Monthly Archives: January 2015

Richard Nixon Superstar

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Nixon Fights BackAnother 8 January, another year without Nixon to kick around. I’m going to be lazy and reprint mostly what I said last year. I have a lot of outside work to do. But also, there are some articles that I just don’t think got read. That’s especially true of birthday posts where, when they were good, they tended to be very long because I was talking about a number of people. I just want to add to what follows with this: I’ve got to go through my files and see if I can find my old Nixon White House puppet plays. They are some of my favorite writings. Maybe by next year, I can post one of them.

Richard Nixon was born on this day in 1913. Look, the man was imperfect. He had a real paranoia problem — but not without cause. And his foreign policy was a disaster. But was it worse than Johnson’s? Well, I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t a lot worse. And he did eventually decide it was time to pull the plug. He also wasn’t bad on domestic issues. But the reason that I love him is that he is the most successful loser in the history of humanity. Even at the peak of his fame, I think he still felt like a loser. And, as mentioned, there are my puppet plays about the Nixon administration. So in a sense, Nixon is no longer a person to me; he’s a character. And in that group, he’s an okay guy. Kind of a Caspar Milquetoast compared to the rest of the cast.

And another thing. Here’s what Nixon said after he lost his election to become the governor of California:

How do you not love that man? He’s angry. He’s sad. But he thinks he’s being funny. And do you know what? I think he was funny! I present the video because when people quote it, they get the tone all wrong. That’s understandable. There’s a lot going on inside him at that point. But it isn’t an angry denunciation the way people usually say it, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” He wasn’t just talking about the media there either. He was talking to the world generally. It’s poignant.

One thing I definitely think: Richard Nixon was not bad for this country in the way that Reagan, Bush the Younger, and even the New Democrats have been. That’s not to say that he wouldn’t be a crazy Tea Party guy if he were in politics today. But even in his own time, the conservative Republicans didn’t much like his liberal social policy. If Nixon had been more of an economic conservative, his party mightn’t have abandoned him so willingly over Watergate. I for one am damn sad that we don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.

Happy birthday Richard Nixon!

The title is a reference to the David Frye comedy album, Richard Nixon Superstar, which I thought was hilarious as a child, even though I didn’t get a lot of it. The one bit I remember is the obstetrician who delivered Nixon saying, “He was the only baby I ever saw with a five o’clock shadow.” Or something like that.

1941 or Never Let Spielberg Near a Comedy

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1941I finally managed to watch the film 1941. Before, I had never made it more than a half hour in because the beginning is so tedious. But now that I’ve seen the whole thing, I can say that in addition to the first half hour of tedium, there is also another two hours of tedium. It doesn’t really matter where you come into the film, you will see exactly the same thing: overcrowded, comedic action sequences that are hard to follow, and almost completely lacking in any wit. And each one of those sequences goes on for at least three to four times as long as anyone could be expected to watch.

What’s interesting about the film is that it is actually well made. It looks great and the acting is wonderful. This makes it all the more bizarre that with such onscreen comedic talent, the film could so consistently avoid being funny. John Belushi spends the whole film doing Bluto from Animal House but without anything to do that is actually funny. In the end, it isn’t clear at all who his character is supposed to be. But the same thing could be said for pretty much all the characters in the film. There are an enormous number of them and mostly, if it weren’t for costumes, it would be impossible to tell them apart. Indeed, Wally goes from zoot suit to navy uniform to army uniform and it takes some time to understand that he is the same character.

It is hard to fault the script, because I doubt it was written to be two and a half hours long. Some of the scenes in between the interminable action sequences are very funny. The best involve Joe Flaherty as the bandleader Raoul Lipschitz. There is a nice joke with the name. A woman asks him what his name is and he answer, “Raoul.” She says, “I knew it!” — apparently excited that he is a hot blooded Latino. Then he finishs, “Lipschitz.” But even better, after a (typically outrageous) brawl destroys the USO club, he signs off his radio broadcast with only a hint of sarcasm:

I’d like to thank all the GIs for helping make tonight’s evening such a… a memorable occasion. Maybe in the future we can have some negroes come in and we’ll stage a race riot… Right here.

