I’ve been admiring Ta-Nehisi Coates off and on for some time, but now he’s on my every-day list. I was just staggered by this post today, on the burden of self-justificatory myths.

I want to focus on . . . the South’s psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don’t mean defeat in the war, so much as I mean lagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.

I’ve actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.

It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. . . .

Nathan Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes, that dead serious countenance, the warrior’s beard. His story is American–the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he’s noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time.

Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry–too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest).  To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK. . . .

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it’s painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn’t just “lost,” it’s barely a cause.

This is a beautiful piece of writing - and the long version is better. (He’s not just crapping on the South, much as they deserve it. He notes the experience of overcoming his own myths, and how liberating that can be.) Coates often sees right to the heart of things, and has a clean and pointed way of expressing that. And not rarely, he tees one up and hits it right out of the park. He needs to be read.

I’m also going to make a point of looking for the book he references, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.

In this John Scalzi post about the latest Harlen Ellison documentary there are quite a few people defending Ellison’s character. Ellison’s character really could use with the defense. Among other things, Ellison is known for his, well, he is not known for being a likable fellow:

On August 26, 2006, during the 64th World Science Fiction Convention, Ellison grabbed Connie Willis’ breast while on stage at the Hugo Awards ceremony.[22] Ellen Datlow described this as “a schtick of Harlan acting like a baby.”[23] Patrick Nielsen Hayden described this as “pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn’t want to watch it.”[24]

Ellison did not respond until three days later when he wrote on his message board, “I was unaware of any problem proceeding from my intendedly-childlike grabbing of Connie Willis’s left breast, as she was exhorting me to behave.” He also posted that “I’m glad, at last, to have transcended your expectations. I stand naked and defenseless before your absolutely correct chiding.” By August 31 his contrition seemed to be waning, as he posted: “Would you be slightly less self-righteous and chiding if I told you there was NO grab…there was NO grope…there was NO fondle…there was the slightest touch. A shtick, a gag between friends, absolutely NO sexual content. How about it, Mark: after playing straight man to Connie’s very frequently demeaning public jackanapery toward me — including treating me with considerable disrespect at the Grand Master Awards Weekend, where she put a chair down in front of her lectern as Master of Ceremonies, and made me sit there like a naughty child throughout her long ‘roast’ of my life and career — for more than 25 years, without once complaining, whaddaya think, Mark, am I even a leetle bit entitled to think that Connie likes to play, and geez ain’t it sad that as long as SHE sets the rules for play, and I’m the village idiot, she’s cool … but gawd forbid I change the rules and play MY way for a change …”, and complained that Willis had not called him to discuss the matter.[25]

And that is just one incident; there are many others.

But among the “other things” mentioned above, Ellison is also apparently fiercely devoted to his friends. In fact, much of the discussion around Ellison’s character revolves around this laudable trait. To which my reaction is “so what?”

So what if Ellison is a good friend? Aren’t we all? Don’t we all have people whose friendship we value and who we would stand by through almost anything? Don’t we all have friends we would give the shirt off our backs to ? Don;t we all, to one degree or another, treat the people we care about well? Isn’t that the bare minimum of civilized behavior - -looking after the ones you are close to? Even granting that Ellison is an exceptional friend, how does that make him a better person? Or, more specifically, how does that rise above the long and well documented history of abusive behavior towards others that Ellison has?

This post isn’t really about Ellison; Scalzi’s comment thread just triggered my normal bemusement at this line of argument. We see this all the time. Almost every time someone controversial passes away or comes to have their character discussed, there are inevitably stories about how they did this or that good thing for a friend or family member. And there is nothing wrong with that, really, but there is nothing really right about it either. It is relatively easy to do the right thing for people you care about — after all, you care about them and thus are emotionally invested in seeing them happy. But isn’t the real measure of character how you treat people you don’t know? Isn’t what counts not that you do the easiest things society asked of you but that you do the hardest?

It seems very odd to me that we have come to the point whee people are lauded for doing what is essentially the minimum or very near the minimum society asks of them. It seems to me that taking care of your friends ought to be nothing more than the price of admission to society. When did it become testament to the shining goodness of man? Ellison may be a great friend, but it seems odd that that can be used as a defensive against the charge that he is a poor human being. After all, if Ellison treated is friends the way he seems to treat people he doesn’t seem to care about, he wouldn’t have very many friends, now would he?

p.s. I don’t understand why Ellison is considered a great writer either, though I suspect it has something to do with reflecting Boomer concerns right back at them, but I should probably save that for another post.

Roger Ebert wields a poison pen as well as the best of them. (I’m currently reading his collection of negative movie reviews - Your Movie Sucks - titled after his memorable response to Rob Schneider’s witless attack on a fellow critic. Some of them are hilarious. None of them would I want written about me.)

Today he takes one great big strip off the hide of Bill O’Reilly, who is all worked up by the fact that Ebert’s paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, dropped his puerile column.

Thoughts on Bill O’Reilly and Squeaky the Chicago Mouse

To: Bill O’Reilly
From: Roger Ebert

Dear Bill:

Thanks for including the Chicago Sun-Times on your exclusive list of newspapers on your “Hall of Shame.” To be in an O’Reilly Hall of Fame would be a cruel blow to any newspaper. It would place us in the favor of a man who turns red and starts screaming when anyone disagrees with him. My grade-school teacher, wise Sister Nathan, would have called in your parents and recommended counseling with Father Hogben.

