If you want to understand theater, you should watch the Italian film Habemus Papam or (more or less), “We Have a Pope.” I picked it because the box said that it was hilarious. And generally, I find that other countries do a better job with comedy. In America, they tend to be over-produced and over-complicated. A good example is Le Dîner de Cons (The Dinner Game). The American remake Dinner for Schmucks was reasonably funny, but it gets awfully sidetracked on unnecessary subplots and smooths away too many of the character’s rough edges. (Admittedly, I loved Barry’s mouse taxidermy.)

Habemus Papam is very amusing at times, but I would hardly call it a comedy. If Shakespeare had written it, we would call it a “problem film.” It tells the story of the election of a new pope. At the beginning of the film, all the cardinals are casting ballots and the camera shows a number of them in close-up with the voice-over, “No me, Lord, not me.” As I understand it, this is very accurate. Most Cardinals have no interest in being pope. As a cardinal, they have prestige, a good job, and they get invited to all the best parties. They’re Catholics, not protestants! Being Pope means a lot of work.

They finally pick Cardinal Melville to be the next Pope. He is definitely not up to the task. In fact, he looks shell shocked throughout the rest of the film. But not much happens for the rest of the film. The new pope runs away and wanders around Rome anonymously. The cardinals, all stuck at the Vatican until the pope goes out on the balcony to greet the people, sit around playing cards and volleyball. Throughout, Melville seems to be reflecting on his life. He had wanted to be an actor, but failed and so succeeded rather brilliantly in the church.

My take on the film is that religion is above all theater. Cardinal Melville has not lost his faith—it is probably stronger than ever. Just as he continues to love the theater while being no actor, he loves God while unable to play the part of a spiritual leader. The denouement of the film is at the very end, and it shows very clearly how much everyone in the church depends upon everyone else playing their role. The film asks an important question, “If you truly loved God, would you ever take part in a formal religion?”

Despite these important issues, the film is filled with joy. I think it does an especially good job of showing that church leaders are regular people with all their quirks. A good example is when the Oceania volleyball team—which only has three players—scores a point. It is the climax of the volleyball sequence. If the three-man Oceania team can manage to score a point, then maybe God really can do anything.

Afterword

The film is also beautiful. Kudos to Alessandro Pesci (cinematography) and Paola Bizzarri (production design).

Peter Baker wrote a good article for the New York Times yesterday, Criticized as Weak in Past Talks, Obama Takes Harder Line. It is very evenhanded, of course, but just in reporting the facts, it makes the Republicans look very bad.

The Republicans claim, for example, that they have changed: they are now willing to raise taxes by cutting deductions. This is a bluff, of course; they know that the few deductions that really do end up getting cut will very quickly be reinstated. But it goes further than this. Boehner claims that by cutting deductions he can raise $80 billion. First, this is half what the president is requesting. Second, as usual, Boehner won’t say what those deductions are. And for good reason: the White House says that to close that many loopholes, Boehner would have to end popular policies like charitable deductions.

This is the Republicans all over. They want serious, long-term cuts to social programs and in exchange for vague promises of maybe increasing revenue in the future but who knows how. Meanwhile, the Democrats present a detailed proposal and it is a “non-starter,” apparently because it does not give Boehner 99% of what he wanted. (Note: when Boehner did get 99% of what he wanted, he still turned down the deal.)

Baker reports that the Republicans are also floating this idea that Obama is acting like Bush in 2005:

Obviously, this is the kind of thing that Republicans say to make themselves feel better. The situations are totally different. Bush went out to convince the country that his idea to privatize Social Security was a great idea. The country hated the idea before and after his tour. Obama, on the other hand, is going out to boost for an idea that is already popular—even among Republicans. So this isn’t an issue of a president who wins by a small majority pitching an unpopular plan; it is a reasonably popular president shoring up support that already exists.

I hate reading the coverage of this day after day, because it really doesn’t matter. Most likely, this will go into January. Then everyone will freak out and we will get a deal. And that deal will be heavily biased toward President Obama and the Democrats. Because they have the leverage. Because the Republicans gave them that leverage over the last two years. Because the Republicans were too big of dicks to compromise.

The dickishness has not changed, but it no long has that much power.

It doesn’t much matter which side of the political spectrum an education bureaucrat comes from, they want to destroy the essence of education. The reason is very simple: they want to create workers rather than human beings. Children are not taught to read so they can spend time with the greatest minds of our culture. They are taught so they can read technical documents and understand signs that say, “No sleeping in the workroom!”

Ezra Klein tells us that 46 states plus the District of Columbia has passed the “Common Core State Standards” in English. These standards call for pushing kids to learn how to read “informational” text rather than fiction. This makes no sense on a number of levels.