But such bits are swamped by the rest of the film. And it isn’t just that the action sequences are long. They are mostly pointless. Much of the destruction that takes places is gratuitous. Army personnel shoot into crowds for no reason — of course no one dies. I’ve often complained about characters acting in odd ways for the sole purpose of furthering a plot. Well, that’s about all that happens in 1941. Things must be destroyed, so the characters act stupidly. Ned Beatty as Ward Douglas shoots a cannon at a submarine through his house rather than, I don’t know, moving the cannon a yard or two to the right.

Ultimately, what most misses in the film is that no one is well enough developed to actually care about. So it is just a bunch of action sequences and stunts that work in a technical sense but fail in any emotional sense. And the tragic thing is that the film could have been a hundred times better with a budget that was one-fifth. If there is a primary narrative in the film it is Wally and Betty’s forbidden love and the evil Corporal Sitarski’s apparent rape efforts. But nothing really comes of any of that, just like nothing comes of the narratives about any of the characters.

It is, however, curious how a film with so much comedic content could be so barren in terms of laughs. I think it is the editing. I think that Spielberg had the film cut as though it were just an action film. But even if there had been real life and death drama to pull the viewer along, I doubt it would have worked. Again, the characters are so poorly rendered I literally didn’t care what happened to anyone other than Betty who I may have only cared about because I have fatherly feelings about young women like her.

I wouldn’t have even written about the film, except that it still bothers me how much I didn’t like it. It isn’t that the film is bad. It is just that there is really nothing to grab onto in it. There is no point to it. But when I saw the filmmakers on a documentary on the DVD talking about how the film did well in Europe and how people like it a lot now, I thought these guys must be deluded. They were going for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. What they made was a cinematic essay about how Steven Spielberg should never be allowed to direct a comedy.

Hazlitt on Political Apostasy

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William HazlittThe principles and professions change: the man remains the same. There is the same spirit at the bottom of all this pragmatical fickleness and virulence, whether it runs into one extreme or another: to wit, a confinement of view, a jealousy of others, an impatience of contradiction, a want of liberality in construing the motives of others, either from monkish pedantry, or a conceited overweening reference of everything to our own fancies and feelings. There is something to be said, indeed, for the nature of the political machinery, for the whirling motion of the revolutionary wheel which has of late wrenched men’s understandings almost asunder, and “amazed the very faculties of eyes and ears”; but still this is hardly a sufficient reason, why the adept in the old as well as the new school should take such a prodigious latitude himself, while at the same time he makes so little allowance for others. His whole creed need not be turned topsy-turvy, from the top to the bottom, even in times like these. He need not, in the rage of party spirit, discard the proper attributes of humanity, the common dictates of reason. He need not outrage every former feeling, nor trample on every customary decency, in his zeal for reform, or in his greater zeal against it. If his mind, like his body, has undergone a total change of essence, and purged off the taint of all its early opinions, he need not carry about with him, or be haunted in the persons of others with, the phantoms of his altered principles to loathe and execrate them. He need not (as it were) pass an act of attainder on all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the shrine of matured servility: he need not become one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself.

—William Hazlitt
“On Consistency of Opinion” in Selected Writings

“Independents” and a Failure to Communicate

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Aaron BlakeWhat’s we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. I hate it when someone tells me they are a political independent. The truth is, I don’t even really know what that means. Does it mean that you think Keynesian economic policy is good in 2008 and then decide that supply side economics is actually right in 2012, only to change back again in 2016? Do you think that women should have reproductive rights one year and then don’t the next? No, it doesn’t mean these things. People’s ideological convictions stay pretty consistent because they are rarely countered on them. So what does it mean to be politically independent?

It generally means one of two things. It could mean that you don’t pay much attention to politics, don’t care much about politics, and just vote for whichever candidate seems nicest. In the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, Irene Reilly is such a voter; she doesn’t vote for presidents — she votes for their wives. (Admittedly, that isn’t the worst idea in the world.) The second thing it could mean to be politically independent is to be pretentious. Most independents I speak to are of this variety: they want people to think of them as open minded and beyond labels.