Yes, the Sun-Times is liberal, having recently endorsed our first Democrat for President since LBJ. We were founded by Marshall Field one week before Pearl Harbor to provide a liberal voice in Chicago to counter the Tribune, which opposed an American war against Hitler. I’m sure you would have sided with the Trib at the time.

I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that “very few” readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, “many more complained about [dropping] Nancy.” I know I did. . . .

That newspapers continue to run your column is a mystery to me, since it is composed of knee-jerk frothings and ravings. If I were an editor searching for a conservative, I wouldn’t choose a mad dog. My recommendation: The admirable Charles Krauthammer. [I am not sure if this is ironic. It would have been if I'd written it. - KTK]

Bill, I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?

That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

Ow . . . ow . . . ow . . .

Interesting article at Washington Monthly about the semi-rise and fast fall of the new-media conservative publishing venture Culture 11 - edited by Lean Left’s own erstwhile nemesis-designate, Joe Carter, formerly of “Evangelical Outpost”. It notes the difficulty of engaging modern culture in an authentic way if you’re . . . well . . . totally out of it. They even quote Joe saying “shit”, which I have to tell you was a shock.

The pub went under even before its official launch date; there are hints at a revival. Joe’s still not back at EO, which has become quite dreary. And of course Huckabee’s still crazy. Glad to see Joe in there plugging away, though.

The hapless Politico is finally catching up to 1982.

Michael Calderone has blown the lid off  “an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList”, in existence for a couple of years, where “several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes”. Continuing the liberal-conspiracy meme (the imbecilic and severely hair-deranged “Vox Popoli” claims that the existence of “JList” is the reason liberals complain about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” - they’re trying to cover their tracks!), Calderone notes the list was begun by Ezra Klein and includes as members a number of prominent liberals such as Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Toobin, and unnamed staffers of Huffington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and so on. And he reports ominously that “there’s a ‘Fight Club’-style code of silence when it comes to discussing it for publication” and asks “do those debates really have to happen behind a veil of secrecy?”.

But the lame and whiny piece just demonstrates how characteristically clueless Calderone is. As he himself notes, at least three of his fellow “Politico” bloggers, including Ben Smith, are members of this group of supposed liberal puppetmasters, and one praises it strongly in Calderone’s own piece. And he mentions at least two other listservs in the same piece, without ever seeming to catch on to his own story: he has disovered the existence of private e-mail lists, a feature of the ‘Net from its earliest days. He still doesn’t seem to understand what JList is (he describes it as an “online meeting space”, but it’s obviously a listserv), and the fact that these sorts of things are fairly common also makes no impression on him.

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Oh, Maureen. Maureen. Maureen Dowd. She tasks me, she heaps me.

Just when you’ve forced yourself to give her up for good - the little-girl melodrama, the high-school Heathers worldview - she runs you through with a heart-piercing icicle of insight, then spins your head with a flip and a giggle and a trite catch-phrase you can hardly believe emerged from the same brain. But still, that cutting clarity, wielded to tease. Maureen Devi, pundit queen. Pulitzer Playmate with a taffy-pink-handled straight razor. Light of my life, fire of my loins.

She’s at it this past week, using the term cooties, of all things, twice in succession, in separate columns about the reputations in retirement of ex-Presidents. Bizarrely, she reverses her own metaphor, first applying it to Jimmy Carter, then attributing it to Carter in respect of his opinion of Dick Cheney. Does she even read her own columns?

But in the same column as her playground parallels and childish taunts, comes this:

I thought it gave the [Senate swearing-in] ceremony [conducted by Dick Cheney] a satirical edge to have the lawless Vice presiding over lawmakers swearing to support and defend the Constitution that he soiled and defiled — right in the heart of the legislative branch he worked to diminish. . . .

Thursday night . . . required extreme defensive maneuvers — much zigging and zagging — to avoid Cheney, Wolfie and Rummy, all three holding court and blissfully unrepentant about the chaos they’ve unleashed on the world. “My conscience is clear,” Rummy volunteered . . . . At least Ernst Stavro Blofeld would have the decency just to leave the scene. . . .

From Gaza to the unemployment figures to the $10.6 trillion debt, things keep spiraling while W. keeps fiddling. Just as when he was in the National Guard and didn’t bother to show up, now, as the scabrous consequences of his missteps shake the economy and the world, he doesn’t bother to show up. He’s checked out . . . .

Asked by People magazine what moments from the last eight years he revisited most often, W. talked passionately about the pitch he threw out at the World Series in 2001: “I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough.”

Asked by Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard if he had made progress in some areas for which he hasn’t gotten credit, the president put trying to privatize Social Security at the top of his list. It’s frightening to think where a lot of people would be now if that effort had succeeded.

Cheney’s theory of executive “unitary” power and pre-emptive war and frightening the world was a theory of Constitutional thuggishness. . . . “I think we made good decisions,” he told Knoller, adding with even grander delusion, “I think we knew what we were doing.”

