In personal correspondence, I was reminded how much I like Dead Milkmen. They are what I’ve always thought punk was at its core: fun. All the great punk bands have much more enthusiasm than talent, and that is entirely true of them. In fact, they hearken back to early Ramones. Anyway, here are Dead Milkmen doing their hit “Punk Rock Girl” which includes a bit about the also wonderful Mojo Nixon:
Okay. Okay. Here’s some Mojo Nixon doing the great “Don Henley Must Die”:
Paul Finkelman has written a most striking OpEd in the New York Times about that great writer of God given liberty, Thomas Jefferson. The title of the article will give you some idea: The Monster of Monticello. I have to admit, I have tended to give Jefferson the benefit of the doubt over the years. I know that I rarely if even live up to my ideals. Just the same, I’ve never been a total dick.
Finkelman presents a very callous man—one who truly saw his slaves as property. He presents a man who sold 85 slaves to buy luxury goods. (That’s a lot of luxury goods.) He sold slaves as a form of punishment. And most shocking of all (I knew of this but not the stark numbers), when he died he only freed 5 of his slaves. The remaining 200 (including his mistress Sally Hemings) were to be sold.[1] In all of my misspent life, I have never done anything as bad as any part of this. It is despicable.
When I was young, I was briefly involved with an older woman who was fond of saying that a man couldn’t be held accountable to mores of his time, but he could be held accountable for his own mores. Over time, I came to see that she was wrong. We are all products of our times. But even with my more liberal view of personal ethics, Jefferson looks very bad.
Compared to the men of his day, he was still conservative at best when it came to the issue of slavery. Compare him to his friend Thomas Paine, and you can only conclude that Jefferson was nothing but a selfish asshole. Even compared to John Adams, himself quite the asshole, Jefferson looks terrible. But as Finkelman shows, it is much worse than even this. He really did think that Africans were subhuman.
Of course, I can’t help but wonder which way this works. I tend to think that Jefferson was the same as all rich people. He came to believe that he was entitled to his wealth. His wealth was dependent upon the enslavement of Africans. But he could see how unjust this was. So he had to justify it. And there is no better way to justify it than to “prove” that your slaves are in no important way different from your cattle.
Let’s not forget that slavery was not about racism. It was about profits. There are historical reasons why slavery eventually was limited to Africans. But the slaveholders kept slaves for the money, not for any of the theoretical reasons they developed to justify the practice. So I tend to think this is what was going on with Jefferson. And what is particularly bad about this way of looking at the man is that it tends to undermine all of his work. It isn’t just that he had a personal failing or a blind spot when it came to slavery. It is that what he wrote he only ever meant to apply to men like himself.
Given that most of the founding fathers were of similar dispositions, even if they weren’t in favor of slavery, it means the whole founding of the country was less a revolution and more a change of ownership. It is only step by step that we make a more perfect union. People like Jefferson were never really in favor of equal rights for the “help.”
H/T Corey Robin
[1] Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph stopped Hemings from being sold.
John Nichols discusses some shocking results from the latest Gallup Poll on economic and ideological terms. Almost one-quarter of all Republicans have a favorable opinion of the word “socialism.” It has been well know that for a while, the “S” word had lost its scare power. But in the last two years, the number of Republicans who say they like the word has gone up from 17% to 23%. All the other group categories have seen increases in positive reactions to the word, but it is most intense among Republicans and conservatives.
Nichols thinks that the reason for this is the glib way that conservative politicians and pundits throw around the word “socialism.” I’m sure that he’s right. And this effect must be biggest on Republicans because they hear this kind of garbage the most. How else should people react when popular laws and politicians are labeled “socialist”? Remember when Clinton was president? There was blanket coverage in the right wing media calling him a socialist. Now, even or perhaps especially to conservatives, he was a great president. How can that not take some chill off “socialism”?