A new Gallup Poll is out that shows that the number of people claiming to be “independent” is at an all time high: 43%. It has been rising steadily since 2008. Basically, during that time, three percentage points of people once claiming to be Democrats and two percentage points of their Republican counterparts now call themselves independents. (This does not include the Republican drop of 5 percentage points from 2004 to 2008.)

Political Independents - Gallup Poll (2015)

At The Washington Post, Aaron Blake wrote, A Record Number of Americans Claim to Be Independent. They Are Kidding Themselves. He called this for what it is, “What we have here isn’t so much a rise in political independence as much as a rise in the desire to be labeled ‘independent.'” And he runs down the evidence that there is actually less political independence than there has been in a very long time. It’s worth checking out because it isn’t the usual direct evidence that “independents” still vote as consistently as self-described Republicans and Democrats. Blake shows that the “swing” voters have declined as a percentage of presidential voters since at least the early 1990s.

I noted a year and a half ago what is really going on, Is Michelle Bernard Really an Independent? In that article, I wrote:

I got the feeling she was saying, “I’m not like you ideologues! I’m open minded! I vote for the best person, not for whatever my party has on offer!” There are a couple of problems with this thinking. First, the assumption is that the middle is not an ideological position. This is simply not true. Second, most liberals don’t vote for Democrats because they are Democrats; we vote for them because even though they generally suck, they are far better than what the Republicans have on offer.

And that pretty much sums it up. It is largely in reaction to this kind of thinking that makes me a Democrat. I am much more unhappy with the Democratic Party than most liberal “independents.” Similarly, I’ve known a number of people who called themselves independents because they thought that the Republican Party was too liberal. I’ll bet most of that two percentage point decrease in Republicans are people who are unhappy that the Republicans haven’t shut down the government enough.

Ultimately, Blake’s conclusion is what sums up the rise of the independents, “About the only thing that’s increasing is the self-delusion of independence.” What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. That’s always the case when people delude themselves. You can’t have an honest conversation with people who aren’t honest with themselves.

Steve King Dishonors the Nation

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Steve KingA couple of days ago, Charlie Pierce brought my attention to quite an amazing bit of rhetoric from the estimable Steve King. King was on WorldNetDaily’s Radio America where he claimed that the founding fathers would be “aghast” at Obama. Certainly he’s right. Most of them would never have found an African American president acceptable. But King does not mean that, because of course, conservatives don’t like to face up to the fact that our nation was founded by a bunch of bigots (some worse than others). No, King is talking about the fact that Obama’s “word means nothing.”

You see, the founding fathers were men of honor. And his example? “It’s been 210 years since Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought a duel over honor.” Ah, yes: that honorable duel. And what was it over? Burr felt insulted by something that Hamilton had said. This was coming off Burr’s devastating loss to the almost unknown Morgan Lewis to become governor of New York in 1804. Burr thought Hamilton had helped Lewis, and he probably did. Regardless, the whole thing seems more like a squabble between mean girls in a suburban high school. Ah yes, honor!

In addition, there is some contention that Hamilton monkeyed with the trigger mechanism of his pistol to make it fire with less pressure than normal. If he did so, it was the wrong thing to do. Or maybe he did it because he knew that Burr was a far better shot. I don’t know. Nor do I especially care. The two showed all the maturity of, I don’t know, Steve King.

Burr was, shortly after, tried for treason. I don’t think there is anything to that except that Jefferson had a hate-on for him. And as my opinion of Jefferson has greatly declined in recent years, I can’t hold that against Burr. However, after the duel, Burr did run off to Louisiana. And while there he most certainly looked into starting a war between Spain and Mexico — hoping to start his whole little kingdom in the newly independent Mexico.

Now some might consider this this a great thing — like the American Revolutionary War. But I think it rather casts a dimmer light on the founding of our own country. When you look at what many of the proponents wanted out of the separation with England, it was not noble. In fact, a big cause for the separation was the fear of southern slave owners that England was going to outlaw slavery. That wasn’t true of Burr, of course, who was very much against slavery. But his petulant behavior doesn’t speak well of him or any of the founding fathers — except for Thomas Paine who people like Steve King would hate if they had ever read his work or any works about him.