Primarily: reading is reading. I have always found reading fiction more difficult than reading technical material, except that most technical material is poorly written. Everyone understand the difficulty in starting a novel. You have no context, it just starts. I remember helping my mother decipher the first couple of pages of Naked Lunch, when she inexplicably decided to read it at 60.

Regardless of how technical the material, a good writer is always telling a story. So in a fundamental sense there is no difference between nonfiction and fiction. The biggest difference I find between the two is that nonfiction is typically padded. Reading a ridiculous amount of nonfiction in book form, I can tell you that most 400 page books could easily have been cut down to 100. (In fact: note how often and easily magazine features—10,000 words—get whipped up in to books of 120,000 words. I avoid such books at all cost.) Technical documents (e.g. government reports) are far worse. First, they are with few exceptions poorly written. Second, they are excessively padded—often belaboring one aspect of the subject because one of the team members cared about it. And was verbose. But the editor couldn’t pair that down, because such reports are rarely read and thus judged by weight.

By far the worst aspect of such guidelines is that they destroy our culture. Do we really what a society in which graduates can easily digest a government report but fail to recognize an allusion to Shakespeare or the Bible? Where no one has read Proust or Dickinson or Cervantes? Conservatives are always claiming that they want individual rights. But rights for what? To be a cog in a massive economic machine?

Give me poetry or give me death!

Dean Baker noted something in a post late last night. He was talking about the latest Robert Samuelson column over at the Washington Post, Who’s Not Bargaining in Good Faith? Baker does this at least once a week. It seems that Samuelson can hardly open his mouth without making him apoplectic. And with good reason.

Samuelson wrote an attack on the horrors of inflation, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath. In 2008. Bad timing? I don’t think so. I would call it poor thinking. He is very good at sounding knowledgeable and reasonable while spouting complete nonsense. In his book, for example, he claims that the high level of government spending caused the inflation of the 1970s. But then this inflation was fixed by Paul Volcker with monetary policy. Somehow, this is due to Ronald Reagan, even though Jimmy Carter appointed Volcker, and Volcker’s anti-inflation policies were one of the reasons that Carter lost re-election. Regardless, Samuelson’s “keep inflation low and don’t give a fuck about unemployment” philosophy has been shown to be the cruel battle cry of the elite. It deserves more than scorn; it deserves indifference.

In Samuelson’s column, he says, “The Administration on Aging reports that in 2010, 25.9 percent of households headed by someone 65 or older had incomes exceeding $75,000.” This one is a softball, which Baker hits out of the park:

This isn’t the first time that Baker has noticed this disconnect. And it doesn’t just come from Samuelson. The elite seem to have divided the world into two parts: their friends (people like them) and everyone else. Any discomfort for their friends is unacceptable. And no discomfort for everyone else is too great.

There are things that make me so angry that I tend to not even write about them. I suspect that some readers will find this amusing, because I seem to be angry much of the time. And that’s true, so what I just said should be given the proper amount of weight. One of those things is the pretend Benghazi scandal. I have to give the Republicans high marks for tenacity, but this is simply an outrage. There is no scandal in this matter and people like McCain are losing much of their unearned credibility.

An issue that makes me even more angry is almost everything about the Bradley Manning case. The worst that any reasonable person can say about this young man is that he should have done a better job of being a whistle blower. And I agree. But he’s a kid. And he is a classic whistle blower: a disillusioned true believer. Perhaps he should be punished, but surely he has already been punished enough.

The more we know about the military justice system’s treatment of this kid, the more disgusting it is. There is no doubt that the military are trying to send a strong message to any other potential whistle blower: we will torture you long before we prove that you’ve done anything wrong. For that is what has been going on: the military has been torturing Bardley Manning. Of course, it isn’t just to send a message; they have also been hoping that he would roll over on Julian Assange.

Glenn Greenwald published an article in The Guardian Friday, Bradley Manning: a Tale of Liberty Lost in America. In it, he gives a really good overview of the case in a very short article. But he makes a really stark contrast between how the current administration has chosen to dispense justice:

I’m actually quite used to the United States government meting out injustice. The biggest thing that bothers me here—the core of why I find this subject hard to even talk about—is the triviality of the information leaked. This is the information that we classify?! How exactly does a democratic government justify keeping stuff like this from the people?

Many have tortured and killed innocent people while working for the government. But these people must not only be forgiven, we must pretend they never did anything wrong. No Truth and Reconciliation Commission for America! That would be wrong. But a kid releases a bunch of documents that embarrass a few people and document what we already knew that the Afghanistan War was going poorly? Well, that’s treason!