Most of the article is about the early history of the Republican Party and how radical it was. He even discusses the direct connection of the Republican Party with none other than Karl Marx. This is all straight out of his excellent book The “S” Word, which I reviewed for May Day. I highly recommend reading it; it is filled with forgotten history—or at least history that a large part of those in power wish was forgotten.
I think there is another aspect to all this increasing love for socialism. People make a distinction between “communism” and “socialism.” Communism is that totalitarian system practiced in Russia that collapsed due to its own weight. Socialism is the system they have in Switzerland, Finland, and even the United Kingdom. These are systems that are just as free as ours, but they are “nicer.” People still get rich. Markets still function. Yet the poor aren’t tormented, the sick get treatment, and minorities are protected. At the end of the day, that sounds pretty good. Is there anything great that our nastier system provides that theirs does not? Increasingly, our answer is no.
There is a question that is always floating around the minds of liberals: why don’t perfectly respectable progressive policy ideas get any media attention while wacky conservative ideas get promoted like journalists are being paid by marketing companies? Earlier today, Paul Krugman posted a really great, if short, article that gives an example of this—contrasting what is considered “serious” versus what is not. Raising the Capital Gains and Estate taxes is not serious. Raising the age of eligibility for Medicare is Very Serious indeed.
But here’s the thing. Krugman looks at the total in new revenue that Obama is suggesting: $1.6 trillion over the next ten years. Raising the Medicare eligibility age would save $0.113 trillion over the next ten years. That means that the unserious Obama proposal would raise almost 15 times as much money as the Serious Republican proposal would save.
What’s going on here? Krugman says that a proposal is only considered serious if it is painful for the poor and middle classes. But I think he’s just being glib—although certainly not completely wrong. I do think there is a common mindset in America that the only way a proposal can be effective is if it is painful. This is the “no pain, no gain” philosophy. And I am with Krugman in that this is part of the story. But there is a much more important part.
The most important issue here is that the media are just too cynical to accept that any plan that makes demands of the rich is politically viable. Like everyone else, they are so used to a system that is overwhelmingly tilted toward the rich, that they can’t imagine that things could be any other way. Thus, when presented with a budget proposal that would do much good but demands sacrifice from the rich, it is labeled a non-starter. (See, for example, the People’s Budget.) But a budget proposal that does little good while harming the poorer classes? They’ve seen that before! They know that’s definitely a possibility.
Of course, the media have been completely corrupted. Conservatives have been so successful playing the media, that they no longer even need to call foul—the media will do it for them. And this is what we get from even smart pundits like Ezra Klein who claimed that Obama’s proposal wasn’t serious. C.A. Rotwang in Cliff Notes, offers up what a truly progressive budget proposal would look like. What Obama offered is what would be called a moderate (centrist) proposal in any other developed nation. Here of course, it “unserious” and a “non-starter.”
This is the legacy of our media: only slightly less infatuated with power than fearful of being called “liberal.” The right has done an amazing job with the mainstream media. There are dictators all around the world who dream of such a “free” press. And this is perhaps the biggest reason that Washington continues to pass laws that are more conservative than what the vast majority of the voters want.
Ed Rendell is the prototypical New Democrat. Or as I like to think of him: an Old Republican. He is a good example of what I’m talking about when I say that any Republican of 40 years ago who really believed in what his party stood for would now be a Democrat. Any person still a Republican is either evil or just not that bright. But it goes further than this.
More and more, what it means to be a Democrat is to be socially liberal and economically conservative. And this is not a deal that I’m willing to make. I just don’t care so much about reproductive rights and gay marriage to abandon economic equality for them. But Ed Rendell, like most supposed liberals, depends upon these issues for his reputation. And I will grant him all of this: he is on the right side of all the really vile social issues that the medieval crowd make us fight over.
But the big issue is economic. We have ridiculous levels of inequality. This has led to far less tax revenues and thus deficits and debt. A big part of this is under-funding Social Security and Medicare—programs that the rich pay almost nothing into. And the solution for people like “liberal” Ed Rendell is simple: fuck the poorer classes!