“Soiled and defiled” the Constitution. “Chaos unleashed” on the world. “Scabrous”, “frightening”, “thuggish”, “delusional” - oh, speak to me, Maureen. Whistle me down the wind. Just pucker up your lips and blow.

Paul Krugman wishes he could write the way Dowd does when she’s in form. Rumsfeld as Blofeld?, Bush as Nero? - that’s priceless, and brilliant. The only thing Bush hesitated about during his entire death-throe fuckup extravaganza was . . . throwing a baseball? Of all the stupid, staggering Bush quotes, she nails the right one.

Even when she’s not making any sense, you can’t help admire it.

[Cheney is] going back to Casper, Wyo., and said he’s giving “serious thought” to writing a book, so he can continue his extremist makeover. The only thing he can do now is shoot a big lie across the bow and see if it lands.

Huh? What does that even mean? Who cares? It’s got a ring and a flair and Maureen Dowd wrote it. I’ll take a Hitler reference and a bizarrely garbled nautical metaphor from her any day, any way.

My god, she’s got it. It. It. Too often she squanders what she’s got. Too often she galvanizes with it. They say the most destructive form of conditioning is the inconsistently-reinforced stimulus. Dowd is an intermittent reward, but I just can’t stop pushing the lever. My twitchy white-rat thalamus demands it: More. Now. Again.

So small parts of the world are in an uproar over reports that His Royal Goofballness Prince Harry of What’s Left of The British Empire videotaped himself, back at their officers’ academy, calling one of his Army mates a “Paki”. I gather that’s a neutral term in some countries, but regarded as an ethnic slur in England (which, in fact, I did not know, but he surely should have). Over at the Althouse sandbox, they’re falling over themselves congratulating the stupid git for not being “PC”, which is predictable enough for them. More than that, though, they’re now expressing satisfaction that this incident, and the avalanche of ethnic slurs used in the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino, have now made racist slurs OK again - something that, apparently, Althouse and her crew have long been waiting for. To her credit, Althouse herself calls out the film for legitimizing racist language, but then quotes one of her own commenters:

I think you’re right about Gran Torino making a case for racial language in general. Having the character talk like that to everyone, people he liked and didn’t like, people of his own race and not, sort of popped the bubble that these words should have special, almost magical, powers to offend.

Free at last, thank God almighty, white people are free at last to talk like racists while imagining that the fact that they don’t care about ethnic slurs means they’re not offensive to their targets either. (Clint Eastwood: “We used to stack gooks like you five high, over in Korea, and use ‘em as sandbags!” Yes, it would obviously take some sort of voodoo magic for anybody to be offended by that! Luckily, Eastwood broke the spell.)

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The Wall Street Journal and the Cato Institute continue their unremitting self-parody with today’s clueless editorial touting . . . (yes, get ready for it) . . . Ayn Rand’s turgid, melodramatic novel Atlas Shrugged.

Proving that Cato really is peopled exclusively with surly 15-year-old prep schoolers, Stephen Moore says with a straight face that:

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

He explains that everything predicted by prescient genius and self-annointed uberfrau Rand is really truly The Way Things Are, and we’re all going to realize it Any Day Now.

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit. . . .

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008. We already have been served up the $700 billion “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” and the “Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act.” Now that Barack Obama is in town, he will soon sign into law with great urgency the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” This latest Hail Mary pass will increase the federal budget (which has already expanded by $1.5 trillion in eight years under George Bush) by an additional $1 trillion — in roughly his first 100 days in office. . . .

The [book describes an event] eerily similar to an event late last year when six bank presidents were summoned by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to Washington, and then shuttled into a conference room and told, in effect, that they could not leave until they collectively signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government. The Treasury folks insisted that this shakedown, too, was all in “the public interest.”

Ultimately, “Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of the entrepreneur, the risk taker and the cultivator of wealth through human intellect. Critics dismissed the novel as simple-minded, and even some of Rand’s political admirers complained that she lacked compassion. Yet one pertinent warning resounds throughout the book: When profits and wealth and creativity are denigrated in society, they start to disappear — leaving everyone the poorer.

Leave aside the whiny doomsaying and petulant self-justification (the book was an “instant hit” among self-absorbed grandiosities and remains a joke otherwise, and there is a reason people call Randites compassionless). Skip the sheer boneheadedness as well (in Atlas Shrugged, the true capitalists are all strong-jawed individualists, the “parasites” are weak, sniveling, beggars; the capitalists withdraw from society, solemnly take a literal oath not to contribute to charity, retreat to a secluded mountain valley, and establish their own strictly libertarian and capitalistic society on the gold standard; naturally, the entire rest of the world collapses into anarchistic chaos as soon as the CEOs of several banks, railroads, and mining companies decide to take a vacation). And even ignore the deliberate distortions required to make Randianism even plausible (how is it that the ultra-capitalist objects to the government taking an equity position in the companies it’s giving money to? - that’s no more than basic business sense; note also that nobody was forced to take any money from the government - they demanded it after they had driven their own businesses into bankruptcy, and then didn’t like the terms on which it was offered - but to Moore, that’s just the same as confiscation without compensation; and perhaps it’s best just to pass over any evaluation of how our modern-day Dagny Taggarts have “cultivated wealth through intellect”, as their entire industries go bankrupt through corruption and mismanagement). What’s remarkable is how blind Moore is to the collapse of the empty myth the Friedmans and Rands of the world comforted themselves with - a collapse he documents but does not notice.