This kind of bullshit that makes me ashamed of our government.

Dean Baker, like any great thinker, has certain ideas that he pushes. (More on that later today.) One of those ideas is that an aging population is not bad for retirement programs. The common refrain from people, who are not nearly as smart and knowledgeable as Baker, is that fewer workers for each retiree will bankrupt the system. Baker notes that this is not true because the effects of productivity gains swamp the effects of an aging population.

Today, he wrote, Ross Douthat Thinks Sub-Saharan Africa Is the Richest Region on Earth. This is a typically sarcastic title from Baker—I’ve come to think that I have never in my life known anyone as sarcastic as this man. What he is doing is making fun of Douthat, “Douthat seems to believe that we face some terrible fate if the population of the United States stagnates or even declines.”

Dean Baker then goes on to discuss why a falling US population would be a good thing. He notes that a 20% decrease in our population would decrease our carbon footprint by 20%—without doing anything! And if there is one thing you can say about the United States, it is that we are good at doing nothing.

The main thing is that Ross Douthat, like most commentators—especially on the right—is worrying about a nonexistent problem. Baker shows this by presenting a graph that charts the funding effects on Social Security of an aging population as well as productivity growth.

Now that Dean Baker has drawn a picture, maybe people like Douthat will finally get it.

Update (3 December 2012 1:27 pm)

Matt Yglesias takes Douthat to task for “condemning the ‘decadence’ of people responding to the situation that actually exists.” It is a fun read and shows that Douthat is wrong even if you accept his claim that we need more babies.

One hundred and fifty-three years ago they hanged John Brown in Charles Town, Virginia. On that morning before his execution, he wrote, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” As ambivalent as I am regarding Brown’s actions, no truer words have ever been written.

I used to think that the Civil War was not inevitable. It’s clear that the institution of slavery was holding the south back. My thinking was that eventually southern whites would see this. There was no doubt that I was wrong. The problem is at the core of how slavery was implemented. In the early days of western settlement of America, slavery was not race based. This caused a problem for the ownership class: the lower classes had a nasty habit of joining together and demanding things the rich don’t like to provide for anyone but themselves: rights and pay. Although there were doubtless many and varied reasons for race-based slavery, one was to solve this problem. By making slavery apply only to blacks, they cut any solidarity between poor whites and blacks. And it made poor whites feel better: at least they weren’t slaves.

This always reminds me of this story that Anderson tells in Mississippi Burning:

“If you ain’t any better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?”

I think that the vested interests of rich white profits and poor white self-respect would have kept slavery alive in the south until its end was forced. And look at the effect of emancipation. It led to Jim Crow. When it was ended, we had the racist “drug war”—a term that first shows up only a few years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act. So I think that John Brown simply had a clearer view on the problem than just about anyone else.

I highly recommend that you listen to Sarah Vowell’s exceptional history of the song John Brown’s Body. It is live and very funny.

There was a good discussion of filibuster reform on Up with Chris Hayes. But some of it was confusing. There were two pro-filibuster guests on the panel. Richard Arenberg and Alan Frumin who both argued energetically for the filibuster. But I found their arguments strangely uncompelling. I was expecting that they would have some great points that I had never thought about. This was not true in the least.

Their argument came down to one very simple point: the Senate is a place where minority rights are cherished. Or something. The truth was the argument wasn’t clear, but it was more or less, “Minority rights are good!” And I agree. Minority rights are good. But this isn’t really minority rights. This is just the minority party using its leverage to stop the majority party from doing anything at all.

I get it. At one time, the filibuster really was used only in extreme cases where the minority was really against something. But the following graph tells you everything you need to know about the modern filibuster:

Note that anyone would have to be crazy to say that “both sides do it!” Clearly, there is something entirely new over the last four years.

What no one on the panel mentioned was that the Senate is already a non-democratic chamber of the legislature. What’s more: it is heavily biased towards the Republicans. So the use of the filibuster by the Republicans is just adding insult to injury. Another thing no one mentioned (Dare they?) is that regardless of what happens, as soon as the Republicans control both the White House and the Senate, they will not only reform the filibuster; they will eliminate it. Republicans play for keeps. So it is fine to say we ought to keep the filibuster, but it isn’t up to the Democrats. The only question that is up to the Democrats is whether they will be allowed to legislate for a couple of years before the Republicans take back control of the Senate.

The most interesting thing in the whole discussion was how Arenberg and Frumin, when it comes down to it, agree with all the proposed changes to the filibuster. Their only concern is that once it is changed it will be easy to change it again, thus leading to its end. But as I said: this is inevitable regardless. And it shows their political naivete that they think it is otherwise.

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”: