Why is the far right of the Republican party called the "conservative base" while the liberal end of the spectrum for Democrats is called the "left wing?" If supporters of single-payer were continually labeled the "liberal base" of the party, their ideas would command more respect in the media and the minds of the public.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Obama Our Chamberlain?
Today the headline on HuffPo is "Leaderless" and refers to the White House's lobbying against a robust public option in the Senate in the name of bipartisan cover to the Blue Dog Democrats for their upcoming election. This at a time when Republican identification is at an all-time low. The President and his cabinet are at risk of making the word "bipartisan" as contemptible a word as "appeasement" has been since WWII.
"Appeasement" became a dirty words in diplomacy because it described the policies of Neville Chamberlain toward Hitler, a policy of ceding the Nazis territory and power in the name of keeping the peace. Appeasement ignored the clearly imperialist plans of the Nazis. Appeasement was motivated by the highest principles, principles the Nobel Peace Committee would approve of. Our own Secretary of State at the time, Henry Stimson, holding the torch of the excellent principle that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail," would not spy on this rising bellicose nation but instead treated the Germans with the cookies and milk of honorable dealings even after the Nazis had shown their contempt for such girlie behavior by taking advantage of it to advance their plans for domination and defeat ours for compromise.
Nazi comparisons are easy because they are seen as so extreme. But the situation today is extreme, and like Chamberlain, our administration is pooh-poohing the risk, holding to its lofty principles of making nice with the Republicans long after they have publicly announced and publicly demonstrated their own obstructionism to the welfare of the citizens of this country. People are dying. This is war. And the President is letting his ego attachment to the idea that he can win over these guys with reason, along with his Chief of Staff's maneuvers to give cover to the Blue Dogs he recruited and owns, sell the rest of us down the river to the actuarial ovens of the insurance companies.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Constitutional Right to Twitter?
I'll tell you a story and you guess who did it. A bunch of politicians signed up for Twitter accounts under the names of their political opponents and began sending obnoxious tweets under those false identities. When they were found out and suspended from Twitter (the act is a breach of the user agreement you must check before joining) these same guys complained that their right to free speech was being blocked.
Okay, now guess. Democrats or Republicans? The answer below the fold.
Before I answer, think about which party has a long history of spreading false information under false identity. The scales are not balanced in the least here. Oh, I'm sure you can find one or two examples on the other side, but this wholesale defrauding the voters has been the tactic of only one major party in the last twenty years: Republicans.
Or as I call them now: twits.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Past Watch - Know Them By Their Tactics
So it turns out that above ground nuclear testing of the Cold War is directly linked to increased cancer in Baby Boomers. A discovery of 85,000 baby teeth donated for a St. Louis study back in the 50's has provided the means, measuring them for the fallout element, Strontium 90, and correlating that to the lifetime cancer rates of those children. The suprise is not in the findings that, yes, the fallout traveled east and contaminated the food chain especially for formula fed babies - air to grass to cow to formula - and that higher Strontium 90 meant more cancer and death for those children in adulthood. The shock is in the way radiation dangers were ignored at the time, sidelined by the establishment and lobbied against in the media. You don't have to imagine the arguments. All you have to do is take the global warming deniers, change a few words here and there, and voilà. Same dog, new bone.
As Walter Shapiro writes in his column Cold War Remnant: Cancer for Baby Boomers:What fascinates me, however, is that 50 years ago, the angry scientists and the ban-the-bomb protesters were right – nuclear testing was dangerous for children and other living things. "Maybe at the beginning of bomb testing, people weren't sure how much this would spread across the globe," Mangano said. "But by the mid-1950s, after dozens of bombs had been tested, they noticed the radiation levels going up and up in the milk and the water. They knew that this was trouble."
Yet there were still scientists who scoffed, scientists who had a political agenda. So you get someone as respected as Edward Teller scoffing at the suggesting that nuclear testing could have long-term effects. "The living organism is so complicated and the intertwining of cause and effect is so intricate that we may never know the biological effect of so small a cause as worldwide radiation." He was a physicist, not a biologist, but he was eminent, so people touted his views about the effects of radiation on living organisms the same way they now tout a once-eminent hurricane expert about current global warming evidence. The same superior dismissal, the same reasonable sneer, the same lemming road to death and loss of quality of life for all.