He’s right, in some sense, that the world - and the United States in particular, the homeland of fuck-you libertarianism - has steadily become ever less Randian in the 52 years since her risible amorality play was published. We grow ever closer to the rest of the civilized world by creating and extending retirement and healthcare programs that provide for all citizens, increasing support for the disabled and special education, improving emergency services (and rightly condemning those who undermine them in times of need), and guarding against ruin by regulating the financial speculators who first destroyed the stock market in the 20s and, again absent appropriate regulations, did the same to the housing mortgage and securities-derivatives markets today. Every such program has bettered the lives of Americans, and all are popular and increasingly in demand. Again and again, unbridled capitalism (and its political lapdog the GOP) has proven it cannot be entrusted with what really matters in people’s lives - it’s great with Pet Rocks, Britney Spears videos, and the Thighmaster, but it kills people or condemns them to misery when entrusted with their healthcare, retirement savings, mortgages, school funding, environment, or public safety. Again and again, prudent regulation and oversight have proven to be necessary, and usually beneficial. And the more obvious that becomes, the more idiotic Rand’s self-aggrandizing fantasy appears.

Look around . . . the economy isn’t collapsing because of the GI Bill, Medicare, the interstate highway system, or FDIC insurance for bank deposits. Those are among the few parts of the economy that worked rightly, and still provide protections for those most in need, and most in danger of ruin at the hands of the businesses they trusted not to destroy them. The economy is collapsing because “the smartest guys in the room” were either insanely stupid or just plain vicious crooks. We’re not going to get out of this by giving those people more freedom to do what they’ve done with even less control or oversight. We’re going to get out of this - like every economy does (”there are non-Keynesian economists, but there are no non-Keynesian economies”) - by spending to stimulate growth, support for the needy to prevent tragedy, and regulations to protect the vulnerable and prevent another incompetent, criminal meltdown like this one. And when we come out the other side, as we will, after we’ve muzzled the crooks, the creeps, and the silver-spoon “rugged individualists” who got us here, we’ll keep the regulations needed to keep them in line until they think of yet more ways to evade them and create another mess later, and we’ll keep the support programs and social services needed to protect the people when they do. It’s what civilized societies do, and it’s what’s necessary when you let capitalists off the leash.

In a way, we have the Randians, the Friedmanites, and the Cato clowns to thank for this last necessary push over the hump into the decently mixed, appropriately regulated economy with robust social services that I hope and expect will arise from the Obama administration. They’ve proven they can’t be trusted with anything as serious as real-world economic policy. Better to leave them to their unreadable books and delusional mutual admiration, while their fantasy world crumbles around them and they don’t realize it.

The Wall Street Journal exists in a bizarre intellectual and publishing space: they hold a commanding position in the heirarchy of newspaper respect and influence, while serving as the quasi-official house organ of the free-market cult, and yet consistently publish the stupidest drivel, demonstrating again and again that they - or at least their most prominent writers - barely understand their own subject and don’t really believe their own ideology. Now, self-serving right-wing hypocrisy is hardly news - in fact, it’s a way of life, at the Journal no less than among their corporate and RNC masters. But the eagerness with which the WSJ - nominally a bastion of objective reporting and the logic of the marketplace - vacates its own ideological commitments in service of the most blatant right-wing and pro-corporate posturing proves how empty are even the loftiest conservative pretensions.

The Journal serves as a case study, then, of the meaninglessness of principle on the right. It will be worth taking a look at occasional examples of their work, in this light, to remind ourselves why it is always so dangerous to take conservatives seriously when their lips are moving.

To that end, we’re creating a new content category: “The Wall Street Journal’s Literary Offenses” (Hat Tip to a worthy predecessor), both to monitor the hapless but not-unread WSJ, and to use it as an example of celebrated right-wing writing that shouldn’t be.

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Mindless fun. This one of my blog posts turned into a work of art. Click on the picture for the larger view.

Via Justine Larbalestier

1. This is funny
2. Since when do we not put two spaces after a period? I was taught that through junior high and high school, in two different states no less.

Via Making Light.

So I get this email saying that someone has a blog they want me to check out. No big deal, happens, even to relatively small blog fish like us, every so often. I usually ignore them, mostly out of a lack of time. I figure if it is interesting enough, I’ll stumble across it in the natural course of my reading. This was different for two reasons. One, the emailer actually offered me advice on getting rid of the track back spam. Second, and more importantly, she was upfront about the blog being a publisher publicity blog. But she also said that they tried to be different. I’m a huge book geek, so the combination of good will form the good advice and curiosity got the better of me. And I am glad it did.

The Beacon Broadside is a publisher’s blog, no doubt about that. But they aren’t just a publicity blog, not in the usual sense. The posts are mostly by their authors, and they are usually pretty interesting. There is one by Carol Joffe (who, by the way, wrote a fantastic book. It literally changed the way I looked at abortion politics and Roe v. Wade) about abstinence only sex education. There is a very interesting piece about Chanukah in Israel and the meaning of the holiday by a foreign rights agent. There is a good overview of the differences in the national culture and the meaning of the Romney and Kennedy religion speeches by the author of a book on the Religious Right and its focus on the judiciary. What there isn’t is a lot of hard sell, buy me now, here’s a contest desperation masquerading as marketing. They have their authors write about subjects that interest them and let their writing do the marketing. It’s a very good idea and should be a template for how publishers do blogs.