I don’t think anyone can reasonably say that Obama is dishonorable. And the nation as a whole is a lot more honorable now than it was 200 years ago. Having fatal duels over petty insults is a sign of immaturity not nobility. It’s interesting that legislative violence has only really come back in the last few years since the Republicans have become so radicalized and been consigned to the minority.

If anything, a prime act of dishonor is what Steve King does: use the fact that he is a big fish in a little (but for historical reasons, politically important) pond to force policy on the right in extremely damaging directions — both for his party and for the nation. That’s something that Steve King ought to give a little thought to — right after he reads a dozen books about American history.

See also: Jim Mowrer on Steve King.

Elvis Presley and All His Impersonators

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Elvis PresleyOn this day in 1935, the King of Rock-n-Roll, Elvis Presley was born. Since I don’t have a lot to say about The King, I’m going to recycle an article I wrote almost two years ago that never got the attention that it deserved, Transubstantiation of Elvis. But let me just add that Elvis would only be 80 years old today. He left us far too young.

In 1992, I went to Hong Kong for the first time. I was sitting in the back of a little Irish pub. And I was pretty drunk. And in walks a Chinese Elvis impersonator in a white jumpsuit studded to the ridiculous extreme that we are all accustom to. Holding an acoustic guitar, he performs “Hound Dog,” collects tips and leaves. You got all that, right? Hong Kong, Irish pub, Elvis. The next day I wasn’t sure myself. I had to ask my colleagues, and they confirmed it: I did in fact see a Chinese Elvis do “Hound Dog” in an Irish pub in Hong Kong. Many people go their entire lives without ever experiencing something as magical.

I love Elvis and even more, I love Elvis Culture. In a sense, Elvis is America: a drug addict who wanted Nixon to make him an undercover DEA agent; a white guy who made millions off the work of poor blacks; and a country rube who somehow connects to a universal audience. In addition to all of this, the music is just fantastic. But it’s the Vegas act silliness that drives the culture. Although I do not particularly like watching Elvis at that stage of his career, I do like what it has spawned. I never would have gone to see one of those shows, but I’d thrill to see Elvis impersonators.

So when I noticed that the film Almost Elvis was available on Netflix, I had to watch it. It isn’t a great film, but it is fascinating. It follows a group of Elvis Impersonators as they compete for the “Images of Elvis” prize for the best Elvis impersonator in the world. It focuses on Irv Cass, a professional from Michigan. Little did I know it, but there is a network of Elvis impersonators throughout the world. If you want one, you call up EEN (Elvis Entertainment Network) and they will send one out. Cass is one them, and seems to make a decent living doing it:

Cass is very free with his opinions of the competition. Since he was one of the most established people in the field at that time, he knows them all. He’s rather good at talking about their strengths and weaknesses. In this way, he nicely systematizes what it is to be an Elvis impersonator. And this brings up probably the most interesting part of the film: race. One of the top people in the field is Robert Washington, who is a black man. Mostly everyone is very respectful of him. But they also admit that he doesn’t look like Elvis because of his race.

But here’s the thing. I don’t think that any of the impersonators looks like Elvis the man. If you take away the hair and the sideburns and the outfits, they just look like random white guys. So really, when we are talking about Elvis, we aren’t really talking about his face. Elvis isn’t a person anymore; he’s an archetype. So to me, it is all about getting up on stage with “the look” (hair, burns, suit) and moving and sounding like Elvis. What’s more, in Washington’s case, he isn’t all that black. Until people started talking about it, I just thought he was really tanned.

All the people said the same thing: I question whether Washington will ever win the title, not because I don’t like him, but because of the judges being, well, racist. This is typical: people generally think their neighbors are more racist than they actually are. At the end of the film, Washington came in second. The good news is he later won the event. Check him out; he’s great:

An academic interviewed for the film referred to the “transubstantiation of Elvis” to explain why people want more than just the music. The music is enough for me. But he’s right: these guys do become The King. And that’s pretty great.

Happy birthday Elvis Presley!

Afterword

This is probably the guy I saw in Hong Kong. He started in 1992, and I believe I saw him on my 1994 visit.