Jonathan Valania writes about this in The Philly Post, Ed Rendell Is on the Wrong Side of the Class War. He starts by noting that he likes Rendell. I alway hate this kind of thing. So what? Andrew Breitbart seems to have been a personable guy, but the world is a much better place since he died. I care about Rendell only as much as he makes the world better, and it just doesn’t matter how many minor issues the man is right on. When it comes to the big issues, he is wrong.
Valania points out that in addition to being a corporate cheerleader for an investment bank (which somehow is never worth disclosing during any of his endless appearances on MSNBC), he a chairman of the steering committee of Fix the Debt. So the next time you see Rendell on the TV machine, ask yourself, do all of his nice words about marriage equality really make up for the fact that he wants to fuck the poorer classes with cuts to Social Security and Medicare?
I have never read any of John le Carré’s books. But I have seen two movies based upon his books. The first was many years ago: The Little Drummer Girl. It is an interesting film, but not all that good. It is probably worth revisiting, especially with the continuing problems between the Israelis and Palestinians. The movie goes along with my many years of experience in academia: taken out of the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians love each other. Why? Because they are the same fucking people!
Last night, I watched The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Unlike The Little Drummer Girl, it is a great film. Above all, the film is beautiful to look at. I really love the lighting and camera work of Oswald Morris (Look Back in Anger). But also, the story is stronger, and acting better, and the film just reeks of Cold War tension.
On a basic level, these two films are the same: individuals matter and states are just evil institutions. In The Little Drummer Girl, this is more implicit. Of course, it was written 20 years latter. Apparently, when le Carré first published The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, it created quite a stir. People were used to the James Bond crap and thought of spies as cowboys (Western) and Indians (Eastern). Le Carré was more sophisticated, saying in effect, “They’re all assholes.”
It was funny watching The Spy Who Came in from the Cold last night. This story, created almost 50 years ago, evidences so much more nuanced an understand of foreign affairs than we get today even in serious reporting. I think we’ve taken a big step backwards. If The Spy Who Came in from the Cold were released today, it would be savagely attacked on Fox News. And this is after Dick Chaney and company said publicly what Control says in the film: they need to be as evil as the other side.
Of course, if this is all that le Carré had on offer, both these movies would be nothing more than exercises in extreme cynicism. But they aren’t. This is because they provide the one defense we have against an evil world: our individual relationships. This is what makes the ending of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold so noble, if sad.
I’m a big fan of Liberal Viewer (see the link on the sidebar below). Still, I don’t think he has ever created as good a video as he did yesterday on Fox News’ coverage of the “War on Christmas.” Check it out:
You may remember Andrew Sullivan. He is a conservative Obama supporter. And after the first presidential debate, Sullivan had a very public freak out. That was understandable, a lot of liberals were similarly concerned, although he was much more ridiculous than most.
Now that Sullivan has got the president he wanted, Sullivan apparently thinks that Obama shouldn’t do anything as rash as govern on his campaign promises. In a blog post yesterday, he writes, Meeting In The Middle. In it, he quotes Ezra Klein and Michael Tomasky, basically saying the same thing: it is good to see that Obama has learned how to negotiate. Tomasky writes, “If the White House had instead yesterday offered a modest set of specific entitlement cuts and domestic spending cuts, that would have started the negotiations on GOP turf, since those are the two things the GOP wants.” Exactly!
But Sullivan thinks this is all wrong:
There is an easy retort to this: we saw the “new politics” over the past four years and it didn’t work. In fact, if Obama had offered the modest set of spending cuts that Tomasky mentions, the Republicans would be saying the exact same thing. About the only person who might have applauded such magnanimity from the president would have been Andrew Sullivan. And even in his case, I suspect all that would have happened was that Sullivan wouldn’t have written this one blog post.
Negotiation is a game. The Republicans know it. The president now knows it. Andrew Sullivan needs to learn it. And he also needs to stop whining.