So it goes on the blog roll, both becasue the concept is interesting and, so far, I’ve liked the posts I have read.

From Farhad Manjoo’s otherwise very good Kindle review:

“E-ink come at a cost, though: This display responds more slowly than a mime at a parliamentary debate.”

I don’t have any profound comments about her place in literature or her works. I just know that they were very good and brought me a great deal of pleasure in my childhood. We should all do so well.

Via Scalzi.

There are times when I really, really hate Slate. Like, when I saw this:

Few movies get the second chance to enter the public’s consciousness that Primary Colors now has. But with Hillary Clinton running for the White House, Mike Nichols’ 1997 adaptation of Joe Klein’s sleazy roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign deserves another look—if not for its political insight, then for what it might tell us about the current Clinton campaign.

No. No, a fictional account of a presidential campaign from fifteen years ago written by a reporter with no particular connection to the people he based his story upon can tell us absolutely nothing about a real person running an actual campaign today. It’s insulting to their readers to even suggest that it can. Movies can talk about particular arch-types or the broad sweep of society and culture, but they cannot gives us any meaningful information about a particular person. People are complicated. much more complicated than any movie could ever be. No movie can capture everything important about a person, an no movie character “based on” a real person can ever tell us anything important about that model for the character. The real person is lost in the demands of shooting schedules and running time and dramatic necessity. The Statons are caricatures at worst, poor, pale shadows at best, of the Clintons. That should be obvious. Sadly, it appears its not, at least not at Slate.

And, sadly enough, the article gets worse:

he moment shows off the brains Emma Thompson brings to the role, but it also suggests the dilemma facing Hillary Clinton. If she learned from the gaffes she made during the ‘92 campaign (particularly her dumb remark about Tammy Wynette’s great “Stand by Your Man”), she has never seemed fully at ease with the smiling public face she has adopted since then. For Hillary Clinton, that public face, the pressure to make nice and act nice, the constant knowledge that women have to prove themselves capable but not act “manly,” may be a distraction from the real work of politics. The catch, of course, is that the public face has to be winning if she’s ever going to have the chance to do that work.

Well, that may be true, but tis only true if people liek this reporter continue to place appearance above substance. Spend more time covering health care plans and less time covering how candidates look on stage and I am rather sure the “public face” of Hillary will be fine.

And this, this is just dumb:

But the deeper problem of Primary Colors isn’t that it trades in gossip but that it endorses a brand of idealism that’s as destructive to politics as corruption. Liberals (and I speak as one) have an unfortunate tendency to confuse compromise with corruption, to mistake the ballot box for the confessional and assume the choice made therein should leave our souls clean. (That’s why so many of us have gone off the deep end and voted for Nader.) The challenge the Clintons have always posed to liberals is the challenge of growing up and realizing how things get done. It’s the inability to accept the compromises of politics that strands Libby Holden in her Neverland (Kathy Bates’ performance strikes the movie’s only genuinely tragic notes).

Put aside the “so many of us” nonsense, and put aside the writer’s flawed understanding of the end of the movie and focus on the argument about liberals and their relationship to the Clintons. It’s as if this person has never heard of NAFTA or Welfare Reform, or the death penalty or the Iraq war vote, or any of a dozen other issues where the Clintons have been to the right of progressives and Democrats. But opposition to them and those policies cannot possible come from the principled belief in certain policies and plans for the country. No, it must come from some strange, childish Clinton Derangement Syndrome. This paragraph is particularly odd in that it is written in the middle of a primary campaign when Democrats don;t have to decide between the Democrat and the Republican but rather between candidates with different visions of what Democrats should stand for and how they should achieve their goals. Its the one place in the electoral system where voting close to your ideals is actually appropriate and effective. Arguing that liberals - -or anyone - -should compromise at the level required in a national election at the primary level is an odd and borderline condescending argument.

And, again, the writer’s reading of the movie is flawed. It isn’t the inability to accept compromise that dooms Holden. It is the realization that the Stantons are on the verge of completely abandoning a core principle that dooms Holden. When Stanton asks toward the end of the movie “But I passed the re-make. Which grade do I get, teach?” the movie is acknowledging that Holden was right, that the Stanton’s first choice was so far from acceptable to their followers that they deserved to lose their support. Their decision — prompted by the loss of their friend — to go another route, to fight back in a more appropriate fashion, is the movie’s “happy ending” so to speak. The Stantons fought back, but, in the end, they didn’t give away all of their core values to do so. It seems odd that someone could argue, then, that the movie means that the liberals should vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary no matter what how far form their positions she may be.

But, then, I’m not the one who thinks a fifteen years old movie written by a stranger provides some sort of window into the soul of Hillary Clinton.

The New York Times  Business section (so, OK, expectations aren’t high, but still . . .) has an article today on a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the artificial sweetener “Splenda”. The issue hinges to some extent on how the sweetener is synthesized, and the reporter tries to explain this horrifically complex process to the reader. It’s not a pretty sight.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Ann Coulter “faggot” incident has set the right-wing blogs buzzing with commendable attempts to distance themselves from her and denounce her incessant hateful gibbering. But some have claimed that it’s unfair to pin this sort of behavior on right-wingers, that lefties do the same thing or worse.