Statistics are abstract but let us not forget that real people suffered and continue to suffer along with their families. The powers that be knew it. They hid behind a few outliers who gave them cover by injecting specious, partisan doubt into the conversation. They poisoned us, themselves, and now like Pilate, wash their hands. That was then, this is now.
Well, my political views were formed then and confirmed by now. Patterns of rhetoric in relation to reality, patterns of action and effect in the public sphere, patterns of integrity and hypocrisy in politics and its coverage in the media. What shocks me is that the same discredited arguments against past efforts to rectify evils are being used today, even as the followers of that rhetoric enjoy and defend their right to enjoy the benefits they (or their doppelgangers) opposed in the past.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Liberals and Reactionaries
I don't see the political debate in the US being between liberals and conservatives anymore. It is becoming clear that what passes for conservatism today is pure reactionary negativism. "I don't like my life and it's all YOUR fault!" Reminds me of how I feel once a month just before my period. The once-conservative Republican party is now the party of perpetual PMS.
Conservatism in my mind is closely allied with caution, with maintaining a tradition in sober equilibrium, of doing nothing rather than doing harm. There are ways in which I, a lifelong wearer of the liberal label, am very conservative at times. To protect and "conserve."
Monday, October 05, 2009
The Chicken Little Henhouse and Fox News
I'm as troubled as most thinking people are about the yellow journalism style that has become respectable mainstream reporting. Fox News is the standard bearer, but by no means the only one. Calls for a return to the "Fairness Doctrine" reflect this growing unease among liberal intellectuals. The problem with those regulations is that they bump up hard against free speech, one of the liberal absolutes. It is an absolute that I hold to even as I want to muzzle or at least restrain the spew on cable. But lately, I have had the feeling that the fable of Chicken Little will prove once again that the wisdom of the ages is found in simple and timeless stories. Fox may have the highest ratings on cable, but I predict that their constant hysterical yammerings about insignificant side-issues and their twisting of fact to get a rise out of viewers will result in a loss of power for the network and put them back on the margins of the public discourse where such antics belong.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Storytelling Our Way to Happiness
While I was cleaning today, I accidentally ripped an old graying piece of paper stuck on the side of my refrigerator. Before throwing it away, I read it over. I kept it because of how it presented the ideas of the philosopher, Richard Rorty, on the need for storytellers. If you have a philosophical bent or a belief in the value of storytelling, read on.
In his ideal of self-creation ... Rorty's new twist is to stress language and literature. The task, as he sees it is to replace the descriptions and labels imposed on us by others – family, professions, culture – with our own descriptions, our own language. We create ourselves by telling our own story.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the question of women's happiness. I wrote about the recent study and my ideas on the subject in another blog here. As I said there, I think a big problem is that the narratives are still the same as they were 30 years ago when the world was much different. They do not serve us in thinking about ourselves or our lives today. The mismatch between the cultural narrative and the individual's life, for women especially, creates a friction that rubs raw those who live according to the mainstream narrative and leaves them unsatisfied with themselves and their lives. This quote by Rorty just reinforces my belief that it is more important than ever that women and men tell their stories, put them out on the internet in blogs and videos. I can hope that this grass roots avalanche of alternative narrative will nudge the mainstream entertainment leviathan. Even a miniscule change in course will take us to an entirely new place over time.
For Rorty, this isn't so much a matter of giving form to the accidental tangle of compulsions, desires and roles that we crudely refer to with the pronoun "I." It's a matter of self-enlargement and self-enrichment – of maximizing possibilities and experiences. "Do I contradict myself?" Whitman wrote. "Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)." This is the sort of picaresque story – full of richly diverse and dissonant impulses and adventures – that Rorty thinks we should be telling about ourselves. To help us do it, we won't have much use for traditional philosophers. What we need are storytellers whose writing gives examples of self-transformation, and poets and poetic philosophers who generate new metaphors for imagining ourselves.
BTW, I think the quote is from an article in the New York Times Magazine from 1990 called "Every Man a Philosopher" but I'm not sure. All I can find are phrases quoted that match the bit of paper I clipped out. The bibliography for one such quote lists: Klepp, L.S. (1990). Every man a philosopher. The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 1990. So we'll go with that unless somebody tells me otherwise.
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