people lately. What, y'all stop fuckin?

-The Pryor

Camille Paglia. If she did not exist, we would not invent her. Her entire, uh, sexual persona is devoted to the notion that women can embrace both armpit hair and cultural subordination--you know, it is fine to go bra-less, as long as you've got perky tits. Here she is opining that "bourgeois propriety" and an "ideological view of gender as a social construct" which she hilariously attributes to the "careerist technocracy" (Harvard offers women's studies; Wall Street is populated with Harvard grads; ergo, Wall Street is bell hooks--LOLZWUTTTTT?) form some horrific biumvirate of sexual doom through which emasculated men and shrewish women have stopped doin' it. Except, of course, for black people, who fucking loooove to hit dat shit.

Look. It is hard to find authoritative numbers, and since most sexual-practice surveys rely on self-reporting, they are inherently unreliable, but what they reveal generally is that people have sex pretty often, including married people--a couple of times a week, anyway, which, let's do the math, means that this fundamentally recreational activity is enjoyed over a hundred times a year. This suggests that fucking hasn't become rare, but has remained a routinized part of human relations, in particular human pair-bonding. I don't mean to sell the bad acid at anyone's Woodstock here, but the truth is that sex, while it can be a natural, zesty experience, can also be pretty quotidian, and in a good way. I like fucking my boyfriend, but I also like taking him to dinner or gossiping about our friends or playing with the dog. I don't mean to minimize the importance of the regular orgasm to the human condition, but elevating any single pleasure to a position of singular importance is the first grim step toward addiction. On the other hand, and not to be too terribly crass, "the elemental power of sexuality" is the sort of turn of phrase employed by someone who hasn't got a lot of experience getting laid.

Tricher

Colleges and universities are basically credential fabricators that provide an indicator of class status for a fee. The fundamental nature of the relationship between the student and the "institution of higher learning" isn't pedagogical; it's transactional. It is worth bearing this essential truth in mind when reading about the efforts by our dons and donettes to combat cheating. (And by the way, is their a fussier ethical fetishist than The New York Times? A thousand-plus words on cheating without a single scintilla of evidence that the scope or prevalence of the offense has increased!)

The stoontz, as we say in Western PA, perceptive little goons that they are, mostly seem to recognize what they're in school for, and according to the article they strive to do an absolute minimum of totally meaningless and unproductive work within the confines of an authoritarian surveillance regime--in other words, let's see, how shall we put it, to acquire valuable skills that will make them competitive in today's global markets. It's only the professors and deans who appear to be confused about the whole affair.

Pass It On

They sound like a gaggle of ancient priests, and they confirm that the worst thing to happen to professional journalism wasn't the internet, but the bachelor's degree. Listening to these guys word-chomp their way around the most absurd series of self-imposed vocational-ethical imponderables as if determining the divinity of Jesus or whatever is truly silly, and in any case betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and the nature of human communication. There are no secrets in the world excepting those you keep solely and exclusively to yourself