Of course there are inflammatory statements made by the left. But you don’t hear the kind of truly vile hatefulness you constantly hear on the right, and you certainly don’t hear it as commonly, or on a routine basis from major figures who are either in office or appear in prominent roles at political functions and in the media. Patterico, however, tries to disprove this (fairly self-evident) claim by presenting a roll call of “true hate speech” from “prominent leftist figures”. You can go read the list if you want to; the quotes are mostly accurate. It’s hard not to notice a couple of things about his collection, though.

Most obviously, a considerable number of sources on it could in no way be considered “prominent leftist figures”. Several are professional comedians who are not particularly associated with politics (Chris Rock - often called conservative for his criticism of low-income blacks; Conan O’Brian; Craig Kilborn); some are totally marginal figures regardless of their politics (Charlie Brooker, a British TV reviewer; Dan Savage, an alternative-paper sex columnist; the St. Petersburg, Florida, Democratic Club [?!]); some are simply not leftist or liberal (Louis Farrakan?! - when was the last time you heard the Nation of Islam called “leftist”?).

More to the point, after scouring both sides of the Atlantic as far back as he could reach, he could only find two dozen quotations, from 21 figures (he gets Farrakhan in there 4 times for effect - it reminds of Warren Beatty’s line in “Bulworth”: “I’m sure they put something bad about Farrakhan in there for you!”). And how far back, exactly, did he have to go to find them? Well, here are the dates of the quotes he cites, in order:

• Nina Totenberg: 1995
• Julianne Malveaux: 1994 (who?)
• Richard Cohen: 1999
• Craig Kilborn: 2000
• St. Petersburg Democratic Club: 2004
• Conan O’Brien: 1998
• Chris Rock: 1998
• Spike Lee: 1999
• James Carville: 1998, if not earlier
• Alexander Cockburn: 2000
• Dan Savage: 2000
• Robert Byrd: 2001
• Jesse Jackson: 1984
• Louis Farrakhan: 1995, 1994, 2000, 1994
• Howard Dean: 2005
• Charlie Brooker: 2004
• Pete Stark: 2003
• Earl Hilliard: 2002 (not proven he wrote the flyer in question)
• Markos: 2004
• Atrios: 2006 (a direct quote of a joke from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
• Lou Hendra: 2006

I can’t help but notice some of them are as much as 23 years old. On average, they are almost 8 years old. Barely a third were spoken within this century (counting from 2001) - only two are within the past year. This is the “leftist” scourge Patterico trumpets. He’s proven his point: the “leftists” of America and Europe (defined to include religious reactionaries, comedians, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) do say rather undisciplined things about conservatives . . . once a year, on average.

By way of contrast, this rom just the latest Ann Coulter column alone, before her CPAC meltdown:

Liberals want mass starvation and human devastation.

They want us to starve the productive sector of fossil fuel and allow the world’s factories to grind to a halt.

There are more reputable scientists defending astrology than defending “global warming,” but liberals simply announce that the debate has been resolved in their favor and demand that we shut down all production.

When are liberals going to break the news to their friends in Darfur that they all have to starve to death to save the planet?

“Global warming” is the left’s pagan rage against mankind.

Liberals have always had a thing about eliminating humans. [Among "liberals", here, she includes Stalin and Hitler]

Margaret Sanger wanted to eliminate poor blacks

Rachel Carson wanted to eliminate Africans

Paul Ehrlich wants to eliminate all humans

global warming is the most insane, psychotic idea liberals have ever concocted to kill off “useless eaters.”

If we have to live in a pure “natural” environment like the Indians, then our entire transcontinental nation can only support about 1 million human beings. Sorry, fellas — 299 million of you are going to have to go.

[Environmentalists] never intended for us to survive.

[According to liberals,] [t]he entire fuel-guzzling, tacky, beer-drinking, NASCAR-watching middle class with their over-large families will simply have to die.

Yep - you can find fully half as many quotes, twice as insane, in one single column by Ann Coulter - and this one written and published while she was still the right’s darling - as in 23 years’ worth of selective quotation from every dubious “liberal” on two continents. And that doesn’t even touch on Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney . . . . Patterico tells us it’s just the same thing. What do you think we’d get if we went back over 23 years of right-wing hate?

Update: Patterico, on his blog, points out that the Conan O’Brien attribution is wrong; it was something said by Alec Baldwin on O’Brien’s show. I can’t see that that changes anything about the basic debate.

By now I think everyone is aware of Ann Coulter’s latest outrage: her “witticism” (in her case, I guess it was one) to the effect that she couldn’t talk about John Edwards because she’d be criticized for using the word “faggot”. She was, and more vigorously than probably she, or anyone else, expected.