Sympathy for Bob McDonnell, Not Ruth Marcus

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Ruth MarcusIt might surprise you to know that I have great sympathy for Bob McDonnell who was just sentenced to two years in prison. Some people are scoffing at the sentence, but I’d like to see them do two years in federal prison. But more than that, I’ve always seen his crime as indicative of our broken political system. Generally, only rich people become governors of large states. So McDonnell and his wife found themselves in this sea of rich people and they felt like they were out of their depth. Bob McDonnell was governor, after all. And I’m sympathetic to that. What he did was wrong and he shouldn’t have done it. But I’m far more concerned about the fact everyone swimming around our governors are rich. That is the problem we should all be concerned about.

Barring people like the gunmen who murdered the people at Charlie Hebdo, I generally feel sorry for people who go away to prison. People who think of it as “easy” or a “vacation” are completely ignorant of the situation. But that doesn’t mean that I will brook the kind of nonsense that Ruth Marcus dished out last night, For Bob McDonnell, Justice Was Served. It’s not that I necessarily agree or disagree with her conclusion. The problem is her logic.

She noted that Bob McDonnell’s “promising career” is now over. Is that not enough of a punishment?! She went back on this later, claiming that, well, if you follow this logic to its natural conclusion that “prison is never justified in cases of public corruption.” And that can’t be the case. But the truth is that McDonnell’s promising career is not over. He may yet have a career in politics. If not, I’m sure he has enough connections to get a good lobbying job. And at the absolute worst, someone will get him a job in upper management at some corporation. He’ll be fine.

What most definitely will not happen to McDonnell is that he will be working as a busboy at Denny’s or forced into a life of crime because no one will hire him. This, of course, is the fate of most people who do two years in federal prison. In fact, this is what happens to most people who get convicted of felonies and don’t have to serve any time at all. The prison time is, in the long-term, the least of the punishment meted out to convicted felons. Bob McDonnell is far luckier than the Ruth Marcuses of the world could ever know.

Marcus wrote something else that almost gave me a stroke:

Sentencing in white-collar and public-corruption cases presents a puzzle. One chief rationale for incarceration — incapacitating the dangerous offender to protect society — does not apply. White-collar defendants tend to be pillars of the community, not violent criminals who need to be locked away.

Let’s leave aside the preposterous idea that “pillars of the community” cannot also be violent criminals. Apparently, she’s never heard of John Wayne Gacy. And let’s leave aside the implicit plea for leniency for the “right kind of people.” What does Ruth Marcus think are the crimes of people in federal prison? As of 29 November 2014, almost 75% of the people in federal prison were there for clearly non-violent crimes. Almost half (48.7%) where there for drug offenses.

But it all goes together. The people in jail for drug crimes are primarily poor. They are by definition not the “right kind of people.” So it doesn’t matter that they are going to be sentenced to at least three years and often far longer. On the state level, it can be much worse. In Kentucky, “For simple possession, first offenders in Kentucky get two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000.”

I’m allowed to say, “For Bob McDonnell, justice was served.” But Ruth Marcus is not. I’ve spent the last two decades of my life pushing for an end to drug criminalization. Ruth Marcus occasionally mentions that mandatory minimum sentences are a bad thing — when it occurs to her. But I can’t find her arguing that the “chief rationale for incarceration — incapacitating the dangerous offender to protect society — does not apply” when it comes to drug “criminals.” Because I’m sure she doesn’t believe that. Growing up in the upper class and studying at Yale didn’t exactly prepare her to empathize with “those kind of people.” She shows a little pity occasionally, but never empathy.

Sharpening the Contradictions

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Juan ColeThe horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.

The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world…

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination…

The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.

Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed this sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly attacking Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic cleansing of a million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization proceeded, with the help of various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for ISIL or ISIS, which descends from al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). And in the end, the brutal and genocidal strategy worked, such that Daesh was able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals that they sought the umbrella of the very group that had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.

“Sharpening the contradictions” is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.

The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals.

—Juan Cole
Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda Attacked Satirists in Paris

H/T: Digby

Maybe It Is Best the CBO Is Now Partisan

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Doug ElmendorfPreviously, I’ve been concerned about what the Republicans were doing to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It has long been known that they wanted to turn the nonpartisan organization into something akin to the Heritage Foundation — something that would simply parrot back to them whatever they wanted to hear. And mostly what they wanted to hear was that if you cut taxes on the rich, they will act like the Great Pumpkin and reward the economy with loads of jobs. So in December, I wrote, How Republicans Intend to Destroy Congress. That was in reference to the effective firing of the CBO chief Doug Elmendorf.

Now, Jonathan Chait sounds the next alarm, Why the Republican Congress’s First Act Was to Declare War on Math. The Republicans changed the rules of CBO analysis so that “dynamic scoring” must be used in the analysis of budgetary proposals that are larger than one quarter of a percent of the size of the GDP. Chait is correct that the Republicans are just turning the CBO into a partisan organization. Its good reputation for nonpartisan analysis will be destroyed. And who then will Congress and the rest of the country look to for “the straight dope” on matters economic?

But is it really such a big deal? I’ve really been questioning that. Chait is right that the CBO analyses are “necessarily imperfect” but “arrived at fairly.” But he downplays just now imperfect the CBO is. Here’s an example from his own article:

The CBO forecast that the unemployment rate would fall to 7.6 percent by the end of 2014. If the conservative analysis [with dynamic scoring] was correct, and higher tax rates on job creators were depressing job growth, we might expect the unemployment rate today to be higher than the CBO forecast. Instead it is much lower. Unemployment fell below 6 percent by the third quarter of last year.

So with dynamic scoring, the CBO would have been even further off. But given that it was off by 27%, does it really matter? Would being off by 35% have been significantly worse? I think what this illustrates is that the CBO already has a conservative bias — a much bigger one than dynamic scoring. So the status quo has been that Democrats have dutifully followed the conservative analyses of the CBO, which has forced them to create worse legislation than they normally would have. I’m thinking specifically of the stimulus. If the Democrats had changed the way the CBO operated, we would have gotten a bill with more infrastructure spending and less tax cutting. But because of the way the “objective” CBO scores things, tax cuts for the rich and highway building improve the economy equally. And that’s dead wrong.

The problem with the very notion of anything “nonpartisan” is that people think it means that it is objective. But clearly that is never the case. The CBO is biased in ways that I think are demonstrably wrong. This change by the Republican Congress will make the work of the CBO even worse. But at least everyone will recognize that. People won’t talk about the CBO as though it were some hallowed organization. And it means when the Democrats have control of the CBO, they can change it to something that does a better job of analyzing than it did in the “good old days” when it simply assumed (against all evidence) that infrastructure spending didn’t stimulate growth.

Je Suis Charlie

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Charlie Hebdo: Faut Pas Se Moquer - You Must Not MockThis is the cover of 19 September 2012 issue of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that was attacked this morning during an editorial meeting. It seems at this point that 12 people were killed — ten at the magazine and two police officers. There were three gunmen who shouted the usual tired Islamic slogans, in particular, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad.”

What the Muslim and Jew are saying on the cover of the magazine is, “Faut Pas Se Moquer!” That means roughly, “You must not mock!” The whole thing kind of reminds me of Kirby Delauter who said, “Your rights stop where mine start.” Somehow, reactionaries think their right not to hear or see anything they don’t like trumps everyone else’s right to say and do what they will. I understand this: if my life and ideology where totally vacuous, I too would make a big deal any time someone mocked me.

So there is a sense in which I think it is wrong to pointlessly poke at religious people and their dogma. That’s not a defense of these and many other evil murderers. But there are lots of devout Muslims, Jews, and Christians who get offended when we mock them. If it’s a priest or a mullah or a rabbi, I don’t care. But it is never my wish to make the powerless suffer more. Of course, mostly these people would never see the offensive material. It is usually priests, mullahs, and rabbis who are out fomenting disease, “Look at this thing! Now be outraged!”

In the case of Charlie Hebdo, any outrage is totally unjustified because the magazine took on everyone. Hugh Schofield of the BBC explained the magazine’s history:

Charlie Hebdo is part of a venerable tradition in French journalism going back to the scandal sheets that denounced Marie-Antoinette in the run-up to the French Revolution.

The tradition combines left-wing radicalism with a provocative scurrility that often borders on the obscene. Its decision to mock the Prophet Muhammad in 2011 was entirely consistent with its historic raison d’être.

And today’s violence is not new to the magazine. Its editor, Stephane Charbonnier, is under police protection following death threats. And the 2011 cartoon of Muhammad titled, “Charia Hebdo” resulted in their office getting fire bombed. The cartoon is, you know, hilarious. But such silliness is apparently forbidden by the true believers who think that God is so great that he needs murdering psychopaths with assault rifles to protect him.

What’s curious about this whole “no representations of Muhammad” is that it is supposedly following from the Fourth Commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” Followers of Islam don’t want people to worship Muhammad — he was a prophet, not a God. But this just shows how religious dogma becomes a muddle. People creating cartoons mocking Muhammad is not going to make anyone worship the prophet. So what’s the big deal? If I were to create a great and reverential stained glass window of Muhammad, that ought to upset the Muslims. If I create a picture of Jesus urinating on Muhammad, it shouldn’t matter at all. Muslims should just write me off as the heathen that I am. God would take care of me!

But the concern about unflattering images of Muhammad have no theological backing. They are instead cultural. I talk a lot about “cultural Christians” here, so let’s extend the concept: these are cultural Muslims. Their complaint is the same as the Christian complaint about businesses saying “Happy Holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas!” Their complaint is that non-Muslims aren’t treating their religion as though it has the special status of The Truth™.

I’m not just talking about the normal — non-psychopathic — Muslims who would never think of gunning down a dozen people because they don’t like some cartoons. It’s a continuum. It is part of the same screwed up mentality. It’s also what causes Planned Parenthood clinic bombings and doctor assassinations. And I’ve always thought that if American Christians were a minority and they were being just a tiny bit oppressed, we would see widespread acts of terror.

It’s all just so horrible.

Silly and Petulant Conservative Kirby Delauter

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Kirby DelauterMeet Kirby Delauter. He’s a Republican Councilman from District 5 in Frederick County, Maryland. It’s a decent sized place with a population density slightly larger than my own home of Sonoma County, California. I mention this because I don’t want you to get the idea that Delauter is representing some tiny county with a thousand people. His position is one with a fair amount of power. And he could certainly go onto state government directly from this post. Or at least he could if he were smarter than he seems to be.

Bethany RodgersMeet Bethany Rodgers. She’s a reporter for The Frederick News-Post. She had apparently written an article about Delauter last year that he didn’t like. So, according to a recent post on his Facebook page, “I had let her know after her hit piece during the election where she embellished, twisted and downright lied about what we discussed for that article, that she was never to contact me again since she has absolutely no morals or journalistic ability.” I assumed he also un-friended her and refused to eat lunch at the same table as Rodgers and the other mean girls.

Things got very bad last Saturday when Rodgers wrote, Shreve Raises Staffing, Parking Concerns. The article is about parking for the new council members. It has two references to Delauter in an 1,100 word article. Other than the fact Shreve and Delauter come off as self-important, there isn’t much to complain about. After all, it’s about how various people in the local government will share parking!

But Delauter was hopping mad. On his Facebook post he continued (suddenly addressing Rodgers directly):

Bethany, please understand, when you do a hit piece, you need to know who you are dealing with. I have worked very hard to earn an honest reputation in this county. You could have earned my respect, instead you’ve shown that you will sell your soul for the liberal agenda at the FNP. You’re better than that, but you have already sold your credibility and that is something you won’t easily get back.

So let me be clear…………do not contact me and do not use my name or reference me in an unauthorized form in the future.

If only Nixon had come up with this idea, he could have shut down all those Watergate articles. It’s brilliant! “I’m a councilman, but you can’t mention my name anymore!” I have to wonder if it would be okay to describe him, “The silly and petulant Republican Councilman from District 5 in Frederick County”? Rodgers doubtless loves this. She replied:

Wow. Well, just to answer a few of these accusations: First of all, there is no requirement to get a person’s authorization in order to mention them in the paper, particularly if that person is an elected official. It is not just our right but our responsibility to report on people like you, who occupy positions of trust in our government, and I make no apologies for doing that. I am also aware that you asked me not to call you anymore. However, it is a journalistic principle to reach out to individuals who are part of an article. Again, it would be irresponsible for me NOT to do so, and I plan to continue giving you the opportunity to comment on articles that concern you. Whether or not you return my calls is up to you.