It’s refreshing to see the immediate negative reaction across the right-wing blogs and media. There seems to be little disagreement that what she said was inexcusable, and there are widespread calls for her not to be encouraged in such behavior. (The punditry is a bit ahead of the rank and file, here; the CPAC audience she was speaking to applauded her and then stood in line for two hours afterward to get her autograph. And I doubt we’ll see her book fall off the best-seller lists just because she’s vicious or disgusting - they never have before.) Some of the reaction is clearly self-interested; a common complaint is that Coulter is making conservatives look bad, not that homophobia is bad in itself. And there are the usual failures of comprehension and perspective: many right-wingers compared this incident to the case of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan’s organized hounding out of their jobs on Edwards’s campaign for supposedly offensive language on their personal blogs. Nonetheless, there was an unquestioning sense that this kind of talk is no longer acceptable (in stark contrast to complacency over previous incidents, such as Dick Armey’s “Barney Fag”, or Jerry Falwell’s blaming gays and feminists for 9/11). That alone is progress.

But the issue does raise familiar questions of how to deal with offensive speech, and especially offensiveness in a public or quasi-official setting. (Coulter does not represent any organization, but she was an invited speaker of a conservative group that surely knew of her offensive behavior in the past; she is also wildly popular among the conservatives who have made her among the most in-demand right-wing speakers and have made her books best-sellers. She clearly embodies a popular point of view and is given credence in that role by conservatives’ endorsement of her speech and behavior to date.) How does one react to such an offensive message without turning that into an attack on the speaker? And when the speaker clearly is never going to change their ways, how can one shun their message without turning that into ostracism?

The welcome condemnation of Coulter’s statement has bloomed into calls for her to be banned from talk shows or magazines. It is beginning to look like another example of conservative mob behavior, triggered by one incident, overrunning even people whose points of view they otherwise endorse - another “Zumboization”, in other words. Many of the right-wing blogs have called for conservative organizations and publications to shun Coulter from now on.

Aside from the superficiality of the response - I have seen many calls for Coulter’s ostracism, but not one for the denunciation of homophobia or right-wing hate in general; the intention, again, seems to be mitigating embarrassment, not really reflecting on the conservative values that made Coulter a star in the first place - I have to say I am concerned that this is not the right way to deal with the issue. As much as I despise Coulter, as much as I would like to see her and all her fans (including the critics who are now silently saying ” . . . but, you know, she has a point . . .”) gone from the public arena, I don’t want to see any more Zumbos, any more mobs, any more secondary boycotts or harassment or blacklists. To be consistent with my position on Zumbo, whom I didn’t really care that much about to begin with, and with that on Amanda and Melissa, who fall into an entirely other category, I must ask for the same consideration for Coulter, whom I truly loathe.

The easiest way to explain is to quote an exchange from another blog where I commented on this. Right-Wing Nuthouse comes down hard on Coulter (from the “avoid embarrassment” perspective, that is), and offers the following suggestions for dealing with her:

I urge everyone – right and left – to take the following actions:

1. Never write another blog post about Ann Coulter no matter how outrageous, cruel, or bigoted her language.

2. Immediately write the Presidents of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN demanding that they refuse to schedule Coulter on any show for any reason on their networks.

3. Write the editor of Human Events and demand that they drop her column.

4. If her column appears in your local newspaper, write a letter to the editor demanding that they drop her column.

5. If you see her writings in any on line or print publication, write the editor and demand that they stop carrying her columns.

6. Any upcoming forum in which she is scheduled as a speaker or panel participant, write a letter to the organizers and make it clear that the reason you are not attending is due to Coulter’s presence.

The goal is to starve the witch of the attention she craves. I’ll have more on this later today, including an on-line petition we can sign and send to the cable nets and a report on my progress.

My response, in comments, was the following:

I appreciate and admire your inclination to roust Coulter from conservative ranks (though . . . I think she is only the tip of the iceberg). But I am uncomfortable with boycotts and protests.

. . . I think it is perfectly appropriate to shun or boycott the products (books, speeches, etc.) of someone whose ideas you disagree with. I am uncomfortable with secondary boycotts – threats against those who merely do business with the offender – and demands for others to shun such a person. If the right of free speech includes the right to say hateful things – which it does, even for Ann Coulter – then it must include the right, not to be heard or agreed-with, but to say them without fear of harassment or retribution other than the disapprobation that the ideas themselves justify.

In the case of people whose product is speech – i.e., writers and speechmakers – the question is a little trickier, because to shun their products is to shun their speech, and to request that publications find better writers, simply because you want to read better ideas, is essentially to request that they fire offensive writers because you don’t like the ideas they promote. It’s hard here to draw a line between rejecting a professional writer’s ideas and seeking financial retribution for their having spoken them. But I think that line at least includes not organizing a mass protest to demand that they be fired.

Certainly no decent person should read or listen to Ann Coulter. Reasonably enough, people can indicate to publishers or program directors that they want better ideas to be presented. But I think there is a difference between saying you won’t read a publication because of the content it carries and demanding that they fire one of their contributors because you don’t like that person’s ideas. (It’s understood that in most cases an opinion writer’s ideas are not endorsed by the publication itself. That distinction does carry some weight, and should offer the publisher some protection.) That distinction, between an expression of opinion and a demand for appeasement, exists even if the end result – the publication will lose a reader if they continue to carry a certain author – is the same. And threatening boycotts of publications or programs because of just one person they carry is a means of using the economic leverage of a large corporation to give your personal grievance a heft it does not deserve.

Although these distinctions may be small, I would suggest that, while I endorse your point #1 above, points #s 3, 4, and 5 should be reworded from “demand that they drop” to “indicate you will no longer read them as long as they carry” the offending writer. Point #2, I think, is similar: the point to be made is that there are better guests to schedule, that you want to see them, and that you will stop watching the show if it does not improve; putting it in the language of “demand” simply makes it sound like you are being intolerant of them for tolerating Coulter’s intolerance, which rather muddies the moral issue.

Point #6 is complex: I don’t know if it’s really a good idea to boycott programs at which hateful people appear. There may still be many other good people on the program, and why cut yourself off from them? To the extent that attendance implies approval of a particular speaker, that is a problem, but one that it seems to me should be worked out case-by-case. But the idea of punishing entire institutions or programs because you disagree with certain speakers is a dangerous one – it smacks of the refusal by the Eisenhower administration to allow Columbia University to hire Bertrand Russell, or the threats today to defund public colleges because they invite controversial speakers. If it’s true that the right wing hardly needs more hateful crazies, it’s also true that they hardly need more McCarthyism.

Why doesn’t hilzoy have a job writing for Time or Newsweek?

I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can’t be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.

Go read the whole thing; that quote is the least of the piece.

When I was a kid, my parents had a simple system for paying bills. They had a cheap, plastic bill holder — a hunk of puke colored plastic with fins of various sizes rising from it’s base. Bills to be paid went on the left half of the holder, already paid ones went on the right, waiting for stamps. The bills themselves could be anything — actual bills from a real company, notes written on scraps of paper to remind my parents to donate to the charity of the day, even bank statements to serve as a reminder to move money form checking to savings, or vice versa. It worked very well for my parents and they still use it — having replaced the ugly bill holder with slots in their elegant computer desk — to this day. It is also a system that is very hard to replicate in a computer.

Computers and human beings do not think the same way. For a human, concepts like “next Tuesday” and “a meeting every other week, on Thursdays” and “this piece of paper is both a piece of mail and a reminder to put a check in the mail on the 13th” are both easy to remember and easy to understand. The same is not true for a computer. Computers store data differently than the human brain and making certain associations is not as easy for programing languages as it is for human beings. This fact, that the human brain isn’t really a biological computer, is the cause of almost all frustration people have with software. We expect our tools to “think” in the same fashion we do, and they don’t. Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, is is the story the failure of programmers and engineers to bridge the gap between they way we think and what our tools can do, using the Chandler project as an example.

I want Chandler, but I will probably never see it. As described in the book, the Chandler group wanted to a create a personal information manager that would store and manipulate data in a fashion much more similar to how we hold information in our brains. In traditional programs, data is separated into categories or “silos”. Email is one kind of data, and so goes in one spot. An appointment on a calender is another kind of data and so goes in another. But as we already discussed, humans don’t operate like that. That email form my boss is also a change in schedule. That status report is also a reminder that the widget problem needs to be solved before we can decide on a release schedule. That calendar appointment is also a mile high stack of paperwork I have to get done before the meeting with the security audit. In small doses, this is easy for me to remember. It is progressively harder to do the more I have to remember, which is why we use programs to help us remember in the first place. But due to the discrete nature of computer data, building in those kinds of relationships among disparate kinds of data is not easy to do. Eventually,you pay a price in performance, in data size and robustness, and in user experience. Rosenberg details how the Chandler team encountered and dealt with — or failed to deal with — those problems. He also, at appropriate points, ties in the decisions that the Chandler team made or fell into to past discussions and fads about the best way to create software.

This is an area where the book really shines. Making software is still hard to do. Its rare for a large project to come in on time, under budget, and with the original feature set. This has been true since the invention of large scale software projects, right after the Second World War, and millions of tress and billions of electrons have given their lives in the search for why this is so. Rosenberg ties the Chandler team’s current problems to discussion of programming efficiency and software engineering from the past, using their problems to bring to life the consequences of popular theories and methodologies of software creation. None of these methodologies or theories has been anything resembling a large scale success. There are many reasons for this, from the iinabality to accurately and objectively measure programmer performance (this is a rant of a separate post, but if you are trying to measure programmer efficiency by some measure like lines of codes or number of bugs reported or fixed, then you are setting yourself up for a colossal failure) to the difficulty in brining new people onto a software project. Rosenberg uses the individual experiences of the Chandler people to illuminate a given set of theories, weaving their personal frustrations and triumphs as a touchstone to a more academic discussion of the history and qualities of software engineering methodologies. It is a very effective tactic, the difference between telling you that Picasso could paint and showing you a print.

This is not just a book for programmers. Anyone who designs, writes code, or manages programmers will be well served by reading the book, of course. Rosenberg has written a kind of meta case study. Not only does Rosenberg highlight what went wrong and right (and much more went wrong than went right), he also highlights what those failures mean for various software engineering theories and methodologies. It is an illuminating look at the topic. But this is also a tail for everyone else. More and more of our lives our intimately tied to software. Everything from how we get our entertainment to how we do our work to how our cars’ safety systems function is dependent upon software. The soul of Rosenberg’s book is the struggles of the Chandler team members to take what happens in their heads and turn it into a software. Understanding that struggle is one of the best ways to come to terms with the failures, compromises, and limitations of the software that runs your life.