Not to be outdone, Delauter threatened legal action, “Use my name again unauthorized and you’ll be paying for an Attorney. Your rights stop where mine start.” The managing editor of the newspaper, Terry Headlee, said, “[T]o threaten to sue a reporter for publishing his name is so ridiculously stupid that I’m speechless.” But apparently, she didn’t remain speechless.

Yesterday, The Frederick News-Post editorial board published, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter. Mostly, it is just an exercise in not using a pronoun when talking about the councilman:

Knowing Councilman Kirby Delauter as we do, we weren’t surprised that he threatened The Frederick News-Post with a lawsuit because we had, he says — and we’re not making this up — been putting Kirby Delauter’s name in the paper without Kirby Delauter’s authorization. Attorneys would be called, Kirby Delauter said.

In fact, we spent quite some time laughing about it. Kirby Delauter, an elected official; Kirby Delauter, a public figure? Surely, Kirby Delauter can’t be serious? Kirby Delauter’s making a joke, right?

You should read the whole thing. It includes a discussion of how they might refer to this nitwit. My favorite was, “The Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter.” There is also quite a bit of serious discussion about the issue. A good picture of Kirby Delauter — and the American conservative movement generally — comes through in this whole episode.

Update (8 January 2015 10:22 am)

From The Frederick News-Post, Delauter: Statement to The News-Post Threatening Legal Action Was “Wrong and Inappropriate”:

“Over my career I have fired off my fair share of angry e-mails, which in hindsight I wish I hadn’t. I can’t think of one that had a positive effect. Usually, they only served to escalate the conflict. I thought I had long ago learned the lesson of waiting 24 hours before I hit the send key, but apparently I didn’t learn that lesson as well as I should have.

“Of course, as I am an elected official, the Frederick News-Post has the right to use my name in any article related to the running of the county — that comes with the job. So yes, my statement to the Frederick News-Post regarding the use of my name was wrong and inappropriate. I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong…”

Mr Delauter, that was a fine apology. I’m impressed.

One Day, Two Great French Musicians

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Francis PoulencOn this day in 1899, the great French composer Francis Poulenc. And exactly 23 years later, the great flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal was born. I believe the two were friends. They were certainly colleagues. Poulenc wrote Sonate Pour Flute et Piano specifically for Rampal.

I know what you might think, “Okay, so he wrote a piece of music for Rampal! Who cares?!” When I was seriously studying flute, my teacher often (Too often!) lamented the fact that there was no great music written from the flute after the Baroque Period and before the Modern Period (if we can define that as starting with Debussy). She was pretty much correct. The great Classical composers didn’t seem to care much for the instrument. When Mozart was commissioned to write three flute concertos, he only managed two write two of them, and one was just a slight reworking of an oboe concerto he had written a year earlier. The Romantic Period was even worse with most of the works written for the flute being tiresome — all fireworks.

Jean-Pierre RampalPoulenc’s sonata has rightly become a flute standard. As far as I’m concerned, it is the best piece ever written for the flute. But then, Poulenc is one of my very favorite composers. Part of that is just that he is alternately fun, sad, thrilling, sensuous, you name it. But it is also that I never hear him working. That’s my biggest complaint with modern composers: I too often realize what they are trying to do — it doesn’t sound organic. Poulenc always made it sound easy, even when he was being extremely serious.

I feel much the same way about Rampal. Other unbelievably great flutists like James Galway and William Bennett still seem to me to be working at times. I don’t know what it is. But with Rampal it just sounds easy, like water flowing through a stream.

Anyway, here is Jean-Pierre Rampal playing Francis Poulenc’s Sonate Pour Flute et Piano. It features Rampal’s longtime associate Robert Veyron-Lacroix on piano. It is wonderful:

Happy birthday Jean-Pierre Rampal and Francis Poulenc!